Donald Trump won’t have you believing for a second that the FBI busted down his door and found a pile of classified documents strewn across the floor, as if he were preparing an entry for his Burn Book. Instead of protecting himself against further incrimination or addressing the new picture proof that he was hoarding classified materials at his Florida home, Trump simply cannot move past the messy floor papers.
The optics-obsessed president spent the last 48 hours offering multiple different explanations for why the documents were on the floor (which is where FBI agents placed them to take evidence photos). While claiming he had telepathically declassified all the records pictured, Trump scolded the FBI for throwing “documents haphazardly all over the floor (perhaps pretending it was me that did it!).” By Thursday morning, Trump came close to admitting he knew the classified materials were at the resort — all for the sake of clearing up any “confusion” about his pig pen office.
“They dropped them, not me – Very deceiving…”
Trump is known for his use of props – often fake, like bloated crowd sizes – to up the drama of his message du jour. The problem with the FBI pulling documents out of a box and placing them on the ground to snap a pic is not that it makes him look even more guilty of hoarding classified documents than he already seemed. It’s that they beat him at his own game – a game that only Trump is playing.
Here’s an inexhaustive rundown of all the times Trump was caught using fake props to project bigly-ness.
10/3/2020
Just after Trump tested positive for COVID-19 in October 2020, the White House released two photos of him sitting and working very hard. Twitter immediately noticed that the photos were likely staged — because the papers he was supposedly signing and flipping through were … completely blank. Journalists at the time also noted that the metadata on the photos showed they were taken just 10 minutes apart. (Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian/The White House via Getty Images.)
12/14/17
Here Trump is seen holding some cartoonishly large golden scissors to cut a red tape tied between two stacks of papers. The piles of paper were meant to represent governmental regulations of the 1960s versus regulation under his administration. Those piles are not only wrongly sized, but they’re also made up of blank pieces of stock paper. Photo by Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images.
9/4/2019
Sharpiegate is an iconic episode of the Trump era. In short, Trump was utterly convinced that the path of Hurricane Dorian would extend to Alabama, even though all the weather experts maintained that it would not do that. Trump presented a map of the storm’s predicted path, which had been altered with a sharpie to show the storm reaching Alabama. Our deep-dive on the entire ordeal is a must read. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.
1/11/2017
Just before becoming president, Trump staged a little press conference to show him handing his business over to his children. He stood by a pile of folders and told reporters the records were “just some of the many documents that I’ve signed turning over complete and total control to my sons.” It’s believed that the folders were filled with blank sheets of paper. His favorite prop. Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images.
1/10/2019
Going to let the Getty Images caption speak for itself on this one: Trump travels to the U.S.-Mexico border as part of his all-out offensive to build a wall. At the event, the props in the center of the room, include an AR-15 rifle, colt handguns, a plastic bag full of cash, and black-taped bricks of heroin and meth, examples of things Border Patrol agents have seized. Photo by Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images.
12/24/2018
Another classic fake out. On the brink of the third government shutdown in 2018, the then-president tweeted out a picture of himself sitting at his desk signing some bills. The tweet was mostly meant to criticize Democrats, but no one could move past the fact that the bill he was supposedly signing looked like a blank sheet of paper. Photo from Donald Trump’s old Twitter page.
07/16/2020
In 2020 Trump held an event to deliver remarks about more deregulation stuff. His speech had quite the backdrop. In an effort to illustrate how “crushing” governmental regulations can be on the economy, the White House set up the above spectacle, featuring comically enormous anvil weights and big boy trucks. When reporters questioned if the weights were real – some pointed out that the trucks would not have been able to hold that much weight – the White House admitted the weights were … not as crushing as they might have appeared. Photo by Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images.
Nicole Lafond (@Nicole_Lafond)
is TPM’s deputy editor, based in New York. She has also worked as the special projects editor and as a senior newswriter for TPM. She has a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University and previously covered education in central Illinois.
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Ok, I’ll start.
Not seeing the issue with using props. Politicians of all stripes use them
I wouldn’t really say that “Trump was utterly convinced that the path of Hurricane Dorian would extend to Alabama” – he’d heard it and repeated it, and once voiced he could never admit he was incorrect so had to go to the mat, including defacing the map. Whether he was “convinced” is not really relevant to how Trump’s brain works. He said it, it was wrong, he had to stick with it.
Please, someone take away crazy Grandpa’s cell phone and car keys.
The old man knows how to stage a cover-up.
Just look at his “hair,” and the artifice on his skin!
Ok, I’ll start.
Not seeing the issue with using props. Politicians of all stripes use them
I wouldn’t really say that “Trump was utterly convinced that the path of Hurricane Dorian would extend to Alabama” – he’d heard it and repeated it, and once voiced he could never admit he was incorrect so had to go to the mat, including defacing the map. Whether he was “convinced” is not really relevant to how Trump’s brain works. He said it, it was wrong, he had to stick with it.
Please, someone take away crazy Grandpa’s cell phone and car keys.
The old man knows how to stage a cover-up.
Just look at his “hair,” and the artifice on his skin!