Postmodernism could’ve been revolutionary. But neoliberalism neutered it.
What the hell is postmodernism?
I’ve written a feature essay on postmodernism and I’m still not entirely sure I know what it is. I can paint a general picture, but even the great postmodern philosophers don’t all agree on what postmodernism means.
Most of the time, when you hear the word “postmodernism” thrown around, it’s a kind of insult. It’s constantly blamed for our “post-truth” era. And it’s often considered a school of thought that abolished standards, denied objectivity, and celebrated a dangerous moral relativism.
Most of this is just using the term as a lazy scapegoat, and yet there is at least some truth in these criticisms. The important thing to know in any case is that postmodernism — or what postmodernism is trying to say about our world — is relevant. Because whether we know it or not, we’re living in a postmodern world.
That’s why I was excited to see a new book by one of my favorite journalists: Stuart Jeffries. The book is called Everything, All the Time, Everywhere: How We Became Postmodern and it does more than offer a useful account of what postmodernism is; it also explores how it revolutionized our culture and politics in ways we hardly recognize.
So I invited Jeffries, who now works as a freelance writer for the Guardian and many other outlets, to join me for an episode of Vox Conversations. We try to make some sense of postmodernism and he explains why he thinks it’s bound up with another boogeyman term: neoliberalism.
Below is an excerpt, edited for length and clarity. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow Vox Conversations on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Sean Illing
I wanted to avoid the temptation to ask you to define postmodernism at the top, but I feel like we have to do it, right?
Stuart Jeffries
Yeah, let’s try it. So the simple idea is that postmodernism is what comes after modernism. And modernism was a very earnest and serious commitment to progress, a commitment to overturning the frills and furbelows of Victorian culture and early 20th century decorative culture, in the arts and in architecture. It’s joyless, really.
And postmodernism is a rebellion against all that. It’s a rebellion against the idea that we should become leaner and fitter and meaner in our architecture and in our literature. It’s a rebellion against the idea that we’re on some path to improving ourselves as human beings, that we’re heading toward some kind of absolute perfection. Postmodernism disdains all that. It says that’s garbage. The postmodernists said we’re going to tear up the rule books to make buildings, to make art, and make it all about expression and fun.
Now the weird thing about postmodernism is that when you put it like that, it sounds great! But my book is about how there’s another “ism” looming as postmodernism emerges and it’s called neoliberalism, which is a new form of capitalism and very much the world we’re living in now. We’re living in a neoliberal era and postmodernism has become a cultural handmaiden for that.
Sean Illing
What do you mean?
Stuart Jeffries
I mean the culture of fun that postmodernism proposes ends up serving neoliberalism. That’s why I wrote this book, because I wanted to pull these two movements together and think about how they reinforce each other.
Sean Illing
We’ll get to that, but you make an interesting observation that may help to set the stage here. You mark the beginning of the postmodern era as the moment President Nixon removed the US dollar from the gold standard, which I think will strike a lot of people as very strange. What’s the connection?
Stuart Jeffries
You’d have thought that postmodernism would be born in something to do with the Vietnam War. Or Watergate. In other words, that you’d have this rebellion against a disastrous war or disastrous corruption. But actually I think it’s the moment in between those two things.
When Nixon effectively takes the world economy off the gold standard, it does something really interesting. It means that money is in free flow. It’s not pegged to anything real. You know, when countries like Britain were running short of money, we’d always think, “Well, we can always just get some gold. We can get rid of our dollar reserves, get gold from Fort Knox, and we’ll be okay.”
So we enter a terrifying world in which there are no real foundations. Credit cards have their era in the years after that. Credit explodes, borrowing explodes. We go completely mad for buying things we can’t afford. And all of these things are reflected in what’s happening in French postmodern theory.
We have these theorists like Roland Barthes arguing that the author is dead as a guarantor of the meaning of a sentence or the meaning of a work. Now we’re in a democracy where the reader has as much power to decide what something means as the author.
So the idea that the author is dead is taking root around the same time the US is coming off the gold standard and it all reflects this deeper loss of foundations, a loss of meaning. And it’s also a moment in which capital goes nuts.
Sean Illing
It’s kind of a metaphor for what happens with language and meaning around that time as well, where there are lots of arguments about separating the words we use from the reality they’re intended to describe, and you have all these thinkers basically arguing that it’s all made up.
