I figured, as well as very much hoped, that Steyn might have a thing or two to say about the execrable, loathsome FBI’s abominable act of Stasi-level thuggery against not just Trump, not just every Heritage American, but against decency itself. Happily, he didn’t let me down.

For almost a decade and a half now, the American “republic” has been decaying to the defining condition of a one-party state – that is, the total merger of the ruling party and the state. Last night, the dirty stinking rotten corrupt US Department of Justice signed off on a raid on Mar-a-Lago, so we’ve now moved into hardcore banana-republic territory: the regime’s cops are busting into the home of the opposition leader. We’re told this is because Trump took some “classified” documents with him when he left Washington. Yeah, that’s always a pretext for an armed raid: You could ask Hillary Clinton or Sandy Berger.

The FBI has been getting more brazen about its political thuggery this last year, increasingly relaxed about putting its thumb on the democratic scale. As my old pal from Hillsdale days, Joy Pullman, notes in a column written pre-Mar-a-Lago:

In Michigan, the FBI openly meddled in the upcoming election by affecting the selection of candidates, arresting and charging the formerly leading Republican candidate for governor for misdemeanors. The FBI raided Ryan Kelley’s home while polls showed him leading the primaries. In the primary election last week, he came in fourth.

Mission accomplished – and all while too many stars of the rube right were still insisting that there are just a few bad apples at the top, I know the rank-and-file, they’re salt of the earth, straight-shooting G-men, they gave me this cute lapel pin, etc, etc. There are no straight-shooting G-men: Who do you think are manning the raids, you chumps? Where are the whistle-blowers? Or even the guys who say, “No thanks, I didn’t sign up for this”? It’s a wholly corrupted institution and has been for the best part of a decade. The default position for what’s left of the opposition party ought to be that the FBI is beyond reform, and will be replaced by a new agency with vastly circumscribed powers.

Annnnnd BINGO. The vile Chris Wray—doubtless the very bottom of a too-deep barrel of inexplicably piss-poor Trump hires as President, alas—wasn’t present at the lawless fishing expedition. Nor was AG Merrick Garland along for the ride, the worthless bag of Lizard-person shit. Nope, every last one of the 30 or so jackbooted thugs at MAL, all of whom Grand Master-rank clueless doofi like poor Sean Hannity still mulishly laud as fine and honorable Americans, were plucked from Famous But Incompetent’s over-ballyhooed rank and file.

There is no “cream” of the FBI crop; it’s nothing but curds, lumps, and a sour, offensive odor all the way down. And from the rogue agency’s inception, it’s been that way. Of all the misbegotten, brutish, and obscenely powerful FederalGovCo divisions, the FBI has always been one of the very worst of the whole sorry lot. How could any agency founded and shaped under the tutelage of a conniving, twisted wretch like J Edgar Hoover—may he roast in Hell for a thousand millennia—be anything but rotten to the very soles of its expensive Italian loafers?

Ahh, but it gets worse yet.

Instead, I see Kevin McCarthy is now threatening Merrick Garland with an “investigation” and ordering him to preserve all documents. Ooooooh! Maybe, after the coming Republican landslide, they can appoint an independent counsel; maybe John Durham or Robert Mueller is available. Why would anyone take McCarthy’s threat seriously? If you don’t grasp that in today’s America there is no equality before the law, there is no point even discussing public affairs.

As for Trump, well, on The Mark Steyn Show three days after the “election” I suggested:

It’s my view that after the Biden regime takes power, as in many coup situations, they will want to have the previous leader arrested. I’m being perfectly serious here. It is the intention of the Democrat Party to put Trump in jail. So, when he launches the ‘Trump News Network’, it’s gonna need to be based out of Costa Rica or the Turks and Caicos or somewhere.

Does that sound a little extreme? Well, here was The Washington Post’s recovering “conservative” columnist Jennifer Rubin round about the same time:

It’s not only that @realDonaldTrump has to lose, his enablers have to lose. We have to collectively burn down the Republican Party. We have to level them. Because if there are survivors….they will do it again.

