In the beginning, the Kremlin probably thought all this was very funny. How easy it was to manipulate the Americans, to get them so upset, to stoke their partisan furies on Twitter and Facebook. All you had to do was offend someone—and pretty much everyone in America was dying to be offended. Hysterical.

Then the buffoon got elected. Vodka shots on the house. That was unbelievable. But funny. But also a little scary. (Will they actually give him the nuclear missiles?) But mostly funny. The Soviet Ministry of Propaganda could not have concocted a more grotesque caricature of the capitalist-gangster than the president of the United States.

On Russian TV, they made fun of this idea, a government investigating itself. How very American this Mueller investigation was! Only virgins (and Americans) believe you can ever get to “the bottom of things.” There is no bottom. There is never any bottom. Human beings can always be brought lower, made more rotten. Also, facts are always “facts.” And facts that are actually facts can be bought off or airbrushed. Everyone in Moscow knows this. It’s a fact.

But now the Mueller report is out, and we’ve learned . . . what? Donald Trump is still a pathetic husk of a would-be oligarch: ignorant, mean, small-minded, devoid of curiosity and insight, an embarrassment, a toddler, with the leathery visage and raccoon eyes and weirdly hyperactive comb-over that’s always felt more like a metaphor than a style. The president and his defenders are claiming exoneration. It’s anything but, given the uncertainty surrounding obstruction of justice and all the Trump lackeys in the slammer and, of course, the Southern District of New York, which progressives everywhere are droning on about—endlessly, annoyingly, as if the Mueller report had been garnish all along.

Meanwhile, the Democrats, the people whose job it is to rein in the administration and restore some modicum of decency to the unholy capital—Jeezusss, have they flubbed this. It’s not just their failure to manage expectations. It’s the rhetoric, the kowtowing, the political impossibility of ceding any ground, acknowledging that maybe the president is simply a puppet, a boob, and not—who knows?—a wholly active colluder. Adam Schiff, the Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, insists that “undoubtedly” there was collusion between Moscow and the Trump campaign. Jerry Nadler, the Democratic chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, wants Attorney General William Barr to testify. The Democratic punditry is right to demand the whole report, but they’re wrong to assume that once we’ve seen it we will have somehow—aha!—gotten to “the bottom of things.” Please: we are a nation reduced to ad hominem attack and genetic fallacies. There is no getting anywhere. There’s just a ratcheting up, a digging in, a ballooning of angers, an ever-crescendoing cacophony of stupid.

And this is what the Russians are, one imagines, thinking about right now. They’re way past funny. The kernel of fear that’s been there since Election Night 2016 is blossoming into something more clinical.

In Moscow, schadenfreude is mixed with a certain sort of fear. Because the Russians have grasped, from the start, something the Trump base has not: all this is dangerous. That was, more or less, received wisdom in Moscow in late 2016. The Russians still recall Boris Yeltsin, so cocked he couldn’t pull it together to disembark from his plane after it landed at Shannon Airport. Trump might be dangerous for America, but he also might be dangerous for everyone. Especially so now.

In a Facebook post, Konstantin Kosachev, the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Federation Council (the upper chamber of the Federal Assembly), sounded alternately angry and mournful: “Mueller’s long-awaited report proved what was known in Russia from the very beginning: There was no collusion between Trump and any of his team with the Kremlin. Even CNN journalists . . . noted that the report is a legal justification for the president and his rather complete rehabilitation.” Well, sort of. He added: “We in Russia have nothing special to celebrate here.”