This is it in a nutshell:

"Through the media, which they own, Ukrainian oligarchs portray their good-government foes as scam artists profiting from their supposedly idealistic crusades. Even the saints are terrible sinners, in their depiction. They hope to stall reform by inculcating broad cynicism in the public. This is precisely Trump’s strategy. Trump’s call to Zelensky was, it seems, part of an attempt to retain political power by depicting the entirety of Washington politics as a swamp. Because Trump’s corruption is his greatest electoral vulnerability, he intends to blunt that weakness by demonstrating that his leading Democratic opponent isn’t so different from himself.

But that opponent is in fact nothing like Trump’s depiction, representing as he does the now old-fashioned American commitment to democracy in Ukraine."

This is the problem we have here in the USA, MAGA morons continuing to support "can do no wrong" Trump. Their imagination runs wild with ways to rationalize his bad behavior.