I have never seen Donald Trump this scared.
Mind you, I’ve been on the Trump beat full time since he declared for president in 2016. I’ve seen him scared many times — often while I was sitting just a few feet away from the carnage in a front row seat.
This is different. The government has shut down for the third time during a Trump presidency. Though Republicans control the House, Senate and presidency — and GOP appointees hold a majority on the Supreme Court — Trump says the budget impasse is still the fault of the radical left and former President Joe Biden. In other words, Trump is a victim — at least according to Presidential Pep Secretary Karoline Leavitt.
The president wants to use American cities as training grounds for the U.S. military. ICE agents are spreading chaos, beating and detaining American citizens. Trump is talking about nuclear war, calling it the “N” word. He has Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the minister of plagues, spreading disinformation about health care. Christian Nationalists are engaged in an ongoing purge of anyone in government who doesn’t see things their way. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Trump’s dog of war, has instituted some of the most racist regulations seen in the military since it was integrated nearly 80 years ago.
“Pete Hegseth is talking about grooming standards and how many pull ups he can do? I mean it’s so embarrassing,” Janessa Goldbeck, CEO of the Vet Voice Foundation told me on the podcast “Just Ask the Question.” Thousands on social media made the same observation, noting that Trump isn’t exactly physically fit himself. “I’m not thrilled with this administration’s complete abdication of our true national security priorities,” Goldbeck added. “I see Trump and this administration setting the military up to be the bad guys.”
There’s a deeper reason why recently he’s sounding even more maniacal. He is the proverbial New York sewer rat, cornered and lashing out in a desperate attempt to survive. He also knows he is becoming more vulnerable.
Trump’s actions are those of a despot trying to seize total power. But there’s a deeper reason why recently he’s sounding even more maniacal. He is the proverbial New York sewer rat, cornered and lashing out in a desperate attempt to survive. He also knows he is becoming more vulnerable. But it’s not just his own mortality, shrinking mental acuity and the Jeffrey Epstein case that is scaring him.
Perhaps just as much, or even more, than Epstein, what most recently set Trump off is a criminal case he already beat in court but is still causing him to howl like a wild animal with its leg caught in a trap. On June 8, 2023, he was indicted on 37 felony counts in federal court in Miami. It was an historic moment — the first time a former U.S. president faced federal charges. Those stemmed from the FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago in August 2022, which uncovered dozens of boxes of highly classified documents stored in insecure settings.
Before being dismissed by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon on fallacious grounds in July 2024, it was considered one of the strongest criminal cases against Trump. He’s apparently still so worried about the case that he’s trying to put up costly roadblocks against someone who has only a chance of getting the information released.
After Trump had the confiscated material returned to him earlier this year, I filed a FOIA request through attorney Mark Zaid for materials seized during the FBI Mar-a-Lago raid that were later returned to Trump. I believe the information is of such vital public importance that we filed suit and petitioned for expedited service. This still means it could take anywhere from two to four years before the case is even heard.
If that were to fail? Well, Trump — in a sweet coincidence — recently released whatever information the government has on Amelia Earhart’s disappearance in 1937. That’s how transparent our government is. It only takes around 80 years.
The president’s response to my request was to tell me I had to pay $50,000 in a bond just to be able to ask for the service. If the petition were denied, I would still have to forfeit the $50,000.
I wonder: If I put it in a paper bag and gave it to Tom Homan, would that work? Remember, this is the administration that claims to be “the most transparent administration in history”.
I’ve often wondered if Trump sits up nights laughing to himself and ruminating over his favorite over-the-top lie as he consumes a Big Mac. Does he still have enough mental acuity to think deeply about his burger and his career favorite lie? You know, before he summons someone to bring him a diet soda.
These days, he’s not what he once was. He’s usually late to work and early to bed, and he spends his weekends golfing. As Trump grows older and increasingly more mentally incontinent, he sits in a stew of his own political flatulence while he mumbles incoherent random phrases “Like nothing ever seen before,” while blaming “the violent radical left,” and “fake media,” along with a dozen other imagined enemies. Like a good bill collector, he always closes with “Thank you for your attention to this matter.”
