As the extraordinary news of the FBI’s raid on Trump’s Florida home, Mar-a-Lago, spread last night, the obvious question repeated over and over again was this: Why would Trump even want to take 15 boxes of what’s been described as “government documents, mementos, gifts and letters.” It’s the latter two that are slightly strange. What leverage, for example, does a fountain pen from Chinese president Xi Jinping afford him? (I’m imagining the fountain pen bit, but you get the point.)
Well, I have unusual personal insight into this.
In my experience, Trump keeps everything—or copies of everything—no matter how apparently mundane because, to his mind…well, you just never know when it might be weaponized.
(In this sense, he is similarly transactional—some might say paranoid—as his late former friend Jeffrey Epstein who, I discovered, deliberately kept thank you letters or copies of correspondence from the children and women he molested so he had “evidence” that only pure munificence on his part was at play.)
In 2014, I learned in a rather shocking way that Trump had kept all the correspondence he’d had with me in the previous six years.