The question no-one seems to asking about Donald Trump, and his attempted hoarding of classified documents in his Mar-a-Largo home, is why he did it. All the focus seems to be on the laws, and precedents, he broke by taking hundreds of classified documents out of the White House when he left……..allegedly stealing them, according to the law.
We know that Donald Trump does nothing that doesn’t enhance his ego and his pocketbook, so let’s look at how stealing, and then hiding, these papers furthers these aspects of his own self-interest.
We could surmise that he just wanted to keep them as an example to prove that he could get away with anything, and is above the law. Possible, but that doesn’t address his financial greed, which experience shows us is always attached to his enormous ego. That means that he thinks they have enormous value to him. It makes no sense that he would go to all the trouble of taking box-loads of classified documents to Florida after he left Washington, store them in bathrooms, on stages, in closets, and god-knows where else in his house, refuse to give them up for over a year, and then try to hide them from investigators, if he didn’t think they were very valuable to him. Just keeping them for the sake of thumbing-his-nose at American laws, the FBI, and the country, makes no sense either. And I mean, no sense to his ego or greed.
The obvious conclusion, at least to me, is that he thought he could sell them or, at least, sell or barter the contents of them. What other possible reason would he have for bringing the wrath of the government down on his head? He is many things, but pragmatically stupid is not one of them.
If the reason for stealing all those documents was to sell them, then the question becomes, to whom. There are very limited answers to that questions both in terms of people or entities and those having the resources to pay what he would ask – he is unlikely to sell them for peanuts.
Given his history of relations with Vladimir Putin, Russia would be the obvious first choice of a buyer. However, China and Xi Jinping could easily be part of the bidding war that Trump would almost certainly initiate. Again, given his history, North Korea and Kim Jong Un would also be a potential “mark”.
You think I’m crazy? Just think about it for a moment, given what we know already about Trump and his character, if I can demean that word by associating it with Trump.
I would even take my case of asking why he would keep such documents, a stage further. How do we know how many documents he actually stole, which begs the question of how many he might have already sold?
I realize that the reaction to the question I posed at the beginning of this piece, particularly from conservatives, let alone Trump’s fanatical base, would likely be that “No American could possibly commit treason on that level, and certainly not an ex-president of the United States”. I would suggest that such a reaction would be naïve at best and, given our knowledge of Trump, stupid.
Unfortunately, I have to include in my grouping of naïve and stupid the reactions of the media. Why haven’t they asked the question I’ve just posed? Some of them are “bright” enough to have thought it, but why haven’t we heard even a whisper of the question? The answer has to be fear, on some level.
What have we come to, when an ex-civil servant, and I use the term very lightly, can corrupt and intimidate so many of our leaders and persons of intellect?
To finish, I was somewhat encouraged this morning to read that the National Review, one of the most conservative publications in the country, just published an article that categorically placed Trump’s crimes in a completely different level than the indiscretions of Hilary Clinton, Joe Biden and Mike Pence. Maybe there is hope that, if what I am surmising is true, Trump will hang for treason before he dies?
