Volodymyr zelensky

It’s oft repeated, but bears repeating, that our president is a man of perfection. From his perfectly done steaks to his perfect tweets, the guy is a stalwart example that you can, in fact, have it all. And when it comes to telephonic perfection, he resides somewhere between Carly Rae Jepsen and Hinder’s 'Lips of An Angel' in his communiqué with other world leaders.So when he tweeted: 'I JUST GOT IMPEACHED FOR MAKING A PERFECT PHONE CALL!' — you know that the phone call was damn near perfect.Which leads us to the quintessential question — what are the elements of a perfect phone call?For one, finding a quiet place devoid of distractions. In this hypothetical, I like to imagine a bathroom with a high vaulted ceiling and good marble work.

This article is in The Spectator’s December 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. The unfolding deep-state effort to remove Donald Trump from office diffuses an acrid aroma of paranoia, partly because of its ever-expanding cast of enemies. After the tears and disbelief of 2016, there were rumors about ‘Russian collusion’ between the Trump campaign and Moscow. It emerged that investigations into Trump and his associates dated back to at least July 2016, when the FBI covertly launched ‘Crossfire Hurricane’ to investigate Michael Flynn, Carter Page, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone and other Trump campaign associates. The Obama administration had been sniffing around Trump since 2015, when his campaign first began to show signs of life.

In turning on Donald Trump, American EU ambassador Gordon M. Sondland, who was sporting a nifty $55,000 Breguet watch today, performed what amounted to a timely jailbreak from the administration. 'Was there a “quid pro quo”?’ he said before Congress. 'The answer is yes.’ Sondland, in other words, was done being a yes-man for Trump.He had to endure a pillorying from Rep. Sean Maloney, who sarcastically observed that it took three times for Sondland to get it right in his testimony, but he ended up delivering the goods. In fact, a bushelful, far more than the Democratic lawmakers might reasonably have expected. Adam Schiff made the Cheshire Cat look dour as he unraveled the Gordian knot, reciting Sondland’s key statements at the close of the hearing.

Democrats like to make out that Donald Trump is terrified of the impeachment juggernaut they are driving at his head. The president is dissembling on Twitter, they say, because he’s in deep trouble. He knows he’s cornered. He’s flailing. He’s spooked. Resistance to the resistance is futile. The problem is, Trump — and, even more so, his online persona @realDonaldTrump — seems to be relishing the impeachment saga. He does his phony melancholy routine, in which he says how sad it is because we should all be focusing on his many achievements. Don’t believe it. He is simultaneously courting the whole Ukraine brouhaha, dragging it out himself. Why else would he have live-tweeted it last week?

The first day of public impeachment hearings was good for Republicans and mediocre, at best, for Democrats. That’s far short of what Democrats need — and they know it. To remove a president, they need clear evidence of serious malfeasance, enough to convince average voters and put pressure on Republicans on Capitol Hill. They did not make a strong start. Hearsay testimony about diplomatic process is not enough, and that’s all they heard on Day One. Trump’s use of irregular back channels may be irritating to career diplomats; it may be a confusing, incoherent way to run foreign policy; but it is perfectly legal. It’s also too deep in the minutiae of public policy to engage the general public.

It’s been a refreshing time for Gordon Sondland, the US ambassador to the European Union, hotel magnate and, not least, $1 million donor to the Trump inaugural committee. It's a long way from Brussels, where Sondland was stationed, to Kiev, but Sondland, who testified before the House Intelligence Committee a few weeks ago that he didn’t really know anything about a quid pro quo, has apparently provided several pages of new testimony that was released today in which he suddenly 'refreshed my recollection'. Sondland, in other words, has recollected that nefarious things were happening or, to put it more precisely, wants to save his own hide. He's flipped. Donald Trump holds strong views about this kind of behavior.

Trick or treat, Mr President? House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tried to deliver the former with the House resolution — passed today entirely on party lines — outlining rules for the impeachment inquiry she announced more than a month ago. Ignoring precedent and the fact that every other presidential impeachment inquiry began with a House vote to authorize it, Pelosi insisted that because there was no constitutional requirement for a vote, she was under no obligation to hold one. She made sure to point out that today’s resolution wasn’t a vote to authorize the inquiry either — that would be admitting that the month of work Democrats have done so far wasn’t fair.

