january/february 2017

Ambassador William Taylor’s testimony to House investigators on Tuesday didn’t answer every question about the Ukraine scandal, but it answered the big one: Will President Donald Trump be impeached?

Impeachment is now effectively inevitable. Taylor’s testimony fleshed out the biggest open questions, including whether there was a quid pro quo with Ukraine (there was), what it involved (military aid), and what Trump wanted (investigations of the Biden family and the 2016 election.) Congress has now heard from career civil servants and from political appointees, all telling a similar story, and Taylor removed the last scintilla of doubt. With that, it’s all but impossible to imagine a scenario in which House Democrats don’t vote to impeach the president.

Donald Trump has never feared another elected Republican. Over the course of five years, he has bullied and insulted, mocked and complained about nearly every GOP officeholder past and present, including George W. Bush and Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Jeff Flake. He knew that the Republicans who dared to stand up to him couldn’t hurt him (Bob Corker), and that the Republicans who could have hurt him wouldn’t dare stand up to him (Paul Ryan).

All of which has led Trump to believe that there is no possible danger of the Republican Party being pried from his grasp. But Trump may at last need to rethink that calculus.

Mitt Romney’s attempt to excise Trump from his party started early. In March 2016, he became the only former Republican presidential nominee to take a public position against Trump’s candidacy. This act of resistance didn’t work, however, because while Romney had moral authority, he had no real power.

“I cheated on my ex during our relationship and she found out shortly after we broke up,” a Reddit user posting from the burner account Khaleesiscorned wrote in the spring of 2016 in the subreddit r/relationships. “She’s blocked me on everything, but briefly unblocks me every Monday to send me Game of Thrones spoilers before I can watch. How do I get her to stop?”

The full story involves a number of details that are not particularly redeeming: The original poster actually cheated multiple times; some of his friends joined the ex in her cause because they no longer wanted to be associated with him and in fact actively disliked him; at no point did the poster acknowledge that this woman is obviously very funny! The post was eventually removed by the subreddit’s moderators as potentially fake, but not before a screenshot of it went viral on Twitter and dozens of outlets circulated the story with headlines like “Girl Gets Sweet, Fiery Revenge on Ex With ‘Game of Thrones’ Spoilers.”

The worst day in the history of life on Earth, so far, happened almost exactly 66 million years ago, when an asteroid roughly the size of Manhattan slammed into the Yucatán Peninsula.

You may know the story. The asteroid—which arrived, probably, in June or July—immediately drilled a 20-mile hole into the planet’s surface, vaporizing bedrock and spewing it halfway to the moon. The planet shuddered with magnitude-12 earthquakes, loosing tsunamis across the Gulf of Mexico. Some of the ejected debris condensed in orbit and plunged back to Earth as searing spheres of molten glass, which torched the land and turned forests into firestorms. Other debris remained high in space, where it blocked the sun’s rays and began to chill the surface of the planet.

For eight years, House Republicans searched for a “smoking gun” that could unravel the presidency of Barack Obama. They presided over hundreds of oversight hearings, issued more than 100 subpoenas, held the attorney general in contempt of Congress, and even formed a special select committee devoted exclusively to one investigation, on Benghazi. As someone who spent five years working alongside Republicans on the Oversight Committee, I can tell you that we never found a “smoking gun” like the testimony that was provided yesterday from the senior U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, William B. Taylor.

Ambassador Taylor delivered a 15-page opening statement that detailed the “confusing and unusual arrangement” involving the nongovernment employee Rudy Giuliani’s “irregular” role in making aid to Ukraine conditioned on the promise to investigate the family of one of President Donald Trump’s political rivals, Joe Biden. Taylor testified that Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney had ordered an Office of Management and Budget staff member to “hold security assistance to Ukraine,” even though the Defense Department had determined that the “assistance was effective and should be resumed.”

It is easy to look at today’s crop of sinking IPOs—like Uber, Lyft, and Peloton—or scuttled public offerings, like WeWork, and see an eerie resemblance to the dot-com bubble that popped in 2000.

