The Classified-Files Scandal Is the Most Trumpy Scandal of All

[Nevilledog]

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Quinta Jurecic
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The angry response to the Mar-a-Lago search speaks to Trump's vision of political authority: all legitimate power flows from him; all force used against him is illegitimate; all violence used on his behalf is justified. For @TheAtlantic

theatlantic.com
The Classified-Files Scandal Is the Most Trumpy Scandal of All
And that’s exactly why it’s so dangerous.
6:46 AM · Aug 20, 2022

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/08/trump-fbi-mar-a-lago-classified-documents/671192/

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https://archive.ph/yYfYW

The iron law of scandals involving Donald Trump is that they will always be stupid, and there will always be more of them. Trump scandals—the Russia investigation; Trump’s first impeachment, over his efforts to blackmail Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; the insurrection on January 6—have something else in common: All these catastrophes result from Trump’s refusal to divorce the office of the presidency and the good of the country from his personal desires.

Now Trump’s apparent squirreling away of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, and his outrage over the Justice Department’s investigation of that conduct, speaks once more to his vision of his own absolute authority—even after he has departed the presidency. It’s a vision that places Trump himself, rather than the Constitution and the rule of law, as the one true source of legitimate political power.

A great deal remains unclear about the documents recovered from Mar-a-Lago—among other things, why and how the material arrived at the estate in the first place instead of remaining in the custody of the National Archives, where it belonged. Reporting, though, suggests that Trump may have understood those documents—material that, under the Presidential Records Act, belongs to the American people—to be his own, to do whatever he liked with. “It’s not theirs; it’s mine,” Trump reportedly told several advisers about the misplaced documents. One “Trump adviser” told The Washington Post that “the former president’s reluctance to relinquish the records stems from his belief that many items created during his term … are now his personal property.” Another adviser to the former president said to the Post, “He didn’t give them the documents because he didn’t want to.”

This childlike logic reflects Trump’s long-running inability to distinguish between the individual president and the institutional presidency, a structure that existed before him and that persists even after he unwillingly departed the White House. In his view, he is the presidency (which … is not what legal scholars typically mean when they talk about the “unitary executive.”) The same logic surfaces in the bizarre arguments made by Trump’s defenders that Trump somehow declassified all the sensitive documents held at Mar-a-Lago before he left office. Under the Constitution, the president does have broad authority over the classification system. But as experts have noted, it makes little sense to imagine a president declassifying information without communicating that decision across the executive branch so that everyone else would know to treat the material in question as no longer classified—unless, that is, you understand presidential power not as an institution of government, but as the projection of a single person’s all-powerful consciousness onto the world.

*snip*

[Tetrachloride]

1. Who wrote this line ? cryptographer ?

quote:

Reporting, though, suggests that Trump may have understood those documents — material that, under the Presidential Records Act, belongs to the American people—to be his own, to do whatever he liked with.

[Nevilledog]

3. Editor must have gone to lunch?

[rubbersole]

2. So, not only mentally unstable, but a complete asshole. Got it.

[Irish_Dem]

4. Scary thing is that if Trump had been smarter and less crazy he could have gotten away with all it.