Why Every New Trump Crime Just Makes Republicans Angrier at the FBI
Repubs know that they're lying to idiot followers and they use that to their advantage.
This weekend, Florida governor Ron DeSantis delighted the crowd at a conference for the far-right group Turning Point Action by proclaiming that the FBI’s warrant to seize national-security documents stolen by Donald Trump was yet another double standard against law-abiding conservatives. “You look at the raid at Mar-a-Lago, and I’m just trying to remember — maybe somebody here can remind me — about when they did a search warrant at Hillary’s house when she had a rogue server at Chappaqua and she was laundering classified information,” he announced. “I don’t remember them doing that.”
Begin with DeSantis’s claim that the FBI never seized Hillary Clinton’s server: In fact, the FBI took it in August 2015. “The seizure of the server, along with electronic copies of its contents maintained by her private lawyer, is in connection with a criminal investigation into the mishandling of classified information,” gloated a National Review editorial at the time. “It is being dressed up by a reeling Clinton campaign as Hillary’s ‘voluntary’ surrender of the server in connection with a ‘security inquiry.’”
Should the Justice Department ultimately decline to charge Trump — which, barring anything deeply sensitive or incriminating in the documents, would seem to be the most likely outcome — conservatives will almost certainly register the FBI’s intervention as yet another case of persecution. The reality of the situation will be just the opposite: Trump openly flouting the law and getting away with it. But the alchemy of conservative paranoia will transmute it into more evidence of his innocence and yet another reason for them to rally to his side when he inevitably proceeds to his next crime.
The underlying cause of this pathological dynamic is a right-wing propaganda bubble that pumps conservatives full of rage, cordens them off from any information that would mitigate their sense of persecution, and primes them to be led by demagogues who feel free to act with impunity, knowing their base will stay loyal regardless. This dysfunction produced Trump’s rise in the first place. And now every new instance of Trump’s misconduct simply confirms to the Republican Party that he was right all along.
Repubs know that they're lying to idiot followers and they use that to their advantage.
This weekend, Florida governor Ron DeSantis delighted the crowd at a conference for the far-right group Turning Point Action by proclaiming that the FBI’s warrant to seize national-security documents stolen by Donald Trump was yet another double standard against law-abiding conservatives. “You look at the raid at Mar-a-Lago, and I’m just trying to remember — maybe somebody here can remind me — about when they did a search warrant at Hillary’s house when she had a rogue server at Chappaqua and she was laundering classified information,” he announced. “I don’t remember them doing that.”
Begin with DeSantis’s claim that the FBI never seized Hillary Clinton’s server: In fact, the FBI took it in August 2015. “The seizure of the server, along with electronic copies of its contents maintained by her private lawyer, is in connection with a criminal investigation into the mishandling of classified information,” gloated a National Review editorial at the time. “It is being dressed up by a reeling Clinton campaign as Hillary’s ‘voluntary’ surrender of the server in connection with a ‘security inquiry.’”
Should the Justice Department ultimately decline to charge Trump — which, barring anything deeply sensitive or incriminating in the documents, would seem to be the most likely outcome — conservatives will almost certainly register the FBI’s intervention as yet another case of persecution. The reality of the situation will be just the opposite: Trump openly flouting the law and getting away with it. But the alchemy of conservative paranoia will transmute it into more evidence of his innocence and yet another reason for them to rally to his side when he inevitably proceeds to his next crime.
The underlying cause of this pathological dynamic is a right-wing propaganda bubble that pumps conservatives full of rage, cordens them off from any information that would mitigate their sense of persecution, and primes them to be led by demagogues who feel free to act with impunity, knowing their base will stay loyal regardless. This dysfunction produced Trump’s rise in the first place. And now every new instance of Trump’s misconduct simply confirms to the Republican Party that he was right all along.
