Opinion: Donald Trump saw it coming

A CNN Opinion column by editor Richard Galant, published May 2, 2021, argued that Donald Trump identified Joe Biden as his most dangerous political rival years before facing him at the ballot box — and that the effort to neutralize that threat ultimately produced Trump's first impeachment, according to CNN.

The column traces the argument back to 2019, when, as CNN's piece lays out, a moderate Biden already looked like the Democratic candidate best positioned to threaten Trump's re-election. That assessment, the column contends, is what drove Trump's push to have Ukraine investigate Biden and his son Hunter.

The Zelensky call at the center of the argument

Central to the column's case is Trump's July 25, 2019, phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in which Trump asked Zelensky's government to work with his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and then-Attorney General William Barr to open an investigation into the Bidens, per CNN's account. Trump defended that call at the time as "perfect." The White House memo of the call, cited in contemporaneous reporting on the underlying episode, quotes Trump telling Zelensky, "There's a lot of talk about Biden's son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that, so whatever you can do with the attorney general would be great."

From the call to impeachment

CNN's column links the call, and the administration's parallel decision to pause congressionally approved security assistance to Ukraine, directly to Trump's first impeachment — a House inquiry that produced articles of impeachment charging abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, and a proceeding that concluded with Trump's acquittal in the Senate. The column frames that sequence of events as evidence that Trump's read of the 2020 field was accurate even as his response to it became his defining legal and political liability.

The column's closing point

The column argues that despite correctly identifying Biden as his chief threat as early as 2019, Trump never found a way to defeat him: "The former president never could solve the riddle of how to defeat Biden," the column states, noting Trump instead accused Biden of being a puppet for the "radical left." The piece ran as part of a new weekly CNN Opinion newsletter format that rounds up, in the column's own description, "the strongest, smartest opinion takes of the week from CNN and other outlets," placing this particular argument about Trump's 2019 judgment inside a broader weekly digest rather than as a freestanding investigative piece.

What it signals

As an opinion piece, the column's throughline — that Trump's own actions toward Biden validated his instinct about which opponent to fear, yet still left him unable to beat Biden in November 2020 — is an interpretive argument rather than a new factual disclosure. It was published against the backdrop of Biden's early presidency, using the by-then-settled history of the first impeachment to make a point about Trump's political judgment rather than reporting new developments in that case.

US In News compiled this archived account from contemporaneous opinion coverage by CNN. It restores a story originally published on this site in May 2021; figures are as reported at the time.