Impeachment of the president seems inevitable.

Impeachment on the agenda

THE IMPEACHMENT hearings took over TV last week and found their way to the front pages of newspapers. Above the fold, too. Few publishers are apologizing. This is a hurricane—and we are The Weather Channel. The media are going to cover the impeachment of an American president. At least, we always have.

Still, it seems like We the People haven’t left the starting point yet, even though the starter has fired the pistol.

The House of Representatives is going to impeach President Donald Trump. That was on the agenda months ago. The Senate isn’t likely to convict and remove this president.

And the people are split down the middle between blue states and red states, to the president’s advantage.

A 50-50 split, or even 45-45, means he holds office.

On your marks, get set, sit there. And watch the show.

We do, however, have some questions and opinions, if not insight. There doesn’t seem to be much danger in giving readers too much impeachment copy, so here goes:

■ As for the president’s now-famous call to the president of Ukraine: “Some aides concluded that the call was inappropriate; others worried that the president had broken the law; and some, while not deeming it wrong, knew that it would be politically explosive if made public. The transcript was quickly moved to a highly classified server. But some of the very highest officials seemed unbothered and unsurprised by the call, and [Gordon] Sondland offered an explanation for why: They all understood what was happening.”—The Atlantic

That was a paragraph from an anti-Trump national magazine, but we repeat ourselves. If aides—professionals who do this stuff daily—listening in on the call couldn’t decide if the word salad coming from the president’s mouth was just fine, inappropriate, impolitic or outright illegal, is it any wonder the American people are walking around in a daze? The hours and hours of daytime sparring during soap opera hours haven’t helped clear the air a bit. (Which, to be fair, is probably a Republican strategy.)

■ The New York Times, CNN and other national media used the word “bombshell” about 50 times Wednesday morning and afternoon as EU ambassador Mr. Sondland testified before Congress. And his bombshells would have been even more explosive if:

A) He didn’t contradict other testimony from the day before.

B) He hadn’t changed his story once already.

C) If Trump had done something worse than is being alleged. For example, if he had actually withheld the money until there was an investigation. But that didn’t happen. Which is why some refer to this whole thing as “quid pro so.” As in so what?

Or what if Trump had told the Ukraine government that it would have to investigate, and announce that Hunter and Joe Biden were culpable no matter what it found? But that didn’t happen, either. Quid pro so.

■ The best summation of the week’s events might have come from Tom Rogan of The Washington Examiner, who wrote:

“Remember, most Americans can’t even pick out Ukraine on a map. The nuances of this impeachment saga are complex and, to many Americans, boring. Most people know Trump is capable of everything he’s accused of here and more, but they factored that into their assessment of him long ago.”

For our more liberal friends, we give you the first paragraph of Aaron Blake’s column in The Washington Post on Wednesday afternoon:

“Pretty much every witness to date has said there was something unholy about asking Ukraine to launch specific investigations, including one involving former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden. But none of them has been able to testify to the idea that Trump actually wanted the U.S. aid or a White House meeting to be conditioned upon those investigations.”

Again, on your marks, get set, find yourself at the beginning.

■ In mid-week, after Mr. Sondland testified before Congress, the president played referee for himself. After the EU ambassador told the world that he’d had a conversation with the president, short and abrupt, and the president told him, “I want no quid pro quo” with the Ukrainians, the president marched before reporters and told them, “It’s all over.”

Somehow, Mr. President, we doubt that very much.