One of the important events on the timeline related to Ukraine is the timing of the release of the funds that Trump had been holding in order to get President Zelinsky to do his bidding. Now we know that Trump was well informed about the whole affair. Trump is claiming that Giuliani was not acting on his behalf. “Rudy is a warrior,” said Trump. “Rudy pretty much knows what is happening and he is a well respected person,” Trump said to the president of Ukraine, with the aim of encouraging communication with the former mayor of New York. Ambassador Gordon Sondland said the same to Congress during his testimony. He said everything they did in Ukraine had to go through Giuliani, because he and the other participants had been instructed to talk to Giuliani.
Trump doesn’t have a campaign message this far into the election process. He has a campaign base on grievance. He is deliberately distorting what Congress is doing pursuing an investigation into his attempted bribery of Ukrainian president Zelensky. At every rally, and he loves to bathe ion the glow of doing supporters, Trump accuses the Republicans of a witch hunt, of attempting to negate the results of the 2016 election, of plotting an elaborate coup. None of that is true, but here is where we must look at what he is doing. He is a master salesman even if his business acumen is in question. He is selling his snake oil, basing his campaign, not on a solid platform of promises to fix what is broken, but on a tower of lies, distortions and exaggerations. The call to Zelensky was not a perfect call. It was a quid pro quo, and the investigators are not maniacs, they are seeking the truth, something unfamiliar to this president.