Javier Zarracina/Vox; NASA

Lunar samples are a time capsule. Scientists say we should go back for more.

In a brilliant white room at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC, lies a clear plastic chest filled with bits of the heavens. Inside are meteorites recovered from Antarctic ice and grains of material believed to predate the formation of our solar system. These are treasures, helping us humans understand our place among the stars.

From the chest, geologist Kate Burgess pulls out another treasure: a tiny Teflon vial, double-wrapped in Teflon bags. It contains soil from the moon, collected by the astronauts of Apollo 17 in 1972.

Brian Resnick/Vox

Brian Resnick/Vox

For a very long time, that soil rested undisturbed on the moon, exposed only to the immense radiation of space. When Burgess peers at the specimen with an electron microscope so powerful it can see down to the scale of atoms, she’s looking for evidence of how exposure to that radiation changed the soil color. This sounds like small-bore science. But it’s in service of a grand, even beautiful, idea.

Burgess is working to make moon rocks a reference guide to the greater cosmos. She’s investigating how much of the soil’s color comes from its composition (what it’s made out of) and how much comes from space weathering. She says figuring that out will help identify the composition of objects — like asteroids — spotted by telescopes.

In this way, the lunar samples are a link between us and the heavens, helping us see deeper into them and understand what we find. For planetary scientists, research on lunar samples is invaluable. Unlike Earth, the moon hasn’t changed much since it formed. That makes it a time capsule, a Book of Genesis for the geologically inclined.

In other words: Moon rocks rock.

Scientists are still studying the lunar samples from the Apollo moon landings. But there is now renewed interest in sending humans back to the moon for more.

President Trump wants them to get there by 2024. (We’ll see about that.) And planetary scientists are salivating over the chance to study rocks from the lunar south pole and the side of the moon that never faces Earth. Whether a lunar return is worth the cost, at this point in time, is debatable. But the planetary scientists I spoke with all said, at least, that it would lead to important scientific gains.

That’s because the moon rocks we have tell an incredible story about our place in the universe. The more we can collect, the more we’ll learn.

Why the moon is so darned important for planetary science

The moon landings — the second of which, Apollo 12, happened 50 years ago this week — were about a lot of things: beating the Soviets in the space race, the engineering puzzle of sending humans to the moon’s surface, the challenge for the sake of a challenge. But they were also about geology. Over the course of the six moon landings, astronauts brought back 842 pounds of lunar rocks, pebbles, and soil.

It’s not an exaggeration to say those rocks changed our understanding of our solar system and rewrote its history. “Before Apollo, we really did not know how the moon formed,” says Juliane Gross, a planetary scientist at Rutgers University.

To study geology is to study history. But Earth is constantly erasing its old geologic record.

“The Earth is a gigantic recycling machine,” Gross says. “We have wind, we have rain, we have ice and weather, and so all the rocks weather away.” The crust of our planet is dynamic; our continents float, move, and change. Through the ages, rocks are recycled, remelted, and reformed as continents smash into one another.

The moon, on the other hand, doesn’t erase its history. Aside from asteroid impacts, Gross says, “the moon hasn’t changed much since its formation.” That makes it a time capsule, a ledger for the history of our solar system.

In a moon rock, “you have this tiny treasure trove in your hands,” Gross says. Growing up, she had a dream of becoming an astronaut, which was eventually quashed by her susceptibility to motion sickness. Working with these rocks, she says, “that’s as close as I can get to be[ing] an astronaut.” But instead of exploring space, she and her colleagues are exploring time.

“The [lunar] crust is basically an archive,” Gross says. “And we need to learn how to interpret and how to read that archive.” One of its most important lessons is about how the Earth and moon were formed in the first place.

Moon rocks tell the story of creation

The picture below shows a 4-pound moon rock recovered in 1972 from Apollo 16. It’s mostly made of plagioclase, a rock formed out of molten magma. Rocks like this one make up most of the moon’s crust. And that tells scientists the moon had a very violent beginning.

NASA

Around 4.5 billion years ago, when the solar system was still in its infancy, it was a much more chaotic place.

Not long before that (cosmically speaking), the sun had burst into being, fusing together hydrogen atoms from an immense ball of gas, setting alight a fire that burns to this day. And that young star was still surrounded by bits of debris clumping together, smashing into one another, forming the planets.

It’s believed that around this time, the Earth (or more like an Earth predecessor) was hit by another planet maybe the size of Mars.

The resulting cataclysm fused the two worlds together, forming our Earth. The power of the collision ejected material from both bodies, and that material melted together to form our moon. The early moon was covered in an ocean of magma, which settled and cooled into the form we know today.

Javier Zarracina/Vox

In this way, the Earth and the moon were a (fraternal) twin birth.

But wait, how do we suspect all this from a boring old white rock?

The answer is kind of simple. Plagioclase is not very dense; it’s the type of mineral you’d expect to arise on the surface of a magma ocean as it cools. When the moon was formed, the plagioclase “actually rose to the surface of the moon and started creating a crust,” says Darby Dyar, a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute who has been studying lunar samples for decades.

Javier Zarracina/Vox

Scientists are still debating the details of this hypothesis. But it seems reasonable because the Earth and moon are made out of similar base materials (suggesting they were created from the same source material) and because that material was molten at the time they formed (due to the great power of the impact).

But that’s just the beginning of the story moon rocks tell.

What moon craters can tell us about the history of the solar system

A huge part of the “archive” of the lunar crust is its craters. And scientists have been able to use the Apollo samples to accurately date those craters.

The moon has changed far less than the Earth, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t changed at all. Asteroids have hit it over and over again, leading to the pockmarked surface we can see in the night sky. Those craters tell the story of what happened in the solar system after the Earth and the moon were formed.

By age-dating the moon’s craters, we can age-date craters elsewhere. The bigger the craters, the longer ago they were made (because bigger chunks of debris were more common farther back in time). “And now … we have a beautiful impact history of the solar system,” Dyar says. There are craters on other planets, like Mercury, for example. We now know the age of Mercury’s craters “because we have a reference set of information from the moon.”

Learning how old the moon’s craters are then led to another stunning hypothesis: that the outermost planets — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune — have changed their orbits over their lifetimes.

The craters show that around 600 million years after the planets formed, there was a period of heavy bombardment, meaning that the moon got smacked with a lot of asteroids. This was weird. The frantic pace of asteroid collisions ought to have settled down by then.

So what explains the impacts during this time? One possible idea is that if those big gas giant planets moved closer to the sun and then farther away, “they would have disturbed asteroids and they would have flung the asteroids around,” creating the collisions, Gross says.

Scientists still aren’t sure if this is the case. But without moon rocks, they might not have considered the case at all.

Why scientists want more lunar samples

We’ve learned a ton from less than a ton of moon rocks. But these planetary geologists are hungry for more. One reason is that all the Apollo missions landed near the moon’s equator.

Would the scientists like to study samples from other areas? “Oh, hell yeah,” Gross says. “Absolutely.”

“To try to interpret something about the history of the moon from a few hundred kilograms of rocks is very frustrating,” Dyar says, adding that we don’t have any samples from the far side of the moon at all. “We don’t know what other interesting science we’re gonna find.”

The White House is currently pushing NASA to send humans to the moon again by 2024. For now, the plan is for those astronauts to visit the lunar south pole at a crater called the South Pole–Aitken basin — one of the biggest, deepest, and therefore oldest of the moon’s craters. It’s possible the impact that created the basin was so powerful that it exposed the mantle, or interior, of the moon.

Scientists can’t directly study the Earth’s mantle. The moon’s would be the next best thing. “If we can get some of that back, that would be absolutely spectacular,” Gross says. It could help us understand why the Earth has such active geology and the moon does not.

Burgess hopes that if humans get to the moon, they can bring home some samples from areas that have not been exposed to as much space radiation so she can see a more pristine example of an unweathered space rock. Again, that’s in service of understanding what other objects — ones we don’t have pieces of — are made out of.

And that knowledge could have a lot of practical implications. For instance, in the future, if humans want to start mining asteroids for metals and minerals, it will be enormously helpful to know the exact geologic makeup of a particular asteroid before we arrive.

There are a lot of reasons to return humans to the moon and establish a more permanent presence there. The moon would be a good laboratory to teach astronauts how to better survive long, lonely missions in deep space. It would be a good launching ground for missions to Mars, or beyond. And it would potentially be a spot to mine for natural resources.

One of Burgess’s favorite discoveries is bits of helium she found stuck into teeny pits on the lunar sample dirt. The helium “is some of the sun trapped in the moon,” she says. The sun blasts off gases and particles in every direction, and our moon soaked up some of them like a sponge. The finding is as poetic as it is practical: Helium is an increasingly scarce resource on Earth. Perhaps we can learn to harvest it from the moon.

Moon rocks represent what happens when human curiosity is allowed to flourish

To study the moon is to study the Earth and wonder: How special is our world?

“I always think that the most important question for human beings to answer is the issue of, are we alone?” Dyar says. “Is Earth unique?” And in a small way, studying a pile of moon rocks helps us answer that question.

Figuring out how our solar system formed, how our planet formed, helps us understand how rare we are and how special a place this truly is. What if a Mars-sized body never collided with an Earth-sized one? Was that cataclysm somehow necessary for the chain of events that led to life, to you and me, to pizza?

If the moon never existed, Earth would be very different (there wouldn’t be ocean tides, for example). But we would be different too. And we’d possibly be less curious about our place in the universe.

NASA

Without the moon, “I think humanity would have probably never looked up into the sky [and thought], ‘Oh, this object is fairly close, let’s try and get there,’” Gross says. “So we would never have had the curiosity to develop our technology and tools to leave our own planet.”

For so many reasons, the moon is our first stepping stone to the greater reaches of space and the mysteries that lie within. I don’t know if we need to get more moon rocks by the year 2024 specifically. But sometime, someday, we ought to go back.

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Additional reporting by Byrd Pinkerton; graphics by Javier Zarracina/Vox

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President Donald Trump (R) puts his hand on Supreme Court Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s shoulder during his ceremonial swearing in in the East Room of the White House October 08, 2018 in Washington, DC.  | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Trump v. Mazars is the biggest presidential immunity case since the Nixon administration.

On Monday, Chief Justice John Roberts handed President Trump a small victory in what could be the most important presidential immunity case since the Nixon administration.

Trump v. Mazars USA involves Trump’s effort to escape a House subpoena seeking many of his financial documents. Roberts temporarily halted enforcement of that subpoena to give the Supreme Court more time to consider whether to grant Trump a lengthier stay or lower court decisions saying the subpoena may be enforced. (As the “circuit justice” overseeing cases that arise from a DC federal appeals court, Roberts has the power to issue a brief stay while the Court is considering whether to hand down a much longer one).

