26 NEWSWEEK.COM OCTOBER 18, 2019
n the day house speaker nancy pelosi said
she would allow an impeachment investigation to
commence, Donald Trump at first was “gleefully defi-
ant,” say two of his aides. He would release a transcript of
his controversial phone call with Ukraine President Volodymyr
Zelensky, showing—as he put it in a press conference at the Unit-
ed Nations on September 25—that there was “no pressure” and
no quid pro quo. He just wanted dirt from Ukraine about one
of his main political rivals, former Vice President Joe Biden, but
didn’t offer anything in return. What could be wrong with that?
When it became clear that the Ukraine controversy would be-
come the centerpiece of an impeachment effort, his glee turned
to anger, the aides say. And those who know Trump best know
what that means: Here comes the counterattack. As Roger Stone,
his longtime political consigliere—who now faces indictment
as a result of the Robert Mueller probe—put it during the 2016
campaign: “He’s the ultimate counterpuncher. If you hit him, he’ll
hit back and hit back hard. He doesn’t necessarily like starting
fights, but if you pick a fight with him, he will fight back. Always.”
Trump as a “fighter” is one of the things that endeared him to
his core supporters in 2016. It’s an image that has, for the most
part, served him well politically: fighting the Chinese on trade,
fighting to “drain the swamp” of the “Deep State” in Washington,
fighting to limit illegal immigration. Those pugnacious instincts
were long a trademark of Trump’s litigious business career. “I love
to have enemies. I fight my enemies. I like beating my enemies to
the ground,” he once said. Those instincts were egged on in the
White House by some of his aides including former campaign chief
Steve Bannon, and now domestic policy adviser Stephen Miller.
The president, says a White House official not authorized to
speak on the record, “has been on a “war footing against his polit-
ical enemies pretty much from day one”—which in part explains
why he apparently had no qualms about asking the president of
Ukraine for dirt on Joe Biden and his son Hunter. That aggres-
sive posture is now more or less permanent. The impeachment
proceeding, and the administration’s inevitable pushback, will
ratchet up the already extraordinary level of political rancor
in Washington and throughout the country. His campaign was
already mocking the Democrats for daring to go down the im-
peachment road. “Democrats can’t beat President Trump on his
stellar record,” said campaign manager Brad Parscale, “so they’re
trying to turn a Joe Biden scandal into a Trump problem. That
will only serve to embolden and energize President Trump’s sup-
porters and create a landslide victory for the president.”
A cohort of Trump’s senior advisers doesn’t share the delight.
White House sources say that Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney,