INDIANAPOLIS—There are reasons former President Donald Trump keeps getting into trouble.

John Krull, publisher, TheStatehouseFile.com

No, it isn’t just that the “deep state” or establishment Republicans or Democrats are out to get him.

To be sure, there are a lot of people who don’t like Trump, but that’s been true of every president—and every political leader in American history, in fact.

I’ve never been quite sure what the “deep state” is, other than a handy kind of ideological grout or glue to paste over the holes or gaps conspiracy theorists have in their half-baked notions of how the world works. The logical inconsistency of their thought never seems to strike them. They think of the federal government as the most inept, inefficient force on the face of the earth, yet it can summon tremendous reserves of skill, discipline and efficiency just to thwart them and their hero.

It’s as if Mr. Magoo suddenly turns into Bruce Lee when they need a scapegoat to blame for their own screwups, failures or misfortunes.

It is possible that establishment Republicans would love to put Trump behind bars. Unfortunately, establishment Republicans now are almost as rare as brontosauruses. Part of the reason they’re almost extinct is that, like that earlier dying species, they rarely did well in combat with the meat-eaters they encountered. That’s why the Trump crowd found them to be easy prey.

And Democrats?

Why would they want to get rid of Donald Trump? He’s the best friend they have, the guy who rallies their squabbling constituencies in a way that none of their own leaders can.

A few months ago, when there was relatively little news coming from the Trump world, Democrats were looking at a Chornobyl-level disaster in the fall elections—GOP sweeps across the board.

Now that Trump dominates the news again, most polls and projections have Democrats gaining solid control of the U.S. Senate and they even have a slim, slim chance of holding onto the U.S. House of Representatives.

Much of this change in their political fortunes Democrats can attribute to the former president. With enemies like Trump, Democrats find themselves with no shortage of friends—and they also find it much easier to paper over differences that otherwise might tear their party apart.

So, if the usual suspects at whom Trump and his acolytes like to point their fingers aren’t to blame, then who is?

Well, the man himself.

The redacted affidavit seeking the warrant that led to the search of Trump’s Florida residence, Mar-a-Lago, demonstrates that.

When the FBI raided Trump’s home in early August, he and—at his frantic urging—his Republican allies shrieked that they wanted the search warrant and then affidavit released to the public.

How they thought this would help Trump is beyond understanding.

Now that many of the court proceedings have been made available to the public, it’s clear that the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the National Archives went to great lengths to try to work with Trump and his representatives to try to resolve the problem of his departure from the White House with a massive number of classified and top-secret files that don’t belong to him.

In response, Trump and his advisors were sometimes obstructionist, other times hostile and often outright dishonest in their representations. They left the authorities with little choice but to seek the warrant and search his property.

But that’s the way Trump operates.

He never has grasped that his narrow election as president in 2016 made him the nation’s employee, not its owner.

In his tweets following the search and the release of the affidavit, Trump says he and his people gave the government many of the files. What he doesn’t seem to grasp—or doesn’t want to grasp—is that they never were his to “give.”

Period.

That’s one problem.

Another is that he never seems to grasp the nature of the trouble he’s in. Trump has genuine legal exposure now, the kind that requires the counsel and advocacy of top-flight lawyers.

Instead of securing good attorneys, though, he surrounds himself with hacks, cranks and oddballs of all sorts. They encourage him to pursue political solutions—rallying the Trump troops—to legal problems.

That’s like bringing a knife to a gunfight.

Donald Trump may be in genuine trouble.

And no one put him there.

No one but him, that is.

FOOTNOTE:  John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students. The opinions expressed by the author do not represent the views of Franklin College.
The City-County Observer posted this article without bias or editing.