President Donald Trump tried to assert his dominance on the world stage before the United Nations Tuesday, while pushing back at growing calls for his own impeachment back at home.
Ahead of his remarks to world leaders in New York Tuesday morning, Trump downplayed the renewed push by Democrats for impeachment proceedings, dismissing the effort as baseless and reviving some of the same pushback he used during former special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.
“I think it’s a ridiculous witch hunt,” Trump said. “I’m leading in the polls, the only way they can stop me is impeachment.”
There has been a marked shift in Congress towards some concrete movement on impeachment by House Democrats following reports that Trump put pressure on Ukraine’s leader to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden. Nearly two-thirds of House Democrats now back some type of impeachment action.
On Monday, The Washington Post and other media outlets reported that Trump instructed his chief of staff to place a hold on $400 million in military aid for Ukraine in the days before a late July phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
The controversy back in Washington threatened up upstage Trump’s moment on the world stage at the United Nations in New York, where he tried to promote his America First foreign policy doctrine and rally allies in his pressure campaign against Iran, North Korea and China.
Trump told reporters Tuesday that his request to withhold the aid was due to his desire to see greater European contributions to Ukraine’s defense, and not linked to whether the country would investigate the Biden family, which media outlets have reported Trump brought up on a July call with Zelensky.
He suggested again that he may release the transcript of the call.
“When you see the call, the readout of the call, which I assume you’ll see at some point, you’ll understand,” Trump said Tuesday. “That call was perfect.”
The White House has sought to link the latest controversy — over whether Trump sought help from a foreign country to go after one of his chief political rivals — to the Russia election meddling investigation, which they have asserted exonerated the president, though it listed numerous instances of possible obstruction of justice.
“The media pushed the Russia lie for almost three years with no evidence, and now they are doing it all over again,” White House spokesman Hogan Gidley told NBC News in a Monday statement. “These allegations are completely false, but because the media wants this story to be true so badly, they’ll once again manufacture a frenzy and drive ignorant, fake stories to attack this President.”