After the Mar-a-Lago raid, Trump and his followers may have a reason to feel paranoid

It may be hard to believe in these hyperpartisan times but, even if you don’t like anything about Donald Trump, you can still think that he’s getting a raw deal. Whether he actually is or not is something else altogether.

A lot of Trump’s most loyal supporters think just that — that he really is getting a raw deal, that he’s nothing more than a political target of the Department of Justice (DOJ) because, well, because he’s Donald Trump. No surprise there: Trump’s most loyal supporters think their favorite president of all time can never do anything wrong.

But it’s also what some of my more thoughtful conservative friends think — friends who wish Trump would take a vacation in Outer Mongolia and not come back until 2025, if then.

They’re suspicious over what motivated the FBI raid at the home of the former president. In their more paranoid moments, they attribute the worst motives to the FBI, the DOJ, the attorney general, and even the current president of the United States, who, they make sure I realize, may wind up running against the man whose home was raided.

As for Trump’s most loyal fans, they’re so mad they can’t see their own hypocrisy.

They yelled bloody murder when progressive Democrats demanded that we “defund the police.” Now, it’s some of the hard right who want to “defund the FBI.”

They screamed when Trump was compared to Nazis. Now they compare the FBI to the Gestapo.

Over the top? Yes. Stupid? I think so.

But there’s a reason a lot of Republicans question the validity of the search warrant that allowed the FBI to enter Mar-a-Lago and rummage around for all sorts of things. They remember that it was an FBI lawyer who lied to a judge to get a warrant during the investigation into Trump’s supposed collusion with the Russians. If the FBI lied then, they want to know, why should we trust them now?.

Besides, some top FBI agents were transparently hostile to Trump while they were investigating his supposed ties to Russia. So why should Republicans simply accept that the FBI was just doing its job, absent any political motives?

And my conservative friends — even those who don’t believe the election was “stolen” and who wish Trump would just go away — wonder if there’s one set of rules for Republicans and another for Democrats.

Why is Trump in the DOJ’s crosshairs, they ask, while Hillary Clinton, who also was accused of mishandling classified documents, barely got a slap on the wrist?

They remember that then-FBI Director James Comey rebuked Clinton for being “extremely careless” in using a private email address and server during her service as secretary of State. They remember that he raised questions about her judgment and said it was possible that hostile foreign governments had gained access to her account. They remember that he said a person still employed by the government — Clinton left the State Department in 2013 — could have faced disciplinary action for doing what she did. Yet he recommended no criminal charges against her, saying “our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.”

So why, conservatives wonder, do we hear talk now — especially on liberal cable news channels — about getting an orange jumpsuit ready for the former president?

“Double standard” are two words I’ve been hearing a lot lately.

My friends also bring up the Russia collusion investigation that crippled much of the Trump presidency. Liberal politicians and their allies in the media couldn’t stop yapping back then about how Trump was somehow involved with the Kremlin.

So if they fell for the Russia collusion hoax — and perpetuated the “fake news” story — why, Trump fans wonder, should we give them the benefit of the doubt now that they’re convinced Trump is up to no good, yet again?

And if Trump supporters believe — as an intelligent friend of mine put it to me just the other day — that “the deep state” won’t rest until it “gets Donald Trump,” let’s not simply chalk it up to paranoia (although, between us, I’m tempted to do just that). After all, it was Hillary Clinton who talked about “a vast right-wing conspiracy” that was out to get her husband, then-President Bill Clinton.

If liberals see right-wing conspiracies, is it really so hard to understand why conservatives see “deep state” left-wing conspiracies?

Before this is all over, it’s possible, I guess, that we may find out Trump had nefarious plans for the documents he allegedly took with him when he left office. If he planned to sell those to the Russians, I’d be the first one yelling, “Lock him up!” But I doubt he would do anything that crazy. Using secret documents to get a YUGE advance to spice up a memoir he might be thinking of writing? With Trump, that’s possible.

What’s also possible, though, is that the raid was legal but not necessary and that, who knows, maybe it was politically motivated, as Trump fans believe.

I don’t have enough information to know if Trump is a victim of the Biden administration — or if everything is on the up and up. But I do know you can have contempt for someone and still leave open the possibility that he’s being treated unfairly.

Trump supporters may very well turn out to be way off-base in what they think motivated the raid at Mar-a-Lago. Just because you’re paranoid, as the saying goes, doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.

At absolute least, it just might mean you have a reason to be paranoid.

Bernard Goldberg is an Emmy and an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University award-winning writer and journalist. He was a correspondent with HBO’s “Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel” for 22 years and previously worked as a reporter for CBS News and as an analyst for Fox News. He is the author of five books and publishes exclusive weekly columns, audio commentaries and Q&As on his Substack page. Follow him on Twitter @BernardGoldberg.