Sometimes historians speculate about what kind of president Nixon would have been like if his positive features—the canny operator in global politics—could have been detached from the noxious ones, the crudeness and paranoia. The same fantasy can be indulged with Bill Clinton—if his powerful gifts of persuasion and illumination were somehow delinked from his addiction to seduction and indiscipline in personal affairs.

The answer, of course, is that such an outcome is inconceivable. In every case, the scandals were projections of fundamental character, springing from the same inner drives that vaulted them to success in the first place.

Taylor nodded to this in his opening statement. He recounted being aghast at how military aid to Ukraine was being withheld to extract a statement from new Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky on a publicly announced probe of Hunter Biden. Gordon Sondland, Trump’s ambassador to the European Union who was also immersed in the negotiation, “tried to explain to me that President Trump is a businessman,” Taylor said. “When a businessman is about to sign a check to someone who owes him something, the businessman asks that person to pay up before signing the check.”

The clash of values and mindset could not have been sharper. Taylor, a career public servant, reminded Sondland that, “the Ukrainians did not ‘owe’ Trump anything.”

The coming weeks will likely also offer a window into the other great continuity of presidential scandal from Watergate to Monica Lewinsky to Ukraine. That is the need for presidents to project confidence and control when the very nature of an impeachment inquiry underscores that they have lost control.

The news has been full of reports lately about Trump’s “isolation,” “anger,” “frustration” and “rage”—toward Democrats, toward the media, toward his own team for failing to bring Democrats and the media to heel. And the White House’s internal recriminations are flowing in both directions. “Frustrated Trump allies urge him to stop talking about himself,” my colleague Anita Kumar wrote earlier this week, in one example of the genre.

The effort to project control recalls the scene in “Animal House” in which the ROTC parade commander, surrounded by chaos, vainly shouts, “Remain calm! All is well!”