Republicans wanted everyone in prison – until the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago

Many members of the GOP are stunned that, in the United States, everyone is treated equally before the law and only real crimes, not made-up ones, are investigated by the FBI, writes Phil Thomas

There’s an old saying that the law should be enforced against our enemies – and interpreted for our friends. One rule for them (because they’re scoundrels and deserve everything that’s coming to them), another rule for us (because we’re misunderstood and persecuted and it’s not fair).

Little could illustrate that mentality better than the Republican reaction to the FBI search of former president Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home. Conservatives who have spent five years shrieking “Lock her up!” in the hope of having a political opponent jailed for something the FBI didn’t consider a criminal offence are now catastrophising about a communist police state following the legally-executed search of Trump’s Florida property in relation to a potentially serious crime.

(The FBI search related to boxes of highly classified documents that Trump – how can one put this – liberated from the American people on his way out of the White House. And the granting of a search warrant, which will have required a high legal bar and clearly carries intense political sensitivities, has raised suggestions there were fears he was planning to either destroy them — as was his habit in the White House, sometimes even flushing them down the toilet — or even allow them somehow to come into others’ possession.)