There should be no tut-tutting about the unprecedented FBI raid on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. It is exactly what it looks like: a show of force against the opposition leader by the head of state and his personal bodyguards. If this happened in any other country, it immediately would be denounced as the act of a dictator. But since it is being done by Joe Biden, the putative leader of Our Democracy™, we are being told to “wait and see” whether this extraordinary action was justified as the Left does a war dance.
This raid is an unequivocal travesty for democracy. It will not “lower the temperature” in our fracturing republic, as Biden once promised to do. To the contrary, it will bring us further along to a boiling point, inflame deep and bitter divisions, and make a hellish descent into violent unrest more likely. It cannot but provoke a large part of the country, and solidify a conviction among them that they are living under the boot of a despotic occupation.
And for what? So that a failing, unpopular president and his base can get their jollies?
Trump supporters know the Left hates Trump, that they regard him as a latter-day Hitler, and that they have spent the past six years anxiously searching for one pretext or another to throw him in prison. After years of fruitless and unhinged “walls are closing in” speculation, there is just no way that Trump could be prosecuted now without arousing deep and well-founded suspicions of political retribution.
The outrageous East Germany optics of the Mar-a-Lago raid show, at best, a careless if not malicious insensitivity to that reality. They are a clear indicator that this raid is politically motivated and not, as the Stalinists tell us, about making sure “no one is above the law.”
Trump supporters know that when Democrats break the law, they get a slap on the wrist at worst. They know that Attorney General Merrick Garland is a craven partisan who has used counterterrorism tools to target conservative parents, and that despite his claim to combat “domestic extremism,” Garland does not give a damn about violent extremism coming from the Left
Trump supporters also know that the FBI is not their friend, and they are right to suspect malfeasance in the Trump raid. They know that the FBI spied on Trump’s 2016 campaign using a dossier of disinformation that came from Hillary Clinton and which the FBI knew was not reliable. They know that top-ranking agents in the Trump-Russia probe discussed “stopping” Trump among themselves and implementing an “insurance policy,” just in case the people made the “wrong” choice for president in 2016. They know that the FBI has had Hunter Biden’s laptop since 2019, and that the FBI raided the home of a journalist in possession of Ashley Biden’s diary, in which Biden’s daughter reportedly describes inappropriate showers with her father. They know that the FBI kicked in the doors of Roger Stone’s house before dawn for “obstructing” a bogus probe that consumed more than half of Trump’s term.
It’s funny to hear some pundits now insist that we must simply trust the FBI, after the bureau has done so much to destroy its credibility.
Contra the Stalinists, there is nothing remotely normal or democratic about a raid on the home of an opposition leader and former president. Democrats, who claim a faithful devotion to “norms,” should understand that such actions are strongly discouraged—unheard of, really—because the United States is supposed to be a republic, not a banana republic.
But times have changed. Americans have received a foretaste of this scenario for years from the Stasi-like shock-and-awe tactics the FBI has employed with increasing regularity against the Democratic Party’s enemies. Except this time, they’re going after a former president, a man who received 73 million votes in the last presidential election and who, barring improper interference in the political process, is likely to run again and quite possibly defeat the incumbent in a rematch.
Nothing like this has ever happened before in the United States. It simply is not done. If we are to infer a motive for the raid from the effect that it is likely to have, we can suppose only that the Biden regime wants to radicalize the Right, that they are trying to make the bugbear of right-wing “domestic extremism” into a reality.
If the past 20 years have taught us anything, it’s that the FBI is better at creating terrorists than catching them. Beneath all of the hysteria about the Capitol protest on January 6, 2021, the regime would like nothing more than to radicalize the Trump movement.
But Trump supporters are not “domestic terrorists.” They are law-abiding, middle-class people who harbor entirely legitimate grievances about having their nation plundered by a corrupt political class. The Biden regime would make them into disillusioned guerillas. An actual insurrection would give the regime a reason to crack down even harder on political dissent, as it has done since January 6.
It is sobering to reflect on how this all began. Americans in 2016 had a simple request: stop plundering our country and enforce the immigration laws. The regime answered by waging a soft coup which, lately, is looking more like a real coup. The political history of America over the past six years can be summed up as the struggle of a corrupt, self-serving political class to eliminate the democratic process and assert its will by fiat. The message they have sent is that in Our Democracy™ the people cannot peacefully change their government. If they dare to choose new rulers, the political class will strike back with a vengeance.
If the raid proves anything, it is that the establishment still fears Trump. To Trump’s supporters, that is one reason for hope. But our nation should tremble to think what the political class might yet do to preserve its power.