Donald Trump is never subtle. Not in his policies, not in his lies. He makes his talking points simple, and he repeats them over and over. His supporters get those talking points well in advance, and the media dutifully follows along by quoting both Trump and his supporters, making sure that the latest meme reaches media saturation almost immediately.
When it came to election fraud, Trump was on the job months before anyone had a chance to vote. In fact, he barely paused in his claims about fraud in the 2016 election. In both cycles, he pounded into his supporters a message of “the only way I can lose is if they cheat,” with absolute plans for claiming fraud no matter what—a strategy that Steve Bannon gleefully confirmed weeks before the 2020 election. He leveraged that lie into multiple attempts to overthrow the results of the election, with the violence of January 6 being only the most obvious.
Trump’s reaction to the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago is no less blatant. But this time, the phrase he’s grinding into his supporters isn’t “election fraud,” it’s “planted documents.” That phrase has already sprung from Trump advisers, from Republicans in Congress, and from right-wing media, as well as from Trump himself.
Just like lies about election fraud, this one has two purposes: protect Trump, and drive a wedge between his supporters and the American government.
The self-promotional aspect of Trump’s Big Lies is clear. Election fraud was meant to be the means by which Trump grabbed control of the government and became dictator in everything but name (though surely that would have come in time). The planted documents lie has a primary goal that’s even more simple: making it more difficult for the Department of Justice to indict Trump for crimes that he has committed with such certainty that “reasonable doubt” is … unreasonable.
But there’s a second aspect to each of these lies. Each is intended to not just elevate Trump, but to do so by using a conspiracy theory to tear apart the connection between a people and their government.
In the case of election fraud, Trump spread a message of that directly attacked the most central institutions of democracy. The truth about the American electoral system is so simple and obvious, that it should be almost impossible to miss. After all, people pull the lever, or check a box, in small local churches and school buildings, staffed by volunteers from their own neighborhoods, under the supervision of state and county officials from both parties whose jobs consist of nothing more than keeping the vote in order. States, and even districts, get to pick their own equipment, refine their own processes, and determine their own voting places. The result is not just one of the most transparent systems of voting on the planet, but one that is anything but homogenous. It’s a hodge-podge of systems, rules, and restrictions that has been heavily tailored by state and local Republicans to favor Republican voters. Not one step of the process is anything like hidden.
But Trump sold this system as a shadowy conspiracy that spanned not just the United States, but connected to Venezuelan dictators, German servers, and Italian satellites. This imaginary worldwide voting system was manipulated by shadowy groups of wealthy (Jewish) metropolitan (Jewish) un-American (Jewish) forces that arrayed themselves against Trump. It’s the farthest thing in the world from how our system works, but it’s the lie Trump sold to his followers. It’s the lie that brought people to storm the steps of the Capitol on Jan. 6, and keeps them primed for more violence at any time.
When the planted documents lie appeared in the immediate wake of the search at Mar-a-Lago, one thing was immediately clear: Trump knew that the documents the FBI recovered were extremely serious, and there was absolutely no excuse for Trump to have them. Trump railed against the “outrage” of his home being searched, but every single spokesperson who spoke for him, including the Fox News pundits, made sure to get in the word “planted,” because even before the release of the FBI’s document list, it’s patently obvious that Trump was holding onto things for which there is absolutely no justification.
Just like claims of election fraud, planted does double-duty. It absolves Trump from a crime for which the evidence seems rock solid, and it widens the division between his supporters and the government.
In this case, the subject of the attack is the FBI and the Department of Justice as a whole. Even without this excuse, Trump has been eager to drive a spike into the DOJ, going back to the point where Jeff Sessions recused himself, and Trump learned that sitting in the Oval Office didn’t allow him to use Justice as his personal means of attacking his enemies. Trump’s hate for the DOJ only ratcheted up after Bill Barr refused to use it to support his claims of election fraud, and the department’s leadership stopped Trump’s scheme to make Jeffrey Clark the acting AG.
So far, the body count of the “planted documents” lie seems to be just one. It will likely climb higher, especially if Trump is indicted. That’s not the DOJ’s fault. That’s the cost of Trump's lies.
We don’t know yet exactly what the FBI recovered from the building Trump illegally uses as his home. But we know they’re serious. Because Trump’s Big Lie #2 is telling us exactly that.