Existing law is very bad for Trump in this case. It’s very clear under decades of Supreme Court precedents that the House can enforce this subpoena. So the stakes in Mazars are high. If Trump does prevail before the justices, that decision could inaugurate a new era of presidential immunity from oversight.

Last May, a federal judge held that the House Oversight Committee may enforce a subpoena seeking many of Trump’s financial documents — including, most likely, his tax forms — from Trump’s accounting firm, Mazars USA. The committee says it seeks these documents as part of an inquiry into whether stricter financial disclosure laws are needed, although it is likely (as Trump’s lawyers suggest in their brief) that the committee also wants the documents because they will offer a window into corrupt dealings by the president.

Trump has fought hard to convince appeals courts that the House cannot obtain these documents — or, at least, that it cannot obtain them right now — and the subpoena remains unenforced.

That could change soon, however, assuming that the Supreme Court decides to apply the same rules to this subpoena that it applied to politically-charged subpoenas in the past. As the Supreme Court explained in United States v. Nixon (1974), the case that required President Richard Nixon to turn over incriminating tape recordings that ended his presidency, “neither the doctrine of separation of powers, nor the need for confidentiality of high-level communications, without more, can sustain an absolute, unqualified Presidential privilege of immunity from judicial process under all circumstances.”

But it’s far from clear that this Supreme Court agrees with the ruling in Nixon — or, at least, that this Court’s Republican majority believes that cases like Nixon should be applied to President Trump.

Trump’s latest addition to the Court, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, suggested in 1999 that Nixon was “wrongly decided” (though he later praised Nixon during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing, saying that he viewed it as a sign of judicial independence). Three lower court judges, all Republicans, also voted in Trump’s favor in various lower court proceedings.

So there’s a real chance that Trump could prevail in the Republican-controlled Supreme Court — and if he does prevail, that could be a legal earthquake. The Supreme Court’s precedents point in one direction: Congress has a broad oversight power, and presidents are not above the law. Mazars could change all of that.

Mazars, moreover, is just one example of Trump seeking extraordinary legal immunity. In a closely related case, Trump v. Vance, where a New York prosecutor seeks Trump’s financial documents, Trump’s lawyer argued that a sitting president is immune from criminal investigation if the president shoots someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue. (Trump’s lawyers also asked the Supreme Court to hear the Vance case, but it’s unlikely that the Court will weigh in on that request before it decides whether to grant a stay in Mazars.)

If the Supreme Court buys Trump’s arguments, in other words, Trump could potentially gain the kind of legal immunity more commonly associated with despots than with elected officials. At the very least, decisions in Trump’s favor would signal that the Court is inclined to give Trump far more favorable treatment than it gave to past presidents.

Trump’s legal arguments are exceedingly weak

Under longstanding Supreme Court precedent, Congress’s power to conduct oversight and issue subpoenas is quite broad. As the Court explained in Eastland v. United States Servicemen’s Fund (1975), Congress’s investigatory power extends broadly to subpoenas “intended to gather information about a subject on which legislation may be had.”

Both the trial court and the intermediate appeals court ruled that the Mazars subpoena was properly issued under this broad power because the House is considering legislation that would impose stronger financial disclosure requirements on the president, and the records sought by the House Oversight Committee could inform whether such legislation is necessary.

In response, Trump’s lawyers argue that the real purpose of this subpoena isn’t to inform the legislative process at all. It’s to determine whether Trump “broke the law.” Much of their argument echoes a dissenting opinion by Judge Neomi Rao, a Trump appointee, who claims that “the Constitution provides only one way for Congress to investigate illegal conduct by the President,” and that’s an impeachment inquiry.

This is the kind of distinction that only the most persnickety lawyer could love. While there was no formal impeachment investigation going on when the Mazars subpoena was initially issued, there is one now. So what’s the point of an argument about whether the House was engaged in a legitimate legislative process if it is free to get these documents as part of an impeachment inquiry?

The most likely answer to this question, however, is delay. If the Supreme Court buys Rao’s argument, that could force the House to reissue the subpoena as part of its impeachment inquiry, and then wait months or even years while the case winds its way through the courts again. By that point, the case could be moot.

Alternatively, Trump’s lawyers also argue that the subpoena is invalid because the “full House” did not vote to specifically give the House Oversight Committee the power to issue this particular subpoena. Again, this is the kind of argument that serves only to delay. If the Supreme Court buys this argument, the House can just hold such a vote — but that could also reset the litigation clock and allow Trump to delay the case into oblivion.

Beyond these two legal arguments, Trump’s lawyers also offer a political argument why the Court should rule in Trump’s favor. The justices should favor Trump in order to fight “the temptation to dig up dirt on political rivals.” Mazars, they claim, is “a case of firsts.” It is the “first time Congress has subpoenaed the personal records of a President that predate his time in office” and “the first time Congress has issued a subpoena, under its legislative powers, to investigate the President for illegal conduct.”

That may very well be true, but it’s far from clear why any of these claims that Mazars is unprecedented should matter legally. The Supreme Court held in Clinton v. Jones (1997) that a sitting president may be sued “based on actions allegedly taken before his term began.” And there was never a serious legal argument that the Senate Watergate hearings were unconstitutional. Mazars is distinct from past presidential investigations in superficial ways, but it is unclear why any of those distinctions have legal significance.

Indeed, to the extent that Mazars is distinguishable from prior investigations into past presidents, those distinctions cut against Trump. As the Court explained in Jones, “We have never suggested that the President, or any other official, has an immunity that extends beyond the scope of any action taken in an official capacity.” The fact that the House seeks records unrelated to Trump’s presidency cuts against Trump.

So current law is very clear that Congress may issue these subpoenas. The open question is whether the current Supreme Court believes that this law should apply to President Trump.

The Supreme Court could hand Trump a big victory without ever ruling on the merits of this case

The immediate question facing the Supreme Court is whether to stay the lower appeals court’s decision against Trump. On Friday, Trump’s lawyers formally sought such a stay from the Supreme Court. Then, on Monday, Chief Justice Roberts temporarily halted enforcement of the subpoena while he and his colleagues consider whether to grant a longer stay. He also ordered the House to respond to Trump’s request for a stay by Thursday afternoon.

That means we will likely find out next week if the Supreme Court will grant a lengthy stay. If the Court does grant it, that would prevent the House Oversight Committee from enforcing its subpoena until after the Supreme Court decides whether to hear the case on the merits — and most likely until after the Court hands down a full decision on the merits.

Should the Court decide to hear the case, it’s possible that a decision could come as soon as next June. It’s also possible that the case could be pushed to next term — which would almost certainly delay final resolution of the case until after the election.

Indeed, if the Court grants a stay and then sits on its hands, we may never get a Supreme Court decision telling us if the Mazars subpoena can be enforced. If Trump wins the 2020 election, gerrymandering and Trump’s coattails are likely to sweep Republicans into power in the House — and then House Republicans can simply cancel the subpoena themselves.

Should the Court grant the stay, moreover, the majority is unlikely to publish an opinion explaining why they did so. Stay requests are typically disposed of in brief orders, although those orders sometimes are accompanied by dissenting opinions.

Trump’s request for a stay, in other words, is an example of what University of Chicago law professor William Baude refers to as the Supreme Court’s “shadow docket” — a potentially very consequential decision that is decided without opinion, explanation, or any impact on the Court’s prior precedents.

If the Court’s Republican majority wants to rule in favor of Trump, but save itself from the awkward task of explaining why precedents like Nixon shouldn’t control this case, they could potentially hand Trump a quiet, unexplained victory simply by granting the stay and then delaying resolution of the case until the next term.

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At Chick-fil-A, controversy is good for business. | Jeffrey Greenberg/UIG via Getty Images

Boycotts and negative press haven’t exactly been bad for business, but the company is still changing its giving approach.

Chick-fil-A is arguably best known for three things: its juicy chicken sandwiches, its employees’ perpetually chipper attitudes, and its long history of donating to charities with anti-LGBTQ stances.

But one of those things will change next year. The fast-food chain is changing its charitable giving approach in 2020 — and says, in an oblique way, that it will no longer donate to such organizations.

The Chick-fil-A Foundation will instead take “a more focused giving approach,” Chick-fil-A announced in a Monday press release. The foundation has set aside $9 million for 2020 that will be split between three initiatives: promoting youth education, combating youth homelessness, and fighting hunger. Those funds will be distributed to Junior Achievement USA, Covenant House International, and local food banks in cities where the chain opens new locations.

Notably, the release didn’t mention the biggest change to Chick-fil-A’s philanthropic giving plan: The fact that in 2020, the chain won’t give any money to charities that take anti-LGBTQ stances. In an interview with real estate publication Bisnow, however, Chick-fil-A’s president and chief operating officer Tim Tassopoulos made it clear that the company’s new donation strategy is at least partly related to the constant backlash Chick-fil-A has faced over its donations.

“There’s no question we know that, as we go into new markets, we need to be clear about who we are,” Tassopoulos told Bisnow. “There are lots of articles and newscasts about Chick-fil-A, and we thought we needed to be clear about our message.”

Chick-fil-A’s controversial donations don’t seem to have made a dent in its profits — as of late 2018, it was on track to be the third-largest fast-food chain in the United States — though it’s hard to know for sure since the company is still privately held. Still, Tassopoulos’ comments suggest that the company’s reputation has suffered even if its bottom line hasn’t.

LGBTQ groups are “cautiously optimistic” about the change

LGBTQ rights groups like GLAAD say Monday’s news is a step in the right direction for Chick-fil-A, though they warn the chain is still far from inclusive.

“Chick-fil-A investors, employees, and customers can greet today’s announcement with cautious optimism, but should remember that similar press statements were previously proven to be empty,” Drew Anderson, director of campaigns and rapid response for GLAAD, told The Goods in an emailed statement. “In addition to refraining from financially supporting anti-LGBTQ organizations, Chick-Fil-A still lacks policies to ensure safe workplaces for LGBTQ employees and should unequivocally speak out against the anti-LGBTQ reputation that their brand represents.”

As Anderson’s statement suggests, Chick-fil-A has promised to cut ties with anti-LGBTQ charities before. In 2012, the Chicago-based Civil Rights Agenda issued a statement claiming that Chick-fil-A had promised to “no longer give to anti-gay organizations, such as Focus on the Family and the National Organization for marriage.”

