No one seems to unnerve Trump more than that original whistle-blower, who kick-started the House impeachment investigation into how he browbeat Ukraine into digging up political dirt on Biden. Again and again, he’s painted this person as a deep-state partisan acting in cahoots with Democrats.

That the whistle-blower has stayed out of view seems to have left Trump only more aggrieved—he prefers a flesh-and-blood foe. “I want to find out who’s the whistle-blower,” he said yesterday at a joint news conference with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, as the first public impeachment hearing unfolded on Capitol Hill.

Yet the case has moved far beyond a single person, and that’s precisely the problem for Trump. Now he has so little time, but so many to tarnish—some with sterling résumés. Still, Trump is giving it his best shot. “NEVER TRUMPERS!” the president tweeted in the hours before the first TV hearing opened yesterday, an apparent effort to sully the witnesses by claiming they don’t, well, like him all that much. “The president is very invested in constructing narratives that make him the aggrieved party in these investigations,” Michael Steel, a Republican strategist who was the press secretary to former Republican House Speaker John Boehner, told me.

Read: The whistle-blowers are multiplying

Discrediting the first witnesses who testified won’t be easy. William Taylor, the acting U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, is a Vietnam War veteran who took the ambassadorial post at the explicit request of one of Trump’s closest allies, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. George Kent is a State Department official who oversees Ukrainian policy, and like Taylor has served for decades under Republican and Democratic presidents alike. In his opening statement, Kent stressed his pedigree, mentioning how three generations of his family swore an oath to defend the Constitution. His father graduated first in his class at the U.S. Naval Academy and served as a captain on a nuclear submarine; a great-uncle was taken prisoner by the Japanese in World War II.

As Taylor and Kent described back-channel efforts to pressure Ukraine into investigating the Biden family, the president spent time retweeting Republican allies who criticized the hearing.

White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham said Trump was working out of the Oval Office and didn’t see the proceedings. “I’m too busy to watch it,” Trump echoed during a photo spray with Erdoğan. Seconds later, however, he contradicted himself: “I see they’re using lawyers that are television lawyers; they took some guys off television.” It’s almost inconceivable that Trump wouldn’t watch: He spends hours each day in front of a television, former White House aides have told me. He hung a 60-inch TV in a private dining room off the Oval Office, and often reads newspapers and paperwork in front of it with the sound down. (He turns up the volume when he sees something that interests him, the ex-officials have said.)