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Trump is panicking as the Thursday impeachment vote draws near. This vote will formalize the impeachment inquiry process. Up to this point, several key committees have been hearing testimony from persons of interest in the case against the President.
This has drawn the ire of Congressional Republicans who have alleged that this has made the inquiry “illegitimate,” as a formal vote had not been cast beforehand.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, however, addressed these claims directly when she announced Thursday’s vote.
She alleged that the Trump administration simply fabricated the idea of the House’s inquiry being illegitimate and that the formal vote was to dispel any doubts to the veracity of their findings.
President Trump, for his part, has done little to endear himself to moderates in the course of the impeachment inquiry. His frequent Twitter outbursts and repetitive defenses against the impeachment process has kept his core base fired up, but has done little to convince the rest of the country that his call with the Ukrainian president was actually as “perfect” as he’s been claiming.
In fact, this morning at 12 AM, Trump was still up, tweeting – and then started tweeting again after 7AM, tweeting no less than 35 times within two hours. His message is clear: how can they impeach me?
As interviews with key witnesses in the Ukraine scandal continue behind closed doors, Trump’s team scrambles to come up with defenses for the President. The favored line of attack has focused on process over substance, alleging that the House was engaging in a “silent coup” to “reverse the results of the 2016 election.”
Trump himself has spearheaded the defense that Democrats are just trying to undermine him for partisan reasons. It seems that Congressional Republicans, seemingly faced with no feasible defense of Trump’s conduct, can only squabble over the process that Democrats are using to pressure the president.
With Thursday’s official vote, even that line of defense may crumble, leaving Republicans in a sticky situation. Will they stick to their guns and continue to defend President Trump? Only time will tell.
