The Mueller report is out: No further indictments have been recommended. The full contents of the report aren\u2019t yet known, but we know at a minimum that the most fanciful conspiracies about Donald Trump and Russia were without merit. Donald Trump did not knowingly collude with the Russians.<\/p>\n

That is the result we should\u2019ve hoped for. There is no situation in which American democracy is better off because our President is the Manchurian candidate. So why aren\u2019t liberals happy? Why does the Morning Joe and Pod Save America crowd continue waiting for this other shoe to drop that seems to have never been hanging in the first place? Well, it\u2019s complicated.<\/p>\n

Liberals really wanted the Russia collusion story to be true. It\u2019s not as if some element of it wasn\u2019t true, there still are dozens of indictments, and a lot of Trump associates are going to jail. There are still ongoing investigations in the DOJ and the Southern district of New York. and of course we still haven\u2019t seen the full Mueller report. But liberals were waiting to find out that Donald Trump plotted with a foreign power and successfully upended the democratic process. Liberals got sucked into this fantasy where we were a part of this spy novel, that we could connect the dots and solve this giant mystery. If we just watched enough Maddow and read enough Washington Post write-ups, we would get the smoking gun. Some of us even branded ourselves members of \u201cThe Resistance\u201d as we sat in our cafes as if we didn\u2019t look like members of some bourgeois rebellion.<\/p>\n

The election of Donald Trump was a traumatic event for liberals that lead many of us to an extended period of denialism. Many of us still have not accepted that Donald Trump was elected President, and we are stuck in the hysteria of election night, still waiting for a recount in Michigan that is never coming. The Russia collusion story allowed us the comfort of believing that America didn\u2019t actually change. If Trump conspired with Russia, then that meant that the country actually didn\u2019t reject Hillary Clinton and the last eight years of Barack Obama. If Trump colluded with Russia, then our friends, relatives, and neighbors weren\u2019t actually complicit in Trump\u2019s white supremacy: They were just tricked and could be forgiven. If Trump colluded with Russia, then the country would unite together and restore us to normalcy.<\/p>\n

What has happened to many liberals since 2016 is almost identical to what happened to many conservatives after 2008. Conservatives could not believe that their America had elected a black man, and not only was he black, but he was well liked and defied every stereotype they\u2019d had about minorities. Conservatives were aghast that their America, the America of Ronald Reagan and John Wayne had been ceded to those<\/em> people<\/em>. So we were introduced to Glenn Beck and his conspiracy chalkboards. Suddenly, Barack Obama wasn\u2019t born in America, therefore his election was illegitimate, and we could take to the streets to oppose him. Barack Obama was a secret Muslim; he hated America, and ACORN and everyone else were conspiring to enact some Marxist agenda.<\/p>\n

This time, liberals could not believe their America had been turned over to those people<\/em>. Liberals could not believe that people they\u2019d assumed lost the culture war and not so subtly looked down on, had elected the manifestation of everything we don\u2019t like about America. It felt personal, and we couldn\u2019t process it, and many of us still can\u2019t understand it. So we fell into conspiracies, we didn\u2019t question the Steele dossier or why we\u2019d only referenced it, but there didn\u2019t appear to be a credible counterpart from an actual intelligence agency. We raved about pee tapes and compramat<\/em> and Moscow and used terms we\u2019d only seen in Tom Clancy novels. We didn\u2019t check back in on those scandalous stories from the New York Times or the Washington Post, or perhaps we\u2019d have seen the dozens of corrections on their Russia reporting which turned out to be dubiously sourced. We, without any irony, became die-hard supporters of the FBI and CIA in spite of the long record of those institutions not being exactly friendly to our causes (see Martin Luther King Jr.).<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not that Trump isn\u2019t cartoonishly corrupt: He is clearly an amoral individual who seems to have not a had a year where he was not breaking the law. We\u2019ve got Trump University, we\u2019ve got tax fraud, we\u2019ve got Stormy Daniels, we\u2019ve got hiring undocumented labor, and probably crimes we\u2019ve already forgotten about. But none of those things explained his victory or absolved America, so liberals didn\u2019t lean into them. So now we are left in a not unfamiliar situation, undefended by a detached Democratic leadership, informed by an elitist media, and lead by a government without competence.<\/p>\n

In 2003, we were readying ourselves to defeat George W. Bush after losing the electoral college in the last election. The facts were on our side, the people were on our side, and the international community was on our side, yet we did not rise to the occasion. We lost focus and thus we lost the presidency. This time can be different, and we should let history be our teacher. It will not be enough to run against Donald Trump and copy the spirit of his rhetoric, just as it was not enough to run against George Bush and unconvincingly wrap ourselves in the flag, as the Republicans had shamelessly done.<\/p>\n

It is without doubt that the Russians interfered in our election on behalf of Donald Trump, and the effect of their efforts are incalculable. There should be no dispute that there was and continues to be a concerted effort to undermine confidence in our democracy. However, the Mueller report has stated there was no collusion. There are almost certainly other behaviors worthy of impeachment that should be investigated, but if Mueller couldn\u2019t find collusion then there likely is none. We are going to have to defeat this President through the electoral process. The cavalry isn\u2019t coming, and the Republicans were never going to save us. This isn\u2019t 1974. Howard Baker and his party are dead. It\u2019s time for liberals to come together and provide a real alternative to four more years of…whatever the hell this has been. Mueller was never going to make the argument for us, so we\u2019re going to have to make the argument ourselves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Mueller report is out: No further indictments have been recommended. The full contents of the report aren\u2019t yet known, but we know at<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":664,"featured_media":40110,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2119,202,2826],"tags":[2871,3416],"yoast_head":"\n