The political theatre of the impeachment hearings has exposed such chaos within the White House that it was predictable that Trump would try to reframe the story. In a bizarre 53-minute phone call with the hosts of Fox & Friends he said: “I want a trial” – as if this could clear his name. During the call Trump also said that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was “crazy as a bedbug”; he dismissed his own EU ambassador’s testimony as “total nonsense”; he complained that former Ukraine ambassador Marie Yovanovitch had taken too long to hang his portrait in the US embassy, and that she had only been praised because “she’s a woman, you have to be nice”; and he called Rudy Giuliani “one of the great crime fighters of all time,” and indicated that the Ukraine crisis would end if his team could confront the whistleblower.
That surreal exchange only makes sense within the context of the hyperpartisan US media landscape. Fox News, whose praise of Trump veers close to state broadcasts in North Korea, has reported on the hearings as though they were, in the words of Ohio congressman and diehard Trump loyalist Brad Wenstrup, part of “the publicly announced and proclaimed Democrat coup.” Earlier this week, following the testimony of EU ambassador Gordon Sondland and National Security Council (NSC) member Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman – most of it utterly damning – Laura Ingraham, one of Fox’s star pundits swept aside the allegations in a segment called “Adam Schiff’s Story Time” – complete with a mockup that showed Congressman Schiff – Chair of the House Intelligence Committee – reading fairy tales to credulous kindergartners.
Trump’s brazen indifference to damning facts, prompted Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland to contrast the current hearings with Nixon’s fall forty five years ago. “The difference between 1974 and 2019 that matters most,” writes Freedland, “is in the political and media landscape. Partisan allegiances are now so entrenched that ever fewer Americans are able to see fault in their own side.” Nixon succumbed after “three TV networks and a half-dozen major newspapers” found the evidence against him too incriminating. His was a world in which “all but a fringe of society agreed on the basic facts.” Now, however, there is “no such shared ‘act base’. Fox News viewers are shown an alternative reality in which Biden is the villain and Trump the valiant scourge of corruption.”
Back in the world of mainstream facts, Trump faced further embarrassment. Testimony from Fiona Hill, former NSC Russia expert and diplomatic aide David Holmes, put the question of a “quid pro quo” with Ukraine beyond reasonable doubt. Hill memorably described how the president’s “domestic political errand” impeded vital national security interests as he insisted that her staff pursue “a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves.” When Republicans on the committee asked Hill whether Ukraine had meddled in the 2016 elections, she countered: “I would ask that you please not promote politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests.”
As the Democrats hone their charges against Trump, dropping legalese like ‘quid pro quo’ for plainer words like extortion and bribery, the true nature of Trump’s misadventure has become irrefutably clear. In The Atlantic, Adam Server writes: “Fearing that the 2016 election was a fluke in which Trump prevailed only because of a successful Russian hacking and disinformation campaign, and a last-minute intervention on Trump’s behalf by the very national-security state Trump defenders supposedly loathe, Trump and his advisers sought to rig the 2020 election by forcing a foreign country to implicate the then-Democratic front-runner in a crime that did not take place.” Unfortunately for the president, that is what the facts show. The rest is flummery.
