One of the big stories of the 2016 Presidential campaign was the role Facebook played in spreading false and misleading information, from Russia and from inside the United States, about candidates. The company has made some changes, but it is still under attack from the press, activists, users, and Congress for its failure to curb the proliferation of “fake news” on its platform. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s co-founder and chief executive, announced this fall that Facebook will not fact-check political advertisements or other statements made by politicians on the platform. Evan Osnos joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss social media's power to shape politics and the likely effects on the 2020 Presidential campaign.

Where do ideas come from? That’s a big question. Here’s a smaller one: Where do mathematical ideas come from? I’ve wondered about this from the time I first contemplated being a mathematician until long after I officially became one.

My earliest memory of anything like a mathematical idea comes from a childhood walk with my dad. We left the house and made our way toward downtown Metuchen, the tiny town in central Jersey where I grew up, to a little luncheonette called the Corner Confectionery. I can still picture it: the rack of newspapers, magazines, and comic books; the ice-cream treats in the back corner; the long counter with stools, where I used to sit and spin until I was told to stop. It was about a mile-long walk, reserved for special occasions. On that bright fall morning, we strolled up Spring Street—a beautiful street lined with huge oak trees—and talked about fractions, though I wouldn’t have known to call them that. We were puzzling over—or, rather, I was puzzling over—how to fairly divide a pie (probably one of the Corner Confectionery’s apple pies). My dad, a mathematical physicist, a man with an active mind, but one of few words, was a gentle guide, letting me think through things on my own.

We took our time walking, and we also took our time thinking and talking about the basic properties of numbers. In my head, it was easy to cut the pie in half, and then in half again, and again: two, four, or eight pieces. But, somewhere near Main Street, I got stuck on how to reliably create three, five, or six pieces. I started thinking about making bigger numbers out of smaller numbers. This leisurely walk through the neighborhood soon led me to the exciting idea that twelve was a great number. Twelve could be divided by one, two, three, four, and six. That’s a lot of numbers! If I had a pie cut into twelve pieces, it would be easy to divvy up dessert for many different-sized groups of friends. By the time we crossed the railroad tracks and arrived at the door of the Confectionery, I thought that I had made a remarkable discovery: Everyone! Stop! We need to think about the world in terms of twelves!

Ten or so years later, when I was a college freshman, I would learn that I had stumbled upon an instance of what is called an abundant number, a phenomenon first studied by the ancient Greeks. An abundant number is smaller than the sum of its divisors: in my case, the sum of one, two, three, four, and six (twelve’s divisors) is sixteen. That morning with my dad, I didn’t have a name for this phenomenon, but I was happy nonetheless, and maybe even happier because I was ignorant of the larger picture. It was my own surprising little discovery, born of walking and puzzling. Magic all around.

As odd as it might sound, I’ve never been particularly confident of my mathematical abilities. I don’t mean the arithmetic part, the part that people usually associate with being a mathematician. (“Hey, let Dan calculate the tip! Ha ha!”) It’s true that I’m probably better than average at mental math, but that’s not really what makes a mathematician a mathematician. My job is to come up with ideas. Sometimes we mathematicians call the things we think about and work with “objects,” which doesn’t mean triangles, spheres, or other shapes. Mathematical objects are big ideas about algebra, geometry, and logic, about the properties and definitions of numbers.

It’s not at all obvious how to go about thinking up some new twist on these things—the transformation from test-taker to theorem poser and then theorem prover is difficult to articulate. My ideas have always felt contingent and magical to me. I don’t think I’m alone, at least as far as the magic goes. Henri Poincaré, the father of chaos theory and the co-discoverer of special relativity, is famous for a story that appears in his 1908 book “Science and Method,” about an insight being jarred loose while boarding a bus: “At the moment when I put my foot on the step, the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it.” The Irish mathematician Sir William Rowan Hamilton, who devoted many years to searching for a way to multiply numbers in higher dimensions, had a similar epiphany, in 1843, just as he was strolling by the Brougham Bridge, in Dublin, while on a walk with his wife. He was so delighted that he stopped and carved the defining algebraic equation into the bridge: i2=j2=k2=ijk=-1. One person’s graffiti is another person’s breakthrough.