Chick-fil-A declined to comment on the matter at the time, instead issuing a boilerplate statement to BuzzFeed News:

“We have no agenda, policy or position against anyone. We have a 65-year history of providing hospitality for all people and, as a dedicated family business, serving and valuing everyone regardless of their beliefs or opinions. The genuine, historical intent of our WinShape Foundation and corporate giving has been to support youth, family and educational programs.”

But the company’s donations to anti-LGBTQ groups continued. As ThinkProgress reported in 2017, Chick-fil-A continued to bankroll anti-gay groups like the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, the Salvation Army, and the Paul Anderson Youth Home through its foundation. Recent tax filings show that Chick-fil-A’s foundation donated $115,000 to the Salvation Army and $1.65 million to the Fellowship of Christian Athletes in 2018, though a company spokesperson told Bisnow that those donations were the result of multi-year commitments to each organization.

This time around, though, Chick-fil-A announced the change to its philanthropic plan itself instead of letting the news trickle out through a third party. But it didn’t quite promise to end all donations to anti-LGBTQ groups. Instead, the Chick-fil-A Foundation will begin doling out donations through annual grants, Tassopoulos told Bisnow, and it will reevaluate the charities it donates to each year.

Chick-fil-A’s business model is largely rooted in its owner’s religious beliefs

S. Truett Cathy, a devout Baptist, opened the first Chick-fil-A in Atlanta in 1967, and the chain has remained in his family’s hands ever since. Today there are more than 2,300 locations across the country — all of which are closed on Sundays. (“Having worked seven days a week in restaurants open 24 hours,” Chick-fil-A’s website reads, “Truett saw the importance of closing on Sundays so that he and his employees could set aside one day to rest and worship if they choose — a practice we uphold today.” A previous iteration of the website reportedly claimed the restaurant was closed on Sundays as a “testament to [Cathy’s] faith in God.”)

“It was not an issue in 1946 when we opened up our first restaurant,” Dan Cathy, Truett’s son and the chain’s current CEO, said in a 2012 interview with the Baptist Press. “While developers had no identity whatsoever with our corporate purpose to ‘glorify God and be a faithful steward of all that is entrusted to us and have a positive influence on all that come in contact with Chick-fil-A,’ they did identify with the rent checks that we wrote to the mall, based on our sales.”

That 2012 interview, in which Cathy was quoted as saying that he believes in the “biblical definition of the family unit” — i.e., that marriage should only be between a man and a woman — was the catalyst for a major national controversy. Cathy later tried to clarify his point in a radio interview: “As it relates to society in general,” he said, “I think we are inviting God’s judgement on our nation when we shake our fist at him and say, ‘We know better than you do as to what constitutes marriage.’”

The backlash to Cathy’s comments was swift. First a New York woman named Carly McGehee planned an LGBTQ kiss-in at Chick-fil-A restaurants across the country. It was scheduled for August 3, 2012. Then came the backlash to the backlash: Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee responded to McGehee’s plan with a “Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day” scheduled for August 1. Thousands of people across the country bought chicken sandwiches in support of the Cathys and their mission, and Dan Cathy himself made an appearance at a Chick-fil-A location in Fayetteville, North Carolina, to thank customers for showing up.

But the 2012 incident wasn’t the first time the Cathys were accused of homophobia. A year earlier, a Pennsylvania Chick-fil-A’s decision to donate food to a marriage seminar conducted by the Pennsylvania Family Institute, a group known for its anti-gay advocacy, prompted a nationwide boycott of the chain. Cathy issued a video statement in response to the boycott, in which he claimed the company “serves all people” and that, while he personally believes in the “biblical definition of marriage,” his company doesn’t have an “anti-gay agenda.” And back in 2002, a former employee of a Houston Chick-fil-A sued the chain for discrimination. The employee, who was Muslim, alleged he had been fired because he refused to pray to Jesus with other employees. The suit was settled out of court.

These controversies also shined a light on the fact that the Cathys regularly made donations to charities known for discriminating against LGBTQ people.

In 2011, the same year a Pennsylvania Chick-fil-A franchise donated food to a local anti-gay organization, the LGBTQ advocacy group Equality Matters obtained tax records which revealed that the Cathy family had donated more than $1.9 million to anti-gay groups in 2010 through the WinShape Foundation, the Cathy family’s charitable giving organization founded by Truett Cathy in 1984. Those donations included a $1.1 million gift to the Marriage & Family Foundation, a group that promoted so-called traditional marriage and opposed both gay marriage and divorce; $480,000 to the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, an athletic organization that requires applicants to agree to a “sexual purity statement” that condemns LGBTQ people for living “impure lifestyle[s]”; and $1,000 to Exodus International, a group that promotes anti-gay conversion therapy.

For Chick-fil-A’s opponents, the problem was bigger than Cathy’s anti-gay comments, it was that he was apparently putting his money where his mouth was, and he had a lot of money to go around.

Petitions and boycotts didn’t hurt Chick-fil-A — the chain continued expanding across the country despite people’s opposition to the Cathys’ views on marriage — but they did potentially contribute to making the Cathys somewhat less vocal about their political beliefs.

In a 2014 interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Cathy admitted he regretted getting involved in the gay marriage debate. Cathy didn’t claim to have regretted what he said, just that he said it. “I think the time of truths and principles are captured and codified in God’s word and I’m just personally committed to that,” he said at the time. “I know others feel very different from that and I respect their opinion and I hope that they would be respectful of mine. … I think that’s a political debate that’s going to rage on. And the wiser thing for us to do is to stay focused on customer service.”

Chick-fil-A’s controversies somehow haven’t been bad for business, but they are bad PR

Though Chick-fil-A never managed to fully shed its reputation as a homophobic purveyor of delicious chicken sandwiches, it continued to expand its national presence, especially above the Mason-Dixon line. New York City’s first Chick-fil-A, a 5,000-square-foot behemoth in Midtown, opened in 2015. (It was met with resistance by locals but opened anyway.) Three years later, Chick-fil-A added another New York City location, a five-story, 12,000-square-foot restaurant that, according to ABC News, is “nearly twice the size of any existing Chick-fil-A.” (This location, like many other Chick-fil-As across the country, is an independently owned franchise. It is not open on Sundays.)

Oliver Contreras-Pool/Getty Images

By the end of 2018, Chick-fil-A was slated to overtake Subway and become the third-largest fast-food restaurant in the country after McDonald’s and Starbucks, according to a report by Kalinowski Equity Research. It’s reportedly the most profitable fast-food chain in the country on a per-location basis, and has been the number one fast-food restaurant on the American Customer Satisfaction Index for three years in a row.

In a 2017 interview with Morning Consult, Thomas Ordahl, chief strategy officer of the brand consulting firm Landor, succinctly explained how Chick-fil-A has been able to weather these constant controversies. “What’s interesting about the paradox of Chick-fil-A is that, in many ways, it’s probably one of the most socially advanced companies in terms of treatment of employees and its role in the community,” Ordahl said, “and yet its founder has a position that is quite dissonant with most people in the U.S.”

As Rachel Sugar previously wrote for The Goods, part of Chick-fil-A’s popularity is due to a pretty simple fact: people eat there because they like the food, even if they don’t like what the Cathys stand for.

The Cathys’ “dissonant view,” as one brand consultant called it, may have finally hurt Chick-fil-A’s bottom line — especially now that a popular, non-homophobic alternative to Chick-fil-A’s sandwiches has emerged. Earlier this year, Popeye’s temporarily began selling chicken sandwiches at its locations across the country. The sandwiches were so popular that the chain declared a national shortage in August.

Popeye’s sandwiches are now back for good, and a promotional video announcing their return even made fun of Chick-fil-A’s long standing policy of keeping all its locations closed on Sundays.

The popularity of Popeye’s sandwiches means Chick-fil-A no longer has a virtual monopoly of the chicken sandwich market, but increased competition doesn’t entirely explain why the company is finally changing its philanthropic giving plan. It’s also possible that the Cathys’ politics are finally hindering the company’s expansion.

In July, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed a controversial piece of legislation that supporters dubbed the “Save Chick-fil-A” bill. The law, introduced in response to the San Antonio City Council’s decision to remove a proposed Chick-fil-A location from its airport concession agreement, forbids government entities from taking “adverse actions” against businesses because of their religious beliefs or actions.

San Antonio may not have fully succeeded in kicking Chick-fil-A out of its airport, but the city’s decision seems to have sparked a new wave of backlash to Chick-fil-A. In September, the airport concession company Delaware North kicked Chick-fil-A and a few other big chains out of the Buffalo Niagara International Airport in favor of local restaurants.

Across the pond, protesters managed to get the landlord of a Chick-fil-A location in Reading, England to opt out of renewing the chain’s lease just 8 days after it had opened. (A Chick-fil-A spokesperson told VICE that the lease was never supposed to last longer than six months.)

Martin Cooper, the head of Reading Pride, told a local publication that the Cathys’ charitable giving influenced the group’s opposition to the restaurant.

“We’re here to inform the community in Reading what has been allowed to set up in our town. It’s a business based on anti-LGBT beliefs,” Cooper said. “If it was just beliefs, we probably wouldn’t be here protesting. It’s about the active engagement and where their profits are going.”

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It’s not really about age — and it’s more complicated than just memes.

For a long time now, the cross-generational dialogue between baby boomers and millennials has been built atop several recurring themes. Boomers — the generation born roughly between 1946 and 1965 — scoff that millennials expect “participation trophies” for doing the bare minimum. Millennials say boomers are “out of touch.” Millennials (born roughly between 1980 and 1996) are “killing” once-stable industries like cereal by saving money, spending less, and “eating avocados.” Boomers have “mortgaged the future” in exchange for hoarding wealth while also voting to end necessary social programs. Millennials would rather complain about student debt than buckle down, work hard, and “get a job.”

If anything, teens have been subjected to even harsher rhetorical maligning. Members of “Generation Z,” born roughly between 1996 and 2015, are portrayed as addicted to their phones, “intolerant” of their elders, and stuck in a “different world” thanks to the internet.

With all this repetitive back-and-forth — seriously, there are bingo cards — it’s no wonder the most polarizing meme of the year is a two-word dismissal of the whole debate. “OK Boomer,” which floated into the internet mainstream and rapidly gained traction this fall, is an attempt by millennials and Gen Z to both encapsulate this circular argument and reject it entirely.

