Representative Al Green, Democrat of Texas, spoke to reporters on Wednesday after his measure to impeach President Trump was tabled.

WASHINGTON — The House on Wednesday killed an attempt to impeach President Trump for statements that the chamber condemned this week as racist, turning aside an accusation that he had brought “ridicule, disgrace and disrepute” to his office.

The move split Democrats, underscoring the divisions within the party over whether they should use their majority to charge Mr. Trump and try to remove him from office, with 95 signaling their support for at least considering the question further, and 137 moving to stop the current effort in its tracks.

By the end of the rally, Mr. Trump went even further, accusing them of seeking the “destruction of our country.”

The president brushed off the vote as a victory, and hours later, at a rally in Greenville, N.C. , he showed no signs of easing his attacks or toning down the vicious language that led to the impeachment attempt. He charged that the “dangerous, militant hard left” among the Democrats were “hate-filled extremists who are constantly trying to tear our country down.”

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“They don’t love our country,” he told the roaring crowd. “I think, in some cases, they hate our country. You know what? If they don’t love it, tell them to leave it.”

Mr. Trump specifically went after the four freshman congresswomen — all women of color — whom he urged this week “to go back” to their country of origin. Of the four, only Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, a refugee from Somalia, was born overseas. At the mention of her name, the crowd chanted: “Send her back! Send her back!”

The 332-to-95 vote to table the impeachment article drafted by Representative Al Green, Democrat of Texas, constituted the first action by the House since Democrats took control in January on a measure to impeach Mr. Trump, a significant move that Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and other party leaders have toiled to avoid. By agreeing to table the article, Ms. Pelosi and the Democrats put off — at least for now — a prolonged and divisive debate over whether Mr. Trump’s conduct warrants his expulsion.

But it was hardly the last word on the topic from Democrats torn about how to deal with the president, between progressives who want to challenge him more aggressively and moderates desperate to quash talk of impeachment and stick to a poll-tested agenda that includes improving health coverage and raising wages for working people.

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Ms. Pelosi has been caught in the middle as she tries to maintain some semblance of control over the party’s agenda while Mr. Trump increasingly dictates the terms of the debate. Those dynamics have already dominated the House’s business this week. For two days, Democrats feuded with the president over his posts on Twitter about four freshman Democratic congresswomen of color.

“You have to give him credit: He’s a great distractor,” Ms. Pelosi, Democrat of California, said of Mr. Trump on Wednesday. She waved off questions about whether the Democrats’ policy priorities were being eclipsed by the president, saying, “We’re not having him set our agenda; we’re setting our own agenda.”

But in recent days, thanks to Mr. Trump’s penchant for stirring up the hottest of political controversies and simmering divisions within their own ranks, House Democrats have not seemed to be able to get out of their own way. This week has been a case in point.

Mr. Trump’s tweets prompted a rush by Democratic leaders to press a resolution condemning him. The vote on the measure took place on Tuesday, and the floor debate devolved into an extraordinarily polarizing spectacle as Republicans and Democrats argued about whether it was appropriate for Ms. Pelosi to have branded the president’s tweets “racist.”

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Then Mr. Green’s decision to force action on his impeachment resolution stretched the narrative into Wednesday, overshadowing marquee Democratic issues, including a vote this week to raise the minimum wage to $15 and one to repeal a tax on high-cost employer-sponsored health plans.

“It’s time for us to deal with his bigotry,” Mr. Green said on Wednesday. “This president has demonstrated that he’s willing to yell ‘fire’ in a crowded theater, and we have seen what can happen to people when bigotry is allowed to have a free rein. We all ought to go on record. We all ought to let the world know where we stand when we have a bigot in the White House.”

A separate vote on Wednesday evening to hold in contempt William P. Barr, the attorney general, and Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary, for their refusal to comply with an investigation into the addition of a citizenship question to the census — a move the administration has since abandoned — added to the portrait of a House floor dominated by Mr. Trump and what Democrats consider his misdeeds.

“I wonder, when I watch people campaign and they talk about what they want to achieve here, how many said they wanted to have a week of contempt, of impeach and resolution all after one entity, the president of the United States?” said Representative Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California and the minority leader. “I didn’t have anybody on either side of the aisle ever ask me that question.”