Stuart Jeffries
Ultimately, that leads to where we are now, which is deep into the post-truth world. I’m not saying that Donald Trump or Boris Johnson read Foucault and Derrida and all these French theorists who deconstructed the notion of abstract truths and undermined the plausibility of objective science. But their incessant lying is made possible by the zeitgeist of a world in which truth no longer has the privileged status that it used to. And that meaning isn’t as fixed as it used to be. It’s not as tied to the real world as it used to be.
Sean Illing
Postmodernism is tied to the liberation of the individual in lots of ways, and you’re tying that to this neoliberal turn where we start to become consumers above all else and the role of the state is to just get out of the way and let the market manage all of life. Why is that so significant in your reading of this history?
Stuart Jeffries
I think it’s because of who I am and where I grew up. I just turned 60, so I’m a child of Margaret Thatcher, who was one of the first world leaders to put the ideas of neoliberalism into practice. And they involved cutting back on the welfare state, on the very idea that there was a community. Thatcher famously said there was no such thing as society, only individuals and families. And she meant it. She meant that all the communal sensibilities that Britain had had since World War II — a strong welfare state, a sense of the country coming out the war and trying to reestablish its identity, with a strong state with nationalized industries and all that — all that was torn down in my lifetime.
And we all know that Reagan quote about how the nine most terrible words you can hear are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” That actually taps into a fear lots of people have about government and it’s not just in the US, it’s everywhere. But it’s particularly resonant in the States, where there’s a deep resentment toward taxation and any kind of state interference.
But I guess I’d say I’ve always been focused on the political dimensions of big cultural changes.
Sean Illing
I don’t think we realize how thoroughly postmodern neoliberalism is in the sense that it’s subversive, even nihilistic. It’s a total amoral capitulation to market society.
Stuart Jeffries
It’s the ultimate irony, isn’t it? And postmodernity’s steeped in irony. It almost became its go-to response for everything, which is in itself disastrous.
Sean Illing
For me at least, the main symptom of postmodern politics is the idea that politics is a personal issue, that politics is a space for self-expression. And what else are we supposed to do when there are no grand ideologies to believe in anymore, no great historical projects to pursue? We’re just individual actors floating in space with no real connective tissue and capitalism fills the void, and everything, including politics, becomes an arena for affirming our status and individual identity.
Stuart Jeffries
I definitely feel a nostalgia for a collective society that probably didn’t exist all that much in my lifetime, but I was sort of stamped with it. It always felt like the right goal, something we should be working toward. And that seems like an incredibly naive thing to say now.
It’s much more likely today that we conceive of politics the same way we conceive of shopping. I don’t mean to sound trite about that, but I really do think we approach politics this way. It’s about personal desire and satisfaction and what this guy can do for me. It’s not about anything grander than ourselves, and that seems so petty and sad. Or maybe I’m just utterly nostalgic and naive. But I still think that collective vision is something worth holding onto.
Sean Illing
Do you feel like the emancipatory potential of postmodernism was squandered? Like, there was a genuine subversiveness to it that could’ve been revolutionary, but in the end it gets commercialized and becomes another trick of capital.
Stuart Jeffries
Absolutely. If you read Francois Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition [the book that coined the term “postmodernism” in 1979], or if you read Gilles Deleuze, both of them are quite radical thinkers. Both of them are born of the disappointment of the failure of the student rebellions in ’68 in Paris. Their ideas are filled with mourning over the lost revolution.
But they’re not Marxist revolutionaries anymore. And Deleuze, the great postmodern theorist, starts to think about desire as a liberator. So forget about socialist organizing, forget about trade unions and barricades — it’s all about desire. Desire is truly revolutionary.
And that just seems so incredibly naive to say now, because you think of how desire — sexual desire, the desire for products, the desire for material titillation — is utterly conformist. Our desires are constantly manufactured and then sold back to us. Desire is so obviously a tool for capitalism.
Lyotard actually wrote very subversively about scientific objectivity. He was pointing out that all the really interesting scientific advantages, particularly in the 20th century, came about as a result of war and a desire for conquest: They are the things that project us forward. So scientific endeavor isn’t necessarily an objective quest for truth — it’s often a money-based pursuit of something that’s gonna keep the shareholders happy.
What a subversive thought that was! I’m not sure it’s true, but it’s a pretty revolutionary thought.
