Trump’s Wild Claim of FBI “Locked and Loaded” to Kill Him Spurs Dangerous Narratives
Absurd as Donald Trump’s latest claim that the FBI — and Joe Biden — were “locked and loaded,” ready to shoot him and harm his family by executing the search warrant at Mar-a-Lago all those months ago, what really stings is the too-often claim of victimhood as a reason to vote for Trump.
After finding phrasing in one of his lawyers’ myriad court filings that mentioned standard search warrant language restricting use of deadly force, Trump sent out a fund-raising post to insist that the Justice Department was ready to kill him.
It was a distortion of the language, of course, that prompted even Attorney General Merrick Garland to warn that the assertions were “false and dangerous,” because it could prompt even one campaign belligerent believer to take retributive steps.
Garland noted that the same language was in the standard search warrant issued to search Joe Biden’s offices and homes. In reality, the FBI took extra precautions to avoid a confrontation by conducting the search when Trump was away and alerted the Secret Service. What the language says is that lethal force can be used only if in “imminent danger of death or serious physical injury.”
Ironically, it is Trump who has argued to the U.S. Supreme Court the need for immunity for any American president from criminal prosecution — even for the possibility of assassinating a political rival, as his legal team argued.
Naturally, this latest fantasy comes amid the closing days of Trump’s hush-money trial in New York and amid fears of rising political violence around the coming presidential election, predominantly from the far right. It comes as Trump’s own advertising talks of creating a “united reich” after his election, evoking phraising and imagery right out of Nazi Germany.
Faux Victimhood
What is so striking is not only the inverted truth that Trump and his allies consistently offer, but the idea that to be successful as a candidate, Trump finds it necessary to depict himself as a lone and targeted victim of anti-democratic deep-state foes.
All candidates stretch the truth; it’s annoying but we are used to it. They take credit for moving the economy, battling disease or for winning or quitting wars that are the result of a lot of people, market forces, and scientific teams having accomplished. They duck responsibility for episodes with which they would rather not be associated — whether at our Southern border, in Afghanistan and the Middle East, with the events leading to Jan. 6, 2021, or with trying to manage the effects of COVID.
The Trump campaign has seen all that and raised — or dropped — the art form to new levels of pretend outrage.
Trump freely makes up facts from crowd sizes, to the backgrounds of immigrants who cross the border, about how tariffs and international treaties work, and about what he sees as the coordinated policies of Biden to control local prosecutors and federal Justice agencies to pursue his indictments by grand juries as unwarranted “witch hunts.”
Worse, his posse of similarly clad congressional supporters have followed him into the actual courthouse in New York to denounce the very impropriety of even having charged him with violating a crime — regardless of any outcome.
As with telling militias to “stand by and stand ready,” this “locked and loaded” pretense is a goad for something far beyond a vote. It is a suggestion for violence in Trump’s name.
