The upshot was predictable. “No Collusion, No Obstruction, Complete and Total EXONERATION,” the president tweeted that afternoon. “KEEP AMERICA GREAT!”
Widespread confusion over what the special counsel had uncovered, on top of the seemingly warring conclusions reached by Mueller and Barr, prompted an outcry for the Justice Department to release the entire report. It grew deafening when sources close to the special counsel’s office told the New York Times and the Washington Post that Barr’s summary did not reflect Mueller’s product. (Unbenownst at the time, Mueller himself wrote a letter to Barr complaining that the attorney general’s summary “did not fully capture the context, nature and substance” of the investigation, as the Washington Post later reported.)
The release of the full, lightly redacted special counsel’s report, on the morning of April 18, 2019, could rightly be considered a watershed in presidential history. Drawn from hundreds of under-oath interviews and thousands of documents, digital files, and other investigatory receipts, Mueller’s 448-page report portrayed an administration built on corruption and deceit. It illuminated in jaw-dropping detail the web of lies woven by Trump and his team, the chaos and paranoia consuming the White House throughout Mueller’s investigation, and the president’s multiple efforts to impede its advance.
The probe found that while no Trump campaign officials engaged in a criminal conspiracy with Russia, they were “receptive” to offers of assistance from Moscow—and in fact expected help to arrive.
Mueller found no smoking gun to prove that collusion occurred. There was attempted collusion, as with Trump Jr.’s meeting the Kremlin-linked lawyer after promises of dirt on Clinton (and Roger Stone communicating with WikiLeaks), but not actual collusion. It was a similar story on the question of obstruction.
According to the report, when then–attorney general Jeff Sessions informed the president of the special counsel’s appointment in May 2017, Trump responded, “Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked.”
The president’s obsessive fear of Mueller’s inquiry prompted him on several occasions to try to thwart it. He pleaded with Sessions to “unrecuse” himself from the Russia probe and redirect the Justice Department’s attention toward investigating Hillary Clinton. He asked his former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, to strong-arm Sessions into denouncing the special counsel’s investigation. He instructed the White House counsel, Don McGahn, to have Mueller fired.
Had Trump’s subordinates not defied these requests, he almost surely would have been charged with obstructing justice. It was the ultimate of ironies: Surrounded by people who wielded deception as a political shield, Trump was likely spared a criminal referral by their refusal to heed his instruction.
“The president’s efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful,” Mueller wrote, “but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the president declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests.”
THE SCANDALOUS NATURE OF THE REPORT—“EVEN AS A LONGTIME, quite open critic of Donald Trump,” observed National Review’s David French, “I was surprised at the sheer scope, scale, and brazenness of the lies, falsehoods, and misdirections detailed by the Special Counsel’s Office”—put congressional Democrats in an impossible position.
Launching impeachment proceedings would be a surefire way to energize and unify the Republican Party coming off a thumping in 2018 and heading into a difficult reelection in 2020. Then again, some decisions should transcend politics, and constitutional impeachment exists for a reason: to consider the removal of a president who has engaged in conduct, criminal or otherwise, that is detrimental to the republic.
The argument was somewhat academic. President Trump was not going to be expelled from office—at least, not while Republicans controlled the U.S. Senate.
Even Mitt Romney, who issued the sharpest post-Mueller rebuke of any Senate Republican—“I am sickened at the extent and pervasiveness of dishonesty and misdirection by individuals in the highest office of the land, including the President”—said it was time for Congress to move on. Predictably, as Romney’s GOP colleagues hung him out to dry with their silence, he came under withering attack from the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Mike Huckabee, and other high-profile Trump apologists.
In this sense, Mueller’s report offered a verdict not just on the integrity of President Trump but on the soul of his Republican Party. No matter what turns up—in the congressional hearings probing Trump’s financial entanglements, in the Southern District of New York’s examination of wrongdoing outside Mueller’s purview—the GOP had committed itself to a fully binary view of politics that safeguards Trump’s survival. This was justified not by adherence to principle but by addiction to power: the power to hold office, the power to make laws and influence government, the power to appoint judges, the power to project ideology onto the culture at large, and the power to deny such powers to an opposing party.
The question Trump asked two years into his presidency, emerging from the longest shutdown in government history and awaiting the findings of Mueller’s investigation, was whether Republicans would remain “faithful” and “loyal.” It had been answered. Their allegiance to him, once fleeting and flimsy, had been hardened by fire. The GOP would belong to Donald Trump for the duration of his presidency.
But what happens when he’s gone?
IN THE SPRING OF 2017, NOT THREE MONTHS INTO HIS PRESIDENCY, Trump was hosting an intimate dinner for some veterans of the transition team when he ambushed them with a most unexpected query.
“Has any president besides Franklin Roosevelt done anything big after their first term?”
It was startling on many levels. For one thing, people around the table were surprised that Trump was demonstrating a textured grasp on the history of his office. And indeed, while some experts believe the so-called “second term curse” is overstated, there is no question that most multiterm presidents accomplish their major initiatives during their first four years.
But above all, the attendees were taken aback by the implication. Although Trump had been in office a very short time, he was showing signs of misery on the job. The press was unyieldingly critical. His staff was clumsy and ineffectual. Congress was moving like molasses. Democrats were dead-set against him. Even many of the Republicans who smiled in his face, Trump knew, were knifing him in the back.
It all made for a compelling thought experiment at the highest levels of the government, the stuff of whispered fantasy for the likes of Speaker Ryan and Reince Priebus and, later, John Kelly. If Trump achieved a series of major legislative victories in his first term, could he be convinced there was nothing to gain—and everything to lose—by seeking another?
“No, because it’s a very big job and there is a lot to do,” Trump told the New York Times in January 2019, responding to questions about such a scenario. He later added, “Here’s the bottom line: I love doing it. I don’t know if I should love doing it, but I love doing it.”
Whenever Trump does vacate the White House, the Republican Party will face a reckoning. It will have been rebranded as a protectionist, big-spending, anti-immigration entity. Its coalition will be overwhelmingly reliant on exurban and rural working-class whites and less dependent than ever on affluent, diverse suburbanites. Its character on everything from trade to international alliances to entitlement spending will be changed, if not converted entirely, from the turn-of-the-century GOP.