Why Did Trump Do It?

When trying to understand Trump's behavior always seek out the dumbest explanation.

I’m Michael A. Cohen, and this is Truth and Consequences: A no-holds-barred look at the absurdities, hypocrisies, and surreality of American politics. If you received this email - or you are a free subscriber - and you’d like to subscribe: you can sign up below.

I’ll be Zoom chatting tomorrow at 12:30 PM! Still working on a guest, so it might just be me, but that’s ok because we have plenty to discuss — from the midterms and my theory below about why Trump absconded with all that classified material to why I hate the British monarchy. Here’s the link. I hope you can join me!

Why Did Trump Do It?

Kevin LaMarque/Reuters

In the month since agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s Florida home to secure classified material taken by the former president, we’ve learned quite a bit of information.

We know that Trump took hundreds of classified documents — some of an extraordinarily sensitive nature — that were not his to possess. We know that he kept them in unsecured locations in his home, often intermingled with personal papers and unclassified material. We know that he rebuffed multiple, desperate efforts by the Department of Justice to recoup the documents.

But one unanswered question hangs over the investigation: why did he do it?

Why didn’t he turn over the material when he had the chance last Spring? Why even take it in the first place?

Some commentators have suggested that Trump intended to profit from the material — perhaps even wanting to sell it to foreign countries. Others have wondered whether he kept them as a potential bargaining chip if one day he is indicted. A report out this week in Rolling Stone says Trump told aides that he “needed to preserve certain Russia-related documents to keep his enemies from destroying them.” Though it has no direct evidence that Trump took classified documents related to Russia, the magazine speculates that it could have been why Trump held on to the classified documents found in his possession and refused to return them.

These theories could be correct, though they suggest a level of forethought and deviousness that heretofore Trump has largely been incapable of.

Yet, I think the answer is far simpler.

It relates to something I wrote about the Trump family in 2017, “If Occam’s Razor posits that the simplest explanation is usually the best one, Trump’s Razor posits that the dumbest, most corrupt, least ethical explanation is the right one for this clan.” And truth be told, when in doubtt look to the dumbest explanation. More often than not, it’s your answer.

So what’s the dumb explanation for Trump’s actions?

This 2019 tweet is helpfulul roadmap:

In 2019, then-President Trump tweeted a classified photo “showing the aftermath of an accident at an Iranian space facility.” Of course, the president is within his power to declassify classified material and put it on a social media website, but that doesn’t make it a good idea. (And it’s worthy of note that it appears Trump took a photo and then tweeted it out because if you look in the upper right corner of the pictured circle, you can see a reflection of Trump’s face). At the time, several experts on satellite imagery posited that Trump revealed advanced U.S. spying capabilities not previously knout by the country’s adversaries.

I assume Trump did this because, in layman’s terms, he thought it was cool.

Here was an amazingly crisp satellite picture of a damaged Iranian launch site. What’s cooler than that?

Trump has long demonstrated a child-like excitement about America’s technological capabilities. With this tweet, Trump could a) taunt Iran, b) brag about the U.S. military and its spying prowess, and c) show the world how cool he is. If everything in Trump’s life is about validation and stroking his swollen ego, tweeting cool pictures of a failed Iranian missile launch is truly the cat’s meow — and an act that I’m sure he thought reflected positively on him.

My theory on the classified material at Mar-a-Lago is two fold. First, Trump thought he was entitled to keep it (just as he felt entitled, as president, to tweet out classified information and, in the process, provide useful information to America’s rivals). But also, he likely figured it would be neat to have around. With all this great classified information, he could impress people and look cool in the process. According to one of the early reports about the material found at Mar-a-Lago, some of the documents allegedly referenced the sex life of French President Emmanual Macron. According to recent report in, in Rolling Stone, he bragged to aides about this nugget of information. Now with that material in his possession, he could show it to aides, family, friends, visitors, hotel guests, the maintenance staff at Mar-a-Lago, etc. This may not explain why he refused to turn it over. I’m sure that had more to do with the aforementioned sense of entitlement and his inherent stubbornness and chafing at someone else ever telling him what to do (both are signal attributes of profound narcissists).

I realize this is a rather unsatisfying explanation (and pure speculation on my part), but to my mind, it’s the most likely explanation for Trump’s actions. Like I said above, when it comes to Trump, when in doubt, always assume that stupidity is the former president’s driving impulse.

The Party of No Ideas