It is exactly what it looks like: a show of force against the opposition leader by the head of state and his personal bodyguards. If this happened in any other country, it immediately would be denounced as the act of a dictator. But since it is being done by Joe Biden, the putative leader of Our Democracy™, we are being told to “wait and see” whether this extraordinary action was justified as the Left does a war dance.

This raid is an unequivocal travesty for democracy. It will not “lower the temperature” in our fracturing republic, as Biden once promised to do. To the contrary, it will bring us further along to a boiling point, inflame deep and bitter divisions, and make a hellish descent into violent unrest more likely. It cannot but provoke a large part of the country, and solidify a conviction among them that they are living under the boot of a despotic occupation.

And for what? So that a failing, unpopular president and his base can get their jollies?

Trump supporters know the Left hates Trump, that they regard him as a latter-day Hitler, and that they have spent the past six years anxiously searching for one pretext or another to throw him in prison. After years of fruitless and unhinged “walls are closing in” speculation, there is just no way that Trump could be prosecuted now without arousing deep and well-founded suspicions of political retribution.

The outrageous East Germany optics of the Mar-a-Lago raid show, at best, a careless if not malicious insensitivity to that reality. They are a clear indicator that this raid is politically motivated and not, as the Stalinists tell us, about making sure “no one is above the law.”

Trump supporters know that when Democrats break the law, they get a slap on the wrist at worst. They know that Attorney General Merrick Garland is a craven partisan who has used counterterrorism tools to target conservative parents, and that despite his claim to combat “domestic extremism,” Garland does not give a damn about violent extremism coming from the Left.

Trump supporters also know that the FBI is not their friend, and they are right to suspect malfeasance in the Trump raid. They know that the FBI spied on Trump’s 2016 campaign using a dossier of disinformation that came from Hillary Clinton and which the FBI knew was not reliable. They know that top-ranking agents in the Trump-Russia probe discussed “stopping” Trump among themselves and implementing an “insurance policy,” just in case the people made the “wrong” choice for president in 2016.

They know that the FBI has had Hunter Biden’s laptop since 2019, and that the FBI raided the home of a journalist in possession of Ashley Biden’s diary, in which Biden’s daughter reportedly describes inappropriate showers with her father. They know that the FBI kicked in the doors of Roger Stone’s house before dawn for “obstructing” a bogus probe that consumed more than half of Trump’s term.