WINNERS:

Robert S. Mueller III: Delivered an important step towards unraveling the ongoing catastrophe at the heart of American government and is about to get a well-earned vacation if the president has any say in the matter

George W. Bush: Ugh, this whole thing will probably further rehabilitate his image, won’t it

John F. Kelly: Limited Internet access means I can’t say this with absolute certainty, but it’s a pretty safe bet that General Kelly continues to do good work protecting all of America from the worst of Trump’s rage in the wake of developments like these, and hasn’t spent the past day digging a deeper hole for the administration by doing something horribly ill-advised like, say, going on TV and suggesting that the Civil War could have been avoided if they’d been better at compromising or something like that

The Democratic Party: Further evidence of Russian collusion provides them with another convenient excuse to ignore the very real and increasingly pressing questions of ideology, tactics, and messaging that made it possible for them to lose the 2016 election in the first place to fucking Donald Trump

Puerto Rico, in one specific instance: Tore up the insanely-obviously-just-a-vehicle-for-enormous-unchecked-cronyism contract granted to Whitefish to rebuild the commonwealth’s power grid, heroically saving the United States from turning into Brazil quite as quickly as some of us feared

 

LOSERS:

Puerto Rico, in pretty much all other instances right now: sigh

Paul Manafort: Laundered tens of millions of dollars and yet didn’t spend the money to get out of New York

Rick Gates: Indicted on the same money laundering, tax evasion, and foreign lobbying charges as Manafort, once again failing to emerge from his mentor’s shadow

The American justice system: Whoooooooo’s excited to see anybody actually convicted of anything related to this investigation serve three months of an 18-month prison sentence

Dr. #Content: Of all the times I could have suffered a comprehensive loss of TV and Internet service, it had to be the past two days

Verizon FIOS: Having spent the better part of two days before reaching an actual human being for a problem that was clearly, blatantly beyond the ability of the automated calling system to address, I’m really hoping the next indictment is for them

Paul Ryan: Fell under a witch’s spell and was replaced by an inanimate papier-mâché statue of himself, but let’s be honest, nobody will ever notice the change

George Papadopoulos: Forget pleading guilty to lying to the FBI; his life was in tatters the moment Trump called him an “excellent guy” in March 2016

Ted Cruz: My limited Internet access means I can’t say for certain that he’s made some horribly self-debasing comment on this whole ordeal, but it’s a pretty safe bet, honestly

The Libs: This is all just part of pan-galactic hyper-Othello master Donald J. Trump’s genius plan to render American liberalism so triggered that it never again objects to his Making America Great Again

 

 

Image: Oliver Spalt, Wikimedia Commons / Other images in public domain