Trump sics the GOP. on the FBI

It was inevitable that the Scofflaw and the Law would clash. Still, it is one of the most bizarre loop de loops in Donald Trump’s dark, crazy reign over Republicans that he turned a party that was pro-law and order and anti-Evil Empire into a party that trashes the F.B.I. and embraces Vladimir Putin. It is the greatest con of the century’s greatest con man: hijacking his own party. The Republicans are echoing “unhinged leftists from 1968,” Tom Nichols, The Atlantic writer, noted Friday on “Morning Joe.” “‘The F.B.I. is the enemy, the F.B.I. is the Gestapo, the F.B.I. is the enemy within.’” President George H.W. Bush resigned his N.R.A. life membership when the N.R.A., just before the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, sent out a fund-raising letter, calling federal agents “jack-booted thugs.” “Your broadside against federal agents,” Bush wrote, “deeply offends my own sense of decency and honor; and it offends my concept of service to country.” Now, the idea that federal agents are “jack-booted thugs” is a G.O.P. mantra.

At a demented Republican news conference Friday on the Hill, Representative Elise Stefanik laced into the F.B.I. leadership “that protected Hillary Clinton, James Comey and continues to protect Hunter Biden” and “that perpetrated the false Russia hoax for years.” Trump expects that kind of obeisance. Peter Baker and Susan Glasser report in their new book, “The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021,” that Trump told his chief of staff John Kelly that he wished his generals were as loyal as Hitler’s were. It’s Pavlovian now. Republicans don’t even hesitate before protecting Trump, even though he’s being investigated for possibly violating the Espionage Act. His casual attitude toward classified material is nothing new. The Times’s Mark Mazzetti wrote that “officials who gave him classified briefings occasionally withheld some sensitive details from him” because they saw him as a security risk. The lord of Mar-a-Lago assumes that whether he’s in or out of office, all top-secret papers are his, to tweet, wave around, declassify or deploy as political weapons. He didn’t think he would appear as a traitor — the word he used to describe Edward Snowden — when he stashed classified material in his Florida Xanadu, with its approximately 58 bedrooms and 33 bathrooms. As an autocrat at heart, Trump simply conflates himself with the republic.