But...Why?

 Why did Trump keep those documents? That's really the central question American politics is pondering at the moment. Outside of the hardcore Trumpists like Lauren Boebert or Gym Jordan, establishment GOP figures are taking a somewhat arm's length approach to Trump's crime - and it is certainly a crime - while not embracing bringing him to justice. There are whispers that leading GOP figures are distancing themselves from Trump, but we heard that after January 6th, and I'm not sure why this would be all THAT different, unless he was actively peddling state secrets to other countries.

Josh Marshall has been a consistently good analyst of Trump's warped psyche, and he thinks it's probably just his warped personality that led Trump to keep these documents. In Marshall's analysis, having these documents made you cool and powerful, and Trump wants to be cool and powerful, so he kept them. 

That's plausible as far as the winter of 2021 or even 2022 goes. However, we are seeing that the National Archives and then the DOJ kept asking for the documents and Trump and his "legal team" kept stonewalling them. Now, Trump's lawyers are...bad. But we have to consider that they either did not know that Trump had troves of top secret documents or that they did know, but knew they couldn't turn them over because that would be worse than keeping them and breaking the law.

So, either Trump lied to his lawyers, because he thought it was cool and powerful to have a bunch of top secret documents or his lawyers were trying to protect their client from serious legal consequences. The first is absolutely plausible, but the second is, too.

We also know that Trump is having a full narcissistic collapse on his Twitter knock off, which suggests that things are getting bad inside his legal team. He has skated from legal consequences for so long, that this must feel different to him. 

It feels weird to type this, but ideally, we have the receipts on Trump giving secrets to someone like the Saudis in return for cash or some other emolument. I feel confident the hardcore Trumpists will still cling to his bloated corpse, like barnacles on a whale carcass, but the GOP has had ample opportunity to cut ties with Trump. They can't, because his voters/cultists are the only way to win elections in the short run. 

There are still persuadable voters out there. They still swing elections. The combination of Dobbs and Trump being an outright traitor might be enough to keep the House and expand the Senate majority.

Might be...