Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago was the scene of the FBI executing a search warrant signed by a federal judge on the basis of believing there was probable cause that a crime had been committed. Joyce Vance, in today’s “Civil Discourse,” provides an exceptional and prudent analysis of this significant event.
Donald Trump is entitled to all of the protections afforded a citizen of the United States under the Constitution of the United States. Specifically, should Donald Trump be charged with a crime, he is afforded the protections of the 4th, 5th, 6th and 8th Amendments to the US Constitution.
It is essential that Donald Trump’s fiercest detractors be his fiercest defenders when it comes to the defense of his rights. Donald Trump has rights. He is presumed innocent of any charges that are filed against him by the federal government, and thankfully the prohibition of cameras in federal court rooms will help reinforce a fundamental American principle that Trump and his entitled family of grifters can’t comprehend. They are not above the law. All American citizens stand equally in the voting booth and in the court room. This applies to presidents who have no greater status under the law than a woman from Ghana who took the oath of citizenship 20 seconds ago.
The FBI is an institution with an exceptional history of Constitutional abuse under its longest-serving director, J. Edgar Hoover. The fact that the FBI building carries his name is appropriate. The letters splay out and form an open wound that serves as a type of graphic warning sign for the American people to be vigilant against abuse from the government and its gigantic, sprawling alphabet soup of security agencies – of which the FBI is the most iconic. The federal police agency was brutally politicized by the preening of James Comey, whose poor decision-making and grandstanding obliterated the non-interference tradition by law enforcement agencies proximate to election day. Comey’s decision contributed mightily — along with much sensationalized and irresponsible media coverage — to the election of Donald Trump by roughly 80,000 votes across three states.
That decision preceded years of attacks by Donald Trump on America’s public servants, soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen, FBI agents, CIA officers, State Department foreign service officers, as tentacles in a massive conspiracy that was plotting against the American people. They were called the “Deep State” by Trump and his cronies. Trump lathered his crowds into frenzies of rage about the conspiracy against him, and thus them, for years. Guess what? It took. It metastasized.
“National conservatism” is the fancy name for MAGA fascists who fancy themselves as the authors of a new destiny for America. They are the vanguard of a movement that aims to take down American democracy to install a “Caesar” who will rule in their interest. This is a philosophy of minority rule that is imposed on the majority. All across America, the states that Justice Louis Brandeis once said were “laboratories of democracy” have become star chambers of extremism, as Jane Mayer frighteningly points out in this New Yorker article. The assertion of control is at the core of both the political philosophy and tactics of the movement. Control is a necessary element to governance when a minority faction is trying to impose a deluded, self-interested, ideological and religious orthodoxy on previously free people who had a say in what was happening around them.
The United States government is many things. It is a sprawling, global, trillion-dollar bureaucracy with an outpost in outer space. One thing it is not is a “regime.” Why would anyone call the United States a regime? It is the oldest constitutional republic in the world. Certainly, it is an imperfect nation. How could it not be, as it is a government OF, BY and FOR the PEOPLE? The people are imperfect, but the government of the United States is not a regime. Regimes are cruel places that need to be toppled in the American ethos. Regimes are tyrannies that deserve destruction. Regimes cannot be negotiated or compromised with. Regimes are illegitimate and, combined with the libels about a stolen election, have turned those conspiracies into a dogma of imaginary and delusional occupation, persecution and victimization. Those imaginary oppressions are the basis of the MAGA cause and national conservative mission. They are the casus belli of Mr. Trump’s war against America.