American Huckster

Why did Trump make off with the classified documents? Why was he reviewing them? What did the quintessential salesman intend to do with them?

Donald Trump wants to sell you something. That’s what he is, that’s what he does. He is a salesman, a dealmaker, a pimp—a carnival barker, as President Obama put it. He wants you to buy a condo, a golf club membership, a bottle of vodka, a steak, a degree at the sham university that bears his name, a red hat, an NFT of your favorite president dressed as a cowboy, a room at his overpriced Washington hotel, a photo op at Mar-a-Lago, a presidential pardon, a book about how artful he is at selling stuff. He also wants you to buy the idea of him as a legit billionaire, a prodigious lover, an alpha male, a successful businessman worthy of apprenticing yourself to, a statesman feared by enemies and allies alike, a selfless patriot who only wants to Make America Great Again, a leader who alone can fix it. There is nothing he would not try to sell. He gleefully handed over his 14-year-old daughter to a modeling agency notorious for predatory behavior, ffs.

To Donald Trump, life is nothing more than a series of business deals. Everything is a commodity: his real estate inventory, his company brand, his influence, his endorsement, his family. Even his sex life is transactional. He turns 77 tomorrow; he’s been a minor celebrity for decades, and the most famous human being on the planet for at least the last seven years; by now, we all know him well enough to know that he is, at his core, P.T. Barnum 2.0, the ultimate American Huckster.

It is through this lens that I read the 38-count indictment handed down on Friday by Jack Smith, the no-bullshit Special Counsel. Thirty-seven of those counts involve Trump (the other belongs solely to his co-conspirator and manservant, Waltine “Walt” Nauta). The FPOTUS is charged with 31 counts (!) of willful retention of national defense information, as well as conspiracy to obstruct justice, withholding a document or record, corruptly concealing a document or record, concealing a document in a federal investigation, scheme to conceal, and false statements and representations.

I loathe this expression, which was used to death on Twitter in the early Trump years, but it is apropos here: let that sink in.

On January 20, 2021, with his coup attempt a failure, Trump begrudgingly left Washington and boarded a plane to Florida, taking with him “scores of boxes, many of which contained classified documents” that he “was not authorized to possess or retain.” Those boxes found their way to Mar-a-Lago. For 20 long months—from January 20, 2021, until the FBI finally came to retrieve the stolen documents on August 8, 2022—stolen classified documents were stored in flimsy file boxes all over the property: by a toilet, in a shower, on a ballroom stage, and in Trump’s residence. During that long interval, Mar-a-Lago was visited by: a woman claiming falsely to be a Rothschild, the propagandist who made the debunked election-fraud film 2000 Mules, MAGA political hopefuls Kari Lake and Herschel Walker, assorted QAnon crazies, Trump’s Indonesian business partner Hary Tanoesoedibjo, and O.G. Kim Kardashian beau Ray J, among many others. God only knows how many foreign operatives were strolling around the grounds. For all we know, it was one of those spies who rifled through one of the boxes, leading to highly classified files strewn across the floor of a storage room, including “information…releasable only to the Five Eyes intelligence alliance consisting of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States.” I mean, look at this mess:

In his time as president, Trump tried to float the idea of Mar-a-Lago as “White House South,” but it’s a fucking social club in Palm Beach, where weddings and other snazzy events are routinely held. My senior prom was held at a similar facility, a fancy banquet hall that employed a transient workforce of bartenders, cater-waiters, line cooks, dishwashers, housekeepers, and so on. Trump stored boxes of classified documents in a Mar-a-Lago ballroom—the same ballroom where, on some nights in high season, a glowing bride would be dancing with her father to “Isn’t She Lovely.” He stored boxes of classified documents in places where party guests came and went, generally shit-faced. As a secure location, Mar-a-Lago is on par with Seaside Heights boardwalk or the Ulster County Fair. That’s bad, but it gets exponentially worse when we consider why the documents were brought there—and what the American Huckster was planning to do with them.

In a text exchange between two Trump employees on April 5, 2021, one of the employees, apparently the subordinate, asks if it’s “only his papers [Trump] cares about,” and not other stuff taken from D.C. The reply: “Yes - anything that’s not the beautiful mind paper boxes can definitely go to storage.” (This is a reference to the film Beautiful Mind, where documents upon documents upon documents lead Russell Crowe to conspiracy-fueled madness.)

