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For Donald Trump, there’s no doubt what the FBI was doing when agents made their foray into the former president’s home this week: it was a raid.
He said so in his social media posts. He said so in his fundraising emails.
Some major news organizations, however, have been reluctant to adopt his terminology and instead settled for more anodyne phrases like “executed a search.”
MSNBC has been leading the pack, with several contributors and guests scolding the use of the term.
“I know Donald Trump is saying this is a raid, but that’s a gross exaggeration,” Dave Aronberg, who serves as state attorney in Palm Beach County, Florida, told the network. “Trump benefits from calling it a raid or a siege because he gets to be a MAGA martyr.”
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And Frank Figliuzzi, who served as an assistant director at the FBI, told MSNBC that “agents don’t like the word ‘raid’”
“It sounds like it’s some sort of extrajudicial, non-legal thing,” he said.
Even as he was speaking, MSNBC changed the banner it was running underneath his image on the screen from “FBI raids Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home” to “FBI executes search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago.”
Yet MSNBC has labeled other search warrants as “raids” in the past, and David M. Shapiro, a former FBI special agent who’s now a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, said there’s a reason why outlets use the term raid: It works.
“It’s commonly used, commonly accepted, because it conveys a lot of meaningful information,” he said.
He said a longer description would also capture the elements, such as saying authorities paid a surprise visit and forcibly entered a property and executed a search warrant.
