“They say I have the most loyal people … Where I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters. It’s like incredible.”
- Donald. J. Trump, Iowa campaign rally, January 2016.
America’s 45th President can do no wrong in the eyes of his millions of MAGA faithful.
In the space of 48 hours this week there was an FBI raid on his Florida home, he was interrogated in New York and he suffered a defeat in his legal battle to keep his tax affairs private. All unrelated matters.
Even by his standards, it was a crazy couple of days. And it’s set to get crazier with several storms brewing over the ex-president.
The silver lining for Mr Trump was the events demonstrated the unshakeable support he enjoys no matter what he’s accused of.
The more s*** gets thrown at him, the more his legions of devotees rally to his defence and rage against his accusers.
His stranglehold on the Republican Party appears as strong as it was on January 21, 2021, when he reluctantly and gracelessly exited the White House and boarded Marine One to whisk him to Joint Base Andrews from where he flew to Florida.
Before turning to enter the helicopter, he told the media pack: “Hopefully it’s not a long-term goodbye. We will see each other again.”
And well he might. According to national polls, he remains the favourite to secure the Republican nomination. He’s yet to declare his hand, but that is considered to be a matter of ‘when’ not ‘if’.
Democrats and some Republicans are praying he’s a convicted felon, or at least facing criminal charges, by the time the 2024 election comes around.
There are several escalating cases that can bring his downfall, though none are certain.
Mar-a-Lago search
Donald Trump was in New York on Monday when two dozen FBI agents turned up at the door of his Palm Beach club and residence with a search warrant.
The sprawling 20-acre Mar-a-Lago has the Atlantic Ocean on one side and Florida’s Intracoastal Waterway on the other.
Mr Trump, who calls Mar-a-Lago his “Winter White House”, bought the estate for a bargain US$5 million in 1985. A decade later he transformed it into a private club, spending US$7 million in gold leaf for its giant ballroom.
The FBI agents searched the palatial property for highly-classified documents the ex-President took with him when he left the real White House.
Following howls of protests from leading Republicans that the search was unnecessary and a malicious attempt to damage Mr Trump and the party before important mid-term elections, the Justice Department on Thursday claimed it only acted because “less intrusive” attempts to retrieve the sensitive documents had failed.
Whilst unprecedented, the so-called raid wasn’t as dramatic as Mr Trump breathlessly made out at the time, with the former president saying “my beautiful home … is currently under siege, raided, and occupied”.
“After working and co-operating with the relevant government agencies, this unannounced raid on my home was not necessary or appropriate,” he said, adding that “they even broke into my safe!”.
Throughout the search, one of Trump’s lawyers was present to observe the agents’ actions and when finished they provided a two-page property receipt detailing which documents they were taking away with them.
The world found out yesterday that the material retrieved from Mar-a-Lago included four sets of top secret documents and three sets of secret documents. It was also revealed the FBI is investigating him for a potential violations of the Espionage Act, not the Presidential Records Act as first assumed.
Some of the documents are marked with the highest levels of government classification. The nature of the contents wasn’t disclosed but The Washington Post reported they included “documents relating to nuclear weapons.”
Although the FBI cited the Espionage Act on the search warrant, it does not necessarily mean Mr Trump took the documents with the intention of passing them to a foreign power. But it does spell big trouble for him.
The Espionage Act prohibits the unauthorised retention of defence-related information that could harm the US or aid a foreign adversary. Two other laws were cited on the warrant.
Mr Trump on Friday claimed he had declassified the information before leaving office.
Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, who vowed to depoliticise the Justice Department when he was appointed, rejected claims the search was politically-motivated.
He suggested it was an action of last resort, having exhausted other attempts to secure the materials.
“Upholding the rule of law means applying the law evenly, without fear or favour,” he said.
“Under my watch that is precisely what the Justice Department is doing.”
The search didn’t come out of nowhere. There had been wrangling for months over the missing documents.
And for Judge Bruce E. Reinhart to sign the warrant, the FBI needed to show sufficient grounds to believe a crime had been committed and the evidence of that crime was at the location it wanted to search. It wasn’t a step to be taken lightly.
The same went for Mr Garland, who would have anticipated the political blowback.
In light of the “substantial public interest in this matter”, Mr Garland on Thursday revealed his department had filed a motion with the courts to publicly release the search warrant along with a list of items retrieved from Mar-a-Lago, with any national security information blacked out.
That happened overnight.
There had been nothing stopping Mr Trump from releasing the warrant himself to back up his claim that the FBI had no cause to search his home. But he didn’t.
Months before Monday’s dramatic events, Mr Trump had received a Grand Jury subpoena seeking the return of classified documents.
Prior to that there had numerous demands for the return of materials. These resulted in 15 boxes of material being handed to the National Archives.
Under the Presidential Records Act, written communications including letters, notes, memos and emails must be sent to the National Archives at the end of a president’s term.
In the White House Mr Trump didn’t pay much heed to record preservation laws and even had a tendency to flush notes and documents down the toilet.
In the 15 boxes that were delivered from Mar-a-Lago archivists found several pages of highly-classified material and referred the matter to the Justice Department.
Department officials visited Mr Trump and one of his lawyer’s at Mar-a-Lago in June after evidence, potentially supplied by someone inside Mar-a-Lago, indicated additional sensitive documents with national security implications remained there.
They examined the basement area, where Mr Trump kept other items he’d brought with him from the White House.
They later subpoenaed surveillance footage to see who was accessing the padlocked storage area amid strong concern about the information falling into the wrong hands.
“Federal law, longstanding department rules, and our ethical obligations prevent me from providing further details as to the basis of the search at this time,” Mr Garland concluded on Thursday.