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Privately, House Democratic leaders coached lawmakers to stay focused on policy achievements that they could tout when they return home for a six-week summer recess beginning in 10 days. In a closed-door meeting in the basement of the Capitol, the chiefs of the party’s messaging arm urged lawmakers to use events in their home districts during the recess to spotlight the legislation they have passed to address health care costs, wages and corruption.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi was asked if she would table a vote on Representative Al Green’s impeachment resolution, which has divided Democrats in the House. Credit... Image by Erin Schaff/The New York Times

But just outside the room, reporters swarmed Mr. Green, pressing him for details about his impeachment resolution.

At one point, Representative Debbie Dingell of Michigan, one of the party’s messaging leaders, popped out of the meeting, stopped before a bank of television cameras and pleaded to talk about anything but impeachment.

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“You know what I think? I wish that all of you would ask me about prescription drugs,” Mrs. Dingell said, before ultimately giving up.

Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, the No. 3 House Democrat, conceded on Wednesday that the party was having a hard time focusing voters’ attention on the minimum wage or any other policy they were pushing.

“The American people need to be informed about what it is their legislators are doing,” Mr. Clyburn lamented during an interview on CNN, “and not be so preoccupied with a lawless president who seems not to care much about the law.”

The trouble is, House Democrats have been unable to shift the spotlight at crucial moments, particularly given the pent-up desire among some of their members to meet Mr. Trump’s over-the-top behavior with dramatic ripostes of their own. That was the case with his tweets against the four congresswomen, which prompted some Democrats to call for his censure or impeachment.

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Knowing how problematic such a vote would be for centrist lawmakers in Republican-leaning districts, Ms. Pelosi opted for a mere condemnation of the president’s rhetoric, which she said on Wednesday had been deliberately meant to be as “benign” as possible.

“Part of the feral genius of Trump is that even when he has not fully thought it through, by behaving outrageously, he demands a response,” said David Axelrod, a Democratic strategist who was a senior White House adviser to President Barack Obama. “Pelosi tried to thread a needle by choosing the least disruptive response that would give the broadest number of people the opportunity to express themselves.”

Mr. Axelrod said the difficulty for Democrats is in striking the right balance between trumpeting their achievements while presenting a vivid alternative to Mr. Trump’s penchant for norm-shattering behavior.

“You need a little jujitsu to turn that against him and make people focus on the sheer opportunism of it and the bankruptcy of it — and the cost to the country of just being locked in it day after day,” he said.

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Mr. Green’s resolution on impeachment made no mention of Robert S. Mueller III’s report or other instances of possible abuses of power by the president that are being studied by the House Judiciary Committee as possible grounds for impeachment.

Instead, it contained a single article that referred to the vote on Tuesday to condemn Mr. Trump’s tweets as racist, and concluded: “Donald John Trump has, by his statements, brought the high office of the president of the United States in contempt, ridicule, disgrace, and disrepute, has sown seeds of discord among the people of the United States, has demonstrated that he is unfit to be president, and has betrayed his trust as president of the United States to the manifest injury of the people of the United States, and has committed a high misdemeanor in office.”

Ms. Pelosi said that she had no quarrel with Mr. Green, but that the House was already taking sufficient steps to hold Mr. Trump accountable for his conduct.

“We have six committees that are working on following the facts in terms of any abuse of power, obstruction of justice and the rest that the president may have engaged in,” she said. “That is the serious path that we are on.”

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Mr. McCarthy, who moved to kill the resolution on impeachment, later told a reporter he had done so “because I think it’s stupid.”

Wednesday’s vote did not necessarily reflect the depth of enthusiasm or opposition for impeachment among Democrats. Some who voted to kill the measure said they had done so not because they were against impeachment, while others who voted to keep it alive said they did not favor impeaching Mr. Trump. Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, the Judiciary Committee chairman, said he had voted to kill the measure because it should have been referred to his panel, which has jurisdiction over the matter.

“I very much doubt that today will be the last action we must consider to hold President Trump accountable,” he said in a statement.

One Democrat, Representative Peter A. DeFazio of Oregon, voted “present.”

Speaking with reporters on Wednesday morning, Mr. Green acknowledged differences with Democratic leaders, but framed his decision to force the impeachment vote as strictly a matter of conscience.

Mr. Green, who first drafted articles of impeachment after Mr. Trump’s comments about the clash between white supremacists and protesters in Charlottesville, Va., has twice before forced similar votes. But in both cases, Republicans controlled the chamber and voted overwhelmingly to table his resolutions.

Lola Fadulu contributed reporting from Washington, and Michael Crowley from Greenville, N.C.

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