Owing to his terrible policies and ongoing efforts to destroy American democracy, it’s hard for me to muster much sympathy for Donald Trump. But I have found myself experiencing pangs of secondhand embarrassment as the extent of the former president’s hoarding was exposed in the past week. While I’ve never stored papers in my bathroom, after my last move it took me so long to sort through my clutter that the spare bedroom acquired the name “the box room.” I can only imagine the mountains of junk I’d amass if I were president and the shame I’d feel if the Feds catalogued my mess and shared the photos with the world.
Suffice it to say, I know hoarding when I see it. And I think I may have come up with a solution that could help both Trump and our beleaguered nation.
Details that have emerged recently make it clear that Trump’s friends and family members felt his pack-rat tendencies were out of control. Texts between Melania Trump and aide–alleged co-conspirator Walt Nauta included in the federal indictment suggest the former First Lady was worried that Trump’s boxes of memorabilia, newspaper clippings, and highly classified documents would spread to their plane:
Another text exchange in the indictment revealed that Trump employees derisively referred to the materials as the former president’s “beautiful mind paper boxes.” On Thursday, the New York Times confirmed that staffers regularly compared Trump’s boxes to the film A Beautiful Mind:
It was a reference to the title of a book and movie depicting the life of John F. Nash Jr., the mathematician with schizophrenia played in the film by Russell Crowe, who covered his office with newspaper clippings, believing they held a Russian code he needed to crack.
The phrase had a specific connotation. The aides employed it to capture a type of organized chaos that Mr. Trump insisted on, the collection and transportation of a blizzard of newspapers and official documents that he kept close and that seemed to give him a sense of security.
Aides repeatedly told Trump that while he’d surrounded himself with clutter his whole life, once he was elected to the White House he needed to comply with various laws for handling presidential documents. But according to the Times, he ignored them:
Shortly after John F. Kelly took over as Mr. Trump’s chief of staff in July 2017, Mr. Kelly and other aides grew concerned that some documents were likely presidential records and might go missing if they were kept in the residence. They impressed upon Mr. Trump that the papers had to be tracked, but he was not especially interested, the people said.
Aides started examining the boxes to check for presidential records, but Mr. Trump still found ways to bring items to the residence. And the boxes began to multiply.
For most people, getting hit with a 37 federal charges that could carry a penalty of decades in prison would be a wake-up call. But Trump still doesn’t seem to understand that he has a problem. During his post-indictment speech, he uttered a line that’s basically the hoarder’s equivalent of “I can quit whenever I want,” claiming that he was definitely going to find time to sort through his boxes one of these days.
“I hadn’t had a chance to go through all the boxes,” Trump said. “It’s a long, tedious job, takes a long time. Which I was prepared to do, but I have a very busy life.”
And as of last week, Trump was still worrying about whether the Feds would give his precious boxes back. He posted on Truth Social:
And in an interview with Fox News’s Bret Baier that aired on June 19, Trump suggested that he was so committed to sorting through his boxes of junk that he was willing to risk a federal obstruction of justice charge. “Before I send boxes over, I have to take all my things out of them,” he explained. “These boxes were interspersed with all sorts of things — uh, golf shirts, clothing, pants, shoes, there were many things.
To be clear, there’s significant reason to doubt Trump’s claims, which have been picked up by his conservative defenders, that he’s just a sentimental guy who didn’t realize he’d made off with many highly classified documents. A former White House official told the Times that Trump was well aware of the boxes’ contents, saying, “Trump would notice if somebody had riffled through them or they were not arranged in a particular way.” And the indictment describes Trump brandishing Pentagon war plans in an attempt to embarrass top U.S. general Mark Milley. As my colleague Jonathan Chait put it, “The truth is we don’t know why Trump was so insistent on stealing high-level secrets that he put himself at legal risk, and we don’t know what happened to those secrets as a result.”
While I want Trump to be held accountable for any crimes he committed, that won’t solve his underlying personal issue. But a Celebrity Hoarders TV special might.
Clearly, there’s an audience for such a show. The A&E reality program, which was canceled back in 2013, has been revived multiple times; season 14 is currently airing. There’s already a Hoarders episode called “The Donald Trump of Hoarding,” but that title was based on a subject’s friend remarking, “Mike has really perfected how to hoard trash and garbage. He’s good at it. I mean if there was a way to make a living doing that he’d be the Donald Trump of hoarding.”
A decade after this episode was filmed, we know that the “Donald Trump of hoarding” is actually Donald Trump. And while holding on to all his old photos and letters did allow Trump to put out two cash-grab coffee-table books, it could also land him in federal prison. Trump needs help, and a televised TV special may be the only way to get him to participate in an intervention.
I’m confident that the man behind The Celebrity Apprentice will see that this could be a win for all involved. Trump would get to dig around in his boxes and show off his memorabilia. Professional cleaners could find some of the classified documents the Feds are still looking for. A return to reality TV might convince Trump to drop his 2024 campaign, which would be great for the American public. And if not, at least we’d get a pretty entertaining hour of TV.
This piece has been updated to include Trump’s remarks to Fox News.
More tremendous content
- Trump Ambassador Picks: Who’s in His ‘Diplomatic Clown Car’
- These Photos Prove Trump’s ‘New Haircut’ Was Just Hat Hair
- Trump (Jokingly?) Insists Canada Should Be 51st State
