Most dramatic, and most cited, may be the moment Trump learned he was going to have a special counsel in his life. Trump, it is said, slumped in his chair and said, “Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked.” For someone who enjoys a fight as much as Donald Trump, an adverse event has to be pretty serious to trigger that sort of despair, and it’s one of his more human moments. But he was probably right, too. To the extent the Mueller probe was intended to curtail the president’s power to defy the bipartisan policy establishment, as some have claimed, you could say it worked. Trump came into office owing nothing to the Republican Party, but, once the investigations began, that changed. Trump needed—or at least felt he needed—the G.O.P. establishment to run interference, and he couldn’t afford to anger it.

It’s true, as some have pointed out, that the Mueller report corroborates a lot of reporting from major media outlets. One should hope for such matches to be the rule and not the exception. (Publish a lot of stories like the Guardian’s “Manafort held secret talks with Assange in Ecuadorian embassy” or BuzzFeed’s “President Trump Directed His Attorney Michael Cohen to Lie to Congress About the Moscow Tower Project,” and readers might start to notice a pattern.) We see that, yes, Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner indeed held a very unwise meeting with a Russian lawyer in the hopes of getting dirt on Clinton, and in this tiptoed up to criminality, even if opportunism and obliviousness were the primary drivers. We see that, yes, Donald Trump indeed tried to get White House counsel Don McGahn to fire Mueller, even if the effort failed.

But proving the major stories of 2017 and 2018 not-wrong is a low bar. Often, the report reflects what the media settled on only after initial stories were debuted with exaggerated or misleading claims and then dialed back. Headlines like “Trump Campaign Adviser Met With Russian to Discuss ‘Dirt’ on Clinton”—when the person wasn't Russian (Joseph Mifsud is Maltese) and the purpose of the meeting wasn’t to discuss dirt (even if it was allegedly mentioned)—began rolling out early and never stopped. (That said, a positive note should be sounded: The New York Times and other papers are less reticent when it comes to quoting words like “fucked,” when they’re used by a source, and that is on balance a good thing. Specificity of words, even curse words, often matters, and we’re adults.)

Certainly, we have set the bar lower for Donald Trump than just about any other president ever. Had Barack Obama been screaming at Eric Holder for not blocking investigations of him or Hillary Clinton or had he been drafting written statements denying that David Petraeus had done something he was fast proven to have done, the public would be shocked and angered. But presidents aren’t judged by explicit standards as much as implied ones that are based on their own campaigns and reputations when they are elected. You could say they are standards of integrity based on a congruence between what the candidate stands for and what he does.

The public had already priced in that Bill Clinton was an adulterer, so he could get a pass on philandering in a way that Jimmy Carter or Barack Obama could not. (And John Edwards didn’t.) It hadn’t priced in that Richard Nixon was an abuser of power. With Donald Trump, everyone had already priced in his vices as an impulsive and vulgar buffoon, someone who had scant respect for institutions and propriety. His supporters wanted him despite these flaws, admiring his willingness to defy the establishment and voice candid and blunt beliefs that many considered horrible. His downfall wouldn’t be over adultery or rule-breaking or his patter of constant lesser lies but over, say, a recording of him casting aspersions on the Deplorables or saying his wall pitch was just a deceptive gimmick.

Nothing about the report changes that balance. The Mueller report is therefore damning yet not damning. It lays out patterns that are unsavory and shows that Democrats could keep giving Trump grief, if they wanted to, but it doesn't offer the bang needed to make anyone take impeachment seriously, or half-seriously. It shows us someone who’s ill-suited to his job and deficient in character. But that’s another way of saying it shows us what we already knew. It might be appalling, but it’s not shocking. Which means that it’s been a bad day for Donald Trump, and yet not so bad, considering.