GROVE CITY, Pa. — More than a year after the phrase
GROVE CITY, Pa. — More than a year after the phrase “Mueller report” entered the national conversation — and after an exhausting stretch of subpoenas, arrests and furious presidential tweeting — the country on Thursday was finally met by the real thing. And while Americans disagreed about what the report meant, one reaction seemed nearly unanimous: disgust with the country’s political leaders.
“I don’t know how he gets out of it all the time,” Judy Campagna, a 58-year-old Democrat, said of President Donald Trump’s ability to remain in office while so many of his associates have been indicted.
“A colossal waste of time,” Ray Ablanalp, a 63-year-old Republican standing at a bar with Judy’s husband, Gene, said of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. Mueller’s findings showed that the real culprits were Democrats and other backers of the investigation who had just wasted two years of time and money, Ablanalp said. “Somebody should be accountable for that, and it should not be the taxpayers.”
Gene Campagna, a 68-year-old Republican who reluctantly voted for Trump in 2016, had only one conclusion about what could happen next: “All the options are lousy.”
From the bar stools of western Pennsylvania to the sidewalks of Southern California, for many Americans, the actual details of the report were almost secondary to the intractable problems the investigation had come to symbolize: in the eyes of Democrats, the administration’s essential corruption and the failure of Congress, prosecutors — anyone — to hold the president accountable; for Republicans, false smears from the Democrats and nearly two years wasted on a special counsel investigation.
But for many across the political spectrum, there was also a sense that the report reflected a basic breakdown of functional government and that critically important issues, such as health care and infrastructure, remained ignored.
“Trump has shown us how flawed our system is; he is the product of a system that has failed, and he’s just doing what the system allows him to do,” said Dwayne A. Jones, 49, a regular Democratic voter in Los Angeles who believed the “circus” surrounding the Mueller investigation had mainly been driven by partisan interests in Washington. “And the people in our Congress, they are more committed to retaining their positions than they are to using their positions.”
Democrats, generally, saw the report’s release as a starting point, not an endpoint — a detailed sketch of a corrupt administration and an outline for congressional investigations. The report included specific and extraordinary details about the president’s behavior behind closed doors and his campaign’s receptiveness to Russian overtures.
