Republicans keep changing their tune on impeachment

There is no theoretical limit to the number of fallback positions available in a retreat. In the real world, Republican defenders of Donald Trump are vacating their defence lines at a remarkable clip. During the first day of public impeachment hearings on Wednesday, Mark Meadows, one of Mr Trump’s most loyal congressional allies, said: “Everyone has their own impression of what truth is.” When conservatives embrace relativism, facts have clearly lost their use.

The speed with which Mr Trump’s defenders have retreated is worth underlining. When we learnt of the Ukrainegate whistleblower in September, the initial line was that Mr Trump had done nothing improper. Then the White House released the edited transcript of Mr Trump’s call with Volodymyr Zelensky. The text clearly showed Mr Trump had indeed pushed his Ukrainian counterpart to investigate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter.

The next line of defence was that Mr Trump had not offered a “quid pro quo”. This fallback was promptly blown up by Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, who confirmed that the release of US military aid had in fact been contingent on Ukraine opening an investigation into the Bidens. A few hours later, a flustered Mr Mulvaney insisted that what he had been recorded on camera as having said was not in fact what he had said.

The third fallback position was that Mr Trump was only doing what any president does: all US aid has strings attached. This was in response to the parade of closed-door testimonies from US public officials that confirmed that Mr Trump was trying to extort electoral help from Mr Zelensky. On top of this, Mr Trump was only trying to tackle general corruption in Ukraine, they said. This, too, was detonated by testimony that Mr Trump had only one particular corruption investigation in mind.

The fourth was that Adam Schiff, the Democrat who is spearheading the impeachment inquiry, was conducting the process from a secret vault in the deep state. Specifically, he was holding the hearings in a secure room in the basement of Capitol Hill. A group of Republicans even staged a televised invasion of the hearing room to make their point. That argument fell apart when the process was moved to the public hearing phase on Wednesday. The same witnesses who spoke in private are now doing so in front of the cameras.

Next, Republicans argued that Mr Trump could not be impeached since he had failed to pull off what he was accused of doing. The fact that he attempted a quid pro quo is irrelevant, they said. The $391m in US aid was released to Ukraine, which did not open an investigation into the Bidens. By the same logic, of course, Richard Nixon should have been exonerated since he, too, was caught in the act and thus failed. Moreover, the Ukraine aid was only released after the House was notified of the whistleblower complaint.

Republicans have tried sticking various other strands of spaghetti to the wall. One of them is that the whistleblower’s identity remains unknown, which implies that he is a nefarious deep state operative. This is because whistleblowers, unlike leakers, are protected by law. Moreover, the accuracy of the complaint should be at issue rather than the identity of the complainer. But that complaint persists. Mr Trump reiterated it on Wednesday.

Another is that Mr Schiff’s witnesses, including Bill Taylor and George Kent, the two diplomats who testified on Wednesday, are relying on hearsay. Again, this sits oddly with the fact that they were only corroborating what appeared in the transcript that Mr Trump ordered to be released. Most senior officials have complied with the White House’s refusal to co-operate with the inquiry. Among those, Mike Pompeo, the US secretary of state, listened in on the infamous July 25 call.

But the great irony is that Mr Trump himself rarely bothers with any of these defences. All along he has maintained the Nixonian line that a president’s actions are by definition legal. Mr Trump’s lawyers told a New York judge last month that he would retain legal immunity even after shooting someone on Fifth Avenue. This is where Mr Trump and Nixon part company. A recent cartoon captured this well. Nixon says: “I am not a crook”, as he did indeed insist. Mr Trump replies: “I am a crook. So what?”