In a disturbing echo of his infamous exhortation to his Proud Boy supporters before the 2020 election to “stand back and stand by,” Donald Trump told Fox News Digital on Monday that he “will do whatever” he can “to help the country” following last week’s seizure of stolen documents from his Florida home. Trump said that the “temperature has to be brought down,” but stressed his conditions. His supporters, he said, are “not going to stand for another scam.”
This follows a warning from the FBI and Department of Homeland Security about the spike in threats against federal law enforcement as well as the attack on an Ohio FBI field office last week. Trump sounds just about as sincere in trying to stop those threats as he did in that debate statement.
“The country is in a very dangerous position. There is tremendous anger, like I’ve never seen before, over all of the scams, and this new one—years of scams and witch hunts, and now this,” Trump said. “There has never been a time like this where law enforcement has been used to break into the house of a former president of the United States, and there is tremendous anger in the country—at a level that has never been seen before, other than during very perilous times,” Trump said. He said he told the Justice Department he would help, but they haven’t responded to his “offer” yet. “I think they would want the same thing—I’ve never seen anything like this,” Trump said. “It is a very dangerous time for our country.”
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He ranted on about “fake witch hunts and phony Russia, Russia, Russia schemes and scams,” complaining that “nothing happens with them, and then they break into a president’s house—a sneak attack where it was totally—no one ever thought a thing like this would happen.” He also raised, again, the insinuation that the FBI “could have planted anything they wanted” during the search.
Yeah, that will calm things down.
Trump’s “offer” to the Justice Department has a hint of extortion behind it after he demanded over the weekend that all “his”documents be returned. Of course he did that in the most Trumpy possible way: on Truth Social, the cut-rate Twitter knock-off site his minions created.
“Oh great!” Trump wrote. “It has just been learned that the FBI, in its now famous raid of Mar-a-Lago, took boxes of privileged ‘attorney-client’ material, and also ‘executive’ privileged material, which they knowingly should not have taken. By copy of this TRUTH, I respectfully request that these documents be immediately returned to the location from which they were taken. Thank you!”
Posts on the site are called “truths.” Trump still seems to be under the impression that he is king—or more likely, a mob boss—and that his dribbling there has any force. (Beyond further riling up his violent followers, that is.)
Trump’s “offer” to the Justice Department claiming his desire to “help the country” sounds eerily like the lead-in to his September 2020 debate declaration: “I’m willing to do anything. I want to see peace,” Trump said then. “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by,” Trump said. “But I’ll tell you what, I’ll tell you what, somebody’s got to do something about antifa and the left because this is not a right-wing problem.”
Trump’s “offer” is a signal to his followers and to the Department of Justice and to the FBI, just like that debate statement. If he doesn’t get what he wants, his thugs are ready to attack. Again.
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