The Man Behind The Curtain Is Revealed. Are We Now Closer To Impeaching Him?

MEDIUM.COM

It was the week that the man behind the curtain finally was revealed for being what we've long known him to be -- a petty tyrant who spews threats against his perceived enemies, large and small, but ultimately is unable to harm him.   And who do we have to thank for this game changer?  Not James Comey or Robert Mueller.  Not Nancy Pelosi or Adam Schiff.  Not Saturday Night Live or Steven Colbert's The Late Show.  Not The New York Times or The Washington Post.  It was a bespectacled 61-year-old career diplomat from Connecticut with the demeanor of a high school librarian. 

In a few hours last Friday, Marie Yovanovitch ripped away the curtain, walking determinedly into the Capitol through the front doors and not sneaking in through the basement, to tell three House committees pursuing the impeachment of Donald Trump that despite her exemplary 14 years as the U.S. ambassador to Kyrgyzstan, Armenia and most recently Ukraine, that the president had fired her at Rudy Giuliani's behest because her anti-corruption crusading was getting in the way of their little scheme to extort the leader of a foreign government into digging up non-existent dirt on Joe Biden and his son. 

"Today we see the State Department attacked and hollowed out from within," Yovanovich said in a scathing denunciation.  "Bad actors [in Ukraine and elsewhere] will see how easy it is to use fiction and innuendo to manipulate our system.  The only interests that will be served are those of our strategic adversaries, like Russia."  

Trump went on the attack, but there was nothing he could do beyond spewing harsh and suddenly very empty words.  It was all smoke and mirrors.  No throwing Yovanovich in irons and sending her off to a federal detention facility.   

The First Amendment -- and America -- had won, and the best the imploding Chosen One could come up with was an empty promise to sue Pelosi and Schiff because they were hurting the feelings of a narcissist whose seeming self confidence is betrayed by the knowledge that the one thing he craves more than anything else -- respect -- is well beyond his oleaginous reach.  

Last week, in fact, was the first since Trump's "election" that there was the sense that we at long last may be gaining the upper hand.  House Democrats dutifully slogged toward an impeachment vote and the full horrors of the Ukraine scandal and an out-of-control president who is weaponizing foreign policy for his own personal and political gain was laid bare.   

Then there is newly awakened realization of the moral rot of Trump's posse -- Vice President Pence, whose self-righteous religiosity masks his willing participation in Trump's evildoing, Attorney General Barr, who we now know jetted off to foreign capitals in the service of Trump's delusions about a "deep state" plot to undermine the 2016 election, Secretary of State Pompeo, who is neck deep in a real plot to undermine the 2020 election, and presidential fixer Giuliani, whose financial ties to Russian and Ukrainian mobsters run so long and so deep that he is now under investigation by the very U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan where he began his career as a prosecutor in 1981.   

All of that is why this week is so important.   

Will momentum against Trump continue to build as others break with president as did the courageous Yovanovich?  Will Fiona Hill, Trump's former top Russia advisor, and former European Union ambassador Gordon Sondland, both scheduled to testify before the impeachment committees, step up?  How about Donald McGahn, Hope Hicks, James Mattis, H.R. McMaster and other players who mutter in private about Trump's awfulness but have been reluctant to speak up?   

Or will the harsh light that Marie Yovanovich so bravely shined be snuffed out and we retreat back into that crushing feeling of helplessness and malaise to which we have became all too accustomed?