A Warning
by tristero
Democratic Congresscritters are all over the Tube saying things like, "Whoa, when Vindman and Hill and Taylor testify publicly, the American public will finally get to hear live the horrible truth about Trump and his goons." This is dangerous naiveté.
The closed-door hearings have given the Republicans a tremendous advantage: they know exactly what Vindman is going to say. They know what gets under Hill's skin and makes her lose her temper. They know Taylor's weaknesses. In short, they are treating the closed-door hearings as a rehearsal, a dry run, a learning experience, and the Republicans are now fully prepared. It's about to get ugly.
"About to?" you ask, astonished. Yep.
The Republicans are going to take the gloves off and stop pulling punches. There is nothing I would put past Trump and the rest of the GOP, including histrionics on the floor of Congress, mass arrests, pardons, physical threats, and worse.
Meanwhile, the Democrats seem to be wholly unimaginative about the nature of the threat. They appear totally unprepared for the level of disruption that will begin with the public hearings. If past is prologue, there will be utter chaos. And the truths Vindman et al have to say will be given short shrift as the media focuses on the disruption and madness.
UPDATE: Part of the reason I'm so concerned about what will happen next week is because to date, I have seen no one raise alarms about the suspiciously-timed release of what Trump is claiming to be a "transcript" of a second call with Ukraine.
Obviously, this call's publicly-released summary will be even more heavily doctored in Trump's favor than the summary of the July 25 call was, and the release spun in Trump's favor, a la Barr and the Mueller report. And yet so far, Trump is getting a free pass to publicize the imminent release of the call with no one (at least in the media I check) raising concerns about its potential veracity. In short, those opposed to Trump still don't fully get how dangerous he is and how nothing he does can, even for a moment, be left undisputed.
The impression I'm getting is that people — Congresspeople, the mainstream press — think that next week will obviously be a slam dunk and Trumpism is in decline. They couldn't be more wrong. As I see it, they have only begun to fight and now it will start to get uglier than anyone has ever seen before.