President Trump is a bit panicky. At about the same time that the House Intelligence Committee released the unclassified complaint that has triggered impeachment proceedings against him, the President delivered this message to his followers on Twitter: “THE DEMOCRATS ARE TRYING TO DESTROY THE REPUBLICAN PARTY AND ALL THAT IT STANDS FOR. STICK TOGETHER, PLAY THEIR GAME, AND FIGHT HARD REPUBLICANS. OUR COUNTRY IS AT STAKE!”

This is not, needless to say, the writing of someone who is confident of his position. Reading the whistle-blower complaint, it’s clear why Trump is so worried: the allegations about his heavy-handed efforts to coerce Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden are specific, clear, and damning, and have their origins in the worries of his White House advisers. The complaint also alleges that, instead of coming forward, White House officials became part of Trump’s coverup, even removing the notes of the call from the normal system in an effort to keep Trump’s inappropriate demands of Ukraine from becoming public. There are many witnesses to call, many people who know about this. It will be hard, if not impossible, to keep the truth from coming out.

The Ukraine scandal is, among many other things, a portrait of American foreign policy gone terribly wrong, hijacked by a President who has shredded the vast U.S. national-security apparatus in favor of a rogue operation looking out for his own interests and overseen by his personal agent, Rudy Giuliani. To anyone who has been paying attention, this has been the President’s approach to foreign policy from the start: it has been all Trump, all the time. He is on his fourth national-security adviser, his second Secretary of State, and his second Secretary of Defense. All of them know well that this is not the way American foreign policy is supposed to work. Ukraine, I fear, is not the exception to how Trump has been doing business, but the rule.