Politico reports that Trump's "optimistic, even nonchalant attitude" toward impeachment perished last week in a hail of horrendous publicity. The White House "tested and retested strategies on the fly" — much as it once did with critical legislation, when such trivialities mattered somewhat — as it "began to
recognize the perilous road ahead."
What, Trump worry? I don't quite follow, since Bloomberg Opinion's Ramesh Ponnuru has already pondered "Trump’s Defenders" and their "Lame Excuses," as foreshadowed in Ponnuru's subtitle: "No quid pro quo! It’s just politics! Democrats did it too!"
There is also, in Ponnuru's telling, …
It’s fine for the president to ask for Ukrainian help in uprooting corruption.
The news media has edited the memorandum of the phone call to make Trump look worse. [Some have, though an "accurate recounting of the memorandum … is strong enough"].
It was just a phone call.
The “whistleblower complaint” contains a lot of hearsay.
Russiagate was a hoax, and the same people who spread it are yelling about this.
The multiplicity of grounds Trump’s enemies have cited to call for impeachment shows they are just after him for partisan reasons.
Trump’s enemies are trying to annul an election; they can’t accept his legitimacy.
In my Guide to Trumpian Humbug, the most enchanting of these "lame excuses" is the penultimate one, that of partisan vindictiveness. There is, no doubt, a lot of that. Trump has debased the presidency and defiled traditional political rhetoric, so there's much to be spiteful about.
But so what? What does vindictiveness have to do with the truth and consequences of Trump's manifestly extortionist phone call to Ukraine's quivering president?
You needn't memorize the above list. We'll all know them by heart by about the ides of October.