August 18, 2022 10:19
If Donald Trump has committed crimes while leaving the White House he should receive the same treatment as any other alleged criminal. The reason is simple. As John Adams said, ours is a government of laws, not a government of men. Nobody, not even a president, is above the law.
But then why did I feel upset watching the reports on the FBI search in Mar-a-Lago?
Probably because this country is approaching a level of political violence never seen since the civil war. For anyone who has spent any time in the physical and virtual spaces of the American right this fact is evident. Go to a gun fair. Visit a church on the right. Attend a Trump rally. Regardless of the circumstances, doomsday prophecies repeat themselves over and over again. And they are scary. Whenever and wherever I happened to hear about scenarios of an impending conflict, the premise was always an alleged abuse of power, in most cases committed by Democrats through the exploitation of federal agencies to target their own. political opponents. I have always walked away from these experiences with a recurring thought: if the United States is a powder keg, a government misstep (real or perceived) could ignite the fuse.
A new chapter
Do you think I’m exaggerating? It is an accusation that has already been leveled at me in the past. But we have seen what happens when millions of Americans lose faith in the nation’s pivotal institutions. We have seen what happens when millions of Americans become convinced that their leaders are illegitimate. We have seen what happens when millions of Americans are manipulated into believing that Trump is suffering to defend them, that an attack on Trump is an attack on them, their identity, their ideas and their sense of sovereignty. And I’m afraid that all of this is about to repeat itself.
We are often tempted to think that January 6, 2021 is just a special day in the history of our country. It is comforting to be convinced that the events of that day – with a president calling upon a violent crowd to storm congress in an attempt to overturn the results of a free and fair vote – were merely the result of unprecedented conditions that accidentally arose. all at the same time but outside our national normality.
But perhaps it would be better to assume that January 6 was the beginning of a new chapter.
People spoke shamelessly of the possibility of amassing weapons. Many were preparing for the day when violence would become inevitable
It is certainly worth remembering how Trump, who has long presented himself as a victim of political persecution, threatened to jail his opponent Hillary Clinton throughout the 2016 election campaign, with slogans such as “lock her up” rallies across the country (Republicans didn’t flinch when the FBI announced an investigation into Clinton just days before the election). During that election campaign – while traveling the country talking to Republican voters in hopes of understanding the Trump phenomenon – I started hearing about civil war. Those conversations were upsetting. People spoke shamelessly of the possibility of amassing weapons. Many were preparing for the day when violence would become inevitable.
I remember speaking to Lee Stauffacher, a 65-year-old navy veteran, at a Trump rally in Arizona. “I’ve seen this country deteriorate, transform from the rule of law America I loved into a country where some people are above the law,” he confessed to me. “Hillary Clinton is above the law. Illegal immigrants are above the law. The judges have stopped applying the laws with which they disagree ”.
At that point Stauffacher told me about his love of firearms and his contempt for the Democratic Party. “They want to turn America into a Communist country. But they will have to pass over my corpse ”.
War president
After Trump’s victory, this kind of rhetoric has lost intensity for some time. But then came the investigation by special prosecutor Robert Mueller on Russian interference in the elections and on possible collusion, with the arrest of some allies of the president. This was followed by Trump’s first impeachment procedure. When the campaign for his re-election began, Trump now presented himself as a war president, engaged at the front of a pitched battle between the American patriots and the “deep state” made up of government bullies who wanted to impose compliance and silence dissent.
On December 18, 2019, the day the first impeachment came, Trump posted a black and white photo on Twitter of pointing his finger at the camera. “They are not angry with me. They are angry with you ”, read the caption. “I am just an obstacle”.
In 2020, when I resumed my trip to the country to take the pulse of the Republican base, I noticed a change. The aggression was the same as in 2016, as were the promises of summary justice. But where in 2016 those statements were disordered (rooted in resentment towards the left, in opposition to a certain political approach or in a general malaise in front of a country no longer recognized) the new threats seemed more precise and targeted. The people I interviewed all told me the same story: There had been a plan to sabotage Trump’s presidency from the start and now there was a new plan to stop him from getting a second term. The entire government apparatus – health officials, bureaucrats, local electoral administrators – was part of the plot. The goal was to steal the presidency from Trump, and consequently from them.
