A raid at Mar-a-Lago and a race against fascism | Will Bunch Newsletter

Even as a kid in the late 1960s and ‘70s — when everybody seemed to love Pete Rose, baseball’s “Charlie Hustle” — I hated the guy. In 1973, I was in the left field stands at Shea Stadium when Rose assaulted Mets shortstop Bud Harrelson, causing whiskey bottles to rain down at our villain. We didn’t even know Rose was a degenerate gambler — and an alleged degenerate. Phillies, please, never again invite this man within 50 miles of Citizens Bank Park.

Did someone forward you this email? Sign up to receive this newsletter weekly at inquirer.com/bunch, because while some still push for Rose to enter the Baseball Hall of Fame ... it ain’t me, babe.

We all know that that the third Monday in February is Presidents’ Day, but it’s becoming clear that America ought to be celebrating Aug. 8 — the date that Richard Nixon announced he was resigning over Watergate, in 1974 — as Bad Presidents’ Day. Because this year, Donald Trump spent the day doing his darndest to remind the nation that Tricky Dick wasn’t the worst human being to sit in the Oval Office.

The morning began for the 45th president with a scathing leak from an upcoming book about Trump’s relationship with his military brass, in which he reportedly asked them “Why can’t you be like the German generals?” — the ones who were loyal to Adolf Hitler. Not to be outdone, the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman then released a scooplet from her own about-to-be-published tome — photographic proof that Trump really did rip up documents and flush them down the toilet, rather than preserve them as required by law.

The back-to-back disclosures were a reminder of how Trump’s four-year regime degraded the presidency even as it steered the White House toward a crude authoritarianism, and also how we just can’t quit talking about The Former Guy some 19 months after he was practically dragged from the Oval Office. But it turned out the fireworks of America’s most memorable Bad Presidents’ Day in 48 years were just getting started.

Around 7 p.m. Monday, the nation’s already fragile body politic was shocked to learn that a team of FBI agents had descended on Mar-a-Lago, the faded Palm Beach mansion where a once-and-wannabe-future president resides in exile. The raid on Trump’s primary residence was confirmed by the short-fingered vulgarian himself in a lengthy online diatribe, in which POTUS revealed that the feds even cracked open his personal safe.

I’m writing this in the pre-dawn gloaming less than 12 hours later, and the list of what we don’t know about the FBI’s action is a lot longer than what we do know. Most importantly, it’s unclear — given the long potential list of high crimes and misdemeanors that could be tied to the ringleader of the Jan. 6 insurrection — what exactly the feds were looking for inside the Trump castle.

Early reports centered on those 15 boxes of documents, including some highly classified papers, that Trump spirited out of the White House before President Biden moved in, and the possible implications for national security. That’s a potentially serious crime that could, according to the statute, bar Trump from running again for president in 2024.

But whatever the goal of the FBI raid, one thing was clear: American politics will never be quite the same. In our long-running debate over whether presidents — even undeniably rotten ones like Nixon or Trump — are above the law, Attorney General Merrick Garland and his Justice Department have just crossed a Rubicon, and there is no turning back. Either Donald Trump will be brought to justice, or the American Experiment will implode.

In the darkness of Monday night, the leaders of the extreme right were promising the latter — maybe even that Civil War II that so many of us have come to fear. A Breitbart News editor tweeted, “There is suddenly a very real risk of violent political instability in this country for the first time in more than 150 years.” A line of trucks with large Trump banners and scores of impromptu spectators packed the road outside Mar-a-Lago.

Ironically, these cataclysmic scenes occurred right as I was sitting down to write the column I had originally planned, which was about ... Donald Trump. Because even before the raid, it was becoming clear that the summer of 2022 was both the best of times and the worst of times for The Donald, and America. On one hand, Trump-backed extremists — including a trifecta of Big Lie backers running for Senate, governor, and secretary of state in Arizona — continue to do alarmingly well in GOP primaries, showing how much Trump has remade the Republican Party in his image.

But Trump’s problems run even deeper than the Justice Department and the House Jan. 6 Committee holding him to account for his past actions. There have been signs that some voters in his GOP base were growing bored with his non-stop grievance over the 2020 election, that partisans wanted more red meat about newer hot-button issues like “critical race theory,” and that more of them were drawn to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as an avatar of the new authoritarianism.

