| | | The quote that distills why Donald Trump is facing federal indictment
Analysis by Philip Bump
National columnist
June 9, 2023 at 9:25 a.m. EDT
Last week, CNN reported on the existence of a recording, taped at Donald Trump’s golf club in New Jersey, in which the former president is heard talking to writers working on a book being written by Trump’s last chief of staff. In the recording, Trump made note of a document in his possession that was classified, a significant admission, given the indictment handed up against him this week.
Hours after news of the indictment broke Thursday, CNN published excerpts of the conversation.
“Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this,” Trump says, according to CNN. “This was done by the military and given to me.”
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Understandably, much of the focus on that quote has centered on the first part, in which Trump tells a visitor to his club about classified material. But what’s more broadly telling is the second part: where he says that the document was “given to me.”
The military did not give that document to Donald Trump, the guy sitting at Bedminster on the day the recording was made. The military gave that document to the president of the United States, to inform his decision-making on some national security issues. At the moment the document was handed over to the president, the person who received it happened to be Trump.
Trump’s failure to understand that distinction — between himself and the office he was granted — is at the heart of nearly every crisis that he’s faced since.
When Trump won election in 2016, it was unusual in a number of ways. An underrecognized one was that he didn’t come to the presidency through the normal channels. There was no career in which he had sought other offices and scrambled past opponents. There were no years seeing how policy was crafted or strengthening his understanding of the history and function of government institutions.
His supporters saw this as a strength: This was a guy not beholden to the Swamp! He would come shake things up! And then he got into office and tried to do things that legislators and the courts recognized were outside his purview, and he got more than one smack on the hand as a result. Eventually, through some combination of indifference and inexperience, he just let Congress bring him bills to tout, sign and spin.
But being an outsider meant he had no interest in rules governing the behavior of a president. The Hatch Act, which limits the use of government resources for politicking? LOL, sure. The guy used the White House for his 2020 convention. He tried to get Ukraine to announce an investigation into former vice president Joe Biden by withholding a state visit, if not military assistance. He understood the power of the presidency but not the checks on it. And when he learned about those checks, there was no personal history of understanding why they were there and important, so he despised them.
Trump did not see the presidency as an enduring position in which he was granted the right to serve temporarily by the public. He saw it as another title held by Donald Trump. And, so, when the public told him in 2020 that they were revoking that right, he did everything in his presidential power to prevent that from happening. Happily, his effort came up short, but there was a cost.
So in mid-January 2021, Trump had to pack up at the White House. And in doing so, it seems, he looked around for the stuff he wanted to keep, put it in boxes and had it shipped to Mar-a-Lago.
We know this is how he behaved in general. Another of his various former chiefs of staff told CNN last year that from time to time during meetings, Trump would ask whether he could keep the material that he was presented.
“In my experience, the intelligence briefers most often would say, well, sir, we prefer to take that back,” Mick Mulvaney told CNN’s Erin Burnett — “but sometimes they forgot.”
Those documents were being shared by one part of the government with the president, another part of the government. Not to mention that, in this specific case, it’s hard to fathom why Trump would want the material. He was understood to be averse to reading the briefings he received; are we to assume that he was doing some extracurricular boning up on the issues?
This indifference to understanding that the presidency is one cog in the machinery of governance is not unique to Trump, of course. Many Americans share the idea that the presidency is superior to other branches, in part as a function of the way the president is elected. It is incumbent upon those who are within government or are appreciative of the complex way in which it holds itself to account to defend that process.
Trump had no interest in treating checks on his power as legitimate. He actively stoked the idea that those checks — impeachment and law enforcement investigations in particular — were themselves vile and corrupt. His supporters and allies in right-wing media, eager to curry favor and enjoy the sunlight of his attention, competed among themselves to reinforce those attacks. This was sometimes framed as a defense of the presidency but was really a defense of Donald Trump, the central star in the right-wing solar system.
So here we are. Trump was given documents, and so he kept them. Then, when the National Archives and Records Administration asked that he return those documents — since they belonged not to him but to the presidency — he told the Archives to pound sand. Ultimately, the government’s law enforcement arm had to go down to Mar-a-Lago to collect them.
That document that Trump showed to those writers was literally given to him, yes. But so was the presidency. And then America wanted both of them back.
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