More than any American President, Donald Trump strains credulity. Of the ten-thousand-plus false or misleading statements he has made during his Presidency that fact-checkers have documented so far, one of the baldest claims came on March 24th. That was when the Attorney General, William Barr, stepped into the vacuum left by the special counsel Robert Mueller’s report and announced that he had cleared Trump of any obstruction-of-justice charges.

Trump then crowed on Twitter, writing, “No Collusion, No Obstruction, Complete and Total EXONERATION. . . .” That statement was false on all three counts. Mueller’s report explicitly did not exonerate Trump, and it cited at least ten possible instances of Trump’s obstruction of justice, while noting that Justice Department policy prevented the filing of criminal charges against a sitting President. Mueller made no judgment on collusion, meanwhile, because that isn’t a crime.

In the political and popular vernacular, collusion has been incorrectly conflated with its legal equivalent: criminal conspiracy. Mueller said that he found insufficient evidence of a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian government—a finding that Trump keeps insisting means there was “no collusion.”

But the special counsel noted in his report that there were “numerous links (i.e., contacts) between the Russian government and the Trump Campaign.” The report also found that affiliates of the Trump campaign repeatedly promoted the work of Russia’s innocuously named Internet Research Agency (I.R.A.), which carried out Moscow’s election-interference operations through a social-media campaign and used various means to communicate directly with the campaign.

The report notes that “on multiple occasions, members and surrogates of the Trump Campaign promoted—typically by linking, retweeting, or similar methods of reposting—pro-Trump or anti-Clinton content published by the IRA through IRA-controlled social media accounts.” Both sides then lied about the meetings and other contacts, which were designed to help Trump win the election.

Collusion is defined by Merriam-Webster’s as a “secret agreement or cooperation, especially for an illegal or deceitful purpose,” such as “acting in collusion with the enemy.” Under that definition, the contacts between Trump’s campaign and Russia, an avowed enemy of the United States, at least amounted to coöperation with a deceitful purpose.

The political significance of collusion depends not on whether the Trump campaign’s dealings with Russia reached the level of a criminal conspiracy but, instead, on whether it can be proved that the campaign worked hand-in-glove with the Russians to help Trump get elected—or, to choose two less ambiguous words than collusion, whether it collaborated or consorted with the Russians.

Most Americans would doubtless consider it unacceptable for a Presidential candidate to collaborate with a foreign enemy to win an election. But Trump, by endlessly repeating his “no collusion” mantra, has been strikingly successful in inoculating himself—especially with his fervent base—against the politically explosive charge that he was in cahoots with the Russians.

“I’m not a political analyst and I don’t know what it would take to shake confidence with the base, but I have been surprised at how resilient Trump has been on this,” Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the editor-in-chief of the Lawfare blog, who has written extensively about the Russia investigation, said. “Part of the problem may be the information they get. But it also may be that they don’t give a shit. I mean, people know Trump is crude and uncouth . . . but they voted for him anyway. So maybe the problem is not that they don’t understand. Maybe it’s that they don’t care.”

Indeed, so far, the Mueller report hasn’t dramatically shifted public opinion about Trump. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll taken after the release of the report found that fully eight in ten Americans had followed coverage of the report, but virtually none changed their minds about the President after its release. But, surprisingly, Democrats and many members of the media also seem to have accepted the conflation of conspiracy with collusion, and have failed to make much of an issue of the latter.

The New York Times documented at least a hundred and forty contacts by Trump and eighteen of his associates with Russian nationals and WikiLeaks, or their intermediaries, during the 2016 campaign. But that story, which appeared in April, after the release of Mueller’s report, failed to get traction, as did the four-hundred-and-forty-eight-page report itself, which only a tiny fraction of the country seems to have read, thereby helping the White House, and Barr, to frame it as a vindication of Trump.

But the report—from its sweeping confirmation of the depth of Russian interference in the election (a conclusion that Trump still refuses to fully accept), to its ten examples of possible obstruction of justice, to its documentation of the extensive contacts between Russians and the Trump campaign—actually amounts to a searing indictment of the President.

The examples of collusion it cites are extensive. While still running for President, Trump secretly tried to set up a lucrative business deal to build a skyscraper in Moscow and then lied about it, thereby exposing himself to Russian blackmail. He publicly called on the Kremlin to hack Hillary Clinton’s e-mails—and Russian trolls connected to the government responded immediately with an attempt.

Other examples involved Trump’s associates. His former personal lawyer Michael Cohen met repeatedly with Russians about the Trump Moscow skyscraper project. Cohen later admitted that he lied to Congress about how late in the campaign those discussions were taking place. George Papadopoulos, a campaign adviser, had several contacts with Russian agents who wanted to arrange meetings between Trump and the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, and he reported back to the campaign about those discussions.

An unidentified Trump campaign associate exchanged private messages with Guccifer 2.0, the pseudonym used by Russian military-intelligence officials who hacked e-mails from the Democratic National Committee and gave them to WikiLeaks, which later released them. That associate is reportedly Roger Stone, Trump’s longtime confidante, who is now awaiting trial on seven counts of lying to Congress about Russia’s attempt to influence the election and other charges. In his indictment of Stone, Mueller disclosed evidence showing that an unnamed top Trump campaign official asked Stone to get information from WikiLeaks about the hacked D.N.C. e-mails.

Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman, supplied internal polling data to a business associate with ties to Russian intelligence and told the associate that he stood ready to provide briefings on the campaign to a Russian oligarch. And, of course, there was the famed Trump Tower meeting, in June of 2016, between Trump’s son Donald, Jr.; his son-in-law, Jared Kushner; Manafort; and a Russian agent who promised dirt on Clinton. In October, 2016, WikiLeaks contacted Don, Jr., and asked him to have his father send out links to their Clinton content on Twitter. The elder Trump did so.

In November, following the election, Kushner met with the Russian Ambassador at the time, Sergey Kislyak, and discussed setting up a secret back channel between the Kremlin and Trump’s transition team. The Times reported that Kushner also met with a Russian banker who had close ties to Putin in an attempt to establish a direct line of communication to the Russian President. During the transition, Trump’s choice to be his national-security adviser, Michael Flynn, had several conversations with Kislyak about eliminating the sanctions against Russia that had been imposed by the Obama Administration and about blocking an impending United Nations vote critical of Israeli settlements.