Trump Is Weaponizing the DOJ Against James Comey and Other Political Enemies Most People Don’t Care About

Good on Comey for doing this and for fighting the good fight, but let’s be real, how many people in 2025 care about James freakin’ Comey? Or George Soros who Trump also said should be prosecuted? I get that these are core antagonists in the right-wing media’s cinematic universe, but among people who don’t own tactical sunglasses or pay for a Daily Wire+ subscription, who gives a shit about these guys? This is pre-pandemic era storytelling, we’re in a world of Tik Toks and streamers and zoomers winning elections now. Trump’s enemies are all avatars of the 20th century, as evidenced by the great Bette Midler being one of the most common proper nouns that appears in Trump jokes. There will likely be more modern and important political actors swept up in this dragnet, but there’s a nonzero chance that Bette Midler will be too.

“It’s about justice really. It’s not revenge,” said Trump. “It’s also about the fact that you can’t let this go on. They are sick, radical left people, and they can’t get away with it.” So there you go, straight from the president’s mouth: he is prosecuting people because of their politics. This is banana republic shit that in a lot of other countries, usually reveals the weakness of the regime and provides a window into its coming downfall. Real strongmen don’t poll in the 30s and have actual popular support and aren’t intimidated by late night TV show hosts and don’t need to waste time making a big show out of settling old scores with FBI Directors they owe their whole career to. Everything Trump does is from the authoritarian playbook, but it’s from the weak authoritarians portion of it.

Per YouGov, 22 percent of Americans have a favorable view of James Comey, 36 percent unfavorable, and a clear plurality of 43 percent of Americans rightly don’t know who the hell this man is. This is the problem the right-wing has. You see their fervor and uniformity in falling behind dear leader at 36 percent, as well as the relative weakness of the MSNBC crew who have turned a pre-Trump Republican who helped elect Trump in 2016 into some liberal hero at 22 percent. But this poll shows the uphill battle Republicans have in their primary bid to control the culture and get 43 percent of Americans to even just listen to their whiny bullshit.

Even with Soros, a far more well-known figure, you see the partisan and “who?” breakdown echoing throughout the polity. YouGov has him at 19.3 percent popular, 29.5 percent unpopular, 17.5 percent neutral, with 33.7 percent again asking the pollster who the heck this person is. The fear around Trump weaponizing the DOJ is very real, but the notion that all of a sudden all of America is going to fall in lockstep with Ben Shapiro’s daily monologue is far from certain.

That’s what all this is really about and why Trump is kicking late show hosts off TV and would prefer to replace them with Ben Shapiro and Greg Gutfeld. Most people don’t care about whatever grievance the GOP is currently bleating on about and that’s why they’re trying to control all the airwaves so people are surrounded by it and forced to listen to it. It’s always something with this crew, the supposed strongest men alive are always soiling their diapers over some kind of perceived sleight, whether it be their real outrage to wholly invented outrage over a jeans ad, or their cataclysmic meltdown over a beer ad they still talk about to this day the same way Uncle Rico talked about his high school football career in Napoleon Dynamite. Every time the GOP’s bubble comes into contact with the rest of reality, the bulk of reality doesn’t know what the fuck they’re talking about, and James Comey is another chapter in this never-ending saga.

Anyone who thinks they can predict the future in the Trump era has been proven to be a fool, but one thing you can bet on pretty consistently in American politics is Americans’ general apathy for politics. All of us–the left, the MSNBC crew, Very Serious centrists, MAGA–we are all collectively in the minority of people who pay attention to this stuff, and so when you start dividing us into our relative camps, our pluralities shrink even more. The nut to crack in American politics is getting the other half of the electorate who doesn’t vote to care about your platform, and as a betting man, I would not bet on James Comey being the guy to do it for the right.