Whatever we end up learning about the rationale for the FBI’s early-morning raid on former national security adviser John Bolton’s Bethesda, Maryland, home on Friday, there’s plainly a major escalation underway in President Donald Trump’s use of law enforcement to persecute his perceived enemies and entrench his authoritarian power. Consider the pattern:
- The targeting of Bolton, a major critic of Trump, appears to have been personally authorized by Kash Patel. An apparently official leak to the New York Post deliberately underscored Patel’s involvement, probably to make sure it’s understood by Trump’s other enemies. Remember: Trump installed Patel as FBI director for this very purpose. Patel had openly declared in 2023 that “the conspirators,” that is enemies of Trump and MAGA, must be prosecuted, and also that more loyalists with the resolve to see this through would be recruited to carry this out. Bolton was on Patel’s enemies list.
- Trump is now targeting Fed governor Lisa Cook, another proclaimed enemy, and he’s escalating the use of law enforcement and the manipulation of the bureaucracy to do so. Trump loyalist William Pulte, head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, is alleging that Cook committed mortgage fraud, and this has been referred to the Justice Department. Whether or not there’s anything to the fraud claims, they’re minor at best, and it’s already highly suspect that Pulte, an agency head, has taken such an active interest in investigations into individual mortgages that happen to belong to Trump’s highest-profile enemies. Given that Trump personally promoted an article about the referral of the Cook matter to DOJ, Pulte’s move looks even more suspect.
- Tellingly, Trump also heavily promoted the news of another supposedly fraudulent mortgage held by an enemy, Senator Adam Schiff. Schiff flatly denies the charges, yet DOJ is now criminally investigating them. Here again, Trump loyalist Pulte was directly involved in the manufacturing of the pretext for this, and experts say the process employed was dubiously manipulated. The same tactic has been used against New York Attorney General Letitia James, another major Trump foe. The question now is whether the White House is directing Pulte to rummage through the mortgages of Trump enemies for material that can serve as a pretext for potential DOJ prosecutions. It’s hard to imagine something of this magnitude proceeding without the White House’s blessing.
- After protests broke out over Trump’s attempted takeover of the Washington, D.C. police force and his deployment of the National Guard there—which is itself a major escalation—White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller expressly declared that protests would be met with a surge of additional law enforcement and/or military resources. Notably, there’s been no serious effort to reassure Americans that Trump’s militarization of the city, or of Los Angeles, is rooted in benign intentions. In fact, this week Trump suggested he would personally ride through the city with the National Guard. Though he scrapped the plan, that was probably for logistical reasons, and he plainly wants all this military activity in urban centers to be seen as affirmative confirmation of his ongoing consolidation of power.
- Longtime Trump ally Steve Bannon explicitly declared the other day that ICE officers will indeed be employed during the 2026 midterm elections in large numbers to monitor voting booths, again floating undocumented voters as the bullshit pretext to justify it. Bannon is not in a position to compel this, of course, but it’s clear the MAGA movement now sees Trump’s militarization of cities as a precursor to the use of law enforcement and/or the military to intimidate voters in large numbers, or foment a crisis atmosphere designed to help the GOP, or both.
- Last but not least, as we reported, a recent internal Department of Homeland Security memo outlines the hopes of senior DHS officials for substantially escalated military involvement in domestic law enforcement going forward. It even declares that military operations like the one in L.A. may be needed “for years to come.”
The raid of Bolton’s home was authorized by a court, and it is seeking to “determine whether he illegally shared or possessed classified information,” according to The New York Times. Trump told reporters Friday that he’d been unaware of the raid, but responded to it ominously.
“He could be a very unpatriotic guy,” Trump said. “We’re gonna find out.” That suggests a thin basis for the raid, raising the possibility that it might be expressly meant to “find” something on Bolton. Indeed, while Trump also claimed he didn’t direct this action, he suggested that he told Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi that “you have to do what you have to do.”
It’s all pure mobspeak: They know exactly what he wants them to do. And this raid was it.
National security lawyer Bradley Moss says we can’t judge the full significance of the action until we know whether Bolton committed some kind of offense—even a minor, inadvertent one—that could be the basis for a preliminary FBI effort to recoup documents in his possession. In this scenario, says Moss, it would be legitimate for the FBI to seek them.
But Moss also notes that it’s not clear why the FBI didn’t arrange with Bolton’s lawyer to collect any documents in a far less dramatic way. Did Bolton refuse to turn over classified documents, as (you may recall) Trump did? Maybe. But if not, Moss says, then the dramatic raid could constitute a serious abuse of power even if there’s some basis for action. (Obviously if there’s no basis at all then it’s even worse, but the court authorization suggests there may be something here.)
“If this is all just a political show to embarrass Bolton on something he would otherwise have cooperated on, it’s a rank abuse of power and one more step toward complete capture of law enforcement by Trump,” Moss told me. “This is pretty darn close to a five-alarm fire if it’s what we fear it is.”
Whatever happens with Bolton, we should keep focused on the unmistakable broader pattern. Trump is dramatically escalating his use of law enforcement and the military on many fronts to target critics and consolidate power. He’s vowing to dispatch the military into more U.S. cities. Internal administration memos are charting out plans for more militarization within the homeland. MAGA movement leaders are openly declaring that the specter of state violence will be used to intimidate voters in urban strongholds. And Trump’s manufacturing of fake pretexts for all of it is growing bolder and more unconstrained. Do we get to call it fascism yet?
