GOP attacks go beyond FBI and elections to delegitimize government

The threat to democracy metastasizing from former president Donald Trump’s refusal to accept defeat stretches beyond elections and into federal agencies and their employees. Vitriol by GOP members of Congress — including comparing the federal government to “the Gestapo” of Nazi Germany and proposing to “defund the FBI” — is just the latest example of boiling aggression that extends across the government. Trump fanned that flame when he shared on social media an article titled “The Fascist Bureau of Investigation” — an incredible act by a former president. But the right-wing anger goes past the law enforcement agency to include scorning feds generally, hitting the Education Department for curriculums it doesn’t control and efforts to improve tax collection. Elections are a foundation of democracy, but “Republicans have convinced a large number of people that election results can’t be trusted,” Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) said in an interview, “which, of course, means that decisions by those elected officials are illegitimate.” For conservative analyst Bill Kristol, an organizer of Republicans for the Rule of Law who held high political positions in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, comments like Grassley’s mean “there’s a big market out there on the right for attacks on the federal government, which are different from just saying we should have small government or we should reform parts of the government. It’s really, ‘They’re out to get you. There’s a conspiracy to get you,’” he said in an interview. “That’s the only way those attacks on the IRS make sense.” But the attacks on the IRS, other agencies and federal employees make sense if delegitimatizing government is the point. “I do think that both the policies and rhetoric that took hold during the Trump presidency led many people to question the legitimacy of government,” said Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees. “They delegitimized everything from the Constitution to elections to Congress to law enforcement to the missions of our agencies. … So, he did succeed in delegitimizing government and people’s trust in our institutions of democracy.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/24/gop-attacks-fbi-doj-government-trump/