Explosives require careful handling. Sometimes they blow up in your face.

After the 2016 election, the so-called deep state was confident that it had the power easily to either stop, remove, or delegitimize the outlier Donald Trump and his presidency.

Give it credit, the Washington apparat quite imaginatively pulled out all the stops. But now the administrative state’s multifaceted efforts are starting to unwind, and perhaps even boomerang, on the perpetrators.

In truth, it’s not just Washington apparat.  The entire multiplex world of the establishment is crumbling in a variety of arenas, from entertainment to Silicon Valley to the workplace.

It would probably give Robert Mueller a nervous breakdown, not to mention James Comey, Andrew McCabe and the rest of the FBI cabal, past and present, but at this point the special counsel seems to be actually causing the reelection of Donald Trump.

Most of the country, other than the greed heads in the media and extreme Democrat Party operatives, no longer gives a hoot in Hades about the "Russia Probe."  They're frustrated and sick of it.

There's a dawning national consensus of "enough already" reflected by Judge Ellis when he demanded to know exactly what Paul Manafort's possible money laundering schemes of years ago had to do with Trump colluding with Russia in the 2016 election. The same might be said of Stormy Daniels, whose Russia connection is even more remote.

But let's skip past the subplots of the moment to the greatest of all unintended consequences of this endless investigation -- the decline and fall of the Democrat Party.

What Mueller really is

Robert Mueller has plenty of questions for President Trump, and maybe he will get to ask them. Most of them are perjury traps rather than real questions for the president.

Surprisingly, they contain very little that wasn’t in the public domain though prior leaks. In other words, the president is not a target because they have nothing implicating him, and so they want to use the interview to create such material.

But the conduct of the investigation by the special counsel and his team has raised a lot of questions as to its foundation, conflicts of interest, fairness and methods.

If you believe the last Harvard Caps-Harris Poll, much of the public supports Robert Mueller going forward with his investigation, although the Washington Post reported yesterday (5/01), “The number of people who say the Mueller investigation should continue is shrinking.’

That shrinking would no doubt continue if Mr. Mueller were required to answer a few questions himself.  In a deposition under oath with threat of perjury.  Such as:

There are lots of possible counterfactuals to think about had Hillary Clinton won the presidency as all the experts had predicted.

The U.S. embassy would have stayed in Tel Aviv. “Strategic patience” would likely still govern the North Korea dilemma. Fracking would be curtailed. The — rather than “our” — miners really would be put out of work. Coal certainly would not have been “beautiful.”

The economy probably would be slogging along at below 2 percent GDP growth.

China would be delighted, as would Iran. But most important, there would be no collusion narrative — neither one concerning a defeated Donald Trump nor another implicating a victorious Hillary Clinton.

In triumph, progressives couldn’t have cared less whether Russians supposedly had tried to help a now irrelevant Trump; and they certainly would have prevented any investigation of the winning Clinton 2016 campaign.

In sum, Hillary’s supposedly sure victory, not fear of breaking the law, prompted most of the current 2016 scandals, and her embittering defeat means they are not being addressed as scandals.