Both of these claims are a way of turning any attempt to hold Trump accountable for crimes he may have committed into an imagined assault on his faux-populist supporters. If “they” – an unnamed, state-sponsored enemy – can target someone relatively as powerful as Trump, then “you” – the right-wing media consumer – will soon be ground to dust by the same forces. Trump’s legal battles, then, aren’t his alone. They belong to his entire movement.
Conservative pundits have spent months recently laying this groundwork, though a larger persecution narrative on the right goes back decades. In the days prior to the Mar-a-Lago search, conservatives reacted to news that landmark legislation known as the Inflation Reduction Act would include $80 billion for the IRS by claiming the new funding would turn the agency into a militarized, political police force.
The reality is the exact opposite. The new funding is specifically designed to provide the IRS the resources it needs to target powerful people and organizations, instead of the low-hanging fruit the agency has gone after following decades of conservative sabotage. Just like in the responses to the Mar-a-Lago search, however, the right reflexively transformed the issue from one of higher tax collection aimed at billionaires and transnational corporations into a wholly manufactured narrative about a supposedly out-of-control government bureaucracy coming for Trump supporters.
“They’re going to weaponize the IRS, use the government to intimidate every single Trump supporter and MAGA supporter in America,” conservative pundit John Fredericks said.
In July, Tucker Carlson devoted his entire opening monologue to similarly arguing that prosecution of anyone associated with Trump’s January 6 attempted coup was, by definition, an example of totalitarian overreach. Carlson spent about 16 minutes of the most watched cable show on prime time mischaracterizing 14 investigations into right-wing media figures or politicians, positioning the FBI as an explicitly political secret police force targeting conservatives.
“The signature tactic of the Biden administration … has been the criminalizing of American politics,” Carlson said.
Again, this characterization could not be more absurd. Both presently and historically, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies have disproportionately targeted, investigated, and prosecuted left-wing people and organizations. The FBI is more conservative than the population in general, and current FBI Director Christopher Wray was appointed by Trump. If anything, the United States has a history of allowing rampant lawbreaking by powerful people to go unchecked. No high-level officials involved in the torture program under President George W. Bush were ever prosecuted, for example, and many went on to successful careers inside and outside government.
The conservative response to all of these developments – the Mar-a-Lago search, new IRS funding, the prosecution of insurrectionists – underscores a basic tenet of their philosophy. As the classical music composer and internet commentator Frank Wilhoit wrote in 2018: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
This pithy remark has almost become a cliche at this point, but it explains a great deal about the last several years. Conservatives constantly claim to “back the Blue,” but when a movement can seamlessly pivot from Blue Lives Matter to Defund the FBI, there is clearly an operating principle at work other than an abstract respect for “law and order.” Their real commitment is to a certain kind of order – one defined by social hierarchies across race, class, and gender.
Neither the FBI nor the IRS actually threaten to subvert those hierarchies, but the conservative imagination transforms them into all-powerful entities that can. Conservative pundits reacting to the Mar-a-Lago search are arguing for a system that protects them, their donors, and their sponsors, no matter the charges against them. The David versus Goliath narrative they’re now pitching to viewers is merely a useful fig leaf toward that end.
