Donald Trump now has at least 19 attorneys defending him in eight or more investigations, according to Politico. If the revelations keep piling up, that number could double in about as much time as it takes a box of bunny rabbits to breed. Finding that help won’t be easy, either; this is an area of the law that isn’t lousy with specific experts, and the ones available have this thing about getting paid.
Plus, the latest development in the saga would have most lawyers running for the hills.
“A document describing a foreign government’s military defenses, including its nuclear capabilities, was found by FBI agents who searched former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and private club last month,” reports The Washington Post. “Some of the seized documents detail top-secret U.S. operations so closely guarded that many senior national security officials are kept in the dark about them. Only the president, some members of his Cabinet or a near-Cabinet-level official could authorize other government officials to know details of these special-access programs.”
If you’re looking for high dudgeon here regarding the holy sanctity of top-secret documents, prepare for disappointment. Yes, there are secrets, and some of those secrets protect people, I get it, of course… but an awful lot of information has been called “secret” by the government only to keep you from finding out about it, and far too many of us believe we live in a Tom Clancy novel. Abu Ghraib was once a secret, as were the “Pentagon Papers,” and those things existed only because someone believed they could keep a lid on it all. Are we as a country better or worse for those efforts?
“A fortress mindset feeds the U.S. government’s huge ‘defense’ budget — which is higher than the military budgets of the next 10 countries combined — while the Pentagon maintains about 750 military bases overseas,” author and activist Norman Solomon writes for Truthout. “But victimology is among Washington’s official poses, in sync with a core belief that the United States is at the center of the world’s importance and must therefore police the world to the best of its capacity.”
The core nature of secrets is their importance, which is why they are usually so well guarded, and why this latest Trump debacle has so many people freaked. Secrets are made portentous by their mystery, and those who are allowed to see them are made very Important, with a capital “I.” I strongly suspect that feeling of Importance is why Trump had this stuff lying around in the first place.
Understand: No intelligence body on the planet would gladly grant top-secret access to a person like Donald Trump. He is the living embodiment of an easily compromised individual, a walking blackmail target with debts on his debts. The only reason he got his hands on all that stuff is because the country went berserk and made him president, and presidents are automatically gifted top-flight clearance by dint of electoral victory.
Yet he remains Donald Trump, the blowhard desperate to hide the small fraction of a man within. Even being president of the United States wasn’t enough to assuage his insecurity, so, perhaps, he surrounded himself with boxes of secret documents that made him feel whatever passes for powerful in his shriveled little soul.
Who knows what country those nuke documents were describing. Israel? China? Russia? Does it even matter at this juncture? Thanks to a million profit-driven war decisions made over the last 80 years, we exist within a wildly delicate latticework of perils that are mostly left over from the Cold War. Not our fault, but all our problem.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
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