Did Donald Trump Read Stolen Top Secret Documents on the Toilet?
The important question that Mainstream Journalists are too afraid to ask.
In the year 2022, there are only two places anyone reads Time Magazine.
The first place people read Time Magazine is the waiting room of a doctor’s office. It’s going to be about 20 minutes before the dentist will see you? Okay, time to read about the presidential ambitions of Marco Rubio.
The second place people read Time Magazine is on the toilet. Despite monumental advances in smartphone gaming, books and magazines remain popular activities for the Toilet-bound.
You know how you can really only buy Cracker Jack at a baseball stadium, or else it doesn’t feel right? I feel the same way about Newsweek and the bathroom. If I’m not sitting next to a toilet paper roll and a plunger, I just don’t want to have a Newsweek in my hands, you know?
Which brings me to this photo, released by the Department of Justice on Wednesday.
I mean, first of all, this photo is so funny. These are like Top Secret files from a Ryan Reynolds movie about Top Secret Files being stolen. It’s like a film director told his propmaster, “Hey, I need some fake Top Secret files, and it should be really obvious that they are Top Secret.” All that’s missing is The Rock arching his eyebrow and saying, “These are the Top Secret files.”
Secondly, the inclusion of a Time Magazine means that, as a journalist*, I have to ask the question: What is the likelihood that Donald Trump illegally perused America’s most highly classified secrets while on the toilet at Mar-a-Lago?
Let’s look at the evidence.
First, of course, is the inclusion of a Time Magazine, which, as I established earlier, would only ever be leafed through at either a doctor’s office or in a bathroom.
And though Mar-a-Lago is doubtless filled with South Florida’s leatheriest plastic surgeons and orthodontists, it is not a physician’s office, per se.
That’s one point for Team Toilet.
Second: Where were these documents stored? Well, we know from previous law enforcement filings that the FBI was very concerned that Trump was keeping the documents in a room that was not highly secure.
And what kind of room isn’t very secure? Well, a bathroom, for one. How many of us have bolted shut the bathroom door at a restaurant or airport only to scramble for privacy when some Chinese businessman swings it wide open?
You can see why the FBI would be concerned. A toilet is not a SCIF. Even those restroom stalls where the walls go all the way down to the floor are not secure enough to house Top Secret material.
So, to me — and I am merely a journalist* — it seems possible, if not likely, that Trump held these documents in a magazine holder next to the john, and the FBI caught wind of that, and demanded that he no longer do that.
Finally: During what time of the day do you imagine Donald Trump sitting down to read?
Is he lying in bed at night with his reading glasses on, unwinding after a long day with a classified briefing about our spies in the Palestinian government?
Is he canceling his tee time on a Saturday morning so that he can curl up with the nuclear codes?
I think not. This is a man who only ever reads when he absolutely cannot be talking to someone else. This is a man who only reads to pass the time between regaling club guests with stories about how much Queen Elizabeth liked him and how he actually won New York in 2020 if you don’t count MS-13 voters.
Donald Trump is a social animal. What kind of animal? Well, one that doesn’t read, that’s for sure.
We must also remember the well-known story — now backed up with photographic evidence — that Trump routinely flushed documents down the toilet while President. I’ve asked myself, many a time: Why would Donald Trump not use a paper shredder? Why rip up documents and send them down the pipes?
Perhaps because…he was sitting on the toilet while he read them? Hmmm??
Look, I can’t say for sure whether Donald Trump read his stolen documents on the Mar-a-Lago toilet. I’m no Glenn Thrush.
But we may very well be in the unprecedented situation where an outgoing president stole America’s top-secret intelligence and refused to return it for the sole reason that he enjoyed having it next to his Time Magazine in the bathroom.
It’s incredible, really. When Ken Burns makes his documentary about this era, he is going to have to slowly pan across a sepia-toned Dyson Airblade as he recounts the tale of the crime that finally took down Donald Trump.
What a Time (magazine) to be alive.
*I am not a journalist at all.