The irony of President Trump’s sudden impeachment peril is that it’s the unintended result of an effort to help him: a political hit job aimed at a likely opponent (Joe Biden) and funded by a major right-wing donor (Rebekah Mercer) that Trump and his lawyer (Rudy Giuliani) impatiently hijacked, with consequences that could turn out to be disastrous for them.

To understand how Trump wound up the target of a House impeachment inquiry, it’s first necessary to understand why he was so obsessed with finding dirt on Biden that he pressured Ukraine’s president in a July 25th phone call to “do us a favor” and investigate Biden and his son, Hunter. The notion that Hunter Biden and his father could be complicit in Ukrainian corruption was first aired in a 2018 book, Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends, by conservative author Peter Schweizer. The book and its author had a purpose and a lineage.

Schweizer, an editor at Breitbart News, is the president of the Government Accountability Institute (GAI), a nonprofit group whose board chairwoman and major donor is Rebekah Mercer, a prominent Trump supporter and benefactor of right-wing causes…

By this past spring, it was clear the Biden attack was stuck in the conservative ecosystem. And here’s where Trump enters the story—and inadvertently kicks off the whole impeachment saga: Trump may be the single most devoted consumer of conservative media, absorbing hours of it each day. He was mainlining the Biden coverage as part of his daily media diet.