Sean Illing
Is it possible that postmodernism was just a diagnosis of the world neoliberalism built?
Stuart Jeffries
Neoliberalism seems to be building the stuff that neoliberalism wants. But I suppose you could think of postmodernism as an intellectual critique of neoliberalism in a way. Because neoliberalism’s foundational principle is that the individual is king or queen. What’s wrong is society. And if you read a lot of postmodern theory, it tells you that these notions of the individual, these notions of the self, can be easily exploded, that they’re artifacts of a kind of economic thinking. So postmodern theory could’ve been used to blow up neoliberalism, but that’s not what happened.
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Accurate data is critical for public health, and the US doesn’t have it.
The US declared monkeypox a public health emergency this month, but the decision may have come too late. Though states are now required to report cases, and commercial labs have an approved test, a testing bottleneck persists, and cases — which passed 10,000 confirmed cases this week — are likely still being underreported. Any effective public health response to an infectious disease is dependent on having accurate data. If the virus spreads to other populations, such as college dorms — where cases have already been reported — the testing bottleneck could ultimately make it impossible to contain the spread. Reliable demographic information is key to making the right choices for allocating limited tests and vaccines.
All of this feels like an uncanny echo of the early mishandling of Covid-19. Limited access to testing, a hobbled federal infrastructure to track cases, and the general lack of communication among different agencies and states complicated the federal government’s ability to make evidence-based public health decisions. Reporting lags on rising cases meant that lockdowns began too late to save tens of thousands of lives. Similarly, certain communities uniquely at risk, like Black and Hispanic people who lacked access to health care, were suffering higher rates of severe illness and death from Covid before policymakers had any way of knowing where to direct public health outreach.
But the roots of this deadly problem long predate monkeypox outbreaks or the Covid-19 pandemic. The US has always had a fragmented health care system, with widely disparate experiences for patients based on state, insurance company, or hospital chain. Without systems to reliably record and share population-level data between decision-makers, health care workers can’t focus on helping the patients who need it most. The consequences are worse for marginalized people — such as Indigenous people, people with disabilities, or youth at risk for teen pregnancy — who were already facing inadequate care before the pandemic.
It doesn’t have to be this way. The US has an opportunity to learn from the tough lessons of the last few years and build on work to improve transparency and data sharing. With monkeypox already a global public health emergency, it’s vital for the data to be available, promptly and accurately, to coordinate an effective public health response. This is how we can get there.
Why does data matter?
Evidence-based medicine — the practice of using observation, studies, and randomized controlled trials to test which treatments work — has transformed the medical field over the last century. But for that to work, as Covid showed, you need to have data to inform medical decisions.
The US has mandatory reporting systems for some contagious diseases, along with public health concerns like lead poisoning. This usually means that hospitals, clinics, and laboratories are required to report the location, severity of the illness, and treatment provided for any confirmed case. They also must document demographic information, such as race and ethnicity.
But that reporting is hobbled by the fact that there is no single agency responsible for the US health care system. Data is collected by federal agencies such as the Department of Health and Human Services — which houses the CDC, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Indian Health Service — as well as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which focuses on supplies and infrastructure for disaster preparedness. But communication among these agencies, the state health departments that report to them, and the hospitals and organizations where data is collected is often challenging, thanks to a fractured system made up of hundreds of different organizations.
Data comes in from over 900 health systems, or chains of hospitals under shared management; the largest include about 200 hospitals. But that’s just a fraction of the over 6,000 hospitals across the country. So when, for example, positive test results for Covid-19 or monkeypox, or cases of workplace exposure to pesticides, have to be reported to the state, public health boards in every state must coordinate with hundreds of different organizations and aggregate their data before they can share it with federal agencies. Except during an officially declared public health emergency — which, for monkeypox, is only a week old — the CDC has limited legal power to mandate reporting.
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Data also isn’t collected the same way everywhere. There is a large number of different electronic health record systems currently in use in the US. They allow medical professionals to document a patient’s diagnosis and treatment, and in theory, share them more efficiently than in the days of paper-based records. But the software systems aren’t designed to be compatible with each other, so they cannot easily exchange data.
Even for a popular software platform like Epic, which covers about a third of hospital systems in the US, categories like a patient’s diagnosis — or even something as simple as their height or weight — are often customized for a particular hospital or chain. This makes for a more efficient workflow for the medical professionals on the ground, but it means that every hospital or chain is collecting slightly different information and organizing it differently. In order to piece the information together into a national picture that policymakers can actually use, each individual dataset has to be mapped onto a standardized format, a massive administrative burden that adds to delays.