These stories suggest that an initial period of concentration—conscious, directed attention—needs to be followed by some amount of unconscious processing. Mathematicians will often speak of the first phase of this process as “worrying” about a problem or idea. It’s a good word, because it evokes anxiety and upset while also conjuring an image of productivity: a dog worrying a bone, chewing at it to get to the marrow—the rich, meaty part of the problem that will lead to its solution. In this view of creative momentum, the key to solving a problem is to take a break from worrying, to move the problem to the back burner, to let the unwatched pot boil.

All problem solvers and problem inventors have had the experience of thinking, and then overthinking, themselves into a dead end. The question we’ve all encountered—and, inevitably, will encounter again—is how to get things moving and keep them moving. That is, how to get unstuck.

For me, the quest for a breakthrough often requires getting myself into literal motion; one small step for Poincaré but a whole sequence of steps for me. I’ll take a long hike, during which my mind has nothing to worry about except putting one foot in front of the other, or I’ll go for a long drive, so that my primary focus is on the road. Maybe it’s the endorphins, or maybe it’s refocussing my attention on some other activity which enables a new idea. Perhaps it is the momentary feeling of being untethered that gives the mind free rein—the space to have a good idea.

In college, I was about twenty hours into a twenty-four-hour take-home algebra exam when I became convinced that I’d hit a permanent block. I went to the weight room, where, bench-pressing in the midst of noisy midday regulars, I finally figured out the key to proving the irreducibility of a certain group of symmetries (in the case of the exam question, all the symmetries of a soccer ball). It happened again a few years later, in Somerville, Massachusetts, when I was in the final stages of my Ph.D. During a regular workout at Mike’s Gym, a friendly, bare-bones place tucked back by the railroad tracks, I experienced an epiphany that would inspire the final chapter of my dissertation. My power-lifting and body-building buddies got a shout-out in the acknowledgements.

Perhaps the most memorable instance was a breakthrough jog I took in Hanover, when I was a young professor at Dartmouth. My colleagues and I were trying—and mostly failing—to come up with an efficient method for solving a class of equations that describe all kinds of waves: both the familiar ones we find in the shallows of oceans and the cosmic ones generated by the Big Bang. We spent every day drawing on blackboards and chasing one wrong idea after another. After one afternoon spinning our wheels, I decided to take advantage of a beautiful day and threw on my running clothes. I had a regular route, which I varied by running it in reverse every other time. That day, I headed away from campus, on a tree-lined and leaf-filled ramble. As I crested the last hill, I saw it all at once: the key to modifying the algorithm we’d been puzzling over was to flip it around, to run it backward. My heart started racing as I pictured the computational elements strung out in the new, opposite order. I sprinted straight home to find a pencil and paper so that I could confirm it. I’m pretty sure I didn’t shower.

The key here isn’t fitness—it’s just a feeling of being free, of forgetting for a moment that we are bound by gravity and logic and convention, of letting the magic happen. For me, perhaps it’s that my ideas just need to be jostled into the right place. Jogging jogs them. But there are mathematicians who try to alter their brain chemistry a little more directly. The Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős was notoriously prolific, someone to whom the magic tricks seemed to come enviably easily. So, what was his secret? His friend Alfréd Rényi, a fellow-Hungarian, once said, “a mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.” And both men were caffeine enthusiasts. But Erdős was a person of extremes, and he also fuelled his ideas through a don’t-try-this-at-home technique: he used stimulants such as Ritalin and Benzedrine for much of his career. At one point, a friend, worried about Erdős’s health, challenged him to go off the drugs for a month, and Erdős agreed, but when the experiment was over he said that, on the whole, mathematics had been set back by his weeks of relative indolence.

