Sometime down the road when, the Good Lord willing, the Hindenburg disaster that is the Trump presidency is in the past and the nation has been cured somewhat of the national disease that brought the large con man into office in the first place, historians may debate what was the most laughable line uttered by this president and swallowed whole by his acolytes. One early favorite is “No Collusion!,” the mantra repeated to ridicule the allegations that his presidential campaign had actively sought a foreign country’s assistance to dig up dirt on his opponent in the 2016 election and help boost him into the White House.

That Trump could claim he had not sought Russian assistance to win the presidency despite the evidence of dozens of contacts between his team and Russian operatives precisely for that purpose is, of course, testament to the gullibility of his base, a gullibility one-part pathetic, one-part terrifying. When special counsel Bob Mueller, ever-by-the-book, made the narrow finding that this evidence did not actually support an indictment under an existing criminal statute, the president boasted that he had been “totally vindicated.” Predictably, his supporters bought this. Equally predictably, they chose to disregard the voluminous evidence that their man had personally tried to obstruct the Mueller investigation for one exquisitely simple, easily grasped and entirely corrupt reason: to keep investigators from learning the facts about the Trump team’s efforts to get Russian help.

Trump’s “No Collusion!” line took something of a hit last week with the emergence of conclusive evidence that he had used his power to attempt to extort a different foreign country to help him win re-election. Once again, the president’s conduct was simple, easily grasped and entirely corrupt, featuring all of the subtlety of Mafia boss John Gotti: Knowing that the Ukrainians desperately need American aid, Trump asked the Ukrainian president to do him a little “favor.” The favor, Trump explained, was to help “find,” or fabricate, a story that then-Vice President Joe Biden had somehow done something nefarious in communicating the Obama administration’s position that the Ukrainians needed to reform their political system. The pitch: It would be a very good thing if the Ukrainians could give Trump a hand in defeating Biden, his most feared political opponent in 2020, by coming up with some dirt on him. To that end, Trump told the hapless Ukrainian leader, again and again, he wanted him to confer with his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and our country’s attorney general, Bill Barr, so that they could explain what Trump wanted and needed.

The only thing more breathtaking than the president’s abuse of power for personal gain was the indulgence afforded it by those from whom one might have hoped for better. It was merely a “favor,” protest Trump’s defenders, even though Trump’s request for the Ukrainians’ help in smearing Biden to help Trump stay in office was a “favor” in the style of a favor conveyed by Don Corleone. The case against the president is mere “hearsay,” claim others, even though it is decidedly nothing of the sort: What Trump did is found in the White House’s own “rough transcript” of Trump’s telephone call with the Ukrainian leader, a call which our president characterized with his signature credibility as “perfect.”

“Today is not a good day for our country,” observed U.S. Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy III grimly last Thursday morning, minutes after Congress released the whistleblower’s report on Trump’s conduct and the White House cover up of it, and is Kennedy ever right. So is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. “If this activity, this pattern of behavior were to prevail, then it’s over for the Republic,” Pelosi said on Saturday. And that’s about the size of it. Whether those who have coddled this president and aided and abetted his behavior will at long last place the Republic over their party, however, remains very much to be seen.

Jeff Robbins is a Boston lawyer and former U.S. delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Commission.