Hal Marcovitz. Pandemic, Protest, and Politics: A Look Back at 2020. Reference Point Press, 2022.
When President Donald Trump looked at early public opinion polls in June 2019, he did not like what he saw. In just seven months voters would begin casting ballots in their state caucuses and primary elections, the beginning of the process to decide who would be nominated by the two major parties for the 2020 presidential election. A Republican, Trump was not expecting competition in his party’s caucuses and primaries, but on the Democratic side candidates were already lining up to seek their party’s nomination. More than a dozen Democrats would soon launch their campaigns.
The polls taken at this early stage in the race showed that Trump was trailing behind several Democratic candidates. His most significant challenger promised to be Joe Biden, who spent eight years as vice president in the previous administration of President Barack Obama. On June 11, 2019, a poll conducted by Quinnipiac University in Connecticut found Trump trailing Biden by a margin of 53-40 percent. Trump realized that if Biden went on to win the Democratic nomination, Trump would be hard pressed to make up the difference, meaning he was likely to lose the presidential election in November 2020.
Elected in November 2016, Trump was a different type of leader than Americans were used to seeing hold the office of president. Dating back to the earliest days of the republic, most US presidents have come up through the country’s political system. Many have served in Congress. Many have served as governors of their states. Some stepped into the presidency after serving long careers as military leaders. But Trump served no time in elective office or the military before launching his campaign for the presidency in 2015. At the time, he headed a company devoted to building hotels and apartment buildings in New York City, among other places. The world of New York real estate development can be hard fought, with competitors often resorting to underhanded ways to undermine one another. That was the culture in which Trump had thrived for decades.
As he prepared for his upcoming reelection campaign for the presidency in 2020, Trump searched for a way to attack Biden’s candidacy. The action Trump is alleged to have taken would result in his impeachment in the House of Representatives and his trial in the Senate on the charge of violating the oath of office he took when he was sworn in as president.
The Call to President Zelensky
Impeachment is a process conceived by the framers of the Constitution to determine whether a US president has violated the responsibilities of his office or has broken the law. The Constitution provides for members of the House to launch an investigation and, if they find the charges have merit, to draft articles of impeachment outlining the charges. The articles then must be approved by a majority of House members. If the articles are approved, they are sent to the Senate, which stages a trial. All members of the Senate act as jurors. At the conclusion of the trial, members of the Senate vote on the guilt or innocence of the president. Two-thirds of the Senate—sixty-seven members—must vote to convict in order for the president to be removed from office.
The act for which Trump found himself facing impeachment stemmed from a phone call the president made on July 25, 2019. Shaken by the public opinion polls that showed him likely to lose the presidency the following year, Trump was desperate to find reasons for voters to oppose Biden. He thought he had found such a reason when he learned of business dealings involving Hunter Biden, Joe’s son, in the eastern European nation of Ukraine. At the time, Hunter sat on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian natural gas company. Hunter’s tenure on the Burisma board ended in 2019. But while he was still a member of the board, Burisma’s president was under investigation by authorities in his own country on corruption charges.
Trump reportedly wanted to tie Hunter Biden to the Burisma president’s legal problems. And so he placed a call to the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, asking Zelensky to launch an investigation into Hunter Biden and publicly announce that Joe Biden’s son was under criminal investigation. With such an allegation hanging over the head of the son of a presidential candidate, Trump’s critics say, Trump hoped to convince voters that Joe Biden had knowledge of his son’s alleged corruption. As such, Trump would charge that Joe Biden was complicit in Hunter’s crimes and, therefore, unqualified for the presidency.
But there was even more to the charge. Weeks after the call was made—while Trump was still waiting for Zelensky to announce an investigation of Hunter Biden—the media reported that Trump had slowed military assistance to Ukraine. At the time, the federal government was sending $400 million in weapons and other aid to Ukraine to help the nation stave off attacks along its border launched by Russia, its hostile neighbor. Critics of the president charged that Trump had slowed the military aid to pressure Zelensky into announcing the investigation into Hunter Biden.