What we take from this exchange is that Trump only needs access to “his” documents. He needed access to the documents because he was systematically going through them. “Between November 2021 and January 2022, NAUTA and Trump Employee 2—at Trump’s direction—brought boxes from the Storage Room to TRUMP’s residence for TRUMP to review.” (Note: boldface mine.)

Around Thanksgiving of 2021, Nauta texted the aforementioned employee that Trump was “working on” a box, and that Trump had “knocked out 2 boxes yesterday.” Two months later, Nauta explained to that same employee that Trump was “tracking” boxes. So much care went into this that Nauta asked to have the covers of the boxes freshened up, because the existing ones “have too much writing on them.” Since when is Donald Trump this careful and meticulous, and for what reason other than money?

By February 2022, the National Archives and Records Administration, or NARA, was so concerned by the discovery of classified documents on the premises that it referred the matter to the Department of Justice. The FBI opened a criminal investigation on March 30, a federal grand jury convened on April 26, and on May 11, 2022, that grand jury issued a subpoena to Trump’s office “requiring the production of all documents with classified markings in the possession, custody, or control of TRUMP or The Office of Donald J. Trump.”

At that point, Trump knew the clock was ticking. He employed every delay tactic in the book, including having his own attorneys misrepresent his make-good efforts, to buy more time for his little project. And he worked as diligently as someone with the attention span of a spooked kitten could, reviewing the documents. Between May 23 and June 2, 64 boxes were brought to his residence. On that last day, one of his attorneys, M. Evan Corcoran (“Trump attorney 1”), asked another of his attorneys, Christina Bobb (“Trump attorney 3”), to sign off on an official document certifying that Trump was returning all the material back to the government. That was a lie, of course—although his attorneys apparently did not think so (which perhaps explains the difficulty Trump had retaining counsel for his arraignment later today).

FPOTUS had a busy summer in 2022, with rallies in Illinois, Alaska, Arizona, and Wisconsin. He appeared at the America First Summit in Washington, and at a Turning Point USA convention in Tampa. But two events in late July—both of them at Trump National Golf Club Bedminster, the same place where Trump brought some of the boxes of classified documents from Mar-a-Lago when he came north for the summer—aroused suspicion even in the moment, and only seem fishier with time.

On July 14, Ivana Trump, the first of Trump’s three wives and the mother of Don Junior, Ivanka, and Eric, tumbled down the stairs of her Upper East Side apartment. According to the medical examiner, she died of blunt impact injuries to the torso sustained during the fall. Which, even if no foul play was suspected, is an unusual—some might even say a Soviet—way to go. Six days later, her remains were laid to rest on the golf course at Bedminster. This caused a social media stir. It was reported that Trump got not one, not two, but three tax breaks for putting a burial ground on the back nine—but even for the perennially weird Trump family, this was really odd. Plus, a CPA writing for Bloomberg Tax insists that the “taxbreak trifecta” theory is poppycock, that there is no tax benefit to doing this. Which begs the question: why the fuck did they bury Ivana there?

The second event is more notable, in my mind. On July 29, the Saudis came to town for a three-day golf invitational at Bedminster to promote their upstart LIV Golf outfit.(This was before they bought the PGA and ruined the sport of golf forever). In other words, the Trump property that housed boxes of classified documents was crawling with shady foreign nationals bearing oversized bags.

Now, it may be that neither of these events was related to Trump’s document conspiracy. Perhaps Ivana Trump had a special yen for that part of the golf course and always wished to be buried there. Perhaps it was a coincidence that the Saudis were at Bedminster a week before the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago. I have no idea. But in light of the egregiousness of Trump’s alleged crimes, nothing can be ruled out.

The indictment, to me, boils down to one question: Why was Trump going through those boxes of classified documents? What was he looking for, and for what purpose? The obvious answer is probably the right one: He was assessing his inventory. Like a coin dealer combing through the plentiful bronzes of Constantius II and Valens for the rare and pricy Jotapian, Trump was almost certainly seeking out the most valuable pieces to offer his potential (or actual) customers. There simply is no other reason why this lazy, easily distracted analphabetic would spend his free time reading stuff. He wasn’t archiving material; he was pulling orders. This was a garage sale. The American Huckster was huckstering American intelligence secrets.

Put it this way: if you really think Trump wasn’t “reviewing” “his” classified documents in order to pawn them off, then I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

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PROGRAMMING NOTE

If you missed the live YouTube show on Friday night and want to hear our thoughts on the indictment, you can now listen to the most recent broadcast of The Five 8 in podcast form.