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Editor-in-Chief | Edward Felsenthal |
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Categories | News magazine |
Frequency | Weekly |
Total circulation (2018) | 2,348,566[1] |
First issue | March 3, 1923; 96 years ago |
Company |
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Country |
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Based in | New York City, New York, U.S. |
Language | English |
Website | time.com |
ISSN | 0040-781X |
OCLC | 1311479 |
Time is an American weekly news magazine and news website published in New York City. It was founded in 1923 and originally run by Henry Luce. A European edition (Time Europe, formerly known as Time Atlantic) is published in London and also covers the Middle East, Africa, and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition (Time Asia) is based in Hong Kong. The South Pacific edition, which covers Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands, is based in Sydney. In December 2008, Time discontinued publishing a Canadian advertiser edition.[2]
Time has the world's largest circulation for a weekly news magazine. The print edition has a readership of 26 million, 20 million of whom are based in the United States. In mid-2012, its circulation was over 3 million,[1][3] which fell to 2 million by late 2017.[4]
Formerly published by Time Inc., Time is now published by TIME USA, LLC, owned by Marc Benioff since November 2018.[5]
Time magazine was created in 1923 by Briton Hadden and Henry Luce, making it the first weekly news magazine in the United States.[6] The two had previously worked together as chairman and managing editor, respectively, of the Yale Daily News. They first called the proposed magazine Facts. They wanted to emphasize brevity, so that a busy man could read it in an hour. They changed the name to Time and used the slogan 'Take Time–It's Brief'.[7] Hadden was considered carefree and liked to tease Luce. He saw Time as important, but also fun, which accounted for its heavy coverage of celebrities (including politicians), the entertainment industry, and pop culture—criticized as too light for serious news.
It set out to tell the news through people, and for many decades, the magazine's cover depicted a single person. More recently, Time has incorporated 'People of the Year' issues which grew in popularity over the years. Notable mentions of them were Barack Obama, Steve Jobs, etc. The first issue of Time was published on March 3, 1923, featuring Joseph G. Cannon, the retired Speaker of the House of Representatives, on its cover; a facsimile reprint of Issue No. 1, including all of the articles and advertisements contained in the original, was included with copies of the February 28, 1938 issue as a commemoration of the magazine's 15th anniversary.[8] The cover price was 15¢ (equivalent to $2.21 in 2018). On Hadden's death in 1929, Luce became the dominant man at Time and a major figure in the history of 20th-century media. According to Time Inc.: The Intimate History of a Publishing Enterprise 1972–2004 by Robert Elson, 'Roy Edward Larsen [..] was to play a role second only to Luce's in the development of Time Inc'. In his book, The March of Time, 1935–1951, Raymond Fielding also noted that Larsen was 'originally circulation manager and then general manager of Time, later publisher of Life, for many years president of Time Inc., and in the long history of the corporation the most influential and important figure after Luce'.[citation needed]
Around the time they were raising $100,000 from wealthy Yale alumni such as Henry P. Davison, partner of J.P. Morgan & Co., publicity man Martin Egan and J.P. Morgan & Co. banker Dwight Morrow, Henry Luce, and Briton Hadden hired Larsen in 1922 – although Larsen was a Harvard graduate and Luce and Hadden were Yale graduates. After Hadden died in 1929, Larsen purchased 550 shares of Time Inc., using money he obtained from selling RKO stock which he had inherited from his father, who was the head of the Benjamin Franklin Keith theatre chain in New England. However, after Briton Hadden's death, the largest Time, Inc. stockholder was Henry Luce, who ruled the media conglomerate in an autocratic fashion, 'at his right hand was Larsen', Time's second-largest stockholder, according to Time Inc.: The Intimate History of a Publishing Enterprise 1923–1941. In 1929, Roy Larsen was also named a Time Inc. director and vice president. J. P. Morgan retained a certain control through two directorates and a share of stocks, both over Time and Fortune. Other shareholders were Brown Brothers W. A. Harriman & Co., and the New York Trust Company (Standard Oil).[citation needed]
The Time Inc. stock owned by Luce at the time of his death was worth about $109 million, and it had been yielding him a yearly dividend of more than $2.4 million, according to Curtis Prendergast's The World of Time Inc.: The Intimate History of a Changing Enterprise 1957–1983. The Larsen family's Time stock was worth around $80 million during the 1960s, and Roy Larsen was both a Time Inc. director and the chairman of its executive committee, later serving as Time's vice chairman of the board until the middle of 1979. According to the September 10, 1979, issue of The New York Times, 'Mr. Larsen was the only employee in the company's history given an exemption from its policy of mandatory retirement at age 65.'
