The FBI raid on the residence of former president Donald Trump raises the stakes in a country torn apart by years of poisonous politics. | OPINION by Nick Bryant
Florida has become a rumbling American fault line, the epicentre of a string of political quakes. It was the scene in the 2000 presidential election of an early 21st century attack on democracy, when a chino-clad militia, orchestrated by a right-wing political provocateur named Roger Stone, tried to storm an office in Miami-Dade County in an attempt to shut down the recount of disputed ballots that might have shown Al Gore was the true victor.
US Secret Service and Mar-A-Lago security members at the entrance of former US president Donald Trump’s residence in Palm Beach, Florida on Tuesday.From this democratic convulsion, America has been suffering aftershocks ever since. Last week, the Sunshine State witnessed another volcanic event – the FBI’s raid on Donald Trump’s coastal mansion, Mar-a-Lago at Palm Beach, which inevitably registered high on the Republican Richter scale of outrage.
However, the most urgent question raised by a possible prosecution – for that is surely what the federal authorities are contemplating in taking the unprecedented step of raiding the home of a former president – is not political. It is existential. Barely 18 months after January 6, can the American republic survive another “big one”: the trial, and possible conviction, of Donald J.
But then came the overwhelming body of evidence presented in the January 6 hearings, which has clearly demonstrated his insurrectionary criminality. Now there is this parallel line of inquiry: that he has mishandled sensitive government documents that should have been handed over to the National Archives.
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