• Both then and now, consumer-tech companies spent lavishly on advertising and struggled to find a path to profit.

• Both then and now, companies that bragged about their ability to change the world admitted suddenly that they were running out of money.

• Both then and now, the valuations of once-heralded tech enterprises were halved in a matter of weeks.

• Both then and now, there was a widespread sense of euphoria curdling into soberness, washed down with the realization that thousands of workers in once-promising firms were poised to lose their jobs.

Like games, geese are notoriously annoying. They’re brusque, clumsy, and territorial. If you are a person and one appears on your country estate, the advice recommends avoiding engagement and then standing your ground if it charges. Show the goose who’s boss. A recent, hugely popular video game, Untitled Goose Game, stages this conflict. For some reason, it turns out to be familiar to everyone, even city slickers who have never seen a goose in person.

It’s fun! Being a goose for a while is diverting and surprising, and embodying one in a simulated, pastoral environment speaks to the flexible power of games as a medium. Games turn the world on its head, allowing you to become all the things you are not: a criminal, in Grand Theft Auto; an explorer of alien worlds, in No Man’s Sky; the universe itself, in Everything. You gain a new perspective, having had the opportunity to be something grander than—or just different from—yourself.

Diplomats are known for their ability to phrase things delicately, but testimony today from William Taylor, the top American diplomat in Ukraine, is notable for its bluntness.

Although the Trump administration has denied that it was trying to extract a quid pro quo from Ukraine—investigations of both 2016 hacking and of the Biden family’s business there in exchange for military aid—Taylor’s opening statement shows that’s exactly what was happening.

In an astonishing 15-page prepared statement, Taylor laid out a detailed chronology, which fits closely with what is already known about the Ukraine scandal, but fills in valuable new details. Far from some disgruntled Obama-administration holdover, Taylor was dispatched to Kiev in June by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo after Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch was fired, reportedly at Rudy Giuliani’s behest. Taylor learned that Giuliani was in effect running a shadow foreign policy in Ukraine. In mid-July, Taylor realized that security assistance to Ukraine was being held up, though not the reasons for the delay. Taylor also came to understand that aides to newly elected President Volodymyr Zelensky felt that their country was at risk of being used as a pawn in the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

“Are you 100 percent confident that vaccines pose no injury to any person on this planet?”

That was a real question asked today by Bill Posey, a congressman representing Florida’s Eighth District, to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook, for the record, is not a pharmaceutical company. Zuckerberg is not a medical professional. There are no indications that Libra, the proposed cryptocurrency that was supposedly the object of the House subcommittee hearing during which this exchange took place, will require its users to submit their vaccination records.

Posey’s monologue—he claimed to “support vaccinations,” but was also “disappointed Facebook would consider interfering with free speech with vaccinations”—was shocking in not only its content, but also its context. Posey was complaining about changes Facebook announced in March: that it would reject ads that include misinformation about vaccines and stop recommending groups and pages that spread such misinformation. Today’s hearing was about whether, in starting a cryptocurrency, Facebook might destabilize the global financial system.

“Where’s the Whistleblower?” President Donald Trump asked in a tweet this morning. The answer that Trump surely doesn’t want to hear, however, is this: It’s not just one whistle-blower anymore.

The president now finds himself virtually surrounded by them, as one official after another treks to Capitol Hill to accuse Trump of putting his own political interests ahead of the nation’s. The clamor is powering the congressional impeachment investigation that Trump has failed to thwart, and that now threatens his presidency.

William Taylor, Trump’s own envoy to Ukraine, yesterday became the latest senior official to cry foul over wrongdoing at the highest levels of the president’s administration. In closed-door testimony to three congressional committees, the veteran diplomat detailed how a pressure campaign directed by the president sought to tie U.S. aid to Ukraine to the public announcement of a Ukrainian investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son. It was the most damaging account yet of a quid pro quo that, despite denials from Trump and his lieutenants, fits the very definition of the term.