After Time magazine began publishing its weekly issues in March 1923, Roy Larsen was able to increase its circulation by using U.S. radio and movie theaters around the world. It often promoted both Time magazine and U.S. political and corporate interests. According to The March of Time, as early as 1924, Larsen had brought Time into the infant radio business with the broadcast of a 15-minute sustaining quiz show entitled Pop Question which survived until 1925'. Then, in 1928, Larsen 'undertook the weekly broadcast of a 10-minute programme series of brief news summaries, drawn from current issues of Time magazine [..] which was originally broadcast over 33 stations throughout the United States'.[citation needed]
Larsen next arranged for a 30-minute radio program, The March of Time, to be broadcast over CBS, beginning on March 6, 1931. Each week, the program presented a dramatisation of the week's news for its listeners, thus Time magazine itself was brought 'to the attention of millions previously unaware of its existence', according to Time Inc.: The Intimate History of a Publishing Enterprise 1923–1941, leading to an increased circulation of the magazine during the 1930s. Between 1931 and 1937, Larsen's The March of Time radio program was broadcast over CBS radio and between 1937 and 1945 it was broadcast over NBC radio – except for the 1939 to 1941 period when it was not aired. People Magazine was based on Time's People page.
In 1989, when Time, Inc. and Warner Communications merged, Time became part of Time Warner, along with Warner Bros.
In 1988, Jason McManus succeeded Henry Grunwald as editor-in-chief[9] and oversaw the transition before Norman Pearlstine succeeded him in 1995.
In 2000, Time became part of AOL Time Warner, which reverted to the name Time Warner in 2003.
In 2007, Time moved from a Monday subscription/newsstand delivery to a schedule where the magazine goes on sale Fridays, and is delivered to subscribers on Saturday. The magazine actually began in 1923 with Friday publication.
During early 2007, the year's first issue was delayed for roughly a week due to 'editorial changes,' including the layoff of 49 employees.[10]
In 2009, Time announced that they were introducing a personalized print magazine, Mine, mixing content from a range of Time Warner publications based on the reader's preferences. The new magazine met with a poor reception, with criticism that its focus was too broad to be truly personal.[11]
The magazine has an online archive with the unformatted text for every article published. The articles are indexed and were converted from scanned images using optical character recognition technology. The minor errors in the text are remnants of the conversion into digital format.
Time Inc. and Apple have come to an agreement wherein U.S. subscribers to Time will be able to read the iPad versions for free, at least until the two companies sort out a viable digital subscription model.[12][clarification needed]
In January 2013, Time Inc. announced that it would cut nearly 500 jobs – roughly 6% of its 8,000 staff worldwide.[13] Although Time magazine has maintained high sales, its ad pages have declined significantly over time.[14]
Also in January 2013, Time Inc. named Martha Nelson as the first female editor-in-chief of its magazine division.[15] In September 2013, Nancy Gibbs was named as the first female managing editor of Time magazine.[15]
In November 2017, Meredith Corporation announced its acquisition of Time, Inc., backed by Koch Equity Development.[16] In March 2018, only six weeks after the closure of the sale, Meredith announced that it would explore the sale of Time and sister magazines Fortune, Money, Sports Illustrated, since they did not align with the company's lifestyle brands.[17]
In September 2018, Meredith announced that it would re-sell Time to Marc Benioff and his wife Lynne for $190 million, which was completed on October 31, 2018. Although Benioff is the chairman and co-CEO of Salesforce.com, Time will remain separate from the company, and Benioff will not be involved in its daily operations.[18] Time USA, LLC the parent company of the magazine is owned by Marc Benioff.