For example, when I worked as a nurse in Canada, different hospitals in the same city used different recordkeeping software. Rather than digitally transferring data, other hospitals would fax a paper copy of their records, which had to be entered manually, leading to delay and data entry mistakes — and this was assuming that we knew the patient had been hospitalized there before. Getting the records of a patient’s medical history from primary care providers or clinics was even more challenging. It wasn’t uncommon for a single patient to end up with two or three duplicate charts, sometimes due to minor spelling errors in their name.
With hundreds of different organizations involved, it’s no wonder the US faces greater challenges in maintaining a complete and accurate national-level database than a country like the UK, with a centralized single-payer health care system. The sheer size and varied demographics of the US population add further challenges.
“The United States is incredibly diverse in many ways,” is how epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina puts it. “You know, race, ethnicity, age, health status, state-level policies, rural, urban. There are so many [of what we call] confounders in epidemiology, so many important factors that will influence health and disease. What we see in New York City isn’t necessarily going to be generalizable or translatable to, for example, rural Texas.”
Until the US started using commercial labs to ramp up testing capacity for monkeypox in late June, samples could only be processed at state public health labs, with a cumbersome process. Hot spots like New York were overstretched, while other states’ labs sat idle. The delays and poor coordination between clinics and city health departments meant that contact tracing happened too late to contain the spread. If the spread had been caught earlier, patients would have been more likely to minimize their risk and seek out testing and treatment if they were exposed, and there would have been more advance warning on ordering a vaccine supply.
Undertesting doesn’t just affect the case numbers reported, but hurts patients’ access to treatment. Tecovirimat, or TPOXX, an antiviral drug that is most effective for treating monkeypox if started early, can’t be prescribed until a test comes back positive, and since it’s not officially approved by the FDA for monkeypox treatment, doctors need to jump through bureaucratic hoops to prescribe it. This leaves many patients suffering from untreated painful lesions for days or weeks.
As Jetelina pointed out in a Substack post, monkeypox doesn’t need to go the same way that Covid did; it’s a known disease, with a vaccine already developed, and spreads via close contact rather than being airborne. But the slow initial response, disorganized due to lack of information, means that the window of opportunity to contain monkeypox is closing.
Where do we go from here?
However difficult the growing pains, there has been real progress made on data collection since the first US Covid-19 cases in early 2020.
The National Covid Cohort Collaborative, a project run by the National Institutes of Health which gathers clinical data on Covid-19, was stood up during the pandemic. Joni Rutter, the collaborative’s acting director, describes the challenges they faced when combining hundreds of disparate data sources around the pandemic: “Even when you’re talking about height, one site will send us data in inches. One site will send it in centimeters.”
For more complicated questions, the process is even more fraught. Long Covid, for example, is linked to more than 200 distinct symptoms of varying severity, but screening tools generally include only some of these, their definitions vary between different hospitals and clinics, and doctors often won’t document every symptom a patient experiences. As a result, estimates on the risk of long Covid vary from as much as one in two Covid-19 cases to one in 20. It’s also particularly important for the Collaborative’s dataset to accurately reflect the diversity of the US population, a challenge their team has worked hard on. “It really helps us to get access to rural communities and more minority communities,” Rutter says.
The NIH’s efforts to build the Collaborative database in the right way were a major step forward, one that should be more widely adopted. More than 2,000 scientists are using the group’s centralized database system to ask critical questions about Covid, like rates of reinfection, characteristics of long Covid, and differences in outcomes between urban and rural patients. Meanwhile, the National Patient Safety Board, an advocacy group calling for a health care equivalent of the National Transportation Safety Board, hopes to improve tracking of medical errors and use machine learning to find underlying causes.
Other organizations are working on cleaning up the data at its source. The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, officially authorized in March 2022, is another NIH program based on the Defense Department’s famous research center DARPA, with the goal of promoting innovation and new technology in health care. Its initial work may include revamping electronic health records and letting hospitals migrate their data over to new and improved systems. In its 2022 National Covid-19 Preparedness Plan, the White House committed to improving data infrastructure by scaling up electronic case reporting systems to cover all states, in order to better track case counts and hospitalizations and link these to vaccination rates.
