No one needs to hear from John Bolton.

Perhaps nothing epitomizes the other-worldliness of the political moment more than folks on the left cheering John Bolton on. Bolton is the man who never saw a war he didn't like. He is the living embodiment of the neoconservative moment; that time twenty or so years ago when the Project for the New American Century held sway over the Republican Party, bringing Dick Cheney into the White House, and American troops into Iraq and Afghanistan.

Some would argue that the neoconservative moment brought us the Arab Spring, as millions of residents of harsh, dictatorial regimes across the Arab world rose up and – for a moment at least – democracy marched into corners of the globe where it had barely breathed before. Others would argue that the neoconservative moment upset the status quo – however brutal that status quo might have been – and unleashed waves of immigrants across Europe that have now left the European Union itself teetering on the brink. It may take decades before the full impact of neoconservatism can be fairly assessed, but in the meantime – with Dick Cheney settled into retirement in Wyoming, and Bill Kristol and Paul Wolfowitz settled into the Never Trump resistance – John Bolton remains one of its few unvarnished proponents regularly speaking out in the public square.

Donald Trump was right when he suggested the other day that if Bolton had his way, our brief military exchange with Iran would have escalated into a full blown war. Trump has proven to be demonstrably skittish about war, even as he loves posturing and threatening. Indeed, John Bolton surely saw in Trump's bluster a man who might have been convinced to take on the mullahs and other bad actors across the globe; but in that Bolton miscalculated. Trump, who brought Bolton into the inner sanctum, miscalculated as well. Now, faced with Bolton's desire to testify and set the record straight, Trump had no choice but to do what Trump does when faced with the exigencies of the moment: he had to take to Twitter to destroy Bolton's name and reputation. Mano a mano, Trump knows no other way.

The odd thing is, all John Bolton looked to do, if he were to find his way onto the witness stand at Trump's impeachment trial in the Senate, was to say what everyone already knows: that Donald Trump wanted military aid funds to Ukraine withheld until Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced an investigation into Joe and Hunter Biden. There appears to be little more to it than that; except, of course, for the book sales.

It is curious that the Quinnipiac University poll released this week suggested that 75 percent of registered voters believe that witnesses should be allowed to testify in the impeachment trial. And what exactly do they imagine these witnesses would say that we do not already know? Anyone who has been paying attention knows exactly what happened; how they spin it depends on where they sit. The argument over witnesses has become little more than a battle for downstream political advantage; there are no more facts to be unearthed.

It really is that simple; as Donald Trump's personal attorneys Jay Sekulow and Alan Dershowitz conceded this week during opening arguments. Doug Collins (R-GA), the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, summed up this state of affairs more than a month ago during the House impeachment hearings, when he commented in exasperation, "What’s amazing... is we don’t even disagree on the facts." Trump may continue to cling to his perfect phone call riff, but his legal team and much of the GOP moved on some time ago. Did the President hold back military aid for political purposes? Perhaps, Sekulow and Dershowitz conceded, but even if he did, they went on to argue, those types of threats and manipulations are simply not the kind of thing for which a president should be removed from office.

And that may well be the case. Lord knows it is hard to imagine that other Presidents didn't make similar threats from time to time. Robert Caro's biography of LBJ, for example, describes a political life built on threats and bullying. It is the nature of politicians – powerful ones, at least – to use leverage where they can find it to their political advantage. While LBJ's defenders would be quick to point out that he used those tactics largely on behalf of the poorest Americans, whose interests were often given short shrift by the nation's political elites, Donald Trump's deeply loyal supporters would no doubt argue the same about him.

As the impeachment trial sputtered toward its inevitable conclusion this week, it was the Ukrainian President himself who gave the full lie to Donald Trump's earlier defense – the woefully unbelievable notion that Trump was simply seeking to root out corruption in Ukraine – to which many Republican Senators continue to cling. Trump's Ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, repeatedly poked holes in this argument in his testimony before the House Impeachment Committee last month. Sondland repeatedly emphasized that the President showed little interest in whether President Zelensky's government actually investigated the Bidens; rather, Trump's interest was specifically in the announcement of an investigation. It is a nuance to which few paid much heed at the time.

Faced with his own desire for an investigation of cross-border political corruption, President Zelensky did what President Trump would have done from the outset if Trump's interest really was in investigating corruption. Upon hearing credible information two weeks ago that suggested that Rudy Giuliani and Trump mega-donor Robert Hyde may have orchestrated illegal surveillance of U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, Zelensky immediately announced a criminal probe of Giuliani and Hyde. In doing so, he enlisted the support of the U.S. Department of Justice under the twenty-year-old mutual criminal investigation treaty that commits the two countries to automatically support any such probe that either country chooses to open. Sure enough, within days of Zelensky's government opening his probe, FBI agents were swarming over Robert Hyde's Connecticut home.