During the second half of 2009, the magazine had a 34.9% decline in newsstand sales.[19] During the first half of 2010, another decline of at least one-third in Time magazine sales occurred. In the second half of 2010, Time magazine newsstand sales declined by about 12% to just over 79,000 copies per week.[citation needed]
As of 2012, it had a circulation of 3.3 million, making it the 11th-most circulated magazine in the United States, and the second-most circulated weekly behind People.[3] As of July 2017, its circulation was 3,028,013.[1] In October 2017, Time cut its circulation to two million.
Time has the world's largest circulation for a weekly news magazine. The print edition has a readership of 26 million, 20 million of whom are based in the United States. In mid-2012, its circulation was over three million,[1][3] which had lowered to two million by late 2017.[20]
Time initially possessed a distinctive writing style, making regular use of inverted sentences. This was parodied in 1936 by Wolcott Gibbs in The New Yorker: 'Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind [..] Where it all will end, knows God!'[21]
Until the mid-1970s, Time had a weekly section called 'Listings', which contained capsule summaries and/or reviews of then-current significant films, plays, musicals, television programs, and literary bestsellers similar to The New Yorker's 'Current Events' section.[22]
Time is also known for its signature red border, first introduced in 1927.[23] The border has only been changed five times since 1927:
Former president Richard Nixon has been among the most frequently-featured on the front page of Time, having appeared 55 times from the August 25, 1952 issue to the May 2, 1994 issue.[25]
In 2007, Time engineered a style overhaul of the magazine. Among other changes, the magazine reduced the red cover border to promote featured stories, enlarged column titles, reduced the number of featured stories, increased white space around articles, and accompanied opinion pieces with photographs of the writers. The changes were met with both criticism and praise.[26][27][28]
Time's most famous feature throughout its history has been the annual 'Person of the Year' (formerly 'Man of the Year') cover story, in which Time recognizes the individual or group of individuals who have had the biggest impact on news headlines over the past 12 months. The distinction is supposed to go to the person who, 'for good or ill', has most affected the course of the year; it is, therefore, not necessarily an honor or a reward. In the past, such figures as Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin have been Man of the Year.
In 2006, Person of the Year was designated as 'You', a move that was met with split reviews. Some thought the concept was creative; others wanted an actual person of the year. Editors Pepper and Timmer reflected that, if it had been a mistake, 'we're only going to make it once'.[29]
In 2017, Time named The Silence Breakers, women and men who came forward with personal stories of sexual harassment, as Person of the Year.[30]
In recent years, Time has assembled an annual list of the 100 most influential people of the year. Originally, they had made a list of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century. These issues usually have the front cover filled with pictures of people from the list and devote a substantial amount of space within the magazine to the 100 articles about each person on the list. In some cases, over 100 people have been included, as when two people have made the list together, sharing one spot.
The magazine also compiled 'All-TIME 100 best novels' and 'All-TIME 100 best movies' lists in 2005,[31][32][33] 'The 100 Best TV Shows of All-TIME' in 2007,[34] and 'All-TIME 100 Fashion Icons' in 2012.[35]
In February 2016, Time included the British and male author Evelyn Waugh on its '100 Most Read Female Writers in College Classes' list (he was 97th on the list) which created much media attention and concerns about the level of basic education among the magazine's staff.[36]Time later issued a retraction.[37] In a BBC interview with Justin Webb, Professor Valentine Cunningham of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, described the mistake as 'a piece of profound ignorance on the part of Time magazine'.[38]
During its history, on five nonconsecutive occasions, Time has released a special issue with a cover showing an X scrawled over the face of a man or a national symbol. The first Time magazine with a red X cover was released on May 7, 1945, showing a red X over Adolf Hitler's face. The second X cover was released more than three months later on August 20, 1945, with a black X (to date, the magazine's only such use of a black X) covering the flag of Japan, representing the recent surrender of Japan and which signaled the end of World War II.
Fifty-eight years later, on April 21, 2003, Time released another issue with a red X over Saddam Hussein's face, two weeks after the invasion. On June 13, 2006, Time magazine printed a red X cover issue following the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in a U.S. airstrike in Iraq. The most recent red X cover issue of Time was published on May 2, 2011, after the death of Osama bin Laden.[39]
Time for Kids is a division magazine of Time that is especially published for children and is mainly distributed in classrooms. TFK contains some national news, a 'Cartoon of the Week', and a variety of articles concerning popular culture. An annual issue concerning the environment is distributed near the end of the U.S. school term. The publication rarely exceeds ten pages front and back.
