Too much smoke, yet no fire. After nearly two years of frenzy surrounding investigations by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the American public is now learning there is no evidence that the Trump campaign knowingly colluded or coordinated with the Russians to beat Hillary Clinton in 2016. The full report isn’t out yet, but the Attorney General’s brief should reassure Trump’s opponents that his victory was legitimate. They can move on now.
But it won’t be easy for Democrats to get closure. Top Democrats, like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, to their credit, had been urging restraint to sections of their liberal base, which had kept calling for Trump’s impeachment. Now that the Mueller report has let Trump go almost scot free – based on the summarized findings made publicly available – those eager Democrats are now left speechless and directionless.
For several reasons, the Mueller findings read like, at least in the public domain, a vindication for Trump’s stance, and a fillip for his re-election in 2020.
One, it hands Trump allies a significant propaganda victory. Supporters would claim, as Trump himself did last Sunday, that this was a “total exoneration” of “your president”. Trump has been calling the Mueller probe a “witch hunt”, a “con job”, a “vendetta”, and several other adjectives since the probe accidentally started in May 2017. His base, which had bought into that narrative of victimization, is now going to cement further.
Two, that Mueller inquiry hasn’t indicted Trump, nor prosecuted any member of his clan, is a major let-down for Democrats, who, by and large, had raised expectations that the probe would get rid of the “Trump problem” one way or the other. This creates a credibility problem for Democrats, whose main Congressional leaders are now being blamed by Republicans for fanning conspiracies. Republicans will sell independent voters this narrative that Democrats wasted two years going after Trump for nothing.
And lastly, it will be difficult for the Democrat-held House of Representatives to return to routine oversight of the Administration agencies and unearth personal conflicts of interest. Already, an absolved-but-angry Trump is promising payback through inquiries of his own into why and how his Presidency was paralyzed and embarrassed through this inquiry. Democrats can fall in that trap and respond in kind.
To take back the Senate and the Presidency next year, the party desperately needs to campaign around “issues”, of which there are plenty. But a coherent strategy is missing, as some Democrats still insist on looking into Trump matters (campaign, business practices, and personal finances). However, it doesn’t look like Democrats can credibly litigate Trump’s past in front of the American public.
With the “cloud of conspiracy” lifted, Trump may feel energized to pursue his disruptive foreign policy. With significant political capital to expend at home, Trump may order a disorderly/hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan (bad for Pakistan); he may further disengage the US from its European and Pacific allies (bad for global peace); and in the process, he may sow the seeds of the next global rams race. Expect 20 months of more chaos before Trump heads into a re-election, confident, against a divided opposition.
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