OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Whatever bump President Joe Biden and Democrats may have gotten following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in June appears to have vanished following the FBI’s raid on former President Donald Trump’s Florida estate last week.
According to a new Rassmussen Reports survey, a majority of likely voters — 53 percent — say they view the FBI now as President Joe Biden’s “personal Gestapo” that he is using to persecute a political opponent.
The majority agreed with the statement that “there is a group of politicized thugs at the top of the FBI that are using the FBI as Joe Biden’s personal Gestapo,” the survey said, as reported by the Washington Examiner.
Last December, just 46 percent of likely voters agreed with the same question, the outlet continued, adding:
In between, the agency increased its focus on Trump and reports that he hoarded documents from his administration stamped “secret” at Mar-a-Lago, which the national police agency raided last week, taking several boxes of documents, including Trump’s current and old passports.
The new survey was suggested by New York Post columnist Miranda Devine, who wrote today that conservatives have had it with the FBI, while liberals, once the agency’s biggest critics, have found a new love.
“Among Republicans, a staggering 76% agree with the Roger Stone quote that there is ‘a group of politicized thugs at the top of the FBI who are using the FBI . . . as Joe Biden‘s personal Gestapo.’ About half (49%) of independents and a sizable 37% of Democrats also view the FBI as Biden’s Gestapo, while 72% of liberals disagree,” Devine wrote.
“Liberals are happy because a politicized agency is coming after their ideological enemies, particularly their bête noire, Trump. It’s a stark turnaround from the days of decrying the FBI’s efforts to target Martin Luther King. The left has discarded any pretense of caring about civil liberties or injustice and instead sneers at conservatives who they claim are the ones who have jettisoned their core principles and now are ‘anti-cop,’” she added.
Good Morning !
“a majority of Americans, 53%, view the FBI as “Joe Biden‘s personal Gestapo,” according to a new Rasmussen poll out Thursday.”
Liberals' FBI trust is a real gut buster https://t.co/QCdTUk61nl via @nypost
— Rasmussen Reports (@Rasmussen_Poll) August 18, 2022
“The agency’s standing is at rock bottom among Republicans and conservatives, and not too healthy with independents and moderates,” she said.
“God knows Trump is no saint, and we still don’t know what the FBI was looking for in the documents they seized on Monday of last week. But it will need to be a national-security emergency to justify sending dozens of armed agents to raid a former president’s home and rifle through his wife’s underwear three months before the midterms,” Devine wrote.
Meanwhile, the raid appears to have dramatically bolstered the former president’s polling numbers, which were already high among members of his party.
Last week, a poll revealed that more than 80 percent of Republican voters said the raid made them “more motivated” to vote in the 2022 election.
A Trafalgar Group and Convention of States Action survey found that 71.7 percent of Independent respondents said that the raid increased their drive to vote.
“Independent and Republican voters are united in their outrage about this unprecedented and tragic event in American history,” Meckler said in a statement about the poll results. “This Gestapo-style injustice has created a voting surge that is so significant, the polling doesn’t even begin to reflect what is coming from grassroots voters in November.”
Newsweek noted further:
Overall, more respondents (47.9 percent) said that they believed “Trump’s political enemies” were behind the raid in comparison to those who said that the “impartial justice system” was responsible (39.7 percent). Another 12.4 percent said that they weren’t sure.
A large majority of Republicans (76.7 percent) believe that Trump’s political enemies were responsible for the raid, while just 11.9 percent of Democrats gave the same answer.
Another 70.5 percent of Democrats said that they believed the impartial justice system was behind the Mar-a-Lago raid.
Among, independent respondents, 53.9 percent said that Trump’s enemies were responsible and 35.3 percent said that it was the impartial justice system.
Not long after the raid, presidential son Eric Trump announced on Truth Social that Donald Trump is raking in the donations, likely in anticipation of a sooner-rather-than-later announcement he will run again for the White House in 2024.