Time LightBox is a photography blog created and curated by Time's photo department that was launched in 2011.[40] In 2011, Life picked LightBox for its Photo Blog Awards.[41]
Richard Stengel was the managing editor from May 2006 to October 2013, when he joined the U.S. State Department.[42][43]Nancy Gibbs was the managing editor from September 2013 until September 2017.[43] She was succeeded by Edward Felsenthal, who had been Time's digital editor.[44]
Managing Editor | Editor From | Editor To |
---|---|---|
John S. Martin | 1929 | 1937 |
Manfred Gottfried[45] | 1937 | 1943 |
T. S. Matthews | 1943 | 1949 |
Roy Alexander | 1949 | 1960 |
Otto Fuerbringer | 1960 | 1968 |
Henry Grunwald | 1968 | 1977 |
Ray Cave | 1979 | 1985 |
Jason McManus | 1985 | 1987 |
Henry Muller | 1987 | 1993 |
James R. Gaines | 1993 | 1995 |
Walter Isaacson | 1996 | 2001 |
Jim Kelly | 2001 | 2005 |
Richard Stengel | 2006 | 2013 |
Nancy Gibbs | 2013 | 2017 |
Edward Felsenthal | 2017 | present |
In 1940, William Saroyan lists the full Time editorial department in the play, Love's Old Sweet Song.[47]
This 1940 snapshot includes:
The following is a list of other major American news magazines:
excerpt and text search
official corporate history
official corporate history
Abigail Spanberger didn’t go to Washington to impeach the President.
Over the course of her first nine months in Congress, she said so over and over. She was there to serve her constituents near Richmond, Va., who wanted safe streets and health care and good-paying jobs. As her colleagues ranted about Russia and racism, she kept saying she was focused elsewhere–until Donald Trump did something she felt she couldn’t ignore.
Spanberger, a former CIA officer, was elected as a Democrat last November to represent a House district that went for Trump by a 7-point margin in 2016. Supporting impeachment could hurt her image as a moderate more focused on getting things done than on partisan crusades, and put her re-election at risk. But on Sept. 23, she joined other centrist colleagues and, for the first time, endorsed impeachment proceedings after a whistle-blower reportedly complained that the President had pressured a foreign leader to investigate one of Trump’s top rivals in the 2020 election. “It wasn’t that my mind was changed, it’s that we were presented with new information,” Spanberger told TIME as she cut across the Capitol lawn the next day.
That information helped change House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s carefully calibrated position on impeachment. Though she leads a Democratic majority elected in part as a check on the President, Pelosi spent months tamping down impeachment talk expressly to protect members like Spanberger. But as details emerged about Trump’s conversations with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, long-wavering Democrats made the decision for her. At least 60 new Democrats in the House have announced their support for an impeachment inquiry since Sept. 23, bringing the number to over 200, or roughly 90% of the caucus. The question was no longer whether the impeachment process would begin, but how.
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And so, on Sept. 24, Pelosi finally made her move. Trump’s actions were a “betrayal of his oath of office, betrayal of our national security and betrayal of the integrity of our elections,” Pelosi said in a brief televised address from her offices in the Capitol. “Therefore, today I’m announcing the House of Representatives is moving forward with an official impeachment inquiry.”
The accusation Trump faces is grave. The President allegedly pressured Zelensky to reopen investigations into previously dismissed and widely debunked accusations involving Joe Biden, the former Vice President. Before making the call, Trump took extraordinary steps to withhold aid approved for Ukraine by majorities of both parties in Congress. These and other actions by Trump so alarmed an intelligence-community official detailed to the White House that the official filed a whistle-blower complaint. By law, the complaint would be forwarded to Congress. The Administration blocked it.
If the accusations are true, Trump’s behavior would be an abuse of power unseen since the Nixon era: using the presidency and the powers of the U.S. government to conscript foreign help in a domestic political campaign. “These allegations are stunning, both in the national-security threat they pose and the potential corruption they represent,” Spanberger and six other Democratic freshman members wrote in an op-ed in the Washington Post.
