The faith of the congregants in his cult of personality will burn brighter with every moment of martyrdom, and any attack on any topic against the exiled leader by any potential rival will hit differently to GOP primary voters as Trump is depicted across right-wing media as battling against these, ahem, unprecedented actions by Sleepy China Joe Biden. It certainly has to be the best news for Trump’s 2024 chances so far. The search of Donald Trump’s Florida home would seem to make that more likely. Might the Trumps persist in an even denser cloud of scandal, greed, and solipsism for decades to come?
Today’s White House interns weren’t even born when Bill Clinton was impeached, and yet he and his wife are still hanging around. Indeed, the papier-mâché martyrdom of the Trumps seems quite akin to that of the Clintons-much like their determined, damaging grips on their parties.
Of course, the same partisans then tended to switch from saying that the target was wrongly accused to saying that the offense was not serious or that the law was being applied in an uneven fashion. In both Iran-Contra and the manifold misdeeds of the Clintons, there was plenty of substance to the underlying investigations. In many cases, there has been truth to the claims of politically motivated investigations. Democrats said much the same of the many, many probes into the Clinton family over the years. Republicans called the Iran-Contra probe a “witch hunt” aimed at damaging the reputation of Ronald Reagan and harming the chances of George H.W. Whether the previous investigations were merited usually depended on one’s political affiliations. It would be right to say that the FBI executing a search warrant at a former president’s home is “unusual” or “remarkable.” I might even turn a blind eye to “historic.” But, yea, verily, there is lots and lots of precedent for criminal investigations of and criminal conduct by America’s powerful people. We are a country that has been through federal criminal investigations involving multiple sitting presidents, their families, vice presidents, presidential candidates, Cabinet secretaries, senators, representatives, and at least one Supreme Court justice. I’m going to throw a Strunk and White (paperback) at the next pundit who uses the term “unprecedented.”
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