A more important reason is that with the passage of time, it is possible to update the original take. Some of the key differences between the two teams in 2017 diverged even further in 2018. Trump’s burn rate through staff has escalated, while Mueller’s team has remained largely intact. Trump’s team is so riddled with holes that senior administration officials publish anonymous op-eds in the New York Times about the president’s awfulness. The White House cannot identify who wrote it because there are too many suspects. Contrast that with Mueller; I cannot find a single quote from his team that describes him in a derogatory manner. Actually, I cannot find a single quote from his team that describes Mueller at all because his team has been remarkable good at not leaking.

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The most important reason is that with news of Paul Manafort’s cooperation with the special counsel, one must appreciate how much better Mueller has been at fulfilling Trump’s campaign promises than Trump himself. Trump promised to drain the swamp of corruption. He and his administration have instead relabeled the Beltway from “swamp” to “elite mud bath” and invited the entire GOP to come hang out at the spa. The raft of administration scandals puts the lie to the notion that Trump would be an anti-corruption fighter. Instead, all the Republicans accused of ill-gotten gain can do is copy Trump and blame the Deep State.

Mueller, meanwhile, appears poised to use the Manafort plea deal to go after other lobbyists for foreign governments who skirt the rules. According to the New York Times’s Kenneth Vogel, the cooperation agreement will put pressure on some of Manafort’s partners: “Mr. Manafort’s friends, and associates who worked with him in Ukraine, say that he might have more valuable information about Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs and politicians, and the Western firms that have helped them, including ones that he recruited, such as Podesta, Mercury and Skadden.”

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With Manafort’s plea agreement, one final difference is revealed. When he was running for president, Trump ludicrously claimed that he would be able to eliminate $19 trillion in U.S. federal debt in eight years. In actuality, the federal government’s debt has exploded since he came into office. This is entirely consistent with his record as a businessman.

One of Trump’s minor-key complaints about Mueller is the cost of the investigation. He tweeted, “At what point does this soon to be $20,000,000 Witch Hunt, composed of 13 Angry and Heavily Conflicted Democrats and two people who have worked for Obama for 8 years, STOP!”

That was all sorts of wrong when Trump tweeted it, but it is even more wrong now. In reaching his plea deal, Manafort agreed to hand over more than $46 million in property and more liquid assets to the federal government. As Marcy Wheeler noted, “with this forfeiture, the Mueller investigation just more than paid for itself.”