Vindman impeachment testimony is the Democrats’ Trump card
A significant moment in the Trump presidency occurred on Tuesday when a serving member of the US Army put on his uniform.
Such commonplace events aren’t normally headline news but when that serviceman is Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, an expert on Ukraine serving on the National Security Council, then his uniform becomes something greater in the national story. It’s precisely why Oliver North became part of the contemporary mythology of America. But in the case of Vindman, there was something more nuanced than the starch stiff, honest, upright Marine giving testimony to Congress during Iran-Contra. The uniform lent credence to the Congressional committee before whom Vindman gave testimony. It deflected attacks that had come from the more extreme wing of the conservative caucus. It even returned some of the fire back in the direction from where it originated.
It was the uniform that ensured that Vindman’s testimony was materially different to that offered last Tuesday, when Bill Taylor, the US ambassador to Ukraine, sat down with the joint committee pursuing the impeachment of this president. Taylor’s appearance was meant to have changed the dynamics of the probe, providing what all the major new networks described as a “tipping point”. At the time that sounded overstated and so it has proved. Rather than see a tectonic change that made the President’s eventual removal from office more likely, Taylor merely confirmed facts we already knew, though importantly he did link Trump to the “quid-pro-quo” arrangement by which President Zelensky would receive US aid in exchange for opening an investigation into Burisma, the energy company with links to Joe Biden’s son, Hunter.
Yet if that sounds too long and complicated to remember, don’t worry. It is. Taylor also provided a long statement which the newspapers ran with evident glee, forgetting as they did so that the central rubric of the impeachment process is that the Democrats must keep it simple.
And that’s what made Vindman so different. There are few things as simple as American patriotism and just as “I thank you for your service” has entered the network news lexicon, so too has the rule that the loyalty of a serviceman or woman should never be questioned. Yet that is exactly what happened Monday night when Fox News sought to get ahead of the following day’s testimony.
The attack came from Laura Ingram, hardly a stranger to controversy given she was forced to take a “pre-planned vacation” last year after making comments around the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting. This time she questioned Vindman’s loyalty to the country. “Col. Vindman emigrated from Ukraine along with his family when he was a child and is fluent in Ukrainian and Russian,” she said, going on to insinuate that he has divided loyalties. John Yoo, a law professor from Berkley (and, incidentally, the person who gave George W. Bush’s administration the legal basis for their waterboarding programme) went even further. Commenting on Vindman’s relationship with Ukrainian officials, he suggested that “some people might call that espionage”. It was all shabby stuff but no more so than we’ve come to expect.
Testimony, however damaging, is merely noise that Republicans think they can drown out. The immediate effect of Ambassador Taylor’s appearance was seen the next day when Congressman Matt Gaetz led a charge of Republicans on the committee’s SCIF (a sensitive compartmented information facility), breaking all rules by taking mobile phones into the area and then leaving empty pizza boxes behind them when their moronic sit-in was finished. Add to the list of infractions the fact that they were also engaged in witness intimidation, given they stormed the room whilst Laura Cooper, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia, was testifying. Yet it was the kind of aggressive posturing that Trump has reportedly been demanding from his key loyalists (and, perhaps, why Gaetz featured prominently in photographs of Trump at the World Series baseball game).
Without the uniform, Vindman would have been just another member of the so-called “deep state”, like Taylor and, before him, Fiona Hill. With it, he amplified the message that this isn’t about Democrats facing off against Republicans, but small, vulnerable, imperfect politicians struggling to live up to the American ideal. Had Ingram and others anticipated, as perhaps they should have, that Vindman would appear in his dress uniform, they might not have scored something of an own goal. Reaction to the attacks on Vindman’s patriotism came from deeper inside the Republican Party than the usual Trump-agnostics. Mitt Romney would, of course, say it was “absurd, disgusting, and way off the mark” but less expected was hearing Liz Cheney, the third most powerful member of the GOP, saying that “I think that we need to show that we are better than that as a nation”. Even Senator majority leader Mitch McConnell refused to get drawn into the Fox News rhetoric.
As with so much around the impeachment, what feels memorable in the moment is soon forgotten. Taylor, the “tipping point”, is hardly remembered barely a week later. What won’t be forgotten quite as easily, however, is Vindman’s appearance in his uniform. It is important not because it was materially significant to the investigation but a symbolic reminder of what this investigation needs to be about. If it’s about removing a president from office, they can and should fail. If it’s about protecting the Office of the President of the United States and all that entails, then they have a route forward. Impeachment needs that symbolic element, especially as we now move towards witnesses giving public testimony.
In the coming weeks, if you look for the fractures emerging in the GOP, don’t fret too long and hard about economic metrics, polls, or even expressions of loyalty by senators taking on TV. Look for them around those things that mean the most to conservatives. Fiscal responsibility might remain the most painful sore for them going into 2020, with the US deficit now topping $1 trillion for the first time since 2012, but it was Trump’s position on Syria that has done more than anything to harm his standing among Republicans. It produced (for a time) the seemingly impossible by swapping the 2019 model of Lindsey Graham for the Lindsey Graham of 2015.
Look out, then, for the possible testimony of John Bolton, who exists in the red, white and blue ether. As an uber hawk and a long-time contributor to Fox News, he is the kind of conservative voice who could inflict serious damage. He has a habit of lodging in the public consciousness in that silly, strange, but potent way that his moustache makes him memorable. His toxic characterisation of Trump’s ransom of Ukrainian aid is already the most memorable phrase of the investigation. As reported by Fiona Hill, Bolton said: “I am not part of whatever drug deal [they] are cooking up”.
Factually wrong but symbolic of something rotten about this Presidency, “drug deal” takes a hugely complicated set of facts, narratives, and multi-syllabic East European names and reduces them into something the public can understand. Small things can have huge symbolism. They are often the sharp edges that shape history and might eventually sever the umbilical that connects Trump to his Republican host.