Let's Just Remember That Donald Trump Was Pitched as the Better Steward of Classified Information

In 2016, Donald Trump ran as the candidate who would be the better steward of classified information. By his telling—and many others'—Hillary Clinton's email protocol had proved she couldn't be trusted with top-secret intel. Our best chance as a nation was to hand over the nuclear codes to the game show host with the fake foundation and the fake university and the fake life story of self-made success in Business.

By February 2017, you could find a random Mar-a-Lago member posting a picture to Facebook showing Trump reviewing possibly sensitive documents with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at a table on the club's back patio following a provocative North Korean missile launch. Opsec! White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said the information wasn't classified, and as we know you can take his word to the bank. But wait! The Guardian remembers there was more: "The same guest and Facebook member who had snapped Trump and Abe receiving the missile news also took a selfie with the presidential military aide carrying the 'football,' the black leather satchel carrying the codes, manuals and equipment that are all that Trump needs to order a nuclear weapon launch."

And that same classy club was the site this week of another testament to Trump's spycraft bona fides, as the FBI descended on his residence there in relation to a Justice Department probe of his handling of classified documents. His allies and lackeys have found themselves continually building lines of defense—it's a witch hunt! why didn't they just ask? or file a subpoena? release the warrant! no, not actually! so now a guy can't keep nuclear intel in his basement?—and then having to abandon them and dig a new moat way closer to the castle.

We should be clear that at this point we don't have much in the way of details about the information in question. Arms-control expert Jeffrey Lewis has cautioned that the term "documents relating to nuclear weapons" is still too vague to make a determination about just how dangerous Trump's conduct here really was. But so far, the count is at least 25 boxes of shit that has been carried out of Mar-a-Lago by the Feds in two separate visits. At the very least, this guy would not take a break from hosting Saudi sportswashing tournaments to take a look around his basement and make sure everything was in order. In fact, the federales reportedly told Trump's aides to put a padlock on the room in question back in June. It sounds to this layman like maybe the security protocols were not all that superior to Hillary Clinton's email server setup.

Which is a reminder that this should all be a moment of reflection for our purportedly anti-Republican lamestream liberal media. The obsessive coverage of The Emails had as its subtext the idea that Donald Trump would be a more secure vessel for the United States' most tightly held secrets, which include the details around weapons that have the capacity to wipe our civilization off the planet. No one said this explicitly, but they didn't have to: the emails coverage was so deafening and constant—it got as much coverage in six days as actual policy issues did in 69—that the only reasonable takeaway for the kind of casual news consumer that makes up a huge part of the electorate was that anyone was more trustworthy than Hillary Clinton. In the relentless quest to show they were Tough On Both Sides, the mainstream media pitched Donald Trump for the job of Secrets Keeper. Unless it directly involves his self-preservation, he's not an ideal candidate.

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