The news that Robert Mueller, after countless hours of investigation, has found no evidence of criminal conspiracy between Donald Trump and Moscow came as a great surprise to some, a mild surprise to others, and as a shrug to most. For what it matters, I’m in the shrug camp. (Every few months or so, I’d argue that the Trump-Russia story lacked compelling substance, as opposed to assumptions and suspicions. Here’s something early and something late.) But shrugging doesn’t mean we say, “Never mind.” In a less repetitive world, we’d look back for some insights. So let’s consider some of the implications of this long, long stretch.

As countless people have already said, there has been a serious political cost to Democrats. What happens today in politics doesn’t tend to matter much in 18 months, but it does strengthen or weaken narratives about the world, and Trump’s just got stronger. Many Democrats had a story: the president of the United States or his associates conspired with Moscow to win the presidency for Donald Trump in 2016. Trump had an opposing story: Democrats and much of the news media are out to get me, and they’ll launch a witch hunt based on a crazy conspiracy theory to make it happen. The latter story is, of course, too simple. Mueller, in the course of his investigation, turned up all sorts of malfeasance. But on the central question of the Russiagate hysteria, the president and his allies got closest to the truth. According to Attorney General William Barr’s synopsis, Mueller “did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” Trump’s story had gained a lot of ground even before Mueller finished his report, with fifty percent of Americans agreeing with the label of “witch hunt” for the special counsel investigation; now, it has only become stronger.

There was also a serious credibility cost to the press. Many news outlets, already struggling with credibility problems going into 2016, redoubled their worst traits in the name of what they thought was a higher truth. CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic and many other news outlets (Vanity Fair among them) have hyped the Russia stories so much that less Resistance-minded readers have started to doubt much of their work altogether. Odds are high that the Mueller report will offer breadcrumbs to other Trump scandals, non-Russia-related, and the press will jump on those and investigate them, as it should. But the impact of any new revelations will be much smaller today than it would have been a decade or two or three or four ago, as more and more news organizations have spent down their reserve of trust and lost a hard-won reputation for disinterest.

There was a serious policy cost, as people’s focus shifted away from issues that were important to ones that weren’t. The Trump administration has bombed Syria, inserted itself into the leadership struggle in Venezuela, voiced support for Israel annexing the Golan Heights, passed immense tax changes, caught and released hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers crossing illegally into the United States, and exited multiple arms-control agreements, and yet, if you put cable news coverage (and even print coverage) of all of these things together, it still, in all probability, wouldn’t equal coverage of Russia-gate. For those of us who felt that hostilities between Washington and Moscow were already excessive when Trump took office, the past two years have seen a disastrous escalation.