Has the dam just broken?

| 10:00 pm EST November 23, 2019
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U.S. Ambassador Gordon Sondland just publicly testified against Donald Trump in televised impeachment hearings – and not only did Trump fail to attack him for it, Sondland still has his job. When this kind of thing happens, the question is whether it’s a one-off event or the start of a trend. Now we already have two more data points in this regard.

Last night State Department officials decided to abide by a court order and turn over documents in Donald Trump’s Ukraine scandal, presumably over the objections of Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo. Of course these officials could have been arrested for contempt of court if they hadn’t complied by the deadline. So was this merely about that, or was it a sign that Trump’s own people are now more willing to defy him? Then today happened.

Donald Trump’s own handpicked Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer has privately threatened to resign if Trump doesn’t stop meddling in the Edward Gallagher case, according to NBC News. Spencer is publicly denying that this happened, but that’s what you say when you’re trying to keep things in-house, and it almost certainly did happen. So it’s fair to count this as another data point in the direction of Trump’s people defying him. With Sondland, the State Department, and now Spencer, that’s three in three days.

We’ll see if this really is the start of a trend, and if the dam has truly broken. But this past week of televised testimony has significantly weakened Donald Trump. That’s the kind of thing that helps motivate his own people to stop being afraid of him – or at least causes them to be more afraid of sticking with Trump than of going against Trump.