A month ago, Donald Trump targeted his former handpicked FBI director, Christopher Wray, in a new and creative way. As part of a weird and discredited conspiracy theory, the president spun a ridiculous tale about Wray having lied about imaginary FBI agents who participated in the Jan. 6 attack.
Though none of this made any sense, the Republican told NBC News a day later that he believed Wray engaged in “inappropriate” behavior during his tenure at the bureau and said he “would think” the Justice Department is investigating him.
“I would imagine. I would certainly imagine. I would think they are doing that,” Trump said when he was asked whether the Justice Department should investigate Wray.
A month later, the president was even less subtle. The New York Times reported:
Trump called for prosecution of former Attorney General Merrick Garland and former F.B.I. Director Christopher Wray, among others, in a rant on his social media platform on Friday night — replete with misinformation and debunked lies about the 2020 election. Trump, seizing on the release of documents showing the Biden Justice Department requested metadata on calls between the White House and Republican senators during the investigation into Trump’s attempt to overturn the election, claimed without evidence that the department ‘taped’ the calls.
For reasons unknown, Trump, while presumably focused on his trip to Asia, published an absurd online tirade about newly disclosed “documents” that don’t appear to exist. As part of the same harangue, the president claimed there’s now “conclusive” evidence against Wray, former special counsel Jack Smith, former Attorney General Merrick Garland and former Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco.
According to Trump, the quartet “spied on” members of Congress (which never happened in reality), “taped” the lawmakers’ phone calls (which also never happened in reality) and “cheated and rigged the 2020 Presidential Election” (which was not rigged).
The post concluded, “These Radical Left Lunatics should be prosecuted for their illegal and highly unethical behavior!”
None of these people are “radical left lunatics”; three of the four weren’t in office on Election Day 2020 and couldn’t have “rigged” anything; and there is literally no evidence of any of them engaging in “illegal” or “unethical” behavior.
Trump’s hysterics, in other words, reflect the perspective of someone living in an alternate reality.
But while the broader conversation about the president’s cognitive state continues to have merit, what I cared most about was his “should be prosecuted” phrase.
Nine days before publishing this nonsense, during an event in the Oval Office, the president pressed the nation’s three most powerful federal law enforcement officials — the incumbent attorney general, the deputy attorney general and the director of the FBI — to prosecute Smith, Monaco and former FBI general counsel Andrew Weissmann. For good measure, the president soon after added, in reference to Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff of California, “I hope they’re looking at ‘Shifty’ Schiff. I hope they’re looking at all these people,” before also endorsing a federal investigation into his election defeat in Georgia five years ago. Weeks earlier, Trump posted an item to his online platform that directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to go after three of the president’s perceived political enemies, whom he said were “guilty as hell” of unidentified crimes. As is always the case, while focusing on those in the White House, it’s important to watch what they do, not just what they say. The trouble in this instance, however, is that officials in Trump’s Justice Department have a scandalous habit of launching investigations — and in some cases, even securing dubious indictments — targeting those on the president’s growing enemies list. In other words, when Trump barks orders about those he wants to see prosecuted, there’s a team of presidential appointees who take these outlandish directives seriously, which makes them harder to simply brush off as meaningless palaver.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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