So ends one of the more incoherent political scandals in modern memory.

After two long, breathless years of investigation, accusations, leaks, scoops, walk-backs, and wild conspiracies, the main findings of Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump-Russia conspiracy were finally released on Sunday. As most anyone reading this now knows, its conclusions are devastating, though not for the reasons many of Mueller’s fans had hoped.

The excerpt of the report included in attorney general William Barr’s summary reads thus: “The investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” Placed just after a list of statistics outlining the massive scope of the investigation — thousands of subpoenas, many hundreds of search warrants and witnesses interviewed, and the like — the message seems clear: there is nothing here.

There’s certainly a chance that Barr, a Trump political appointee, summarized the findings in such a way as to be most politically advantageous for the president (though he did also point out that Mueller did “not exonerate [Trump]” over the charge of obstruction of justice). And many will continue to hang on Mueller’s wording — “did not establish” — to insist the jury is still out.

But those still holding on to a flicker of hope that Mueller will emerge on horseback, thick stack of papers in hand, with details and conclusions running counter to Barr’s summary need to get a grip. If there was something there, it would have leaked a long time ago.

It’s hard to overstate how devastating this all is. This is the culmination of what some declared the “crime of the century.” The idea that Trump “colluded” with Russia was considered virtually a foregone conclusion for the past two years by the majority of the political and media class. It fed a constant stream of breathless, often irresponsible and misleading, media coverage, the definitive account of which was written up by Matt Taibbi and is worth reading in full. And until an approaching election concentrated Democrats’ minds and brought them to their senses in last year’s midterms, it served as the foundational element of the otherwise incoherent “resistance” to Trump’s presidency.

It’s not as if there weren’t voices warning against this. Figures like Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, Aaron Maté, Michael Tracey and many more have faced attacks, ridicule, and, too often, baseless smears and accusations for criticizing media coverage of the scandal and calling for skepticism and caution.

And it’s not as if there haven’t been signs that the theory would fall short of reality. One of the earliest Russiagate scandals — Michael Flynn’s secret contact with the Russian ambassador in December 2016 — swiftly turned out to have actually been about protecting Israeli interests. Congress learned early on that the fiercely anti-Trump FBI official Peter Strzok had privately admitted about the investigation that “There’s no big there there.” Successive Trump associates were criminally charged, not for making secret deals with the Kremlin, but for other, sometimes tangentially related, crimes, including lying to investigators. Detail after sensational detail of the infamous Steele dossier went unproven or was proven wrong, such as former Trump attorney Michael Cohen’s alleged clandestine trip to Prague.

As the Mueller investigation approached its end point, even media outlets that had spent years hyping the story started publishing skeptical accounts about the impending release of its findings. Michael Isikoff, the journalist who literally wrote the book on the scandal, publicly doubted anything would turn up. A few months later, both Democrats and Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee were forced to admit that after two years of intense investigation, they had found “no direct evidence” of a Trump-Russia conspiracy.

As disappointment loomed, some of the conspiracy theory’s biggest boosters already started shifting the goalposts. How could they not? A cornucopia of media and political figures have staked their careers and professional reputations on its veracity, many have made fortunes off book deals on the scandal, some of which are now no doubt on the rocks.

Two years on, with talk of “collusion” suffusing the political discourse, it’s easy to forget that the alleged collusion was never really the heart of the matter. Indeed, the Clinton campaign itself “colluded” with Ukraine’s far right-enabling government during the election, and foreign powers like Saudi Arabia and Israel regularly “collude” with both major parties out in the open.

Rather, the core concern that animated the last two years of anti-Russian panic was the notion that Trump was under the influence (or, depending on who you listened to, under the direct control) of a neoliberal, authoritarian petrostate in the form of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. This worrying idea, though unproven (though in a different sense somewhat true), was one that led preeminent liberal columnist Jonathan Chait to spend thousands of words wondering if “Trump has been a Russian asset since 1987,” less than two decades after writing column after column confidently asserting there were WMDs in Iraq.

Unfortunately Trump’s actual presidency swiftly turned this theory into a joke. In power, Trump has been the most aggressively anti-Russian president since the Cold War. Yet nothing he did, no matter how hostile to the Kremlin — from sending arms to Ukraine to bombing Syria to perpetuating a new nuclear arms race to trying to knock off a Russian ally in Venezuela — could make the establishment budge from the certainty that, somehow, some way, this was all part of a cunning plot hatched by Putin. When Trump recently withdrew from the Reagan-era INF Treaty, prominent liberals somehow determined that this, too, was a “favor to Putin.” Russia might have found Trump a grave disappointment, but he could never be aggressive enough for a US media that declared US withdrawal from the Middle East a “reward” to Trump’s supposed master.

No one can be faulted for initially entertaining the theory. Trump’s ramshackle campaign, like his presidency, was an open invitation for influence peddling and corruption of all kinds, particularly given Trump’s overseas real estate interests. It’s clear the Russian government made attempts to aid or even infiltrate Trump’s campaign, though to what end is still not clear (it’s hard to believe the Kremlin foresaw Trump’s victory when even the candidate himself didn’t, and various reports have the motive as anything from sticking it to Clinton to getting revenge for the release of the Panama Papers). Meanwhile, Trump and his associates did seemingly everything they could to make themselves look as guilty as possible.

But rather than treat these developments with measured skepticism — there was, after all, always a possibility that Trump and his associates were amateurishly lying and obstructing justice to tamp down a scandal that was less criminal than embarrassing and politically damaging — the political and media establishment largely threw caution, care, and, sometimes, professionalism out the window, expecting their conclusions would eventually be proven entirely right. The fact that less than two decades ago denizens of these same journalistic quarters — in some cases the exact same individuals — had been duped by sensationalized, intelligence agency-fed stories about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction apparently gave them no pause.

Instead of removing Trump from power or even weakening him — the real purpose of all this — those who pushed the Trump-Russia scandal have instead handed him an entirely unearned victory. It’s not clear how politically valuable it will prove to be in the long run; Trump’s policies, after all, have been disastrous for the vast majority of voters, and his historic unpopularity has little to do with a scandal that obsessed only a narrow sliver of the US public.

But Trump, who in 2016 ran disingenuously against the establishment before spending his entire presidency coddling it, can now say he’s been vindicated. He’ll point to the last two years as an organized conspiracy by the Democratic establishment, in concert with the media, to destroy his rebel presidency, just as he’s been saying all along. Perhaps it won’t work. But the Democrats, who have only recently begun learning to oppose Trump on anything other than Russia-related nonsense have a lot of catching up to do.

Meanwhile, it’s hard to overstate the damage the media has done to itself, an ominous development when, coming off its role in the Iraq War, its public standing remains low. After spending the last two years both celebrating itself and panicking about Trump’s hostility to press freedom, the media has now appeared to confirm every ungenerous right-wing talking point about itself, and it has done so when press freedoms are increasingly under attack, not from Trump but from the establishment that supposedly hates him. This is a grave unforced error whose exact significance for the press we likely won’t know for some time.