While Zelensky's investigation into Guiliani and Hyde barely pierced the all-impeachment-all-the-time news cycle, it warranted greater attention. It has been a long time – perhaps ever – since the United States has been shamed by a model of good-government emanating from the Russian landmass. But there it was: if Donald Trump was actually interested in a corruption probe of the Bidens – as he and his defense team continue to maintain – he did not need to cajole or threaten or bully his Ukrainian counterpart. All he had to do was have the Department of Justice open a probe, and Zelensky and his administration would have been bound by treaty to jump on board. But to this day, no such investigation has ever been opened. Instead, as Gordon Sondland explained, the President had no interest in fighting corruption. His interest was solely in a photo-op and news story that would dominate the news cycle and smear his political rival: Ukraine Opens Corruption Investigation into Joe Biden.

There are no more witnesses needed to point out that simple truth. Republican Senators watching the smarmy smearing of John Bolton fully understand what is going on, just as they understand what was going on in Ukraine. Witnesses or no, they have made their bed; it is only a matter of when the final vote is tallied. But the ironies of the moment should not be overlooked; both that Volodymyr Zelensky – the young president of a struggling democracy – has shamed the United States by showing an American President how things are supposed to be handled in a nation of laws, and that Donald Trump has managed the unlikely feat of turning John Bolton – for a brief moment, anyway – into a Democratic Party hero.

Follow David Paul on Twitter @dpaul. He is working on a book, with a working title of "FedExit! To Save Our Democracy, It’s Time to Let Alabama Be Alabama and Set California Free."

Artwork by Joe Dworetzky. Check out Joe's political cartooning at www.jayduret.com. Follow him on Twitter @jayduret or Instagram at @joefaces.

The Shadow War.

Donald Trump was right all along about the intelligence and national security establishment. They appear to have no idea who they are dealing with.

The President was spending the holiday in Florida, facing two looming threats to his reelection. First, there was the editorial in Christianity Today, a leading newspaper of the American evangelical Christian community, that called for his impeachment and removal from office. Mark Galli, the editor of the newspaper founded by Billy Graham – the Godfather of the modern evangelical movement – did not just decry the legality of Trump's actions in Ukraine, but the immorality of his indifference to the constitutional constraints on the Presidency. 

Galli's piece struck at the heart – and the souls – of Donald Trump's most loyal constituency. "To the many evangelicals who continue to support Mr. Trump in spite of his blackened moral record," the editorial concluded, "we might say this: Remember who you are and whom you serve. Consider how your justification of Mr. Trump influences your witness to your Lord and Savior. Consider what an unbelieving world will say if you continue to brush off Mr. Trump’s immoral words and behavior in the cause of political expediency."

Ouch.

Then there was impeachment itself, which had been been voted by the House but not yet referred to the Senate. As much as Donald Trump, the politician, liked to tout impeachment as a boon to his reelection prospects, Donald Trump, the branding maven, loathed the prospect of the permanent scarlet letter that will forever be attached to his name.

Against that backdrop, the President's national security team made the trek to Mar a Lago to brief the brooding President on options for dealing with growing Iranian-supported actions against the American presence in Iraq. For a number of months, Iranian-backed militias had been amping up rocket attacks against Iraqi military bases housing U.S. troops. Then, two weeks ago, the pattern of provocations came to a head, as Iranian-backed forces attacked the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, and a rocket launched targeting an Iraqi military facility killed an American contractor.

According to the New York Times, a number of options were offered to the President during the meeting in Florida, of which killing Qasem Soleimani was considered the most extreme. The fact that Pentagon and intelligence officials were taken by surprise when Trump gave the thumbs up to the targeted assassination suggests that they have not been paying attention to the man they serve.

For Trump – as well as Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo – the choice was easy. Threats to U.S. embassies in the Middle East push all kinds of buttons, for Republicans in particular. Donald Trump watched Jimmy Carter's presidency crash and burn during the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis. Both Trump and Mike Pompeo savaged Hillary Clinton for her handling of the attack against the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, where U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed. Trump and Pompeo, in particular, were determined not to be taken down by one more embassy fiasco.

And then there was the political backdrop. By the end of December, Trump was under pressure. Between impeachment and a fracturing evangelical community, the year had not ended well for the President. His need for a new story to change the news cycle was palpable.

Against that backdrop, something serious was required, and killing Qasem Soleimani fit the bill. Half measures would not take Mark Galli out of the news. Half measures would not assure that the evangelical community that was critical to his reelection remained fully on-side. Half measures would not sideline Nancy Pelosi. Once his national security team put killing a vilified, diabolical adversary on the list, how could they have expected that the President would have picked some lesser option?

While Trump's affection for military hubris is evident – threats to rain "fire and fury" on North Korea and destruction on Iran "the likes of which few throughout history have ever suffered before" come to mind – the truth is that he has been torn from the outset of his presidency between his "Bernie Trump" persona, who rails against the trillions of dollars spent on "endless wars" and insists that it is time to bring U.S. troops home from across the globe, and his "Donald Cheney" persona, summed up succinctly by the three word definition of Trump doctrine offered by a senior White House official, "We're America, Bitch."

