Trump wants you to know he is not a messy bitch

Did he take confidential documents? Who cares — but if he did he definitely wouldn’t leave them all over the floor.

WASHINGTON, DC - JULY 26: Former U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during the America First Agenda ...
Drew Angerer/Getty Images News/Getty Images
Impact

If nothing else, Donald Trump is the human embodiment of “style over substance.” The man moves through the world with an innate understanding that so long as he looks and acts a certain way, there are enough credulous dupes out there who will happily give him enough adulation (and cold hard cash) that the difference between his overwrought form and underdeveloped function becomes effectively nil.

This, at least in part, explains much of the former president’s hysterics around the Justice Department’s latest court filing in the ongoing investigation into how and why he apparently absconded the White House with a tranche of ultra-classified national security documents. The issue, per Trump, isn’t whether he definitely did the thing he’s been extremely credibly accused of doing by the Justice Department. No, no. The real crime here is that the anti-Trump, deep state, socialist, Democrat-run FBI had the gall — the temerity! – to make him look messy in the process.

In a phone interview with the ultra-conservative Real America’s Voice network on Thursday, Trump picked up where he’d left off with Wednesday’s frantic ass-covering over at Truth Social, whining to the outlet that the FBI’s just-released photographic evidence that he had apparently taken, mishandled, and inadequately stored classified documents at Mar-a-Lago was staged in a way to make him look “like a slob.”

“They put them there in a messy fashion and they took a picture,” Trump insisted, zeroing in on what is clearly the real crux of the alleged crime being investigated here: sloppy presentation.

It makes a degree of sense that this would be the issue that sticks most firmly in Trump’s swollen, phlegmy craw. For a person hyper-focused on their image above all else, the FBI’s cold, hard documentation of his alleged misdeed is less an affront to his sense of law and order, and more a violation of his carefully crafted persona. And so, while his lawyers scramble to hobble together something even vaguely resembling a coherent legal defense, Trump himself has dedicated his valuable time and energy into making this the big issue for his millions of supporters.

Meanwhile, over in the “things that aren’t all that interesting in terms of optics, but which are actually super important in terms of actual developments” department, the House Oversight Committee announced Thursday that it had finally reached an agreement to obtain “key financial documents” from the former president, ending a years-long legal squabble over who could have access to which forms, which could open Trump up to yet another front of criminal charges. Let’s just hope, for Trump’s sake, that if and when the committee makes those forms public, they do so in an orderly and organized fashion.