“OK Boomer” is meant to be cutting and dismissive. It suggests that the conversation around the anxieties and concerns of younger generations has become so exhausting and unproductive that the younger generations are collectively over it. “OK Boomer” implies that the older generation misunderstands millennial and Gen Z culture and politics so fundamentally that years of condescension and misrepresentation have led to this pointedly terse rebuttal and rejection. Rather than endlessly defend decisions stemming from deep economic strife, to save money instead of investing in stocks and retirement funds, to buy avocados instead of cereal — teens and younger adults are simply through.

The conversation isn’t through with them, however, not least because the rise of “OK Boomer” has provoked concurrent backlash from baby boomers, many of whom have misread the meme, and feel it is motivated mainly by ageism. But that misreading also feeds the meme — because baby boomers failing to understand the point of “OK Boomer” is, well, the point of “OK Boomer.”

Don’t get it twisted. It’s important to understand that what really lies behind “OK Boomer” is increasing economic, environmental, and social anxiety, and the feeling that baby boomers are leaving younger generations to clean up their mess.

“OK Boomer” is an instantly relatable cry of frustration to many people

The earliest mentions of “OK Boomer” can be traced as far back as 2015 on 4chan, where the phrase was used as an insult by the forum’s anonymous users, aimed at other anons who seemed out of touch. But the phrase really took off this year on TikTok, as a rebuttal to angry rants by baby boomers about kids these days. A song by Peter Kuli & Jedwill known as “OK BOOMER!” — the verses define boomers as racist, fascist Trump supporters with bad hair — became a popular song choice for TikTok sing-along videos this fall. Teens on the platform used the song’s intro and chorus as a rebuttal to annoying run-ins they’d had with seniors policing or judging their behavior:

Sometimes, the complaints teens are referencing in these videos are typical generational conflicts. But more often, they’re politicized, with teens reacting to adults who are judging things like their gender expression, their financial choices, their approach to job-hunting, or their leisure activities. The broader background to all of this resentment is the perceived irony that while boomers nitpick and judge younger generations for their specific choices, it’s the boomers’ own choices that created the bleak socioeconomic landscape that millennials and Gen Z currently face.

“Everybody in Gen Z is affected by the choices of the boomers, that they made and are still making,” teen entrepreneur Nina Kasman told the New York Times in October. “Those choices are hurting us and our future. Everyone in my generation can relate to that experience and we’re all really frustrated by it.”

“[T]he two words [OK Boomer] feel downright poetic after years of hearing my generation blamed for ‘killing’ everything from restaurant chains to department stores to relationships,” wrote Grist’s Miyo McGinn in early November, “even as so many of the challenges people my age face — student loan debt, general economic instability, and, of course, a rapidly warming planet — are the result of short-sighted decisions made by earlier generations.”

This broader socioeconomic aspect seems to have gotten lost as the meme spread throughout the mainstream, however. Many people became aware of “OK Boomer” through the October New York Times article, which focused on teens who had taken the meme offline and were turning it into merchandise and fashion statements. Almost immediately, people rushed to sell “OK Boomer” merchandise and attempted to trademark the phrase, and brands began to use it on social media — completely missing the inherent critique of capitalism that the meme enfolds, which led to more eyerolling.

But millennials who mocked the instant trendiness of “OK Boomer” were drowned out by the meme’s intended targets: boomers. Some began claiming that “boomer” was an ageist slur equivalent to “the n-word,” while others merely discouraged the use of “boomer” in the workplace. Media outlets opined that the meme was “dividing generations.” Gen Xers offered the “both sides” take. In the Washington Post, history professor Holly Scott reminded everyone that boomers were once activists too.

All of this response helped further cement the meme as a dismissive retort to boomer condescension — and as it spread, its political aspects became more pointed. On November 4, 25-year-old New Zealand politician Chloë Swarbrick used the phrase as a rebuttal to one of her older colleagues in Parliament after the man heckled her during a speech about climate change. The moment occurred just as she was discussing the urgency her generation feels to prioritize and deal seriously with the problem, and explaining her frustration that previous cycles of lawmakers have failed to do so.

Swarbrick was castigated for bringing the meme into a political forum — but as she herself made clear in a subsequent essay for the Guardian, the meme represents a wealth of generational political concerns: “My ‘OK boomer’ comment in parliament was off-the-cuff, albeit symbolic of the collective exhaustion of multiple generations set to inherit ever-amplifying problems in an ever-diminishing window of time,” she wrote.

The point of Swarbrick’s climate change speech was that younger generations feel they can no longer rely on older generations to help solve major and daunting environmental and economic issues. And many baby boomers seem to be making her point for her by misunderstanding what “OK Boomer” is about.

What many boomers think “OK Boomer” is about: ageism and entitlement

“As a baby boomer myself, I have mixed feelings about the latest linguistic weapon of generational warfare being deployed against us,” Bloomberg’s Tyler Cowen recently wrote in response to the meme. Cowen touched on what he saw as the meme’s ageism and attempted to reframe it as an ironic compliment to boomers, asserting that boomers are still the boss. “The phrase ‘OK Boomer’ is itself an implicit and indeed somewhat passive admission as to who is really in charge,” he decided.

Cowen’s column was a strange echo of an August essay by former Deadspin editor Megan Greenwell. As she was exiting Deadspin, she wrote about the tone deaf and inexperienced changes the site’s new parent company, G/O Media, had brought to the newsroom. Beyond discussing specific issues at Deadspin, Greenwell’s essay was a larger swipe at the hubris of tech companies and corporate moguls for assuming that they, not the journalists whose media outlets they were ruining, were “the adults in the room.” This attitude prompted an eventual wholesale rejection by Deadspin’s editorial staff, as they chose to resign en masse rather than submit to the whims of the bosses they felt were out of touch.

In a very real sense, that same tension between condescending, older authority figures and younger ones who reject them is at work in the “OK Boomer” meme. Boomers like Cowen are simultaneously anxious about the meme’s ageist implications, and eager to assert their wisdom over younger generations. In response to this line of thinking, the Twitter hashtag #boomeradvice recently went viral — but instead of praising boomers’ knowhow, the point of the tag was to mock the most out-of-touch advice, often about work, job-seeking, and finance, that boomers had given millennials and teens.

What’s largely missing from the “elders know best” logic is any acknowledgment that it’s part of the problem, and that younger, well-read adults might also have wisdom and insight into the problems they’re dealing with.

It doesn’t help that studies have found that older people are more likely to judge younger people harshly compared to qualities they have themselves. As Vox’s Brian Resnick recently explained, a study on a phenomenon called “presentism” showed that “adults who are more authoritarian are more likely to say kids today are a lot less respectful of elders than they used to be. Adults who are more well read say kids today are a lot less interested in reading than they used to be. And adults who are more intelligent (as approximated by a very short version of an IQ test) are more likely to say kids are less smart than they used to be.”

So if an older adult sees themself as financially successful, respectful, and job-loyal, the study suggests they might be more likely to view a younger person as a financially irresponsible and insolent job-hopper.

This is all arguably a new iteration of the “kids these days” generational cycle that every era experiences — at the very least, the backlash to the “OK Boomer” meme underscores the belief held by many millennials that boomers have never understood their generation. But because of the cultural and political moment we’re in, the stakes feel much more fraught and high-risk than other generational clashes.

What “OK Boomer” is really about: economic anxiety, the threat of environmental collapse, and people resisting change

“I talked to my dad about it and he said the reason the ‘boomers’ get so mad is because they feel as if they earned the right to say such things to us kids because they worked hard for what they have,” said Adriana Lepera, who talked to Vox via Instagram. Lepera, a popular TikTok teen with over 120,000 followers, made a viral “OK Boomer” TikTok reacting to a conversation she had with her grandfather. She used the meme to respond to his assertion that she should be working — even though she doesn’t even have a driver’s license yet, which she says makes it harder for her to find a job.

“After my [“OK Boomer”] video, I got a few comments from ‘boomers’ explaining how many jobs they had and how hard they have to work, proving the joke to be true,” she told Vox.

Lepera admits that today’s teens do have it easier than boomers did in some ways. “Today’s kids are getting things handed to them and that’s not what the boomers like to see so they make cocky comments because they believe that they are ‘superior,’” she said.

But she also argues that boomers miss the point — that crucial things are a lot harder. “We are working hard to get fewer jobs,” she said. “That’s why we’re mad, because all of the boomers made it to be like that.”

Teens like Lepera understand that “OK Boomer” is driven both by their generation’s deep economic and environmental anxiety, and by progressive values that are only getting firmer over time. Younger generations are more diverse, less religious, and, crucially, more directly impacted by economic inequality than their forebears. “Ok, Boomer, millennials actually earn 20 percent less than you did,” GQ declared last week. Millennials who value work culture, advancement possibilities, and quality of work over quantity are finding their paths to promotions blocked by baby boomers — but when they change jobs or careers in search of these things, they find themselves branded with the false stereotype of being disloyal job-hoppers. All the while, jobs remain scarce, student debt remains high, and the economic scandals of the Aughts have led to millennials being more cynical than their elders about the benevolence of corporate overlords.

But many of those offended by “OK Boomer” seem to understand very little of this. They’re instead sticking to their guns about the workplace, according to the teens who don’t trust them. “I feel as if they aren’t changing with the times,” Lepera told Vox. “They believe that how they did everything when they were younger, we should do as well.”

Whether it’s justified or not, boomers are largely perceived as resistant to progressive change. In 2016, boomers were more likely to vote for conservative options like Brexit and Donald Trump than younger voters; statistically, boomers are less concerned about climate change than younger generations. And even after overseeing decades of financial prosperity that’s arguably wrecked the economic future for decades to come, the richest baby boomers continue to amass wealth for themselves in the face of debilitating economic inequality.

Baby boomers, however, also have to contend with their growing obsolescence. Boomers as a voting bloc are outnumbered by millennials, and there’s an advancing push among millennials for greater voter turnout; in the 2018 election, Gen Z, millennials and Gen Xers collectively edged out the voter turnout of everyone older than them.

So the older generation is being told its advice is out of touch, and that boomers are out of touch, at a moment when their views have less traction in the current economic and political landscape than ever. Perhaps that’s why so many of them keep misunderstanding the meme — thereby strengthening the meme’s basic point.

The debate around ‘OK Boomer’ is a new spin on the old debate over millennials — and an even older debate about kids these days

We all know the immortal cry that parents just don’t understand, but in this case, the media and the cultural narrative around the meme isn’t helping — especially since attempts by the media to “explain” the meme or “clap back” keep missing the point about why millennials are mad. Some attempts to “explain” the meme have come across just as out of touch as the meme’s targets.

