"The Mueller report, it was always Manafort this and his son that. There was a cascade of players," said presidential historian Douglas Brinkley, referring to former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Donald Trump jnr. "This was just Donald Trump and a disturbing conversation with another world leader."
So, suddenly, Washington is different and the history of Trump's presidency has changed. By year's end, he could become only the third American president impeached by the House of Representatives.
That new reality caught Trump and his advisers off guard, according to people close to the President. If anything, they thought the spectre of impeachment had been lifted after the Mueller investigation ended without a clear determination that Trump had committed a crime.
The contours of that investigation played to Trump's strengths. Mueller spent two years in silence, allowing the President to fill the vacuum with assertions that the investigation was a "hoax" and a "witch hunt". The details of the investigation that did leak out were often complicated and focused on people in Trump's sphere. Even Mueller's statement that he had not exonerated Trump did not seem to stick. There was plenty of smoke, but no smoking gun. Other Democratic inquiries appeared likely to meet a similar fate, including a House investigation into Trump's business dealings. For many Americans, they were one big blur of investigations without any clarity of purpose.
Then the whistleblower gave the Democrats what they needed: a simple, easily explainable charge — that the President sought a foreign government's help for personal political gain — and his words to back it up. For House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and moderates who had resisted calls for impeachment, the calculus shifted. It was now more of a risk to recoil from impeachment than charge ahead.
Mike Staffieri, a retiree and Republican who lives just outside of Richmond, Virginia, said Democrats were trying to "throw enough poop at the wall and hope something sticks".
That rough transcript of a call in which Trump presses Ukraine's President, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, to work with Attorney-General William Barr and personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani on an investigation into Biden? It's just Trump being Trump, according to his backers.
There were small signs that some Republicans were trying to keep some distance from Trump. Some GOP lawmakers fled Washington claiming they hadn't yet read the whistleblower's complaint. Others said they were open to learning more about the situation. Trump's hold on the party makes it nearly impossible to foresee a scenario in which the GOP-controlled Senate convicts Trump if he were impeached by the Democratic-run House.
Impeachment: Next steps
House Democrats are planning a rapid start to their push for impeachment of President Donald Trump.
●Democratic leaders have instructed committees to move quickly after revelations that Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to investigate his potential 2020 Democratic challenger, Joe Biden.
●The House Intelligence Committee, the House Oversight and Reform Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee, have scheduled depositions starting this week for State Department officials linked to Trump's dealings with Ukraine.
●The Intelligence Committee has been negotiating to interview the whistleblower who began the firestorm.
●The inspector general who handled that complaint, Michael Atkinson, is slated to testify to the Intelligence Committee in private on October 4.
●Lawmakers on the committee said they also want to speak to White House aides who were present for the call and to Rudy Giuliani, the President's personal lawyer, who urged the investigations.
- AP
