I’ve always been of the opinion that the bigger picture is reducing GOP political power, and this outcome doesn’t actually change the big picture on that IMO.
Specifically, there is clearly huge room for heavy Congressional investigation, reviewing the sufficiency of the evidence, etc., and of course the many other avenues of investigation outside the narrow remit of Rosenstein’s original memo.
So, Congress needs to keep investigating, and Trump needs to face continued scrutiny over his many transgressions, abuses of power and general unfitness for office. Ultimately the voters will decide his fate, and I’m fine with that.
I would like to point out that a key purpose of the Mueller investigation was to determine how Russia meddled in the election. They did meddle, and Mueller made indictments to that effect. By far the most important concern is to protect the integrity of our election process going forward.
If Mueller has found no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, then so be it. It doesn’t make Trump a good president, it doesn’t make his other corruptions go away, etc. If the electorate decides they want to re-elect him because he was not in this respect a traitor or criminal, then that is a very low bar for the presidency and once again our deficient electorate will reap what it sows.
I’ll be curious to see how this plays out. This seems to be a “big win” for tribal Conservatives eager to blow smoke in liberal faces. All conventional media is claiming that “no collusion” was found.
Conservatives have long put paid any concerns for impropriety with their “live or die” attitude toward liberalism/Democats by framing essentially every step made by liberals as being “death”, and in that world view nothing Trump does that is immoral is a bridge too far, nor really any conservative, for the worst conservative, venal and corrupt, is infinitely preferable to a liberal, who want to put you into camps and eradicate your class, race, and heritage. Nothing is forbidden in the war against progressives, regulation and taxes.
It’s only their insistence on legality that they care about, and as long as Trump isn’t doing anything illegal and against the letter of the law, they couldn’t care less.
There’s been lots of movement from pseudo intellectual figures like Jordan Peterson that sort of terrify ‘mainstream’ progressives because they just don’t know what to do with them; they’re not obviously bad faith figures like Milo but are both Not For Them and also tend to be wretched bores who wave the same handful of facts a hundred times in every debate ad nauseum. All these movements seem parallel to Trump’s rise, and the same people cheering Peterson seemed to cheer Trump.
Will this “win” energize that side into metamorphizing into a more coherent and broad ideology than grievance politics? Will the Trumps and Petersons cause young conservatives to coalesce into a new, more potent and deliberate political force, being anti-liberal? Or will this all just collapse into fronts for grift and money making as it always does, fronts for the globalized class to forestall tax and regulatory policy?
+1. Whatever the report says (and right now we only have Barr’s interpretation of it, Barr being appointed by DJT to bury the report, whatever Barr’s intentions are), the fact is DJT has committed numerous impeachable offenses outside whatever Russian connections may or may not exist. This is aside from DJT’s criminality and incompetence, of course.
The Mueller investigation was a great success, yet because so many Democrats had pinned all of their hopes on it connecting something huge with Trump (as if that would make any difference any way) the Repubs are going to be crooning about this from now until Nov 2020. Headlines today around the world are saying “no evidence Trump colluded”, and that’s all a majority of people are going to be reading about it.
We need to instead pin our hopes on the general public electing the D candidate, whoever that may be, and probably apologize that we made it harder for her or him by putting so much attention on collusion and the Mueller investigation. In retrospect, the moment Trump decided not to fire Mueller or Rosentein we should have known it was not going to get him or his family.
