Within hours of the release of Mr. Mueller’s report, a new strategy was born: to insist that it was as bad for the president as his enemies had always hoped. The report was an “impeachment referral” without saying so, and Mr. Mueller — far from erring or flinching — had done precisely what he needed to do to incite congressional action. Hesitating to voice their actual disappointment that Mr. Mueller had simply not come through, interpreters elevated the text to almost scriptural status, requiring proper interpretation and vulgarization for the masses: The report actually had proved Mr. Trump’s criminality, they said. If only people would read it, or listen to the dramatic readings of it, or the podcasts about it, they would see for themselves.

So many like-minded commentators spent weeks debating how precisely to question Mr. Mueller when he appeared before Congress that few noticed that if there was a game to play, it was won and lost in the organization of the hearings. Within minutes of the event’s opening on Wednesday, it became apparent that there would be no Mueller ex machina. The brevity of each Democrat’s questioning, along with Republican conspiracy-mongering and hectoring, compounded Mr. Mueller’s own limitations.

Even so, some were convinced that this week’s testimony was already leading to “a groundswell of support for impeachment,” as the executive editor of the website Lawfare put it on Twitter. Others said that we simply need to try again to explain to harried Americans, who don’t have time for seven hours of unriveting television, that something fatal to Mr. Trump’s presidency had now in fact happened. But no groundswell is rising. Even Representative Adam Schiff, long the political standard-bearer of impeachment, has predicted the dream is now dead.

In spite of the report’s legalistic haze, and its author’s soporific bearing, for many it is a definitive verdict on a man and a moment. If no one enforces that verdict, they say, Americans will never live down their country’s shame. But the report was neither definitive nor a verdict. Of Mr. Trump’s deeds, the ones Mr. Mueller chronicled are far from the worst. And of all the things Americans have had to be ashamed about, the president’s infractions as chronicled in the report are not high on the list. The causes of Mr. Trump’s election — most pressingly, a loss of faith in the American political system — ought to be far greater priorities.

Liberals and progressives who have eaten, breathed and slept the Mueller report are right to complain of the outcome. Nobody likes to be outmaneuvered. Nobody likes to lose. Getting the truth — and not just about Russian high jinks or Trumpian misdeeds — is a legitimate demand. That the president’s actions were beyond the pale, though never as shockingly illegal as his critics have believed, has made the sting of the failure to pin crimes on him worse.