All of a sudden, lots of Trump’s friends are making noises about how he’s unfit to run again, because no matter how he explains it, even the most steadfast members of the MAGA cabal have difficulty buying the idea that any American from President on down should be sitting in his home surrounded by documents that have been judged to contain classified information and might, if leaked, harm the United States.
So, Trump can bitch and moan about how his passports were stolen and how the FBI actually brought sensitive materials into his house before they then took them out. Or he can say that this is just the next chapter in the ‘get Trump’ witch hunt that has been going on since 2016.
But the bottom line is that Trump’s star is beginning to fade, and when you stop and think about, the FBI raid is a perfect excuse for him to withdraw from the 2024 race and keep all money he’s raised for himself.
On the other hand, there may be a perfectly plausible reason why those cartons of documents were sitting on his basement floor and why from his point of view removing them from the White House didn’t mean he did anything wrong.
Remember when Alex Butterfield appeared before the Watergate Committee on July 13, 1973, and disclosed the existence of the White House tapes? I happened to be watching the hearing that day and like just about every other Watergate junkie I couldn’t believe that Nixon could have been smart enough to go to China and at the same time dumb enough to let anyone know about those tapes.
Because the moment it got out that virtually every conversation held in the Oval Office had been recorded without the knowledge of the individuals who were taped, you knew that the government was going to demand the tapes be turned over, which eventually they were. And this was the point at which Nixon’s chances of avoiding responsibility for the 1972 break-in of the DNC office at the Watergate went down the drain.
But in Trump’s case, we have a somewhat different situation because Nixon was still President when the Watergate investigation took place, whereas Trump is already out of office now that we are being treated to Mar-a-Lago-gate.
But here’s the point. Nixon never owned the Watergate tapes because they never left the White House until they were eventually sent over to the National Archive which eventually published the voice transcriptions and then gave copies of some of the tapes and the transcriptions to the Nixon Presidential Library where they are now stored.
But if possession is 9/10ths of how we define owning any object, then until the FBI took back those documents sitting at Mar-a-Lago, those documents belonged to Trump. And what was he going to do with them?
I’ll tell you what he was going to do with those documents. He was going to sell them and pocket the dough because that’s how he defined his role as President of the United States.
Trump was the first Presidential candidate who copyrighted his campaign slogan and then put the slogan – MAGA – on every, single shirt, hat, flag, bumper sticker that he then sold at his rallies and online.
He’s still selling that crap online. Don’t believe me? Click right here. You can also text ‘STORE” and then 88022 for what the website says is “early-access on new Trump merchandise.”
Want to read probably the most negative book review of all time? Try Dwight Garner’s review of Twerp Kushner’s so-called memoir in The Failing New York Times. But what Garner missed was a section where Twerp says that when Trump became President, they sold 80.000 MAGA hats in one week!
How much do you think an official document from the Oval Office in a nice frame would fetch online? Two hundred bucks?
How about if the document had been classified before Trump ‘declassified’ it and then shipped it down to Mar-a-Lago in 2021? That’s right. Trump says he had the authority to declassify anything at any time by waving some kind of magic wand.
A once-classified document signed by a President and hanging on your wall in a gilt-edged frame? At least five hundred bucks, if not more.
Now that the FBI has seized all those documents, what’s left for Trump to sell? Don’t worry, he’ll figure something out.
[Thanks Jon G. for this idea.]