The anticipated conclusion of Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia has given way to a broad sense of anticlimax. Media coverage has fixated on the potential that Mueller will produce new revelations of impeachable conduct, emphasizing heavily the expectation he will not. This belief simply shows how the case has already been proven and it simply has not registered.

A great many intelligent people who hold no brief for Trump have nonetheless refused to believe that he is hiding some deep, dark secrets regarding Russia. As more and more evidence has appeared over the last two and a half years, that bloc of skeptics has melted away but failed to disappear completely.

The cause of this incredulity, I have come to suspect, lies in the vast distance the mind must travel between the normal patterns of American politics and the fantastical crimes being alleged. The Russia scandal seems to hint at a reality of fiction or paranoia, a baroque conspiracy in which the leader of the free world has been compromised by a mafiocracy with an economy smaller than South Korea’s.

The flaw lies […]