Alexander Vindman, the White House staffer who sparked Trump's 1st impeachment, tells his story

• Vindman confided in his brother after the Trump-Ukraine call
• The book, "Here, Right Matters" depicts a mercurial president uninterested in policy

Alexander Vindman was preparing to testify at President Donald Trump's first impeachment hearing – in an inquiry that arose from Vindman's report of a troubling White House phone conversation – when the National Security Council staffer faced heated pushback from a certain Trump ally.

His father.

"Support the president!" Semyon Vindman demanded during a long drive, fraught with conflict, to a family wedding in Rhode Island in September 2019. "Do whatever the president wants!"

“It was a source of tension,” the younger Vindman acknowledged dryly in an interview with USA TODAY at his home in a leafy Washington suburb. “He wanted me to kind of reconcile with President Trump. He had this image of me, you know, marching into the Oval Office, saluting sharply and saying, ‘OK, President Trump, how do we fix this?’”