Last week, the FBI executed a search warrant at Donald Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago in Florida. So far, the fallout from that event foremost shows me just how deeply polarized the U.S. are. It feels like reading about two different countries.
Political Fallout From Mar-a-Lago Raid
On the one side, Democrats say that this shows that no one is above the law. And that Trump is in serious legal trouble.
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On other side, there are the Trump supporters (and Republicans in congress who depend on his supporters to get elected). They immediately and instinctively jumped to his defense. They claim that Democrats are obsessed with “getting Trump” and have reached a new level of politicizing the FBI (all the while immediately politicizing the event themselves).
As Trump said himself at the very beginning of his political career: he could shoot somebody on fifth avenue and wouldn’t lose any votes. It truly is incredible.
This said, we don’t know how this will eventually play out at this point in time. It could be the FBI overreacting. Let’s not forget that the Russia investigation ended without a smoking gun and that the two impeachments went nowhere in the senate.
But Trump’s claim that the FBI would only have had to ask for the documents seems untrue, however. As we now know, they did precisely that. And if Trump were a victim of a political witch hunt, why didn’t he proactively make the search warrant public?
The bottom line is that we will just have to wait until we learn more about what the FBI was searching for and what it actually found.
About the Author
Dr. Louis Perron is a political scientist, consultant and TEDx Speaker based in Switzerland.
