Ambassador Gordon Sondlin: “President Zelensky loves your ass.”
Trump: “He’s going to do the investigation, then?”
Thus, according to the New York Times and several networks, went a weird exchange near the beginning of the June 26 phone call placed, via utterly unsecured cellphone, by the Ambassador from the terrace of a restaurant in Kiev. The conversation was overheard by Foreign Service officer Mike Holmes, and is to be probed publicly in impeachment hearings next week. The quote comes from a preliminary written deposition and was reported on CNN by Manu Raju, who obtained a copy.
But something very weird is happening here. Really? Would Sondlin use such a crudity with a president he was anxious to please, in the very same breath as the careful formality of “President Zelensky”? It’s possible, of course; he may have been nervous, he is no professional diplomat, and he doesn’t seem naturally tactful. He may have been trying to ingratiate himself by mimicking Trump’s own habitual coarseness. Still, he would have to know he risked giving offense. If your ass looks like Trump’s, you don’t enjoy having it mentioned by an eager underling you hardly know.
When I first heard the remark quoted on TV, my hearing aids were out, and what I made of it was something quite different: “President Zelensky loves your ask.” That was the readout my ears and brains gave me, through several iterations, and I still more or less hear it that way.
What could my version mean, you say? In various contexts, “ask” as a noun is a very common synonym for “request.” Like all slang, it can be annoying but catches certain nuances better than its more standard alternative. In business, politics, and bureaucracy, speakers often have to engage in fairly elaborate pleasantries and a lot of general discussion. But “the ask” in any presentation is the bottom line, the cut-to-the-chase part, the thing you are actually hoping to get people to do. “Great remarks, Ronald, but what exactly is your ask?” “If you’re with me so far, here is my ask: everyone in this room get out and register five voters by Labor Day.” Union organizers talk like this all the time, and I have attended enough meetings and rallies to find the strange usage unsurprising by now.
In speech processing, apperception is perception. What goes into consciousness, after the incredibly rushed and complicated business of plucking phonemes out of a long continuous string and assembling them into words, is heavily conditioned by what you are poised to hear in the first place. So my old ears told me that Sondlin was telling Trump that his “ask” — to open a phony investigation of Joe Biden — had been enthusiastically received by Zelensky.
What a difference a phoneme can make! Heard my way, notice, the remark is actually far more incriminating than the canonical version. Trump's response, now much less a non sequitur, clearly shows that, the day before,making the famous “read the transcript” call, he knew just what he was asking, knew that Zelensky knew, and was demanding a quick response. It further implies that he had charged Sondlin to follow up, and that Sondlin responded by speaking to Zelensky or other high Ukrainian officials, in conversations that have not yet come to the attention of investigators. Read my way, the conversation looks like a vivid glimpse into an explicit conspiracy and gives a powerful rationale for new subpoenas.
What a pity we don’t have the tape, so we can know for sure. Maybe if we ask the Russians nicely enough, and throw in another well-equipped American military base or two, they will let us listen to the version their scanners surely picked up.
