Read this the other night while finishing Mark Leibovich's book on the cowards and opportunists in the Republican/Trumpian party. It's a sum-up as Trump is letting the door hit his ass on the way out:

Trump's always-low approval ratings—now down in the 30s—were the well-earned product of a toxic personality and now fully disastrous final scorecard: he would leave office as the first president in history to be impeached twice, the first since Hoover to preside over his party's loss of the House, Senate, and White House in a single term, the first president in history to leave office with fewer jobs than he entered with, the indirect cause of (conservatively) thousands of coronavirus deaths, countless international embarrassments, and a nation that felt far more divided and deranged than at any time in decades. Trump was easily the sorest loser, most prodigious liar, and most insufferable whiner in presidential history. And no commander in chief had ever departed the White House with as massive a legal and financial burden as Donald Trump would now face.

And it gets worse—for him. This week the affidavit that led to the FBI retrieval of classified and/or national security documents from Trump's private residence at Mar-a-Lago was made public in very redacted form. (The New York Times has a very helpful annotated version.) What does it show that we didn't suspect? Not much. But it shows it in plain legal language. All of us are learning our government acronyms, too: NARA for National Archives and Records Administration, the dept. that spent much of 2021 and '22 trying to retrieve the 15 or more boxes; NDI for National Defense Information, which was what was in those 15 or more boxes, including SCI (Sensitive Compartmented Information), SI (Special Intelligence) and HCS (intelligence derived from human sources or spies). Trump was putting them all at risk—that's how NYT led with it the following day—but the big point is he might have already done so. Allies and operatives might already be dead because of him. He's a sloppy man who put top secret intel in a sloppy place, and the question is still this one: why.

Initially I thought it was just the sloppiness. It was the whiny baby in him who needed to say “MINE!” on the way out. That, by the way, is the best interpretation Republicans can make—that their man is just a whiny spoiled child who grabbed stuff as he pouted his way home. “Well, if you're not letting me win I'm going to take this!” That was my initial thought. But now I'm wondering. There's also vindictive Trump. Maybe he's trying to get back at us, the whole country, for “betraying” him by not letting him win. Then there's bad-businessman Trump, who never did a thing in his life without attempting to monetize it. Those documents had value to our enemies—who were often his friends. Could I perceive a scenario where Trump might think, “Why wouldn't I make money by showing my friends these papers that my enemies, who wouldn't let me win, think are important?” You bet. 

That final scorecard is still in play.