What is going on in America? A celebrity eccentric known as ‘the Pillow guy’, his real name is Mike Lindell, claimed yesterday that the Federal Bureau of Investigation seized his mobile telephone.

Lindell, a former crack addict turned successful entrepreneur who is now a major supporter of the Trump movement, says he was returning from a hunting trip when ‘cars pulled up in front of us, to the side of us and behind us. I said, “those guys are either bad guys or the FBI.” It turns out they were the FBI.’

Lindell is a wacky guy, and his claims should be treated with scepticism. Yet there is growing evidence that the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation are indeed now treating the Trump movement as a domestic terror threat.

Let’s rewind a bit. At the beginning of this month, Joe Biden gave a peculiar speech in Philadelphia. ‘Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic,’ he said.

It was too camp to be sinister – Biden had himself backlit in red, like some club night Halloween Führer. The Marines stood still behind him, their white gloves and hats glowing in the artificial light. But Biden was, in fact, branding a large section of the American public as terrorists.

The MAGA Republicans in question instantly cried fascism, but that was hard to square with the image of a doddery old man apparently calling for ‘unity.’

Still, reading that speech back, stripped of televisual context and setting, Biden’s speech clearly does represent quite an extraordinary and alarming moment in American politics: a Commander-in-Chief declaring that his political opponents represent a national security threat.

It’s worth quoting Biden at length:

‘MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution. They do not believe in the rule of law. They do not recognise the will of the people.

They refuse to accept the results of a free election. And they’re working right now, as I speak, in state after state to give power to decide elections in America to partisans and cronies, empowering election deniers to undermine democracy itself.

MAGA forces are determined to take this country backwards — backwards to an America where there is no right to choose, no right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry who you love.

They promote authoritarian leaders, and they fan the flames of political violence that are a threat to our personal rights, to the pursuit of justice, to the rule of law, to the very soul of this country.

They look at the mob that stormed the United States Capitol on January 6th — brutally attacking law enforcement — not as insurrectionists who placed a dagger to the throat of our democracy, but they look at them as patriots.

And they see their MAGA failure to stop a peaceful transfer of power after the 2020 election as preparation for the 2022 and 2024 elections.

They tried everything last time to nullify the votes of 81 million people. This time, they’re determined to succeed in thwarting the will of the people.’

It can be argued that political actors who refuse to accept electoral results are dangerous to democracy. But Americans have a constitutional right to think and say whatever they want about the 2020 election, so Biden is arguably the one not showing ‘respect’ for the Constitution by denouncing them as persona non grata in American democracy.

Perhaps the most disturbing part of that speech is the mixing of obviously political issues with the stuff about the importance of ‘recognising the will of the people.’ It’s not just that Trump and the MAGA movement refuse to honour an election, it’s that they want to ‘take the country backwards’ – i.e. oppose the Democratic line on abortion, LGBTQ matters and, er, the right to privacy. It’s odd to hear Biden, a practising Catholic, denounce people who oppose ‘contraception’ as enemies of the state – that means the Church he belongs to is anathema to American democracy, too. But the real menace lies in the idea that people who don’t agree with progressivist ideas of progress must be defeated.

Still, it was just one speech, and all the Republican hoopla about Biden’s ‘fascist turn’ sounded hyperbolic. In the days that have followed, however, it has become increasingly clear that Biden’s talk of ‘protecting democracy’ is a conscious and conspicuous campaign to demonise the opposition — for all his insistence that it isn’t.

Joe Biden marked the 20th anniversary of 9/11 with another speech in which he said the day was ‘not about the past. It’s about the future. We have an obligation to defend, preserve and protect our democracy.’ In case you didn’t get the point, at the same time Vice President Kamala Harris added that, 20 years after Islamists brought down the twin towers, the threat to America now came from ‘election deniers’ and those ‘who refuse to condemn’ the storming of the Capitol on January 6th at the bitter end of the Trump presidency. And the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Alejandro N. Mayorkas, said that the ‘threat landscape has evolved considerably over the last 20 years’ to include ‘an ideology of hate, anti-government sentiment, false narratives by public platforms, even personal grievances.’

Anti-government sentiment? Is that now illegal? The Biden administration appears to be saying: if you support unapproved political actors, you are a threat to the Republic.

It’s not merely rhetoric. The Department of Justice and the FBI now seem to be enforcing Biden’s message with gusto. Right-wingers who’ve said the wrong thing on Facebook say they have been targeted. Some 40 prominent Trump supporters have been issued with subpoenas, apparently in relation to their activities around the time of January 6th, 2021. Two Trump advisors have had their phones seized. Steve Bannon has been arrested and charged with money laundering.

The Bannon case has its own peculiarities, and no doubt every FBI or DoJ swoop can be justified on some legal grounds, but taken together it looks a lot like what MAGA Republicans say it is, a coordinated political campaign.

Is it all really about the ‘attempted insurrection’ of January 6th? Is this about defending democracy? Or is it an authoritarian attempt to suppress dissent ahead of the mid-term elections in November?

People who really want to protect democracy should at least ask.