President Trump may be pulling out of Syria, but it’s bombs away in Washington. John Bolton’s likening Rudy Giuliani to a 'hand grenade' has now prompted America’s mayor to fire back that his old chum is an 'atomic bomb'. Both may be right.As the president complains about a lack of transparency in the House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry, enough information is surfacing to make it clear that the testimony of former National Security Council staffer Fiona Hill administered another body blow to Trump’s claim that his July telephone call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky was fine and dandy. Hill apparently testified that Bolton wanted nothing to do with a Ukrainian scheme that he likened to a 'drug deal' and told her to speak with White House lawyers.

Oops. Donald Trump has another nettlesome whistleblower on his hands that he’s going to have to try and drown out.  The latest revelation: a career Internal Revenue Service official has filed a complaint alleging that a Treasury Department official sought to tamper with the annual audit of Donald Trump or Mike Pence’s tax returns. Which official do you think is more likely to have sought to intervene?According to the Washington Post, which broke the story, the whistleblower’s account focuses on 'the integrity of the government’s system for auditing the president and vice president’s tax returns.' Needless to say, the process is supposed to be inviolate.

This article is in The Spectator’s inaugural US edition. Subscribe here to get yours. One thing is now as obvious as a brick through a window: politics is the new comedy. Who in America believes that the road to 2020 will be paved with prudence, solemnity and fair campaigning? Nobody does. This election season will be defined by below-the-belt hits, salty jokes and juvenile comebacks, all delivered with the subtlety of an air horn blast. Already we have seen doddery Joe Biden challenge the president to a push-up contest on national television, while Bernie Sanders wants to take on Trump at a mile-long footrace. The president, according to the cerebral Andrew Yang, is ‘so fat’. This is not an American phenomenon.

Poor Joseph Maguire. The acting head of the intelligence agencies sure was in an awful predicament as he testified before the House Intelligence Committee. The former Navy SEAL was thrashing about to avoid becoming entangled in the net of the Democratic inquiry, swimming in murkier waters than he had ever encountered before. Indeed, at one point he confessed that he never would have accepted his post had he been aware of the whistleblower report that sounded an alarm about what Adam Schiff deemed the ‘nefarious’ activities about President Trump and his top aides.How different from Corey Lewandowski, who appears to be headed to the White House to help lead the defense of Trump!

I am not thinking of that scene at the beginning of Dickens’s novel where Mr Blotton says he regards Mr Pickwick as a 'humbug'. That was nice, especially when Mr Pickwick angrily demands to know whether the Rt. Honorable gentleman called him a humbug in its ordinary or 'common sense'. No, no responded Mr Blotton, he had 'merely considered him a humbug in a Pickwickian point of view'. Well, that’s all right then, rejoined Mr Pickwick, and peace and amity reigned once more among the members of the Pickwick Club. There is a lesson in there somewhere for the Democrats, but when it comes to their virulent case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, more pertinent is the episode describing the case of Bardell v. Pickwick.

Is Donald Trump going to be impeached? Nancy Pelosi is not giving herself much room to maneuver: once a Democratic-led committee of inquiry is assembled, its results are a foregone conclusion. It will recommend impeachment — to fail to do so would only strengthen the president and make Democrats look stupid on the eve of an election. As things are, Pelosi evidently found the pressure from within her party already too great to withstand: her sense of the political risks of impeachment was outweighed by her sense of the danger to her own position from continuing to resist it. So the die is cast. Perhaps this tells us, too, that Joe Biden’s support for the Democratic nomination is dwindling behind the scenes.

Spin the magic wheel: click, click, click, click, click — click — click: Ukraine! We’re all going to Ukraine! Another week, another pseudo-scandal fomented by anonymous anti-Trump actors in the 'intelligence community' and fanned into attention-grabbing headlines by an impatient, irresponsible press. Can anyone keep them all straight? They rise like noxious bubbles from the cauldron of deep-state anti-Trump sentiment, only to pass away almost immediately, carried off by their own insubstantiality and the contrasting bright-light series of real achievements on the part of the Trump administration.