Donald Trump is His Own Worst Enemy – I’m fairly certain that former President Donald J. Trump just nuked his own legal defense in the ongoing classified documents federal grand jury investigation during a recent, bizarre interview with Fox News’ Bret Baer.
In that contentious interview, Trump did something that most lawyers—and most people who’ve ever watched an episode of Law & Order know—tell their clients never to do: speak about an ongoing legal matter, especially a legal matter involving federal criminal charges.
Alas, Trump thinks that he knows better.
Donald Trump is the Expert
In fact, his entire presidency and life is summed up with the infamous quote from his 1987 bestselling business book, The Art of the Deal: “I don’t hire a lot of number-crunchers, and I don’t trust fancy marketing surveys. I do my own surveys and trust my own conclusions.” Trump spent his entire career in business eschewing expert advice.
He had some major success, in part, because of that mindset. What’s often forgotten by Donald Trump, is that he also had some serious failures. Trump was his own expert; the star of his own show—literally so.
The Donald leveraged that confidence into a stellar second career in the entertainment business. From there, he segued into the White House. Ask anyone who was even nominally involved in the Trump Administration, though, and they will lament how their former boss rarely—if ever—listened to expert opinions on any subject.
It wasn’t just that Trump thought they were wrong. Presidents, after all, routinely disagree with their advisers and experts. It was that Mr. Trump didn’t even like to hear out his advisers or experts; they were viewed with suspicion and usually met with derision. Only occasionally were they listened to.
Chaos is a Ladder
That explains much of the chaos the Trump Administration routinely displayed.
Chaos can be helpful or destructive. Creative destruction, the basis of capitalism, is largely chaotic. And in that chaos a better, more efficient product or system is built. It is one of constant self-renewal and evolution.
Many voters assumed that the chaos Trump courted was similarly helpful. By the end of his time in office, sadly, it was clear that much of Trump’s chaos was of the destructive—even to Trump himself—kind.
That gets us to the matter of Trump’s unnecessary and possibly incriminatory interview he gave with Fox News.
In his attempts to deflect attention away from the classified documents case—which was totally exaggerated for political effect by his rivals in the run-up to the 2024 Presidential Election—Trump made provably false claims that he did not have access to classified war plans or that he showed those classified war plans for a possible US military attack on Iran to two journalists who were unauthorized to see such plans.
This, despite the fact that a recording exists of Trump bragging to the two journalists who were interviewing him for a biography they were writing on former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows that he had copies of the classified war plans.
On the recording, Trump explicitly acknowledges that the war plans for Iran in his possession were still classified and that as president, he could have declassified them but did not.
And since he was no longer president, Trump could not anymore declassify them. After stating that fact, Trump proceeded to wave the papers around (papers rustling could be heard on the tape) and show them to the two journalists.
Now that Trump has commented on this, lawyers are going to subpoena the two journalists who were making the biography on Mark Meadows under oath.
Once under oath, prosecutors will ask the two journalists if, contrary to Trump’s claims in his Fox News interview, the papers rustling around on the audio recording were, in fact, just newspapers as Trump claimed or if they were the classified documents.
Should the reporters testify under oath that the papers were the classified documents in question (you and I both know they were, if we’re being honest with each other), then Trump will likely be found guilty of violations related to the Espionage Act and obstruction of justice.
Donald Trump is Being Targeted
There is little doubt that Trump is being unfairly targeted by the “Deep State”.
Joe Biden perpetrated the same crimes that Trump is accused of with the classified documents and he has yet to be tried. And let’s not even get started on the pervasive corruption that the Biden Family has engaged in for decades. If Trump had done half the horrible things that the Biden Syndicate had done, he’d have been given the death penalty.
Yet, none of this will save Trump from the fact that he clearly violated these rules. He refused to cooperate with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), even after they spent a year giving the forty-fifth president every opportunity to hand the documents over.
It really doesn’t matter why Trump was resisting the Archives’ requests.
What matters is that he created this situation by refusing to cooperate and by knowingly refusing to follow the declassification guidelines that he had been thoroughly briefed on by the National Archives before he left office.
Trump Makes Himself Vulnerable
He gave his enemies the ammunition they needed to go at him legally with his behavior and refusal to cooperate.
One must ask: why in the world is Donald Trump incapable of self-control over these matters? Why can he not see the larger picture?
Had he just cooperated and, at the very least, kept his mouth shut, he’d be free-and-clear, riding high in the polls right now.
Instead, he’s being dogged by these ridiculous charges and empowering the very enemies he seeks to destroy. The Democrats love going against Trump because he’s his own worst enemy.
A 19FortyFive Senior Editor, Brandon J. Weichert is a former Congressional staffer and geopolitical analyst who is a contributor at The Washington Times, as well as at American Greatness and the Asia Times. He is the author of Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower (Republic Book Publishers), Biohacked: China’s Race to Control Life (Encounter Books), and The Shadow War: Iran’s Quest for Supremacy (July 23). Weichert can be followed via Twitter @WeTheBrandon.