The implications go beyond the fate of a presidency to the heart of our democracy. Trump stands accused of using America’s vast wealth and the presidency’s unmatched sway to hold onto power for himself. In this era of hyperpartisan politics, the impeachment process will test the mechanisms of accountability built into our system of government by the Founders, who anticipated many things–but could not have envisioned Trump.
The President, for his part, responded to the House’s action with characteristic fury, denying wrongdoing and accusing his critics of “presidential harassment.” Trump was in New York City for the meeting of the U.N. General Assembly when the dam broke. Speaking to reporters on his way to a meeting with the President of Iraq, he said, “Listen, it’s just a continuation of the witch hunt.” In shifting statements as the Ukraine story unfolded, Trump has offered different rationales for the withheld aid but insisted there was no quid pro quo. His allies have sought to reframe the scandal as a “deep state” plot by hysterical Trump antagonists, and to deflect attention from the allegations of corruption by the Bidens, which numerous independent observers have determined to be unfounded, the Ukrainian government has denied and Biden decries as a smear.
What is about to unfold is more than political drama. Presidents have been impeached or threatened with impeachment before, but never in the heat of a re-election campaign. (Presidents Nixon and Clinton were in their second terms when they faced impeachment; Andrew Johnson, impeached but not convicted in the 1860s, was never elected to the office.) Now Pelosi and the Democrats have staked the course of history on an constitutional clash, one that threatens to put a deeply divided nation to a new test.
The President wanted a favor. “We do a lot for Ukraine,” Trump told Zelensky on July 25, according to a declassified summary. “I wouldn’t say that’s reciprocal.” So Trump requested that his Ukrainian counterpart work with Attorney General William Barr and his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani on the investigation into the origins of the Russian election probe, and help Barr look into work Biden undertook in Ukraine as Vice President.
At least a week before the call, the U.S. had frozen nearly $400 million in aid allocated to Ukraine by Congress, reportedly at Trump’s direction. The declassified summary of the call does not include an explicit threat to continue withholding the aid if Zelensky’s government did not pursue the investigation, and the Ukrainian government has denied that they were pressured in that way.
But Trump’s Democratic critics, and some worried Administration officials, view the exchange as a shakedown. “It didn’t have to be explicit,” says one senior U.S. official. Trump was reminding Zelensky, the senior official says, how much Ukraine depended on U.S. aid, military assistance and loan guarantees, and then repeatedly expressing his interest in the unproven corruption claim tied to the business connections of Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son. Whether he felt squeezed or not, Zelensky promised to meet with Giuliani as soon as the former New York mayor came to Ukraine.
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At least one person privy to the conversation found the request to be part of an alarming pattern of behavior, and blew the whistle. When a member of the intelligence community sees an urgent national-security concern, there is a protocol to follow, established by Republicans and Democrats in Congress and the Executive Branch. The whistle-blower, whose identity has not been disclosed, went through those channels, lodging a complaint with the inspector general of the intelligence community on Aug. 12. The inspector general, charged with vetting such highly sensitive matters, examined the complaint and found it to be both credible and a matter of “urgent concern.”
The complaint was then forwarded to the acting Director of National Intelligence, Joseph Maguire. Federal statutes require the DNI to forward credible whistle-blower complaints to the intelligence committees in Congress. When Maguire did not do so within seven days, the inspector general alerted the committees to its existence. After an internal battle, the White House backed down and provided the complaint on Sept. 25 as this story was going to press.
But the substance of the whistle-blower’s allegation soon began to trickle out in news reports. Trump denied that he improperly pressured Zelensky to investigate a political opponent, insisting there was no explicit quid pro quo linking the aid to the Biden investigation. But he acknowledged that he raised the issue: the conversation, Trump said on Sept. 22, centered on “the fact that we don’t want our people like Vice President Biden and his son creating to the corruption already in the Ukraine.”
Giuliani has been trying for months to push the Biden-Ukraine story in the U.S. press, to little avail. The President’s lawyer contends that Biden did something eerily similar to what Trump is now accused of: threatening to withhold American aid in order to pressure the previous Ukrainian government to fire its top prosecutor, an office similar to the U.S. Attorney General. Giuliani alleges that Biden was trying to head off the prosecutor’s investigation into a Ukrainian gas company for which his son Hunter worked as an adviser.
