We have stumbled through the looking glass many times and in many ways in this era of Donald Trump, American president. Our fearless leader does not seem to hold many fixed views beyond the idea Donald Trump ought to have more money and people ought to say nice things about him on the teevee. As a result, he can often go shooting down the rabbit hole in a spasm of self-interest, particularly as he sinks deeper into grave legal peril. His Republican allies, eager to prove their loyalty to El Jefe—and, more importantly, The Base they need to keep reelecting them in their gerrymandered districts—often launch themselves after him, only to find themselves at dinner with the Mad Hatter.

Seldom has our new bizarro world been on show like it was Monday night on The Fox News Channel. Various Republicans have, for months now, taken to attacking the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the nation's most powerful law-enforcement organization that they once thought very honorable indeed. Not anymore, you see: the FBI has been investigating The Leader, including, according to The New York Times this weekend, exploring whether Trump might be a Russian asset after he fired FBI Director James Comey. El Jefe has, in turn, been attacking the FBI.

So it's time for the various freakish fauna of the netherworld to really blossom.

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Fox legal analyst Gregg Jarrett just called for the FBI to be disbanded over reports that they are investigating Trump



"Frankly, it's time that it be halted in its tracks, reorganized and replaced" pic.twitter.com/szhaOSLOve — Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) January 15, 2019

(Leave aside, for the moment, this scene from Fox News: Sean Hannity, who long covered up that he shared a lawyer with the president—Michael Cohen, now headed to federal prison for three years—and who is one of the president's main advisers—but rarely discloses this conflict-of-interest to his viewers—is playing host to a Legal Analyst who wrote a book called The Russia Hoax. Also featured: Mark Meadows of the far-right Freedom Caucus and Mark Penn, the former Clinton adviser whose job now seems to be to go on Fox News to concern-troll Democrats about moving too far left. There really isn't even a pretense that what's being discussed is what is actually happening out in reality. Everyone, including viewers, likely prefers it that way.)

Not for the first time, Trump's thrashing about in the interests of self-preservation have served up a very palatable meal indeed for lefty types and scrambled the political spectrum. Here is a conservative calling for more oversight of law enforcement! Calling attention to the potential for abuse! Demanding accountability for leadership! Surely, this new philosophical breakthrough will filter down to, say, how conservatives process the event when a police officer shoots an unarmed black man. Surely, it will lead conservatives to reexamine the FBI's conduct through much of the 20th century, a record which includes wiretapping and threatening Martin Luther King, Jr. and at-times-illegal operations to counter political dissidents in the Black Panther Party and the antiwar movement during Vietnam.

over the years that Illinois Black Panther leader Fred Hampton was assassinated. Bettmann Getty Images

And surely it is not tailored specifically to this case, which Legal Analyst Gregg Jarrett completely misrepresented when he suggested there was "no probable cause, no credible evidence." There was publicly available reason for suspicion before the FBI opened its counterintelligence investigation into Trump, who had called for the Russians to hack his political opponent from the podium. (Later, we learned the Russians tried to hack Clinton's server the same day.) Who knows what still hasn't become public, but would have been available to the FBI? Trump shared classified information with Russian ambassadors in the Oval Office, and, of course, fired Comey over the investigation. By the way, he invited those Russians to the Oval the day after he fired Comey—and told them firing that "nut job" eased the pressure of the Russia probe.

This new concern for law-enforcement overreach would be very promising indeed if we didn't all know that it will be abandoned at the first moment of convenience. (On the flip-side, liberals' new knee-jerk support for the intelligence community because it has opposed Trump may have staying power.) After all, right-wingers are already concern-trolling over a completely non-analogous incident involving President Obama. It's not that they don't want the Feds to have vast and formidable powers—it's that they want them used only against Certain People. That group does not include the president, no matter what he's done.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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