The crisis Mueller is sowing

Do you remember when the United States was about to have her constitutional order upended? If you printed out all the concern-trolling articles from the fall of 2016 about whether Donald Trump would "accept" the results of the presidential election and laid them end to end, they would stretch from China to Peru. As far as I recall, no one actually predicted that opioid-addicted out-of-work steelworkers in Carhartt jackets would roam the streets of Washington looting and burning and eventually installing an Alex Jones puppet government under the nominal leadership of the host of Celebrity Apprentice. The point, assuming there was one, was that the "credibility" of our election system would be undermined if one of the candidates and most of his supporters refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the next commander-in-chief.

I made light of most of these concerns at the time. The subsequent refusal of everyone from Clinton to The Washington Post to the president's own Department of Justice to come to terms with the fact that Trump narrowly won by campaigning in crucial states his opponent didn't bother to visit has proven me wrong. Mea maxima culpa. Half the country seems to believe that Donald Trump is not the duly elected president of the United States.

If people have come to this conclusion, the rest of us have Robert Mueller and his special counsel investigation to thank. After nearly two years of hunting he has ensnared much small game but no large mammals. He has never produced any evidence that Trump colluded with either the Russian government or individuals "tied" or "linked" to Moscow.

At this point the most obvious fair-minded explanation of the Russia investigation is that it exists to paralyze the Trump administration. It certainly monopolizes the president's attention. When he is abroad he broods over the latest media talking points from his suite. When he is in Washington, he fumes in front of the television and tweets his favorite tidbits from Fox News. The special counsel has taken his attention away from diplomacy and the other ordinary business of the presidency. Mueller has failed to deliver the goods not simply because there are no goods to deliver but because delivering them is not the point. The point is to hurt Trump.

https://theweek.com/articles/810202/crisis-mueller-sowing