Will Bunch: Hey, Trump GOPers, we don't have to imagine what cops can do to everyday citizens

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Will Bunch
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Imagine what the FBI could do to YOU after raiding Mar-a-Lago, GOP leaders ask. Seriously?? We know what cops already do to everyday folks like Breonna Taylor

What's with the right's new take on 'law and order'? Who are police really for? My new column

inquirer.com
Hey, Trump GOPers, we don’t have to imagine what cops can do to everyday citizens
In a society rife with cop brutality, the GOP freak-out over the Trump Mar-a-Lago search isn't about the rule of law, but preserving white privilege.
10:30 AM · Aug 14, 2022

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/republican-outrage-trump-raid-mar-a-lago-20220814.html

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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.


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