Former Barack Obama administration official Van Jones told CNN’s Don Lemon on Sunday evening that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s finding that there had been no collusion between President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and the Russian government had triggered “sadness and disappointment and disorientation among progressives and Democrats.”

Jones noted that Democrats had become too focused on the Mueller investigation, believing it would provide a means to remove Trump from office, while ignoring other issues.

I’ve been trying to tell folks for a long time: there’s no Santa Claus, there’s no Harry Potter with a magic wand. And I can’t tell you how many people over the years have come up to me — serious people, with their hearts broken — saying, “But when Bob Mueller comes, man, he’s gonna get Trump, and Trump’s gonna be out of there — Van, how many more days do you think Trump has left? And I said, “Maybe eight years, if we don’t start working on real issues and not just talking about Robert Mueller all the time.”

Van Jones on Mueller findings: “There’s an honest level of sadness and disappointment and disorientation among progressives and Democrats and I think it goes deeper than just what’s in the report.” https://t.co/0sF0fQ4YY4 pic.twitter.com/YV6l7KNxIQ — CNN Tonight (@CNNTonight) March 25, 2019

As Breitbart News noted on Friday — before news that Mueller’s report had been completed, and that there would be no further indictments:

The “Russia collusion” hoax has undermined the new administration and divided the country. But perhaps its worst damage has been to the Democratic Party itself. The party establishment became so obsessed with Trump, Russia, and impeachment that it failed to develop an alternative vision, a set of policies that could compete to provide a better life for ordinary Americans (who are, it turns out, doing better than ever under Trump).

Jones described a Democratic Party that essentially wanted Trump to have rigged the election with Russia’s help, and hoped the president was a Russian president.

The revelation that none of that was true had created a general sense of moral confusion among Democrats, Jones said, and also an inability to understand what the administration has done, without the filter of “Russia collusion.”

“It is good that the president was not up to no good with the Russians,” Jones said. “But it’s still confusing to people — ‘Why does he kiss up to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin so much? Why does he want to meet with him by himself?’. People are confused — ‘Well, if it’s not that, what is it?'”

Jones could have elaborated, but did not, that voters and activists on the left had struggled to understand that Trump’s policies on Russia — the toughest of any president since the Cold War — were different than his diplomatic tone.

Overall, Jones said, there was a sense of grief: “I think people are also just heartbroken that it seems like he’s going to continue to say and do stuff that we can’t do, and there’s no consequences.”

In other words: progressives and Democrats had misled themselves, and each other, into believing they had not actually lost the 2016 election. Now there was a sense of grief, and a reckoning with reality — albeit perhaps too late.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.