To make matters worse, before the call record of that conversation was released on Wednesday, President Trump pointed to it as exculpatory evidence. It makes you wonder what will be revealed about other calls, contacts or additional forms of impropriety that informed a whistle-blower complaint that led to leaks to reporters about the phone call. Mr. Trump’s attempt to gain a personal political favor is not simply astoundingly bad judgment, it is antithetical to our democracy. If Americans cannot trust that their elections are immune from foreign interference, there will be a legitimacy crisis in American democracy itself. Furthermore, by doing this, Mr. Trump opened himself up to blackmail. He gave the Ukrainian government a weapon to wield over him — if he didn’t do their bidding, they could have gone public with what he had done.

That’s why our founders wrote the impeachment clause to be broader than criminal activity. Many crimes are not impeachable (jaywalking, for example). Other activity isn’t necessarily criminal but is obviously a basis for impeachment (not defending the United States against a foreign attack).

For our founders, the touchstone of presidential unfitness to serve was always abuse of the public trust. They viewed the president as having a fiduciary obligation to the American people — just like trustees — and if the president violated that duty, he should be impeached. The first Congress discussed as one of the obvious bases for impeachment the possibility that a president dismissed “meritorious officers.” Or as Charles Black, the greatest scholar of impeachment, once reasoned, if the president announced a policy that he would give pardons to every police officer who killed someone in Washington, D.C., that wouldn’t be criminal but would be obviously impeachable.

Mr. Trump’s administration tried to hide the full whistle-blower complaint by attempting an end-around a federal law that requires that the full report be sent to Congress. His own Justice Department (once again) is working hard to clear him of wrongdoing. This time, the president’s appointees in that department did not even have the veneer of first allowing a special counsel investigation to proceed before trying to undermine its conclusions; they tried to stop the investigation before it even began.

The Justice Department’s involvement in this affair is striking for another reason: It is the department’s official position that Mr. Trump cannot be indicted on a charge of obstruction of justice as a sitting president. Every responsible scholar who takes the view that a president cannot be indicted says that the remedy instead is to impeach the president. But the Justice Department is trying to interfere with that impeachment process as well, going so far as to take tendentious legal positions to try to avoid the information being turned over to Congress.