Archivally challenged
Ed Pilkington at the Guardian notes that Trump has an issue with documents:
Trump has been archivally challenged, to coin a phrase, for many years. The roots of his refusal to abide by normal rules relating to documents stretch back at least to his refusal to disclose his own tax returns during the 2016 presidential campaign – a resistance to accepting public access to his personal papers that is the mirror image of his current claim that presidential records from his time in the White House belong to him.
Good point. Trump gets to keep his secrets, and he also gets to violate all other forms of secrecy. Heads he wins tails we lose. Trump’s will is all that matters on all occasions.
By June 2018 such proprietary behavior was expressing itself in the White House. Politico reported that Trump was routinely tearing up official records rather than filing them for safekeeping in the National Archives as he was legally obliged to do.
White House aides were left desperately attempting to tape the documents back together – a farcical vignette of government in the Trump era. After he was forced out of the White House, many presidential papers were received by the archives in similarly torn-up condition.
Was there a plan? If so what was it?
Then there is the overriding puzzle: what, if anything, was Trump intending to do with the documents and why has he gone to such tortuous lengths to hold on to them? Cohen, who watched Trump’s antics up close for many years, thinks he knows the answer.
“Donald intended to use the documents to extort the US government and prevent an indictment and conviction. In essence: a get out of jail free card.”
That, or paper the public rooms at Maralago with them.
It’s amazing if Trump actually believed he could get away with this. Did he single-handedly dismantle the “deep State” he went on about to a degree sufficient to render it powerless to oppose him once he was out of office? It doesn’t look like it. Or was he so confident that he would win the election that he considered this a second term project? Or, that he would be President for Life and not have to worry about it at all?
Taking the papers thus becomes his acknowledgement of losing the election, a secret, reflexive protection strategy and insurance policy based on a narcissistic overestimation of his power and influence, and the imagined impunity it offered him. Having gotten away with stiffing multiple contactors over the years as an alleged business tycoon, he can’t imagine why this strategy wouldn’t keep on working. Once defeat was ineveitable, Trump gathered the “hostage” papers with which to bargain with the United States Government (you know, the one with the bombs and the planes and the tanks) over the terms of its surrender.
I don’t know. It sounds good, but that suggests planning Donald doesn’t usually do. It suggests a capacity for long term thinking, and maybe even a theory of mind.
I might believe it if it was on the advice of some of his crooked lawyers; I imagine they could see the handwriting on the wall. Trump, even if he could see it, would not be able to read it unless it said “You’re the greatest, Sir!”
Trump could get away with failing to pay contractors because he had deeper pockets, and could hold things up in court for years. That’s been a winning strategy for him in the past. He’s probably not used to the idea of holding the weaker hand; however many gullible dupes donate to whatever funds he sets up for himself in any forthcoming court case launched by the DOJ, Trump’s not going to outlast the government in a war of financial attrition. He also can’t have that many years left. One hopes, anyhow.
One does indeed. Please, Don, eat more burders.