The 3 kinds of Republicans that Bolton's testimony would reveal

Understanding the GOP's spectrum of relative Trumpification

John Bolton.
(Image credit: Illustrated | vovashevchuk/iStock, Dan Kitwood/Getty Images, DaddyBit/iStock, BirdHunter591/iStock, EvgVect/iStock)

With it looking increasingly likely that Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell won't be able to prevent a vote in favor of calling witnesses in the impeachment trial of President Trump, the GOP finds itself in a tight spot.

Everyone agrees that there's something close to a zero chance that 20 — and only a tiny chance that any — Republicans will join with 47 Democrats to vote in favor of convicting and removing the president from office, no matter what Trump's former National Security Adviser John Bolton says under oath. (Conviction and removal would require an affirmative vote of 67 senators.) Yet allowing Bolton to testify about what's apparently in his forthcoming book — namely, that in August 2019 the president understood himself to be withholding badly needed aid to Ukraine in order to get its president to announce he was opening an investigation of former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden — would force Republicans to clearly reveal where they stand on the most important issue dividing the party.

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Damon Linker

Damon Linker is a senior correspondent at TheWeek.com. He is also a former contributing editor at The New Republic and the author of The Theocons and The Religious Test.