Critics of the President – particularly Republican hawks who have for years been itching for military action against Iran – have been dismayed by Trump's Bernie Sanders tendencies. Sanctions, which have emerged as Trump's preferred get-tough foreign policy tool, were the stuff of ridicule when proposed by Democrats in lieu of military engagement over the years. Those same Republican hawks – undoubtedly including Trump's former National Security Advisor John Bolton – saw the growing Iranian actions against U.S. forces in Iraq over the past months as rooted in Trump's tendency to Talk Cheney but Act Bernie, which was evident most recently in his failure to respond aggressively to the Iranian missile attack against Saudi oil facilities this past September.

Driven by the political exigencies of the moment, Trump's Dick Cheney side rose to the fore this time around. The proposed assassination would not be undertaken through some kind of covert operation, and there would be no effort to claim plausible deniability. For the killing of Soleimani to serve Trump's purposes, he needed to be able to trumpet it to the world. And, more specifically, to his supporters at his rallies and on Twitter.

Since the moment of the attack, as fear of an escalating war with Iran gripped Washington, members of Congress on both sides of the aisle have been demanding proof that the killing of Soleimani was a response to an imminent attack, as required under war powers doctrine for unilateral presidential action. Yet, from the moment of the attack, it has been evident that imminence played little if any role in the decision to go forward. Donald Trump, along with Mike Pompeo and Mike Pence, talked around the question of whether intelligence suggested that there was an imminent threat.

On Sunday talk shows, Mike Pompeo dodged the notion of what constituted an "imminent threat," and chose instead to parse the meaning of the term, and shame reporters obsessed with whether hours vs. days vs. weeks matter when American lives are at risk. Each of the three of them – Trump, Pompeo and Pence – simply posited that Soleimani had been a bad guy in the past, and would continue to be in the future, as providing sufficient rationale for the targeted assassination.

Calling into Laura Ingraham on Fox, Trump weighed in with the embassy card, suggesting that four embassies were at risk, not just the embassy in Baghdad. But Ingraham knew she was being played. She knew that Trump's team had never mentioned specific threats to any embassies in their closed-door briefing with members of Congress this week. A big supporter of Trump's Dick Cheney side, Ingraham was looking for Trump to stick with his "we're America, bitch" rationale, and seemed let down by his rambling on about apocryphal embassy threats.

Ingraham's instinct was on target. The more Trump went on about embassies, the more he seemed to diminish himself. Somewhere in Wyoming, sitting around the kitchen table over the holiday, Dick Cheney and his equally hawkish daughter Liz must have been lamenting the state of affairs with Bernie Trump in charge. As reporting has continued to provide more details on events of the past two weeks, it seems that the "Seven Days in January" – as a headline in the New York Times framed our near-war with Iran – was instead a shadow war of sorts. Working through the Swiss government – which has long been the intermediary between the U.S. and Iran, in the absence of formal diplomatic relations – U.S. officials reached out to Iranian leaders from the outset, urging them not to over-react to the killing of Soleimani. For their part, Iranians leaders forwarded details of the subsequent missile attack to their U.S. counterparts, giving ample time for U.S. soldiers to be tucked into bunkers when the missiles hit and assuring there would be no American fatalities.

Members of Congress, who continue to rail on about the War Powers Act and the lack of proof of an imminent threat, seem to be stuck in their own echo chamber. Like the Pentagon and intelligence officials who flew to Florida with briefcases full of military options for what they saw as a foreign policy challenge, members of Congress who continue to argue Constitutional law and doctrine have failed to grasp the essential political reality of the moment. Imminence and the War Powers Act simply don't matter right now. Utah Republican Mike Lee lashed out publicly about the constitutional rules that the Trump administration had violated, simply ignoring the fundamental fact – which was central to Mark Galli's editorial in Christianity Today – that this President simply does not care. Donald Trump is acutely aware that he has already been impeached, and to some extent he must find it liberating. If Mike Lee doesn't like the fact that he has chosen to ignore the Constitution when it comes to war powers, what do Lee and others in Congress propose to do, impeach him again?

This week we witnessed war in the Trump era. It was scripted for politics, scripted for television and scripted for how it will play at his next rally. Sure, Donald Cheney killed a bad guy, but Bernie Trump had no interest in actually going to war over it. As long as everyone kept to the script – which it appears even Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei proved willing to do – the moment would soon pass and the world would move on.

And so, it would appear, they have. Trump has his shiny object, and things are looking up. The rift with the evangelical community has disappeared from the news, and he has offered returning prayer to the public schools to make amends. And Trump is now a "wartime" president as the impeachment trial looms. His public approval polling may not have budged – at 41.8% it remains much the same as it has been for almost two years – but his prospects in the betting markets are looking up. For the first time, Trump's prospects for reelection in public betting markets are topping 50%.

Follow David Paul on Twitter @dpaul. He is working on a book, with a working title of "FedExit! To Save Our Democracy, It’s Time to Let Alabama Be Alabama and Set California Free."

Artwork by Joe Dworetzky. Check out Joe's political cartooning at www.jayduret.com. Follow him on Twitter @jayduret or Instagram at @joefaces.