Now Republicans are shifting to the “Ok what he did wasn’t great but that doesn’t make it impeachable” defense. Apart from the squalor of that, there’s also the inconvenient fact that it’s not true.

The argument, according to constitutional experts and historians of impeachment, is not a strong one. In fact, Trump’s conduct, according to analysts interviewed by the Guardian, hews more closely than any previous conduct by any other president to what scholars conceive as a concrete example of impeachable behavior.

What, you mean strong-arming a vulnerable ally to smear a political rival in exchange for aid? That’s impeachable? Whaddya know.

Frank O Bowman III, author of High Crimes and Misdemeanors: A History of Impeachment for the Age of Trump and a professor at the University of Missouri school of law, said that Trump’s having extorted actions with no legitimate US national purpose from a foreign country that is “literally at risk of losing its political and territorial independence” without US support was impeachable.

“It’s plainly an abuse of power, and it’s plainly impeachable,” Bowman said.

“I think these are quite clearly, precisely the type of high crimes and misdemeanors that the founders not only feared but actually discussed at the constitutional convention,” said Jeffrey A Engel, co-author of Impeachment: An American History and director of the center for presidential history at Southern Methodist University.

“The high crime is the trade – give me dirt on Joe Biden and his son, and I’ll give you in return military aid and help with your economy – I think that is certainly impeachable,” said Corey Brettschneider, author of The Oath and the Office: A Guide to the Constitution for Future Presidents and a professor of constitutional law at Brown University.

See, if he weren’t the president, he wouldn’t be able to bully another president to help him kneecap a personal political rival. Using the presidency for such a personal-interest act of bullying – yes that looks like an abuse of power to me.

In an Oval Office interview on Thursday, Trump compared his conduct favorably with the last two presidents to face impeachment proceedings, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton.

“Everybody knows I did nothing wrong,” Trump told the Washington Examiner. “Bill Clinton did things wrong; Richard Nixon did things wrong. I won’t go back to [Andrew] Johnson because that was a little before my time. But they did things wrong. I did nothing wrong.”

Everybody knows no such thing, and it’s not true.

Trump’s analysis of his own behavior does not stand up to scrutiny, scholars said.

“Obviously the degree of severity is almost immeasurably different,” said Bowman. “With respect to Clinton, yes you had a violation of law, in the sense of his having committed perjury, but he committed perjury in order to conceal a private, consensual sexual affair. Now that’s discreditable, it’s also criminal – he got disbarred as a result of doing it.

“But in terms of the interests of the nation, not even remotely comparable.

“In this case, Trump is literally holding the independence of another country hostage to his own political interests. Not only is that contemptible, and in many ways more contemptible than what Nixon did, but I think it’s also true, and we’ve heard a lot of testimony about this over the past couple of weeks, that what he was doing is endangering an American policy objective, the whole framework of containment of Russian expansionism, the bedrock of our policy in eastern Europe for the last 70 years.

“It’s far worse, in that regard, I think, than what Nixon did.”

Of course, Russia sees it as a matter of containing US-NATO expansionism, but that’s another bag of cats.