Opinion
Trump is channelling George Costanza, but this is not about nothing
Bill Wyman
ColumnistThere’s a Seinfeld episode that reminds me of the predicament in which America finds itself with Donald Trump right now. You will recall that schlubby George Costanza at one point loses his fiancée in a tragic wedding-envelope mishap.
In a later episode, he bumps into her parents. In a typical instance of George’s hapless bravado, he tells the older couple that he has a house in the Hamptons, the swanky Long Island playground for New York City’s one-percenters.
Donald Trump is taking a leaf out of George Constanza’s book.Credit:
Eyebrows raised, they say they’d love to see it. Refusing to back down, George says he’d love to show it to them. The remainder of the episode sees the trio making the long drive out to see something they all know doesn’t exist.
That existential, pointless journey is where a good part of the US is right now, courtesy of the former president.
All parties know that Trump took many sensitive documents with him from the White House. Various government agencies asked for the material back, and Trump stonewalled. The government took the extraordinary step of getting a judge to issue a subpoena. Trump grudgingly turned over some, but not all, of the records he had.
Security at Mar-a-Lago, his southern Florida resort, was so lax – and the lips of some of his associates so loose – that the government soon discovered that he had retained other documents. And then, in an extra-extraordinary move, the government got a judge to sign a search warrant for his property – and we all saw how that played out on TV.
Ten months later, a former US president is facing a federal indictment. In it, the government paints a by-turns comic and bleak picture of a scheming man importuning everyone from his lawyer to his valet to ward off pesky government inquisitors. He was arraigned on Tuesday, the eve of his 77th birthday.
None of this needed to happen; Trump could have just returned the documents. And now we are faced with the prospect of a federal criminal trial – and that is to say, a trial that could result in his imprisonment – taking place first over the Republican primaries and then, potentially, a federal presidential election in 2024.
Surely, Trump’s own narcissistic and sociopathic urges made him keep the documents in the first place. He doesn’t seem to have an actual legal case to explain why he had them or why he should have been able to keep them. If he had a case like that to make, one would think he would have challenged the original subpoena in court. In a rambling, defiant talk in New Jersey a few hours after his arraignment, he focused on … Hillary Clinton.
The plan, it seems, is to deliberately use this indictment to maintain his image as a martyr and secure himself the Republican presidential nomination. The legal proceedings will, of course, cause him problems in the general election but, in Trump’s tactical playbook, that is a problem to be faced another day.
He and his minions are flailing around, crying bitter tears and making all manner of outlandish claims. You will hear that the prosecutor is a political hitman. (Smith has actually prosecuted quite a few Democrat politicians. And note that the grand jury of private citizens that indicted Trump was in red-state Florida.) You will hear babbling about how something called the Presidential Records Act allowed him to keep the documents. (It doesn’t, and whose word would you take on this: Trump’s – or a federal prosecutor’s?)
You will hear the chestnut about how Trump supposedly declassified the material before he left the White House. (There’s no evidence he did; he had ample time to have litigated this point previously, which again he didn’t; and in any case the statute under which he is charged refers to national defence information, which should not leave government hands.)
The newest line of defence – trotted out in the past few days by craven Marco Rubio, a senator from Florida – is that there’s no evidence the sensitive information leaked, so there’s no harm done. (That’s not how the law works.) It’s sad to see these strained rationalisations already turning up in the Trump-friendly Murdoch media, including in Australia. Sky News had a guy on who likened what Trump did to having “overdue library books”. Let’s see if a jury agrees.
In the meantime, the rest of us are stuck in that metaphorical car ride with Donald Trump. It won’t be easy, but the Hamptons, as it happens, are lovely this time of year.
Bill Wyman is a former arts editor and assistant managing editor of National Public Radio in Washington. He teaches at the University of Sydney.