In campaign seasons past, presidential candidates generally used the long Memorial Day weekend to roll out an avalanche of patriotic messaging about their vision for America’s future. Not so for Republican presidential contender Donald Trump, who chose instead to spend the days leading up to the holiday accusing President Joe Biden of scheming to assassinate him.
Trump’s bogus claim that “Biden was locked and loaded ready to take me out” stems from the FBI’s 2022 raid on his Mar-a-Lago compound, during which Trump claims FBI agents were authorized to use “deadly force.” The claim showcases Trump’s persecution complex at its finest, with the former president willfully disregarding facts and distorting reality for an audience that mostly doesn’t know better.
Of course Trump being Trump, this whole scandal isn’t without its irony. After all, it was Trump’s legal team that earlier this month claimed before the Supreme Court that presidents could legally assassinate their political rivals. And it was Trump — not Biden — who last November pledged to “root out” political opponents he described as “vermin.”
Trump’s apparent assassination fantasy is more than just narcissism on a national scale. It’s also a perfect example of his ability to manufacture and spread lies that weaken American voters’ faith in government.
But Trump’s apparent assassination fantasy is more than just narcissism on a national scale. It’s also a perfect example of his ability to manufacture and spread lies that weaken American voters’ faith in government. And those lies are working. That’s more than a problem for Biden’s re-election campaign; it’s a threat to the republic itself.
Spreading a so-called Big Lie requires two things: an electorate primed by disinformation and a cartel of media-savvy influencers willing to amplify the lie. Republicans have already turned producing disinformation into its own toxic art form, to the point that fewer voters today believe the 2020 election was fair than did three years ago. The GOP’s disinformation machine was sophisticated enough by 2019 that it raised concerns among national security officials. It’s an order of magnitude more effective today.
Meanwhile, the MAGA movement has no shortage of sycophants willing to peddle a lie in exchange for Trump’s political favor. Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene expanded on Trump’s assassination tall tale in a social media post in which she claims to have warned Trump of his impending murder at Mar-a-Lago. (She conveniently leaves out the fact that Trump wasn’t at his Florida estate at the time.)
Greene’s lie met with a flood of criticism from actual law enforcement experts including former FBI assistant director and MSNBC columnist Frank Figliuzzi, who offered a refresher course on how the department’s deadly force policy works.
Within an hour, users had tagged her post with the social media generation’s equivalent of a warning label: the dreaded Community Note. At least there’s justice online.
Even so, Republican lawmakers continued to defend his impossible version of events. Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar posted that the FBI’s raid was an attempted “hit on Trump,” despite FBI officials confirming in a public statement that agents were following standard operating procedure, which forbids the use of force unless an agent’s life is in imminent danger.
None of that matters to the Republicans who profit from amplifying Trump’s lie. “These people are sick,” Fox News anchor Jesse Watters said of Biden and the FBI in a prime-time segment Tuesday. Megyn Kelly scolded Biden for “endanger[ing] everybody down there.”
The Republicans peddling Trump’s lie are taking advantage of an electorate that doesn’t understand how the FBI actually works. Despite how federal raids are portrayed in movies and on television, actual FBI raids are mostly coordinated affairs designed to limit officers’ risk of harm. That was especially true at Mar-a-Lago, where armed Secret Service agents patrol the entire building. Trump’s antics would have many Americans thinking heavily armed FBI agents rappelled through his windows in a made-for-TV assault. But reports indicate the FBI coordinated every step of the raid in advance with Secret Service agents stationed at Mar-a-Lago. When FBI agents arrived at Trump’s gate, it was Secret Service agents who let them in. Agents exchanged paperwork with the Secret Service and walked in through the front door. Getting Americans to believe he’s been mistreated is key to Trump’s political survival. It’s also working: Trump is more popular now than on the day he left office, in part because a subset of voters believe the 91 criminal charges against him are politically motivated. Voters who believe Trump was mistreated are more likely to go along with his laundry list of antidemocratic remedies. Unfortunately for our democracy, those remedies include staffing the entire Justice Department with MAGA loyalists and ending all prosecutions into Trump’s criminal misconduct. Coincidentally, that would also make it much easier for a re-elected Trump to prosecute his own political opponents with impunity. Democrats now have an obligation to give the American people a crash course in how the FBI works, and why Trump’s lies about it don’t stack up. Attorney General Merrick Garland must also come forward to defend the integrity not only of the Justice Department, but of the law enforcement process as a whole. Because left unchecked, the false claim that Biden tried to assassinate Trump will become this campaign cycle’s Big Lie — where it will warp the electorate in ways that are both dangerous to democracy and incredibly difficult to deprogram. Trump’s lies threaten public faith in our government at every level. Democrats’ defense of the rule of law must be equally ambitious.
Max Burns is a Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies. Find him on X, @themaxburns. 