In an attempt to provide a retort to the meme, Myrna Blyth, the senior vice president of the senior advocacy group AARP, stated in an interview that boomers are “the people that actually have the money.” This widely shared quote came in for massive criticism and ridicule, and the AARP quickly apologized, reminding everyone that ‘isms that divide us are not ok’.

But Blyth’s statement is a peak example of boomers missing the point. A big cause for the resentment toward boomers is the perception that boomers are hoarding wealth. (This perception is accurate; the average baby boomer has a net worth that is 12 times more than the average millennial.) In particular, her quote highlights the pattern of boomers failing to realize that the perceived ageism of the meme, even as a joke, is a stand-in for rational economic anxieties.

Still, expressing this frustration through the meme seems to make boomers less inclined to listen, which just leads to doubling down on all sides. As novelist Francine Prose put it in an op-ed for the Guardian:

The accepted explanation and justification for all this is that the old have ruined things for the young: we’re responsible for climate change, for income inequality, for the cascading series of financial crises, for the prohibitive cost of higher education. Fair enough, I suppose, though it does seem unjust to direct one’s anger at the average middle-class senior citizen struggling to survive on social security rather than raging at, let’s say, the Koch brothers the Sacklers, the big banks, and the fossil-fuel lobbyists who have effectively dismantled the EPA. OK, Morgan Stanley, have a terrible day.

But to the TikTok teens, the boomers’ sensitivity to the meme just makes them hypocritical. “They feel as if they can say whatever they want about our generation and no repercussion,” Lepera told Vox, “but when we make a joke about them it’s the end of the world.”

In the end, the debate around “OK Boomer” might be another iteration of the endless parade of internet-fueled ideological debates in which neither side is listening to the other. For frustrated millennials and teens, “OK Boomer” is an emotionally valid response to boomer condescension, but to frustrated baby boomers, the retort is insolent and disrespectful. You say, “OK Boomer,” and I hear, “your entire generation has irrevocably destroyed human civilization.” Let’s call the whole thing off?

Perhaps, in the future, it’s worth eschewing the meme altogether and having one more conversation across the generation gap. Or, if you’re a boomer, you could take Lepera’s advice:

“Just like take a joke and calm down boomer ”

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Nine witnesses will testify at five hearings between Tuesday and Thursday.

House Democrats have set up a packed schedule for their second full week of impeachment inquiry hearings, with nine witnesses set to testify between Tuesday and Thursday.

Things kick off on Tuesday morning at 9 am Eastern, with testimony from Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman (a National Security Council staffer) and Jennifer Williams (a State Department official detailed to the vice president’s office). We’ve embedded a live stream above, and you can also watch it on C-SPAN or on Vox’s Facebook and Twitter.

Later, on Tuesday afternoon at 2:30 pm Eastern, the committee will hear testimony from Kurt Volker (the former US special representative for Ukraine) and Tim Morrison (a National Security Council staffer).

The hearing beginning Wednesday morning at 9 am Eastern will likely be especially explosive. It will be devoted entirely to Gordon Sondland, the US ambassador to the European Union. And Sondland is viewed by Democrats as the least credible witness so far — much of his testimony has conflicted with other aides’ recollections and documents, and he’s already “updated” his testimony once. So expect him to face serious pressure over whether he’s telling the full story.

That afternoon, Wednesday at 2:30 pm Eastern, two lower-profile witnesses — Laura Cooper (a Defense Department official) and David Hale (the under secretary of state for political affairs) will appear.

The week’s testimony will close out on Thursday at 9 am Eastern, with testimony from Fiona Hill (the former top NSC staffer handling Russia and Europe), as well as David Holmes (a Kyiv-based State Department official who stepped forward only recently to report new information about the scandal.)

All of these witnesses have already given closed-door depositions in the impeachment inquiry, so most of what they have to say is already known. The hearings are primarily to have them repeat their accounts of what they saw transpire in public.

And, for Ambassador Sondland in particular, they provide one more opportunity for him to try and remember some of the many things he failed to recall in his first go-round.

Where the facts stand in the Trump-Ukraine scandal

The impeachment inquiry has reached a point where relatively few of the underlying facts are disputed. Extensive witness testimony and documents have clarified the following:

• Very soon after Ukraine elected a new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, in April 2019, Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani began urging Zelensky’s team to launch certain investigations Trump wanted.
• Some Trump administration officials became involved in this effort, too. Specifically, they demanded investigations into Burisma (a Ukrainian gas company that Joe Biden’s son Hunter sat on the board of) and into purported Ukrainian interference with the 2016 US election.
• When Trump talked to Zelensky on the phone on July 25, he brought up both investigations specifically and urged Zelensky to talk to Giuliani and Attorney General Bill Barr about them.
• The Ukrainians were seeking a White House meeting between Trump and Zelensky. Trump officials told them that they wouldn’t get it unless they committed to those investigations: a quid pro quo.
• Around the same time, Trump was holding up nearly $400 million in military assistance Congress had approved for Ukraine’s government. Ambassador Sondland has admitted telling the Ukrainians that they likely wouldn’t get the aid unless they placated Trump by publicly committing to the investigations. The aid, however, was let through just before this scandal broke into public view.

We’re still lacking some facts about the military aid holdup and release (because the key officials involved, like acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney and former National Security Adviser John Bolton have refused to testify). Still, the question of whether a quid pro quo was presented to the Ukrainians is no longer in doubt. In fact, two were — first, a White House meeting in exchange for investigations, and then, releasing military aid in exchange for investigations.

Meanwhile, Trump’s team is still trying to downplay the extent of the president’s involvement in all this — arguing that it was limited to what he said on just one phone call. But more information keeps coming out suggesting he was personally involved in what his aides and allies were doing all along.

What the witnesses will talk about this week

Nine separate witnesses are expected to testify this week. Some were more involved in the scandal than others — and some may be more eager to defend Trump politically than others.

For instance, three of the approved witnesses — Kurt Volker, Tim Morrison, and David Hale — were actually requested by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee. (The GOP requested a longer list, but Democrats only approved those they deemed most relevant to the inquiry).

None of these witnesses will get Trump off the hook, exactly — in fact, Morrison’s testimony can be read as quite damning for Trump, and Volker turned over a plethora of text messages that have been crucial evidence for Democrats. But Republicans who heard their closed-door testimony evidently concluded they’d each by politically helpful in some way.

Another witness — Gordon Sondland — has also seemed to be trying gamely to protect Trump in his testimony so far, often in ways that strain credulity. For instance, he has argued that the quid pro quo push came relatively late and that he didn’t even realize it was about the Bidens, he has tried to put the blame for it on Giuliani, and he has repeatedly failed to “recall” any personal involvement from Trump in it.

But after Sondland went in to give his initial deposition, other witnesses told the impeachment investigators a very different story. They recalled that Sondland was heavily involved in demanding investigations from the Ukrainians, and that he repeatedly claimed to have talked with Trump about the topic and to be carrying out Trump’s wishes.

One new witness, Kyiv-based State Department official David Holmes, came forward just recently to reveal that he saw Sondland call President Trump while they were in a restaurant together. Holmes said he could hear Trump ask about “investigations,” that Sondland assured him the Ukrainians would play ball, and that Sondland said after the call that Trump only really cared about Ukraine for the purposes of investigating Biden.

Holmes was a late addition to Democrats’ hearing lineup, and will appear Thursday. The other witnesses called by Democrats include, as mentioned, Fiona Hill and Alexander Vindman (National Security Council officials who were deeply concerned by the push for investigations), Laura Cooper (a Defense Department official who struggled to learn why the White House was blocking aid to Ukraine), and Jennifer Williams (a State Department official detailed to Vice President Mike Pence’s staff).

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Pelosi and Trump at this year’s State of the Union. | Photo by Cheriss May/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Journalists get fired for this sort of thing.

It’s not exactly a hot take these days to point out that President Donald Trump lies a lot. What doesn’t get as much attention is his propensity to completely fabricate quotes and attribute them to his political foes.

Recently, to defend himself against the impeachment inquiry, Trump has made up two different quotes and put them in Nancy Pelosi’s mouth. Both of them were aimed at misleadingly portraying the House Speaker as obsessed with getting him out of office.

Early Tuesday morning, Trump tweeted that Pelosi said “it is dangerous to let the voters decide Trump’s fate” — a comment that, if true, would bolster the “coup” narrative he’s been pushing.

Pelosi, however, never said that. Trump, as the Washington Post details, appears to have lifted the misquote from a Fox News segment he watched about Pelosi’s comments about an hour earlier. What Pelosi actually said in a “Dear Colleague” memo was, “The weak response to these hearings [among Republicans] has been, ‘Let the election decide.’ That dangerous position only adds to the urgency of our action, because the President is jeopardizing the integrity of the 2020 elections.”

Pelosi’s comments alluded to Trump’s efforts to leverage the Ukrainian government into interfering in the 2020 election on his behalf. Instead of pushing a “coup,” what she was saying is that holding impeachment hearings now is not only important in terms of getting to the bottom of Trump’s conduct, but also in terms of making sure he doesn’t benefit from foreign interference again.

As reckless as pushing false quotes in any circumstance is, Trump’s Pelosi misquote could’ve resulted from a mistaken recollection of something he saw on TV. But during an interview with Fox News contributor Dan Bongino that was published online last Friday, Trump flat-out put words in Pelosi’s mouth.

“She said, ‘You can’t impeach a man on this call!’” Trump told Bongino, despite the fact that Pelosi said no such thing.

Pelosi, in fact, responded to the White House releasing the call memo with a stern statement saying the document “confirms that the President engaged in behavior that undermines the integrity of our elections, the dignity of the office he holds and our national security. The President has tried to make lawlessness a virtue in America and now is exporting it abroad.”

Daniel Dale of CNN reports that Trump has now fabricated five quotes from Pelosi. And it’s not just her — Trump has also put fake words in the mouths of Barack Obama and Al Green.

If a journalist did this sort of thing, they’d likely lose their job. It says something that when this president does it, it’s barely a blip on the news radar.

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The news moves fast. To stay updated, follow Aaron Rupar on Twitter, and read more of Vox’s policy and politics coverage.

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Victor Urisa Cabrera from Guatemala came with his daughter, Jaqueline Maria Urisa Reyes for a better life, but has been on the bridge for five days waiting for his asylum meeting on November 4, 2018 in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico | PAUL RATJE/AFP via Getty Images

The rule allows Trump’s asylum agreements in Central America to go into effect.

The Trump administration issued a rule on Monday that would allow it to send migrants seeking protections in the US at the southern border back to Guatemala under an agreement brokered earlier this year.

