... folks insisted Trump is just stubbornly clinging to otherwise irrelevant classified documents, and that the "raid" was closer to the government coming to fetch an overdue library book.
Late Tuesday, reports from both the Washington Post and the New York Times pointed to the latter theory, with the Times noting that the "agents carried out the search in a relatively low-key manner," even avoiding wearing their FBI jackets. If that turns out to be true, then the situation is disappointing, but somehow even more sinister. It would suggest Trump is hanging onto these documents for the same reason a serial killer keeps jewelry from his victims, as a trophy to caress whenever he wishes to reminisce over his destructive power and gloat about how he got away with it all.
All of the violent rhetoric and defenses of Trumpian criminality are bad no matter what, but it's especially bizarre if it's all in service of Trump boring his guests at Mar-a-Lago by showing off letters from Kim Jung-un. As Paul Waldman of the Washington Post points out, however, it's part of a larger Trump-driven mission — which has been wholly adopted by the larger Republican Party — to collapse any distinction between the party's political agenda, the goals of far-right extremists and Trump's impulses.
There was much online mockery of the GOP House Judiciary tweeting, "If they can do it to a former President, imagine what they can do to you." A lot of people pointed out that the FBI wouldn't hesitate to show up at any of our houses, if we had, like Trump, stolen classified documents. But that's not really what any of this is about. Trump has, with his relentless whining, managed to turn himself into a larger symbol of right-wing America's own complaints about what they perceive as unfair attacks on their own unearned privileges over those they consider un-Americans.
Republican America is trapped in an endless whirlwind of nebulous rage over its own perceived victimization.
Trump's whining is received by his base on this symbolic level. His tantrum over being asked to obey record-keeping laws resonates with his followers because of its resemblance to their personal grievances like being asked not to use the n-word around the grandkids or being told by H.R. to stop ogling the secretary's legs. It's not unlike having your niece make a face at Thanksgiving when you go off on another rant about "globalists" and the "abortion industry" or having people unfollow you on Facebook when you post yet another unhinged meme about the "invasion" at the border. Trump devotees keenly feel the slights against their "right" to be racist, sexist louts — that's what all the "cancel culture" whining is about.
Trump has channeled that larger and inchoate cloud of entitled whining into his own set of often idiosyncratic bellyaches.
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