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Escalate to... what, exactly? Just getting rid of the whole organization due to its history of misdeeds ranging from MLK to Whitey Bulger to modern political interference? When I look at something like the Strzok text messages and his role in the Russia-baiting, I arrive at the conclusion that this organization cannot be salvaged.
As long as you have federal crimes you need someone to investigate them. And if it's not the FBI it's going to be someone even more political, like the local US attorney, or even more disliked by the right (any votes for giving the ATF more power?). It's like the calls to eliminate the IRS that don't realize that unless they want government spending limited to customs revenue, any other tax collector is going to be just as bad.
If someone discovers that the local police force is astonishingly corrupt and has just been taking money from the mafia in order to allow them to run their protection rackets and deal drugs with impunity, "But who will investigate crimes?" is not a meaningful response to the argument that the current police force needs to be replaced.
It's an argument in favor of firing corrupt people, not of disbanding the department entirely.
If the corruption is deep enough, the difference is probably negligible. Especially if the corrupt people are running the show.
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Big parts of the right consider declining federal state capacity to be a good thing- either because they want to live in Montana collecting machine guns in peace, or because they live in places that would strongly benefit from capital flight.
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Killing the FBI entirely is certainly a nuclear option, but yes it should be on the table if things get that bad. R's want to abolish large parts of the federal government including entire agencies, so I don't see why the FBI would be considered off limits.
Trump should campaign on dismantling the FBI and the ATF. Can't imagine a more redmeat sort of deal for his base.
Trump doesn't need to offer red meat to his base. His base already love him so much that they are still supporting him even after he has been indicted twice for serious crimes of which he is obviously guilty (and once for some bullshit process crime in NY). His problem is that his base are not close to a majority of the electorate - they are barely a majority in a Republican primary.
Trump either needs to convince more NeverTrump Republicans to hold their noses and vote for the crook, not the Democrat, or to convince more Reagan Democrat types that trannies are more of a threat to their kids than Russians.
...These are a thing?
Per Wikipedia, the term referred to non-Southern white working-class voters who switched from D to R for culture-war issues, particularly (in the 1980's) crime. Obviously that group has continued to drift right since Reagan to the point where most of them voted for Trump, but it isn't really part of the Republican base the way rural voters, small business owners, or the white South are.
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