Just like the week Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the impeachment inquiry was a turning point for Democrats, this week marked a turning point for Trump’s allies. Until now, senior members of the administration and other Trump defenders had mostly managed to hang together while bumbling through a cascade of revelations and even self-inflicted wounds about Trump's July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. But the splinters within the administration started to emerge this week brought on by a raft of heroic testimony from career public servants that culminated in one of the first instances of a veritable Trump conspirator placing his own interests above those of Trump and his coterie of crooks.
After it became clear to major Trump donor turned ambassador to the E.U. Gordon Sondland that history would not look kindly on his role in aiding Trump's efforts to abuse the presidency for his personal gain, Sondland decided, at the very least, he wasn't going to be the fall guy for anybody. The written testimony Sondland released publicly was a clear effort to absolve himself of Trump's sins, but it also took the dots laid out by a string of career professionals who testified before Sondland and connected them directly to Trump.
Sondland wrote that his preference would not have been to involve Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani in U.S. diplomacy but, "given the President’s explicit direction," and the desire to broker a meeting with Trump that Zelensky badly wanted, he and others "agreed to do as President Trump directed." Sondland's bombshell was the natural extension of testimony that had demonstrated overwhelming trepidation by career professionals both at the State Department and on the National Security Council (NSC) about Giuliani's shadow foreign policy and the fact that it was harming America's strategic interests abroad. Sondland wrapped that all up in a bow and placed it at Trump's feet—Giuliani wasn't freelancing, he was Trump's emissary, advancing the goals that Trump had instructed him to advance.
Sondland's candor regarding Trump wasn't an outgrowth of courage as much as perhaps pride and certainly an instinct to guard his reputation against the clutches of history's harsh verdicts. Sondland had been thoroughly implicated in the Trump-Giuliani scheme by the texts special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker turned over to investigators several weeks ago and the testimony of Trump's top NSC adviser on Russia, Dr. Fiona Hill. Hill detailed a July 10 meeting she attended between her boss, national security adviser John Bolton, Ukrainian officials, and Sondland that resulted in her flagging Giuliani's shadow effort for NSC lawyers. Further reporting revealed that during the meeting Bolton had been noncommittal about setting up a face-to-face between Trump and Zelensky at which point Sondland interjected that Trump was perfectly willing to take that meeting on the condition that Ukraine opened corruption investigations.
But Sondland's willingness to implicate Trump and likely corroborate much of the testimony of career diplomats clearly set off alarm bells in the White House. Thus appeared White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney in front of the White House press corps in the middle of Sondland's testimony to drop some of his own bombshells of distraction. First, in direct conflict with the Constitution's Emoluments Clause, Trump would be awarding his own Doral Resort a major contract to host the 2020 G7 summit, in the month of June, when Miami is hot as blazes and Doral bookings plunge. Second, the quid pro quo Trump and his defenders had eagerly and combatively denied for weeks actually existed. Say what? “Absolutely, no question" that Trump talked about "the corruption related to the DNC server," Mulvaney stated. "That’s why we held up the money.” As reporters marveled over the admission, Mulvaney instructed them to "get over it" and boasted that "elections have consequences." Wow.
It was classic Trump: Once you've been caught red-handed doing the thing you have been adamantly denying, just boast about doing it as if it was totally normal and expected and that's what everybody does. Mulvaney almost surely undertook that hastily arranged presser at Trump's direction, or at least his blessing, as Mulvaney had been prepped by White House lawyers and press staff in advance. Then, also classically, Trump was angry afterward.
The whole thing went over like a lead balloon. The Justice Department rushed to say the quid pro quo was "news to us," and Trump's outside lawyer Jay Sekulow equally as swiftly said the legal team wasn't "involved" with Mulvaney's briefing. Meanwhile, Trump's defenders on Capitol Hill were apoplectic about the confession. "In interviews with more than 20 GOP lawmakers and congressional aides in the past 48 hours, many said they were repulsed by Trump’s decision to host an international summit at his own resort and incensed by acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney’s admission," reported the Washington Post. As if no one could have ever predicted that Republicans would eventually get burned and totally disgraced by Trump's erratic and shifting defenses of his criminality.
But the bottom line is that the more Trump flails and the more precarious his actions and his grip on his allies become, the more everyone who took part in his dirty scheme will become increasingly self interested, just like Sondland did in his testimony. The truth began having a domino effect this week, with the testimonies of Volker and Hill leading to Sondland's admission, which in turn led to Mulvaney's confession, which then rippled through Capitol Hill like a mid-grade earthquake—shifting the landscape without totally destroying it. Most Republicans haven't abandoned Trump yet, but they sure are looking around and wondering whether they can really survive this thing by gluing themselves to a human wrecking ball.