The quote that explains why Donald Trump is facing federal indictment

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Last week, CNN reported the existence of a recording, taped at Donald Trumps golf club in New Jersey, in which the former president was heard talking to writers working on a book written by Trumps last chief of staff In the recording, Trump noted a document in his possession that was classified, a significant admission, given the indictment brought against him this week.

Hours after news of the indictment broke Thursday, CNN published excerpts of the conversation.

Secret. This is confidential information. Look, look at this, Trump said, according to CNN. The military made it and gave it to me.

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Understandably, much of the focus on that quote has centered on the first part, in which Trump tells a guest at his club about the classified material. But whats more broadly telling is the second part: where he says that the document was given to me.

The military did not give that document to Donald Trump, the man sitting in Bedminster the day the recording was made. The military gave that document to the president of the United States, to inform his decision-making on some national security issues. Once the document was given to the president, the person who received it was Trump.

Trump’s failure to understand the difference between himself and the office he was given has been at the heart of nearly every crisis he has faced since.

When Trump won the 2016 election, it was unusual in many ways. What is not recognized is that he did not go to the presidency through normal channels. There was no career in which he sought other offices and contended with opponents. No years of seeing how policy was made or strengthening his understanding of the history and role of government institutions.

His supporters saw this as a strength: This was someone who was invisible in the Swamp! He will come to fix everything! And then he went into office and tried to do things that lawmakers and the courts recognized were out of his purview, and he got more than a slap in the hand as a result. Eventually, through some combination of apathy and inexperience, he simply let Congress bring him bills to announce, sign and spin.

But being an outsider means he has no interest in the rules that govern a president’s behavior. The Hatch Act, which limits the use of government resources for politicking? LOL, sure. The man used the White House for his 2020 convention. He tried to get Ukraine to announce an investigation into former vice president Joe Biden by withholding a state visit, if not military aid. He understood the power of the presidency but not the checks on it. And when he found out about those checks, there was no personal history of understanding why they were there and important, so he despised them.

Trump did not see the presidency as a stable position in which he was given the right to temporarily serve the public. He saw it as another title held by Donald Trump. And, so, when the public told him in 2020 that they were revoking that right, he did everything in his presidential power to prevent that from happening. Fortunately, his efforts were short-lived, but with a payoff.

So in mid-January 2021, Trump had to pack up the White House. And in doing so, apparently, he looked around for things he wanted to keep, put them in boxes and shipped them to Mar-a-Lago.

We know this is how he behaves in general. Another of his various former chiefs of staff told CNN last year that occasionally during meetings, Trump would ask if he could keep material that had been shown to him.

In my experience, what intelligence briefers say most often is, well, sir, we’d rather take that back, Mick Mulvaney told CNNs Erin Burnett but sometimes they forget.

Those documents are shared by one part of the government with the president, another part of the government. Not to mention that, in this particular case, it’s hard to understand why Trump would want the material. He is understood to have refused to read the briefings he received; are we to assume he is doing extracurricular boning up on issues?

This disinterest in understanding that the presidency is a cog in the machinery of governance is not unique to Trump, of course. Many Americans share the idea that the presidency is superior to the other branches, in part as a function of the way the president is elected. It is the duty of those within government or who appreciate the complex way in which it conducts itself to defend that process.

Trump has no interest in treating checks on his power as legitimate. He actively promoted the idea that impeachment investigations and law enforcement investigations in particular were themselves evil and corrupt. His supporters and allies in the right-wing media, eager to curry favor and bask in the sunshine of his attention, raced among themselves to amplify those attacks. It is sometimes framed as a defense of the presidency but is really a defense of Donald Trump, the central star in the right-wing solar system.

So here we are. Trump was given the documents, so he kept them. Then, when the National Archives and Records Administration asked him to return those documents because they did not belong to him but to the presidency he told the Archives to beat the sand. Eventually, government law enforcement had to descend on Mar-a-Lago to collect them.

That document that Trump showed those writers was literally given to him, yes. But so is the presidency. And then America wants them both back.

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