“Why are they even doing this,” a Kansas Republican asked me the other day, “when it’s only going to give him the nomination?”
The “this” and “it” we were talking about was of course Donald Trump’s most recent indictment, for allegedly stealing and stockpiling documents that detail some of our most sensitive military and nuclear secrets. The Department of Justice only got involved after Trump refused to surrender them to the National Archives, as required under the 1978 Presidential Records Act. Eventually, the Archives’ Office of the Inspector General sent a referral to the DOJ requesting that it investigate Trump’s handling of records.
Trump had chance after chance to comply, but would not. So now, more than two years after those first efforts to recover what never belonged to him, Trump has been charged with urging others to lie to authorities about his stash of the kind of secrets that can get people killed, while also showing them off to various randos toddling through Mar-a-Lago. If we’ve ever had a president who acted more like a seventh grader, I’m not aware of it.