Former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan, who spearheaded the agreement, has billed it as a way to help the country build up its capacity to process migrants seeking protections under both international torture agreements and asylum.

But under the rule issued Monday, the agreement will be used to deport migrants to Guatemala and, eventually, to El Salvador and Honduras, which have signed similar agreements with the US. Hundreds of thousands have fled violence and the lack of economic opportunity in the region, known as Central America’s Northern Triangle, over the past year.

The agreements with the Northern Triangle countries resemble “safe third country agreements” — a rarely used diplomatic tool that requires migrants to seek asylum in the countries they pass through by deeming those countries capable of offering them protection — although the Trump administration has been reluctant to use that term. Until recently, the US had this kind of agreement with just one country: Canada.

The administration has sought such agreements in Central America as a means of achieving President Donald Trump’s goal of driving down the number of migrants seeking refuge at the US southern border by sending them back to the countries they came from and passed through. But immigrant advocates argue that sending migrants back to those countries could have deadly consequences.

How the rule will be implemented

When it goes into effect next month, the joint interim final rule by the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice will establish a new screening process to determine whether the US or Guatemala will process migrants’ claims for protection. It will apply both to immigrants who show up at US ports of entry at the southern border and those who try to enter the country without authorization between ports of entry.

A former administration official familiar with the implementation of the Northern Triangle agreements said that migrants from Honduras and El Salvador who seek protections at the US southern border will be asked whether they sought protections in Guatemala first. If they did not, they would be sent back to Guatemala.

The regulation claims that asylum seekers will only be sent back to countries where they have “access to a full and fair procedure for determining a claim to asylum or equivalent temporary protection.” The administration has certified that Guatemala’s legal framework meets that standard, the official said, but has not evaluated whether Guatemala has the capacity to accept asylum seekers based on, for example, infrastructure or personnel needs.

Initially, the administration will only send relatively low numbers of single adults to Guatemala in order to test out the policy, they said. The United Nations refugee agency, meanwhile, will be working on the ground to bolster Guatemala’s capacity to receive more migrants.

The official said that it is in DHS’s interest to make sure that Guatemala is capable of accepting asylum seekers, particularly in light of anticipated litigation.

Immigrant advocates say the rule would put migrants’ safety at risk

The Tahirih Justice Center, which already pledged on Monday to challenge the rule, is one of many immigrant advocacy groups arguing that none of the Northern Triangle countries are able to guarantee “full and fair” immigration proceedings, and that to send asylum seekers back to those countries would violate bedrock human rights principles.

“The rule flatly violates federal law and makes a mockery of our national obligation not to return asylum seekers to violence and persecution,” Richard Calderone, litigation counsel at the Tahirih Justice Center, said in a statement. “And if fully implemented, it will effectively end asylum and related protections in the United States for everyone except unaccompanied children.”

According to the most recently available data from the United Nations, Guatemala had the ninth highest homicide rate worldwide, about 26 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants. The State Department has issued travel warnings for US citizens in all four countries.

The Northern Triangle countries also produce high numbers of people seeking asylum. In 2017, the most recent year for which asylum is available, the US granted asylum to 3,471 migrants from El Salvador, 2,954 from Guatemala, and 2,048 from Honduras.

Douglas Stephens, a former asylum officer who has spoken out against other Trump administration immigration policies, told reporters on Monday that the agreements are one of many Trump administration policies “designed to destroy” the US asylum program and to “target and discriminate against a particular class of would-be asylum seekers.”

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Deputy Assistant Secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs George P. Kent (left) and top US diplomat in Ukraine William B. Taylor Jr. are sworn in to testify before the House Intelligence Committee on November 13, 2019. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Lt. Col Alexander Vindman, Jennifer Williams, Kurt Volker, and Tim Morrison will all testify Tuesday.

The House kicks off another set of public impeachment hearings this week. And with at least nine witnesses set to testify, it’s set to be a busy and likely dramatic one.

Four people will appear on Tuesday alone: Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a National Security Council official who actually listened in on President Donald Trump’s July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; Jennifer Williams, a member of Vice President Mike Pence’s team who also heard Trump’s call; and Kurt Volker, the former special envoy to Ukraine; and Tim Morrison, the former top Ukraine official on the National Security Council who also heard the July 25 conversation.

House Democrats have been looking into whether President Donald Trump purposefully withheld US military aid to Ukraine and a presidential meeting in order to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to open investigations into Trump’s political rivals — namely, Joe Biden.

The cast of characters has grown immensely throughout their inquiry, and now includes three ambassadors, multiple White House, State Department, and Pentagon staffers, Cabinet members, Ukrainian officials — and even the US and Ukrainian presidents.

But wait, who are all these people? As last week’s hearing showed, tons of names are bandied about as lawmakers try to learn the full story of Trump’s Ukraine policy — or try to protect him from being impeached.

So we’ve put together a list of the main players you need to know in this drama, including all the US officials testifying in the coming days and other figures who are likely to be mentioned or whose testimony has — or may still — shape the narrative around impeachment.

We didn’t include Trump because, you know, we figured you had that covered.

The witnesses testifying this week

Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman

Vindman is an Army officer who currently serves as the director for European affairs on the National Security Council, working first under Fiona Hill and then under Tim Morrison as their point person on defense-related issues involving Russia and Ukraine.

Vindman listened in to the July 25 call and offered damning testimony to House lawmakers last month in which he described the president making a clear quid pro quo “demand” of Zelensky: a White House meeting in return for investigations into the Bidens.

Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

Vindman also testified that the White House’s readout of that call, which Trump has repeatedly characterized as “perfect,” omits some words and phrases that were said during call. Vindman said he tried to correct it but those changes were never made.

He will testify in an open hearing Tuesday morning at 9 am Eastern.

Jennifer Williams

Williams is a special adviser to Vice President Mike Pence for Russian and European affairs who worked in the State Department. She listened to the July 25 call between Trump and Zelensky, and reportedly told lawmakers in her testimony last week that the call was not a normal diplomatic call.

Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

Lawmakers presumably asked Williams what, if anything, Pence might have known about Trump’s policy toward Ukraine. According to the whistleblower complaint, Trump insisted Pence cancel his plans to attend Zelensky’s inauguration in May. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry went instead.

She will testify, alongside Vindman, on Tuesday morning at 9 am Eastern.

Kurt Volker

Volker was the US special representative to Ukraine negotiations, tasked with working with America’s European allies as well as the Russians to negotiate an end to the Russian war in Ukraine.

A career foreign service officer, Volker took on the Ukraine job on a part-time, voluntary basis but eventually got caught up in the White House’s shadow foreign policy toward Ukraine spearheaded by Giuliani. Volker stepped down in September amid the brewing impeachment scandal.

Melina Mara/The Washington Post via Getty Images

The first witness to testify in the closed-door impeachment inquiry, Volker told House lawmakers in October that he’d tried to advance US interests while simultaneously working to dilute some of Giuliani’s influence. Yet text messages show that Volker was a willing participant — along with Sondland, Perry, and Giuliani — in the not-so-official efforts to pressure Ukraine to pursue investigations.

He will testify in an open hearing on Tuesday afternoon, starting at 2:30 pm Eastern.

Tim Morrison

Morrison joined the National Security Council when Bolton arrived at the White House and was briefly the top Ukraine official on the National Security Council, having taken over for Fiona Hill in July 2019. In his October testimony to the House Intelligence Committee, Morrison essentially confirmed the quid pro quo: that Trump wanted to withhold military aid to pressure Ukraine to investigate his political opponents.

Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

Morrison did tell the committee he didn’t think Trump did anything illegal on the July 25 call with Zelensky, but he also said that at the time he feared if the details of the call were made public it could be politically explosive and weaken bipartisan support for Ukraine. Morrison resigned from his post at the NSC in October right before his scheduled deposition.

Morrison will testify alongside Volker on Tuesday afternoon at 2:30 pm Eastern.

Gordon Sondland

Sondland is a wealthy real-estate developer who donated to Trump’s inauguration; his reward was the plum posting of US ambassador to the European Union. Sondland was deeply involved in the shadow campaign to pressure Ukraine to investigate Trump’s political rivals.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

In a now infamous text exchange from September 2019, William Taylor, the top diplomat in Ukraine, texted Sondland to ask whether US military aid to Ukraine and a White House meeting between Trump and Zelensky were being conditioned on Ukraine launching investigations into Trump’s political rivals. Sondland cryptically replied, “Call me.”

About a week later, Taylor again texted Sondland, writing, “As I said on the phone, I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign.” Sondland responded by denying that this was the case — and urging Taylor not to text about the matter anymore.

Sondland initially testified that there was no quid pro quo involving withheld military aid to Ukraine, but he later revised his testimony to say that even though he hadn’t recalled it earlier, yes, Ukrainian aid was in fact made contingent on investigations.

He will testify in an open hearing on Wednesday morning at 9:30 am Eastern.

Laura Cooper

She’s the Defense Department’s deputy assistant secretary for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia and thus the top Pentagon official working on Ukraine. In closed-door testimony last month, she told investigators that the White House had directed the freeze on aid to Ukraine and that Kyiv was concerned by the stalled support.

Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

She will testify in an open hearing on Wednesday afternoon at about 2:30 pm Eastern.

David Hale

Hale is the State Department’s undersecretary of state for political affairs. He’s the highest-ranking career diplomat in the foreign service. Hale reportedly told the impeachment inquiry behind closed doors that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other senior officials didn’t want to protect ousted US ambassador to the Ukraine Yovanovitch because it could hurt the chances of military aid flowing to Ukraine.

He will testify in a public hearing alongside Cooper on Wednesday at 2:30 pm Eastern.

Fiona Hill

From 2017 to July 2019, Hill was a senior director on the National Security Council responsible for coordinating US policy on Europe, including the European Union, NATO, Russia, Turkey, and Ukraine.

Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images

Hill resigned from her position in the White House by the time the July 25 Trump-Zelensky call occurred, but in her testimony she gave a firsthand account of a tense White House meeting that took place on July 10, in the days leading up to that phone call — a meeting that’s now key to the impeachment inquiry.

At that gathering, several senior US officials — including Hill, Bolton, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, and Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland — met with top aides to Ukrainian President Zelensky to discuss, among other things, a possible Trump-Zelensky meeting, which the Ukrainians had been pushing hard for but which Bolton and Hill were reluctant to agree to at that stage.

