Skip to content

Donald Trump and his obsession with “my boxes”

I want to highlight this excerpt from the Trump indictment:

What's interesting to me is not the obvious obstruction of justice, which we know is a core part of the indictment, but Trump's obsession toward "my boxes." His sense of possession is palpable: even though he knows better, he's convinced they are "my" boxes and he wants to keep them all to himself.

It continues to be a mystery why he felt this way. He doesn't seem to have actually done anything with the documents he took aside from periodically waving them around while he rants about something related. Was he keeping them "just in case"? Or what?

My wife says she knows the answer: Trump is a wackadoodle and he just does weird, unexplainable stuff. Maybe that's all it is.

60 thoughts on “Donald Trump and his obsession with “my boxes”

  1. cld

    He feels this way about anything he can get a grip on.

    It's straightforward psychopathic infantility, a characteristic he expresses in almost every aspect of his life.

    That's why Nancy Pelosi knew exactly how to manage him, she's had children and grandchildren.

      1. xabicaj

        ?US Dollar Rain Earns upto *****50 to *****50 per day by google fantastic job oppertunity provide for our community pepoles who,s already using facebook to earn money 85000$ every month and more through facebook and google new project to create money at home withen few hours.Everybody can get this job now and start earning online by just open this link and then go through instructions to get started………: https://iplogger.cn/125t

    1. Citizen99

      Yep, this is what I have concluded too. He's a 78-year-old child. Not joking. This is what our antiquated, self-immolating electoral system put in the White House for four years.

      1. Atticus

        The system is fine. Trump won the election fair and square because there was a backlash from much of the country who was sick and tired of being called racist, misogynistic, and everything else. I’m not a Trump fan but let’s be clear eyed about why he won and not blame it on the electoral system. The electoral college didn’t manufacture 63 million votes for Trump.

        1. lawnorder

          That purports to explain why Trump won the general election. Why did the Republican Party choose him as candidate when there were so many obviously better choices?

        2. irtnogg

          Nor did the electoral system manufacture 66 million votes for Hillary Clinton. What it DID manufacture was a way for someone who was the choice of a distinct minority of voters to claim victory. And that has nothng -- absolutely nothing -- to do with people being sick and tired of being called racist, misogynistic and everything else. Hell, millions of Trump voters earnestly declared that they were voting against Hillary, rather than for Trump, or because of some sort of snowflakey backlash against a cultural narrative.

    2. Lounsbury

      Yes although I do not think attributing Madame Pelosi's skills to the mere fact of having children and grandchildren is meaningful. She is politically skilled, simple as that. Having children and grandchildren doesn't give one particular skills in itself (as legions of catastrophic parents rather amply demonstrate)

  2. jdubs

    "He doesn't seem to have actually done anything with the documents he took aside from periodically waving them around while he rants about something related. Was he keeping them "just in case"? Or what?"

    Its my understanding that:
    -there are still missing documents/boxes whose whereabouts are not publicly known and not covered in the Florida case.
    - grand juries are convened for Trump in both DC and New Jersey for activity related to his stolen documents.

    I dont think we know enough to say that he doesnt seem to have done anything with the documents. It would be more accurate to say that we dont know what he did with the documents or why he stole them. Its misleading to imply that he didnt do anything.

  3. KJK

    He is a pathological liar and has the impulse control of an infant. He always lies if he thinks the lie sounds better than the truth, even if the truth would not be detrimental to him. He lies even when the lie can put him in legal jeopardy.

    He is where he is because of his infantile obsession with holding on to toys (boxes of mostly useless bullshit), and wanting his payments to silence women to be tax deductible (instead of just sending one of his idiot sons with a bag of cash).

    Rex Tillerson got it right when he called him a fucking moron.

    1. VaLiberal

      I can't remember which MSNBC host brought it up but they showed a video of Trump in his office, filled with tchotchkes, and called him a hoarder.

      1. mudwall jackson

        it's one thing to "hoard" one of shaq's shoes and other mementos; it's another to hoard classified documents when you have no business having them, legally speaking.

  4. oldfatpants

    He also asked the attorney after a review of some of the boxes if he “found anything bad in there,” as if there are incriminating documents he’s trying to hide

  5. Dana Decker

    Even taking the charitable view that Trump "just does weird, unexplainable stuff", those actions may lead to situations where he can profit (politically or financially) by using items he has stolen.

    Trump shows a rando the Iran invasion plan. Word gets to Saudis (or even the Iranians). Later, there's a "friendly' meeting with Trump. A deal is made. We all suffer as a result.

