The iron law of scandals involving Donald Trump is that they will always
be stupid, and there will always be more of them. Trump scandals—the
Russia investigation; Trump’s first impeachment, over his efforts to blackmail Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; the insurrection on
January 6—have something else in common: All these catastrophes result
from Trump’s refusal to divorce the office of the presidency and the
good of the country from his personal desires.
Now Trump’s apparent squirreling away of classified documents at
Mar-a-Lago, and his outrage over the Justice Department’s investigation
of that conduct, speaks once more to his vision of his own absolute authority—even after he has departed the presidency. It’s a vision that places Trump himself, rather than the Constitution and the rule of law,
as the one true source of legitimate political power.
A great deal remains unclear about the documents recovered from Mar-a-Lago—among other things, why and how the material arrived at the
estate in the first place instead of remaining in the custody of the
National Archives, where it belonged. Reporting, though, suggests that
Trump may have understood those documents—material that, under the Presidential Records Act, belongs to the American people—to be his own,
to do whatever he liked with. “It’s not theirs; it’s mine,” Trump reportedly told several advisers about the misplaced documents. One
“Trump adviser” told The Washington Post that “the former president’s reluctance to relinquish the records stems from his belief that many
items created during his term … are now his personal property.” Another adviser to the former president said to the Post, “He didn’t give them
the documents because he didn’t want to.”
This childlike logic reflects Trump’s long-running inability to
distinguish between the individual president and the institutional
presidency, a structure that existed before him and that persists even
after he unwillingly departed the White House. In his view, he is the presidency (which … is not what legal scholars typically mean when they
talk about the “unitary executive.”) The same logic surfaces in the
bizarre arguments made by Trump’s defenders that Trump somehow
declassified all the sensitive documents held at Mar-a-Lago before he
left office. Under the Constitution, the president does have broad
authority over the classification system. But as experts have noted, it
makes little sense to imagine a president declassifying information
without communicating that decision across the executive branch so that everyone else would know to treat the material in question as no longer classified—unless, that is, you understand presidential power not as an institution of government, but as the projection of a single person’s all-powerful consciousness onto the world.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/08/trump-fbi-mar-a-lago-classified-documents/671192/
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