On getting away with everything – Fintan O’Toole in NYRB:

(My friend P urged me to read to read this article and he was right.)

‘Secrets are a kind of currency. They can be hoarded, but if kept for too long they lose their value. Like all currencies, they must, sooner or later, be used in a transaction—sold to the highest bidder or bartered as a favor for which another favor will be returned. To see the full scale of Donald Trump’s betrayal of his country, it is necessary to start with this reality.’

(…)

‘Trump’s hoarding of official secrets is both breathtakingly careless and utterly calculated. At the heart of that calculation is a cold resolve to not give up the power that access to highly restricted information had given him.’

(…)

‘If comedy is generated by incongruity, what could be more incongruous than nuclear plans or details of “potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack” sitting beside a toilet?’

(…)

‘In those boxes, when the FBI opened them in August 2022, were eleven documents marked Top Secret, thirty-six marked Secret, and twenty-eight marked Confidential. It would have been the least thrilling spy thriller ever made. No James Bond high-tech gadgets or George Smiley ingenuity—just turn up in a cocktail dress, slip through an open door, and help yourself to the US military’s contingency plans for invading Iran.’

(…)

‘Even Trump does not engage in a criminal conspiracy purely for its own sake. The retention of those boxes mattered to him because he understood the market value of what they contained.
It is important to bear in mind that chaos is Trump’s natural element. It is the medium in which his narcissism thrives. When there is no plan, the only law is his own desire.’ (…)

‘This does not suggest that he was holding these documents merely as souvenirs. It’s quite possible to believe that part of his motivation lay in his fantasy that he was still the real president: retaining the intelligence briefings he received as POTUS would make him still, at some level of self-delusion, potent. The two known occasions, cited in the indictment, when Trump produced some of the documents to outsiders while explicitly referring to them as secret and confidential have this air of showing off—perhaps as much to himself as to those he was trying to impress. It is also quite reasonable to think of him experiencing a tingle of pure pleasure in imagining his own impunity—knowing that he was committing the ultimate transgression and thrilling to the idea that he would get away with it because he had always in his life gotten away with everything.’

(…)

‘The indictment states that the documents also included information that could identify US agents and informants in some of those countries and “the continued viability of sensitive intelligence collection methods.” This is worth underlining: Trump went to great lengths to retain for himself, as a private citizen, the power to reveal to any foreign power not just US military secrets but the workings of US intelligence-gathering in those countries. It is impossible to believe that he did this accidentally or without considering that he might at some time use that power in return for some financial or other benefits.’

(…)

‘Much of the history of the right in America is bound up with paranoia about the possible existence of traitors at high levels of government. Here is stark evidence of the existence of one at the very highest level of government, and Republicans are rushing to defend him.’

Read the article here.
A brilliant piece with some Lacanian insights.

Secrets are currency, on the level of countries and imperia, on the personal level. On every level.

Desire is the law. When the chaos prevails, the only law that will survive is the law of desire.

And yes, help yourself to champagne and some state secrets. We ran out of canapés.