“I think it’s a horrible thing to be using the tool of impeachment, which is supposed to be used in an emergency,” Trump grumbled in the midst of a meeting with President Mario Abdo Benítez of Paraguay. “It’s a scam. It’s something that shouldn’t be allowed. And it’s a very bad thing for our country.”

On the eve of the House vote, he sent hundreds of tweets raging against Pelosi, Representative Adam Schiff and the Democratic Party as a whole.

“READ THE TRANSCRIPTS!” Trump said on Twitter. “The Impeachment Hoax is the greatest con job in the history of American politics! The Fake News Media, and their partner, the Democrat Party, are working overtime to make life for the United Republican Party, and all it stands for, as difficult as possible!”

And on Tuesday, the president sent a rambling six-page letter to Pelosi condemning impeachment as an “unprecedented and unconstitutional abuse of power by Democrat Lawmakers.” He went on: “By proceeding with your invalid impeachment, you are violating your oaths of office, you are breaking your allegiance to the Constitution, and you are declaring open war on American Democracy.” Attacking the process as an “election-nullification scheme,” Trump insists that it’s unconstitutional for the House to exercise its constitutional prerogative.

A president who wants to be impeached — a president who thinks he benefits from impeachment — does not behave this way. If Trump is unhinged, it’s because he sees that impeachment hurts, that it harms him in the eyes of the public and undermines his case for re-election. Acquittal won’t change that.

This isn’t a statement about the polls, which show a divided public. An average of 47.3 percent of Americans support impeachment and removal, versus 46.2 percent who don’t. Compare this with his job approval numbers — 43.3 percent who approve versus 51.9 percent who disapprove — and there’s a clear group of voters who disapprove of the president but don’t want to remove him from office before the election.

This is a statement about the way impeachment promises to loom over the next year of American politics. Just because Trump will almost certainly be acquitted doesn’t mean he is unaffected. We can already see how his reactions — his anger, his rage, his furious denunciations — are counterproductive. They undermine his case for himself, bolstering the Democratic charge that he’s fundamentally unfit for the office. A slower impeachment would have made this dynamic stronger, with Trump responding to new revelations in ever more damaging ways, but that’s not on the table.