It’s time for a new episode of our favorite show, “Hoarders: Mar-a-Lago.” What items might our former president Donald “Sticky Fingers” Trump be keeping somewhere deep in the towers of classified documents and old Steak ‘Um packages that line the musty halls in which he will one day die alone, in his bathrobe, muttering “Rosebud” and clenching satellite photos of an Iranian nuclear weapons plant to his chest just before a nurse rushes in for an unenthusiastic round of CPR capped off with a celebratory martini?
If you guessed “ancient Israeli antiquities,” well, congrats. According to news reports, Trump has been keeping these antiquities at his home like some sort of 19th Century British lord, and Israel has not been able to get them back.
Tell us more, Haaretz:
Among the antiquities are ancient ceramic oil lamps which are part of Israel's national treasures collection. They were sent to the U.S. in 2019 with the approval of then-Director of the Israeli Antiquities Authority, Israel Hasson, on the condition that they be returned within weeks, yet almost four years later, they have yet to be returned.
You ever have one of those friends so absent-minded that you can’t loan him so much as a pen to write something on his grocery list without him putting it in his pocket and walking away, even if it was a nice pen that some kindly elderly Jew gave you for your Bar Mitzvah? Donald Trump is that friend, but orange.
The items were reportedly sent to the White House for a Hanukkah event back in 2019. Then, according to Haaretz, the Antiquities Authority did not want them sent back via regular shipping company for fear of damage, or possibly that the UPS guy would leave them on the Knesset’s front steps while no one was home and some porch pirate would steal them and the Knesset hasn’t gotten around to installing a Ring.
So they asked a guy named Saul Fox, a major donor to the Authority, to hang on to the oil lamps until Israel could come get them. (Why no one could just throw them in an Uber and run them over to the Israeli Embassy in Washington is a question left unexplored.) Then COVID hit and the items seem to have gotten lost in all the chaos. Until several months ago when Israeli authorities found out they were at Mar-a-Lago for some reason.
Given the rushed packing at the end of Trump’s administration, it is no surprise that someone apparently threw these items in a box, probably with an old raincoat and half a roll of Mentos, and sent them off to disappear in that dollar-store Xanadu in Florida. And given Trump’s propensity for literally making a federal case out of returning important stuff that he carted off at the end of his presidency like Tokhtamysh returning from Moscow, it would be no surprise to learn that he has Mar-a-Lago staff moving the stuff around in case anyone asks about it.
The big irony? Due to some kind of bureaucratic fuck-up, the items were never displayed at the Hanukkah celebration they were shipped to the White House for in the first place.
The next Lara Croft movie practically writes itself.
[Haaretz}
Look, it's kinda on you, Israel for trusting the orange fucker with anything. You should have had your kid make a forgery menorah out of blue Play-doe and sent that. He wouldn't have known the difference.
"Indiana Jones and the Menorah of Mendacity"