[NBC News] The news that special counsel Robert Mueller found no proof that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia is much worse for Democrats than it appears. Because the vehicle for destroying President Donald Trump has crashed so spectacularly that Trump will reconstruct it into the campaign bus that will deliver him victoriously to the White House on his second Inauguration Day.Trump’s opponents will try to characterize the report as a detail that can now be discarded as congressional committees and various local prosecutors race to produce damning information. But they’ve already bet on the wrong horse. The Mueller report will simply trample everything else, smashing and discrediting ‐ whether justifiably or not ‐ all other probes hurled Trump’s way.
Worse for Democrats, Trump, who tweets from the hip and produces all kinds of unreliable, errant missives, begins to look credible. "Witch hunt," he regularly exclaims at dawn from the White House residence. Now, that formulation, drilled into voters’ heads, begins to look like a potentially apt description of the opponents Trump has said are trying to thwart his agenda and unfairly delegitimize his election.
Meanwhile, the left-wing voices in Congress will spend the next few months demanding internal administration documents, hurling people before committees and heading to TV studios to proclaim that Trump is guilty of something or other.
They'd better be careful. They reached very far and grabbed hold of mostly air so far. They run the risk of being perceived by reasonable people as engaging in overreach.
I know some reasonable people who already think the Dems have overreached.
I'm betting that despite the risks, however, many Democrats won't be able to help themselves. The Democratic base smelled blood and still wants it. And these are the people whose small-dollar donations are fueling the Democratic presidential hopefuls, and whose votes in the primaries will choose the nominee. But they are not the people who will put a Democrat over the top in a general election.
The Mueller report has likely ensured it's going to be a very cold January 2021 for the Democratic Party.