What Defendant Trump does not understand

As we all know, late yesterday, Defendant Trump was charged in a superseding indictment in the first Mar a Lago documents case.  The grand jury charged him with several additional counts, including a 32^nd charge of illegally possessing and mishandling a document containing national security information, in this case, the now infamous Iran attack plan he waved around and apparently showed to several people at his Bedminster golf club in 2021 who were not authorized to see it or hear anything about the details of the secrets it contained.  The other charges had to do lying to the government and with conspiring to conceal, alter, or destroy security video that the DOJ had subpoenaed from Defendant Trump in 2022, before the FBI had searched Mar a Lago for classified documents the government believed he hadn’t turned over on June 2.  They were correct of course.  The FBI found 102 additional classified documents when they searched the place on August 8, 2022.

So, what does he do today?  Well, he goes on something called johnfredricksradio.com, a right-wing online radio show that advertises itself as “Real America’s Voice,” and he tries to defend what he did with the security video last year.  Asked about the indictment, Defendant Trump first accused “deranged Jack Smith,” which is what he calls the Special Counsel prosecuting him, of trying to intimidate “two good people” who work for him, an apparent reference to Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, charged as his co-conspirators.  Then he tells the host, “These were my tapes that we gave to them. These were security tapes. We handed them over to them.  If we wanted to fight that, I doubt we would have had to do this.”

This is what Trump does not understand:  once the Department of Justice, or any other prosecutor for that matter, gets a court to subpoena something from you, in this case, the security tapes, in a real sense, they are no longer yours.  You can keep a copy, but the originals, the actual security tapes or discs, belong to the prosecutors.  He should have learned this last year when he filed the civil lawsuit in Florida heard by Judge Aileen Cannon, the same judge hearing the criminal case against him today, asserting that not only the classified documents but everything the FBI seized on August 8, 2022 belonged to him.  Cannon at that time imposed her famous hold on all the evidence seized at Mar a Lago until a so-called special master could go through it and determine if it was subject to executive or attorney-client privilege.  Cannon’s order was struck down in its entirety a couple of months later by the 11^th Circuit Court of Appeals.  Defendant Trump should have learned then that if he wanted to “fight that,” meaning the subpoena for the surveillance video, he would lose again.

You could say that Defendant Trump was engaging in hyperbole for the purpose of stirring up his base, and that was doubtlessly his intent.  He is good at that.  As a demagogue, he is among the world’s best.  But the context tells us differently.  He believes what he said on right-wing radio yesterday.  He has made similar claims before, that the classified documents are “mine,” under the Presidential Records Act.  He said it again on the radio yesterday.  Right after he claimed, “these were my tapes,” Defendant Trump said, “They’re trying to intimidate people, so that people go out and make up lies about this.  I did nothing wrong.  I come under the Presidential Records Act, which is not even criminal.” 

Defendant Trump, facing years in prison just on the charges that have been brought so far, has been told by lawyers who have quit representing him that claiming protection under the Presidential Records Act is not a defense.  Still, he clings to this fiction because a man who lies so preternaturally cannot distinguish between fact and fiction.  That old phrase applies perfectly:  how do you know he’s lying?  His lips are moving. 

Given the choice between telling a lie and telling the truth, he will tell a lie nearly every time, because he can’t help himself.  It explains why his lawyers will never consider putting him on the stand as a witness, even if his story would win the case for him.  He would embellish, he would dissemble, he would create scenes and dialogue and facts out of whole cloth.  He will lie.  He can’t help himself.

The most important thing Defendant Trump does not understand is the situation he is in right now.  Ordinarily, as it is often said of his political skills, he can “control the narrative.”  But the narrative he faces now is found in the indictment.  He had no hand in writing that document, other than (allegedly) committing the crimes cited in its pages.  Special Counsel Smith and his prosecutors will continue to control the narrative in the way they lay out their case against him in a courtroom.  A judge, even if in this case the judge is friendly to him, will control the narrative in the courtroom in the way she rules on issues of evidence, presentation, and the law.  The jury controls the narrative of what will happen to him with its verdict. 

Defendant Trump’s problem with the narrative in which he finds himself the subject is that facts, within the strictures of the rules of evidence, are what matter in a court case, civil or criminal.  Defendant Trump is uncomfortable with facts.  The facts presented in the case brought against him by E. Jean Carroll, for example, did not serve his interests.  The facts served hers.  The same was true in the case against him for defrauding students who signed up for Trump University.  Those facts were so unfriendly, he settled out of court for $25 million.  There are other examples, but we do not need to review them to understand Defendant Trump’s current situation. 

The problem in writing about this man is the caveats that you find yourself making all the time.  Even the headline in this column should probably have one.  It’s probably not completely true that Defendant Trump does not understand a lot of this stuff, but in a larger sense, perhaps even a much larger sense, I think it’s true that he does not understand at all what is going on around him.  He has been in control of his own life and gotten so much of what he has wanted for so long that he has lost track of things.  Not facing any consequences at all for his own actions for so long has caused him to lose a sense of what is real and what is not.  Any man who thinks he can reach his hand up a woman’s skirt and “grab her pussy” because he thinks he is entitled to do it, and because he has gotten away with it for so long, lost a sense of right and wrong a long time ago, if he ever had it in the first place.

There are words in medicine for such people and their behavior, but I don’t think it’s necessary or useful to go into them here.  The words describe symptoms of what medicine calls a disease.  I don’t think the problem here is disease.  I think the problem is this man.  He is who he is, and because we live in a country where tens of millions of its citizens identify with him and put value on his symptoms, we are stuck with him until tens of millions more of us rid ourselves and the country of him.