Donald Trump has broken so many laws and trampled so many rules and principles it is perhaps no surprise that what I believe to be his worst offense has been lost in the maelstrom of his unconstrained criminality.
This uniquely heinous crime begins with his looting the White House of its most secret security documents and hiding box after box in his Florida estate. He first denies that he has them. Then when his lies are penetrated he insists that they belong to him and he will not return them, finally grudgingly giving back just a portion of what he had while claiming that he had returned everything he had taken.
Of course, none of these documents “belonged” to him but when president he was one of a tiny handful of people to be granted access to them. But he was no longer president, no longer had any rights whatsoever to them; theft of government property as well as perjury would have put any other American citizen in prison by now.
But outrageous though this may be, it understates his sociopathic criminality:
For what Trump stole was nothing less than the entirety of our painstakingly gathered intelligence on this country’s various enemies, the specific means with which they could do us harm and the counter measures we’d prepared in the event of an attack. As I say, this intelligence is so sensitive that just the president and several of his closest security advisors even knew of its existence. Not even incoming President Biden would know about them unless the outgoing president filled him in, which Trump petulantly declined to do. That they were found to be missing was apparently an inadvertent discovery of the White House registrar/librarian who found an entire library of secret documents had not been signed out but simply disappeared.
What Donald Trump did was cripple President Joe Biden’s ability to protect our country in the event of an attack by leaving him in the dark, reduced to hastily trying to cobble together some sort of defense. Difficult under any circumstances, Biden would be obliged to respond to an attack half-blind and with one arm tied behind his back.
Now imagine the commanding officer of an infantry company in a theater of combat who has completed his tour of duty and as he heads for home elects to take with him all of his company’s weaponry – their rifles, mortars, armored vehicles, bullet proof vests, etc. Perhaps he wants them as souvenirs or knows he can get a good price for them from some arms dealer. Whatever his reasons, the men he leaves behind are essentially defenseless.
And that’s precisely what Trump did to his country.
The president, our commander in chief, defends this country not with firearms – those are the weapons of soldiers in the field – but with the intelligence, the precious data collected over the years that one hopes provides an edge over our enemies. Former President Trump stole the current president’s ability to protect us, thereby leaving us vulnerable and exposed.
This leaves open the question: whatever possessed Trump to do such a terrible thing?
- Because he could – and damn nearly get away with it.
- He could sell the purloined information to his good buddy, Vladimir Putin, for a princely sum.
- A security crisis or outright attack occurs and a blindsided Biden’s response proves inadequate. Whereupon Trump with his superior knowledge steps in and saves the day, demonstrating to the public which of the two men is a true leader and simultaneously punishing “sleepy Joe” taking what this self-important, sociopathic, narcissistic empty shell of a man believed belonged to him.
Wherever you may be on the political spectrum – radical left, radical right or somewhere in the middle – if there still is a middle – in short, if you are a patriot how can you not condemn this odious man and exclude him from all political life, putting him in strict quarantine before he does this nation any more damage?