Trump's followers are delusional and dangerous -- but don't call them hypocrites

[Nevilledog]

https://www.salon.com/2022/08/29/followers-are-delusional-and--but-dont-call-them-hypocrites/

Throughout his presidency and beyond, Donald Trump has proven to be a public menace, quite possibly the most dangerous person in the world. His evident crimes and other acts of perfidy, both as president and subsequently, are almost too numerous to list: collusion with a hostile foreign power to subvert an election, conspiracy to obstruct justice, a coup attempt that involved a terrorist attack on the Capitol, incitements to political violence, fraudulent claims and conspiracy theories about election fraud, democide through willful negligence and corruption during the pandemic, using the office of the president to personally enrich himself, and extortion or blackmail against the leaders of Ukraine, possibly leading to the Russian invasion.

It's important to understand that Trump's followers and voters love him because of his wrongdoing and disregard for the rule of law and democracy, not despite those things.

Trump is at long last under investigation by the Department of Justice for a variety of offenses involving the highly classified documents he stored at Mar-a-Lago, including obstruction charges and violations of the Espionage Act. More than two weeks after the FBI searched Trump's residence and recovered numerous boxes of documents, the seriousness of these charges is coming into focus. At the Guardian, reporter Hugo Lowell writes: "The details contained in the affidavit used to secure a warrant to search Mar-a-Lago ... offered the clearest insight yet into the basis for the FBI's seeking permission to search the resort":

[T]he FBI needed to forcibly retrieve the United States government's most sensitive secrets, especially after it came to suspect Trump and his team were holding on to classified documents despite repeated efforts — including with a subpoena — to secure their return.

Most pressing, according to the affidavit, was that the FBI had identified probable cause that documents containing national defense information were scattered across Mar-a-Lago, potentially jeopardizing intelligence gathering and revealing the identities of human clandestine sources…. the affidavit ... also showed how Trump had previously retained government secrets at Mar-a-Lago after he was no longer president.

The FBI noted that after Trump finally returned around a dozen boxes of materials to the National Archives this year, an FBI triage found 184 unique classified documents, including 25 marked top secret, 92 marked secret, 67 marked confidential, and some with Trump's distinctive handwriting.

The documents also included some with markings like "SI" for special intelligence, "HCS" for intelligence from human clandestine sources, "NOFORN", for "Not Releasable to Foreign Nationals", "FISA" for the "Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act", and "ORCON", which restricts non-US dissemination.

*snip*