Unfortunately, Mueller is not that guy, and maybe he never was. He wanted the report to speak for him, and that’s all he was going to offer.

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The House Judiciary Committee hearing in the morning had started out strong, with Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) listing Mueller’s greatest hits: “You obtained criminal indictments against 37 people and entities. You secured the conviction of President Trump’s campaign chairman, his deputy campaign manager, his national security adviser and his personal lawyer, among others.” And for a minute, it was exciting; maybe our Marine would, in fact, deliver on the wildest resistance fantasies. Maybe Mueller would get up on the table and demand that Congress act on the obstruction of justice charges that he had decided Justice Department policy prohibited him from pursuing.

But that’s not what happened. Mueller stammered, he looked kind of lost, he seemed kind of old. I turned on MSNBC to see a dejected-looking Brian Williams recapping the morning. President Barack Obama’s former chief strategist, David Axelrod, declared, “This is delicate to say, but Mueller, whom I deeply respect, has not publicly testified before Congress in at least six years. And he does not appear as sharp as he was then.”

It felt like the beginning of the coverage of last fall’s midterms, when Claire McCaskill lost her Senate seat in Missouri, and it wasn’t clear that Democrats were going to win control of the House. We Democrats had been through so much disappointment already. Every day, we wake up to see that Trump is still in the White House. We needed a superhero! Instead, we got the last person in the entire executive branch who wanted to follow the rules.

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But Mueller is not a creature of our highly partisan times, and he clearly didn’t want to become one Wednesday. He has always been a sort of Rorschach test because of his continued Zenlike stillness and refusal to venture out into the spotlight. Perhaps his belief that he could stay on the sidelines and people would simply read his report should have been a tip-off that Mueller really isn’t a special counsel suited for anyone in the modern age to hang their hopes on.

And then, something weirdly miraculous happened in front of the House Intelligence Committee in the afternoon: He got a lot better. Was it the smooth voice of Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.)? Was it the thoughtful phrasing of Rep. Sean Maloney (D-N.Y.)? Whatever it was, Mueller was much more substantive during the second half of his testimony, despite being tormented by a vaguely Incredible Hulk-like jacketless Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio). Did we have the hero we longed for? Not by a long shot, but the words “unmitigated disaster” no longer immediately sprang to mind. Mueller still didn’t stand up and do a Rachel Maddow-style explanation of how the Trump campaign committed malfeasance, but it was something.

And by the end of the day, along came Trump to remind us that even if Mueller wasn’t the hero Democrats needed, the president certainly remains the villain.

“The performance was obviously not very good,” Trump told reporters outside the White House on Wednesday evening. “He had a lot of problems.”

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If Trump was so sure the day was great for him, maybe it wasn’t really so bad, after all? Gleeful Republicans and glum Democrats alike should look back at what Mueller actually said in response to all those questions. When asked by Nadler, “Did your report totally exonerate the president?” Mueller answered definitely: “No.” All day, he hammered that theme, in his own frustratingly subdued way: The investigation was above reproach. The facts were all in the report. And they were not good for the president.

And a boring TV performance doesn’t undo any of what Trump did.