In Defending Trump, Baleful Republicans Are Severely Wounding America

When the FBI gets a warrant to search your private residence, that means you are in deep trouble -- obviously. As we learned last week, there are multiple levels of approval for something like that, and with Donald Trump that included an unobtrusive attorney general and a judge in Florida who has appeared on Newsmax.

I've become a bit blase regarding news about Trump. We all know he was as crooked as a coat hanger while in the private sector, and that coat hanger turned into a corkscrew with his twisted behavior while he was president. And as an ex-president? That corkscrew has turned into a steak knife as he stabs America in the back.

However, I clicked fast on all the breaking news last week about the FBI's search of his Mar-a-Lago home. If Attorney General Merrick Garland was out to show that nobody, even a former president, is above the law, then a visit by the FBI to a former president shows there's no disparity.

However, the rest of us, or at least most of us, aren't under investigation for espionage. And by a former president? Well, he was never a president. He was just a grifter. And there's no reason to doubt he's been using those top secret documents to sell out America and enrich himself.

That's how his niece, Mary Trump, described him last month when I spoke to her. "He didn't like the job, and the main reason he'd run is he thinks he can avoid being charged with any crime," she said. "But he loved the job because he took advantage of the emoluments clause and made money during his term. The best thing about the presidency to him is that it's a good grift gig that made him a lot of money."

There's no reason to think he's not looking for ways to make money because he has valuable documents in his possession. Why else wouldn't he return them when asked, not once, not twice, but three times?

What could be worse than an ex-president cashing in on secrets? While not as illegal as espionage, what's getting worse is the hysterical tweets and statements from the extreme right and others defending Trump. They are blindly and blissfully throwing matches on a smoldering fire of resentment to his hyper-violent base, who now more than ever distrusts the government and the FBI.

And of course, Trump himself does his best to stoke that fire. The incident took a wild turn by the flailing responses of a twisted Trump. For the umpteenth time, Trump was the victim: "My beautiful home." And with Trump the autocrat in waiting, he took the opportunity to be hypocritical again: "Such an assault could only take place in broken, Third-World countries," he said. "Sadly, America has now become one of those countries, corrupt at a level not seen before." What did you expect from someone who has and is doing his best to solidify the U.S. as a Third World autocratic country?

He's laid it on thick. Witch hunt. Fake news. Lies. And then he started the cascade of phony allegations against the FBI, one about planting evidence. "The FBI and others from the Federal Government would not let anyone, including my lawyers, be anywhere near the areas that were rummaged and otherwise looked at during the raid on Mar-a-Lago," Trump lied on his pathetic Truth Social last week.

Then, the bottom fell out of that allegation when his attorney Christina Bobb appeared on the right-wing Real America's Voice channel (Real America?). "I think the folks in New York -- President Trump and his family -- they probably had a better view than I did," she said. "Because they had the CCTV, they were able to watch." Um, so she was there, and Trump and his family were watching the whole time. Pretty hard to plant evidence when the eyes of Trump world are upon you.

Then, in a disgraceful vent on Truth Social, he lambasted the National Archives, and he did it in a sinister and outright racist way: "President Barack Hussein Obama kept 33 million pages of documents, much of them classified. How many of them pertained to nuclear? Word is, lots!"

Officials at the National Archives had heard enough, and they then released a statement, which was rare for them, and in shorthand they called Trump's accusations a lie.

Trump falsely (again) started to attack the "deep state FBI" that we all know hates Trump. He said that Mar-a-Lago was "under siege, raided, and occupied by a large group of FBI agents."

The FBI doesn't "raid, siege or occupy," in the case of a simple search warrant. Siege and occupy are what terrorist groups do or the autocratic leaders Trump loves like Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban; however, Trump's lies are more serious than just exaggerating about the FBI. It has sparked a wild burst of reactions of support for him, despite the very legal process initiated against him.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy screamed that Garland had to preserve his documents and clear his calendar, threatening an oversight probe of the AG if Republicans take the House in the November midterms.

Can you picture the mild-mannered, buttoned-up, and lawful Garland reading that statement? I guess McCarthy imagined that the AG would call all his top aides and assistant AGs to an urgent meeting and announce, "Kevin McCarthy wants to investigate me. All hands on deck!"

"The Department of Justice has reached an intolerable state of weaponized politicization," said McCarthy. This from a guy who thought it was a good idea for Trump to name environmental lawyer Jeffrey Clark as the acting attorney general in Trump's effort to politicize the position of the attorney general and weaponize the Justice Department to steal the election from Joe Biden.

