Perspective: Why were liberals so desperate to believe that Mueller would save democracy?
By Paul Musgrave Paul Musgrave is an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. March 28 at 12:36 PM The conclusion of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report on his investigation of President Trump last weekend came as an anticlimax. Attorney General William P. Barr’s summary makes plain that while the report does not conclude that the president committed crimes, it does not exonerate him, either.
Many expressed their hope in Mueller’s investigation quietly and soberly. The journalist Garrett Graff argued for patience, writing in Wired last year that Mueller “always knows more than we think.” Others were less restrained. The prominent Twitter account @ProudResister crowed in January that Mueller’s indictments of Russian agents showed that “Trump defends Russia because he is a TRAITOR.
The most loyal Democrats hoped that Mueller would save the day for two reasons. First, as the CCES data showed, they were already convinced that Trump had colluded. They expected that any fair investigation, therefore, would arrive at the same conclusion. A December 2018 Fox News poll of registered voters found, for instance, that 65 percent of Democrats thought it was extremely or very likely that the special counsel would find that Trump had committed impeachable offenses.
Yet the evidence shows that Mueller was never quite as respected by Americans in general as the myth required. I downloaded every polling question in the Roper/iPoll database between June 2017 and January 2019 that asked whether Americans approved of Mueller and whether they believed that his investigation would be fair. Although Mueller began his appointment with nearly 70 percent approval ratings, by January, his approval hovered just above the 50 percent mark.
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