Drawing Trump’s Impeachment

Liza Donnelly
5 min readDec 19, 2019

A day in history, December 18, 2019

I began drawing at 8 am, listening and watching people mill about with papers in the House Chambers. The first order of business was to pass the rules for the day — members of the rules committee spoke in short segments. Basically, the arguments made in the morning were a sample of what was going to be said over and over again throughout the day by other members of both sides of the House.

Then a clerk read the two articles of impeachment against Trump: Abuse of Power and Obstruction of Congress.

I drew speakers from both sides of the aisle, to get a sense of both Republican and Democratic arguments against and for impeachment of the President. The Republicans put forth that there is no impeachable offense, Trump did nothing wrong. They continually argued that in his interaction with the Ukranians, he did not ask anything (when he did in fact), the aid was released (after Trump was caught withholding for the favor), and that the president of Ukraine said there was no pressure to do what Trump asked as a favor (what else could he say? The country is a fledgling democracy and in need of our help). The Republicans also claimed over and over again that the process of impeachment as set up by the Democratic run House, was “unfair.” It followed rules that have been followed before. They also claimed it was a too-short and slipshod process. One of the very common claims from the GOP was that the Democrats “hate” Trump and that is why they want to impeach him.

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Liza Donnelly

Visual journalist/writer for New Yorker, New York Times, WaPo, CNN. TED, SXSW speaker. Looking to change world w humor. newsletter:https://lizadonnelly.substack