The House Impeaches the President
Soon information about the July 25 phone call came to the attention of Congress. Under federal law, so-called whistle-blowers are able to report misconduct by officials to investigating agencies. Under law, their identities remain secret in order to protect them from retribution from those under investigation. In this case a foreign affairs analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency with knowledge of the call to Zelensky filed a whistle-blower report that was sent to members of the House and Senate.
Based on the allegations in the whistle-blower’s report, the House (controlled by a Democratic majority) announced that it would pursue an investigation. The House staged a public hearing on its inquiry, which was broadcast live on national TV. The hearing, and the evidence that emerged, captivated the nation.
One of the witnesses who testified during the hearing was Alexander Vindman, a colonel in the US Army, a native of Ukraine, and a member of the White House foreign policy staff. Whenever presidents speak with foreign leaders, members of the foreign policy staff listen in on the phone calls. It is believed that following the conclusion of such calls, the staff’s input in interpreting the conversations is helpful to the president. Vindman was assigned to listen in on Trump’s July 25 call with Zelensky. As he listened to the call, Vindman testified during the impeachment hearing, he was shocked by what Trump asked Zelensky. “I was concerned by the call, what I heard was improper…. It is improper for the president of the United States to demand a foreign government investigate a US citizen and political opponent,” Vindman said. “It was also clear that if Ukraine pursued an investigation into the 2016 election, the Bidens, and Burisma, it would be interpreted as a partisan play.”
On December 13, 2019, the House Judiciary Committee approved two articles of impeachment against the president. The first article alleged that Trump abused his power as president by placing the call to Zelensky, asking for the investigation of Hunter Biden and withholding military aid to Ukraine to pressure Zelensky to comply with his demand. The second article alleged that Trump was guilty of obstruction of justice—that during the House’s investigation of the case, Trump withheld documents and other records requested by House investigators as they sought to uncover the truth.
Five days later the House approved the articles of impeachment by a vote of 230 to 197. All Republicans in the House voted against the impeachment of the president. On January 15, 2020, members of the House who were to serve as managers of the impeachment—essentially, the prosecutors for the trial—delivered the articles to the Senate.
The Senate Trial
On January 16, 2020, the trial commenced. In his opening remarks, Adam Schiff, a Democratic member of the House from California and one of the managers, said, “President Trump withheld hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to a strategic partner at war with Russia to secure foreign help with his re-election, in other words, to cheat … His scheme was undertaken for a simple but corrupt reason: to help him win re-election in 2020.”
For the next three weeks, the nation was captivated by the impeachment trial, which was broadcast live by several TV networks. During the trial, the president’s defenders insisted the charges were contrived by Democrats who sought to bring the accusations against the president for purely political purposes. The goal, the defenders said, was to undermine Trump’s standing among voters in the hopes they would turn to Joe Biden or another Democrat in the November election. Said Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator from South Carolina, “I’m not trying to pretend to be a fair juror here. What I see coming, happening today, is just partisan nonsense.”
The trial concluded on February 5. On the charge that Trump had abused his power, the Republican-controlled Senate voted 52-48 in favor of acquittal—falling well short of the two-thirds majority needed for a conviction and to oust Trump from the presidency. The lone Republican to vote for conviction was Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, a longtime Trump critic. Said Romney, “I believe that the act [Trump] took—an effort to corrupt an election—is as destructive an attack on the oath of office and on our Constitution as I can imagine.” On the charge that Trump obstructed justice, the Senate voted 53-47 in favor of acquittal. On this charge, all Republican senators voted to exonerate the president.
Following the Senate’s vote to acquit Trump, White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham issued a statement denouncing the campaign by Democrats to impeach the president, The statement said, “Today, the sham impeachment attempt concocted by Democrats ended in the full vindication and exoneration of President Donald J. Trump. As we have said all along, he is not guilty.”
Trump survived the impeachment effort, but he would soon learn that his path toward reelection had not been made easier by his acquittal. Four days after the Senate voted to acquit the president, a new Quinnipiac University poll showed Trump continuing to trail Biden and the other Democratic candidates in popularity among voters. For months, the nation’s attention had been squarely focused on the impeachment investigation and the Senate trial—a circumstance that haunted Trump as he sought reelection in the months ahead.