When an individual exits his or her place of employment for whatever reason, said individual only removes items that pertains to or belongs to them. Period. Any items that are clearly and specifically the property of the employer remains. If the employee that is being discharged from their place of employment works in an office, the only things getting packed into a box will be the materials that they brought to their workstation. That is all. If most Americans have a working understanding of what happens when one is dismissed from their place of employment, why is it that Donald Trump believed he could pack up and walk off with hundreds of classified documents that were no longer under his jurisdiction once he left the White House?

On January 20, 2021, at 8:20 a.m. Trump and his wife, former First Lady Melania Trump, exited the White House to make way for the Bidens and their official White House staff. Among the furniture and other odds and ends that were loaded up to leave with the Trumps were thirty-five boxes filled with sensitive governmental documents that were noted as “Presidential records from January 20, 2017 to January 20, 2021…or documents with classification markings.” These documents traveled approximately 990 miles to the Florida home and private club belonging to Donald Trump, Mar-a-Lago. For over a year these documents have been stored improperly and illegally in a basement at Mar-a-Largo. The Presidential Records Act (PRA) of 1978 specifically states that “Presidential records automatically transfer into the legal custody of the Archivist as soon as the President leaves office.” This also includes all the records and documents in the vice president’s offices as well. So former vice president Mike Pence had to follow the same instructions. But for some mysterious reason Trump made the decision to ignore the law and do his own thing. Critics and right-winged media argue that an official ‘raid’ on the former president’s Florida residence was unnecessary and political theater meant to deescalate the phantom momentum of a possible presidential candidacy in 2024. It was revealed by sources close to Trump that the Department of Justice and Merrick Garland had been “in discussions” with the former president and his attorneys for months and that in January of this year, Trump released 15 boxes from Mar-a-Largo. Now, eight months later the FBI produced a search and seizure warrant to collect the rest of the classified documents. Another 20 plus boxes with 11 sets of classified records. Why? Trump lied and told officials that he had given them everything they asked for when in fact he had not. More discussions happened. Trump refused to hand the classified records over. That is why Merrick Garland, and the DOJ, sent an affidavit and search and seizure warrant request to U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart to be approved. Why is any of this up for debate?

Donald Trump, his allies in Washington politics, and the right-winged media have, as usual, turned something that is blatantly wrong and incorrigible, and used it to promote an agenda that props up White entitlement and supremacy. Had 44th POTUS Barack Obama been guilty of the very same act when he left office, Trump and the entire FOX primetime lineup would have verbally crucified him. But since it was Trump, the sentiment is “what’s the problem?” Trumpism is the problem of significance. There are now loud calls of outrage from Republicans that the FBI should be “defunded” and allegations have been floated that the largest law enforcement agency in the country could be guilty of “planting evidence” in the boxes seized from Mar-a-Largo. Trump, in a statement released on Truth Social, noted the dark history of the FBI under its legendary director, J. Edgar Hoover, and all the nefarious doings of the agency under Hoover’s tenure, and attempted to implicate the bureau responsible for whatever is discovered in the confiscated boxes. Right-winged media, chirping actively whatever the former president orates, concurs that the FBI and the U.S. government itself cannot be trusted. Why is there a fostering of distrust of the government by right-winged media and GOP Trump supporters?

Black Americans are very much aware that the FBI and other governmental agencies have worked tirelessly to proliferate and engage practices of White supremacy racism. It is well known and documented regarding the efforts of both the CIA and the FBI to infiltrate, discredit, and dismantle Black organizations whose mission was to gain civil and social rights under the Constitution for disenfranchised Black Americans such as the Marcus Garvey movement, the Nation of Islam, the Civil Rights movement, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and the Black Panther Party. Any Black organization or individual that Hoover deemed was “extremist” and a threat to the U.S. government, the FBI had a file on them. It is no secret that the FBI ‘planted’ disruptive information and seeds of distrust in Black organizations and orchestrated events that led to the assassination of Fred Hampton. Black Americans have watched on the sidelines for decades as crooked governmental agencies and agents have snatched land, destroyed documents, set up innocent people in court, unjustly imprison, lynched and withheld reparations from them. Black Americans called for the defunding of police departments that did not meet the requirements of the communities in which they served in 2020 during the protests that resulted from the death of George Floyd. White politicians like Sen. Rand Paul, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green, and Rep. Kevin McCarthy were adamantly against defunding of the police and this was a major talking point they used against the Democrats in the 2016 election season. However, now there are calls to defund the Federal Bureau of Investigations, the FBI, because it had the audacity to investigate a former president who has been impeached twice, and serve this same person with a search and seizure warrant because they are a known adroit liar? Could it be that these calls to defund the FBI, which is headed by Christopher Wray, a Trump appointee, are nothing more than a smokescreen to what is really happening in this country? The search and seizure at Mara-a-Lago has everything to do with Trump breaking the law. He likes to call himself the president of “law and order” but had he really believed that January 6th would have never happened and once he departed the White House on January 20th, he would have traveled to Florida, and his presidential records would have moved on to the National Archives. All of them. This is not a “defund the police” moment. Yet once again, White America is guilty of misappropriation. White America is not above hijacking an entire movement for the benefit of White supremacist behavior and advocacy.