As he spoke, a gunman tried to storm the Cincinnati office of the FBI in what appears to have been a retaliatory attack linked to the Mar-A-Lago search. The assailant, Ricky Shiffer, was shot dead. According to media reports, he had ties to extremist right-wing groups.
The FBI search has triggered fury and threats of violence and civil war from Trump die-hards and right-wing social media influencers. They also called for the dismantling of the FBI.
Without even knowing what they were looking for and actually found in Mr Trump’s basement, Republican House minority leader Kevin McCarthy said “the Department of Justice has reached an intolerable state of weaponised politicisation.”
Steve Bannon, Mr Trump’s former White House chief strategist advisor and now a podcaster, told Fox News the FBI was “the Gestapo.”
“We’re at war,” he added.
Bannon was last month convicted of contempt of Congress for his refusal to provide documents or testimony to a select committee investigating the deadly attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters on January 6 last year. He’s due to be sentenced next month.
Judge Reinhart, who signed the search warrant, has received death threats and anti-Semitic abuse this week. His home address, phone numbers, and names of his family members have been shared on right-wing social media.
“This is the piece of s**t judge who approved FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago,” one person posted on a pro-Trump message board, Vice reported. “I see a rope around his neck.”
“Let’s find out if he has children....where they go to school, where they live...EVERYTHING,” another posted.
Taking the Fifth
On Wednesday, Mr Trump came face-to-face with his New York nemesis.
For four years, New York State Attorney-General Letitia James has been investigating whether the Trump Organisation fraudulently inflated the value of his hotels, golf clubs and other assets to secure favourable loans, whilst understating the values to get tax breaks.
In a court-ordered deposition, that his lawyers fought tooth and nail to block, Mr Trump invoked his Fifth Amendment right to not answer questions on more than 400 occasions. He didn’t answer a single question, other than providing his name.
The US Constitution’s Fifth Amendment offers protection against self-incrimination.
Mr Trump claims – again – that the probe is a politically-motivated witch hunt. In fact, in typical hyperbole he called it “the greatest witch hunt in US history.” He also called Ms James a racist and a “renegade prosecutor.”
Despite invoking the Fifth previously during a deposition in connection with his divorce from his first wife Ivana Trump in 1990, he has repeatedly mocked others for “taking the Fifth”.
“If you are innocent, do not remain silent. You look guilty as hell,” he once remarked.
Mr Trump acknowledged his previous stance in a statement he read, saying the vendetta against him left him “with absolutely no choice” but to take the Fifth.
If Ms James goes ahead with a civil case against the Trump Organisation, jurors at a trial would be permitted to draw negative inferences from Mr Trump’s refusal to answer questions.
In his statement, Mr Trump hinted at a grand conspiracy against him, “a coordinated attack” on several fronts by Democrats.
“If there was any question in my mind, the raid of my home, Mar-a-Lago, on Monday by the FBI, just two days prior to this deposition, wiped out any uncertainty,” he said.
“I have absolutely no choice because the current administration and many prosecutors in this country have lost all moral and ethical bounds of decency.”
There’s more storm clouds on the horizon.
On Friday, A New York state judge refused to dismiss criminal tax fraud charges against the Trump Organisation and its long-time financial chief Allen Weisselberg. The trial will begin in October.
In regard to his own tax returns, Mr Trump lost a court appeal on Tuesday in a legal battle with a US House of Representatives committee that has been fighting since 2019 to force disclosure of his records.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tweeted: “We look forward to the IRS complying with this ruling and delivering the requested documents.”
Mr Trump was the first president in 40 years not to release his tax returns as he aimed to keep the details of his wealth secret. He has until this Tuesday to appeal the ruling.
The embattled former president also has Georgia on his mind.
There’s a criminal investigation underway into his efforts to pressure state officials to overturn his 2020 election loss there.
Fulton County prosecutor, Fani T. Willis, is reportedly considering whether to subpoena Mr Trump himself to seek his testimony before a grand jury. Rudolph Giuliani and others close to him have already been subpoenaed.
Capitol Assault
The prime-time hearings of the January 6 committee’s probe into the ransacking of the US Capitol and attempted insurrection last year have yielded new and sensational information.
The committee is piecing together the most definitive account of the riot and what drove a seething mob of so-called patriots to storm the sacred seat of American democracy. It will almost certainly result in a criminal referral to the Department of Justice.
We now know the department has been doing more than sitting back and watching the hearings, which will re-convene next month, due to a flood of new information.
It has been conducting a parallel investigation, albeit one that is far more secretive with Mr Garland especially tight-lipped.
It’s latest move was to seize the mobile phone of one of Mr Trump’s key allies, Representative Scott Perry, on Tuesday. In June, the FBI seized phones and other electronic devices of two other Trump loyalists who assisted in a plan to overturn the 2020 election result.
It would be a seismic development if Mr Trump is charged in connection with the January 6 events and plots leading up to it. It could also be nation shattering, such is the wide and deep fault line in American society.
His fanatical base is both outraged and galvanised by moves against him. He feeds off their energy and it puts pressure on Congressional Republicans to toe the Trump line, regardless of what they might privately think.
More than three-quarters of Republicans still view Trump favourably and a good chunk of these have fully bought into his false conspiracy that the 2020 election was stolen. It’s not a big leap for them to believe “Deep State” forces are now moving to thwart his chances in 2024.
Incredibly, several participants in the Capitol riot are running for office and wearing their involvement like a badge of honour.
A big irony in claims that Democrats have weaponised the justice system to target Mr Trump, was that he tried his hardest to politicise it when he was president, sacking senior officials who didn’t bend to his will.
But charges of hypocrisy are water off a duck’s back for Mr Trump. The other more serious charges that might be headed his way, less so.