WASHINGTON — In their final appeals in President Trump’s impeachment trial, House Democrats argued on Monday that he had corrupted the presidency and would continue to put American interests at risk if the Senate failed to remove him from office. Trump’s defenders, denouncing the case against him, said he had done nothing wrong and should be judged by voters.

Making their closing arguments, the House impeachment managers and the president’s lawyers invoked history and the 2020 campaign as Democrats and Republicans prepared to take the fight over Trump’s fate to the broader public arena. Neither side expected to change the outcome of the final vote on Wednesday, when the Senate is all but certain to acquit the president, largely along party lines.

The Democratic managers, led by Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, said Trump had tried to rig the 2020 election in his favor — by withholding military aid from Ukraine in an effort to pressure the country to investigate his political rivals — and had put a blot on the presidency that would stain those who failed to stand up to him. Calling the president “a man without character or ethical compass,’’ Schiff insisted it was time for members of Trump’s party to choose between normalizing corruption or removing it. “Truth matters to you. Right matters to you,’’ Schiff said, making a case aimed at Republicans. “You are decent. He is not who you are.’’

Casting the managers’ case as shoddily constructed, the president’s defense team issued a scathing indictment of the Democrats’ argument, contending that removing Trump would subvert the will of the electorate and fundamentally alter the functioning of the separation of powers. Their final word sounded as much like a campaign pitch as a legal defense.

“This is an effort to overturn the results of one election and to try to interfere in the coming election that begins today in Iowa,’’ said Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel. “The only appropriate result here is to acquit the president and to leave it to the voters to choose their president.’’

In an awkward confluence of events, Trump will have an unimpeded platform to make his own final case Tuesday, when he delivers his State of the Union address from the floor of the very House that impeached him in December.

The abbreviated closing arguments constituted the substantive end of Trump’s impeachment trial, the third such proceeding in US history. In a mark of just how entrenched both sides were in their positions, senators skipped a period of deliberation and instead made their way to Senate floor to announce their positions before Wednesday’s final vote on the House’s abuse of power and obstruction of Congress charges. In 1999, the Senate spent three days weighing President Bill Clinton’s fate during his impeachment proceeding.

One moderate Democrat, Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, broached the idea on Monday of censuring Trump, a largely symbolic gesture that he said could attract bipartisan support. “His behavior cannot go unchecked by the Senate,’’ Manchin said, “and censure would allow a bipartisan statement condemning his unacceptable behavior in the strongest terms.’’

But given that most Republicans are reluctant to criticize Trump and Democrats are almost uniformly in agreement he should be removed — there was no serious discussion of that option.

Despite the president’s lawyers’ frequent references to the Iowa caucuses, few senators needed a reminder. Just after the arguments ended, three senators sitting in judgment of Trump who are running for the Democratic presidential nomination — Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota — raced to catch planes to the Midwest for rallies. A fourth, Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado, traveled to New Hampshire, which will hold the 2020 race’s first primary next week.

So far, the senators who have stated their decisions on acquittal or conviction have lined up along party lines.

“Simply asserting — at least 63 times — that their evidence was quote unquote overwhelming doesn’t make the House of Representatives’ allegations proven or an impeachable offense,’’ Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa said as he announced his acquittal vote.

But several moderate Republicans and Democrats, whose votes could swing against their parties, had yet to declare their intentions. It would take a two-thirds vote, or 67 senators, to convict and remove Trump, an outcome that appeared far out of reach. Still, the president is eager to be acquitted by a bipartisan vote and to avoid the spectacle of having even one Republican vote to convict him.

Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, another potential swing vote, said she would vote to acquit Trump, while taking jabs at both parties for engaging in a partisan brawl and calling the president’s conduct “shameful and wrong.’’

“His personal interests do not take precedent over those of this great nation,’’ she said. But, she added, “the response to the president’s behavior is not to disenfranchise nearly 63 million Americans and remove him from the ballot.’’

Manchin said he was undecided. Senator Doug Jones, Democrat of Alabama, said he remains undecided, too.

Monday’s closing remarks made evident just how far apart the two sides remained after two weeks of heated arguments before the Senate. They disagree not only on how to interpret the facts of the case, but on what constitutes an impeachable offense. Lawyers for the president advanced a theory rejected by most scholars that neither abuse of power nor obstruction of Congress meets the definition of high crimes and misdemeanors.

House managers insisted they had compiled a mountain of evidence capped by new disclosures by John R. Bolton, the former national security adviser, that Trump had acted corruptly and with his own interest in mind when he conditioned nearly $400 million of military aid to Ukraine and a meeting at the White House on investigations into his rivals.

Schiff portrayed it as part of an insidious pattern of conduct — dating to Trump’s embrace of Russian election interference on his behalf in 2016 — that continues to put the country at risk.

“The short, plain, sad, incontestable answer is no, you can’t, you can’t trust this president to do the right thing,’’ Schiff said. “Not for one minute, not for one election, not for the sake of our country. You just can’t. He will not change, and you know it.’’

Trump’s lawyers condemned the impeachment case as a hastily thrown together partisan enterprise, noting that the only bipartisan vote in the House was in opposition to impeachment.

“This is exactly and precisely what the founders feared,’’ said Jay Sekulow, one of Trump’s personal lawyers. “This was the first totally partisan presidential impeachment in our nation’s history, and it should be our last.’’