With his defense team's impeachment memorandum, Trump has shown Republicans what he expects of them

This morning — and, it’s worth noting, on the federal holiday honoring the memory of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. — the White House released an Impeachment Trial Memorandum. This memorandum revealed how President Trump intends to shape the impeachment trial’s narrative, as well as what he expects from the Republican members of the Senate.

“The Articles of Impeachment now before the Senate are an affront to the Constitution and to our democratic institutions,” the memorandum begins. “The Articles themselves — and the rigged process that brought them here — are a brazenly political act by Democrats that should be rejected.” And so the president’s defense team launch their offensive attack, not with a whimper, but with a bang. Notable is the manipulation of the terms of impeachment here. The assertion that this particular impeachment has turned into a “political process” completely ignores the fact that impeachment is, by its very nature, a political process. That’s why we use it — rather than legal means — to penalize a president who has done wrong.

And the president has done wrong. Despite the memorandum’s argument that he “did absolutely nothing wrong,” most of us know that just isn’t true. Trump asked a foreign nation to interfere in an American election. That point has been proven through credible, first-person witnesses and has been substantiated further by Lev Parnas’ detailed text messages and notes, which were turned over just last week.

Further, the president attempted to stall and derail the investigation into his actions by obstructing Congress at every turn. That obstruction resulted in its own article of impeachment.

The most resonant line of the president’s defense team’s memorandum is this one: “House Democrats were determined from the outset to find some way — any way — to corrupt the extraordinary power of impeachment for use as a political tool to overturn the result of the 2016 election and to interfere with the 2020 election. All of this is a dangerous perversion of Constitution that the Senate should swiftly and roundly condemn.” Herein lies the thesis of the Trumpian argument. The “rigged,” “concocted,” and “frivolous” impeachment is nothing more than a malicious reaction to his daring to become president from indignant political losers.

This argument may seem, to the rational thinker, no more effective than throwing darts in the dark. But the fact of the matter is that President Trump has learned the lesson of influence and narrative wholly. During his tenure as president, Trump has told somewhere around 16,000 lies according to The Washington Post (which claims to assiduously keep count). Still, his followers believe what they are told by him, and Trump knows, as a result, that his voice is important, even if his voice is dishonest. In the vacuum of Twitter, the president’s words — true or otherwise — resonate for those who look to him for guidance. As always, he’s banking on that power to sustain him during the trial (and tribulations) that lie ahead.

The Impeachment Trial Memorandum is a lengthy offensive designed to turn an earnest investigation into a farce. It’s also a roadmap for senators grappling with how to defend the indefensible actions of the country’s leader. If all else fails, blame the Democrats for staging a coup. That’s essentially what is written on page 24 of the memorandum: “House Democrats’ theory that the President can be impeached and removed from office under a vaguely defined concept of “abuse of power” would vastly expand the impeachment power beyond the limits set by the Constitution and should be rejected by the Senate”.

Needless to say, Republicans waged no similar attack on the premise of abuse of power as an article of impeachment when president Bill Clinton was charged with it two decades ago. Still, the intent is clear. Senators who wish to remain in Trump’s good graces need only peruse the document for a signal as to which way they must vote in the coming weeks — and how they can justify themselves.

This memorandum adds no new information or nuance to the debate about the president’s actions. Those actions are still wrong and, yes, impeachable. What this memorandum does, however, is attempt to reconfigure the narrative, and owning the narrative is a technique that Trump has all but mastered.

What remains to be seen is whether or not this response is yet another example of how the Trumpian distortion of reality can become truth if you choose to believe it. And the only ones standing in that doorway between right and wrong are the 53 Republican Senators who will decide the fate of this president. Will they fall prey to this narrative of feigned innocence, too, using this memorandum as their guideline? Or will they choose a more righteous path in the interest of preserving democratic principles? Because there is only one truth, and the president isn’t the one telling it.