Peggy Noonan leveled President Trump and claimed his Republican supporters have “no defense” following the impeachment hearings.
Noonan argued that the evidence from the House impeachment hearings painted an indefensible picture of Trump’s demands from Ukraine in a Wall Street Journal column published Thursday night.
Noonan acknowledged that the witnesses called by the majority party were “uneven” in favor of the Democratic case, but she claimed that didn’t diminish the evidence presented during the hearings. She noted that no Republicans found it out of the question for Trump to demand a political investigation of the Bidens from Ukraine in return for military aid.
“In the two months since Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced a formal impeachment inquiry was underway and the two weeks since the Intelligence Committee’s public hearings began, no one, even in the White House, has said anything like, ‘He wouldn’t do that!’ or ‘That would be so unlike him.’ His best friends know he would do it, and it’s exactly like him,” Noonan wrote.
Noonan broke down each witness’s testimony and noted that it was not a “seamless success for Democrats.” She acknowledged that Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman came across as “smug” and “self-valorized” when he demanded to be called by his rank.
She argued that the witnesses who followed Vindman gave much better testimonies. Noonan claimed U.S Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland “seemed like a guy with nothing to lose” and that top Russian adviser Fiona Hill was “serious woman you don’t want to mess with.”
“What became obvious in the hearings was the sober testimony from respectable diplomats — not disgruntled staffers with nutty memoirs but people of stature who don’t ordinarily talk — about how the administration operates,” Noonan wrote. “It became clear in a new and public way that pretty much everyone around the president has been forced for three years to work around his poor judgment and unpredictability in order to do their jobs.”
She claimed “the case has been so clearly made” for impeachment and questioned how Senate Republicans would manage to string together a trial that didn’t further prove Trump’s guilt before inevitably voting against his removal from office.
“A full-blown trial on charges most everyone will believe are true, and with an election in less than a year, will seem absurd to all but diehards and do the country no good. So the reasonable guess is Republican senators will call to let the people decide. In a divided country, this is the right call,” Noonan wrote.
Noonan, 69, was President Ronald Reagan’s speechwriter and special assistant from 1984 to 1986. She also worked for President George H.W. Bush’s presidential campaign. She has criticized Trump in several columns. The president called her a “simplistic writer for Trump Haters” who was “stuck in the past glory of Reagan.”
