Republicans Rally Behind Trump, Who Reprises Favored Role: Victim

Arguments used against Hillary Clinton in the 2016 email inquiry are long forgotten as G.O.P. officials rush to condemn the F.B.I.’s search of Mar-a-Lago.

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By Michael C. Bender, Shane Goldmacher and Maggie Haberman

WASHINGTON — Republicans sought Tuesday to turn the F.B.I.’s search of Donald J. Trump’s Florida home into a rallying point, positioning the former president in his political comfort zone as a partisan target and victim, while effectively suspending the party’s efforts to focus on other issues heading into the midterm elections.

The immediacy with which Republicans closed ranks and focused on the political ramifications of the search of Mar-a-Lago — without a full understanding of the direction of the F.B.I.’s investigation or the potential criminality that could be uncovered — underscored Mr. Trump’s role as keystone of the party, the single figure upon whom its elected leaders and midterm candidates depend most heavily for support.

Some party officials tried to channel conservatives’ rage about the search of the former president’s winter home into productive energy for the coming midterms. Within hours of the news that Mr. Trump’s home had been searched, the Republican National Committee texted an urgent appeal about the search to supporters asking for cash to “take back Congress.”

Mr. Trump also sought to capitalize financially. His political committee, Save America, followed Tuesday morning with a fund-raising text message suggesting that the F.B.I. search was proof of a corrupt “radical left.” It added: “Return the power to the people! Will you fight with me?”

And in Ohio, J.D. Vance, the Republican nominee for Senate, who has struggled to match the fund-raising strength of his Democratic opponent, Representative Tim Ryan, emailed supporters an appeal about the F.B.I. search that included two siren emojis and a request to donate and “Join the Trump Strategy Team,” though the money went to the Vance campaign.

Republicans largely ignored the possibility of any wrongdoing on the former president’s part, and the fact that law enforcement agents would have had to show probable cause that a crime had been committed in order to obtain a search warrant. The search appeared to be focused on material that the former president had brought with him from the White House, according to multiple people familiar with the investigation.

The Republican rush to judgment amounted to a sharp reversal from their quick condemnation of Hillary Clinton, Mr. Trump’s 2016 rival, during an F.B.I. investigation of her personal email system during her time as secretary of state. (Mrs. Clinton, for her part, was selling “But her emails” hats on Tuesday, in reference to that inquiry.)

From comparisons to Nazi Germany to warnings that the nation was on the brink of becoming a “banana republic” or “third-world country,” Republicans drew from a short list of dire-sounding metaphors intended to maximize outrage among voters by contending, without knowing what investigators cited as their probable cause, that the pretext for the F.B.I. search was little more than a mere records-retention violation. Their words mostly echoed a statement from Mr. Trump on Monday evening.

Senator Rick Scott, a Florida Republican overseeing his party’s Senate races this year, sounded nearly every one of those themes in an interview Tuesday on Fox News in which he made comparisons to the Nazi secret police, communist Russia and Latin American dictatorships.

“This should scare the living daylights out of American citizens,” Mr. Scott said.

Other top Republicans demanded answers from the F.B.I. and threatened investigations of the Justice Department should the party capture control of the House. And a group of House Republicans headed to Bedminster, N.J., for a previously scheduled dinner with Mr. Trump on Tuesday that abruptly turned into an opportunity for a symbolic show of solidarity.

The search also prompted Mr. Trump’s potential rivals in 2024, including Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, to fall in line and question the F.B.I.’s action. But even Mr. Trump’s critics in the party, such as Representative Peter Meijer, Republican of Michigan, said the unprecedented search of a former president’s home required a public justification from the Biden administration.

The speed with which Republicans have rallied around Mr. Trump threatened to drive the former president directly into the spotlight of the 2022 elections, something many party leaders had hoped to avoid.

Republicans have sought to focus on rising inflation and President Biden’s poor approval ratings as key midterm issues, and have been divided over whether a presidential campaign from Mr. Trump would present an unhelpful distraction. In Kentucky on Tuesday, Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, sidestepped a question about the search.

But the F.B.I.’s decision to execute such a fraught and politically high-stakes search warrant further dimmed the hope of some Republican strategists working on key House and Senate races that the 2022 midterms could stay focused on the Democrats.

Yet again, it was Mr. Trump dominating the news.

Fox News aggressively reported the search, featuring overhead camera shots from above Mar-a-Lago and multiple interviews with Trump family members, including his son Eric and daughter-in-law, Lara, and former administration officials, such as Stephen Miller, his chief policy adviser, and Stephen K. Bannon, the chief strategist.

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