Whereas Erdős sought hyper-focussed vigilance, other eminent mathematicians have found a hazy drowsiness to be the most fertile state of mind. Poincaré described lying in bed in a half-dream state as the ideal condition for coming up with new ideas. The philosopher and mathematician René Descartes famously loved to lounge in bed in the morning and think (I suppose to give evidence that he was). It was on one such morning—as the story goes—while dreamily watching the path of a fly flitting around on the ceiling, that he came up with the xy plane of Cartesian coordinates.

I have had similarly dreamy mathematical experiences of my own, though never one that has quite borne fruit once the mist cleared. Once, I dreamed that I had stumbled upon a means to multiply matrices in a way that would be dramatically faster than any known method. In the dream, I stood in a room with a blackboard covered in notation—numbers, Greek letters, diagrams. I was far enough away that I couldn’t decipher the formulas, but I was certain that they showed the way around an obstacle I was facing in real life—if only I could get close enough to read them. I had the dream night after night, and each time I approached the blackboard I discovered that what looked like math was just scribbles. For a while, I took to going to sleep with a writing pad by my bed in hopes that I could force myself into wakefulness and write down the solution. But my dreaming self was never able to read the board. My kids are right—I really do need to work on my handwriting.

This kind of hallucinatory visual phenomenon is one of a host of well-known phantasms. Despite the ultimate frustrations of my dreamed mathematics, I sometimes wonder if they did in fact help spur my creative process in a subconscious way. Many of my topologist colleagues, who study the properties of geometric objects, seem to live in an alternative, imagined world. Their hands are almost always in motion when they are lecturing or discussing ideas, as if they were rotating and examining a magical crystal ball in space. Other topologists nod along, appearing to instantly see the imaginary objects being conjured between their colleagues’ fingertips. I confess that I am rarely able to join them in this shape-shifting mental world. That said, I know that some of them are less comfortable in my world of algebra and computing. It’s reassuring to remember that all sorts of intellectual—and hallucinatory—predilections can find a way into mathematical work.

The origin stories of big ideas, whether in math or any other field, generally highlight the eureka moments. You can’t really blame the storytellers. It’s not so exciting to read “and then she studied some more.” But this arduous, mundane work is a key part of the process; without it, the story is just a myth. There’s no way to skip the worrying phase. You work, and you work, and you work, and then you get a glimmer of understanding. In college, I would spend hours in the library, rewriting class notes to insure that I really understood them, and then pushing to take that understanding to a new level. I was an office-hours rat, to the delight of some of my instructors and the annoyance of others. (I still remember the gleaming head of one eminent, bald professor who welcomed me with a resigned look every time I appeared at his door.) As a graduate student, I’d wake up early each day, pouring coffee down my throat while poring over my notes and books. Progress was gradual, and sometimes imperceptible. Chance really does favor the prepared mind; when the moments of discovery came, often unexpectedly, my hours of hard work felt newly valuable.

My waking, working life, like my dream life, can sometimes feel like a series of epiphanies that are just beyond my reach—nonsensical symbols that I can’t read and invisible objects that I can’t see. I still don’t know where ideas come from, but I now seem to at least know something about my own methods for finding them, which I keep holding on to even as the realities of my professional and personal life evolve. I read around and talk to colleagues, trying to keep a steady flow of new ideas in my daily work. Honestly, the homework never stops—it just isn’t graded.

I don’t lace up my running shoes as much anymore, but there is still the gym, the pool, the bike, and, of course, walking the dog. On the tennis court, my backhand still needs work, but the steady stroke of the racquet creates a conscious physical rhythm—just what I need to disrupt an unproductive mental eddy. I strike the ball and lift the weights, knowing that there is something about moving my body that will help move my mind.

One of the odder sidelights of the impeachment drama is the emergence of the whistle-blower as a kind of comic-book nemesis of President Trump. “Who’s the whistle-blower? Who is the whistle-blower? We have to know,” Trump said at a rally in Dallas. He cites the word constantly, using the general term as though it were a personal title. “We must determine the Whistleblower’s identity to determine WHY this was done to the USA,” he tweeted. “The whistle-blower should be revealed because the whistle-blower gave false stories,” he told reporters at the White House on Sunday. “He made up a story.” The impression created is that the civil servant in question prowls the corridors of Washington wearing a little mask, like the Riddler’s, and a big, symbolic whistle around his neck.

