Colonel VINDicated

| 5:30 pm EST November 21, 2019
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When Donald Trump’s House Republican allies tried to smear Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman during his televised impeachment testimony this week, they tried to paint him as some kind of rogue military officer who can’t be trusted because he’s an immigrant. Specifically, they tried to invoke the name of his former boss Fiona Hill while painting him as disloyal.

That stunt didn’t work – at all – when they tried it. If you randomly and baselessly accuse a military officer of being disloyal to his country, just because he’s testifying about facts that you wish weren’t true, you end up pissing off a whole lot people among the general public.

The House GOP looked even stupider when Colonel Vindman pulled out his glowing performance review from Fiona Hill and read it aloud. But then Fiona Hill publicly testified today, and it got even worse for Team Trump. Hill ripped into those in Trump’s orbit who made the xenophobic attacks on Vindman’s character and loyalty. She took their already-backfiring talking point and ensured that it blew up in their faces.

Colonel Vindman is now Colonel Vindicated. This kind of xenophobic garbage might be pleasing to Donald Trump’s filthy base. But Trump’s base alone isn’t large enough to save him. To succeed, Trump and his allies would somehow have to find a way to use these impeachment hearings to convince additional voters to come over to their side. That’s not how this has gone at all.