With that, Trump’s defenses have failed on every side. Though the president was reportedly adamant that the exchange not be called a quid pro quo, it doesn’t matter what it was labeled, since it apparently was, in fact, a quid pro quo. Nor does the excuse that Trump was simply trying to use American leverage to fight corruption stand up. The president was seeking to aid his own personal reelection prospects using American statecraft as leverage—a clear abuse of power. (It’s also still possible that the administration broke the law by trying to hold up the funds.) Nor can the president claim ignorance of the scheme, since multiple witnesses have attested to his personal involvement.

“The president used the machinery of government to advance his private interests instead of his own administration’s public policy,” Daniel Fried, a former State Department official in Republican and Democratic administrations, wrote in an email. “Taylor’s statement outlines in devastating detail that there was indeed a presidential-mandated ‘quid pro quo,’ that the substance of the U.S.-Ukrainian relationship was to be made conditional on the Ukrainians acting on behalf of the president’s partisan interests.”

With this information in hand, Democrats have little choice but to vote to impeach. They just have to decide, as my colleague Elaine Godfrey reports, when and on what specific issues.

Any impeachment of a president is an epochal event. Yet this realization is especially surprising because of how quickly it has come. As the drip of evidence has turned into a steady stream over the past two weeks, it’s easy to lose sight of how much the ground has shifted.

Less than one month ago, on September 24, Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that the House was launching an “official impeachment inquiry.” At the time, that seemed like a potentially risky move. What led Pelosi to act was that a group of moderate Democratic representatives who had been reluctant to impeach announced that they supported an impeachment inquiry—not necessarily articles of impeachment, or a vote to impeach, but a simple inquiry.

A probe made sense, since the public, and Congress, knew very little about the matter in question. There was a whistle-blower complaint about the president’s behavior, and the White House had been refusing to release it, but the substance of the complaint was still mostly unknown. The White House had not yet released the transcript of a call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, had been relatively open about his muckraking in Ukraine, but the extent of his hijacking of U.S. foreign policy was unknown. More than half the country opposed impeachment (51.2 percent on average, per FiveThirtyEight), and less than 39 percent of the country backed it.