American Stasi

Monday’s shocking images of police sirens blaring outside Mar-a-Lago, former President Donald Trump’s magnificent Palm Beach, Florida, estate, will not soon be forgotten.Much has already been said and written about the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago that precipitated those sirens: “outrageous,” “unprecedented,” a “crossing of the Rubicon” moment. Regrettably, all of that is true. The siccing of the national law enforcement apparatus to execute a pre-dawn raid on a top partisan rival — especially when that rival is the head of state’s predecessor and perhaps-likely future opponent — is a contemptible act of raw political bloodlust. It is an act far more befitting a crumbling hellhole like Venezuela, or a third-world country in sub-Saharan Africa, than it is the land that was to be, per Benjamin Franklin’s alleged quip, “a republic, if you can keep it.“America, it seems, won the Cold War only to see its own federal law enforcement/national security apparatus morph into a version of the old East …