Robert Mueller has given Trump a rare good day, and a tool to rally his supporters as 2020 looms

The Trump presidency has known some good days, more bad days, and plenty of angry days. Many of the bad days came as a result, directly or indirectly, of the allegations about collusion with the Russian authorities during the 2016 presidential election.

No other issue, not even the wall or the government shutdown, has caused the ever-changing cast of the Trump administration more trouble than the notion that the 2016 election was, in effect, stolen with the assistance of a foreign power – tantamount to treason.

So the president and his team have made the very best of the very best moment of his volatile presidency so far – when the special counsel Robert Mueller, announced, in a carefully-worded formulation that he “did not find that any US person or Trump campaign official conspired or knowingly coordinated with Russia”.

That isn’t quite the same as saying it didn’t happen, but it is near enough, and certainly close enough to vindication for Mr Trump to seize on it and trumpet it for all it is worth.

Mr Mueller was less emphatic about the question of obstruction of justice – itself a serious charge. That carries with it the awful echo of Watergate, where, famously, it was not the break-in that did for president Nixon, but the cover-up. Mr Trump, in other words, has not been entirely exonerated, and new revelations may yet come to haunt him. For now, he is understandably making the most of the Mueller report.

It is a turn of events that can only bolster confidence in the independence of thought and action of Mr Mueller, and the enduring strength of the checks and balances engineered into America’s system of government.

Mr Mueller was certainly being pressured by the White House into pulling his punches; but he was coming under no less a weight of expectations from the media and the opposition to Mr Trump, who fully thought he would deliver a host of impeachable indictments that would kill the Trump presidency well before polling day in 2020. Mr Mueller has proved that he is his own man, and will not mind being responsible for some serious introspection on the part of news outlets.

Rightly so. It is strange – and yet to be fully explained – how such an apparently formidable body of evidence against Mr Trump could result in such meagre condemnation from the independent counsel.

Few would want to defend Mr Trump, whose manifest disqualifications for office extend far beyond the allegations of foreign collusion, but, unless the Mueller investigation itself can be shown to have been in some way compromised, the tone and extent of coverage of these affairs was surely at times overheated – with the benefit of hindsight at any rate.

More dangerously for the media, Mr Trump will also seize on the Mueller verdict as corroboration for his absurd claim that the mainstream media is engaged in some vast conspiracy, manufacturing “fake news” in order discredit him.

They hardly need to do so. Mr Trump generates more than enough negative stories of his own, and the allegations against the president were substantial and apparently well-supported. Still, his base will be that much more inclined to believe Mr Trump’s outlandish conspiracy theories.

The only upside is that the Mueller report might just restore some of their faith in Washington’s institutions.

The much-exaggerated risk of impeachment – and successful prosecution – of Mr Trump can now be seen to have been just that. It was never very likely that a highly partisan senate was going to approve by the required majority of two-thirds a verdict of guilty on Mr Trump. It would have been a major distraction, however, and damaged his reputation, but he was never in reality going to be formally removed from office.

And so America, and the Democrats, can now return to the more substantive business of thwarting the Trump administration’s policies; and building some kind of momentum for a challenge to him in about a year and a half. Given the man, some new scandal may well emerge between now and then, but it would be unwise for his opponents to count on it, and still less to think that such things make much difference his loyal base.