Are you saying you don't trust us any more?

Politico is shocked to discover that the Republican party has conservatives in it who distrust the government, even a formerly sacrosanct entity like the FBI, which previously only Democrats were smart enough to distrust:“

The attacks on the FBI are already working,” said Princeton University historian Julian Zelizer. “Regardless of what happens next, the news has now been filled with sordid accusations and stories about corrupt FBI agents, that they will sink into the minds of many Republicans and even Democrats who are paying attention. These Republican attacks can possibly achieve the same kind of effect on law enforcement institutions, as Republican attacks on the social safety net or regulations like OSHA in the eras of Reagan and Bush. In other words, nobody or nothing in government can be trusted.”

If his goal was to deride the grounds for distrust and suspicion of the political weaponization of yet one more previously respectable federal agency, then his concluding paragraph may have gone awry:

But there are profound dangers for the Republicans, too. Unlike some other quarters of the government, intelligence and law enforcement agencies have power to strike back. After all, they know the secrets, and have been known to use them. At this moment, no one knows more about what really did or didn’t happen between the Russians and the Trump campaign than the FBI agents working on Robert Mueller’s investigation. That may make the bureau a tempting target for this White House, but it makes it a formidable adversary as well.