Donald Trump is staring down a lot of problems, but the one he seems chiefly concerned about isn’t how classified documents from the White House ended up in his Palm Beach resort, but rather how those materials – photographed strewn across his floor – could make him appear “like a slob”.
On Tuesday, the former president took a call on the far-right television network American Voice Now for one of his first televised interviews since the Department of Justice issued a warrant on 8 August to raid his Mar-a-Lago home for classified documents.
Those efforts proved successful after FBI agents uncovered 11 sets of classified documents when it searched the premises. Those documents add to the about 100 documents with classified markings, totalling more than 700 pages, that were retrieved from his Florida estate earlier this year.
Earlier this week, the first set of photos from that raid were released, where some of the haphazardly strewn papers can be seen with markers bearing the reading “secret” and “top secret. The images all but remove any doubt about whether the one-term president was hoarding classified documents at the unsecured resort and residence where he currently lives.
In his interview this week, however, instead of getting too hung up about the contents of those unsecured documents, Mr Trump became fixated with another narrative that could possibly be construed: that he’s a disorganised “slob”.
“A lot of people think that when you walk into my office, they have confidential documents or whatever. It may be all declassified, but I had confidential documents spread out all over my floor,” he began while speaking to the American Voice Now, as first flagged by attorney Ron Filipkowski earlier on Twitter. “And like a slob, like I’m sitting there reading these documents all day long or somebody else would be.”
“It’s so it’s so dishonest when you look at it,” the former real estate mogul decried, emphasising that people could extract the wrong thing from the photos, thinking it a “strange scene”.
“You look at the floor and you see documents, right? You have cover sheets of documents. Now, they put them there,” he falsely asserted, before accusing the FBI agents who raided his winter escape residence as having done so in “a messy fashion”.
The photo dump that upset the former president came as part of a late-night filing by attorneys with the Justice Department. Mr Trump has sued a Florida court to appoint a special master to review the documents taken by FBI agents last month. That third party, typically an attorney, could determine whether any of the materials are protected by executive privilege.
A court hearing for Mr Trump’s request is set in Florida in front of US District Judge Aileen Cannon on Thursday at 1pm ET.
This is hardly the first time that Mr Trump has drawn focus from the media about his uncommonly proud hygienic habits.
The former resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has previously disclosed in interviews how he’s obsessive about washing his hands multiple times a day, prefers to drink from a straw out of fear of the glass being contaminated, abhors shaking hands thinking it “barbaric”, prefers to eat mostly processed food because of his perception that it’s somehow cleaner and is an overall self-admitted germaphobe.
Outside of the disorder that the documents inside Mr Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate were photographed, there is no evidence to suggest that he made any efforts to declassify those materials. Notably, it wouldn’t matter anyway as the items would have remained property of the US government under US law.
