Today’s fantasy from Donald Trump riling up Fox News and his MAGA base is the fallacy that President Biden was “locked & loaded ready to take me out” during a 2022 search of the disgraced ex-president’s Mar-a-Lago golf club for classified documents.
Not sure what’s the worst part of this – that Trump, who wasn’t even at Mar-a-Lago during the search, a fact that was known to the FBI to the point that it planned the search around him not being there, is this much of a liar, or that his MAGA base is this obtuse.
“It’s just been revealed that Biden’s DOJ was authorized to use DEADLY FORCE for their DESPICABLE raid in Mar-a-Lago. You know they’re just itching to do the unthinkable,” Trump wrote on his flailing Truth Social platform, which is on pace to lose a billion dollars this year.
This would be the same Donald Trump whose lawyers, arguing in front of the U.S. Supreme Court in favor of an expansive concept of presidential immunity, asserted that Trump could order Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival without any legal repercussions.
So, there’s that.
What Trump was getting at with this latest lie was a law enforcement document released on Tuesday that described the FBI’s plans for the Aug. 8, 2022, search of Mar-a-Lago, which included a “policy statement” on the use of deadly force that said officers may resort to lethal force only when the subject of such force poses an “imminent danger of death or serious physical injury” to an officer or another person.
That’s boilerplate police procedure for the execution of a search warrant, as anybody who knows anything about law enforcement is already well-aware.
Enter Marjorie Taylor Greene.
“The Biden DOJ and FBI were planning to assassinate Pres Trump and gave the green light. Does everyone get it yet???!!!! What are Republicans going to do about it?” Greene tweeted in response to that revelation, such as it was a revelation.
The subject line of a Trump campaign fundraising email says it all:
“They were authorized to shoot me!”
A couple of other newsworthy items came out in the document dump related to the 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago: more classified documents were found in Trump’s Mar-a-Lago bedroom four months later, and an adviser connected to Trump’s Save America PAC acknowledged scanning the contents of the box that contained the classified materials in 2021 and storing them on a personal laptop provided by the PAC.
But if you watch Fox News, the story is how the FBI was somehow planning to shoot Trump during a search conducted while he was in New Jersey.