Two Wrongs and the Republican Right

How two betrayals just exposed a plot bigger than even Trump could imagine

At the turn of the 20th century, Russian author Anton Chekhov gave a now-immortalized piece of advice on writing good drama.

“If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. It’s wrong to make promises you don’t mean to keep.”

The “Chekhov’s gun” trope applies to any sort of narrative, not just fiction. If a particular detail or conversation or course of events doesn’t contribute to the intended end of the story, it doesn’t belong. So it was hard to understand, during the House Intelligence Committee hearings on the Trump-Ukraine scandal, why Adam Schiff and the others investigating Trump spent so much time on former ambassador Marie Yovanovitch. The pieces didn’t seem to fit.

Fiona Hill, Tim Morrison, Bill Taylor, and others testified that Ambassador Yovanovitch had been a champion of anti-corruption efforts in the Eastern Bloc, earning the ire of oligarchs and corrupt interests in the Ukrainian government. The smear campaign to remove her, orchestrated by Rudy Giuliani, was obviously wrong and unfair. But her inclusion in the narrative seemed to serve only as more fodder for the far-right’s attacks. Many derided her as a “snowflake” or a…