Donald Trump has long been convinced that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without losing the support of his followers. Now the question is: Can he threaten an entire nation, repeatedly, without losing the support of Republicans in the Senate? Because, despite a history of altering transcripts to massage Trump’s fumbles, misstatements, lies, and insults, the document that the White House put out on Tuesday morning is sufficient on its own merits to convict Trump in any court. It is terrible.
The White House transcript is replete with language that would make a Mafia boss blush. It’s absolutely chock-a-block with descriptions of political opponents as “very bad people,” with praise for a pro-Russian prosecutor who resigned in disgrace, and with pressure from Trump to not just investigate Joe Biden’s son, but dig into a laundry list of disproven conspiracy theories.
That includes Trump telling Zelensky that William Barr will be calling him up to look for a missing DNC server that Trump thinks is in Ukraine—even though there was never any missing server, and the whole idea is several-letters-after-Q bonkers.
That particular request begins with a sentence that will go down in history. Or infamy. Both. Because after Trump spends a considerable amount of time making it clear to Zelensky that Ukraine definitely owes the U.S. for its very survival, there comes this …
Trump: I would like you to do us a favor …
It’s an opening so blatantly threatening that it makes it seem as if there must have been violin music playing during this call. Or possibly the theme from Jaws.
Trump: I would like you to do is a favor though, because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine. They say Crowdstrike … I guess you have one of your wealthy people … The server, they say Ukraine has it. There- are a lot. of things that went on, the whole situation ... I think you surrounding yourself with some of the same people. I would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it. As you saw yesterday, that whole nonsense ended with a very poor performance by a man named Robert Mueller, an incompetent performance, but they. say a lot of it started with Ukraine. Whatever you can do, it's very important that you do it. If that's possible.
This is one day after Mueller’s testimony before the House. Trump is emboldened by what he sees as Mueller’s “incompetent performance” and charges in to tell the president of Ukraine, “Whatever you can do, it’s very important that you do it ...”.
Crowdstrike is the company that the DNC hired to investigate the break-in to its servers and theft of documents. It’s an American company. Its only connection with Ukraine is that it helped Ukraine by informing it that Russia had also hacked into an app used by the Ukrainian military. Why Trump would ask Zelensky about this requires going down an entire rabbit hole’s worth of conspiracy theories based on bad presumptions and nonexistent connections.
Donald Trump actually believes that there’s a missing DNC server. And that it’s been hidden in Ukraine. And he believes it so much, he’s telling the president of Ukraine that he’s going to have the United States attorney general call him up to talk about it. Forget impeachment; there’s enough to invoke the 25th Amendment in that single paragraph.
This White House transcript … it’s all like that. There’s a fresh insult to reason every time Trump opens his mouth. Handing this over is like handing over a confession to murder. Scrawled in mysteriously red “ink.”
And this is what’s still there, even though the White House has condensed 30 minutes of conversation to just five pages of text, and there seem to be some clearly dangling bits of conversation that may reflect sentences or whole paragraphs that are somewhere on the cutting room floor.