What Went Down During Marie Yovanovitch’s Testimony

It seems to me that Trump did about the worst thing he could have done for himself by tweeting an attack on Yovanovitch in the middle of the hearing. Reminds me of all the advice he got to not attack Mueller… only to attack Mueller, over and over and over and over.

Yovanovitch was asked about the unsubstantiated allegation that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election. Goldman highlights that Putin raised the conspiracy theory involving Ukraine several years ago. Yovanovitch says that’s “classic” behavior for a former intelligence officer like Putin — trying to offer an alternative narrative that doesn’t implicate his country.

It’s very hard to deny that the president has a tendency to make different kinds of attacks toward men and women. Relatedly, suburban white women turning away from the GOP was an important story of the 2018 elections. There are a lot of debates about the extent to which women should be considered any kind of cohesive group in the electorate. But there has been a persistent gender gap since the 1970s, with Republicans at a disadvantage with women. And groups have abandoned parties — African-Americans turned away from the GOP beginning in the 1920s — because of perceptions of hostility or indifference from those parties.