That isn’t enough, though. According to Karen Feinstein, spokesperson for the National Patient Safety Board, the entire approach to health care needs to change. One example to emulate could be the aviation industry; thanks to decades of recommendations from their safety board, which has scrupulously tracked airline data since 1967, accident and fatality rates in air travel have fallen drastically.
“We have all kinds of technology to keep our pilots and passengers safe on airlines and our astronauts safe as they go to and from the space station,” she said. “We know that the answer is to build a better airplane or to build a better spaceship, and to have the pilots and astronauts do the things for which they are trained and prepared. The problem we have in health care is that we haven’t yet built a better airplane.”
And building a “better airplane” for health care will involve reforming the current decentralized and fragmented recordkeeping. As Rutter sees it, “electronic health records need to evolve, and that’s going to be one of those things that I think we as a community, as consumers, need to help ensure does happen.” In the meantime, the National Covid Cohort Collaborative will continue with its current strategy of cleaning and combining the existing records, and is about to launch a section on monkeypox within its open-access database.
Jetelina believes that the federal agencies involved in public health responses need to be granted stronger legal authority to mandate standard reporting from states and hospital systems so they can come closer to the kind of constant surveillance the UK managed early on with Covid-19 and with monkeypox. She thinks the key is to “take out a lot of this red tape and bureaucratic paperwork, at least during a public health emergency, [and] respond much, much quicker.”
With monkeypox, the US can lean on the systems and infrastructure built during the Covid-19 pandemic, but some programs, like those that reimburse providers for treating uninsured patients or provide free Covid-19 tests, vaccines, and antiviral drugs to community health centers, were already scaled down after funding was decreased. In order to pull together a national response, the US needs straightforward, transparent data reporting that can be compared and combined on a national level.
The final difficulty will be in keeping this momentum going. The declaration of a new public health emergency for monkeypox will help keep federal funding flowing toward projects like the OpenData portal, but the need for better health care infrastructure won’t end when the emergency does. In a chronically underfunded public health system, short-term efforts may not be enough.
As Feinstein puts it, “the challenge we always have is something new that distracts the efforts toward reform, because we’ve gotten close to this in the past.” But with the lessons learned during the pandemic and new threats potentially on the horizon, she believes that “now is the time.”
The FBI’s unsealed warrant tells us why they searched Mar-a-Lago — but not much about what they found
After a week punctuated with reprimands of the Department of Justice by Republican lawmakers and their subsequent demands for accountability following an FBI search of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence, the search warrant released Friday indicates the search was conducted in connection with, among other things, the Espionage Act.
The Espionage Act is actually a series of statutes under 18 US Code Chapter 37 related to the collection, retention, or dissemination of national defense or classified information. The Mar-a-Lago search warrant referred to Section 793 — “Gathering, transmitting or losing defense information,” which doesn’t just cover “spying” in the sense that many think of when they hear the term. Section 793 specifically states that people legally granted access to national defense documents — people like the former president — are subject to punishment should they improperly retain that information.
Under the Presidential Records Act, which relates to the retention of government documents by the National Archives and Records Administration, or NARA, official documents and other material or information a president and vice president may have obtained while in the office must go to NARA for preservation.
The Presidential Records Act is a post-Watergate innovation which “changed the legal ownership of the official records of the President from private to public, and established a new statutory structure under which Presidents, and subsequently NARA, must manage the records of their Administrations,” according to the NARA website. Under that statute, presidential records belong to the national archivist — and therefore the American people — when a president leaves office, unless that person has the permission of the archivist to dispose of records that are no longer useful.
That didn’t happen at the end of the Trump administration; instead, as Maggie Haberman reported on a recent episode of the New York Times podcast The Daily, Trump took 15 boxes of material with him when he departed for Mar-a-Lago as Biden took office. Those boxes contained, as Haberman recounts, items like a raincoat and golf balls. They also contained a number of documents that fell under the Presidential Records Act, and NARA spent the better part of 2021 negotiating with Trump’s team to obtain those records. When NARA finally received those documents earlier this year, Haberman reported, they found several marked “classified.”
