Yesterday, when Newsmax host Eric Bolling asked Meatball Ron if he would agree to be Trump’s running mate, he said he wouldn’t. It’s the MAGA dream ticket, although Trump is doing his best to turn MAGAts against DeSantis in such a way-- and irrevocably-- that even if DeSantis manages to win the nomination, MAGAts will be reluctant to vote for him in the general.
On Saturday, Trump holds his first campaign rally of the cycle, traveling into the heart of MAGA country: Waco, Texas (McLennan County, where he took 61% of the vote in 2020). On MSNBC yesterday, George Conway told former RNC chair Michael Steele that Trump is a “narcissist, a pathological narcissist, a malignant narcissist, a narcissistic sociopath… He is panicked and terrified. Narcissists live in panic and terror that their true selves, their true inadequacies, will be revealed to the world. So they create these false images of themselves and they lie and they brag and they say things about themselves that aren’t true (George Santos). At the same time they want to make themselves the center of attention… He is absolutely putting on the old schtick of trying to get as much attention as possible and trying to raise money off of it and get the grift off of it— but the fact of the matter is, he is terrified. And you can see it in his social media posts. They’re insane to begin with but they’ve taken on a whole new level of extreme nuttiness… He is a severe disordered personality— and he is not very smart. He lashes out because he’s being attacked, he feels he’s being humiliated. But at the same time he’s going to put on a show to gin up his followers. And that’s what the danger is here; he will keep doing this over a period of several months… and he is going to try to foment violence, as he did on January 6.” A few hours later, in the wee hours of the morning, Trump put this up on his fake Twitter platform:
This morning, Maggie Haberman noted the “death and destruction” threat, calling them “a stark escalation in his rhetorical attacks on… Alvin Bragg, ahead of a likely indictment on charges that Trump said would be unfounded… In a post early Saturday morning, Trump erroneously claimed that he was to be arrested three days later and urged people to protest and ‘take our nation back.’ Since then, he has called Bragg, the first Black district attorney in Manhattan, an ‘animal’ and appeared to mock calls from some of his own allies for people to protest peacefully, or not at all. ‘Our country is being destroyed as they tell us to be peaceful,’ Trump said in a post on Thursday… So far, Trump’s calls for protests have been largely ignored, with just handfuls of people coming out for a demonstration on Monday organized by some of his New York Republican allies.”
Yesterday, Glenn Thrush and Adam Goldman reported that Trump’s various criminal prosecutions present a stress test for Justice in a polarized nation. “Even in the absence so far of any charges against Trump,” they wrote, “political polarization runs so deep, and mistrust of federal law enforcement is so ingrained on the right, that efforts by [Attorney General] Garland and others to offer assurances that justice is being dispensed without regard to politics are often drowned out by powerful counterforces. Among the strongest of those forces are allies of Trump who have sought to undercut the legitimacy of the Justice Department in general and the Federal Bureau of Investigation in particular… For months, Justice Department officials have been bracing for an all-out attack from the Republican-controlled House, which has launched investigations into what it calls the ‘weaponization’ of the department against the right. Trump set a more menacing tone shortly after the Mar-a-Lago search last year, when he told a rally in Pennsylvania that ‘the F.B.I. and the Justice Department have become vicious monsters.’ Officials expect the reaction to any indictment of Trump by a grand jury in New York on the hush-money payments to be swift and ferocious— a preview of the bigger reaction expected if federal prosecutors indict Trump.”
Garland, a former federal judge, is keenly aware that the prosecution of a former president and leading presidential candidate from the opposing party has enormous political consequences. And he has taken steps to ensure that the department’s side of the story is being told— disclosing key details of the investigation in public court filings, to make the case that his investigation represents the pursuit, not perversion, of justice.
…But House Republicans have already made their investigation of the Justice Department a focus of their oversight and political messaging efforts.
“All of these steps are about planting the seeds for a potential impeachment of Garland in 2024 during the campaign, which would be their ultimate demonstration that the investigation, and indictment of Trump, were all about partisanship,” said Charles Tiefer, a University of Baltimore law professor, who served as a legal counsel in the House and Senate.
The FBI, once considered the most unassailable law enforcement institution in the country, might be in an even more vulnerable position than the Justice Department.
The drumbeat of attacks, aimed at sowing doubt among Americans that the FBI is a fair and impartial law enforcement agency, have taken their toll on morale and fostered a culture of caution as some agents worry about becoming political targets. Many bureau veterans have come to believe they are subjected to unfair condemnation when any major investigation— even one overseen by the Justice Department— runs into problems.
The bureau’s concerns have played out in the investigation into Trump’s handling of classified documents after leaving office and the search in August by FBI agents of Trump’s private club and residence, Mar-a-Lago.
Days before the FBI executed the search warrant at Mar-a-Lago, some agents expressed concern about how it would look if they descended on the property in their signature raid jackets, emblazoned with “FBI” on the back. (They carried out the search without the jackets.)
Agent’s of the FBI’s Washington field office also wanted to obtain consent first from Trump’s lawyer for a search— and wanted to serve a search warrant only if agents failed to obtain the consent of Trump and his legal team.
In a tense meeting before the search, Justice Department officials made it clear to FBI agents that they did not care about the optics of the search and did not trust Trump’s lawyer, according to a former federal law enforcement official familiar with the episode. Agents have been careful to make sure every step is documented, mindful that any mistakes could be exploited for political purposes, the former official said.