The promise of President Donald Trump’s second term, according to his MAGA media allies, was that Trump loyalists installed at the heads of federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies would finally reveal the “deep state” corruption behind the myriad investigations into his misdeeds and bring his political enemies to justice. While the administration’s actual document releases have proven little, its strategy of chumming the water with red meat for the MAGA base has worked on the Trumpist propaganda corps, which has taken the bait and used it to demand a wave of arrests and prosecutions.

In the latest such salvo, Fox News Digital reported Tuesday morning that “the FBI did not believe it had probable cause to raid President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in 2022, but moved forward amid pressure from the Biden Justice Department,” citing “newly declassified documents” to which the outlet apparently received exclusive access. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt and FBI Director Kash Patel quickly promoted Fox’s story; so did Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), who said he had received the “shocking new docs” that day and alleged they proved that the FBI’s search of the president’s home had been a “miscarriage of justice.”

But as legal reporters who had followed the Trump documents case swiftly noted, the GOP’s spin was nonsense. 

• The FBI agents’ worries about probable cause, documented in the emails Fox News Digital reviewed, predated the acquisition of Mar-a-Lago surveillance video showing “Trump aides secretly removing boxes of records,” which convinced the bureau’s leaders that probable cause had been reached. 
• Even Trump-appointed Judge Aileen Cannon rejected the Trump legal team’s argument that “the dissenting views” by FBI agents would have “altered the evidentiary calculus in support of probable cause.”
• And concerns aside, a magistrate judge signed off on the search warrant — and when FBI agents executed it, they found reams of unsecured classified material in various rooms of Trump’s home/private club.

The right’s propaganda apparatus nonetheless sprang into action. 

MAGA slop artists like Benny Johnson rushed to social media to hype the “massive” story and demand “charges and arrests” in response. 

Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon discussed the “blockbuster” story during his December 16 show with right-wing propaganda magnate John Solomon, who suggested the documents were “the most important document to date” and “could lead” to criminal charges or a civil suit from Trump. 

That night, Solomon was on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show telling millions of viewers that the news, which Hannity termed “a bombshell revelation,” could trigger “legal consequences.” (Trump himself subsequently posted a clip of the segment on social media, then denounced “the FBI’s CRIMINAL RAID.”)

On Newsmax, host Greg Kelly even declared that “Jack Smith belongs in jail” over the Mar-a-Lago search, a bizarre conclusion given that Smith was prosecuting war crimes in Europe at the time and would not become special counsel until two months later. 

We’ve been seeing iterations of this pattern throughout this first year of Trump’s second term: The Trump administration chums the waters by handing over documents related to one of the myriad past investigations into the president’s actions; the president, top Trump officials, and Republican officeholders say they show a massive scandal; and mainstream reporters point out their narrative is farcical while MAGA media stars call for the indictment, arrest, prosecution, jailing, and perhaps execution of their political enemies.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard triggered a firestorm in July with her bogus claim that former President Barack Obama directed a “treasonous conspiracy” against Trump in 2016. While the documents she cited as evidence, originally provided to Fox, proved nothing of the sort, her claim was nonetheless accepted as gospel by MAGA media figures who spent weeks regurgitating her claims and demanding arrests of a litany of purported culprits. The president himself even posted to Truth Social an AI video featuring Obama being arrested and imprisoned. 

In August, the purported “Clinton Plan” emails in a newly declassified annex to special counsel John Durham’s 2023 report supposedly unveiled a “plot” against Trump, leading to calls for Hillary Clinton’s imprisonment (Durham had assessed that the emails in question were forgeries created by Russian intelligence). 

Two months later, it was FBI documents purporting to show that special counsel Jack Smith had been “spying” on GOP senators that led to right-wing outrage and calls for his arrest (the FBI had reviewed the toll records of senators in order to establish who Trump and his alleged co-conspirators were trying to contact before and during the January 6 insurrection).

And now it’s the Mar-a-Lago search coming under scrutiny based on similarly dishonest readings of documents the administration has released.

Maybe this is all part of the Plan B that DOJ “Weaponization Working Group” head Ed Martin laid out in May — to “name” and “shame” people who the Justice Department proved unable to indict. If that’s the case, a rude awakening may be in store for the right-wing media figures who predicted “justice” was coming — and for the audiences who believed them.

But one can’t put anything past an authoritarian president who has installed loyalists who treat the Justice Department as his personal law firm, purged the law enforcement apparatus of anyone who thinks otherwise, and frequently demands probes into his political foes that his underlings scuttle to carry out.

The constant right-wing celebrations for Trump’s revenge tour can only increase the pressure on law enforcement to try to somehow bring cases against his foes. Indeed, Attorney General Pam Bondi ordered a grand jury probe into Gabbard’s nonsensical accusations in August; three months later, Reuters reported that prosecutors were drafting grand jury subpoenas “to investigate Obama-era intelligence officials.”

We’ll see where that goes in 2026.