Violating the Presidential Records Act alone would be significant enough, but, as Haberman said, “The fact that there were documents marked ‘classified’ in these boxes raised all kinds of concerns from federal officials.” Even more concerning, Trump apparently didn’t return all of the records falling under the Presidential Records Act — prompting Monday’s Mar-a-Lago search. That yielded 11 tranches of documents, four of which are top-secret, three of which are labeled “secret,” three of which are labeled “confidential,” and one of which is labeled “Various classified/TS/SCI documents” meaning they’re meant to be read only in secure rooms by people with high levels of security clearance, according to the Justice Department’s property receipts.
Who has previously been charge under this act, and for what?
High-profile Espionage Act cases often involve leaking classified government information to news sources. Reality Winner was a contractor with the National Security Agency when she leaked a classified government report about Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election to The Intercept. She was arrested shortly after the story published in June 2017 and sentenced to five years and three months in federal prison on one count of transmitting national defense information under the Espionage Act.
That Winner’s single charge resulted in more than five years in prison is an indication of just how seriously the Espionage Act can be prosecuted; it’s also part of an almost consistent struggle between the free press and the US government across administrations. Winner and other whistleblowers have done what can arguably be called a public service — risking their freedom and livelihoods to provide the public with information about what the government is doing in their name, or other critical but classified information.
Daniel Ellsberg, for example, was tried in 1973 under the Espionage Act for leaking to the Washington Post and the New York Times the so-called Pentagon Papers — about 7,000 pages of documents covering US involvement in the Vietnam War that countered the government’s official narrative for that involvement. He faced up to 115 years in prison for leaking the report, but his case was dismissed due to the government’s malfeasance in gathering evidence about Ellsberg. The government also attempted to prevent the Post and the Times from publishing the Pentagon Papers, but the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the papers.
Both Winner and Ellsberg had legal access to the documents they leaked; their crime was in sharing it. Trump, too, had the legal right to access the documents and records the government just seized — but not after he left office, and not at Mar-a-Lago, under unclear security measures.
According to Section 793, part d, it’s illegal to knowingly retain information that one believes could do damage to the US or aid another country and fail “to deliver it on demand to the officer or employee of the United States entitled to receive it.” On Sunday, it appeared that Trump may have crossed that line, according to a New York Times report. One of Trump’s lawyers apparently signed a document in June stating that all classified material had been returned to the government; the DOJ’s unsealed receipts detailing all the items taken from Mar-a-Lago Monday indicate that statement wasn’t true.
What could be next for Trump
Since the affidavit outlining the DOJ’s reasons for believing that Trump had documents in his residence that could pertain to the Espionage Act has not been made public, we don’t know the evidence that justifies that possibility.
“If the Justice Department wanted to pursue a criminal case, based on the available information known to the public to date, they appear to have a very strong case,” New York University law professor Ryan Goodman told Axios. The unsealed warrant also cites Section 1519, which refers to the destruction or manipulation of records (whether classified or not) related to a federal investigation or bankruptcy proceedings. As the New York Times’ Charlie Savage reported Friday, it’s unclear whether the DOJ invoked Section 1519 regarding Trump’s resistance to giving documents to NARA, or to something else entirely. The warrant also refers to Section 2071, which makes it illegal to hide, remove from its proper location, destroy, or attempt to destroy a government document — something Trump reportedly did while in office.
Though Trump agreed to release the search warrant and receipts of what the DOJ took from Mar-a-Lago, he has offered several excuses for having the documents in his possession, falsely claiming that former president Barack Obama also retained classified documents, floating the idea that evidence had been planted at Mar-a-Lago, and saying that he declassified all the documents in his possession which could be true — but wouldn’t save him from legal penalty, since there’s no record of such an action and some national security documents could carry heavy penalties for improper storage whether or not they’re technically classified.
Regardless, Republican politicians and Trump’s supporters have branded the DOJ’s search a witch hunt and accused Democrats of playing politics, as they did during Trump’s two impeachment trials and the investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) compared the search to tactics used by “the Gestapo,” the Nazi secret police, and Trump’s supporters have threatened the FBI over the investigation, the Washington Post reported Friday.
Trump also took advantage of the search by painting it as “lawlessness, political persecution, and [a] Witch Hunt” in a fundraising email Tuesday, which “must be exposed and stopped,” Reuters reported.
Although it’s certainly possible that Trump will be charged with crimes under the Espionage Act or another of the statutes in the DOJ’s warrant, it’s far from certain; there’s still much that is unknown at this point. And while Trump has behaved in some truly alarming ways before, with no repercussions; there’s no indication — yet — that this situation will be any different.