Trump’s Nuclear Stash

Frequently, in coffee shops and take-out joints, condiments and sweeteners are displayed in self-serve bins. Predictably, I suppose, many customers of such businesses have an irresistible urge to cram handfuls of these “freebies” into purses or pockets. It’s a compulsion, isn’t it?, generated by some atavistic “get ahead” instinct. The freeloaders have no real physical need for such extras, and they have no actual plan for what they might ultimately do with them. Indeed, these items will probably wind up in a junk drawer or a glove compartment—only, in time, to be tossed away.

Yet there’s a delicious little thrill in “sneaking away” with this stuff, and the freeloaders feel vaguely self-satisfied and, yes, self-aggrandized by their preposterously cheap (albeit minor) acquisition. (Yeah! King of the hill!) They “took” something that some dumb bunny had stupidly made available and that others, therefore, couldn’t take, and they (the freeloaders) thus added to their personal STASH of stuff—a stash that they figure makes them somehow richer, more powerful and, well, “better” than those poor suckers who don’t have, somewhere in their junk drawers, multiple individual packets of powdered coffee creamer and artificial sweetener.

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THIS, I think, is the best analogy for Trump’s seemingly heedless, almost knee-jerk absconding with truckloads of classified documents. They were available, they might be handy sometime, and so, why not? Ya never know. Most of all, they added to the vast STASH of stuff that he—king of the hill—“owns” and “controls.” (And no, he probably wouldn’t ever use them or even know exactly what or where they were: he really is too intellectually lazy to be that organized.) 

Only trouble with this analogy is that, as most ordinary crap-collectors know, it is not illegal to sneak away with random handfuls of help-yourself condiments. But it IS illegal to cram your personal basement with nuclear plans and codes—even if you have no idea what to do with them and have merely taken them in order to punk the suckers who made the stuff available, at a preposterously cheap price. That, after all, is the Art of the Deal, isn’t it—acquiring lots of stuff by punking suckers?