Donald Trump is exactly where he wants to be – the centre of attention.
The Steele Dossier, the Mueller Report, the two impeachments – nothing makes the man happier (and more powerful inside the Republican Party) than playing the role of victim in a grand conspiracy.
And he’s great at it! Who else could manage to sidestep questions about why he took top-secret documents out of the White House, and instead turn all the chatter to whether the FBI has turned into the KGB.
It’s all terrific theatre, alternately enraging and thrilling, depending on which cable TV wormhole you choose to go down.
Over on lefty cable, Democrats are positively levitating with excitement, thinking this time – this time! – they’ve caught the rascal.
Meanwhile on Fox, Trump’s supporters are accusing the FBI of becoming the political goon squad Trump wanted to turn it into.
They’re also asking the FBI to publicly reveal all the state secrets they found before they come up with another excuse not to believe any of it.
Then there is the analysis of all this political theatre.
David Brooks in The New York Times worried that the raid somehow ensured Trump’s re-election – the logic being that swing voters will swallow their disgust with Trump because they now feel sorry for him.
Others note that Trump’s advisers warned GOP leaders not to get out over their skis defending their leader, just in case the trove of boxes does indeed contain some pilfered nuclear codes.
By yesterday, all the ingredients seemed in place: The grinding legal manoeuvres, the well-placed leaks, the volatile tweets.
Welcome to the next two years.
All this comes just weeks before the home stretch of the mid-term elections.
Voters have been hammered by inflation (now moderating, but still high), Supreme Court rulings, lingering COVID-19. But instead we’re all talking about Trump again.
Perhaps it was naive to think it would be anything but. Perhaps, if there was no raid, we’d find some other reason to make it about him.
And there are plenty: Just hours after the Mar-a-Lago raid, Trump spent six hours stonewalling questions in a separate New York State probe over whether he fudged the value of his real estate holdings to get bank loans or dodge taxes.
Still to come is his court-ordered testimony in still another case, this one over possible election result tampering in Georgia.
And then there is the biggest question of all – whether US Attorney General Merrick Garland decides to prosecute Trump for his actions on and around the Jan. 6 insurrection.
That decision may not come until the fall, when the congressional panel investigating January 6 issues its final report.
We remain a very long way from Trump being convicted of a crime, or being barred from running for office.
If raiding an ex-president’s home triggers outrage, just imagine what indicting him in an election season would cause.
No matter how much the Justice Department might insist it is completely independent of the White House, don’t think for a minute Garland isn’t weighing the constitutional and electoral impact of bringing charges against Trump.
Democrats’ revenge fantasies are persistent but often fail (see Report, Mueller) because fighting Trump is an asymmetric battle.
The idea he will one day hang his head in shame, his crimes exposed, is both an animating dream and a complete misunderstanding of their quarry.
What does matter is whether these probes are chipping away at Trump’s electability. There too, the results are hard to divine.
The country is unhappy with Biden, and Trump remains the top choice of GOP primary voters, but his track record with endorsements is not flawless.
More tellingly, recent polling and repudiations of abortion bans in deep red places like Kansas suggest the public is wary of too hard a rightward swing. The three conservative justices on the Supreme Court that Trump proudly appointed could be his achilles heel.
To that end, there is already much talk that the expected Democratic rout this fall at the midterms may not be that severe.
Even before this week’s raid, GOP operatives were said to be dreading an expected Trump announcement that he was running again, seeing that as the Democrats’ best recruitment tool.
If this past week proves anything, it’s that American political life still revolves around one man. No matter what’s in those boxes.
Larry Hackett is the former editor-in-chief of People magazine, and a contributor to the US morning television news program Good Morning America
