The Mueller report has put the question of whether Donald Trump should remain President of the United States, and more particularly whether he should serve a second term, back into the hands of those most qualified to decide. The United States constitution calls them “We The People.”
Barring any new revelations, Mr. Trump will not be leaving office prior to the end of his term in January of 2021. He will not be dragged from the White House by a court order; he will not be impeached and removed by Congress. He’s the Leader of the Free World we’re stuck with for the next 21 months. Beyond that, it’s up to American voters.
It’s also up to the Democratic Party to select as its candidate someone who can defeat Mr. Trump, in part by winning over swing voters who were willing to take a flyer on an angry outsider who promised them the moon in 2016.
Now that the 45th President’s failings are well known, Democrats have got to select a candidate who can speak not just to their own base, but also to the electorate’s persuadable middle. Enough of those people voted for Mr. Trump to make him president. They might do so again. But if they don’t, he’s done for.
That’s how Democrats regained control of the House of Representatives in last fall’s midterm elections. They spent less time talking about their moral superiority to Mr. Trump and his voters, and more time talking about concrete ideas to improve people’s lives, from education to health care.
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Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report into allegations of collusion between the Russian government and Mr. Trump’s team does not give the President a clean bill of health, legally or ethically. This is a man who has spent a lifetime running with a pride of grifters, con artists and confidence men. His inner circle looks like a scene from a better-dressed version of The Sopranos.
But those who believed that Mr. Trump would be revealed as a modern equivalent of The Manchurian Candidate, a conspirator against his own country, in league with or in service to Moscow, were disappointed. Mr. Mueller and his team of investigators simply could not find enough evidence to make such a case.
Did agents of the Russian government, largely operating online, try to influence the 2016 election? Yes. Did they try to undermine the Hillary Clinton campaign? Of course. Did they try to sow discord in American society? Repeatedly. From hacking Democratic Party e-mails; to spearfishing their way into parts of the electoral system; to using social media to create front organizations to promote protests and counterprotests, the Russians called on all the tricks of dezinformatsiya.
The goal was sapping confidence in democracy and sowing chaos, including by boosting Mr. Trump, the official candidate of chaos.
Congress should continue its inquiries into what the Russians did, and how they did it. Steps have to be taken to ensure that the world’s most important democracy is capable of remaining an open society, and running democratic elections, while protecting itself against interference from anti-democratic rivals. That is going to be an issue for decades to come, even after Mr. Trump is long gone.
The Mueller report also refuses to declare that Mr. Trump should be charged with interfering with its investigation. It finds a number of times when Mr. Trump wanted to take steps that might have constituted obstruction of justice, but members of his team refused to carry out his wishes.
As a result, Mr. Mueller declines to conclude that Mr. Trump should be prosecuted for obstructing justice, while also carefully declining to exonerate him. The President hardly comes up smelling of roses, but the truth is that, at the end of the day, the Trump administration largely co-operated with the Mueller inquiry. There does not appear to be a criminal case here.
The bottom line is that the 2020 election will not be about whether the current occupant of the White House is a criminal, or whether he should be impeached.
But even if Mr. Trump is not a secret Russian agent, he is, for all the world to see, a terrible president. He’s made the average American less secure, while making the free world less united. That’s hardly classified information, and it’s what his opponents should be running on.