
When it comes to impeachment, no one with a brain is disputing the facts of the case: Donald Trump pressured Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskiy to investigate Joe Biden, using the president’s power over American foreign policy to target a political rival and influence the 2020 election. To suggest otherwise is either to knowingly obfuscate the issue at hand or to appear brain-dead—the latter being the new default mode of the politics desk of The New York Times.
On Friday, the paper published an article by White House correspondent Michael Shear that stated that Democrats and Republicans were living in “different impeachment realities.” With neither party able to agree on “basic facts,” Shear was at a loss. Taking the GOP’s conspiracy theories and bald lies at face value, all he could say was that impeachment had devolved into an “intensely partisan” and “very divisive” fight, with “both sides” sensing that “political vandalism” had taken place.