I’m not willing to credit Trump’s own Attorney General with an honest interpretation of the report, and I still think we need to see the whole thing. But it seems pretty clear that this isn’t going to be the turning of the tables that so many liberals and lefties hoped for. That’s pretty much exactly what I’ve worried about since the probe began.
I’ve hardly weighed in on the Mueller investigation at all over the past couple of years, precisely because I thought that all of the gee-whiz hypotheticals and the rampant speculation and the breathless anticipation on the part of the media and the public were incredibly premature and largely unproductive. One of my few observations on the matter came in January of last year, in this very thread, when we were discussing a Saturday Night Live sketch where Kate McKinnon played Robert Mueller:
I was never confident that Trump himself would be found to have committed an indictable or an impeachable offense. For me, this whole issue was always likely to be won and lost in the realm of politics, and even if the full report is released, and even if it shows a whole bunch of sleazy and unethical behavior on the president’s part, that’s simply not going to change the mind of the vast majority of the people who support him. We’ve seen that time and again during the campaign, and during his presidency. As long as he’s lying in ways that they find appealing, and as long as he’s sticking it to the “libtards” and the “cucks” and the “social justice warriors,” Trump’s supporters will have his back.
Unfortunately, now that so many liberals, in the media and in the nation generally, have spent months and months hyping the investigation as the potential smoking gun that would bring down the presidency, those people are going to have to live with a massive sense of deflation and recognize that defeating Trump and the Republicans will require old-fashioned grind-out-the-policy and get-out-the-vote politics.