Don’t get too excited for Mueller
Without courting attention or even familiarizing Americans with the sound of his voice, Robert Mueller became a celebrity, portrayed by Robert De Niro on Saturday Night Live and a potent political symbol: of the stubborn hope for truth and justice if you believed in his cause; of the indefatigable persecution of Donald Trump if you bought the president’s deceits and delusions.
So, yes, his appearance on Capitol Hill on Wednesday — hours of remarks from a man who has barely spoken in public since the start of his investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia — is a big moment. But that’s not the same as a game-changing one. And anyone rightly aghast at this presidency and righteously desperate to move past it needs to recognize that Mueller’s testimony probably isn’t even the beginning of the end.
It should be. That’s obvious from his report, unexamined by most voters. It makes clear that while officials with the Trump campaign didn’t huddle with Vladimir Putin over vodka and blinis to scrawl a to-do list — Column A for the Kremlin, Column B for Javanka — their attitude about help from Moscow was: Here’s the Trump Tower address! Use the farright elevator in the lobby. Wait, wait, you have emails? Out with them, fast! It’s not digital theft. Merely glasnost for the age of Julian Assange.
And while Trump may not have dispatched goons to kneecap Mueller, he made plenty of other attempts to interfere, impede and intimidate. A vivid, colorful recitation of those efforts would be damning.
But Mueller is neither vivid nor colorful. He takes pride in that, and he twists his fingers into pretzels lest he put them on the scale. He’s so emphatically apolitical and nonpartisan that he became inadvertently political and partisan. His report’s arid language, gummy syntax and thick riddles dulled its findings of awful conduct. He gave Bill Barr room to spin and Trump the opening to claim exoneration, which he has been doing for four months now.
That’s another drag on Mueller’s testimony: the passage of time. He began his work two years and two months ago. He concluded it in March, when Barr scurried to issue his blithe four-page summary of Mueller’s report. A redacted version of the report was released in April. That drawn-out process means that many Americans have grown numb to it, dismissed it as the latest front in a ceaseless war between Republicans and Democrats, or both.
There was also a gap of nearly a month between Barr’s summary and journalists’ ability to call out its staggering inaccuracy and bias. That gap allowed his fiction to jell. There’s no impression as strong as the first one. He knew and exploited that, potentially diminishing the effect of what Mueller now has to say.
In an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released about two weeks ago, only 21 percent of respondents believed there was enough evidence to begin impeachment hearings against the president. That’s the climate in which Mueller is testifying. While I’d bet that the percentage rises after Americans hear and see him, it’s unlikely to go up to 50 percent or more. House Democrats will still be looking at a situation in which impeachment is, politically, an enormous roll of the dice.
The climate is also one in which seemingly nothing moves public opinion about Trump all that much. It’s extraordinary, and it reflects both the era’s profound political tribalism and the fact that he has been omnipresent for so long that almost all voters have made up their minds: love him, hate him, endure him, check out property in Canada.
For all of his presidency — through that humiliating news conference with Putin in Helsinki, through Michael Cohen’s damning account of his years in Trump’s employ, through a long and fruitless government shutdown — his approval rating has remained between the mid-30s and mid-40s, according to the Marist Poll. Not even his racist attacks on four Democratic congresswomen of color changed that. An NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll released Monday put his approval rating at 44 percent: the highest in that survey since his inauguration. So can Mueller really do to Trump what Trump can’t manage to do to himself ?
There’s yet one more reason for Trump’s opponents to be guarded in their expectations of what Mueller’s testimony will achieve. Mueller is answering questions from Republicans on the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees as well as Democrats. Lawmakers who support Trump have the same opportunity to inject their views and massage Mueller’s findings as lawmakers who oppose Trump do. They too are plotting carefully.
Make no mistake: It matters that Mueller have this say and this day. But for November 2020? Maybe not so much.