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If you haven’t gotten to it yet, you ought to devote at least a few minutes of your holiday week to this delightful long-read in the Washington Post about the joyful Christmas elf of Mar-a-Lago who rides on the golf cart with Donald Trump carrying a real-ass printer so she can print out ass-kissing articles that will make the baby feel better. It is a Santa Claus miracle!
The article is about other things too — the sad and lonely and dejected post-presidency existence that led Donald Trump to steal state secrets and stuff them underneath Eric’s spare swim trunks in the cabana next to the swimming pool at Mar-a-Lago — but this graf about the printer is what’s just killing us:
Natalie Harp, one of Trump’s employees and a former host on the pro-Trump cable network One America News, often accompanies Trump on his daily golf outings, riding the course in a golf cart equipped with a laptop and sometimes a printer to show him uplifting news articles, online posts or other materials.
Sometimes a printer. On the golf cart, sometimes a printer.
A copy machine would be kind of awkward, obviously.
On some quiet days, another aide, Molly Michael, who served asTrump’s assistant in the White House, has called around to Trump’s network of allies across the country requesting that they dial the former president to boost his spirits with positive affirmations. There’s nothing going on, she has told them, adding that his friends know how restless he gets when nothing is going on, according to people who have heard her appeal.
The baby is restless, please call him on the telephone. We finally gave Ms. Harp a restroom break so she’s not available to print out his candygrams.
This long read kind of picks up where the other story about Trump’s new full-time babysitters left off, after Trump’s big fun fancy dinner with the Nazis. It’s about how few people have really been around Trump for the past two years, what a lack of authority figures, how there’s just been no adult supervision to tell him no. The aides who do exist, WaPo says, are getting stupider and more loyal. “These days,” they write, “he is served almost exclusively by sycophants, having replaced successive rounds of loyal yet inexperienced aides with staffers even more beholden and novice.”
It’s a wonder he’s bumblefucked himself into this many criminal investigations.
The piece is full of new and grifty details about the man who just last week released internet-only trading cards of a fantasy superhero version of himself. For instance, his staff tried to get the General Services Administration (GSA) — which leases office space for former presidents — to pay Trump to lease office space above the ballroom at Mar-a-Lago, for Trump’s own offices. The GSA said fuck off and rented space in West Palm Beach.
Trump Gets Round-The-Clock Babysitters To Make Sure He Doesn’t Invite Any More Nazis To Dinner
It’s got juicy quotes about the general environment down there:
A longtime Trump confidant termed his Mar-a-Lago existence, where he has tried to re-create the trappings of the presidency, as “sad.” Comparing it to life at the White House, this person added,“It’s like a Barbie Dream House miniature.”
Hahahahaha bless his heart. He does just sound miserable, in his gilded trash palace. He reportedly wakes up, farts around, plays golf, farts around some more, goes to the dining room where they clap for him, leaves the dining room and they clap for him again, and then his day is over. We imagine there’s nothing to look forward to except the FBI’s next visit. “There are no protocols. He plays golf. He meets with people in the afternoon. He really doesn’t do a lot of consequence most days,” said one of WaPo’s sources.
It sounds like he was totally not ready for not being president anymore, and how lonely he would be. His living quarters at Mar-a-Lago aren’t as big as they were in the White House, there’s no Air Force One, he had no Twitter, and he was upset there isn’t a press pool to follow him around anymore:
“We had to explain to him that he didn’t have a group standing around waiting for him anymore,” one former aide said.
And aides kept asking him all these really weird questions that implied he wasn’t president anymore:
“It was a really dark, dark time,” the aide said, recalling that staff would ask “are you going to set up a library? What’s your post-presidential foundation?”
“He wasn’t interested in any of that at all,” the aide added.
Within the piece, WaPo does its best to trace Trump’s stolen documents, starting after he lost the election and refused to accept it. The weeks between the election and Joe Biden’s inauguration featured trucks going back and forth carting presidential records to the National Archives, but also weirdly Trump was taking all these boxes full of documents up to the White House residence. There was office space hastily rented for Mike Pence’s staff in Crystal City, Virginia, which Trump staffers reportedly begged to also use even after Trump incited his supporters to hang Mike Pence on January 6. All kinds of other Trump documents got stuffed there. That all eventually ended up in Florida, including the stuff recently found in the GSA-rented storage unit in West Palm.
We are of course still watching the documents story play out. No telling what’ll turn up by the time this is all over.
Obviously security at all these places is amazeballs:
One person familiar with the Virginia office called it “not especially secure” —the 12th floor of a high rise, where people came and went. Meanwhile, the storage facility, located off a busy interstate in West Palm Beach, lacks visible security guards near the rear entrance. People come and go there as well.
Mar-a-Lago also comes across EXTREMELY secure:
The club […] is bordered by residential streets, including one to the north which ends at a gate with only a small sign to warn away trespassers.
Visited on a day late last month — four months after the club was searched by the FBI, and just as scandal was breaking over how easily Ye’s entourage was able to access the facility — there were no security guards at the entry point to the former president’s home.
The gate stood open.
Sounds like, at least sometimes, you can just walk on in. And if you see a sad dumpy man waddling around muttering about “CRAZED AND DAMMING LAPTOP,” tell him he looks like Superman. He needs to hear your affirmations.
We skipped a ton, read the whole thing, etc. and so forth.
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And once that doesn’t exist, I’m also giving things a go at the Mastodon (@evanhurst@newsie.social) and at Post!
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