And if all else fails — well, sometimes you’ll write up the alligator requisition orders and steal them off his desk.

The two biggest disasters in Trump’s presidency have both been cases where these guardrails collapsed, and the president actually got his way in full. He actually fired James Comey, setting in motion the probe whose workings dominated his first term, and his Homeland Security apparatus actually separated thousands of migrant children from their families, creating the biggest moral scandal of his presidency.

But in other cases he has been protected by the “don’t-give-him-the-alligator” operations all around him. Indeed, the ultimate fizzle of the Mueller report was possible because that report ended up documenting a president whose staff let him rant about obstructing justice, but then — in Mueller’s own words — mostly “declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests.”

With the Ukraine scandal, though, this protection has broken down again. (Not least because in Rudy Giuliani, Trump found an adviser even more enthusiastic about alligators than his boss.) The quest to get Ukraine’s government to reopen an investigation that would touch the Biden family wasn’t just a wish that Trump expressed; it was a policy objective that, however reluctantly and haphazardly, the U.S. government seems to have pursued. Trump’s now-publicized conversation with the Ukrainian president was itself an act of foreign policy, not just a spitballing conversation, and, whatever its intentions, so was the delay of military aid. We can’t see the full body of the alligator, but you can see it moving in the water; it’s right there.

Now clearly people around Trump still believed that they weren’t going all the way to Alligatortown with Rudy, and maybe when we see the full shape of things it will be clear that the president’s men did actually prevent the most explicitly Biden-focused quid pro quo from taking shape. In which case there will be defenses of Trump that say, in effect: Look, he wanted an alligator, and we let one thrash around in the water for a while, but we always kept it on a leash.

I expect that will be the defense offered, eventually, by pained Republican senators voting to acquit — that this was bad behavior but happily the president’s diplomats kept things from reaching the level of an impeachable offense.

The only difficulty will be that Trumpland will probably spend the next few months making a different argument: Actually, alligators are great.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram, join the Facebook political discussion group, Voting While Female.