The phrase “whistle-blower” derives, obviously enough, from the now largely vanished habit of a cop blowing a whistle to call attention to trouble in the streets, and also to the still-extant practice of a sports referee blowing a whistle to call a foul. Yet one has the impression that many Americans believe that this whistle-blower is, for good or ill, a person of conscience, or, otherwise, a citizen of the “deep state,” who decided to step outside normal lines in order to report the President’s phone conversation with a foreign leader. He or she may be brave or malignant, but what he or she is doing is exceptional.

In truth, the real significance of this whistle-blower’s whistle-blowing is that, rather than leaking word of the famous Ukrainian phone call to the media, he or she acted in a neatly procedural and tightly regulated manner. As sanctioned by the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act of 1998, he or she submitted the complaint to the Inspector General, who reviewed it for credibility and then passed it along to the director of national intelligence, who would have sent it to Congress for investigation if Trump’s Justice Department hadn’t blocked the normal progression. The whistle-blower is the one who is acting in the prescribed lawful way; the President and his henchmen are the ones—no surprise here—calling on the media to violate the point and purpose of the law. At an election-eve rally on Monday night in Lexington, Kentucky, where Trump and Senator Rand Paul were stumping for Matt Bevin, the Republican governor, Paul said, referring to the whistle-blower, “I say tonight to the media, ‘Do your job and print his name!’ ” (The next night, Bevin’s Democratic opponent, Andy Beshear, declared victory.) On Wednesday, Donald Trump, Jr., following a story posted by Breitbart, heedlessly tweeted the whistle-blower’s possible identity.

We do not all share, perhaps, sufficient awareness of the fact that the whistle-blower is called the whistle-blower not by some accident of tabloid nomenclature—the way that the winning quarterback of any team except the Jets is called “the franchise”—but by statute. We actually have a complex institutional and statuary system that allows men and women in subsidiary roles in government to out the wrongdoing of their superiors without fear of retaliation. (The oddity is that the whistle-blower in public life is the most visible person on the scene, even though the essence of the whistle-blower law is to shield the person.)

If you think about this, there is no end to the substance of astonishment that the statutes ought to provide. It was the essence of almost every known previous form of government to make certain that there were no whistle-blowers—that the spear-carriers just did whatever the chieftain told them to. To speak up against power was to put your life and well-being at risk. That is the usual matrix of power: obedience offered or retaliation made.

Click Here: liverpool mens jersey

You will sometimes read that whistle-blower statutes of a kind can be found in medieval English history, in the doctrine of qui tam, which said that, if you reported someone breaking the law for profit—for instance, a fellow-farmer working his fields on a Sunday, which was forbidden—a bit of the proceeds could go to you, in addition to the authorities. But this was really a reward for ratting on a fellow-citizen, not exposing the higher-ups.

The idea that subordinates making a legitimate claim against authority ought to be protected is a much newer idea, and one more or less associated with liberal values. Many historians track the beginning of American whistle-blowing to the 1777 case of the U.S.S. Warren, in which the ship’s officers swore out a complaint against their commander, Commodore Esek Hopkins, for, among other things, mistreating prisoners. One of the officers, all of whom were fully aware that they were putting not only their careers but their lives on the line, wrote, in words that may still resonate today, that Hopkins was “a man of no principles, and quite unfit for the important trust reposed in him,” and another asserted that “his conversation is at times so wild and orders so unsteady that I have sometimes thought he was not in his senses.” The Continental Congress, instead of siding with authority against mutiny, eventually took the side of the officers and passed a resolution declaring that “it is the duty of all persons in the service of the United States, as well as all other inhabitants thereof, to give the earliest information to Congress or any other proper authority of any misconduct, frauds or misdemeanors committed by any officers or persons in the service of these states.” Blow that whistle when you spot the wild and unfit leader! That was the Founding Fathers’ unambiguous message.

