Mr. Trump himself drew this distinction in 2008, arguing that President George W. Bush should have been impeached for lying about the reasons for the Iraq war, while at the same time rejecting the Republicans’ impeachment of Mr. Clinton for lying about sex as “nonsense,” done for something “totally unimportant.”

By any reasonable measure, Mr. Trump’s own conduct in office clears the bar for impeachment set by the founders. The case against him is that he solicited foreign interference to help in his 2020 re-election campaign, that he used hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to do it, that his administration tried to hide the evidence and that he then blocked Congress from performing its constitutionally mandated role of checking the executive branch. Multiple government officials, some appointed by the president himself, have confirmed all of these facts.

There may be no better illustration of what the Constitution’s framers considered to be impeachable conduct. And that’s leaving to the side strong evidence that Mr. Trump has committed other impeachable offenses, including taking foreign money at his personal businesses, obstructing justice and violating campaign-finance laws — the latter two of which are also federal crimes.

Through it all, Mr. Trump has had the opportunity to rebut the charges. By his account, he could have extinguished both articles of impeachment by allowing top administration officials to testify under oath. If he really did nothing wrong, the testimony of these officials would exonerate him of the charge of abusing his power, and simply their appearance under oath would dissolve the charge of obstructing Congress.

And yet when given the opportunity to defend himself, the president has refused to participate, defying all of the House’s subpoenas for witnesses and documents, effectively declaring himself unaccountable.

His defense has consisted of sending all-caps tweets accusing the Democrats of perpetrating a “hoax” and trying to overturn an election. On Tuesday, Mr. Trump delivered an unhinged, error-ridden six-page letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in which he called the impeachment inquiry “an illegal, partisan attempted coup” and claimed that the Salem witch trials provided more due process. Tell that to the women and men who were hanged in Massachusetts.

The president’s letter demonstrated again his complete failure to offer a substantive defense. His refusal to admit he did the slightest thing wrong, or to offer witnesses who could affirm his innocence, left the House with no choice but to impeach him. By the sworn testimony about his actions, and by his own public statements calling on China and Ukraine to investigate the Bidens, he has shown not only that he tried to cheat to win the 2020 election, but that he is continuing to do so.