Stacks to go through later
Former Trump people tell us he never did bother to learn how to handle documents.
A former Trump official told CNN that they were not surprised to hear that the National Archives found boxes with classified records that “were unfoldered, intermixed with other records, and otherwise unproperly (sic) identified.”
According to this source, the former President was known to walk around both the White House and Mar-a-Lago and pull documents out of boxes and look at them, then put them in other boxes or to the side, often with no method or reasoning to it. One source said that Trump was constantly putting things into stacks and leaving them around his office to go through later. These stacks often included everything from newspaper clippings to the Presidential Daily Briefing.
Sources also said Trump would write notes on the back of other presidential documents — even when aides told him not to.
Another source described how Trump would show off presidential documents to visitors including the letters between himself and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, indicating how lax the protocol seemed to be around these documents.
This is one consequence of being both stupid and lazy. Trump is too stupid to grasp that being president isn’t the same as being the crooked head of a crooked real estate swindle. Trump is also too lazy to figure out that he’s too stupid to understand his change of jobs and too lazy to do the work to become slightly less stupid on the subject. You have to be really dim and incurious to think you treat official papers like so much scrap paper left over from printing contracts.
“…often with no method or reasoning to it…”.
Often? Sounds like an understatement to me.
All the while, looking for his name.
For Trump, high level papers like this- that is, papers written by and for serious, thoughtful people who actually read- would mean almost nothing.
I can imagine him wandering around, late at night, in his bathrobe and slippers, a sheaf of papers clutched in his fists. He tilts his head, and adjusts his glasses, trying to make sense of them, but the different angle does not help. Any meaning or import they could possibly contain eludes him. They might as well be written in Chinese. He stops and stands. He’s like a four year, old pawing through the reports, wondering where all the pictures are, losing interest when he finds there are none. He puts the papers down, already forgotten, and goes off in search of more ice cream.
This probably overlaps a lot with “stupid and lazy,” but I think most of it is just selfishness.
Trump doesn’t give a shit about orderly recordkeeping. That’s somebody else’s problem. Let the secretary or archivist or whoever deal with it. He wants to take some papers into the bathroom, or write on them, or tear them up, then he does it.
Or, to the extent he cares about recordkeeping, he’s against it. When you constantly lie and offer whatever “facts” suit your current purposes, being reminded of what you actually said or did or knew is… inconvenient. Trump’s well-known aversion to using email isn’t old person technophobia, it’s a desire to avoid leaving a trail of evidence.
I guess he should have been shooting all his staffers, then.
He learned from watching mobsters get caught with a “second set of books” and realized that the way to avoid their fate was to keep no sets of books.