Subsequent legislation to safeguard whistle-blowers from retaliation, far from being a minor efflorescence of post-Watergate legislation, is widespread and effective. Our laws encourage functionaries within the government to report on skullduggery by their bosses, in the knowledge that there is an orderly, safe procedure to do it. This protection is a clear example of the way that liberal democracies try to install, like a software program, a corrective conscience in all their institutions. On a government Web site you will find a list of no fewer than twenty-three Occupational Safety and Health Administration programs and protocols for the protection of whistle-blowers. If you think you have information that an automaker has too cozy a relationship with the regulators, or that a meat-packing plant isn’t packing meat safely, you can tell it to the appropriate office and still be safe in your job. Whistle-blowing is not merely legitimate in our system; it is uniquely encouraged and protected.

A deeper question arises, though. Why is Trump obsessed with his nemesis the whistle-blower? The complaint by now has been substantiated, repeatedly, by other witnesses and by the government’s own record of the phone call in question—to the extent that the original alert is no longer anything but the remote trigger of a set of testimonies and depositions that stand or fall on their own merits. Why, then, the vengeful obsession with exposing the whistle-blower? In part, it may be because Trump knows that he can persuade at least part of his base that the person is just a servant of the opposition. In part, the rage against the whistle-blower is there to intimidate future whistle-blowers.

But the rage is also there to assert, even at some cost in relevance, the central rule of Trumpism, which is that no one can oppose Trump. The interests of the state are identical with the interests of the boss: L’état, c’est him. To a degree that we still cannot quite accept, Trump’s rage is against liberal democracy itself, for limiting his power. He is leading an instinctive assault on the rule of law, whose simplest principle is that the cops and the judges and the bureaucrats work for the state and its system, not for the current political leader and his interests—that they work for the people, not for the President. This is not a rule of the deep state; this is the rule of the self-evident state, the statuary state, the state of laws that the founders envisioned. So what we have is a simpler confrontation, one at the heart of Trump’s every political instinct. It is the contest between a Putinesque belief that a plebiscitary President embodies the will of the people and must never be challenged, and the liberal belief that the will of the people is so various that it must be dissipated through a network of laws and institutions in order to prevent anyone from ever pretending to embody it.

Federal laws do not explicitly prohibit the President—or members of the public—from outing a whistle-blower, unless the person is an undercover agent. Yet, as John McLaughlin, the former acting director of the C.I.A., pointed out, before Trump came along, nobody ever imagined that a President would think of doing it. Observance of laws “depends largely on a sense of integrity and voluntary compliance,” McLaughlin told National Public Radio. “You just have to expect people to obey the law and the established practices, which of course in this administration has not always been the case.”

Meanwhile, we should struggle to see past the cartoon tale of the baleful President and the elusive whistle-blower to the beautiful parable of liberal democracy it actually dramatizes—that the dissident is, in our system, protected in complaints against the government, and that it is the King who has to bite his tongue and let the law play out. This is hard on the King but good for citizens of a liberal state, who did not choose to be his subjects.

This coming Wednesday marks the official start of the impeachment hearings against Donald Trump in the House Intelligence Committee, the public beginning of what the historian Jon Meacham rightfully calls “a test for the country.” The allegations of abuse of power are striking and unprecedented: a President seeking to privatize American foreign policy for his personal political benefit. The hearings on Trump’s extortionate Ukraine scheme will be quickly followed by the drawing up of articles of impeachment, a House vote, a Senate trial—the mechanisms of the constitutional process. All the indications are, however, that we already know the outcome of this test. For Trump and his defenders, it is a coup, a show trial, a witch hunt. When that is the starting point, there is no place for the facts, no process that can satisfy, no way to split the difference. It’s the reason why a key Trump ally in the Senate, Lindsey Graham, introduced a resolution condemning the House’s proceedings for lacking transparency, and then refused to read the evidence from closed-door depositions this week now that it is being made public. The impeachment investigation is a “joke” and a “political vendetta,” Graham told reporters, so why bother?

