Team Trump demonstrates its loyalty through professional abasement
Ritual humiliation in traditional societies can serve to enforce a particular social order, or, as with hazing rituals, to emphasize that the group takes precedence over its individual members. — Psychology Today
Nothing is traditional about the Donald Trump cult. True, it enforces social order by exiling members who step out of line. Most Republican members of Congress who voted for Trump’s impeachment have lost their seats or not run for reelection. But they may not feel particularly humiliated by it. Liz Cheney doesn’t.
It’s the self-humiliation by committed cult members that’s distinctive. Dear Leader, not the group, takes precedence over individual members. Since he humiliated all rivals in the 2016 Republican presidential primary, we’ve watched former adversaries who declared him “a kook” unfit for office shine his shoes with their tongues. The group does not ritually humiliate them to enforce conformity. They ritually humiliate themselves.
Now it is clearer than ever Trump is a walking threat to national security. Since the F.B.I. released a the picture of classified documents arrayed across the rug somewhere in Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club, Trump supplicants have lined up to publicly humiliate themselves in defense of the indefensible.
“They are more upset at the FBI for taking a picture of the stolen documents than they are at Trump for stealing them,” tweeted Acyn.
Normal people are embarrassed when they say things on TV that make them look stupid. Not Trump’s people.
Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) suggested Trump absconded with classified documents because he, Donald Trump, is writing a memoir.
Trump attorney Alina Habba on Wednesday tried to casually dismiss the Justice Department’s criminal investigation into former President Donald Trump’s hoarding of classified documents, claiming that potential acts of “espionage” and “obstruction” are merely “mundane statutes.”
That was on Trumper pundit Charlie Kirk’s talk show. Habba later appeared with Sean Hannity in prime time to dismiss the obviously staged F.B.I. photo as obviously staged to make Trump look as if he leaves classified documents lying on the floor.
“I have never seen that…. That is not the way his office looks,” Habba said, parroting Trump’s Truth Social confession:
There seems to be confusion as to the “picture” where documents were sloppily thrown on the floor and then released photographically for the world to see, as if that’s what the FBI found when they broke into my home. Wrong! They took them out of cartons and spread them around on the carpet, making it look like a big “find” for them. They dropped them, not me – Very deceiving…
“He has guests frequently there,” Habba added, admitting that resort guests were frequently in Trump’s office where he stored highly classified documents in cartons in his office closet and in his desk drawers.
“I’m starting to think Trump doesn’t have very good attorneys,” tweeted the Lincoln Project’s Rick Wilson.
But then Trump hires McLawyers (Emptywheel’s term) for how they’ll look on television.
We may never get to the bottom of why Trump stole the documents. Trump simply had a thing for piles of paper, as former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham confirmed:
Grisham noted that Trump simply has a thing for paper — heaps of it, the more jumbled, the better. He even hauled boxes of assorted materials with him when he traveled on Air Force One. “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 told The Post. “He’d want to get work done on long trips so he’d just rummage through the boxes. That was our filing system.”
He just never seemed to actually do any work with them. David Von Drehle of the Washington Post believes he kept them around as a prop, “as much a part of the never-ending Trump Show as the make-believe coat-of-arms he had embossed on each leather seat [of his private jet]. The mountain of paper showed how very busy and important its owner was.”
As scattered as Trump is, he may have had several reasons for taking them.
Perhaps they’ll let Trump keep a few boxes in his cell.
Update: Found another example with Alan Dershowitz
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