John Bolton claims could change public opinion

John Bolton's evidence may hurt Donald Trump's chances in the presidential race.

For a nation raised on Perry Mason, Law & Order and Ally McBeal, the impeachment trial of Donald Trump has not exactly been a courtroom drama to keep Americans glued to their screens. “Cancel that dinner reservation, Ida! I want to watch Representative Adam Schiff laying out the parameters by which to judge presidential abuse of power,” said absolutely no one as the trial unfolded over the last week.

So far it has been less 12 Angry Men, more A Hundred Sleepy Senators. We’ve had prolix speeches from the prosecution, “the honourable House of Representatives managers” as they are formally called, and repeated invocation of irrelevant material by the defence.

The problem is it’s hard to inject much excitement or anticipation into an event whose outcome is so obviously pre-ordained. The jurors, 100 senators, have all made up their minds about the guilt or innocence of the accused. Every Democrat thinks the president is guilty as hell. Every Republican thinks the whole thing is a witch-hunt.

But just as we were settling into the dreary inevitability of it all, with the prospect of a conclusion – and an acquittal – by the end of the week, we got what scriptwriters term a MacGuffin.

It took the unlikely form of the exuberantly mustachioed former national security adviser John Bolton, a man of hawkishly reliable Republican credentials who, nonetheless, may be in a position to do much harm to Mr Trump.

A brief reminder of the case: the president was impeached by the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives on charges including the abuse of power, for allegedly making military assistance to Ukraine conditional on that country’s president helping Mr Trump with his re-election campaign.

Specifically, the president is supposed to have told Volodymyr Zelensky to order an investigation into two matters. First, alleged Ukrainian intervention on behalf of Hillary Clinton in the presidential election of 2016 and, second, alleged corruption associated with the fact that the son of the then vice-president Joe Biden was given a lucrative position on the board of a Ukrainian energy company run by an allegedly corrupt oligarch, while Mr Biden senior was overseeing the Obama administration’s policy towards the country.

Democrats have so far produced evidence from people claiming they believe Mr Trump did make military aid conditional on these investigations, but no one who has actually said the president told him to do it.

Step forward Mr Bolton. On Sunday it was reported that in the manuscript of a book the former national security adviser is to publish later this year, he recounts a conversation with the president in which he said he was indeed linking the suspension of aid to the proposed investigations.

For Democrats, it is the smoking gun and it has thrown the trial into unfamiliar territory. The prosecutors want to call Mr Bolton and perhaps others to testify about what the president said and when he said it. To do that they will need the support of at least four Republican senators since the party holds a majority of three.

Up till now those votes have seemed elusive but the Bolton bombshell has changed that. After the news emerged, Mitt Romney and Susan Collins, two of the more Trump-sceptical senators, indicated they’re open to calling witnesses. And late on Tuesday Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, told his members that there were not enough votes to block witnesses.

Public opinion certainly seems to be in favour of broadening and extending the trial. A Quinnipiac University poll this week found 75 per cent of voters want the senate to call witnesses. More than half believe Trump has abused his power, isn’t telling the truth about his actions and has obstructed Congress.

The prospect of Mr Bolton’s testimony has clearly alarmed the president. Yesterday (Wednesday) he went on a Twitter rant that even by his standards was intemperate, saying among other things that if he hadn’t fired Mr Bolton last year, the US “would be in World War Six by now”.

A longer trial and more testimony could cut both ways for Democrats eager to delve deeper into the president’s alleged misconduct. If there are witnesses, Republicans have said they should include Mr Biden himself and Hunter, his son at the centre of the Ukraine drama. That could prove embarrassing. And even if Mr Bolton does testify damagingly, Mr Trump’s lawyers can still claim that the president’s efforts were legitimate – he was simply demanding that Ukraine investigate corruption.

But what is starting to worry Republicans is that if the trial runs on – and with new testimony, we are likely to see it continue well into February – the politics may change.

The choice in November’s election was always going to be between two competing popular sentiments. By large margins, voters approve of Mr Trump’s record: a strong economy, a foreign policy that has avoided major US entanglements. But by a similar margin, voters dislike his character, the behaviour and the language.

For the Democrats, it’s critical to keep the focus of public attention on Mr Trump’s character as the election nears. The longer the impeachment process goes on, the more the country will be talking about the supposedly seamy things the president does and says rather than the positive achievements he can claim.

There will still be no conviction in the impeachment of Donald J Trump. But his opponents hope that in the court of public opinion, there might be a different verdict.

The Times