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You give someone enough rope and he will hang himself.  That appears to be what the Don has done.  It isn't so much the severity of the action, as it is his feeble attempt to cover it up and all the persons involved, notably his vice president and attorney general.  Trump now has his very own "Stupid Watergate," broken long before the elections ever came.  At the very least, state Republicans might want to reconsider suspending their primaries and caucuses.

The interesting part is that this now infamous phone call took place the day after Mueller testified before Congress.  The Don obviously felt indestructible at this point and figured he could get away with anything.  His security advisers weren't so sure.  According to the whistleblower, they did their best to cover Trump's tracks by placing the transcript of the phone call with the newly elected Ukrainian president in a secured server, normally only used for highly classified state secrets.  The only thing this phone call qualified as is an attempt at extortion.

The Trump administration was eventually forced to provide a summary of the phone call to Congress, which it begrudgingly did.  The summary was surprisingly short given the length of the call and Trump's pension for rambling.  For all we know, he may have unwittingly spoke about highly classified information, as he has been known to do.

Since day one, Trump has been a walking, talking security risk.  His sense of immunity and his need to impress anyone around him, including his followers on twitter, has led him to repeatedly divulge classified information that has left intelligence experts aghast.  He and his sidekick, Rudy Giuliani, have an insatiable need to brag, basically meaning no secret is safe with them.  Even if the whistleblower hadn't written his well-articulated report, it is likely one or both of these buffoons would have revealed the dastardly transaction before long.

As it is, they both admitted to the extortion attempt but see no harm in it.  After all, this is what they are claiming Joe Biden did by withholding aid to Ukraine until then President Poroshenko fired his attorney general, who had a long list of corruption complaints.  As it was, Ukraine did investigate the matter and found nothing wrong with Hunter Biden sitting on the board of Burisma.  Trump, of course, wasn't satisfied and wanted the new President Zelensky to reopen the case.

One can find a lot of fault with what the Bidens did, but influence peddling is nothing new, and Trump has used it egregiously throughout his administration.  Trump has his own son-in-law screening foreign government requests, unbeknownst to his Secretary of State.  In fact, Jared Kushner essentially acts as an unofficial minister plenipotentiary on state matters, including the much maligned Palestinian peace deal, bypassing normal department channels.  Many of these transactions take place at Trump resorts and hotels, like the one in Washington, so he doesn't even need the notorious Watergate Hotel.

The Don was determined to dig up some dirt on Sleepy Joe, hoping to turn Burisma into this election year's Benghazi.  Naturally, Don would have known nothing about Biden's relationship to this Ukrainian energy holding company had not someone told him, so most likely this plot was hatched by Stephen Miller or one of Trump's Republican stooges in Congress, say Devin Nunes, who likes to skulk around the White House.  It has now blown up in Trump's face and he is none too happy about it.

It is unlikely that the House impeachment will lead to the removal of Trump from office, but it does make his path toward re-election that much more difficult, which might explain why he is throwing Mike Pence under the bus.  We'll see now whether Pence will take the fall for Trump.  However, chaos rarely serves a sitting president well during an election year.


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