Was Donald Trump the true mastermind of the Mar-a-Lago raid?
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In his damage report on the Florida primary on Wednesday, Neal B. Freeman, former editor and columnist for National Review and former producer of “Firing Line,” described how the Florida governor’s race that was once the Republicans’ to lose is now within the margin of error.
Then Freeman rhetorically asked readers of National Review, “What happened?”
“What happened was a raid in south Florida,” wrote Freeman. “Across the country, it was a big story. Here in Florida, it was a seismic event.”
The temblor in the Sunshine State made Donald Trump the unquestioned leader of the Republican Party at a moment when a powerful challenger was beginning to emerge in Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Trump could now sweep the 2024 nomination
Wrote Freeman:
“If Trump wants GOP support here for a 2024 campaign, it’s now his for the asking. The Raid didn’t just stop the steady erosion of support to more viable GOP alternatives. It packed outraged, middle-roading Republicans atop his hard base, giving Trump enough sway for at least short-term party control. If the Democrats’ intention was to revive Trump’s flagging prospects, The Raid was an unqualified success.”
Trump's attacks on FBI search: What he said vs. what we know
Freeman punctuated his piece with this ominous note:
“The Raid itself, in simultaneously boosting Trump and damaging DeSantis, may have been the most effective August Surprise ever devised. Somewhere, Chuck Colson is paying his professional respects.”
But what if the Democrats are not the Machiavellians here, but the mere benefactors of a raid someone else provoked?
Is it possible Trump wanted the FBI raid?
Understand, one only contemplates such things in the madcap world of Donald Trump, when anything you can imagine is not only possible but has already been eclipsed by something even crazier, such as, I don’t know, Trump insulting a Gold Star mom whose son died defending the U.S. in Iraq?
In the Age of Anything is Possible, it is not entirely absurd to contemplate that Donald Trump is the cunning author of the FBI raid on his own home. In fact, it’s delicious to contemplate.
I only do so because of something I read just Tuesday in the Washington Post:
“In a legal filing on Monday, Trump’s lawyers insisted that he had been cooperating with Justice Department requests. In fact, however, the narrative they laid out, as well as other documents and interviews, show that Trump ignored multiple opportunities to quietly resolve the FBI concerns by handing over all classified material in his possession — including a grand jury subpoena that Trump’s team accepted May 11. Again and again, he reacted with a familiar mix of obstinance and outrage, causing some in his orbit to fear he was essentially daring the FBI to come after him.”
“Daring the FBI to come after him.”
What a journalist witnessed at Mar-a-Lago
Now where had I read that before? Oh, yes, in the online magazine Unherd.
Earlier this month, Michael Wolff, the much-maligned journalist and author of negative books about the Trump White House, wrote that Trump had invited him to his Palm Beach compound in the spring of 2021.
“After writing two books generally butchering Donald Trump, I received an unlikely invitation to visit him at Mar-a-Lago so I could write a third. Negativity was not something he feared. To the extent it added to the further sturm und drang that surrounded him, he courted it.”
When Wolff arrived at Mar-a-Lago, Trump went on about “the stolen election and all the various bad people, dark forces, and disreputable agencies of government out to get him.”
Trump was savoring the discussion, recalled Wolff. Eventually that conversation evolved into dinner with Trump and Melania on the Mar-a-Lago terrace, where the former president continued airing all of his complaints.
“As I tried to leave, he held my arm for a few last-minute words about his unbelievable fortitude in the face of his enemies, adding:
Trump: What if my enemies 'stormed in here'?
‘What if they stormed in here to search the place? Mar-a-Lago! Here! Do you believe that’s possible? Well, I wouldn’t put it past them!’”
Wolff noted that when the FBI finally did raid Mar-a-Lago, Trump, as if anticipating the moment, quickly leaped to the front of the narrative, saying: “My beautiful home, Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, is currently under siege, raided, and occupied by a large group of FBI agents.”
By contemplating any of this, some of you will no doubt wonder if I’m back-tracking on earlier columns in which I called the Mar-a-Lago raid “a fiasco.” A friend on the political left predicted I’ll regret what I’ve written on that.
I tell you what I told him.
I’ll never regret that because I’ve got the smoking gun. I’ve got the Newsweek story in which the Justice Department and the FBI’s own anonymous sources acknowledged they failed to anticipate the blowback to the raid.
Which explains why they so badly bungled the aftermath. There was no plan for managing the fallout of federal agents raiding a former president’s home for the first time in American history.
When I’ve got the FBI’s own source calling Mar-a-Lago raid “a spectacular backfire,” I’ve got the goods.
So no, I won’t be changing my mind.
The hottest game in Washington, D.C.
But I am playing today’s hottest new D.C. parlor game:
Who was the real puppet master at Mar-a-Lago on Aug. 8?
Could it have been Donald Trump?
Wolff wrote that as he prepared to leave Mar-a-Lago last spring, Trump said to him of those enemies whom he predicted would one day “storm” his home:
“Let them come. If they think they can get away with that. They probably think they can. How stupid can you get?”
Should we believe any of this?
No. I’m not going to believe it.
Not until pigs fly.
Or the President of the United States tells us to drink Clorox.
Phil Boas is an editorial columnist for The Arizona Republic. Email him at phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Was Donald Trump the true mastermind of the Mar-a-Lago raid?
