“In order to defend Trump, one has to attempt to suggest that anyone charged with holding the White House accountable is corrupt and evil,” explained Matt Lewis, a conservative commentator who has become a harsh critic of Donald Trump ever since 2016. And indeed, that appears to be what the majority of the Trumpist right has done over the past 24 hours, in the wake of the F.B.I.’s shocking raid on the president’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, railing against Robert Mueller and calling for his head. In fact, the special counsel was technically not in charge of the raid, which was carried out under the direction of the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Mueller appears to have recognized that going after Cohen for potential campaign-finance violations related to the payoff of a porn star might be outside the scope of his investigation, and so he outsourced the matter entirely. For the president’s hardline defenders on the far right, however, this appeared to be a distinction without a difference.

“So was Stormy a Russian agent? Is she the link to Putin? Does she spank Russian strongmen?” Jim Hoft, the founder and editor-in-chief of the conspiracy-minded site Gateway Pundit, responded rhetorically when I asked what he made of the Cohen raid. “Or does she reserve that trick for U.S. billionaires?"

“This has the hallmarks of a desperation move,” agreed Kurt Schlichter, a Townhall.com pundit who could be found ardently defending Trump all of Monday. “They apparently seized everything, which is outrageous. This is a disgraceful violation of attorney-client privilege and [the] left is going to regret changing the rules that protected them.” This, he argued, should be the perfect opportunity for Trump to fire Mueller—a nuclear option that the White House stated Tuesday is within the president’s powers—“but being fired almost seems like what [Mueller] wants, because otherwise he’s going to come up with a big fat zero.”

The war cry was loudest on Fox News, where close Trump confidant Sean Hannity raged that “Mueller has ostensibly tonight declared war against the president of the United States. Clearly his objective is to remove him from office.” His colleague Tucker Carlson snarked earlier that CNN, by covering the raid, declared that “Stormy Daniels is way more important than any war with Syria,” while on Tuesday, Outnumbered invited staunchly pro-Trump congressman Matt Gaetz to defend Cohen. “Are we really in a situation where Bob Mueller is no longer investigating crimes, he’s just investigating people?” he asked. “And if he finds out anything about those people, he’s going to sic U.S. attorneys all over the country on them to ask questions that have nothing to do with foreign interference in our elections? If that’s the new standard, let’s out it.”

In general, pro-Trump digital redoubts amplified the party line, positioning the raid as a concrete manifestation of what they’ve claimed for months: that Mueller has overstepped his purview and has to go. Breitbart’s home page pointed out that the raid was “NOT PART OF THE RUSSIA PROBE,” pairing it with stories calling for Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who appointed Mueller, to be fired. Townhall.com began obsessing over Alan Dershowitz’s condemnation of the raid; Gateway Pundit began seeing Cohen conspiracies everywhere; and at one point, Alex Jones, live-streaming from the lobby of the Trump Hotel in D.C., asked whether “the swamp” was behind the hotel bar’s decision to air CNN’s “fake news” coverage.

While Hannity and Hoft raged, some factions of Trumpworld took a more cautious approach. “We are in agreement that if internal D.O.J. procedures were followed, this is definitely bad news for Michael Cohen and probably bad news for Trump,” Will Chamberlain, a lawyer and the organizer behind the pro-Trump social club MAGA Meetups, told me, saying he believes he speaks for other “New Right folks,” too. “I think it’s more likely that internal procedures were followed, given that it went through the U.S. Attorney in SDNY and not Mueller’s office.”

Independent journalist and MAGA cheerleader Mike Cernovich, for one, was unconvinced, seizing on news that South District U.S. Attorney Geoff Berman, a Trump appointee, had recused himself from the investigation. “Yesterday the Legal Experts said Trump’s appointee for SDNY approved the unlawful search,” he tweeted, vindicated, on Tuesday afternoon. “FAKE NEWS!”

Cool-headed legal analysis was mostly hard to find, with some of the soundest advice, shockingly, coming from the conservative troll queen Ann Coulter. “2d worse thing @realDonaldTrump could do is fire Mueller and make him a martyr,” she tweeted. “Fire Rosenstein. Fire Marc Short. Fire Nielsen. Let Mueller twist.” For most pro-Trump pundits, however, the anti-Mueller Kabuki theater had all the subtlety of a nuclear arms race. “This is political warfare,” former White House aide and Breitbart editor Sebastian Gorka told Lou Dobbs on Fox Business Monday night, erroneously claiming, as the president would hours later, that Mueller had destroyed attorney-client privilege and was conducting a “witch hunt,” and needed to be “dealt with.”

Lewis lamented the inanity of the Gorka-ization of the right—“The people who want to fire Mueller over this don’t seem to be reckoning with the fact that the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York executed these search warrants,” he said—but seemed resigned to the fact that the Mueller-Cohen affair, like all such political dustups in the Trump era, is just another proxy battle in a broader, bad-faith culture war.

“The people who are attacking Robert Mueller, Rod Rosenstein, and even Jeff Sessions, are not doing it in good faith. They are reflexively defending their guy—which, O.K., is what all political hacks do. The problem I have with it is that this isn’t a normal political fight; the stakes are much larger this time,” he told me. “What happens when half the country believes that the game is rigged and that the rule of law is a sham—which is essentially the argument that Trump’s defenders are making? It’s an argument that is pretty unusual for conservatives to make, and it sows distrust and division. The damage these claims are potentially doing to the social fabric and our trust in American institutions is hard to calculate. But as Seb Gorka said, he sees this as ‘war,’ and all is fair in war.”