Thread by @JewhadiTM

The Mueller Fantasy Comes Crashing Down nyti.ms/2JTjkgD

In the hours and days after Mr. Mueller gave his opening statement before the House Judiciary Committee, it became clear how tenaciously many liberals and progressives are clinging to fantasy —

— not just that Trump will eventually find himself impeached and removed, but also that they can advance their values by means of legal machination rather than political vision. And at a moment of intense polarization in American politics, this fantasy is especially shortsighted.

In their minds, Mr. Trump’s treasonous malfeasance — his collusion with nefarious Russian intelligence operatives and obstruction of Mr. Mueller’s investigation — is long since proven.

But for some reason, it is not unanimously denounced, either by the mainstream of both parties or by the American people. Why, these liberals wonder, has everyone else not yet risen up in horror? Surely they will soon.

Mueller’s “reticence,” it was argued in Salon, was actually an “eloquent” case for impeachment. Why did no one hear it? As one writer for Slate magazine put it, the task now for those with “lonely but certain knowledge” of Trump’s criminality is to try, again, to get the word out

Those channeling their honorable outrage into a narrow strategy to wait for Mr. Mueller’s truth have been in denial for a long time.

Before the special counsel’s report was released this spring, the likely content of Mr. Mueller’s findings was inflated, not least to the certainty that Mr. Trump was a Russian asset.

Instead of focusing on why he won and ensuring an alternative outcome next time, many Trump critics spent years comforting themselves with assurances that the slowly turning wheels of justice would arrive at the White House.

It didn’t happen.

Within hours of the release of Mr. Mueller’s report, a new strategy was born: to insist that it was as bad for the president as his enemies had always hoped.

The report was an “impeachment referral” without saying so, and Mr. Mueller — far from erring or flinching — had done precisely what he needed to do to incite congressional action.

Interpreters elevated the text to almost scriptural status, requiring proper interpretation and vulgarization for the masses: The report actually had proved Mr. Trump’s criminality, they said.

If only people would read it, or listen to the dramatic readings of it, or the podcasts about it, they would see for themselves.

Some were convinced that this week’s testimony was already leading to “a groundswell of support for impeachment,” as the executive editor of the website Lawfare put it on Twitter.

Others said that we simply need to try again to explain to harried Americans, who don’t have time for seven hours of unriveting television, that something fatal to Mr. Trump’s presidency had now in fact happened. But no groundswell is rising.

Even @RepAdamSchiff, long the political standard-bearer of impeachment, has predicted the dream is now dead.

In spite of the report’s legalistic haze, and its author’s soporific bearing, for many it is a definitive verdict on a man and a moment. But the report was neither definitive nor a verdict.

None of this, however, excuses the deepest fantasy around the Mueller report, which is the belief that it could save the trouble of crafting a winning majority.

Does the “resistance” really believe it can win the next election by depriving American voters who are angry at elites of the protest candidate they elected?

(Yes)

Gratitude toward Mueller ought to be that his poor showing as a witness will eventually force the president’s enemies to realize that they have to beat him on their own.

But they know they can’t.