  6. painedumonde

    Are we to assume the boxes are the Boxes of Power, with three Boxes for the Branches of government under the Electorate, seven for the Tech Bros in their halls of silicon, nine for Boys of Pride, doomed to cells deep and dank, and one for the Orange Lord on his wicker throne in the Land of Mar-a-Lago where the wrinkles tan. One Box to rule them all, one Box to find them, one Box to bring them all and in the darkness bind them in the Land of Mar-a-Lago where the Derp lies?

  7. Salamander

    Trophies? Plain old hoarding behavior? (you should see all my cacti!!) The explanation "he's just nuts" seems to lack specificity or motive. There's always some motive, generally many motives.

    1. mudwall jackson

      he's a self-entitled 78 year old little boy. same reason why he thinks he can molest women; they're his even though they're not. perhaps by retaining the docs, it reaffirms in his mind the lie that he's still president. who the hell knows?

  8. Pittsburgh Mike

    He wanted to keep the boxes as souvenirs. He's been doing criminal stuff for decades, and has always, always gotten away with it. The closest to real pushback he's gotten was E Jean Carrol's $5M judgement, and it'll be interesting to see if she ever collects a dime.

  9. Reverent

    There are no grounds to assume that he has done nothing with the documents - quite the opposite.
    - Documents were being pulled out of the boxes, moved around, stored in different places, commingling with Trump's passport.
    - There is audio of Trump showing individual documents to people.
    - There is video of Trump taking boxes of documents with him while traveling.
    - An unusual number of human sources were killed or compromised in the months following Trump leaving office.
    - A specific highly valuable document cannot be located by Trump's team (the Milley attack document).
    - Trump's son in law visited a very rich very interested future king that then overruled his kingdom's own investment people who ruled that it would not be ok to invest billions with that same inexperienced son in law.
    - Trump couldn't get the PGA to host golf tournaments at his properties. That same kingdom is now trying to buy the PGA, despite having set up their own independent golf organization.

    We know Trump did things with several of the documents. We just don't know how bad.

  10. Justin

    Liberals, progressives, homosexuals, trannies, blacks, democrats, and non-republicans have spent decades being abused, owned, trolled, and otherwise annoyed by so called conservatives. It’s time we hit back. Hang Donald Trump! And while you’re at it, hang Mike Pence, Desantis, and Jared Kushner’s kids too!

    The list is long… hang them all! Because you know deep down, they will hang you at the first chance.

    1. Salamander

      I don't think hanging is a thing anymore in These United States. And cap punishment is on its way out, too.

      1. Justin

        “In order for stability to return, elite overproduction somehow needs to be taken care of – historically and typically by eliminating the surplus elites through massacre, imprisonment, emigration, or forced or voluntary downward social mobility.”

        https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jun/10/how-to-avoid-a-civil-war-by-the-man-who-predicted-trump

        Off with their heads!

        You think I’m unreasonable because you don’t perceive the threat the same way I do. I’ll wait for you. You’ll come around eventually. Maybe after Biden loses to some right wing freak. The evils are still sufferable to you.

        1. irtnogg

          There are fresh towels and an empty wastebasket in that picture. Mar-a-Lago cleaning staff must have had regular access to that room, and all those boxes including the classified material.
          How hard would it have been for Cuba or North Korea or Iran or China or Russia to put an asset among the resort's housekeepers?

  11. kahner

    trump today: “Because in the end, they’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you and I’m just standing in their way.”

    Are his supporters really dumb enought to believe this crap?

    1. Justin

      Of course they do. Why don’t you? They think you are the enemy and you think they are your fellow citizens. Just like the Capitol police on 1/6, you don’t perceive the threat.

  12. Traveller

    My immediate reaction was the same as painedumonde...though he said it better, or maybe even best.

    But Mr Trump was Gollum, the boxes, more properly said, the contents of the boxes were his "Precious," his rings of power....a blinding obsession.

    What is odd, or sad or something is the fact that this Sméagol need not have descended to being Golum....at any time in 2022 or probably even 2023 had Mr Trump let go of his obsession...he would have survived.

    Thus, our often blind grasping can destroy any of us. A strange lesson. Best Wishes, Traveller

  13. Navin R. Jason

    He's clearly been unstable for a while now. From some of the comments Gen. Milley it seems like he got more and more irrational throughout his presidency.

    I don't know what his problem is but he is a very sick individual. I think it's really that simple. If his name was Bob Johnson and he wasn't from a wealthy family he'd likely be homeless, institutionized or imprisoned.

    1. KawSunflower

      Considering how he treated his father, who had bankrolled his start in business, after Fred trump developed Alzheimers's, I suspect that he is at least cognizant of his own mental deterioration (which he projects as Biden's problem). He is aware of his impending end of life & of not having entirely succeeded as America's fuhrer, despite his impressive crowd sizes. He us manifestly unhappy with his current situation & lashing out more & more as he panics.

