It was a chaotic as his mind
This story in the Washington Post is an interesting look at this latest scandal from the National Archives’ point of view. It’s so clear that Trump is hiding something. It makes absolutely no sense for him to have behaved this way if he wasn’t.
This anecdote really illustrates exactly how incompetent Trump was as president. This is a picture of a man totally over his head, basically pretending to know what he’s doing but really just trying to get through the day:
Trump’s disdain and disregard for the presidential record-keeping system he was legally bound to adhere to is well-documented. And while advisers repeatedly warned him about needing to follow the Presidential Records Act early in his presidency, his chaotic handling of the documents prevailed.
NARA’s motto, Littera Scripta Manet, translates from Latin to “the written word remains.” But in Trump’s White House, the written word was often torn, destroyed, misplaced or hoarded.
“Any documents that made it to the White House residence were these boxes Trump carried around with him,” explained Stephanie Grisham, a former senior White House staffer. “Usually the body man would have brought them upstairs for Trump or someone from the outer-Oval at the end of the day. They would get handed off to the residence and just disappear.”
Boxes of documents even came with Trump on foreign travel, following him to hotel rooms around the world — including countries considered foreign adversaries of the United States.
“There was no rhyme or reason — it was classified documents on top of newspapers on top of papers people printed out of things they wanted him to read. The boxes were never organized,” Grisham said. “He’d want to get work done on long trips so he’d just rummage through the boxes. That was our filing system.”
That’s just Trump acting like he’s on top of things when he actually had no clue how to do his job. Once things get out of control the only thing you can do is try to keep others from knowing how out of control it is.
It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that Trump doesn’t know exactly what he’s got — or doesn’t understand what he’s got — but he knows there’s stuff in there that’s incriminating, whether against others or himself. He couldn’t trust anyone else to go through the stuff so he just wanted to keep it all under wraps, assuming that some day he would go through them and use them for whatever purpose he once thought would be important.