At 1:48 p.m. on October 23rd, Donald Trump posted a tweet that, in any other political moment, would be a strong contender for the worst public statement ever made by a President of the United States. Attacking enemies within his own party, Trump wrote, The Never Trumper Republicans, though on respirators with not many left, are in certain ways worse and more dangerous for our Country than the Do Nothing Democrats. Watch out for them, they are human scum!

But, of course, this is not any other moment. The Times has tracked hundreds of insults that Trump has already made since entering public life. He has called his critics dogs, losers, and enemies of the people; praised racists and trafficked in casual misogyny; derided people from nations he calls shithole countries; and labelled American cities where he is unpopular as rat-infested hellholes. This is not even the first time that Trump has used the word scum; in June, 2018, he referred to the lead F.B.I. officials who had investigated him as the scum on top of the agency. Perhaps its unsurprising, then, that, with such a record, his Never Trumper tweet was not treated as major news (although a Republican House member from Illinois, Adam Kinzinger, did say on CNN that it was beneath the office of the Presidency). Arguably, the tweet was not even his most offensive and inflammatory of the week, a distinction that might belong to Trumps self-pitying, racially charged, and willfully ahistorical lament, from Tuesday, that the impeachment proceedings against him in the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives amounted to a lynching. In some ways, these Trumpisms have become so abhorrentand frequentthat it may be easier to ignore them than to contemplate them.

Still, the Presidents human scum tweet bears noting. First of all, it is quite simply the language of tyrants and those who aspire to be tyrants. Hitler called his enemies human scum, and so did Stalin. In recent years, the Brazilian President, Jair Bolsonaro, often referred to as the Trump of South America, denounced refugees as the scum of humanity, and the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, denounced Sergei Skripal, the former spy recently poisoned by Russian agents, in Britain, as a disloyal scumbag. The North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un, with whom Trump says he has a love affair, executed his uncle after a show trial in which he was called despicable human scum... worse than a dog. Kims regime, it should be noted, also called Trumps former national-security adviser John Bolton, who differed with the President on the subject of North Korea, a bloodsucker and human scum.

The other reason to consider Trumps words this week is because of what is happening around him. In the twenty-four hours between Trumps lynching tweet and his human scum tweet, William B. Taylor, Jr., the acting Ambassador to Ukraine, offered the most damning testimony against the President yet in the month-old congressional impeachment inquiry. Taylor, a Vietnam veteran and career Foreign Service officer, was called out of retirement by the Trump Administration to serve in Ukraine after the President fired the previous Ambassador at the behest of his private attorney, Rudy Giuliani. Taylor flew in from Kiev in defiance of a State Department demand that he not coperate with the House probe, and he brought with him a fifteen-page opening statement, which offered specific, detailed evidence of the pressure campaign waged by Trump and Giuliani to force Ukrainian officials to investigate the former Vice-President Joe Biden, and which discredited conspiracy theories about Ukraines role in the 2016 U.S. election. This campaign, Taylor said, included explicitly linking Ukraines willingness to undertake these investigations to nearly four hundred million dollars in security assistance and a Presidential meeting. Trump even personally insisted that the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, announce the probes himself, to put Zelensky in a public box. Committee sources told reporters that there were gasps in the room when Taylor testified. The diplomat was describing not one but multiple quid pro quos, in which Trump appeared to condition American assistance to a beleaguered, war-torn ally on actions that would be taken for his personal political benefit. Even the Senate Majority Whip, the Republican John Thune, of South Dakota, called the emerging picture not a good one for Trump.

The Presidential freakout of recent days can only be understood in that context. Trump is adjusting to a new political reality, one that is taking shape in a secure conference room on Capitol Hill, and it is a dangerous one for him: he now faces the very real possibility of impeachment in the House and a trial in the Senate, and just in time for the start of the 2020 election year.

For the first thousand or so days of the Trump Presidency, it has been a near-certainty in Washington that Trump might someday be impeached in the House, but he could never be convicted by the Republican-controlled Senate. And by near-certainty I mean as close to absolutely, a hundred-per-cent positive as is possible in an uncertain world. There might be one or two or five wobbly Republicans, it was believed, but never twentythe number of votes needed to convict him, assuming all Democrats and Independents also vote for his removal. Essentially, the political world agreed with the premise of Trumps tweetthat the Never Trump opposition to him within the Republican Party had faded to the point of political irrelevance, leaving those remaining against him within the G.O.P. an outnumbered minority, if not actually on respirators.

