If Ivanka is the iciest Trump and Eric is the kindliest Trump, Donald Jr. is the Trumpiest Trump. It’s not just the hair, which, while special to Don Jr., still borrows from the old man in its independence from taste or passage of time. It’s the Weltanschauung. What Donald J. Trump has to pretend to be, Don Jr. really is. Donald has ideas that are loosely connected, open to alteration, and based more on gut than systemic thought. Don Jr., by contrast, is a surprisingly consistent and clued-up populist of the right. This past weekend, The Washington Post reported that Don Jr. has been a fixture at Republican rallies and fund-raisers, “a natural,” according House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, even as he contends with persistent headaches over whether he might have prevaricated before Congress. He’s a promising politician who also happens to be in some high-profile trouble. This leads to a simple question: is Don Jr. headed to federal office or federal prison?

When Don Jr. is in the news, it’s usually because he’s in a pinch. There’s the personal stuff: he’s divorcing his wife, Vanessa Trump, and dating former Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle. (I’ll note that she calls him “Junior Mint,” and he calls her “Pooh Bear,” in case you like your news items emetic.) Then there’s the political stuff: he’s at risk of getting tangled up in legal trouble over a meeting, now infamous, that he had in Trump Tower with a long-winded Russian lawyer, Natalia Vladimirovna Veselnitskaya, who was promising dirt on Hillary Clinton and her dealings with Russia. When the news of that meeting came out a year later, Don Jr. released a statement to The New York Times that was misleading by omission (it had been dictated by his father), fast amended it, and then testified evasively before Congress. Some legal scholars now believe that Don Jr. may face charges of perjury.

For all the worries, however, each development and headline in the Don-Jr.-and-Russian-collusion story has turned out to be less momentous than met the eye, all the “Boom” tweets notwithstanding. For one thing, the idea of a years-long conspiracy doesn’t jibe with a two-bit music promoter named Rob Goldstone and others trying to establish a connection between Russia and Trump for the first time in 2016. For another, Goldstone was promising “official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia.” Recall that the concept of stolen e-mails was still weeks away, and the idea that Hillary Clinton was the one with shady Russian connections was widely entertained by conservatives. (Many partisans on the right had been obsessing for months over the connections between Bill and Hillary Clinton and the sale of a uranium firm to Russian buyers.) There was no reason yet for Don Jr. to suspect Goldstone’s contact of peddling stolen, as opposed to merely inside, information.

In the meantime, the investigation itself has started to look strange, too. The lawyer, Veselnitskaya, was connected to Fusion GPS, the firm that was behind the dossier on Trump, later revealed to be funded by the campaign of Hillary Clinton. Fusion GPS also employed the spouse of F.B.I. official Bruce Ohr, who was in touch with the firm and investigators at the F.B.I. Now we can even read the allegation, from RealClearInvestigations, that Clinton-linked players were reportedly behind the meeting at Trump Tower to begin with. No, don’t bother re-reading the previous sentences. I’m confused, too. The point is this: these Clinton-Fusion-F.B.I. overlaps create bad optics that would hinder efforts to throw the book at Don Jr., even under conditions of unimpeachable investigative work and unambiguous criminality. Those conditions weren’t met here. If you want to indict Don Jr. for something, find something in the Trump empire, the organization with supporting characters like Michael Cohen and tenants like Paul Manafort. (Recall that, in 2012, he and Ivanka and Eric only narrowly escaped indictment for felony fraud over claims they’d been making to prospective purchasers of a Trump condo development in SoHo.) Or just indict Jared. He’s been quiet, but we can’t take that for granted.