Does the truth about Ukrainegate even matter?

If you think the election here has been a disorientating exercise in post-truthiness, try following the latest twists in Washington. In the coming days Donald Trump will become the third American president to be impeached. Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic speaker, is rushing the vote on articles of impeachment through the House of Representatives, so that the Senate trial of Trump can start before the 2020 election primary season begins.

Pelosi knows that impeachment is probably a losing cause: the Republican–controlled Senate will almost certainly acquit the President. What, then, is the point? The Democrats will say impeachment is a moral necessity, since the President is evidently unworthy of high office. Trump and his allies, for their part, will insist that impeachment has always been the Democrats’ objective, because they know they can’t beat him at the ballot. Each side endlessly obfuscates by accusing the other of obfuscation.

Trump is accused of abusing presidential powers and obstructing the congressional investigation into his conduct. He allegedly coerced Ukraine by withholding military aid until the new government in Kiev launched an investigation into former vice-president Joe Biden, the man who leads the polls to be the Democratic nominee in 2020. That, according to congressman Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, amounts to ‘soliciting’ foreign interference in the 2020 election. ‘The facts are not seriously contested,’ he says. The Republicans are about to prove him wrong.

Trump, it is claimed, pressured the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in the now notorious telephone call between the two leaders on 25 July this year. ‘Do us a favour, though,’ said Trump, and then talked about Joe Biden’s son Hunter, who was paid large sums of money by a Ukrainian energy company for no good reason.