Trump tape: His obsession with holding grudges and exacting retribution could land him in federal court

Department of Defense photo

It wasn’t the first time Donald Trump whined about General Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but it may be the time that will cost him.  There was some interesting reporting, at least to these ears, from the New York Times yesterday on the tape that Special Prosecutor Jack Smith presented to the grand jury looking into Trump’s mishandling of classified documents.  The Times reported that the tape was made during a meeting in July of 2021 between Trump and two writers who were working with former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows on a memoir of his 10 month – wow, ten long months! – in the White House.  The meeting occurred at Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, where he spends his summers. Sources told the Times that Trump was said to refer to a classified document he had from his time in the White House that dealt with plans for an attack on Iran.

“On the recording, Mr. Trump began railing about his handpicked chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley, who was described in media accounts at the time as having guarded against Mr. Trump’s striking Iran in the final days of the presidency, according to the people briefed on the matter,” the Times reported.  “Mr. Trump then began referencing a document that he had with him, saying that it had been compiled by General Milley and was related to attacking Iran, the people briefed on the matter said.”

Wow, and wow, and double wow.

The Daily Mail printed photos of Trump boarding a private jet at the West Palm Beach Airport bound for his New Jersey golf club.  Six boxes similar to those used to store Trump’s top-secret documents at Mar a Lago were pictured being loaded onto the plane by aides.  That trip happened on May 8, 2022.

On May 11, Trump was served with a subpoena for any and all classified documents he took with him from the White House and was holding at Mar a Lago. 

On June 3, several FBI agents and two Department of Justice officials visited Mar a Lago, at the invitation of Trump’s lawyer Evan Corcoran, where they were given two things:  an envelope containing 38 classified documents and an affidavit certifying that no more classified documents had been found at Mar a Lago after a “diligent search.”

On August 8, the FBI served a search warrant at Mar a Lago and discovered dozens of boxes of White House documents there, including more than 100 classified documents that had not been turned over to the DOJ in response to its subpoena at the June 3 meeting.

So, questions arise:  Why was a search warrant not served on Trump’s Bedminster golf club in the summer of 2022, along with the one served on Mar a Lago?  Could there be another trove of classified documents that Trump is still hanging onto that the DOJ has not found yet, that had been at his Bedminster golf club since the summer of 2021?

All of the reporting on the tape has referred to the fact that in discussing the classified document, Trump acknowledged that the document was classified and apparently lamented his inability to declassify it and reveal its contents to the world.  The Washington Post pointed out that Trump “understood both the legal and security concerns around his possession of such restricted information.”  This would undercut Trump’s claims that he had “automatically” declassified every document he had taken from the White House.

But there’s something else going on here:  Why would Trump want to reveal the classified document about plans to attack Iran?  Trump apparently told his interviewers that the plans had been drawn up by General Milley and complained that he couldn’t reveal the document to shoot down a report that had appeared in The New Yorker that same month.

The New Yorker reported in its July 15 issue, “Milley had been engaged in an alarmed effort to insure that Trump did not embark on a military conflict with Iran as part of his quixotic campaign to overturn the results of the 2020 election and remain in power. The chairman secretly feared that Trump would insist on launching a strike on Iranian interests that could set off a full-blown war.”  The magazine reported that “Milley had, since late in 2020, been having morning phone meetings, at 8 a.m. on most days, with the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, in the hopes of getting the country safely through to Joe Biden’s Inauguration.” 

The New Yorker reported that “Milley referred to these meetings with his staff as the ‘land the plane’ calls—as in, ‘both engines are out, the landing gear are stuck, we’re in an emergency situation. Our job is to land this plane safely and to do a peaceful transfer of power the 20th of January.’”

It’s fairly easy to imagine how pissed Trump must have been at Milley in July of 2021.  Both the New Yorker and newspapers reporting on the New Yorker’s report compared the Milley story about Trump to the final days of the Nixon administration, when Henry Kissinger claimed to have worked to keep the beleaguered president from launching a nuclear strike to save his presidency. 

But Trump’s grudge against Milley went back further than that.  The New Yorker reminded readers that on June 1, 2020, Trump had “used the general as a prop in his infamous Lafayette Square photo op: Trump had marched through the plaza minutes after it had been violently cleared of peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters, and following him was Defense Secretary Mark Esper, a pack of his White House advisers, and Milley, who was dressed in combat fatigues, as if at war inside America.”

Realizing the purpose for which he was being used when he saw press photographers ready to take the infamous photo of Trump with the upside-down Bible outside a church parish house that had been damaged by fire during Black Lives Matter protests over the murder of George Floyd, Milley turned around and walked back to the White House by himself.  Several days later, Milley apologized for the role he had played in what had turned out to be a political event to benefit the reelection of Trump.  “I shouldn’t have been there,” Milley said at a graduation ceremony for the National Defense University in Washington.  “My presence in that moment and in that environment created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics.” 

Days after Milley’s speech, Trump had him into the Oval Office and reamed him out for the apology he had issued for his appearance in Lafayette Square with Trump.  He demanded to know why Milley had apologized, because apologies are “a sign of weakness,” according to an account of the meeting in the New Yorker. “’Not where I come from,’” Milley replied, as he later told associates. Milley said he had to ask for forgiveness because he was a soldier in uniform who did not belong at a political event. ‘I don’t expect you to understand,’ Milley had said. ‘It’s an ethic for us, a duty.’” 

I leave it to your imagination what Trump’s reaction to that must have been.  During a trip to Europe, Trump infamously asked aides when he was scheduled to visit an American military cemetery in France, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.”  The Atlantic went on to report that “in a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as ‘suckers’ for getting killed.”

Trump has made repeated promises at his recent rallies that he will get “retribution” on his enemies if he is elected president in 2024.  Clearly, General Mark Milley, who has announced that he will retire as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff later this year, will be a target of Trump’s retribution campaign.

There has already been reporting that Special Counsel Smith has heard testimony that Trump retained at least some classified documents so he could show them off to visitors at his Mar a Lago club in Palm Beach.  It isn’t much of a stretch to conclude that he retained other classified documents so he could eventually use them to retaliate against people he perceived had wronged him somehow, either while he was in office, or afterwards. 

Trump has long had a penchant for holding grudges and an obsession with getting back at those he believes have been somehow disloyal to him.  That those qualities have now apparently put him at serious risk of indictment for withholding classified documents from the government when he was asked to return them, and then issued a subpoena for them, is such a delicious form of poetic justice, I can taste it in the back of my mouth as I write this.