The Republican walk back has started, but has a long way to go

Several lawmakers pushed back on Sunday against Republican criticism of the FBI’s court-authorized seizure of documents from former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club, with even some in the GOP warning that the violent rhetoric was “dangerous” and “absurd.”

Still, many Republicans continued to defend the former president, casting doubt on whether the FBI search of Trump’s Florida home earlier this week was justified — and whether the documents seized were actually top secret.

That's from the Washington Post (free link here.) 

As usual, I found Allahpundit at Hot Air has a decent take on the matter (the "he" here is, obviously, Trump):

If he truly wanted to turn down the political heat in America, I can think of a few things he might have done differently.

1. He could have returned all of the documents the first time the National Archives asked for them back.

2. He could have returned them later when the DOJ subpoenaed them.

3. Having failed to return them, he could have kept the search of Mar-a-Lago a secret. Remember, it wasn’t the feds who announced it. Trump announced it on Truth Social because he recognized that the incident would benefit him politically. The FBI even carried out the search dressed in civilian clothing so as not to alert bystanders as to what was happening. Trump alerted the country because he wanted to raise “the heat.”

4. He could now call on his followers to chill out before one of them kills someone, as nearly happened a few days ago in Cincinnati.

5. He could, at the very, very least, refrain from further inflaming the situation:...

Of course, the best way to have turned down the heat would have been to not remove classified material from the White House in the first place, thereby risking this sort of standoff over recovering the documents.