Can You Please Speak Louder into the Mic?

​I really didn’t want to write about the debt ceiling bill passing the House last night – not because of having to argue whether it was a good bill or a bad one, but because it shouldn’t have even been an issue.  It’s stomach-churning galling that the Republican Party was willing to risk world financial collapse and the full faith and credit of the United States – something that had NEVER been done in the history of the country, and which, if there was only one default, could NEVER be said again to the world in support of the rock-solid safety of the dollar – just because they could.  And all for these piddling issues they “got” in their forced hostage negotiations. All of which should have been negotiated when it was actually time for the next budget conference.  Hopefully when the bill is finally signed, and there’s no deadline looming that would risk collapse in case a court challenge was made, President Biden will then consider seeing if the Fourteenth Amendment could be used from now on, so that the country never again faces undermining what is required by the Constitution.

Happily, though, another story popped up that provided me with a reason not to write about the debt ceiling.  Well...okay, not write about it more than the one paragraph above.  But as readers here know, writing just one paragraph about something is for me almost like not even trying.

And what that other story was – was the reported recording of Trump purportedly talking in a meeting about having classified documents and him knowing they’re classified and therefore not being able to go into details about them to the others, which means he knows he didn’t “pre-declassify” them in his mind when still president.

The thing is, what interests me about that story is not what he specifically said or what the documents actually are.  Special Prosecutor Jack Smith and his staff know all that, and so too do the people in the room with Trump at the time -- as well as Grand Jurors, for whom the tape has, in fact, been played -- but nobody else does.  And none of those who know are talking.  So, that means we’ll all just have to wait.  (Though since it was played for the Grand Jury, we can at least assume it's pretty damning.)

No, what absolutely fascinates me – to the point of giddiness – is something else entirely.  It's this:

Ever since Trump was elected, we’ve been told about how obsessive he is about not committing anything to paper.  He doesn’t ever even use email.  He ripped up documents even though they legally had to given to the National Archives, and so staff needed to tape the pieces back together.  We even saw photos of material that Trump tried to flush down the toilet.  He got angry when learning that a lawyer was taking notes during a meeting, something that's core to an attorney's job.  But anathema to Trump.  He was obsessive about it all.  It was what he was taught in business his whole life.  Put nothing that's private on the record.  Nothing.  Ever.  Indeed, Trump may not know much history or care about it, but once elected he made clear that he knew the lesson of Watergate and pitfalls of setting up a taping system in the Oval Office, something he knew had led to Nixon’s downfall and was something he would never, ever, not ever, never, never do.

And he did it. 

And it may possibly (until we know more) help be his downfall.

All because he hated the press so much, hated them even more it seems than his obsession of putting anything on paper, on the record.  He convinced himself in his warped mind that the press really was the Enemy of…well, if not The People, then of Trump.  And he wanted, he needed to have proof that he wouldn't be misquoted.  And that evidence was to always record meetings with news reporters.

What makes the story even more fascinating and, for Trump, “tragic” is that the others in the room weren’t news reporters at all, the people that Trump was obsessed with hating – nor were they even there about Trump!  Rather, it was a meeting with people helping his former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows who was writing a book about his time in the administration.

But Trump still had to have the meeting recorded.  And Special Prosecutor Jack Smith now has the recording.

This is the story that most fascinates me.  To the point of giddiness.

Man, if the Tony Awards had a category for something like this, God would be a shoe-in to win Best Writer. 

(Side Note: it would have to be the Tonys, because if it was the Oscars or Emmys, God would be on strike.)

Indeed, this is precisely the kind of twist a good dramatist would do.  Give the antagonist his comeuppance from the one thing he set up and relied on to be his greatest protection. 

It’s like the classic movie, A Face in the Crowd. In the story, Patricia Neal [Spoiler Alert] puts Andy Griffith’s character Lonesome Rhodes on the path to becoming a huge, beloved “man of the people” radio star by secretly turning on a microphone to record his homespun storytelling in prison and putting it on the air – and at the end of the film, when he has become a megalomaniac, so popular that he's on the verge of controlling the next President of the United States, she brings him down by secretly turning on a microphone during one of his crazed rants and putting it on the air.

In fact, considering that Trump became “beloved” to his adoring acolytes by playing himself on a fake-reality TV show, it’s eerily a lot like that.

This is the story that most fascinates me.  To the point of giddiness.