Trump’s Very Bad Impeachment Week Is About to Be Broadcast Live on TV

WASHINGTON — President Trump knows if it doesn't happen on camera, it doesn't really matter. Now, the reality-show president will watch the impeachment investigation become must-see TV.

This week, House Democrats will bring in three respected diplomats who were alarmed by Trump’s actions toward Ukraine for the first public testimony of the investigation. Their public appearances marks a new phase in the impeachment process — the shift from uncovering what happened to explaining it to the American people.

The action will start Wednesday, when Acting Ambassador to Ukraine Bill Taylor and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent are scheduled to publicly testify about why they were so alarmed by the Trump administration’s actions toward Ukraine. On Friday, ousted U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch will add her voice to the chorus of officials detailing the pressure campaign on Ukraine that was led by Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani.

The facts of the case will be hard for Republicans to defend. Multiple witnesses have now testified that they believe President Trump actively pushed Ukraine to investigate both the Bidens and the 2016 election — and that congressionally approved military aid to the country was held up while Trump sought to get what he wanted.

Read: The 5 Bombshells From Bill Taylor's Testimony on Trump and Ukraine

The question now is whether televised testimony of those facts will move public opinion at all — and whether there are any new cracks in Republicans’ near-unanimous defense of the president as a result. Recent polls show the country is closely divided over impeachment, with most surveys finding a majority of Americans supporting the investigation itself but about the same number of voters supporting and opposing Trump’s removal from office.

The three officials’ closed-door testimony painted an alarming picture of Trump’s attempts to pressure Ukraine into investigating Joe Biden, his 2020 political rival, as well as a debunked conspiracy theory that Ukraine (rather than Russia) interfered in the 2016 election.

• Taylor testified privately last month that it was his “clear understanding” that “security assistance money would not come until the [Ukrainian] president committed to pursue the investigation.”
• Kent said “it was clear that the investigations that were being suggested were the ones that Rudy Giuliani had been tweeting about, meaning Biden, Burisma, and 2016” — and that he was told by a senior official who talked to Trump that the president “wanted nothing less than [Ukrainian] President Zelensky to go to a microphone and say investigations, Biden, and Clinton.”
• And Yovanovitch testified about Giuliani’s monthslong efforts to remove her from her job — and her feeling “threatened” by Trump’s sinister-sounding comments during his now-famous July 25 call with Ukraine’s president that she was “going to go through some things.”

Read: ‘Talk to Rudy’: How Trump Let Giuliani Hijack the State Department into Chasing Conspiracy Theories

Trump is clearly on edge about what this week will bring. He claimed in a Monday morning tweet that Democrats “doctored” the released transcripts of their testimony — an outlandish allegation that has not been backed up by any of the dozens of Republicans who participated in those interviews.

If Taylor’s and Kent’s public testimony is as bad as what they said behind closed doors, Trump may abandon his standard Twitter tantrum for a live rant from the White House, where he’s scheduled to hold a presser with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Cover: President Donald Trump arrives to speak at the New York City Veterans Day Parade at Madison Square Park in New York, Monday, Nov. 11, 2019. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)