      And while Biden occasionally mumbles or mispeaks, he does speak English that is grammatically correct, not simply ranting lies. Democrats need to stop contributing to the depiction of him as being the politician actually suffering from dementia, or pointing to his tripping over an object as being somehow as significant as trump's inability to walk down a short sloping ramp without hanging onto someone - he's the guy who had to use two hands to hold a glass of water.

  14. D_Ohrk_E1

    Let's consider how he reportedly would tear up and trash documents that were lawfully required to be kept whole, saved for posterity. Add to this, his apparent belief that he could do whatever he wanted with his properties, irrespective of HOAs, land-use laws, covenants, and building codes.

    It's clear to me, he thinks anything he received -- whether to review, as a gift, or outright purchased -- is his to control, unencumbered by outside rules governing its use and handling.

    They are his boxes because they are filled with things that he received.

    There's a word to describe people like this. Egregious? Egalitarian? Egged? Ego sum? What was the word?

  15. akapneogy

    " .... Trump's obsession toward "my boxes." His sense of possession is palpable .... "

    Somewhere between November 3rd, 2020 and January 20th, 2021 and perhaps after January 6th 2021, Trump's boxes became objects of fetish. They became imbibed with magical powers that made their possession tantamount to being president.

  16. Yehouda

    When Trump says:

    "I don't wany anybody looking through my boxes"

    He gives the message:

    "If what is in these boxes becomes public knowledge it will be very bad for me"

    In the least incriminating way he can think of.

  17. raucous

    This looks to me like a combination of narcissistic personality disorder and hoarding behavior. I've seen the same behavior (including the compulsion to lie, regardless of the potential cost) in others with those issues.

  18. kenalovell

    Trump simply can't comprehend the concepts of ethics and morality. That's why to this day he claims his crude attempt to coerce Zelenskyy into announcing an investigation of the Bidens was a "perfect phone call". He didn't expect releasing the transcript to cause such a fuss because he literally couldn't see anything wrong with it. In similar fashion, he sincerely sees nothing objectionable in his phone call asking someone to find another 11,000 votes. In both instances - the Bidens' corruption, his winning election margin - he "knew" that what he sought really existed, so where was the harm in trying to get it?

    I suspect the material in the boxes is valuable to him because he believes it will validate his version of his presidency. The one instance reported where he showed a document, he was effectively saying "See? They claimed I wanted to start a war with Iran, but here's proof it was really Milley!" The boxed material is the kernel of his presidential library, which will prove he was right all along about the Deep State, the Russia hoax, the China flu, the crookedness of Nancy Pelosi, and all the rest of his pet hobbyhorses.

    There may of course be a perfectly ordinary explanation for him referring to "my boxes". Other boxes might also have been stored alongside them, or he suspected some of his staff were a bit too nosy. He had, after all, good reason to doubt they were all totally loyal. "My boxes" was probably just convenient shorthand for "the boxes we brought here from the White House".

    1. kenalovell

      I should have added - he wouldn't give the documents back because he's convinced the 'Deep State' will either deep six them or alter them to make him look bad.

  19. pjcamp1905

    According to Bill Barr, he does things like this to show he can get away with it.

    Personally, I think he thought he needed something valuable to bargain with Russia for election interference.

  20. Traveller

    Yikes, what PJcamp says:

    I think he thought he needed something valuable to bargain with Russia for election interference.
    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
    That is a frightening thought and maybe true...I am glad I came back to look at newer comments. Best Wishes, Traveller

  21. frankwilhoit

    Mental illness is the last taboo. We can still use dismissive, reductive words like "whackadoodle", "batshit", etc. The problem with these words is not that they are offensive -- the presumption is that their targets are too severely compromised to even take offense -- but that, by putting mental illness in a box, and a cute, little box at that, they foreclose any real effort to understand the problem. The problem is quite a large one, arguably the largest that we face, but general understanding of it is essentially nil.

    We're not going to solve that one here today, so call Trump a "whackadoodle" all you like -- but don't allow the connotation that he is an outlier, because he is not. Half the country thinks like him, and possibly much more than half. Try to think of remedies; build, along the way, a case for medicalizing it, or even build a case for criminalizing it -- but don't minimize it, don't brush it off.

    1. Yehouda

      " Half the country thinks like him, "

      No they don't. The vast majority of them don't think attacking the Capitol is a reasonable activity, and the same about stealing state secrets and groping women, and there are many other issues on which they differ. But they are ready to allow him to do it.

      I agree that calling him names like "whackadoodle" is useless.

  22. Corey Mutter

    My theory is still "bragging", e.g. "check out these cool nuclear submarines and war plans." Probably no more or less. It complies with Trump's Razor (the stupidest explanation is the correct one).

Comments are closed.