THEY DON'T NEED ANOTHER SHERO

I'm seeing a lot of Fiona-mania in the media today. I admire Fiona Hill, too, but I don't believe anything she said yesterday moved the needle. I'm reminded of previous moments when a certain class of Americans -- my class -- thought forthright women were changing the American political conversation. Sally Yates. Wendy Davis. Sandra Fluke. It was assumed that all Americans recognized their heroic acts of speaking truth to power. But eventually it became clear that only liberal America was moved. Those women courageously stood up to the powerful, but the powerful prevailed. Nothing changed.

More generally, I'd say nothing was changed by these impeachment hearings. I'm glad the press is reporting the witnesses' statements as solid confirmation of the case against the president -- that might tip a few people into the anti-Trump camp. But I agree with Ryan Broderick's must-read BuzzFeed piece on the competition between our two impeachment narratives: The right-wing narrative is winning in much of America.

But there are two impeachment hearings unfolding in the nation's capital. One, carried out by the Democrats, is designed to ascertain the truth as to whether Trump sought a "quid pro quo" deal with Ukraine to get the country to investigate Joe Biden and the 2016 presidential election in exchange for aid money. The other, being carried out simultaneously by the Republicans, is quite different. Instead of trying to learn the truth, it seeks to create not just a counternarrative but a completely separate reality.

Each round of GOP questioning is not meant to interrogate the witnesses, ... but instead to create moments that can be flipped into Fox News segments, shared as bite-size Facebook posts, or dropped into 4chan threads. Their alternate universe — built from baseless online conspiracy theories and reading the tea leaves of Trump’s Twitter feed — dominates Fox News and Facebook. And the Republicans’ strategy, as confusing and bizarre as it may seem to those on the outside, is working....

Here’s TrumpWorld’s version of the impeachment narrative: Claims of Russian meddling in the 2016 election were part of a hoax orchestrated by the Democrats to cover up their own collusion with Ukraine to block Trump’s presidential campaign. A 2017 Politico story written by Kenneth Vogel and Ukraine-based reporter David Stern and a series of articles by John Solomon in the Hill earlier this year prove this, Trump’s defenders say. The depositions for the impeachment inquiry were conducted in a basement of the Capitol building “like some kind of strange cult,” in the words of Republican Rep. Devin Nunes, to continue that cover-up. Every witness who testifies to the contrary, like Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman or Marie Yovanovitch, former US ambassador to Ukraine, is spreading unreliable hearsay. Democrats are playing dirty by hiding the whistleblower.

Throughout the hearings, Democrats carefully -- and often dully -- built a meticulous case for the president's guilt. Republicans countered by histrionically describing a conspiracy to cover up the truth and railroad the president. Their story was just more visceral. To the faithful, the GOP committee members described yet another liberal stab in the back. To the undecided, the GOP worked hard to establish reasonable doubt.

Democrats made their case on the facts and the law, but I fear that Republicans won over quite a bit of the populace. We'll see what happens in the coming weeks, but I don't feel as good about this week as I imagine a lot of you do.