File this one under “What could go wrong?” and also “Oh, hell no.”
It was only a week ago that President Donald Trump seized from the FBI the documents he had stolen and whisked away to Mar-a-Lago when he was booted from office in 2021. Those documents were evidence in one of his many criminal cases until his hand-picked judge waved a magic wand to make that go away and the Supreme Court ruled that he can do whatever he wants because … whatever.
Now The Atlantic reports he’s got his eye on an even bigger prize: the Declaration of Independence.
To be clear, Trump isn’t looking to display the sacred founding document that belongs to all Americans in his tacky Mar-a-Lago bathroom where he stashed his stolen classified documents. At least, not that we know of.
Instead, according to reporting, Trump is interested in removing the Declaration of Independence from the National Archives in Washington, D.C., where anyone can visit and pay homage—for free—and instead display it in the Oval Office like the head of an elephant he killed on safari.
Boxes of classified documents stored inside a bathroom at Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in April 2021.
The declaration is carefully housed in a dimly lit room behind thick glass to protect it from deterioration. Recreating that kind of protection in the White House would be an enormous expense—but maybe Trump could beg Elon Musk for an efficiency waiver because while the federal workers who guard our nukes and protect us from epidemics might be considered a waste of money, surely giving Trump any trophy he wants is an excellent use of taxpayer dollars.
The very tiniest glimmer of hope is that unnamed aides say Trump has perhaps moved on from the idea of getting his greedy little hands on the original Declaration of Independence and is flirting with the idea of displaying a copy in the Oval Office instead.
“President Trump strongly believes that significant and historic documents that celebrate American history should be shared and put on display,” White House communications director Steven Cheung told The Atlantic.
That’s not a lot of reassurance because we actually do know how Trump feels about national documents that belong to the country, not to him. And we also know the extent of Trump’s respect for the critical work the National Archives does is approximately zilch, which is why he fired the head of the National Archives last month.
And while the idea of a president stealing a sacred founding document from the American public sounds like a very bad Nicolas Cage movie, we’ve all been here before so anyone who’s hoping The Atlantic’s reporting is wrong or that Trump would never actually be so brazen, well, don’t hold your breath.
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