There’s no need to get into the merits of the FBI’s execution of a search warrant at Trump’s home. Nobody but a handful of people in the DOJ/FBI and a federal judge really know what all that’s about.
But that fact puts the response of the Trump Party (from would-be House Speaker McCarthy, to would-be President DeSantis, to Republican propaganda channel FOX News) into a stunningly clear light.
And what that light shows, with no room for doubt, is that the Trump Party is the enemy of the rule of law.
Those people have made declarations — no need to spell them out here — that have no conceivable justification. Without seeing what was presented to the federal judge who approved the search, they are entitled only to wonder.
The Trump Party’s attack on that search can only mean that they are the enemies of the rule of law. Of course, we’ve seen that many times before, in their protection of Trump. But their attacks on the DOJ and FBI are a particularly obvious demonstration of their being a lawless party.
The Democrats should seize on this opportunity to demonstrate that lawlessness. There are Americans who could follow this reasonably simple demonstration of the fascistic nature of the Trump Party. And it is the Democrats’ responsibility to make them pay a political price for this wanton exposure of how the Republican world betrays the basic principles of the American constitutional order in service of a man who — as the 1/6 Committee has shown — attempted to overthrow that order in a coup d’etat.
Which leads to one more point.
In principle, the Republicans might be entitled to suspect the search to be politically motivated. Just as Democrats suspect a political motivation behind the whole “Hunter Biden” theme.
But really, in this situation, even such a suspicion can easily be denounced as unwarranted:
- When the DOJ is led by a man — AG Merrick Garland — who until very recently was frustrating much of the non-Trump part of the American political world with his apparent excessive hesitancy about investigating the people behind the Insurrection (even getting pushed in that direction by Republican Liz Cheney, and by Garland’s former law school professor Lawrence Tribe);
- And when the man whose premises were searched at Mar-a-Lago has shown a level of criminality and lying far beyond any presidential precedent — two quite legitimate impeachments, 30,000 false or misleading statements, all that the 1/6 Committee has shown;
any American with an ounce of political sanity left in their minds should figure the odds that this search was legitimate are prohibitively in favor of its being entirely justified.
The Democrats don’t need to talk about the reasons for the search. But they should loudly expose the perfidious nature of the Trump Party — as the enemies of the American system — using the grotesquely indefensible attacks some of their most prominent voices have launched.
The political battle in America today is best understood as a battle between Democracy and Fascism. This is a moment of opportunity to help awaken the American people to that fact.