As a strict matter of numbers, that is still correct. Public polls have shown a dramatic increase in support for impeachment, but largely among Democrats and, increasingly, Independents. Most surveys now find a majority of Americans in favor of Trumps impeachment and removal from office, but still the number is well below the percentage of Americans who disapprove of his performance as President. Even more significantly, Trumps backing among Republican voters has yet to suffer much, with fewer than ten per cent of themso farsaying they would favor impeachment. Republican members of Congress have largely held firm with Trump, too, though each day brings more examples of isolated individuals like Thune and Kinzinger publicly expressing concern. In terms of the Senate, the jury pool that may ultimately be called on to render a verdict on Trump in the Ukraine affair, most Republicans have either stayed resolutely silent or ostentatiously demonstrated their loyalty to Trump. Mitt Romney has been the only Senate Republican to forcefully question Trumps actions. When Trump furiously attacked Romney over it, not a single one of his Senate colleagues rose to his defense.

And yet something does feel different around Washington. Republicans, and not just Trump, seem visibly nervous. This is shaping up to be a very dark moment for the Trump White House, a Republican source close to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told the National Journal Hotlines Josh Kraushaar. Even the Senate vote in an impeachment trial shouldnt be taken for granted, the source said. Its getting to be a harder choice for more people. Whether thats enough for enough senators to take decisive action... every single move has been in the wrong direction for Trump.

Its early days yet, of course, but since Taylor testified, political operatives have openly struggled to figure out whether this time might really be it. Everyone has his or her own little anecdotal data points, like the veteran Republican who told me he now thinks theres about a twenty-five per cent chance the dam breaks in the Senate and they turn on him and convict, or the fervent Never Trumper who, buoyed by the recent news, texted me that he was sure DT will be CONVICTED! Although, he added, in a nod to a more likely reality, unless, of course, that doesnt happen. Another Never Trumper, the former Republican senator Jeff Flake, said a couple of weeks ago that thirty-five Republican senators would probably vote to convict the Presidentif the vote were held in secret. Only 7 (!) Republican Senators are ruling out removing Donald Trump a headline on an article by the CNN political analyst Chris Cillizza read. The Senate Minority Whip, the Democrat Dick Durbin, from Illinois, claimed in a TV interview this week that Republican leaders were having second thoughts about the President.

But Trumps outbursts can still produce the shows of loyalty that the insecure President craves. On the same day as his human scum tweet, some two dozen Trump supporters in the House stormed into the closed-door secure facility where the impeachment depositions are being taken and disrupted the planned testimony of a Pentagon official for more than five hours. The representatives complained about the unfairness to the President of taking impeachment testimony in private, which has been Trumps constant gripe. In fact, it soon was reported that Trump had been in on the stunt before it occurred, and the President took to Twitter to thank the protesting House Republicans afterward for their vigorous defense of him. There is no room for wobbling, as far as Trump is concerned. By Thursday, John Thune appeared to have got that message, and CNN reported that he walked back concerns he raised in the wake of Taylors testimony, which Thune now called, in keeping with the Party line, secondhand information. He joined other senators, including a number of moderates, such as Ohios Rob Portman and Tennessees Lamar Alexander, at an Oval Office lunch with the President, the message of which was a not-so-subtle show of theyre still with me. As for Trumps hateful tweet, not a single Republican senator called him out on it, even as his press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, went on Fox News on Thursday morning to underscore the point. Those Republicans working against the President, she said, are in fact human scum, adding, They deserve strong language like that.

All of which is to say that Trump was crude in his tweet, but he was also right: his internal enemies in the Republican Party are weak and few in number. For now. One thing missing from all the Republican complaints about impeachment this week, however, was a robust defense of what Trump actually did. And that, in the end, is exactly what the Senate jurors will ultimately have to make up their minds about.

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On Human Scum and Trump in the Danger Zone - The New Yorker