Mar-a-Lago search highlights Trump's Kafkaesque showdown with rule of law

The collective huffing from the GOP might have been more credible if the country had not been treated in recent weeks to a series of former Trump administration officials testifying before the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6^th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. Several testimonies revealed that virtually everyone in the West Wing, including the former president's children, were trying to figure out how to prevent Trump from staging a coup. Is it really such a stretch to believe he refused to hand over documents in clear violation of the law?

Republican officials may not be able to escape the performative outrage on Twitter, but when they are under oath or talking among themselves, they admit he is a threat to democracy, that his narcissism knows no bounds, and that his disregard for legal and democratic norms was a given. In fact, the very same people complaining about the FBI raid were the ones who witnessed firsthand that constitutional norms were to Trump what the Marquess of Queensbury rules are to professional wrestling.

As a political matter, for 24 hours after the FBI executed the search warrant, I feared that the incident would benefit the GOP heading into the midterms, boosting turnout among outraged Republican voters. The maintenance of government records, even of classified documents, is not the kind of crime that most people can even wrap their heads around. Officials in Washington, and archivists everywhere, get it, but otherwise, most people say, "Meh." It is like a violation of campaign finance rules: If you have never had to raise money for a campaign, a violation in that area seems opaque.

Then Trump gave his deposition and took the Fifth. Suddenly, the metaphor for understanding Trump shifted from "Wrestlemania" to reruns of "Law & Order." The man who famously said, "“The mob takes the Fifth. If you're innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?" took the Fifth. It was as if Franz Kafka had returned from the dead to announce the whole last seven years of American political life had been scripted by him. The theater of the absurd has reached its apotheosis and only the truly cultic followers of the former president can stick around.

EWTN, unsurprisingly, ranged itself among those "truly cultic followers" by inviting Amber Athey, Washington editor of The Spectator, to analyze the situation. Athey is also a fellow at the Steamboat Institute, a faux think tank that works to promote the fossil fuel industry. The host of EWTN's "News Nightly," Tracy Sabol, asked Athey about "the raid" while pictures of Mar-a-Lago at night splashed across the screen. The search began in midday, but I suppose the nighttime images aided the narrative that it was "a raid."

Athey repeated the Trump talking points on cue. "This was pure political intimidation," Athey claimed, without an ounce of evidence. She also misstated the issue of declassification, stating wrongly that if Trump had declassified the documents in question, "they would be perfectly allowable to be at Mar-a-Lago." But documents do not have to be classified to be subject to the Presidential Records Act.

Athey added that "perhaps this was a fishing expedition," a claim that could be easily proven or not by seeing the warrant. The FBI does not publish the warrants it executes, but they were legally obligated to provide a copy to the former president. He could release it at any time so we could all ascertain the scope of the search. The fact he has not done so speaks volumes.

Not to be outdone, EWTN's Raymond Arroyo, appearing on Fox News' "Outnumbered," had this to say about the FBI's search. "It's like the Gestapo!" No, Raymond, it's not.

I happen to like the Fifth Amendment almost as much as I like bananas. Its provision against self-incrimination was rooted in prior legal reforms in England, related to the desire to eliminate the use of torture to induce confessions. It is one of the alarming dynamics of our own time that contemporary liberals can be dismissive of the provisions of our constitutional fabric, a dismissiveness rooted in ignorance of the history of such provisions. Those concerned with outcomes more than procedures are doing the devil's work, whether they be on the right or left, and they forget that these constitutional provisions were and are part of the political architecture that allowed our civilization to begin the processes of widespread civic enfranchisement and diminishment of "might makes right" justice. Those processes are still a work in progress, and we humans will not attain perfect justice this side of the eschaton, but progress has been made.

Donald J. Trump threatens that civilizational progress more than any human being in my lifetime. I know it and you know it. The Republicans on Capitol Hill know it. Tracy Sabol and Amber Athey know it. Those who still cling to the Trump cult do so knowingly, and before the bar of public opinion, as opposed to the bar of court, they can no longer take the Fifth.