Will leftists finally drop delusions about Trump?

The Mueller investigation failed to find any proof of the US President conspiring with Russia, but there’s little evidence those who whipped up the collusion narrative will do any self-reflection, writes James Morrow.

So after 675 days, more than 2,800 subpoenas, over 500 search warrants, and 13 requests to foreign governments for evidence, Special Counsel Robert Mueller has issued his report into Donald Trump’s alleged collusion with the Russians to steal the 2016 election and come up with … nothing.

A summary of the report issued overnight Australia time reveals that the Mueller investigation found that the Trump campaign did not — repeat, did not — conspire with Moscow, though it did stop short of exonerating Trump over questions of obstruction of justice.

This is massive news, because it means that all the countless television hours and column inches devoted to pushing the line that Trump is a Russian plant turned out to be, quite predictably, fake news.

RELATED: Trump has outflanked the left time and time again

Instead, as anyone not suffering a terminal case of Trump Derangement Syndrome knows, the only things that cost Hillary Clinton the election were her dismal record of destabilising countries as Barack Obama’s Secretary of State, her failure to campaign in states she’d taken for granted, like Wisconsin, that ultimately fell to Trump, and her own exceedingly grand sense of entitlement.

The Mueller investigation did not find that US President Donald Trump conspired with Moscow in the 2016 election campaign. Picture: Eric Baradat/AFP

For Trump haters banking on Mueller coming up with the goods on Trump, the report is devastating.

Legions of commentators, pundits, and anti-Trump obsessives both in Australia and the US have spent the last two and a half years lighting Robert Mueller devotional candles (no joke: actor Patricia Arquette bragged about having such a thing on US television recently) and praying for a bombshell report that would blow Trump out of office.

Many leftists have built entire careers around the idea that Trump is and has been a Russian agent for years, if not decades.

RELATED: What Democrats should learn from the midterms

You can only imagine the wailing and gnashing of teeth at the ABC, which has led the charge to convince Australians that our closest ally had been hopelessly corrupted by Vladimir Putin. Last year we taxpayers funded — among other things — a special three-part Four Corners devoted to “exposing” the ties between Trump, his business organisation, and Moscow.

Depressingly, there is little evidence that those who did so much to whip up the collusion narrative in an attempt to delegitimise Trump’s presidency will show any sign of self-reflection.

Instead, the reaction is likely to show many up as poor weather patriots who only love the idea of America when they can use it as a cudgel against their ideological opponents — and that terrible, terrible man who denied Hillary Clinton “her turn”.

Special Councel Robert Mueller closed his long and contentious Russia investigation with no new charges. Picture: AP/Cliff Owen

None of them seem to understand that by advancing a false narrative about Putin’s string-pulling, they have done more to sow division and mistrust than anything some basement Kremlin troll farm could ever accomplish.

Or if they do, they don’t care.

Instead of self-reflection or apologies or hefty orders of humble pie expect a new sort of “collusion trutherism” to come to the fore.

RELATED: What if Trump is right about Germany?

It’s worth noting that even before the report summary dropped, Congressman Adam Schiff raised the possibility of subpoenaing Mueller to appear before Congress, presumably to call him on the carpet for failing to deliver the goods.

Given the depth of the rabbit hole many Never Trumpers have dived down, it is only a matter of time before someone claims that Mueller himself was compromised by the Russians.

But never mind.

No collusion is terrible news for the left, but everyone else, it’s good news. Or at least it ought to be.

Those anti-Trump types who have a shred of conscience and who lionised Mueller (and his team of largely Democrat staffers) and hoped on a bombshell report that would blow Trump out of the White House should issue their mea culpas, and try not to let their tribal blinders get in the way of an honest assessment of things next time.

And those who don’t should simply be tuned out.

James Morrow is opinion editor of The Daily Telegraph and co-host of Sky News’s Outsiders.

@pwafork