To observe the general explosion of tweets on Friday was to believe that Donald Trump’s time in office was hurtling toward an inevitable end. That morning, Robert Mueller, the special prosecutor investigating the extent of the president’s ties to the Russian government, announced that Mike Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, had pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. about his contacts with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Upon observing that, though Mueller was purportedly in possession of enough evidence to charge Flynn and his son, Mike Flynn Jr., with a whole host of crimes, he stopped at a single charge and let Flynn Jr. off scot-free, many surmised that Flynn had cut a plea deal with the special prosecutor. “He is obviously cooperating . . . If he wasn’t cooperating he would be indicted and I guarantee you there would be more counts than this,” Sol Wisenberg, a criminal defense lawyer on the Whitewater investigation, told my colleague Abby Tracy, an assumption seemingly confirmed by an ABC News report that Flynn stood ready to testify against Trump, members of Trump’s family, and others in the White House.

Denizens of the populist-nationalist world where Flynn was first hailed as a hero also believed the end was near—the end of the Russia distraction, that is. Several prominent sources I spoke to expressed little, if any, concern that Flynn’s indictment would upset their agenda, brushing off Mueller’s probe as a witch hunt that had unearthed zero evidence of underlying crimes. The argument, as populist operative Jack Posobiec put it to me, was that of course Flynn was in contact with Russian ambassadors—that is, after all, what ambassadors are for. “The left is acting like Trump is going to have to leave office because Michael Flynn got a parking ticket,” he said, calling Flynn’s indictment a “process crime” and a technicality. “Talking to diplomats is legal. The much bigger question is how the F.B.I. obtained a transcript of his phone conversation without a warrant.”

If there was concern in the ranks of the right that Mueller’s probe would eventually ensnare their president, it didn’t show. As proof of their utter public confidence that nothing truly bad was happening, the front pages of Infowars and Breitbart, two prominent far-right organs, were free of the normal partisan hyperbole, instead reporting the story under comparatively straight headlines. (CNN reporter Oliver Darcy did note that Fox News, Trump’s biggest booster, barely mentioned the indictment and led straight with a Hillary Clinton story.)

Though its outlook was far from the apocalyptic fervor of even the mainstream press, the majority of which was running around with its hair on fire reading the tea leaves, Steve Bannon’s war machine did supplement its analysis of the indictment with an attack on Ty Cobb, Trump’s lawyer who famously predicted that the Mueller probe would be done by the end of the year. “That is beyond wishful thinking. It is borderline delusion,” wrote Breitbart editor-at-large Joel Pollak in an editorial positioned prominently on the front page. (At the time of publication, Bannon’s spokesperson had not returned a request for comment.)

Over on right-wing Twitter, the news inspired little more than a shrug, punctuated with the barely expressed hope that Jared Kushner, the president’s slender cuck of a son-in-law, would be out next. In the midst of her furious tweets about the Kate Steinle murder trial, which ended with the acquittal of the accused undocumented immigrant, Ann Coulter sent out a few tweets reminding her followers that Ted Kennedy had sent secret letters to the K.G.B. proposing a media strategy to defeat Ronald Reagan in 1984. “Kennedy was writing mash notes to Soviet leaders back when Russia was threatening Americans with nuclear annihilation—liberals loved THAT Russia,” she wrote. “It’s today’s Christian Russia that liberals hate.”