If Trump was engaged in a campaign to pressure the Ukrainians, and he was incautious enough to do it right out in the open in front of dozens of people looped into this call, why wouldn't he actually use the leverage of foreign aid that Joe Biden had?
https://twitter.com/kenvogel/status/1176882766597767168The whole 'quid pro quo / coercion' angle seems to be mostly giving way as people instead say the real scandal is trump just asking them to look into Biden, 'pressure' or not.
But that begs the question- why wouldn't he use the obvious pressure? The same one Joe Biden famously deployed, which is what Trump knows is at issue?
It seems to be that to believe in a nefarious intent of coercion,
you have to simultaneously believe Trump was willing to talk about Biden to Ukraine right on this phone call with large numbers of people looped in- yet was clever enough to avoid directly talking about the foreign aid and instead left it as an implicit and inferred threat. And left it secret, making it unknowable to the Ukrainians, so they couldn't even know they were being threatened. Oof
Narcissism is the word that describes this behavior.