The Top 5 Best Excuses For Why Trump Was Hiding Those Top Secret Documents!

These aren't very bright people, and things just got out of hand.

Hello, gentle drunk readers! Have you been struggling to keep track of all the excuses that former president Donald Trump and his harem of apple-polishers have been throwing out all week trying to explain why old Sweet Potato Suharto kept boxes and boxes of classified government documents stored inthe basementwe are now informed a "storage room in the hallway by the pool" of his dollar-store Xanadu in Florida? Us too!

So we have put together a probably-not-at-all-comprehensive guide to the main excuses Trump and his lickspittles have been expelling into the atmosphere at a volume exceeding the methane-laden cow farts from an industrial dairy farm. In doing so, we have tried to weed out actual excuses (Trump had unlimited declassification power) from whataboutism (whatabout Hillary/Obama/ Benghazi ) from ridiculous and nonsensical counterattacks (the judge who signed the warrant is a Jew , if you can believe such a thing).

In cases where we couldn't determine exactly when an excuse was first introduced, we tried to pinpoint when it really got going in the zeitgeist.

We have also tried to gauge how long the bootlickers used those excuses before moving on to a new one. Unsurprisingly, in keeping with Trump's firehose of bullshit communication model, there was a lot of overlap.

Grab your Thermos full of benzoates or whatever you need to not turn into a frothing rage hamster while reliving this week, and let’s get started.

EXCUSE #1: This is all a setup by the out-of-control tyrannical federal government.

Who said it: Lord, who didn’t.

First appearance: Trump himself first floated a version of it when hereleased a statement announcing the raid on Monday.

Etymology: This excuse depends on not acknowledging at all, except perhaps briefly in the middle of a larger rant, that Trump even held any government property at Mar-a-Lago that didn’t belong to him. For example, Trump in his initial statement said, “After working and cooperating with the relevant Government agencies, this unannounced raid on my home was not necessary or appropriate.” This was his only even glancing reference, in the middle of a larger, spittle-flecked harangue, to the fact that the government might have had a goddamn good reason for getting a search warrant for his estate.

How long they test-drove this excuse: This one got a long tryout on Tuesday and much of Wednesday, when the Justice Department still had not said anything to counter the rightwing cacophony. The Republican Party drove right into that information vacuum to test various sub-categories of the excuse. For example, the sub-category of “Rogue FBI planted all the evidence” was still going strong on Thursday morning’sFox & Friends. Though by that point the fact that the FBI had a duly issued warrant was enough that even Steve Doocy was pushing back on it. 

“Surely this won’t come back to bite us in the ass”: Perhaps you don’t want to go too far out on a limb on the planted evidence talking point before Trump inevitably switches to yes, he had boxes of classified documents but it’s okay because he declassified them at some non-determinant point in the past? Too late, we’re hearing sawing noises.

EXCUSE #2: Those boxes were full of mementoes, and anyone who knows Trump knows he likes to collect lots and lots of souvenirs he finds meaningful.

Who said it: The most visible people trying to sell this particular dog’s breakfast seem to have beenLara and Eric Trump , or Slack-Jawed Sammy and his Incredible Botoxed Remora, as they are known around the inside of our brain.

First appearance: Monday evening, a few hours after the raid was announced, Lara and Eric were already touring Fox to test-drive this line.

How long before this talking point disappeared: Not long! Trumpworld seemed to move on by Tuesday morning.

“Surely this won’t come back to bite us in the ass”: Lara told Tucker Carlson guest host Generic White Nazi Guy that her father-in-law “loves to save things like newspaper clippings, magazine clippings, photographs, documents, that he had every right … to take from the White House.” Whoops!

EXCUSE #3: Trump used his power as president to declassify all the documents in the hallway by the pool before they were moved to Florida.

Really got going: Thursday morning when word was finally leaking that the FBI had been seeking code-word level top secret documents that Trump had stored in the hallway by the pool. Uh-oh! Fortunately all the information classification experts on the Right could explain that nuh-uh, it was all declassified while Trump was still in office but the White House Counsel’s Office failed to generate the proper paperwork. That’s cool though, right?

How long they test-drove this excuse: It was dying by Thursday afternoon when multiple lawyers and government employees and legal experts were pointing out that a president does not have unlimited declassification powers, particularly with nuclear-related documents, which are classified by statute (the Atomic Energy Act) that can’t just be unilaterally ignored.

Still, flare-ups were ongoing all day Friday as people sorted out the timeline of when exactly Trump claimed to have declassified all these documents and patiently explained to wingnuts that no, the president could not just declare information declassified at like 11: 59 A.M. on January 20, 2017, and then throw it into a moving box with that engraved ashtray that the Russian ambassador gifted him for the Oval Office.

“Surely this won’t come back to bite us in the ass”: Only if you don’t bone up on the different categories of classification and the different rules that govern information under them! Surely you boned up, right?

EXCUSE #4: Trump was so busy those last two weeks, he didn’t have time to properly pack.

Really got going: Trumpworld was trying this one out on Friday, particularly in the form of concrete-headed law professor Jonathan Turley, who never met a Trump crime he couldn’t justify.

How long they test-drove it: Pretty much however long Friday afternoon was, because it’s too silly for even hardcore Trumpists to take seriously. We like to think that us jokingly predicting as early as Monday night that the Right would try this one on for size led to its apparently quick demise.

But more likely it was just quickly overtaken by the next excuse that came on Friday evening.

EXCUSE #5: Trump had a long-standing order that anything he took out of the Oval Office was automatically declassified.

Who said it: Trump himself, coming full circle from Monday, in a statement read by alleged journalist/Trumpworld suckerfish John Solomon, announcing this thing no one had ever heard of before.

How long they test drove it: We’re pretty sure the howls of laughter extinguished this one before midnight.

“Surely this won’t come back to bite us in the ass”: It was biting you in the ass the second Trump opened Friday night’s statement by claiming he often took classified documents up to the White House residence because like any other American employee, he sometimes was so busy he would take work home. No one believes this, because a) Trump is a famously lazy toad who spent most of his time in office watching Fox News, tweeting, and yelling at people, b) so we can all see everything that he ever took to the residence, right? and c) see "a."

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