For months now, progressives have been wondering if Attorney General Merrick Garland was going to ever formally charge Donald Trump for the crimes he seemed to have committed as president. The question as to what Garland was waiting for got louder as the Congressional January 6th Committee released its findings, revealing even more corruption from the former president.
Well, yesterday it appears that Garland finally has decided to do something, with Trump himself announcing that Federal Agents had raided his home in Mar-O-Lago while he was out of town. This is a truly unprecedented move made by the Federal government; such a raid has never been carried out against a former American president, but, then again, no American president has ever been as openly corrupt as Trump was. And it's important to note that this raid was made by agents who first were granted a search warrant by a federal judge, meaning that they were able to prove a strong belief that illegal materials were in Mar-O-Lago and that only such a raid could obtain them. So, it was not an action taken lightly by the Justice Department.
Somewhat amusingly, the media has pounced on this story and drawn attention away from congress's successful passage of the Deficit Reduction bill. Yes, as always, Trump sucks up all the attention, good or bad.
The crazy thing is that this raid may not have anything to do with January 6th; it appears it is in response to him taking classified documents that legally belong to the American public out of the White House and refusing to return them. Combine this with recent reports that Trump also routinely tore apart, flushed down the toilet or even ate classified documents, and you can see why Garland took action. And while we may never know just why Trump decided to destroy(or steal) so many documents, it certainly doesn't put him in a good light.
The former president has, predictably, blasted the raid an "attack by Radical Left Democrats." And, even more predictably, Republicans in congress have joined him in piling on, and even darker statements have been made by Pro-Trump right wing media figures, like on the Steve Bannon podcast “Bannon’s War Room,” when, Joe Kent, a Trump-endorsed House candidate in Washington said “This just shows everyone what many of us have been saying for a very long time, we're at war."
As always, the right wing in this country has no last straw when it comes to Trump; really, why should they? They stood by him after he bragged about sexually assaulting women, called white supremacist rioters "very fine people", refused to admit that he lost the 2020 election and incited a riot. What's a little illegal stealing of presidential documents after all that?
Even more depressing is the possibility that this raid, as necessary as it seems to be, could wind up strengthening Trump's chance of winning if he runs again in 2024, as he most surely will. Constant complaints about how he has been unfairly persecuted is a big part of his dishonest persona. What just happened at Mar-O-Lago could just push his followers to support him even more, as he screams about how unfair it all is, and how it was all partisan. I hate to think about it, but Donald Trump has so completely rewritten the rules of acceptable political behavior (and decent human behavior), that even having his home subject to a criminal raid may not stop him from regaining the White House, and it could even help him.
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