On Thursday, Republicans made up two whole new excuses for Donald Trump withholding funds from Ukraine, which is handy for Republicans who want to pretend they’re not defending a grave threat to national security without cause. However, Trump himself doesn’t seem to give a damn. While Republicans are defending Trump using claims that he never bothered to make, Trump isn’t interested in defense. Instead, Mr. “Perfect phone call” is out there trying show that he has noting to defend.
One step in that is something that did come up repeatedly in Thursday’s impeachment hearings. Republicans are claiming that since Ukrainian officials stated that they did not feel pressured by Trump, there can be “no crime.” To back that up, The Daily Beast reports that Trump wants to bring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to the United States to not just give him that White House meeting that he’s so far been denied, but to give Zelensky a tour of U.S. liquefied natural gas producers.
The goal is to push back against the idea that holding up a meeting that Zelensky long desired was ever part of the extortion Trump was conducting in Ukraine. Republicans have trotted out a court case in which they claim that a meeting isn’t sufficient to be the subject of a bribery charge, while ignoring the fact that it was a very different kind of meeting in a very different context. But Trump is planning to … trump them, by simply moving the needle to “see, he got that meeting after all,” and, Trump will claim, America even got a trade deal out of it—one sure to create millions, and millions of millions, of jobs.
That this meeting is happening not just after Trump was caught with his hand in the Ukraine jar but after he’s actually been impeached by the House won’t matter to the claims made by Republicans. After all, they’re already claiming that the release of the military assistance had nothing to do with the fact that Trump had just been definitively, and decisively put on notice.
And as Republicans made absolutely clear in Thursday’s hearing, if you mention that someone is a hostage who is being forced to make a statement they don’t agree with, it’s an insult … to the hostage.
It’s not incidental that the deal being worked out includes natural gas. Not only is that industry one of Trump’s top contributors and not only is it deeply entangled with Trump’s economic claims, but making a deal over natural gas allows an additional spotlight to be turned on Burisma, which is a natural gas producer and distributor. As in claims that Joe Biden was helping foreign gas producers, while Trump is boosting the American end of the pipeline.
As one Trump official told The Daily Beast, “ … having Zelensky or people close to him come and do a photo opportunity would be so key given everything going on with impeachment.” After all, what better ammo can Republicans wave around going into the Senate trial than chummy Christmas time shots of Zelensky smiling in the company of everyone who has given him such great instruction on how corruption is done in America? Maybe they’ll even show the Ukrainian president strolling among Melania’s latest collection of cheery dead Christmas trees.
Just ignore the gun to his head.