I’m not as surprised as some might be by the news today that even more classified documents that Donald Trump stole from the White House turned up squirreled away in a storage unit in Florida.
Why aren’t I surprised? Because the guy is undisciplined. He is erratic. He’s dishonest. He’s disorganized. I mean, have you ever heard him speak? He doesn’t draw an arc from A to Z. He flies all over the map, shifting from boast to boast, from lie to lie, from grievance to grievance. This failing is not an excuse for Trump’s illegal possession of top secret material. There is no excuse.
But it might be an explanation. I go with the theory that he took this stuff into exile to gratify his unquenchable ego, something to show off to his star-struck supporters, kind of like the phony Time Magazine covers he had created for himself before his presidency that Time hadn’t even produced.
But for whatever reasons he unlawfully filched these papers in the first place, he might have just stashed some of it here and some of it there and forgotten where he put it.
From all we’ve seen of the man, that would not be unlike Donald Trump.
Then again, he might have purposefully concealed things in four different locations— Trump Tower in New York, his golf club in New Jersey, Mar-a-Lago, and the Florida storage unit— and figured, no one’s going to find it all. For all we know, the way new material keeps turning up, they still haven’t.
That would not be unlike Donald Trump either.
But whatever the answer, today’s news of newly discovered documents that Trump wasn’t supposed to have is one more sign that the walls are closing in.
I heard CNN’s Jake Tapper do a laundry list today of how fast those walls are closing. He cataloged the bad news for Trump since his declaration three weeks ago that he’s running yet again for President. And I’ll add to it.
First came the reaction of news organizations to his announcement itself, news organizations that once were his most strident supporters. Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post buried its caustic report about it on Page 26, with this satirical start: “A Florida retiree made the surprise announcement on Tuesday evening that he was running for president.” Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal editorialized, “Trump is the Republican Party’s Biggest Loser.” Fox News didn’t even carry Trump’s full hour-long speech— they cut away when they got bored.
Then the news kept getting worse.
• A special counsel was appointed to drive the federal investigations into Trump’s role in the insurrection of January 6th, and into his possession of those top secret documents he wasn’t supposed to have.
• More close cohorts were ordered by the court to testify to the grand jury in Atlanta that’s examining Trump’s efforts to alter Georgia’s 2020 election results. Michael Flynn and Lindsey Graham are only the latest.
• Trump lost his fight to keep his tax returns private and was ordered to surrender them to Congress.
• He dined two days before Thanksgiving at Mar-a-Lago with known anti-semites and to this day, hasn’t uttered a public word of contrition. He has taken heat from some in his own party for that.
Then, literally in the last few days…
• He urged the “termination” of parts of the Constitution, the same Constitution he once swore to uphold and would be required, should he win in 2024, to swear to uphold again. He has taken more heat for that.
• The Trump Organization was convicted, in a unanimous verdict, of seventeen counts of tax fraud and other crimes and, while Donald Trump was not a defendant, the implication that he was behind these crimes is impossible to ignore and what’s more, it might be hard for his companies to scare up new business ever again. Meantime the ex-president himself is still being scrutinized in New York for financial fraud and illegal payments of hush money after an affair with a stripper. Not to mention answering to a charge of rape. More trials ahead.
• The newly appointed special counsel in Washington sent subpoenas to Trump loyalists in three states where Trump looked to overturn their elections, demanding any and all communications they had with him, his allies, and his campaign.
• The January 6th Committee announced that based on what it learned in its exhaustive year-and-a-half-long investigation, it will make criminal referrals to the Department of Justice. If you don’t think Donald Trump’s name will be at the top of the list, you haven’t been paying attention.
• Herschel Walker lost in Georgia. Not by a little, by a lot: almost a hundred thousand votes.
It underscores, as if we didn’t already know from Keri Lake’s loss in Arizona, Adam Laxalt’s in Nevada, and Doug Mastriano’s in Pennsylvania, how Donald Trump’s blessing can be the kiss of death.
Of course there’s one more thing I’ll add to the laundry list since Trump announced his candidacy three weeks ago: silence. There has been no roar from the crowd. There has been no crowd.
Remember when White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified to the January 6th committee that when attorney general William Barr declared that there had not been widespread voter fraud in 2020, Trump was so enraged that he threw his porcelain plate of food across the room and “there was ketchup dripping down the wall?”
My guess is, the walls at Mar-a-Lago right now are slathered in it.
Donald Trump probably isn’t sleeping very well right now. If life is fair, it won’t get any better.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 36-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
Bravo Greg
Can’t wait for his lifetime imprisonment (only because we likely won’t hang this traitor)