As well as the arrival of some record-breaking arctic temperatures, America is bracing for another crucial and crazy political week, with the bizarre and often unsettling soap opera that is the presidency of Donald J Trump poised to dominate the nation’s TV sets as live televised impeachment hearings begin from the House of Representatives.

The production kicks off its run on Wednesday and, in common with many other episodes of this particular mini-series, we really don’t know how it will end, but we know it will be historic. As Helen Coster writes for Reuters: “The public inquiry into the Ukraine scandal will be the first impeachment hearings of the social, two-screen era, when viewers scroll platforms like Twitter or Facebook while simultaneously watching TV.”

Broadcasters are expecting huge audiences.

ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS will all be setting time aside in their daytime schedules to cover the hearings – and what they don’t carry live will be available online – while cable networks CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and C-SPAN will all broadcast the events live in what’s known as “gavel-to-gavel” coverage. The opening hearing of the House intelligence committee is scheduled for 10am ET on Wednesday, with the second on Friday at 11am.

House Democrats know that with a programming opportunity like this, they’ll only get one shot at making a first, blockbuster impression with any members of the public who might still be unconvinced about the necessity for impeachment; so the first public witnesses will be three significant diplomatic figures whose on-air testimony, based on their previously gathered depositions, Democrats hope will solidify the case against the President and what has been described as his “highly irregular” conduct of foreign policy.

First up on Wednesday will be William Taylor, the top US diplomat in Ukraine, and George Kent, deputy assistant secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs. On Friday, the committee will hear from Marie Yovanovitch, the former US ambassador to Ukraine. An impressive cast list.

Republicans, meanwhile, have been circling the wagons around the President, who continues to describe proceedings against him – just as he did the Mueller Report – as a “witch hunt” a “hoax” and, confusingly, “the single greatest lie foistered on the American people.” Also oddly, the slogan Trump chose for fighting back against the claims against him is “Read The Transcript” which seems strange, since arguably that’s what has brought us to this point.

Yet Susan Glasser, writing in the New Yorker, suggests why, because of the still full-throated defense from his supporters, Trump may be “already winning” on the issue. “Trump has framed the impeachment case, as with all the other challenges to his controversial actions over the past few years, as a purely partisan matter of loyalty and legitimacy,” she writes.

After a series of stunts aimed at disrupting the investigative process and compromising the so-called “whistleblower” whose revelations helped drive the proceedings forward, the GOP strategy now seems to have coalesced around the idea that whatever the President may have done – whatever evidence the Democrats may produce – falls short of impeachable conduct.

 

An audience divided

Like Robert Mueller’s televised testimony to Congress in the summer, how a divided audience perceives this week’s programming might depend on how pre-disposed they are for one outcome or another. Democrats will certainly be wary of a re-run.

Fox News anchor Chris Wallace said that the impeachment hearings are “an utterly polarized, utterly partisan exercise,” arguing that “No Republicans are jumping ship and joining the Democrats. No particular Democrats are jumping ship and joining the Republicans. These two camps are locked in place and it seems that nothing that is being presented is changing either side.”

Another veteran journalist, Bill Moyers of PBS, meanwhile, showed his faith in the revelatory power of television, urging his network to follow the model set by public broadcasters in the 1973 Watergate hearings of airing the proceedings live in daytime, and then re-airing them in the evening during prime-time. More than 70 per cent of Americans watched as Congress investigated events surrounding the Watergate break-in, a path that would lead to the resignation of Richard Nixon.

These are, obviously, different times.

Moyers writes: “Once upon a time PBS offered prime time specials, debates, even teach-ins to help us sort out complex public issues or get to the heart of a clear and present danger to our fragile democracy.  The least its gatekeepers can do now is re-broadcast these upcoming impeachment hearings in primetime. Yes, it means disrupting the schedule for as long as it takes. And yes, we know they can be streamed online—but not every American has that luxury; many still rely for their information on the good, old-fashioned TV set.”

So for both sides, the stakes are high.

Historian Jon Meacham has described what is about to happen as a “test for the country” while Andrew Sullivan at NY Magazine called it “the endgame for Trump’s relentless assault on the institutions, norms, and practices of America’s liberal democracy for the past three years.” And he goes on: “It’s also a deeper reckoning. It’s about whether the legitimacy of our entire system can last much longer without this man being removed from office.”

And Sullivan warns of the real possibility of America falling victim to “regime cleavage” a term coined by political scientists – with probably one eye on their SEO results – to describe “a decline in democratic life so severe the country’s very institutions could lose legitimacy as a result of it.”

To heighten the week’s political drama still further, likely sharing a split-screen with Wednesday’s hearings will be a White House press conference following what could be a contentious meeting between Trump and the President of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Finally, given Trump’s apparent obsession with ratings – his own and everyone else’s – it was probably ironic ahead of the hearings that he was reported to have been in talks, not with another world leader, but with his old TV collaborator Mark Burnett, about possibly creating an “Apprentice”-type show based around Trump’s experience in the White House.

The President later tweeted that the report was – take a guess – “fake news,” a by-now routine pushback that, of course, kept the story circulating for yet another news cycle.