EDITORIAL: Where my Trumpies at?

Things are not going great for former President Donald Trump, who was meeting with his lawyers over a separate matter — a civil investigation in New York for allegedly lying about the size and source of his fortune — when the FBI raided his Florida home, Mar-a-Lago.

There they found reams of classified information that should not have been there. In his defense, Trump and those left standing by him say that the FBI planted those documents, and also that they already gave the documents back, and also that it doesn’t matter anyway because Trump declassified the documents with a blanket order that does not exist anywhere.

Two days later, in the NY civil matter, he pled the Fifth more than 400 times, for several hours straight, while under questioning by the NY attorney general’s office.

That quieted down his supporters some — Trump himself has said only guilty people and “the mob” use the Fifth Amendment to avoid incriminating themselves, and so that’s what they thought too, until they didn’t.

Now, as details of the FBI search come forth, all of those people who lustily yelled, “Lock her up!” in 2016 are perhaps reconsidering that as a campaign slogan.

Let’s face facts: There just aren’t as many people around Trump as there used to be. A lot of them are in jail: Almost 890 people have been charged with various offenses in the Jan. 6 Capitol Insurrection, all but 185 or so await sentencing. A number of them are being indicted or are under investigation, like Rudy Giuliani, who is under criminal investigation in Georgia for his actions before and after the 2020 election, or attorney Sidney Powell who, we learned this week, sent teams to rip data from voting machines in Georgia, Michigan and Nevada, which is not, technically speaking, legal.

And then there are those who are peeling off, a few every day, like the ones who walk away from Omelas in the middle of the night, turning down the volume on Fox News, quietly putting their Trump flags into storage and peeling the “Fuck Your Feelings” bumper stickers off their trucks.

The only ones left are the most loathsome, those who care not about the rule of law, the future of our republic or the opinions of their family members and neighbors. And, of course, there are those who have tied their political futures to Trump — the ones who haven’t lost their primaries, anyway. In that they have no choice but to ride out the trend of diminishing returns, and hope they don’t lose too many people before Election Day.

Because for their man Trump, things keeps getting worse.