Right Wing Media Cheer Trump’s Call To “Defund DOJ & FBI”
By Kevin Howley
Even by contemporary, which is to say Trumpian standards, last week was one for the history books. On Tuesday, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and his team took a modest, but long overdue step toward holding the powerful to account, when the twice-impeached former president was arraigned on 34 felony counts for falsifying business records.
By all accounts, Donald Trump was on his best behavior in Judge Juan Merchan’s courtroom, even as the jurist cautioned the defendant against using social media to intimidate court officers, prosecutors and prospective jurors. Later that evening, Trump rallied supporters in the friendly confines of his Mar-a-Lago estate to rail against, well, just about anything you care to mention: from the 2020 election and his (mis)handling of classified documents to liberal megadonor George Soros’ “relationship” with DA Bragg.
Trump’s post-arraignment speech, aptly described by The Hill as an “extended tirade,” was too much for some TV news networks, who either ignored it altogether or cut away before the Donald wrapped up his primetime grievance session. Undeterred, Defendant Trump took to his anemic social platform the next day and picked up where he left off: “REPUBLICANS IN CONGRESS SHOULD DEFUND THE DOJ AND THE FBI UNTIL THEY COME TO THEIR SENSES.”
“President Trump Is Right”
Despite Trump’s willingness and ability to, as Ralph Nader recently put it, turn the White House into “a daily crime scene,” the Republican base and MAGA loyalists in the GOP-led House remain under his spell. Similarly, conservative pundits are down with Trump’s program to fatally undermine the rule of law. A sampler of right wing media reaction to Defendant Trump’s latest assault on the legal system ought to be grave concern for every American, regardless of party affiliation.
Within hours of Trump’s Wednesday morning post, Gateway Pundit praised the criminal defendant’s call to defund federal law enforcement. “President Trump is right,” proclaims Joe Hoft. Castigating lawmakers, Hoft adds, “Representatives and Senators who call themselves Republicans didn’t stand up yesterday when a totally BS arrest was carried out on the former President of the United States. They remained, for the most part, quiet. Where is their outrage?”
Headlined “Great Idea! Trump Calls For Defunding The FBI and DOJ,” PJMedia could scarcely contain its glee before launching a full-throated defense of Trump’s demand. “The usual suspects are enraged, but really, where was Trump wrong? Do American taxpayers really need to subsidize agencies that have become the enforcement arm of the authoritarian Left?
The ever reliable WND drew most of its reporting from Trump’s social media thread and the aforementioned commentary from Gateway Pundit. For good measure, Bob Unruh recycles well-word conservative talking points about Democrats’ long history of weaponizing the Justice Department; repeating unhinged claims that the “Trump-hating” Judge Merchan is out to get the former president; and reminding readers that Bragg’s star witness, Michael Cohen – Trump’s longtime fixer who did prison time for these very same crimes – is “a convicted perjurer.”
MAGA Hypocrisy
There’s nothing new about Republican calls to defund the DOJ and FBI. It’s a well-worn trope in MAGA country – part and parcel of a broader linguistic strategy that appropriates words like “defund” and “woke” used by activists and academics to capture forthright criticism of a fundamentally flawed criminal justice system predicated on white nationalism. In this way, conservatives undermine legitimate critique while claiming victimhood at the hands of the “radical left.”
The right’s hugely successful reframing is the gift that keeps on giving. For some observers, calls to defund the police are tantamount to civilization-ending calamities. Consider this bit of hysterical right wing clickbait from PJMedia: “Forget Defund The Police. How About No Police, No Prisons, And No Jail Time.” On the other hand, conservatives deploy the same language to advance longstanding objectives. For example, there’s the gun touting, right-to-lifer Lauren Boebert’s call to “defund” Planned Parenthood earlier this year.
But let’s get to the root of the problem, as Front Page recently did with this item headlined, “America’s Crime Problem Begins In Our Colleges,” the latest diatribe from David Horowitz Freedom Center’s “Defund the University” series, which aims to gut higher education and replace critical inquiry with political indoctrination.
In a similar vein, The Federalist grants tacit approval to Trump’s latest broadside against the “many federal agencies [that] have been politicized and now serve as arms of the far-left wing of the Democratic party.” In a bit of linguistic jujitsu, columnist Jesse Russell claims Stanford University professor Lerone A. Martin’s recent book, “The Gospel According to J. Edgar Hoover,” exploits the longtime FBI chief’s scandalous reputation to smear “conservatives and Christians by association with the famously authoritarian Hoover.”
It all puts me in mind of the bible verse: “There’s no rest for the wicked.”
Kevin Howley is a writer and educator whose work has appeared in Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism, Social Movement Studies, and Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture. His most recent book is Drones: Media Discourse and the Public Imagination.
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There’s nothing new about Republican calls to defund the DOJ and FBI. It’s a well-worn trope in MAGA country – part of a broader linguistic strategy that appropriates words like “defund” and “woke” used by activists and academics to capture forthright criticism of a fundamentally flawed criminal justice system predicated on white nationalism. (Image: Pixabay)
