Targeting political opponents with claims of corruption has a storied and sordid history in places like Putinist Russia, where authorities recently slapped anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny with claims of money laundering. In China, President Xi Jinping has wielded supposed “anti-corruption” campaigns as a means of shoring up domestic support amid a flagging economy—campaigns that, wouldn’t you know it, just so happen to rope in those on the wrong end of China’s internal political divisions. Xi’s wide-ranging campaign is, as one expert related, “more of a Stalinist purge than a genuine attempt to clean up the government.” (What this means for a potential investigation into supposed Biden “corruption” in China, which Trump has called for time and again, is anyone’s guess.)

Trump’s turn toward “corruption” as a pretext for his efforts to strong-arm Kyiv has a particular aim in mind.

Trump’s turn toward “corruption” as a pretext for his efforts to strong-arm Kyiv has a particular end game. Most pertinently, it’s increasingly the only defense left for Trump and his toadies to describe Trump’s unprecedented actions in Ukraine. Most of the other recent defenses of Trump’s conduct collapsed quickly under the faintest of scrutiny. The notion that there was never a quid pro quo involved in Trump’s mafioso moves against Ukraine? It turns out there were multiple quos involved, including military aid and a visit to the White House for new Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. The idea that Ukraine had no knowledge of this arrangement, and therefore couldn’t have possibly felt any pressure? As it happens, Kyiv understood perfectly well what was on ask, almost from the beginning. How about the way White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney waved away the quid pro quo accusations by confessing in a now-infamous press conference earlier this month that “we do that all the time with foreign policy,” as if it was just a generally accepted practice? That defense had the shortest shelf-life of all, with Mulvaney mumbling an embarrassing walk-back only a few hours later.

All of which leaves “corruption” as the crux of Trump’s ever-imploding defense as he slouches toward impeachment. “I don’t care about politics, but I do care about corruption. And this whole thing is about corruption,” Trump said earlier this month about his pressure on Ukraine. “This whole thing—this whole thing is about corruption.” It’s a line Trump’s sycophants have already begun workshopping. To take one such lickspittle, Ben Shapiro attempted to claim that Trump could “argue plausibly that [Trump’s pressure] was part-and-parcel of his general anti-corruption concern.” Trump could argue that, sure. He could also argue that the moon was made of Swiss cheese with the same level of veracity. The notion that Trump has sincere concerns about corruption, at home or abroad, is a farce.

When it comes to Trump’s fealty toward enabling corruption, you can point to almost any of his policies; mix and match as you’d like. His campaign against Biden in Ukraine is emblematic. Biden served as the point-man for the entire West’s call to oust former Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin, the man who had single-handedly stymied Ukraine’s anti-corruption drive. Trump, however, needed to paint his presumed presidential rival as the quintessence of corruption himself. (Trump’s efforts were buoyed by the fever-swamp insanities of Rudy Giuliani, his personal lawyer, who’s already on record as whinging that Eastern European governments have been too effective at combatting corruption.) In Trump’s Upside-Down, it’s Biden who sunk to unprecedented levels of corrupt dealings. Conversely, those (like Shokin) specifically identified as crooked actors by the U.S., its European allies, and the entire trans-Atlantic anti-corruption community are, to the president’s mind, mere victims.