For so long, Democrats thought that the Mueller investigation would bring down President Donald Trump. The truth could be the opposite: without the Mueller investigation, President Trump is sunk.
For two years, all that FAKE NEWS, as he so often called the allegations of collusion with Russia on Twitter, was the BEST NEWS Trump could have hoped for. The whole story was such obvious elite media madness that it induced mass sympathy towards him among the saner public. Trump knew that. Hence all the tweeting.
For two years, Trump could make out that he would have already Made America Great Again were it not for the establishment collusion WITCH HUNT, and most people would say he had a point.
Take away Mueller, and the heavy impeachment talk, and support for Trump starts to vanish. Look at the polls since Mueller delivered his damp collusion squib: Trump’s approval ratings have just hit record lows.
You can read these figures in different ways. Most the anti-Trump media will take it as a proof that voters are disgusted by revelations of the Mueller report, or appalled by Attorney General William Barr’s supposed ‘cover up’ of the truth. That is more hot air, however. It may be true that many Americans are suspicious of Barr’s redactions and feel they should be allowed to read the full story. Yet many more are tired of the Russia story, and want some other political criterion on which to judge their president – something other than the convoluted question of whether he is or isn’t a Russian asset.
That suggests another, more coherent explanation for Trump’s slump in the polls. He is not well-loved, never has been, and even his supporters are starting to turn on him. He has disappointed his base, we know, mostly with his failure to build any wall. The economy continues to thrive under his leadership, but Americans aren’t feeling much more enthused about their futures.
Since the midterms, the Democrats have accepted that attacking the administration on healthcare is more effective than whining about Putin and 2016. It took them long enough. Nancy Pelosi, a compromiser in the 1990s mould, now urges caution on impeachment talk while offering rhetorical succor to her more aggressively anti-Trump colleagues.
The point is, since the Mueller inquiry started fizzling out, the Democrats have thrived and Trump appears to be at best stalling.
Put aside, then, all the Republican noise about the Russiagate hoax being the greatest scandal in the history of the American politics. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t. What all the president’s boosters know, in their hearts, is that the whole Mueller charade was the best thing that could have happened to the Trump presidency: the ultimate Trumpist talking point. Now that the media hoopla has gone quiet, people are thinking about what Donald Trump is really like as a president. The initial results are not promising for him.
