The investigation into the Ukrainian affair did not undermine the credit of the American president in his electoral base.
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The impeachment procedure for Donald Trump reached a first hurdle on October 31, with a favorable vote in the House of Representatives. This vote, however, can only feed the questions about an approach that, for the moment, remains the hostage of a political polarization with few precedents.
Everything in the Ukrainian case is gradually turning into a "Rorschach test". In other words, everyone sees what he wants to see, starting with the reading that can be made of the telephone conversation between the President of the United States and his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, July 25. It is this exchange which is at the origin of the signaling of a whistleblower, initially blocked by the department of justice.
During this discussion, Donald Trump suggested to his interlocutor, who had just told him of the weapons needs of his country faced with a low-intensity conflict led by pro-Russian separatists, to open investigations against his political opponents. Democrats see it as an abuse of power for personal political ends. On the contrary, the Republicans do not discern any.
This suspicion justifies the opening of the procedure in the House, in the name of the respect of the Constitution, defended Thursday the speaker (President) Nancy Pelosi, hammering that no one is above the law. The file being empty for Republicans, theimpeachment on the contrary, according to them, can only be the latest attempt " to return to the 2016 election and weigh on the 2020 election As the leader of the Conservative minority, Kevin McCarthy (California) assured. This would be just the new stage of a manhunt that would have started as soon as Donald Trump was elected.
Thursday's vote showed that five weeks of revelations since the announcement of the opening of the proceedings on 24 September have not changed the lines. These revelations, however, confirmed rather than confirmed the Democratic suspicions by corroborating, broadly, the whistleblower's reporting and by highlighting, moreover, the freezing of American aid by the White House to put pressure on Kiev.
No Republican broke ranks and only two Democrats, out of the 40 constituencies won in the mid-term elections of November 2018, opposed the opening of the indictment procedure. The rally around Donald Trump took away the doubts that some members of the Grand Old Party could have expressed, like Mark Amodei (Nevada) or former CIA member Will Hurd (Texas).
