When the House impeachment inquiry began more than a month ago, much of the focus was on a complaint from a whistleblower that drew attention to a July 25 phone call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, during which Trump asked for investigations into potential political rivals.You'll have to go to the site to click on the letter and see all the instances of corroboration. It looks like this:
The whistleblower accused Trump of abusing his office for political gain and laid out a road map that House Democrats have followed in their investigation.
Trump has spent weeks questioning the whistleblower's motives and slamming the account for being inaccurate. But as this annotation shows, most of the complaint has been corroborated during closed-door depositions of administration officials, through public statements and from a rough transcript of the call itself, released by the White House.
Why does the Republican base remain unmoved by the devastating findings of the Mueller investigation and by the revelations of Trump's extortion of the Ukrainian government for political favors? A recent study sheds light with somewhat surprising and heartening answers.
It's not that Republicans follow the president robotically. It's that they are not either paying attention to, or are not being exposed to, media reports about what's really going on here. cambridge.org/core/journals/…
The more reports Republicans see about these scandals, the more their support for Trump declines. Just the headlines alone are enough to prompt their decline of support.
This is encouraging news. The authors of the study conclude thusly.
It's not so much that the right-wing media echo chamber has convinced it's audience that Trump is a saint. It's more that they report on his scandals far less than do mainstream media outlets. Accordingly, out of sight, out of mind. You can see that from this analysis by @NateSilver538. And from what I can tell, it remains true. fivethirtyeight.com/features/all-t…
That's why I think the Democrats are right, as a political matter, to pursue impeachment regardless of the likely vote count in the Senate. And who knows--an erosion of Republicans support for Trump might still be coming, which could effect that trial.
From the authors:The major challenge is the degree to which the Republican base is either paying little attention to politics these days or paying little attention to media outlets outside of the right-wing bubble.
That's a very big challenge. Maybe even insurmountable. But it is a tiny bit hopeful that these people aren't totally brainwashed.