Why Republicans are calling the US government a “regime” bent on persecuting Trump.
After news of the FBI raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home broke on Monday night, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy responded by openly threatening Attorney General Merrick Garland.
“The Department of Justice has reached an intolerable state of weaponized politicization,” he said in a statement. “Attorney General Garland, preserve your documents and clear your calendar.”
Think about this for a second. Here you have the likely next speaker of the House claiming without the tiniest shred of evidence that the Justice Department is persecuting a former president — and vowing to use his authority to punish them as a result. His response to his baseless claim of the politicization of investigative powers is to promise a politicized investigation of his own.
McCarthy was far from alone. Trump, who confirmed the raid in a lengthy statement, called it “an attack by the Radical Left Democrats who desperately don’t want me to run for President in 2024” — an allegation that set the tone for much of the party in the wake of the dramatic FBI operation.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the leading non-Trump candidate in the 2024 GOP primary race, called the raid “another escalation in the weaponization of federal agencies against the Regime’s political opponents.” Sen. Rick Scott (FL), head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, called it “3rd World country stuff.” Rep. Elise Stefanik (NY), the third-ranking House Republican, called for “an immediate investigation and accountability into Joe Biden and his administration’s weaponizing this [Justice] department against their political opponents.”
Some leading Republicans, like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, did not engage in such fevered speculation and kept their counsel. But the backlash from the party has been loud and broad, revealing the GOP as basically in lockstep with the Trumpian line that the Justice Department has been fully politicized and needs to be brought to heel.
There is no evidence to support the idea that the raid on Mar-a-Lago was politically motivated. FBI Director Christopher Wray is a Trump appointee and would almost certainly have personally signed off on the warrant; so too would the attorney general and a federal judge. The Biden White House, by contrast, says it was not informed of it in advance. We also know the target was real — possibly classified documents Trump improperly brought back to his private residence — and that there are a number of serious crimes that Trump might well have committed in office. It’s possible that the raid turns out to be an overreach or a mistake — FBI history is certainly full of those — but, as of right now, there is no evidence of any kind of political misconduct on the part of the agency.
The Republican attacks on the Mar-a-Lago raid result not from reasonable skepticism of law enforcement, but something darker: a belief on the right that the government’s functions must necessarily be partisan, either wielded for Republicans’ benefit or against them.
