STUPID?

“I do whine, because I want to win, and I’m not happy about not winning, and I am a whiner, and I keep whining and whining until I win.” (Trump: CNN, August 11, 2015)

 Now that former President Donald Trump has been formally indicted with 37 criminal charges by Special Council Jack Smith concerning the former president's holding on to classified documents, one thing is clear: the absurd idea that Trump is a smart man must be abandoned by anyone with any level of honesty.  Because Trump is about to face criminal charges for crimes that he appears to have committed for no reason other than plain stupidity and a complete lack of understanding of just what the office of the presidency is and how our government works.  And the important thing to understand here is that these documents were classified for a a reason; some of them contain the names of American agents in hostile foreign countries whose lives would be in danger if the wrong people were to see them.  In other words, files that shouldn't be stored in a bathroom.

“Nobody knew health care could be so complicated.” Trump: Washington Post, 27/2/17

Remember the timeline here: Mar-o-Largo was raided back in August of last year, and at first it seemed to have come out of nowhere.  But over time we were told that Trump had been contacted repeatedly by the government concerning the classified documents that he took out of the White House after he left.  And we now know that he only returned some of the documents and appears to have lied about what he held on to.  And in new information that has come out, we have discovered that he kept the documents in random places in Mar-o-Lago, like in a bathroom, and  a ball room.   Along with Trump, his aide, Walt Nauta, has also been charged for moving boxes of documents around  and later lying about it to investigators (it sounds like he was seen  moving them on a security camera before saying he didn't).

“The day I realized it can be smart to be shallow was, for me, a deep experience.” (Trump: Think Like a Billionaire, 2004)

The question that arises here is simple: why did he do this?  What reason did he have to hang on to classified documents when he could have very easily  returned them?  While it is possible that he held on to them for nefarious reasons, like selling them to a foreign government, the more likely reason seems to be that he just likes having them to show off to people, to remind them that he used to be president and  got important briefings.  Like a small child, Trump assumes that every document he ever got while he was in office is his to do whatever he wants with forever.  He's a grown man shouting "MINE! MINE!"

“I’m speaking with myself, No. 1, because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things. … My primary consultant is myself.” (Trump: MSNBC, March 16, 2016)

Is this kind of behavior really so unexpected?  To me Trump is worst kind of fool: one who is utterly convinced of his own intelligence, and who was lucky enough to be born into a family of enormous wealth and raised around people who never told him he was wrong,    So, to him it makes sense that he can call himself a smart businessman while stumbling into 6 bankruptcies and being bailed out by his father to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in unpaid loans.  A list of his failed business ideas include steaks, vodka, bottled water, a magazine, vitamins, an airline, a board game and, of course, a so called university that was such a blatant con that he had to pay a 25 million dollar class action settlement to people who had been scammed by it.   A list of Trump's stupid ideas would be a long one, here's some of them: that the sound from windmills cause cancer, that climate change is a Chinese hoax to destroy the American economy, that joking about sex parties he used to go to was a good topic to bring up at a Boy Scouts Jamboree, that we could prevent forest fires by raking the forest floor, that injecting bleach is a way to cure covid, and, he may have even possibly suggested that nuking a hurricane could be a good way to stop it!  He also appeared to once crudely use a marker to alter a weather map to conform to a tweet he earlier made, and then proudly held it up for the TV cameras to show that he was right. And more seriously, he completely mishandled the outbreak of covid and held a masks optional  rally in Tulsa Oklahoma during the height of the pandemic. And now, it appears that Trump not only held on to classified documents after being told to return them, he allegedly openly showed them to visitors without any kind of security clearance.   A transcript of a recording has been released in which Trump once held up a secret document to some visitors and said , "This is secret information! Look!  Look at this!"   On that same recording he even admitted that the document was still classified because he didn't declassify it as president.  In other words, this fool of a man admitted to committing a crime while being recorded.  That's going to be hard to defend in court.

"Testing is a double-edged sword. When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people, you’re going to find more cases, so I said to my people ‘slow the testing down please’."(Trump: speech, June 2020)

Yes, Trump's life is the perfect example of one of the worst things about America: that it's better to be born rich than smart or talented.  I only hope that he may finally have found the one thing he can't get away with, no matter how much money he has.

"My father gave me a small loan of a million dollars."- Trump Campaign speech, 2015.