Those who enjoy whodunit novels invariably pick up on obvious pattern: Suspects who repeatedly change their stories and struggle to keep straight basic details tend to look guilty. With this in mind, when it comes to the scandal surrounding Donald Trump’s classified materials, it should probably raise some red flags for the Republican’s acolytes that his talking points keep evolving. The New York Times highlighted some of the “ever-shifting explanations.”
First he said that he was “working and cooperating with” government agents who he claimed had inappropriately entered his home. Then, when the government revealed that the F.B.I., during its search, had recovered nearly a dozen sets of documents that were marked classified, he suggested the agents had planted evidence. Finally, his aides claimed he had a “standing order” to declassify documents that left the Oval Office for his residence, and that some of the material was protected by attorney-client and executive privilege.
At the heart of the controversy is some straightforward questions: What materials did Trump take? Why did he take them? What exactly did the former president intend to do with the secrets he wasn’t supposed to keep anywhere, let alone at his unsecured golf club?
But as the story has become more serious, Team Trump has avoided each of these lines of inquiry, instead pushing an avalanche of nonsense.
Indeed, it’s been fascinating to watch the talking points unfold over the last week in a series of phases, without regard for accuracy, consistency or common sense.
Phase 1: Stick to vague principles that sound nice so long as no one thinks too much.
In the immediate aftermath of the FBI executing a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago, Republicans largely stuck to wild claims about government overreach. To hold a former president accountable for suspected felonies, we were told, would be to turn the United States into a “banana republic.” (Apparently, to avoid becoming a “banana republic,” powerful people should be allowed to get away with crimes as a matter of course.)
Similar voices insisted that if the FBI can go to court, get a search warrant, and reclaim classified materials where Trump lives, law enforcement officials could do the same thing where you live. (I suppose that’s true, but I have no idea why that’s supposed to sound scary.)
As this first phase of the GOP pushback came to an end, the general idea was that Trump must be above the law, which was an unsustainable position, and which gave way to…
Phase 2: It’s time for some conspiracy theories and attacks on federal law enforcement.
Feeling desperate and unable to come up with good arguments, Trump and some of his more ridiculous allies thought it’d be a good idea to accuse FBI agents of possibly “planting“ evidence. House Minority Leader Steve Scalise added that he intended to look for “rogue“ agents within federal law enforcement.
Some other Republicans started publicly talking about “defunding“ the FBI, while equating federal law enforcement with “the Gestapo“ — indifferent to the fact that the Nazi’s secret police didn’t compile evidence, make requests for cooperation, go to court, and request search warrants.
Phase 3: Is it too late to change the subject and turn Barack Obama into a villain?
By Thursday, Trump decided it’d be a good idea to claim that his predecessor did the same thing he did with classified materials. After the National Archives explained that Trump was lying, he continued to push the line anyway.
Around this same time, a Trump lawyer told Fox News that the ratings for the Jan. 6 committee’s hearings weren’t impressive enough, which brought the FBI to Mar-a-Lago. Phase 4: When all else fails, go with post-hoc rationalizations and the-dog-ate-my-homework-style excuses. Team Trump made up some bizarre claims about a declassification process. Other Republicans suggested the former president only took sensitive secrets by accident, which might be more persuasive if he’d given them back when asked. My personal favorite was when some Trump allies in conservative media coalesced around the idea that the former president was so busy with his coup last January that he didn’t have time to pack his stuff in a responsible way. To be sure, the lines between the phases aren’t perfectly clean. Some Republican voices, for example, kept pushing the “planted” line after others had abandoned it. But the bottom line remains the same. The scandal-plagued former president announced that the FBI had shown up at his door, and his party was told to get in line behind him. Republicans wondering what to say, and how far to go out on a limb, were handed a script filled with evolving nonsense, some of which contradicted earlier nonsense. Try, for example, to reconcile the idea that the FBI planted incriminating evidence that Trump secretly declassified before leaving office. Four years ago, Steve Bannon reportedly summarized one of his strategies as, “Flood the zone with s—.” The relevance of the line lingers for a reason.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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