There’s no proof that’s the case, and plenty of evidence that it isn’t. Hunter Biden served until this year on the board of Burisma, a private energy firm that the Ukrainian government investigated for corruption. Hunter Biden was never a focus of the Burisma investigation, which was no longer active at the time of his father’s 2016 push to fire the prosecutor, a career U.S. diplomat familiar with the issue tells TIME.
Moreover, Vice President Biden’s efforts were part of a broad reform agenda by the Obama Administration and its allies aimed at a prosecutor they saw as corrupt and ineffectual. The U.S. was not alone in pressing the previous Ukrainian President to fire the prosecutor, says the diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “So did the Brits and the IMF and many others.”
Zelensky, a former comedian who won his office in April by campaigning against corruption and Russian influence, inherited the controversy and wants no part in it, his former adviser Serhiy Leshchenko tells TIME. “It’s like he stumbled into some strangers’ wedding. The groom’s family and the bride’s family are both dragging him onto the dance floor. But he doesn’t want to dance,” Leshchenko says. “Please just leave us out of it.” Asked by TIME about the July 25 call with Trump, a Zelensky aide who was on it at the time would only confirm the accuracy of the account released by the White House.
Speaking near his home in Wilmington, Del., on Sept. 24, Biden denounced Trump’s effort to push the story as a smear. “Pursuing the leader of another nation to investigate a political opponent, to help win his election, is not the conduct of an American President,” he said. “It’s an abuse of power. It undermines our national security. It violates his oath of office. And it strikes at the heart of the sworn responsibility that the President has to put the national interest before personal interest.”
The stakes go beyond the 2020 election and to the balance of power in the conduct of America’s national security. Congress, with its constitutional power of the purse, decided it was in U.S. interests to send nearly $400 million in aid to Ukraine, which was invaded by Vladimir Putin’s Russia in 2014, sparking a war that has so far killed more than 13,000 people. “There is an appearance of the President holding back congressionally appropriated and authorized aid to Ukraine without telling the Congress that the Administration wanted to use it as leverage to persuade Ukraine to open an investigation on one or more U.S. persons,” says a top U.S. intelligence adviser.
Moreover, foreign policy and constitutional experts say, whether Trump actually got anything in return misses the point. Making a request for a politically motivated investigation is dangerous on its own. “It is an invitation for other countries to meddle in U.S. elections if they want to help President Trump,” says Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. That invitation puts America’s security at risk by making it secondary to the President’s political goals, and corrupts American democracy by giving foreign regimes the opportunity to influence U.S. elections.
As for whether that would be an impeachable offense, the Constitution allows Congress to impeach and remove federal officials for bribery, treason or “high crimes and misdemeanors.” U.S. laws against bribery abroad are aimed at businesses greasing the palms of corrupt foreign officials; they’re less equipped to grapple with a President using the power of his office as his currency. Critics say that what Trump is accused of is graver than violating a mere statute. “It undermines the entire structure of our constitutional republic if the Executive Branch is allowed to do that,” says Asha Rangappa, a Yale lecturer and former FBI special agent.
It has been a long time since politics truly stopped at the water’s edge. Previous Presidents have twisted national security to suit their political purposes. The Johnson Administration distorted the Gulf of Tonkin attacks that drew the U.S. deeper into Vietnam, and George W. Bush made false claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But even those grievous episodes primarily served a Commander in Chief’s national-security agenda, not his political goals.
There has been such sustained chaos throughout Trump’s term that it can be hard to determine which outcries to worry about and which to ignore. To the President’s critics, a dispute over a weather map is a symptom of the rule of law under siege; even if they’re right, the layperson could be forgiven for becoming numb to the constant drumbeat of outrage. A special counsel spent two years meticulously documenting a presidential campaign receptive to assistance from a foreign adversary and a President who may have used his office to block the investigation. In the end, the result was a collective yawn.