“They try to fool us from the start,” Deborah Fuqua-Frey told me outside a Ford plant in Michigan that Trump visited in the early days of the pandemic. “First there was Mueller, then Russia. Do you think it is a coincidence that after the failure of the impeachment this virus arrived immediately? ”
I asked her to explain herself better.
“It is the fault of the deep state. It is an act of domestic terrorism by the Democratic Party ”.
“If they can do it to a former president, imagine what they can do to you,” reads a tweet from the Republicans in the House Justice Committee
This kind of opinion explains why a multitude of individuals donated their hard-earned savings – over $ 250 million – to an “Election Defense Fund” that didn’t even exist, and explains why other people took storm polling stations, intimidated tellers, participated in unlikely legal crusades, threatened to kill electoral officials, and listened to bizarre theories proposing solutions such as martyrdom and secession from the country. They are the same ones who finally got on the buses bound for Washington and stormed Congress.
The element that made January 6 extremely predictable – the willingness of Republican leaders to take advantage of these voters’ insecurities and paranoia – is the same that makes August 8 very dangerous.
“Obama’s FBI started spying on Trump when he was still only a candidate,” he said Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee tweeted. “If they can do this to Trump, they will surely do it to you too.”
“If they can do it to a former president, imagine what they can do to you,” reads a tweet published by the Republicans of the House Justice Committee. And they went on to another tweet: “The taxman is looking for you. The Justice Department is looking for you. The FBI is looking for you. In Joe Biden’s America, no one is safe from political punishment ”.
The same tone was adopted by the Republican Party of Texas: “If there was still some doubt, we can now be sure that we are living in a post-constitutional America where the justice department is exploited against the political opponents of the regime, as would happen in a banana republic. They won’t stop with Trump. You are next ”.
They won’t stop with Trump, that’s for sure. House Republican leader Kevin McCarth has essentially sworn revenge on the Justice Department should his party regain a majority in the mid-term elections scheduled for the fall. The investigation into President Joe Biden and his son Hunter is a foregone conclusion. It remains to be seen how far-reaching will be the maneuver that Republicans in Congress, eager to take revenge on Trump’s behalf and satisfy the raging base, will launch to target people close to the president and the administration.
If Trump were to actually run for election in 2024, the risks would be even higher. In the event of a defeat against Biden (or another Democratic candidate), Republicans will have even more reasons not to accept the result of the polls, considering the current theory of politicized investigations against their probable candidate. If Trump wins, however, the president and his hawks will carry out a purge in the justice department, the intelligence community and other key departments by eliminating any officials deemed not loyal enough. Trump would pay no political price: a victory by him would in fact constitute a mandate to prosecute his opponents. This scenario appears increasingly probable.
“Biden is playing with fire when he uses a dispute over documents to get the Justice Department to prosecute a probable electoral opponent,” he wrote on Florida Senator Marco Rubio tweeted. “One day the knots will come to a head”.
But what will happen at that point? In uncertain moments like the one we are experiencing, it is simplistic and hasty to speak of a secession and a civil war like in the 1860s. Yet that’s what the Americans think. In 2021, a survey conducted by the University of Virginia found that the majority of Trump voters (52 percent) and a solid minority of Biden’s (41 percent) agreed with the idea that the United States was so divided. to make a solution in which democratic states could separate from republican ones and create two different countries desirable. A survey conducted by the Washington Post and the University of Maryland indicates that one in three Americans believe violence against the government is justified, while another survey conducted in early 2022 by the NPR found that one in ten Americans believed that the violence was justified “in this moment”.
It is difficult to imagine how this situation could improve, while it is very easy to imagine how it could worsen dramatically.
We don’t know exactly what the FBI was looking for in Mar-a-Lago. We don’t even know what the agents found. What we need to recognize – everyone, even those who believe Trump has committed blatant crimes and deserves prosecution – is that bringing him to justice could have horrific consequences.
Is justice towards Trump worth this risk? On August 8, FBI agents determined that this was the case. We can only hope they were right.
(Translation by Andrea Sparacino)
This article was published on the site of the US monthly The Atlantic. International has a weekly newsletter that chronicles what’s going on in the United States. You sign up who.