Third Thoughts: Narratology

I hope I'm not getting repetitive here, but it's driving me nuts the way the journalists keep losing the thread and getting themselves manipulated from a significant development

The potentially incendiary whistleblower complaint that reportedly involves President Trump, also at least partially centers on Ukraine, the Washington Post and the New York Times reported Thursday evening.

While the contents of the complaint are still largely shrouded in mystery, multiple reports indicate that the complaint focuses on President Trump and an apparent “promise” he made during a phone call with a foreign leader. (Nicole Lafond/TPM; my bold)

to a completely unwarranted formulation

The DNI whistleblower case Josh has been tracking blew up Thursday night, as Giuliani gave an interview on CNN during which he admitted that he asked Ukrainian officials to look into Biden before quickly denying that he ever said such a thing. This bombshell comes amidst news that Trump made a promise to the Ukrainian president so alarming that it triggered the whistleblower’s complaint. (TPM staff; their bold)

There is no witness claiming that Volodymyr Zelensky is the foreign leader to whom Trump "made a promise". To the extent that anything about this story is true, and I suppose a lot of it is, that doesn't even make any sense.

What we know about the Giuliani strand is that

• the former New York mayor and current Trumpian ambassador to TV-land had been trying to get to Kiev to meet with president-elect Zelensky before his inauguration on 20 May, to ask him to revive long-dropped Ukrainian investigations into Hunter Biden (and somehow Joe as well), and 
• to open up a new investigation into the possibility that the previous Ukraine government had "interfered" in the 2016 US presidential election when it revealed that Trump's then campaign manager, Paul Manafort, had taken something upwards of $12 million in off-the-books payments from the Party of Regions, forcing him to resign and eventually to end up in jail;
• Giuliani dropped his plan after it became public and Rep. Adam Schiff remarked that "Today, Giuliani admitted to seeking political help from a foreign power, again"—Rudy complained that he thought some unidentified Ukrainians might be "setting him up" for some undescribed plot;
• but never did give up on the plan, and did make contact with Zelensky in July-August by phone and in meetings in Madrid, set up with the help of the State Department (though he is not an employee of the US government but of Citizen Trump), with a top Ukrainian official, Andriy Yermak, as The Times reported 22 August; and meanwhile
• Trump had a phone call with Zelensky on 25 July, in which he certainly could have discussed these matters, and then called Putin on 31 July about something or other, and by 25 August in Biarritz he was starting huge fights with his comrades in the Group of Seven by insisting that they ought to invite Russia back and let the bygones of the annexation of Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine and death of 13,000 Ukrainians be bygones, and by 30 August he had ordered a postponement of US military aid to Ukraine while the program was "reviewed".

What's being suggested in the new story is that Giuliani's and Trump's request to the Ukrainian president was accompanied not by a "promise" but a threat: that if Zelensky didn't agree to these stupid investigations, the Ukrainian military would lose $250 million. A trap for the very inexperienced Zelensky, with the possibility that siding with Trump could harm his country in the likely event that Biden won the election, making him a pawn in what Google Translate calls "the game of the big uncles".

Which may well be true, and pretty grotesque, and certainly illegal and impeachable, though it's hard for me to believe that Trump himself believes in or even clearly understands Giuliani's cockamamie theories about Ukraine, but the really odd thing is Trump was threatening not to do what everybody wanted him to do—Europe, and NATO, and his own national security and diplomatic establishments, and everybody in the legislature but Tulsi Gabbard. There was no constituency for US abandoning aid to Ukraine, anywhere but in Russia, whose president Trump called for unexplained reasons a week after his call to Zelensky (negotiations Putin would undoutedly have heard something about from his agents in Kiev). Indeed, it seems just as likely Zelensky turned him down  and Trump called Putin to say, "Don't worry, I'm cutting them off." A kind of promise there.

And there's more than one country involved, as the new reporting emphasizes: that is, Ukraine and Russia, and one interlocutor to whom Trump could have made a promise in the normal sense of the word, that is, Putin. I'm holding on to my narratology for now.