That’s why the 108-minute (aiming for Fidel Castro territory, apparently) speech that Trump delivered on Saturday in Dallas to the latest gathering of CPAC — the conservative group that started as Reagan fanboys and then sliced to the extreme right like a bad Trump tee shot at Bedminster — should have gotten a lot more attention than it did.

While the news media has largely turned off Trump rallies due to his tiresome obsession with 2020, the ex-president used CPAC as an opportunity to finally roll out a vision for what a second term in January 2025 might look like — making his past invocations of “American carnage” feel like Disneyland. Perhaps Trump was motivated by coming after the political strongman of Europe, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. If CPAC wanted a taste of fascism, it would be a former U.S. president that offered the real deal, and not some Eastern European.

Trump’s complaint that Biden’s 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan — which actually followed a blueprint that Trump left for him — “surrendered our dignity” carried echoes of the German far right’s complaints about the Treaty of Versailles in the 1920s.

“The streets of our Democrat-run cities are drenched in the blood of innocent victims,” Trump said. “Bullets are killing little beautiful little children who never had a chance. Carjackers lay in wait like predators.” The riff prompted one observer, the Texas Monthly journalist Michael Hardy, to accuse Trump of “literal blood-and-soil rhetoric,” as the prospective 2024 candidate promised he would send federal troops into the streets of Chicago to address urban crime. He also suggested the death penalty for drug dealers, echoing the murderous Philippine strongman Rodrigo Duterte.

Trump, who showed a certain level of diabolical skill in 2016 in molding the unformed grievances of the GOP base into an authoritarian movement, clearly would take American neo-fascism to new depths if given a second chance in the White House — including a scheme to remove civil service protections and fire the public servants who thwarted his worst instincts from 2017-21. The stakes for America have not been this high since 1861.

This is the frightening reality that a band of FBI agents suddenly interrupted at Mar-a-Lago on Monday. The events of Aug. 8, 2022, have started the clock, because the next year or two is going to determine if America is a nation governed by the rule of law, including whether a president can be brought to account for his crimes. Or will the mobs lining the roads in Palm Beach and cheering for Nazi-type stuff in Dallas finally get their civil war?

Question: I may have asked you this before but is there a correlation between who owns the Washington Post, the New York Times, etc. with how they don’t write about the fantastic job Biden and his administration are doing? — Via @AlexFTweets on Twitter

Answer: I like this question, in part because it’s an opportunity to take note in the newsletter of the remarkable run that Biden and his administration is enjoying, including the pending passage of the Inflation Reduction Act to tackle both climate change and prescription drug prices, new laws on making microchips and tackling the health woes of our veterans, record-low unemployment, the killing of al-Qaeda’s top terrorist, falling gas prices, etc., etc., etc. And, yes, you are absolutely right that mainstream outlets like the Times and the Post have been muted and cautionary in their coverage. It has nothing to do with the papers’ ownership and everything to do with the value system of journalists, compelled to show their toughness and skepticism toward Biden after dealing with Trump’s lies for four years. It’s an ethos that too often has served readers poorly.

The looming passage on Capitol Hill of the Inflation Reduction Act — centered on the most aggressive ever federal initiative to fight climate change, with some $369 billion to speed the transition to clean energy and electric cars — is coinciding with several new data points on the destructiveness of the so-called “fracking boom” that was so heavily promoted by both Democrats and Republicans in Washington and in Harrisburg. Unconventional drilling for oil and natural gas in the Keystone State has polluted once-pristine rural communities, triggered a childhood cancer scare, and worsened greenhouse-gas pollution with methane leaks. But surely this benefitted the economy, right? Right? Actually, fracking proved largely a disaster of Wall Street speculation, producing some $300 billion in losses during the 2010s.

That jibes with a stunning new report that came out Monday from the Ohio River Valley Institute, which found that while fracking boosted economic activity in the rural Pennsylvania counties where it took place, the impact on jobs — the reason state lawmakers so vehemently defended the practice — proved to be negligible. Its research found that “natural gas counties” in the Keystone State lost population at a faster rate than neighboring jurisdictions, and the job picture didn’t look that much better. Said the institute’s executive director Joanne Kilgour. “Data suggest that Pennsylvania’s natural gas counties may have been better off had the fracking boom never happened.” Meanwhile, the Texas company behind one of Pennsylvania’s largest natural-gas infrastructure projects — the Mariner East pipeline that snakes across Philadelphia’s exurbs — just pleaded no contest to systematically polluting waterways and wells along its route. With so little to show for it, Pennsylvania will be bearing the scars from this energy boondoggle for years to come.