In such a politically divided moment, Graham is merely saying out loud what has become increasingly obvious: the President has successfully rendered the investigation irrelevant, at least for his most fervent supporters (and that apparently includes virtually all of the Republican elected officials in both the House and the Senate). There is no evidence, no testimony, no revelatory text message, that can sway them. There is a justification for anything that has come out, and for anything that might still be revealed. Trump has framed the impeachment case, as with all the other challenges to his controversial actions over the past few years, as a purely partisan matter of loyalty and legitimacy.

It is not just Trump-loving Republicans who may react to the actual details of the investigation with indifference. Polls suggest that there is now nearly a complete partisan gulf between how Americans view the impeachment matter, with Democrats and independents in favor and Republicans against, in a way that makes the inquiry itself almost beside the point. How much does anyone—on either side of this yawning national divide—care about the evidence if they know in advance how they plan to interpret it? And, of course, the sense of constant crisis is overwhelming. How can Americans bother to keep track of who said what to whom about Ukraine when there will soon be another scandal, another cast of characters, another alarming development to monitor? On Tuesday, Trump’s longtime friend Roger Stone went on trial for lying to Congress, and prosecutors said that he did so to protect the President. On Thursday, a New York court ordered Trump to pay two million dollars in damages for illegally misusing his Trump Foundation to help his 2016 campaign. Who knows what tomorrow will bring? There is already a Trump-era precedent that shows that engagement with the facts revealed by impeachment may be less than robust. After the release, this spring, of the four-hundred-and-forty-eight-page Mueller report, even many members of Congress confessed to not having read it, but that did not stop them from pronouncing their opinion on what it did or did not say regarding President Trump’s culpability.

Nonetheless, there is an actual investigation, with actual testimony. There are facts and even, in this post-truth age, truths. Since Monday, the House Intelligence Committee has released more than a thousand pages of transcripts from its private depositions with six of the diplomats who were caught up in Trump’s scheme to pressure the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, to open investigations into a political rival of Trump’s, former Vice-President Joe Biden, and into the debunked conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 U.S. election. The depositions both confirm and expand upon what is known about the Ukraine affair, and how directly it points back to actions undertaken by Trump himself and by his private attorney Rudy Giuliani.

The most significant new information of the week comes from the revised testimony of Trump’s Ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, released by the committee. After press reports of other witnesses’ testimony contradicted him, Sondland told the panel that “I now recall” two vital points differently. Not only was there an explicit quid pro quo between the withholding of nearly four hundred million dollars in U.S. military assistance to Ukraine and Ukraine’s willingness to publicly investigate Biden, but Sondland himself had made the linkage, in a September 1st conversation with a top Ukrainian official. Somehow, he failed to remember this in his initial testimony.

Sondland is a key witness not easily dismissed by the White House: a Trump appointee who gave a million dollars to the Trump Inauguration and was rewarded with the E.U. ambassadorship, he was seen by the other witnesses as a direct conduit to the President. “He had a relationship with President Trump I did not have,” Kurt Volker, the former special envoy for Ukraine, testified. “He felt he could call the President and that they could have conversations.” The depositions released this week make clear why Sondland had little choice but to change his testimony. William Taylor, the top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, testified about Sondland’s September 1st meeting with the Ukrainians and the ultimatum it contained. George Kent, the State Department Deputy Assistant Secretary responsible for Ukraine, also pointed a finger at Sondland, saying that he “had talked to the President, POTUS in sort of shorthand, and POTUS wanted nothing less than President Zelensky to go to the microphone and say ‘investigations,’ ‘Biden,’ and ‘Clinton.’ ”

