While I think that former President Donald Trump is a fool, there is one thing that he does that's smart: he never communicates with his political or business associates by email or text. Like the mob bosses he is so often compared to, Trump realizes that having a trail of his communications with others could lead to revealing possible criminal behavior. So when former Trump aides and associates repeat things that he may have said that are crazy (like say, using nuclear weapons to stop a tornado) or possibly criminal (suggesting that border patrols shoot at undocumented immigrants coming over the border), we just have to take their word for it.
There is, however one way that have heard Trump's unvarnished opinions in the past few years: secret audio recordings. Now saying something unwise when you don't know that you're being recorded is not a new problem for politicians: back in 2008 Barack Obama made an offhand comment when he didn't know he was being recorded about midwest voters holding onto "guns or religion", that may have hurt him politically. Also, Mitt Romney in 2012 disparaged people in America who pay no income tax at a fund raiser when he didn't know that he was being recorded, which made him look even more out of touch with the average American than he already was.
But it's Trump's secret recordings that really show what kind of man that he is: the first was, of course, the Access Hollywood tape back in 2016 in which he bragged about sexually assaulting women and getting away with it. Somehow he overcame the fallout from that recording to win the presidency, but other recordings may still lead to his downfall. The second important secret recording of Trump came shortly after the 2020 election when Brad Raffensperger, the former Secretary of State in Georgia, recorded a phone call with Trump in which the then president pushed Raffensperger to "find" him votes. Trump even implied that Raffensperger himself could face some kind of legal problem for not finding those votes. (The tone of the call is interesting in that Trump's manner is mostly jovial, but his threatening stance still shines through.) It should be no surprise that this recording is a part of the criminal charges recently brought against Trump by special council Jack Smith. The last important Trump recording is about his holding of unclassified documents in his Mar O Lago home in Florida after his presidency. Here, he clearly states that he is showing someone without security clearance classified documents, even remarking that he could have declassified them as president but didn't. (Again, the tone is interesting in that he seems to want to impress the young woman that he's talking to in the recording, and they even joke about how Hillary Clinton got in trouble for much the same thing!). And, as with the call to Raffensperger, this recording has become the basis for criminal charges made against Trump regarding his holding on to those secret documents. So, putting it bluntly, there are 3 secret recordings of Trump that we have heard, the first of which has him bragging about committing a crime and getting away with, and the other two record the actual moment in which he commits a crime! It's important to note that Trump is using a freedom of speech defense when it comes to his attempt to overturn the 2020 election. But, as Smith's summary of charges points out, it was perfectly legal for Trump to lie about the election result and challenge it in court. The crimes comes when he went beyond that by doing things like pressing Raffensperger to find him votes, or setting up an "alternate" set of electors, or trying to persuade then Vice President Mike Pence to reject the electoral vote count in the Senate, all of which would have illegally disenfranchised the votes of the over 80 million Americans who went for Joe Biden.
The interesting thing to consider is that, if we have now heard Trump commit crimes on tape, how many other illegal things has he done in his life that we don't know about? The mind boggles. And given the fact that 26 different women have accused him of sexual assault or rape, it certainly likely that he has broken laws in the past. Hopefully, now, for the first time in his life, he may actually be held accountable for his crimes. We'll see.
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