On the eve of his 77th birthday, former President Donald J. Trump was arraigned in a Miami courthouse on 37 felony counts of holding and withholding government documents, charges that range from obstruction of justice to espionage.
Reporters, legal scholars and political commentators have already weighed in on the activities of the day and the merits of the case far better than I could. Instead, as a cultural writer, I’d like to focus on the thing I find most striking — indeed it has haunted me from day one — and that is the placement of the documents at Mar-a-Lago. For they were not confined to numbered drawers in a sealed vault or alphabetical filing cabinets in a locked home office. Rather they were strewn on a carpet, stacked on a ballroom stage and, most incongruously, placed in a room that is not paper’s friend — the bath.
Once the indictment was unsealed, Republicans — those stylish interior designers — fell all over themselves in their mental contortions to note the superiority of storing government documents in a bathroom as opposed to a garage, where archenemy number one, President Joe Biden, “hid” his from his days as President Barack Obama’s veep. (No one seems to care where former Trump Vice President Mike Pence put his.) House Speaker and clearly HGTV host wannabe Kevin McCarthy opined that bathrooms lock. To which New York magazine responded with an observation that I’m sure occurred to many a homeowner: Garage doors do not open themselves throughout the course of a day. And while bathrooms lock, they do so only from the inside. As The New York Times added, “not exactly the industry standard” for keeping valuables safe.
Of course, a bathroom could be locked from the outside. Doors have keyholes, but they are often more about form than function, remnants of a bygone era when Agatha Christie murderers locked rooms from the inside to pretend that the dead victim had died by suicide, then came running in a desperate attempt to break the door down. (Mar-a-Lago was built in the heyday of the Jazz Age, 1927, the year Christie published one of her best-known Hercule Poirot mysteries, “The Big Four.”)
Back to the bathroom itself. It’s a kind of contradiction, isn’t it — ritzy chandelier, retro shabby chic pink shower curtain, suggesting a kind of faded grandeur. It makes you wonder about Mar-a-Lago, all Spanish Colonial beauty and escapism on the outside. But what other disorganization does it hold?
Perhaps it is a metaphor for the man himself — all show on the exterior but a hot mess on the inside, clinging to pieces of paper to feel loved and important, oblivious to the lives they represent. Or maybe not so oblivious. It’s easy to control paper; lives, not so much.
Paper, however, tends to leave a trail, as does digital paper. No sooner was Trump indicted, than Republican interior decorators unspooled an oldie but goodie — Hillary Clinton’s emails. That one, like Hunter Biden’s laptop, never gets old. The younger Biden is under investigation for alleged problems related to his taxes and his foreign work, while his presidential father’s handling of sensitive government material is also being probed. (The Pence investigation has been closed, with no evidence of wrongdoing.)
Clinton, too, was investigated for her mixing of sensitive material with personal emails about yoga, the schedule for the CBS series “Madam Secretary” and her inability to DVR it. And after wading through all that, FBI director James Comey — remember him? — found what she did was careless but not criminal.
Clinton, Pence and Joe Biden all cooperated. Trump stalled and obfuscated. As Sen. Mitt Romney said, all Trump had to do was hand over the documents when he had the opportunity to do so. And none of what followed would’ve happened.
But no. In his poem “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” Oscar Wilde writes, “for each man kills the thing he loves.” I think, though, Wilde got it backward: Each man is destroyed by the thing he loves.
For Trump, those papers were just so many mirrors.