I learned these and other notable details from reading the transcripts. They make for gripping reading, documenting the ways, large and small, that the “irregular channel” of Trump and Giuliani, as Taylor calls it, took over from the regular foreign-policy work of the Administration. There is Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch’s dawning realization that she is under attack from factions in Ukraine and Washington that she is barely aware of. “Watch my back,” a Ukrainian minister tells her at one point. When Giuliani and Donald Trump, Jr., publicly attack her, State Department intermediaries try to get Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to help by calling the Fox News host and Trump confidant Sean Hannity. (Hannity, for his part, has denied discussing Ukraine with Pompeo.) But soon enough Yovanovitch is fired anyway, ordered in a late-night phone call to take the next plane back to Washington and removed from her post without cause on Trump’s order. Although she served decades in the Foreign Service, Pompeo refuses to speak with her or issue a statement in her defense. Kent calls her ouster the result of a “campaign of lies” by Giuliani. Taylor, who reluctantly agrees to temporarily succeed Yovanovitch at the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, picks up the story of the Washington “snake pit,” as he terms it, in his deposition, a detailed accounting of facts made all the more powerful by his testimony to the committee that he is a compulsive note-taker, who brings his small, spiral-bound notebook to key meetings at which the President’s Ukraine quid pro quos were discussed.

On Wednesday, Taylor and Kent will be the two lead witnesses at the impeachment hearings. Reading their sharp, compelling testimony, it is clear why Democrats have chosen them for this role. They come across as patriotic, nonpartisan, and alternately stunned and appalled by events as they unfold over the spring and summer of 2019. But will it matter?

As Trump awaited the opening of what he called “next weeks Fake Hearing,” the President attacked Taylor and Kent as “Never Trumpers” and held a series of rallies in bedrock-Republican parts of America, appearing alongside would-be Senate jurors who, like Graham, have made it clear that they do not need to see or hear more evidence to establish their view of the case against Trump. On Wednesday night, in Louisiana, Trump stood onstage with one of the state’s Republican senators, John Kennedy, who, in Trumpian fashion, used his turn at the microphone to mock House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for opening the impeachment probe in the first place. “I don’t mean any disrespect,” he shouted into the microphone, to cheers from the audience and a grin from the President, “but it must suck to be that dumb.”

Earlier in the day, at the Capitol, Kennedy had weighed in on the impeachment inquiry, telling reporters, “The quid pro quo is a red herring unless you make a distinction between a legal quid pro quo and an illegal quid pro quo,” Kennedy said. This did not seem like legal brilliance on the part of Kennedy, or even to make much sense at all. But it was revealing as an example of the latest form of political self-preservation being offered by Senate Republicans, who seem to be responding to the emergence of inconvenient impeachment facts even if they deny that they are doing so. Given that the evidence so strongly shows that Trump withheld U.S. aid and an Oval Office meeting unless the Ukrainians agreed to make a public statement about the investigations that the President wanted, Kennedy and other Senate Republicans have been publicly floating the idea that it’s perfectly within the President’s power to do so and, even if improper, hardly rises to the level of an impeachable offense.

Graham offered a slightly different variant this week: while insisting that he would not read the evidence, he also told reporters that the whole mess was a matter of Trump Administration incompetence and incoherence in its Ukraine policy. “They seem to be incapable of forming a quid pro quo,” he said. Neither of these rationales for Trump’s behavior is the robust defense of the President’s “perfect” dealings with Ukraine that Trump has demanded of his allies. But both speak to the willingness to endlessly accommodate a President who has convinced his supporters to make even nonsensical arguments on his behalf. The “stupid” defense; the “yeah, so what?” defense; the “Democrats are bad, so never mind” defense. There will be more. Trump has defined winning impeachment as keeping it partisan, so for him this is what winning looks like.

On Wednesday, a few hours after Taylor’s deposition was released, Trump appeared at the Louisiana rally with Kennedy. He did not address the revelations from the nine hours of testimony, or even bother with an explanation of his actions. He simply told the crowd that “corrupt politicians, Nancy Pelosi and Shifty Adam Schiff and the crooked media have launched the deranged, delusional, destructive, and hyper-partisan impeachment witch hunt.” The crowd cheered. The defense, at least for that night, had rested its case.