Trump is attacking our democracy. There must be consequences

When the news of the Trump administration's supposed "investigation" into Rep. Ilhan Omar first broke, I was a very good boy and waited to hear whether the administration would offer up any explanation for the raid other than "because we are Nazis" or "because we are corrupt" or "because we are corrupt Nazis who are bitter because mommy never had sex with us" or take-your-pick.

But now we know the details of the raid, and it indeed turns out that the worst and most corrupt theory of events was the correct one. A group of giggling fascist shits in Trump's Justice Department hatched a plan to "investigate" the sitting member of Congress who their oozingly racist president most has it out for, and did it in the final weeks of her reelection campaign in an effort to tilt the election against her, and there really isn't any question about any of that.

The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that the federal government is investigating how Omar got her citizenship after she arrived in the U.S. from Somalia as a child, focusing on how her late father filled out her forms. Her Washington, D.C., home was searched on Monday, just three weeks before the midterm elections in November.

Homeland Security agents took her cellphone, notebooks, personal computers, and passport. Several subpoenas have been issued to her relatives and others close to her. It’s obvious that the Trump administration wants to make an example out of her as part of its effort to begin denaturalizing American citizens.

Seizing a sitting congressperson's cellphone, computers, and passport is a Big Fucking Deal, is generally reserved for cases when an elected official is suspected of taking bribes or of trafficking children, but since nobody in Trump's administration is allowed to investigate bribe-taking or sex trafficking Homeland Security's remaining chucklefucks have a lot of spare time to pursue their own hobbies.

Donald Trump, a convicted felon and adjudicated rapist alleged to be a serial bank defrauder, sex predator, and international money launderer, the man who incited violent insurrection against the U.S. government after losing an election and who is now the head of a governmentwide effort to block publication of the full extent of his "friend" Jeffrey Epstein's sex trafficking ring and coconspirators, has decided in his old age to single out Somali immigrants in a campaign of ethnic cleansing. None of that is in dispute.

Nor is it in dispute that his minion shitheels quite intentionally scrambled to raid the congresswoman's house before the election.

And this is going to be interesting. Because it's not likely to hurt Omar in her reelection bid, since any American who is not a grubby racist is far more likely to see the raid as another bold-text example of Trump and his goons trying to overthrow democracy and install a dictatorship of red hat fascists. But there will be a paper trail here, and a big fat greasy one at that, and it will come to light.

For years, conservatives have pushed the unfounded rumor that Omar married her brother to bring him to the U.S. Investigations by media outlets and the government have yielded nothing incriminating about her.

Right. Because Trumpism is a movement of conspiracy theorists, oure and simple: From Pam Bondi to RFK to "Doctor Oz" to Kash Patel to Stephen Miller to Bode to Blanche to grinning dipshits like Bessent and Hassett, Trump surrounds himself only with compulsive liars, conspiracy-addled freaks, and people who think breaking the law is funny. That's his base.

The new claim against Omar, since the "married her brother" lie fell apart (like the claim that another Democratic candidate "disappeared" into a mental health facility in Ohio, and like every other claim that these Absolute Unhinged Piece Of Shit Chucklefucks invent to prop up the most openly corrupt political movement this nation has ever seen) is that Omar's father might have gotten her age wrong on his citizenship documents.

Now, this is probably not true. It's probably a flat-out lie, because we have caught these exact same fucknuggets lying on a daily basis since the day any of us had to first hear their names.

But if it is true, then this falls squarely into the realm of I do not give a shit, and I'm willing to put money on the theory that nobody in America gives a shit except for a small set of racists who will believe anything you tell them if it gives them a racism erection.

It's going to be a fine proxy question for identifying racists, in fact. Nearly foolproof. There will be some set of people who think that your dad getting your age wrong on a government document means you should be deported and your citizenship stripped from you, and there will be another set of people who think that even if your dad filled out a form wrong, once you've been a United States citizen for over a quarter of a century and have proven yourself to be so significantly beneficial to the nation that your fellow citizens elect you to the United States Congress, you get a We Do Not Fucking Care pass.

The first group will be made up 100% of racists. Zero question about it. There is no non-racist theory of justice that will land you in the first group.

Oh—and hey, racists, if your dad ever comes back from buying milk maybe you can ask him what age he thinks you are now. Go on, it'll be funny.

So there's no question here that this is a Trump protodictatorship's attack on an individual member of Congress, that it's illegitimate for multiple reasons even before you get to the main reason, and that it's predicated on the very specific hate Donald Trump has for this specific influential black woman.

And there has got to be consequences. It should start with a brand-new congressional impeachment investigation and branch out from there. The current Republican Congress will not do it because it is, to repeat yet again, the most corrupt Congress in U.S. history. Most of them supported violent insurrection on Trump's behalf; there are none remaining who publicly oppose him.

Presuming the election tosses as many of these authoritarian-minded dipshit crooks as the polls suggest will happen, however, a new Democratic Congress will take over in January and can start cleaning house. It must clean house. There is no goddamn question of it; if there are not lifelong consequences of the bluntest and, pointedly, most mean-spirited nature, then we will have cemented competitive dictatorship as the United States' new system of governance.

No, there has to be a Find Out phase that shakes Washington to its core.

There is going to be a paper trail that identifies every last member of this shit-laden "administration" who had a role to play in the racist pre-election raid of a sitting congresswoman's house and the seizing of her phones and other belongings. There are going to be emails ordering the raid, or acquiescing to the raid, or planning out the raid, and from whatever Homeland Security dipshit knocked on the door to the highest rung in that chain of command, every last person involved needs to be ripped out of government and barred from returning. At minimum.

Whether that means defunding departments in whole or in part, whether that means impeaching the ones Congress has the ability to impeach, whether it means hauling individual bootlickers before Congress for a series of hearings so endless and hostile that the perpetrators flee to Dubai rather than put up to it—whatever it takes.

And if there is a hole in the documents such that accountability can't be pinned down, when you get to the upper levels, then good news: It means every name that ought to have been there, or even might incidentally have been expected to be somewhere in the vicinity of the breakroom near the desk of the secretary of the person who ought to have been there, can also be shot out of a cannon with malice. Bring it on. Clean house, top to bottom.

The consequences for trying to rig elections with "investigations" of political enemies needs to be more severe than anyone in a new Congress will be willing to stomach. It is the basis of authoritarianism. It should rightly be considered an attempted coup, just as much as Trump singling out his vice president for justice at the hands of a violent rioting mob was an attempted coup. There remains robust debate about whether the necessary consequences for acts which attempt to overthrow democracy can even be contained in normal democratic processes, or whether successfully countering it requires consequences that themselves overstep, by existential necessity, the prior norms.

I do not know and I do not care. I do not expect we will even get half that far, not even if House and Senate Republicans are routed in every last race in every last podunk town—the Americans who have profited from this orgy of corruption and crime will pull out every stop to ensure that consequences stop long before they themselves have to face any.

But there had better damn well be consequences of sufficient severity that it routs every last person directly involved in Trump's attempted autogolpe from American life. There had better damn well be consequences for every last one of these Nazi-aspiring shitstains.