Mueller’s Damning Portrait of Trump
The president lies wantonly and profligately—to the press, to his aides, and above all to the public. He tries to interfere in investigations. He acts as if he has something to hide. He reacts petulantly to being told no, and repeatedly pressures staffers even after being rejected.
Those words are not taken from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report, but they might as well be. Over 448 pages, the report sketches a portrait of the president as chronically dishonest and unfit for office. Then it fills the portrait in, with painstaking and meticulously footnoted cross-hatching and shading. Opinions on Donald Trump, both for and against, seem ossified, and it is not as though Trump is underexposed. Yet even so, the Trump who emerges from the pages of the report is surprising.
The actual substance of the report is far more damning than what summaries from Attorney General William Barr, in a four-page letter to Congress in March and in a short press conference Thursday morning, suggested. Although Mueller did indeed conclude that there was no “collusion” between Russia and the Trump campaign, he also noted, “If there was no collusion, it wasn’t for lack of trying.”)
