There’s really only one thing missing from this large pile of paper: a precise account of Trump’s own role and that of Mulvaney. The idea that Trump was uninvolved, unaware of what his personal lawyer and government officials were carrying out—a notion currently being floated by some defenders—is risible. The text of the call memorandum with Zelensky makes his involvement obvious, as does the testimony of several of the officials as to his comments about Ukraine at various points. That said, we still don’t have a clear account of exactly how the aid got frozen; who, other than Sondland, stalled on arranging the Trump-Zelensky White House meeting; or what the president’s personal role in either of those actions might have been. This is inconvenient for congressional Democrats, for whom it would be useful to be able to provide a long list of specific things Trump himself did—as they can, for example, with respect to obstruction of justice in the Mueller report.

That is, however, the only thing in the transcripts that can remotely pass for good news for Trump. By and large, they tell an unremitting story of the hijacking of a policy process on a sensitive matter for personal political purposes. They aren’t subtle. They aren’t ambiguous. And the added details tend to make the story worse, not better.

But Donald Trump, unlike Buster Keaton, will not be taken down by transcripts. He won’t do the work of reading them. And his defenders won’t either—as Senator Lindsey Graham made abundantly clear this week in announcing that he would refuse to read the documents as a matter of principle, despite aggressively advocating for their release. Perhaps more importantly, the public is not going to read them. The record released by the House is the length of War and Peace without Tolstoy’s narrative flair, or even that of Special Counsel Robert Mueller. It’s dense and complicated, and while it actually has a great deal of dramatic tension—an incredible story lies beneath it all—one has to read through the repetition, the formal questioning style, and the bickering over Republican procedural complaints to get to anything of substance.

Read more: The more we learn, the worse things look for Trump

The transcripts ultimately aren’t a threat to the president in and of themselves, but they present two distinct harbingers of threats that are coming down the pike. At the most granular level, the transcripts are the raw material out of which the House will craft some sort of narrative report that will, in turn, lie beneath its articles of impeachment. In other words, this is the record of the conduct for which the House will impeach the president. It won’t be the paper that will consume Trump, as in the Keaton clip—but the words contained in those many pages will be condensed into something like an indictment.