Hill sat in on that meeting, and she testified that during the sit-down, Sondland “blurted out” that there was already an agreement in place: Ukraine’s president would get a meeting with Trump if he agreed to launch certain “investigations in the energy sector” — which she said later became clear was code for Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company where Hunter Biden served as a board member.

Bolton, Hill said, reacted badly to Sondland’s announcement — abruptly ending the meeting and later telling her, in rather colorful terms, to report it to the NSC’s lawyer, John Eisenberg. “[Bolton] told me, and this is a direct quote,” Hill said, “‘You go and tell Eisenberg that I am not part of whatever drug deal Sondland and [acting White House Chief of Staff Mick] Mulvaney are cooking up on this.’”

She will testify in a public hearing on Thursday, beginning at 9:30 am Eastern.

David Holmes

Holmes is a counselor for political affairs at the US embassy in Kyiv, Ukraine. He overheard US ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland’s call with Trump about “investigations” alongside Suriya Jayanti.

He is expected to testify Thursday, alongside Hill.

The witnesses who already testified

Marie Yovanovitch

Marie “Masha” Yovanovitch was the US ambassador to Ukraine between August 2016 and May of this year. A widely respected career diplomat and the highest-ranked female ambassador at the State Department, Yovanovitch was the target of Giuliani-led attacks falsely accusing her of, among other things, working to thwart President Trump’s Ukraine policy and being close to the previous Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko. That smear campaign ultimately led to her unceremonious dismissal months before her time was up.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

As Vox’s Andrew Prokop explains, “Because Yovanovitch was ousted back in April, she can’t shed much light on the key allegations against Trump: that he pressured Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to investigate Joe Biden and his son in exchange for a White House meeting and withheld US military aid. All that unfolded after she left Kyiv.”

During her hearing last Friday, she withstood a real-time attack from Trump and made her case for how the president and his allies forced her out of her job as ambassador to Ukraine. What’s more, she said the administration’s actions may have increased corruption in Ukraine — not curbed it. As she departed the dramatic session, Yovanovitch received a rare standing ovation from onlookers.

William Taylor

William “Bill” Taylor is the current US chargé d’affaires for Ukraine — basically the acting ambassador at the US embassy in Kyiv. He took over for Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch in May after she was pushed out by top Trump officials who falsely believed she was disloyal to the president. Taylor also served as the US ambassador to Ukraine from 2006 to 2009.

In his closed-door deposition with congressional investigators last month, Taylor said his “clear understanding” of the White House’s position was that US military aid and other assistance wouldn’t go to Ukraine unless Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky agreed to investigate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. In other words, he believed there was a clearly proposed quid pro quo.

Saul Loeb/ AFP via Getty Images

Taylor’s concerns about the White House’s Ukraine policy first came to light in text messages between him and two US diplomats in which Taylor expressed his worry that pushing the Ukrainians to open such an investigation would inappropriately involve that country in domestic US politics. The envoy, who in his testimony was very open about wanting the US to strongly support Ukraine, said he was worried that the aid-for-investigations ploy would hurt American-Ukrainian relations.

He reiterated all those points during Wednesday’s opening. He also dropped a bombshell, adding that he’d learned new information last week from a staff member about a previously unknown phone call involving Trump.

Taylor did not name the staff member but described that person’s account of going to a restaurant with Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland on July 26. The staffer witnessed Sondland call Trump and heard Trump ask Sondland, over the phone, about “investigations.” Sondland said the Ukrainians were ready to move forward with them.

It was later revealed that the staffer’s name is David Holmes, and will take part in a closed-door deposition on Friday — the same day as Yovanovitch’s hearing. It’s also been reported that a second US embassy official overheard Sondland’s call with the president.

George Kent

George Kent is the current deputy assistant secretary in the State Department’s European and Eurasian affairs bureau. In that senior role, he oversees the Trump administration’s policy toward Ukraine, as well as Moldova, Belarus, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. Based in Washington, his job is to communicate with the US embassies in those countries and ensure that the administration’s policies are being properly carried out.

Perhaps more importantly, though, Kent also served as the senior anti-corruption coordinator in the State Department’s European bureau from 2014-15 — which means he has particularly good insight into how the US government normally goes about addressing issues of corruption in countries like Ukraine.

Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images

(Remember: Trump and his allies have argued that his demands of the Ukrainian president to investigate Biden and his decision to withhold US military aid from the country stemmed from his concerns over corruption in the country and had nothing to do with his own personal political interests.)

During his closed-door deposition, Kent explained to investigators why the White House’s “corruption” defense is bogus. “Politically related prosecutions are not the way of promoting the rule of law. They undermine the rule of law,” he said. He also detailed Rudy Giuliani’s “campaign of lies” against US ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, which ultimately resulted in her early recall from Kyiv.

Kent made these same points alongside William Taylor, the top US diplomat in Ukraine, during Wednesday’s first public impeachment hearing.

The rest of the impeachment cast of characters

US officials

John Bolton: Trump’s national security adviser from April 2018 to September 2019, he reportedly said he was concerned by what he described as the “drug deal” the administration was “cooking up” toward Ukraine.

Yuri Oreshkin/TASS via Getty Images

However, it’s not clear how hard he tried to stop it. Bolton’s lawyers have said he is open to testifying publicly despite White House orders not to cooperate, but he is awaiting a court decision before agreeing to do so.

Catherine Croft: A State Department Ukraine expert who worked for former special envoy for Ukraine Kurt Volker. She told congressional investigators about calls she received pushing for Yovanovitch’s dismissal as ambassador.

Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

John Eisenberg: The National Security Council’s top lawyer to whom multiple administration officials reported their concerns about the White House’s Ukraine policy. In their testimonies, staffers said he chose to put the transcript of the problematic July 25 Trump-Zelensky call into an ultra-secret server. He has also repeatedly concluded no one involved in the quid pro quo scheme violated the law, despite noting how unorthodox it all was.

Rudy Giuliani: The former mayor of New York City is a central figure in the impeachment scandal. In his capacity as President Trump’s personal lawyer, Giuliani spearheaded the campaign to convince the Ukrainian government to open an investigation into Joe Biden and his son. He was also instrumental in pushing the false allegations against Marie Yovanovitch that ultimately ended her stint as the US ambassador to Ukraine well before her assignment was up.

Alex Wong/Getty Images

Suriya Jayanti: Jayanti is an economics officer at the US embassy in Kyiv, Ukraine. She overheard US ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland’s call with Trump about “investigations” alongside David Holmes.

Charles Kupperman: Kupperman was Bolton’s No. 2 at the National Security Council. Kupperman was subpoenaed by House Democrats to testify, but he asked the courts to weigh in first as he had also received orders from the White House not to testify.

Kupperman, as deputy NSA, likely had an insider’s view on what was going on in the White House with respect to Ukraine. But House Democrats dropped the subpoena last week, making it unlikely Kupperman will testify anytime soon.

Michael McKinley: McKinley resigned from the State Department on September 30, where he’d previously served as a top aide to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. McKinley explicitly said he stepped down over Pompeo’s failure to support or defend State Department personnel amid the impeachment inquiry. McKinley told House lawmakers that he wanted to put out a statement of support of Ambassador Yovanovitch but that that request was denied.

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Mick Mulvaney: He is the acting White House chief of staff. Trump told him to tell the Office of Management and Budget to put a hold on aid to Ukraine. When confronted about it by reporters in October, he said this kind of thing happens “all the time” and told critics to “get over it.” (He later unsuccessfully walked back his statements.) Based on current testimony, it seems that Mulvaney was intimately familiar with the scheme to pressure Ukraine.

Rick Perry: The current secretary of the Department of Energy, Perry led the US delegation to Ukraine for Zelensky’s inauguration in May. Along with US ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland and special Ukraine representative Kurt Volker, Perry was pretty bullish on Zelensky and urged Trump to work with him. His full role in the scandal isn’t clear — Perry hasn’t testified — but Trump has blamed Perry for getting him to set up the July 25 call with Zelensky.

Perry announced he would be resigning from his post as energy secretary in October but as of now he is still in the job.

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Mike Pompeo: Pompeo is the secretary of state, though his role in l’affaire Ukraine is still a bit murky. Pompeo listened in on the July 25 call between Zelensky and Trump. Based on testimony so far, Pompeo allowed Giuliani’s shadow diplomacy with Ukraine to happen under his watch at State. Several former officials who’ve testified have also expressed their disappointment over Pompeo’s failure to publicly defend career diplomats like Yovanovitch, who became collateral in the Ukraine scheme.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Phillip Reeker: The acting assistant secretary in charge of European and Eurasian affairs at the State Department, Reeker testified to House lawmakers that he tried to defend Ambassador Yovanovitch against attacks from Trump’s political allies, specifically Giuliani. Reeker said he wanted the State Department to issue a statement of support for Yovanovitch, which ultimately didn’t happen.

Mark Sandy: The deputy associate director for national security programs at the Office of Management and Budget, Sandy told House investigators he received no explanation for why the White House froze the military aid to Ukraine. He found the decision to be highly irregular, informed by his many years working these issues at the OMB.

Ukrainian officials

Oleksandr Danylyuk: Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s former national security adviser — so essentially John Bolton’s counterpart in Ukraine through September. He took part in the July 10 White House meeting in which US Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland said investigations into the Bidens were important to President Trump.

Just 10 days later, Danylyuk relayed his concerns about Ukraine being used as a pawn in Trump’s reelection campaign to US Chargé d’Affaires for Ukraine Bill Taylor and US special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker.

Per Taylor, Danylyuk remained in close contact with US officials. In early September, Danylyuk mentioned to National Security Council director for European affairs Tim Morrison that he was concerned about dwindling US support for Ukraine.

Yuri Lutsenko: Ukraine’s now-former prosecutor general who helped plant the seeds for the conspiracy theories about Ukraine and about Ambassador Yovanovitch that fueled Giuliani’s actions.

This spring, Lutsenko (who was still the prosecutor general at the time) gave interviews to the publication The Hill in which he announced he was opening investigations into Ukraine’s meddling into the 2016 elections (this is a debunked conspiracy theory that alleges Ukraine worked with Democrats to frame Russia for election interference) and into Burisma, the company tied to Hunter Biden.

Danil Shamkin/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Lutsenko has since retracted many of his allegations and said there’s no reason to investigate the Bidens.

Igor Fruman: a Ukrainian associate of Rudy Giuliani. Fruman was arrested, along with Lev Parnas, in October on charges related to campaign finance violations tied to illegal donations to US political campaigns, including a pro-Trump super PAC. Parnas and Fruman also allegedly lobbied to get Yovanovitch removed from her post in Ukraine.

Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Lev Parnas: another Ukrainian associate of Giuliani’s. Parnas was arrested, along with Igor Fruman, in October on charges related to a campaign finance violations over illegal donations to US political campaigns, including a pro-Trump super PAC. Parnas and Fruman also reportedly began working with Giuliani in his campaign to get Ukraine to investigate the Bidens and to get Yovanovitch removed from her post.

Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images

Parnas is now saying through a lawyer that in May he traveled to Ukraine to tell the new administration that Vice President Mike Pence wouldn’t attend Zelensky’s inauguration unless the prosecutor investigated the Bidens. He said he did so at Giuliani’s instruction — something Giuliani has denied. There’s some doubt about how legitimate this story actually is as Fruman has also denied it.

Petro Poroshenko: the Ukrainian president who was ousted in 2019 after the election of Zelensky. The New York Times reported that, as Poroshenko faced grim reelection prospects, he became more receptive to pursuing the investigations that the Trump administration wanted: one into Burisma and the other into aspects of Ukraine’s role in the 2016 elections.

Xander Heinl/Photothek via Getty Images

Viktor Shokin: Ukraine’s former top prosecutor who was fired in March 2016. Trump’s allies have falsely claimed that Vice President Joe Biden tried to get Shokin fired because he was investigating the Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma where Biden’s son Hunter served on the board. There’s a video of Biden discussing his efforts to push Shokin out, which Trump claims is proof of a conspiracy.

Sergii Kharchenko/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images

But Trump is wrong. When in power, Shokin was seen as an obstacle to cracking down on corruption in Ukraine, and the investigation into Burisma had actually languished during Shokin’s tenure. What’s more, Biden’s push to get Shokin fired wasn’t Biden’s idea — it was Obama administration policy that originated at the State Department. Other Western governments and international organizations also embraced the view that Shokin had impeded efforts to crack down on graft in Ukraine and should be fired.

Andriy Yermak: Yermak is a top adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who features heavily in text messages released by the House in the impeachment probe between US State Department officials.

In July, Volker put Yermak in touch with Giuliani, and Yermak later met with Giuliani in Madrid. Yermak lobbied for a meeting between Zelensky and Trump. According to House testimony from Volker, Giuliani insisted that the Ukrainians commit to investigations and Zelensky announce publicly probes into Burisma and the 2016 elections before any such meeting could be set.

Volodymyr Zelensky: Zelensky was overwhelmingly elected president of Ukraine in April 2019. A former comedian, Zelensky had no political experience, though he literally played a president on TV. The newcomer rode a populist, anti-corruption message into office and in July won a majority in Ukraine’s parliament, known as the Rada, clearing the way for his agenda.

STR/NurPhoto via Getty Images

That parliamentary victory preceded the now-infamous July 25 phone call with Trump where the president asked Zelensky to “do us a favor though” and investigate the Bidens. Zelensky, an untested president dealing with a war with Russia in eastern Ukraine, needed US military assistance.

The central question of the impeachment investigation now is whether Trump, knowing this, withheld security aid to force Zelensky to pursue investigations into his political rivals.

Zelensky, for his part, has made it clear that he wants to stay out of the US political drama. Meeting with Trump on the sidelines of the United Nations in September, he said that Ukraine did not want to interfere in the US elections. “I think good phone call,” Zelensky told reporters of the July 25 conversation. “It was normal. We spoke about many things, and I — so I think and you read it that nobody pushed me.”

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Dana Rodriguez for Vox

It’s the one activity where money becomes more magical and less weighty.

The one time in my life, aside from sleeping, when I’m not obsessing about money is when I’m playing bingo. I know that sounds ironic, but bingo is my mental escape, offering a few hours where the numbers in front of me all start with a letter, not a dollar sign.

I’ve been in debt my entire adult life, first with student loans from undergrad and the law school I never graduated from, then from living above my means — not hard to do on a $40,000 New York City salary.

In my 20s and 30s, I ignored my debt, thinking it would somehow eventually resolve itself (how, I’m not sure, but I assumed more money would simply materialize the older I got). When, at 40, I realized that wasn’t quite how real life worked, I dedicated myself to earning as much as I could as a freelancer, with a mix of book royalties, articles, and a part-time copywriting gig.

The downside of self-employment is I never feel like I can truly be “off.” There’s always a potential story at my fingertips, and thereby a way to chip away at my looming debt, which hovers at a little over $50,000.

My local bingo hall is my happy place, somewhere I can go any night of the week and know I’ll leave with a smile on my face no matter what the outcome. It’s the one activity that lets me escape, well, me, where money becomes more magical and less weighty.

I live within walking distance of a bingo hall that offers games every evening, plus an additional 10:30 Tuesday night game, and Friday morning and Sunday afternoon games. Over the last four years, I’ve attended almost all of them, and win or lose, each was money well spent.

Entry costs $5, for the bare minimum number of two boards for 12 rounds, but I never play the minimum. You can buy extras for a dollar or two, depending on the value of the round; most offer $100 or $200 jackpots, with some rounds for larger amounts ranging from $1,000 to over $4,000, depending on how much has been bet. The first night I attended I spent around $30 and won $200, thus turning me into an instant convert. Now, I usually spend around $50 each time I go.

Lately, that’s every few months, but after the 2016 election I played bingo several times a week to help me forget about the news. I was a drag queen bingo regular in the East Village in the ’90s, but there we were competing for Queer as Folk DVD box sets and giant glasses filled with margaritas. This is serious, adult bingo, the kind where you’ll get shushed for talking too loudly.

The bingo hall is a place where I can forget about myself for two hours. For that small slice of time, I’m not a failed adult riddled with debt. I’m simply a middle-aged white lady with a dabber in her hand. All those money worries and existential angsty thoughts that rush to the surface whenever I have a free moment — Will be able to retire someday? Will I ever be a mom? What if [insert horrible catastrophe befalling anyone in my family]? — I can push to the back burner and focus solely on getting five stamps in a row, or a pyramid or four corners, or whatever variation of the game we’re playing at that particular moment.

I’d be lying if I said the prospect of winning doesn’t motivate me to settle in alongside women 30 and 40 years my senior, who come armed with special bingo bags that hold a rainbow array of dabbers and tape to fasten their boards together. Money, of course, is the main reason any of us lurk at the bingo hall. Another reason I stopped going to casinos is that the only games I like, slot machines, have the lowest odds. After reading that, I couldn’t quite bring myself to revel in their blinking lights and beckoning noises.

With bingo, I’ve never stopped to look up the odds (please don’t tell me if they’re bad). Instead, I let myself sink into a fantasy world where I fully believe that I just might walk away with a stack of cash. All that’s required of me is to stamp red or green or purple blobs of ink onto a piece of pre-printed paper. I love the sense of excitement that washes over me at the start of each new round — all those blanks squares, all those possible chances.

When my boyfriend and I moved within 10 minutes of Atlantic City, I worried that the lure of the casinos would be impossible to resist. Yet one evening in a smoky local casino cured any romanticism I might have had. I don’t know how to play casino games like poker or craps, and I don’t care to. I don’t want to think too much when I’m hoping to catch a financial windfall, or for it to feel like work, but I do want my mind to be occupied.

Bingo fills that purpose perfectly. There’s no free time to stare dazedly at Twitter. I can’t slack off or I’ll miss a number being called. The avid players know to look up at the TV screens to see which number will be called next before it’s actually spoken. Bingo makes me feel like I’m an active participant who, with a combination of luck and alertness, has a chance of winning. Bingo is full of colorful markers, breathless anticipation, and quick reflexes, surrounded by people who are a little more relaxed than the average casino-goer. Regular players give advice to newcomers, call out happy birthday to each other, and root for their friends as much as themselves. What I’ve learned is that I don’t actually love gambling; I love bingo.

I allow myself to be fully immersed in the drama. I double and triple check my cards, mentally noting which ones are close to winning and which ones are duds. I rub the orange hair of the troll doll I bought on my first visit. I silently chant “I-18” or “G-57” until the combination echoes in my mind. There’s a ripple of energy that races around the room when someone is about to hit bingo, knowledge that is transmitted either through a small gasp passed as if playing an almost-silent game of telephone or a collective Spidey sense shared by the players.

The few times my good-luck tactics have actually “worked” and I’ve looked up at the screen to see my number about to be called, I’ve felt euphoric. It’s what I imagine winning a game show — my ultimate bucket list item — would be like. I don’t care whether it’s luck or chance or fate. In that moment, I’m not, for once, thinking about the money. My entire being is focused simply on hearing that magic letter and number spoken into the microphone by the person sitting behind that spinning wheel, at which point I can shoot my hand in the air and call out as loud as I can, “BINGO!” There are no other moments in my life where I get to literally yell out a victory.

That possibility is truly why I play bingo. For $50, I get to spend an afternoon or evening utterly caught up in the dramatic highs and lows of being three away, then two, then one. I know going in that I have just as much of a chance as anyone else in the room.

While the result may be just as predetermined and out of my control as playing the lottery, bingo feels more active, like if I pay close enough attention, I just might win. History has shown that I truly might; I’ve won four times, out of approximately 40 visits, totaling $1,350 (with one momentous Super Bowl payout of $1,000). I’ve spent around $2,000 by my estimation, so my total losses are $750.

Given those numbers, you might assume I’m just sinking myself deeper into debt, and technically, you’d be right. But I’m purchasing much more than that potential chance to become a champion. I’m buying myself a temporary shortcut to mental health, a reprieve from that constant inner refrain that loops from you’ll never be good enough to why even bother trying. Unlike casinos, I never sense that the people around me are gambling with their rent money in a last-ditch effort to get rich. We’re all playing bingo, with an emphasis on play. With bingo, I don’t have to be smart or ambitious. I’m not being measured by my net worth, or anything else.

In lottery player parlance, I’m a dreamer, someone who sees their gambling as the “chance to fantasize about winning money.” A bingo victory feels likely enough that it makes sense to try, while knowing that what I could potentially win during any given round, while exciting, wouldn’t change my life. At best, I’d pay down a small fraction of my debt. Competing for a welcome but not mind-boggling amount of money, though, feels more sane and satisfying than wondering if I’ll win the next Mega Millions.

Plus, bingo is more communal, and more fun; in that room, I’m a dreamer surrounded by dreamers. I know that someone in the same room as me will be walking away the big winner. I can say congratulations, and see the look on their face when they win — and know it might be me next time.

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Rachel Kramer Bussel writes about sex, dating, books, culture, and herself. She is the editor of over 60 anthologies, including the Cleis Press Best Women’s Erotica of the Year series.

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