In a Friday appearance on Newsmax, the rightwing media site, Ron Johnson blasted the FBI for not being aggressive enough in following the evidence. Was the great patriotic Republican senator from Wisconsin angry that the FBI had waited too long before searching Mar-a-Lago for illegally stashed documents critical to US national security? Hardly. What agitated Johnson was an alleged whistleblower’s complaint that the FBI had failed to take the “necessary investigative steps after receiving Hunter Biden’s laptop”.

Remember laptop-gate? The FBI received the laptop back in 2020 from a computer repair shop owner who claimed the PC had been left in his shop but never retrieved by Hunter Biden. Analysts determined that much of the data was a “disaster” from a forensics standpoint, as the hard-drive had clearly been accessed by persons other than Biden’s son. Nonetheless, after exhaustive studies completed earlier this year, both the New York Times and the Washington Post concluded that some of the retrieved material had been authentic; and while it showed that Hunter clearly tried to trade on his father’s name, it failed to indicate any corruption on Joe Biden’s part.

For the likes of Senator Johnson, the laptop remains the story of the hour. Unworthy of the senator’s attention was the release of the redacted affidavit that indicated former president Trump, in defiance of a subpoena, had refused to hand over documents that had the highest security classification and arguably included the names of American intelligence assets abroad. There was a time when Republican lawmakers took dangerous security breaches seriously. But this was back when Republican lawmakers also recognized the possibility of electoral defeat after a fair vote.

Senator Johnson was hardly alone in his peculiar priorities. The Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, attacked the “raid” on Mar-a-Lago as “another escalation in the weaponization of federal agencies against the Regime’s political opponents, while people like Hunter Biden get treated with kid gloves”. Also joining the attack was former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, who earlier lamented, “look what the DoJ did … to President Trump, while it slow-rolls and looks the other way on Hunter Biden”. And while Senator Johnson is yet to join Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar in their calls to “defund the FBI”, the Wisconsin senator insists the handling of the laptop affair demonstrates the FBI’s “corruption”; the bureau, he concludes, is “not to be trusted”.

If we struggle to characterize the unrelenting efforts of those like Johnson, who defend Trump through systematic misdirection and by attacking the integrity of US institutions of law enforcement, President Biden himself supplied a helpful term – “semi-fascism”. In a speech given last Thursday, the president rightly described “Maga Republicans” as a “threat to our very democracy”.

The rise of semi-fascism within the heart of the Republican party underscores the exceptional risks in indicting Trump and bringing him to trial. That some form of indictment will soon follow now seems increasingly likely. The redacted affidavit reveals that in hoarding and refusing to surrender government documents, Trump may have violated three separate federal criminal statutes, which carry penalties from three to 20 years imprisonment. And this investigation is unrelated to the criminal fraud inquiry in Manhattan; the election interference investigation in Georgia; and the Department of Justice’s examination of the election tampering scheme that culminated in the violence of January 6.

While many no doubt eagerly look forward to Trump’s day of legal reckoning, dread is the more proper response. When even a Maga-lite lawmaker like the Florida senator Marco Rubio counters the president’s claim of authoritarian strains within the Republican party by tinnily declaring, “If you’re looking for authoritarianism, look no further than what happened under the watch of Anthony Fauci and his allies in the elite establishment,” we know that any future indictment will be greeted by hysterical and violent attacks on the integrity of the US system of justice.

And yet the costs of inaction are greater still than the costs of moving against Trump. A failure to indict born of fear of the political risks of doing so suggests that Trump and the semi-fascists have already succeeded in deforming the rule of law in America. Holding Trump to legal account may not succeed; it may trigger civil unrest and redound to his favor. But it may also begin a long, painful process of removing the poison of Maga authoritarianism from our body politic.

Those who cherish democracy need to call out the proto-fascist tendencies now seizing the Trump-occupied Republican party.

• Lawrence Douglas is the author, most recently, of Will He Go? Trump and the Looming Election Meltdown in 2020. He is a contributing opinion writer for the Guardian US and teaches at Amherst College