by George Neumayr
Like Shakespeare’s King Lear, Donald Trump is a “man more sinned against than sinning.” Trump’s enemies invariably exceed him in excesses. They accuse him of dictatorial behavior even as they seek to turn America into a left-wing authoritarian regime. The wags who dubbed their feverish hatred of him “Trump Derangement Syndrome” were right. The condition is altogether real, spurring everything from the bogus Russia investigation to the equally outlandish FBI raid on his home.
The condition is clearly incurable. It induced the infected in official Washington to try and cripple Trump before, during, and now after his presidency. The hopelessly politicized senior leaders at the FBI and the Justice Department have learned nothing from their utterly discredited investigation of Trump as a supposed Russian agent. That fiasco led to spying on Trump Tower (just as Trump claimed) and using an oafish “confidential informant” to infiltrate his campaign.
Former FBI head James Comey, after he got popped for these extreme measures, claimed disingenuously that he wasn’t investigating Trump directly but only his campaign and had an obligation to protect it from foreign influence. Of course, this was contradicted by the fact that he never gave Trump a briefing on his ostensible concerns. As it came out later in the texts of agent Peter Strzok, the FBI wanted to “stop” Trump and had an “insurance” policy in case he won. The Mueller probe that hobbled almost half of Trump’s presidency was the fulfillment of Strzok’s partisan crusade.
Official Washington has long convinced itself that Trump is an inconceivable monster capable of anything. Hence, it could believe a surreal story about Trump hiring hookers to defile Barack Obama’s bed in Moscow. It could believe that Trump was in Putin’s employ. And it now believes that he is so dangerous he deserves fewer due process protections than a mobster.
From the start, the ruling class treated him like a foreign occupier of the country and would whip themselves up into a lather over his most prosaic exercises of presidential power. They now tell us in hushed tones that Trump’s alleged violation of the Presidential Records Act obligated the FBI to ransack his home. What a sick farce. This trivial matter probably could have been resolved with a single phone call from the FBI to Trump’s lawyers. But the ruling class feels no need to extend even the most minor courtesies to a former president because it sees Trump as irredeemably illegitimate.
Beneath this view lies not a respect for democracy, as the ruling class contends, but a contempt for it and the “deplorables” who compose much of the electorate. America’s elites are fanatically determined to deny the American people the democratic choice of electing Trump again. From John Brennan to James Comey to Merrick Garland, these elites behave not as dispassionate defenders of democracy but as partisan hacks no different from the crackpot intelligence operators who work in Third World one-party states. The FBI in particular has become largely an appendage of the Democratic Party, trafficking in propaganda and dirty tricks in service to the one-party state that President Joe Biden wants a “fundamentally” transformed America to become.
The FBI’s treatment of Trump is akin to what we see in the crudest autocracies, where the moment a politician loses power, he finds himself a hunted enemy of the state and must either fight to reclaim his office or suffer prison and death. Trump is like America’s banished Napoleon whom the ruling class would imprison on an island if they could get away with it.
In recent days, the chattering class has pooh-poohed the notion of an FBI raid on Trump’s home as evidence of America turning into a banana republic. But it is, almost cartoonishly so. From the FBI’s protection of the current president’s son to the unprecedented harassment of his chief political opponent, America under Biden looks as ramshackle as the left-wing dystopias of the past. What we’re witnessing is truly frightening and goes far beyond Trump, foreshadowing a brutal American future in which the ultimate crime is conservatism itself.
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George Neumayr, a senior editor at The American Spectator, is author most recently of The Biden Deception: Moderate, Opportunist, or the Democrats’ Crypto-Socialist?
This article is spot on, but it is way worse the TDS. In Mar-a-Lago the DOJ knew he had the documents and previously simply asked the President to keep them secure. Furthermore, any search warrant that excludes the attorneys or witnesses from being present is forfeit and illegal as it allows the possibility for evidence to be “planted”. Kinda like the fake “dossier”.This is political persecution and prosecution as is done in China and Russia and third world dictatorships and it should be clear and abhorrent to every American citizen that this Administration has weaponized the FBI, the DOJ, the CIA, the DOD and the IRS against its political opposition.
Now they will double the size of the IRS, (for a mere 80 BILLION) adding 87,000 armed agents. Think they’ll be coming after anybody but Republicans? Do you think they need to do this if there will be no new taxes on anybody making under $400,000? Remember Lois Lerner who got caught targeting Conservative groups under Obama. No consequences for her and she retired with a full government pension. Just like Hillary, Jim Comey, James Clapper, John Brennan, Peter Strozk, Michael Sussman, and every other Democrat who lied and conspired for four years, two impeachments and a Special Prosecutor investigation to oust a duly elected President. Now they conspire with the Jan. 6 committee clown court to try and make it impossible for Trump to run in 2024.
I say they are the real “Seditionists”, not the Jan. 6 protestors who are being locked up for walking around the Capitol on Jan. 6.; many of whom were let in by Capitol police. Over 200 have already been sentenced in the largest country wide manhunt in FBI history. How many BLM and Antifa from the real riots in the summer of 2020 have been arrested or charged? Riots where 24 people were killed and billions of dollars of property damage and businesses destroyed across dozens of states. Wake up America. Unless there is a Republican tsunami, and not just a “red wave” in November, our Republic will be over and we will be the western equivalent of the CCP.