"We need answers NOW," U.S. Sen. Rick Scott said in a tweet tirade. "The FBI must explain what they were doing today & why." Scott took his rhetoric to sinister heights. "The way our federal government has gone, it's like what we thought about the Gestapo, people like that, that they just go after people, what we thought about the Soviet Union, look at Latin America," Scott said on Fox Business News.

And Scott's backboneless Florida colleague Marco Rubio tried to outshout Scott on Twitter when he wrote, "After todays raid on Mar A Lago what do you think the left plans to use those 87,000 new IRS agents for?" As far as we know, Marco, the FBI investigation was about the handling of missing presidential documents, something that I believe the IRS has little experience with. Unless it's his tax documents, but those now belong to Congress.

The most outlandish response to the FBI warrant, which gets first prize for idiocy, comes from the gay conservative group Log Cabin Republicans, which tweeted this out: "Just as the patrons of Stonewall were not intimidated by police, we will not be intimidated by the weaponization of the FBI and DoJ against President Trump or his home, Mar-A-Lago... ...where (as we announced hours ago) we will be holding our annual gala later this year!"

Here's some things that the clueless Log Cabin folks might want to know. There was not a raid on Mar-a-Lago, so that's a lie. Cops did raid the Stonewall Inn in June of 1969, and that's a fact. LGBTQ+ people were beaten by the cops, arrested, thrown into paddy wagons. No one was beaten, arrested, or hauled away in an FBI van at Mar-a-Lago. Trump had his home searched, not raided, once. Gay bars were raided -- not searched -- hundreds if not thousands of times in New York City alone.

Get your facts straight, Log Cabin, and more importantly, show some respect for those who came before you who are turning in their graves because you support a man like Trump who spews hate, lies, ridicule, and terror about our community.

Further, the Log Cabinites are mixing destruction and demoralization of our community with a grossly lighthearted touch about having their annual gala at Mar-a-Lago, going from intimidation to invitation. Also, it's just slimy. Wonder how much Log Cabin is paying (a.k.a. lining Trump's pockets) for the privilege of holding its gala at a venue that has been "raided" by the FBI?

If the members of Log Cabin are looking for a location that has actually been raided, perhaps they can go to Waco, Texas, and check on the rental rates of the Branch Davidian compound, which was raided by the ATF. Otherwise, they're going to be really disappointed when they get to Mar-a-Lago for their big gala and don't find any bullet holes in the walls.

I'm not the only one whose fired up about the disrespect that the Log Cabin people showed for our elders. Social media users went wild, as well they should. However, our brothers' and sisters' wild tweets are to call out a gross injustice, not to try to defend a former president under criminal investigation.

There's so much more to the story about the FBI's visit to Trump's den of destruction. We now have a hint that he was believed to have some of the most top secret documents of our nation, which he kept most likely to deconstruct our democracy at a price. Why in God's name would a president (again, he really wasn't one) keep classified, top secret documents? Because this not-president wanted to make a quick buck off of America's secrets.

Perhaps he's using those sensitive documents to blackmail some country into letting him build a Trump Tower on every corner -- for free. That is extremely dangerous.

However, what is also extremely dangerous is if leaders like McCarthy, legislators like Rubio, and less than legit clubs like Log Cabin continue to lie about reality in an attempt to try to protect a twice-impeached president, currently under investigation for espionage. Their kissing-up to Trump by dissing the FBI and pissing off the base will come back to haunt them.

The FBI had every legal right to search Trump's home, and it is Trump supporters who are trying to politicize and weaponize the FBI in a dangerous way. By doing so, the same crowd that raided the U.S Capitol is standing by and standing back, ready to become even more violent and more lethal. They are just waiting for the tweet or Truth Social post that tells them it's time to take up arms.

And one extremist in Cincinnati, who attended the January 6 insurrection, tried and failed to harm the FBI office there. He died, but how many more will attempt to copycat his attack on federal buidings and FBI agents? He is only, most assuredly, just the tip of the iceberg.

The rhetoric by the extreme right this week has been chilling, almost as chilling as hearing "espionage" in the same sentence as "ex-president." Will extremists and Republicans chill out once the truth about Trump is finally exposed? Will they chill on Trump? Not likely. And that means we will see even more chilling scenes like what happened in Ohio that might be far worse and have much more dire consequences for our country.

John Casey is editor at large for The Advocate.

Views expressed in The Advocate's opinion articles are those of the writers and do not necessarily represent the views of The Advocate or our parent company, equalpride.