“Survivors”? There’s that ol’ Churchillian magnanimity in victory. As I said five days after the “election”:

My advice is to take Ms Rubin and her chums at their word…

Even if they never succeed in gaoling him, they will surely use the “peaceful transition” to put in place a couple of decades’ worth of litigation-without-end. Come to that, can he even trust the Secret Service agents they’ll assign to him?

He will never be a ‘normal’ former president – because they are determined to exclude him from those ranks.

“Normal” is not a word to apply to present-day Washington – which is why my advice to President Trump during that “peaceful transition of power” was to get the hell out of the country and be the king across the water. The purpose of Liz Cheney’s January 6th “hearings” is to lay the groundwork for turning Trump into just another of those poor schlubs who were wandering around the Capitol in MAGA hats and ever since have been in solitary awaiting a scheduling hearing for a conference call on a pre-trial hearing for their constitutionally guaranteed “speedy trial”.

Agreed, one million billion kajillion percent. In fact, after learning that Trump had asserted his 5A right against self-incrimination yesterday during one of the forty or fifty ongoing “investigations” into everything from his hairstyle choices to whether or not he enjoyed a good, stiff dump this morning, I’m comfortable with laying a most grim prediction on the table for all y’all.

To wit: It is now my belief that, barring some outlandish, unforeseeable occurrence up to and including Divine intervention, Donald J Trump will be locked up in a federal penitentiary within no more than one (1) year from today’s date.

Mark your calendars, folks.

The common, increasingly-irritating notion that this whole sordid business revolves entirely and exclusively around the 2024 “election” is the product of far too narrow, too small-time a viewpoint. Trump’s legion of enemies, tormentors, and anklebiters have long been known, rightly, as long-term planners, malefactors possessed of a near-infinite store of patience. Their perseverance is the stuff of legend; their arrogance, boundless; their commitment to the pursuit of power and the suppression of dissent, total. This being so, they can never be content to settle for merely fencing The Demon Trump off from a single election cycle. No, they want the man and his E-ville™ supporters, minions, and enablers destroyed utterly—for all time, beyond any hope of redemption or rebirth.

And if Our Side ought to have learned anything at all about their ilk by now, it’s that they have more than sufficient will and determination to see to it that things work out exactly that way.

Worst of all, their brass-balled expectation that Real Americans will sit idly by once more and just let it all happen without demur appears at this stage of the game to be wholly justified. Maybe I’m all wet on that, at least; I could easily be, and I hope to God I am, frankly. But right now, it ain’t looking to me like it’s the way to bet. Steyn’s conclusion is in no wise reassuring, to say the very least.

Oh, relax, the Durham Report will be coming any day now! If you’re still talking about “investigations” and “hearings”, you’ve already lost. If that’s the best McCarthy can do, it’s hopelessly insufficient to the moment: There ought to be total non-cooperation with the regime by the GOP with the intent of bringing it to a standstill – because this “administration has gone way beyond politics and is corrupting institutions to a degree that will make violence inevitable.

Oh, but don’t worry, says McCarthy, there’s that Big Red Wave coming in November.

Yeah, right. A throwaway line from The Mark Steyn Show of December 15th 2020:

By the way, when they mention Covid and 2022, that’s code for: ‘Yeah the US midterms are gonna get stolen too.’

From where I sit, it would seem that both Steyn and myself have the right of it: Trump should have fled these un-American shores long since, washed his hands of the whole mess, and spent the rest of his mortal existence relaxing on a sandy Bahamian beach with a frozen Margarita in hand, trying to forget that any of this shit ever happened at all. I for one would never dream of holding it against the man if he did precisely that. Clearly, there ain’t no salvaging what’s left of this country without a seriously bloody reckoning at this point. And if nothing else, Trump has earned himself a nice, extended vacay for his efforts.