Hey, Trump GOPers, we don’t have to imagine what cops can do to everyday citizens

In those hazy initial hours after last week’s shock news that FBI agents were searching Donald Trump’s fading pleasure palace at Mar-a-Lago, there was understandable confusion over what the feds were even looking for in this unprecedented swoop into an ex-president’s private home.

And yet among America’s top Republicans, there was an almost bizarre, instant certainty about the true meaning of the FBI’s operation in Palm Beach: If law enforcement can come after the 45th president, then you — an everyday Trump backer — could be next. “If the [Department of Justice] can target President Trump, imagine what they will do to anyone who dares support him,” Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn said in a statement, echoing the almost unanimous GOP sentiment on Capitol Hill that the federal probe — focused, we now know, on Trump’s hoarding of top-secret documents, possibly nuclear secrets — is “a political witch hunt.”

Like many of her Republican colleagues, Blackburn also tied the probe of a rogue former commander-in-chief to an unrelated development — the hiring of thousands of new IRS workers and stepped-up audits of wealthy households earning more than $400,000 — to argue that a hyper-politicized new kind of police state is coming for regular folks.

The logic here is so 180 degrees opposite from reality that George Orwell must be spinning in his grave right now. Freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, and now, apparently, applying the rule of law to a former president is tyranny. The truth is that throughout modern American history, the presidential exemption to the supposedly cherished notion that no person is above the law — from Richard Nixon’s obstruction of justice to the torture regime of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney — has been a bug crashing U.S. democracy, and not a feature.

But there’s also a grating flip side to the bleating of Blackburn and the so-called thought leaders of the modern conservative movement. There’s no need to “imagine” what an oppressive police and carceral state can do to everyday American citizens. Just pick up a newspaper or surf the web and read the horror stories.

Rather than imagine the right-wing fantasies of a looming police state, I can absorb the news about the 2021 death of incarcerated Ishmail Thompson inside the Dauphin County Jail in central Pennsylvania. According to the report by Pennlive.com investigative journalist Joshua Vaughn, Thompson — a previously healthy 29-year-old — went into a coma and later died after he was pepper-sprayed by corrections officials who placed a hood over his head and restrained him in a chair. No one has been held accountable for his killing.

It didn’t require my imagination — just the ability to digest facts — to process what happened to Brianna Grier, a 28-year-old Georgia woman who died last month of severe brain injuries after officers from the Hancock County Sheriff’s Office handcuffed this woman suffering a mental health crisis. The lawmen put her, without a seat belt, in the back of a cruiser with one door left open and then sped off, as she was thrown out of the vehicle.

The reality is that America already operates as a brutal police state where law enforcement officers can trample your constitutional rights — as long as you look like Ishmail Thompson or Brianna Grier, who were both Black, and not like Donald Trump or Marsha Blackburn.

Indeed, what actually transpired on Aug. 8 at Mar-a-Lago — when a team of casually dressed FBI agents, who coordinated their arrival with the Secret Service team based there, to avoid the potential chaos of showing up unannounced — looked nothing like the tens of thousands of no-knock raids that the feds and local cops have executed since launching the so-called war on drugs in the 1970s. These are often conducted in the dead of night by militarized robocops using battering rams or other weapons of war.

The truth of what such a police state can do to everyday citizens was driven home in February 2020 when the chaos caused by such a predawn drug raid in Louisville led to the police killing of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency-room technician with no criminal record. One of the many ironies right now is that after Taylor’s death and the knee-on-neck killing of George Floyd, Blackburn and her GOP colleagues like Sen. Marco Rubio out there complaining about the alleged tyranny of FBI or IRS overreach had a golden opportunity to rein in the abuses of law enforcement through a 2021 bill called the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. The bill would have barred federal no-knock drugs raids, among a number of steps to curb police brutality, which is the real “overreach.”

But the bill died because Blackburn, Rubio and almost all their Republican Senate colleagues refused to support it. In the reality-based world, the Washington Post reports that shootings by the police have killed 1,065 Americans in the last year — a rate that’s actually slightly higher than at the time of Taylor and Floyd’s deaths, which sparked worldwide protests.

» READ MORE: A raid at Mar-a-Lago and a race against fascism | Will Bunch Newsletter

In the fantasy world of the far-right, the post-Mar-a-Lago frenzy whipped up by top Republicans who ought to know better seems to have inspired an attack on an FBI office in Cincinnati by a Trump supporter who was then killed by police, and has drawn throngs of enraged members of the GOP base to the Florida causeway near the ex-president’s retreat and outside the Phoenix FBI office, where some of the partisans are brandishing weapons.

Yes, it’s bizarre to see a conservative political movement that traces its origins to the “law and order,” pro-cop campaigns of Ronald Reagan for California governor in 1966 and Richard Nixon for the White House in 1968 — in tandem with J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI’s unlawful war on left-wing dissent known as COINTELPRO — now label the FBI as Public Enemy No. 1. But the collective freak-out over the federal investigation of Trump has exposed what America’s conservatives think law enforcement is actually for. It’s not to uphold the rule of law.

No, the cops exist to enforce the rigid and repressive hierarchies that have mostly dominated American life since its founding — a nativist patriarchy rooted most deeply in the terra firma of white privilege. The real overreach by law enforcement — targeting Black and brown communities with the barrel of a gun or a knee to the neck — enforces these hierarchies through terrorism and fear. But now a form of blowback where this brutal machine is abruptly turned toward Trump — and the millionaire tax cheats who are down with his brand of fascism — is found intolerable.

It runs deeper than the knee-jerk defense of Trump and his alleged mishandling of top-secret documents, which is a symptom of a sick cult of personality. The right’s anger over a plan to boost the struggling IRS is arguably more instructive. The GOP lie that Democrats are siccing 87,000 gun-brandishing tax agents on everyday Americans (that figure involves replacing tens of thousands of employees expected to retire, most from back-office jobs) is a mix of fear-based political posturing and the actual worry that America might do what it’s avoided so well in this age of mass incarceration — treat white-collar crime seriously.

For 50 years, ever since Nixon’s high crimes and misdemeanors were exposed to the American people, our nation has dealt with the schizophrenia of our alleged core value that no one is above the law and the reality that our presidents get away with everything short of murder. When you take a step back and ponder the lifetime of immunity — so far — enjoyed by Donald Trump in contrast to the habitual split-second injustice against folks like Breonna Taylor, you suddenly get what the fuss is about. In a land where our presidents have been the ultimate symbol of white male dominance, The Establishment is terrified by a new vision of equal justice.

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