We should have known better. We should have known better! We should have learned from the time that we believed we were on the verge of the first female president – the derivative T-shirts, the chilling champagne – only to find that our hopes had been dashed by a racist misogynist demagogue. Yet here we are again, a mass of deflated blue balloons, as the Monday morning headlines confirming our worst fears. Robert Mueller has issued his report. And Donald J Trump is still the president, happily golfing our taxes away.

I’d like to say that I was among the sensible, maintaining a healthy skepticism that Robert Mueller would provide us with the deliverance we’ve been longing for. Sometimes, I was: as the investigation dragged on and on, with no indictments of the Trump family and no interviews with the president himself, it was hard to hold on to hope that the release of the report would be Trump’s Watergate. Yes, Mueller was known for being thorough, calm and comprehensive; that could have explained how long he was taking. But had he uncovered that the president was treasonous it seemed unlikely that he’d go through all of the evidence before alerting the nation. Two years was a very long time to maintain a heartfelt belief in the possibilities of the Mueller report. Optimism flagged.

And yet: we all saw Trump as a candidate call for Russia to hack his opponents’ emails. We all saw his conduct in his Finland press conference with Vladimir Putin, and we all know as well that he’s worked to obfuscate the details of their other meetings. And most of all: we’ve witnessed Trump telling lies, all kinds of lies, from the small to the huge. Until Trump’s attorney general, Bill Barr, declared that his boss had been exonerated, it was hard not to hold out that kernel of hope that there would be something redemptive in Mueller’s report. Something more than what we’re left with, which is disappointment and ambiguity.

‘The problems in our democracy run much deeper than Trump.’ Photograph: Ting Shen/Xinhua/Barcroft Images

Until the report is released in full to the public – which it may never be unless some plucky intern leaks it (plucky interns, if you’re reading this, America needs you!) – we can continue to speculate on its contents, question the legitimacy of Barr’s biased judgment, wonder whether there is still evidence that can lead to other indictments. We can argue about whether a Democrat would get away with this and compare it with what happened with the Starr report.

Or we can spend our time in more productive ways. It’s tempting to simplify our current political culture into a narrative of good versus evil. It would have been great if Prince Mueller had ridden in on his … file folders to rescue us all from the evil king. But even if the Mueller report had turned out to indicate impeachable culpability on the part of the president, the complex problems at the heart of our current political crises would remain. Regardless of the role of Russia in the last election, Trump’s success is symptom of a racist and corrupt nation. The problems in our democracy run much deeper than he.

It’s tempting to mourn the loss of the dreams we had for Robert Mueller, fulfilling our cravings for justice – or company – with hours of analysis on MSNBC. Instead, we should take this disappointment as a prompt to reconsider who is actually doing the hard work to make our country a better place right now: the activists and politicians who are pushing for institutional and cultural change that might, one day, ensure that Trump’s regime is an anomaly, not a new norm. Democrats needs to lick our wounds quickly and start putting our money, our time and our effort behind the people we believe can start the long, hard process of repairing our country in 2020.