But the Ukraine affair has caused something to snap, and not merely because Trump has supplied enough final straws to fill a hayloft. Unlike the Russia controversy investigated by Robert Mueller, it took place entirely while Trump was in office. It affects national security in the present, not the past, and bears on an election yet to take place. It is, compared with the Mueller probe, relatively easy to understand. Perhaps most significant, for Democratic members of Congress it appears to have been born out of Trump’s sense of impunity. Having escaped Mueller’s net and dodged congressional oversight, critics say, Trump apparently believed he could get away with anything–and immediately set out to solicit a foreign power to involve itself in his next election. He made his call to Zelensky the day after Mueller testified before Congress.
Now even many reluctant House Democrats have concluded they have no choice but to begin an impeachment inquiry. “To me,” says Dean Phillips, a moderate freshman Congressman from Minnesota who came out for impeachment on Sept. 23, Trump’s behavior “was so egregious and beyond the pale, and so cut and dried, that there was no alternative.”
The White House denounced impeachment proceedings as baseless. The Democrats'”attacks on the President and his agenda are not only partisan and pathetic, they are in dereliction of their constitutional duty,” White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said. The President’s political team predicts he will benefit from the fight. “Democrats have wanted to overturn the legitimate results of the 2016 election ever since President Trump was elected,” says Tim Murtaugh, the Trump campaign’s director of communications. “They’ve always wanted to impeach him, and they’ve just been shopping around for an excuse.”
Plenty of Democrats remain wary of the politics. “There’s definitely a feeling that people are rushing into it before they’ve gotten all the necessary information,” says a House Democrat who has not called for an impeachment inquiry. “I don’t take away from anyone else who’s arrived at the decision that they’ve arrived at. But they don’t hold an ethical high ground on this. It is a perfectly rational, perfectly ethical decision to say, ‘I’m going to wait and hear out the facts.'”
Pelosi’s announcement signaled an official imprimatur more than any material change to the congressional investigations that are already looking at the President’s financial dealings and building a public case around alleged corruption. The Constitution leaves it up to Congress to make its own way on impeachment. In the past, the House first voted to move forward with the impeachment process.
What is certain is that the President is about to be put on trial in a whole new way. The Democrats’ investigations have taken on a heightened level of seriousness, visibility and focus. If the allegations are firmly supported by evidence, articles of impeachment will be drawn up and put to a vote of the Democratic-controlled House. A majority vote sends them to the Republican-controlled Senate, where the two-thirds bar for conviction and removal has always proven prohibitively high. (In 1868, President Johnson escaped conviction by a single vote.) Trump has assumed Republicans will stand by his side to the bitter end, and that has been the case so far. Most GOP Senators who spoke to TIME said they considered the Ukraine allegations mere hearsay, or tried to change the subject to insinuations about Biden.
But impeachment proponents predict things could be different once Republicans are under pressure to take a side, with history (and swing-state voters) watching. Senator Mitt Romney of Utah has said Trump’s alleged actions would be “deeply troubling” if they took place. On Sept. 24, the Senate called for the release of the whistle-blower complaint in a unanimous, bipartisan vote.
For months, the sense in Washington has been that impeachment would be a political loser for the Democrats, but that conventional wisdom seems to be bending too. GOP strategist Brendan Buck says he now believes a corruption-focused impeachment proceeding has the potential to damage Trump politically, if Democrats “focus on this simple-to-understand transgression: the President [allegedly] sought assistance from a foreign leader to affect our election.”
The process is likely to drag on into the heat of a fiercely competitive Democratic presidential primary. Iowa and New Hampshire will cast the first votes in February. Biden’s campaign hopes the scandal will cause voters to rally around the well-liked former veep. But some advisers worry it could damage him by putting “Biden” and “corruption” in the headlines, sowing doubts among voters.
For Spanberger, the time has come to pursue the truth, whatever the politics may be. “I believe that my voters elected me because they thought that I would lead with integrity,” she tells TIME as the sun sets over the Capitol. “I think anybody, regardless of party, should want to get to the bottom of these allegations.”
With reporting by Charlotte Alter/New York; Simon Shuster/Berlin; and Alana Abramson, Brian Bennett, Tessa Berenson, Vera Bergengruen, Philip Elliott, Lissandra Villa and John Walcott/Washington