Merrick Garland's mistake

 Roger Kimball:

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Monday’s FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Palm Beach residence, was probably the single biggest boon to his stature among voters since he left office in January 2021, bigger even than the partisan witch hunt over which future CNN hostess, Liz Cheney, has been presiding with such ostentatious zeal.

This is obviously a concern among the beautiful, well-pressed people with white collars and clean fingernails who hate Trump. Employing a ju-ju they recognize but do not understand, Trump has time and again demonstrated an uncanny ability to goad his would-be attackers into contortions of self-immolation.

Is that happening now? Maybe. My friend thinks so, hence his buoyant mood and affectionate feelings about the attorney general.

A lot of other people think so, too, though for many the apparently rising fortunes of Donald Trump are not something to celebrate but something to abominate. A good example of the latter was just provided by David Brooks, successfully housebroken faux-conservative columnist for our former paper of record, the New York Times.

In an extraordinary column called “Did the FBI just reelect Donald Trump?,” Brooks eloquently dramatizes the anxiety of those “quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails” C. S. Lewis wrote about.

There are two currents of sentiment running through Brooks’ column. One is a certain obtuse contempt. The other is an imperfectly concealed fear.

He leads off with the contempt part. “Why is Donald Trump so powerful?” he asks. “How did he come to dominate one of the two major parties and get himself elected president?” It’s not his looks. Brooks speaks sarcastically of his “hair” and “waistline”—wink, wink— little synecdoches for the “Bad Orange Man” meme we’re supposed to recognize and nod knowingly about. No, says Brooks, the secret to Trump’s power are the stories he tells, above all the story that “America is being ruined by corrupt coastal elites.” Somehow, tens of millions think that Trump is right. How can this be? “According to this narrative,” Brooks continues,

there is an interlocking network of highly educated Americans who make up what the Trumpians have come to call the Regime: Washington power players, liberal media, big foundations, elite universities, woke corporations. These people are corrupt, condescending and immoral and are looking out only for themselves. They are out to get Trump because Trump is the person who stands up to them. They are not only out to get Trump; they are out to get you.

I know that story. I tell it often myself. And I appreciate its formulation by David Brooks. I wouldn’t change a syllable. It was at the center of what Trump campaigned on in 2016 and 2020. (It will also be at the center of his campaign, should he choose to run in 2024.) The great power of these sentences is that they not only express what Trump believes: they also express a truth that is recognized by those “tens of millions of Americans” Brooks nervously evokes.
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And here comes a leap. Eyes still closed? Trump’s narrative, Brooks says, “simply assumes that the proof of people’s virtue is that they’re getting attacked by the Regime. Trump’s political career has been kept afloat by elite scorn. The more elites scorn him, the more Republicans love him. The key criterion for leadership in the Republican Party today is having the right enemies.”

And here I thought that the chief criterion for conservative leadership of a Trumpian stamp—let’s leave the Republican Party out if it, shall we?—was “making America great again.” You know, things like nominating hundreds of judges who, like Antonin Scalia, believe that their role is to interpret the law in light of the Constitution, not make the law on the basis of their personal policy preferences.

It’s things like pursuing policies that make America energy-independent, enforcing immigration laws so successfully that illegal immigration is slowed to a trickle. It’s pursuing economic policies—slashing taxes, sharply reducing regulations that are merely burdensome—that lead to the lowest unemployment rates in decades or in history for minority workers, who also saw real wages rise at their quickest rate ever. It’s defanging “corrupt,” “malevolent,” “partisan” diktats like Title IX rules in colleges and “woke” ideology in the military. It’s insisting that our NATO allies act like allies and pay their agreed-upon fees to support the organization. It’s also making symbolic gestures like moving our Israeli embassy to Jerusalem where it belongs, and formulating the Abraham Accords, a world-historical foreign policy achievement in the Middle East.

I could go on. But I don’t want to stand in the way of David Brooks’ main point, which is to lament that Trump’s narrative, such as it is, has suddenly been goosed by the FBI, which, acting on a wide-ranging warrant that Merrick Garland personally approved, raided Mar-a-Lago, rummaged through Melania’s personal wardrobe, and carted off some 11 boxes of documents that have been variously described as classified presidential documents (just think of Hillary Clinton’s 30,000 emails, some of Barack Obama’s papers, etc.) and “nuclear secrets.” (One wag wondered whether there was a video of Trump peeing on nuclear codes with Russian prostitutes, but that probably came from Christopher Steele.)

The entire episode has put David Brooks in a bind. On the one hand, he would love to see Donald Trump taken away in handcuffs and indicted. On the other, the FBI’s actions have galvanized conservative, and even Republican, support for Trump. It has also got people thinking that America’s premier law enforcement agency is, well, “corrupt,” “malevolent,” “partisan,” and “acting in bad faith.”
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The left's belief that Trump has committed crimes is rather strange.  They seem to just assume that not embracing the evils of liberalism is a crime.  They never thought he was a criminal when he was just a successful businessman developing high rises and hotels.  It was not until he successfully ran for office as a Republican that they saw him as a criminal.