Still, Trump and his Project 2025 cabal of closeted reprobates won’t be happy until the entire nation is reduced to the socioeconomic levels of rural eastern Kentucky or southern Mississippi. They won’t stop until no one is able to question them.
That would enable Trump to retire to his modern day plantation, Mar-a-Lago, and enjoy the infamous spa where Epstein “stole” an underaged worker — and caused Trump to end his bromance with the deceased sex offender. The estate was also the site of Puff Donny’s worst prosecutorial nightmare, at least until a judge loyal to Trump dismissed the case. Like most Trump debacles, the Mar-a-Lago disaster was of his own making.
After losing to Joe Biden in 2020, Trump left the White House like an angry tenant who didn’t get back his deposit. During the last week of his first term, reporters — myself included — witnessed his staff walking out with all sorts of odds and ends, including but not limited to paintings, other art work and office furnishings. It was like watching looters in a riot. We saw Trump himself boarding Marine One on the South Lawn while an ant-train of young staffers carried boxes to the helicopter.
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Moving out of the White House is a cumbersome endeavor for all presidents. On the last day of the administration, it takes a fleet of moving vans, a large work force and much back-breaking labor to move one president out of the White House and another one in during a span of about six hours.
With such chaos, it isn’t unusual for some papers to end up leaving the White House that should have stayed. Within weeks — and sometimes months, and occasionally even later — the National Archives reaches out to retrieve the government’s property, and the ex-president finds the appropriate staffer to hunt down whatever is needed so it can be returned.
Not in Trump’s case. His story about the classified documents has changed more often than some people change their underwear. He had a lawyer write a letter and tell everyone he’d given everything back. Rumors leaked that he was brandishing highly classified information, some of it about Iran, to visitors, and that he was moving it around so his lawyers couldn’t find it. Some of it was infamously found in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom.
Trump then denied he had any materials, which were of course found during the FBI search, so then he said the bureau had planted it. Finally, Trump admitted he had it, but said he had declassified it before leaving the White House without telling anyone or adhering to any process – basically through a political Vulcan mind meld, so he could keep whatever he wanted.
Agents seized more than 13,000 government documents from Trump, among which they found 103 classified government documents. Eighteen documents were marked top secret, and one of those sets had the control system protocol “top secret/SCI,” or sensitive compartmented information.
Less than two years later, Cannon dismissed the case. Special Counsel Jack Smith appealed the dismissal, but following Trump’s election to the presidency last November, Smith’s office dropped the appeal.
That would seem to be the end of it. Trump beat the odds.
But here’s where it gets fun.
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Once he took office in January for a second time, the Department of Justice arranged for the material seized in the August 2022 search to be returned to Trump. On February 28, 2025, as Trump boarded an Air Force One flight from Joint Base Andrews in Maryland headed to Mar-a-Lago, boxes were loaded onto the plane. He issued a statement: “The Department of Justice has just returned the boxes.”
That’s when I filed my FOIA request. “I don’t think anyone expected that,” a current White House staffer told me. “Well, maybe some of the lawyers did.”
That would explain the reaction from the DOJ. The lawyers’ request for the $50,000 bond came in a Washington federal court filing, and it’s a startling example of “pay-to-play” justice. Worse, it’s pay-to-have-the-chance-to-play justice.
“Never in over 30 years of law practice have I seen the government so blatantly seek to intimidate FOIA requesters by threatening tens of thousands of dollars of fees merely because we sought our statutory legal rights to expedite processing of documents,” Zaid, my attorney, explained. “This case seeks production of the documents retrieved by the FBI from Mar-a-Lago that were said to be classified but President Trump and his allies say are not. One must question what threat we pose by simply requesting expedited processing of these records. Could it be they are actually classified and President Trump did violate the law?”
Trump’s fear is palpable, and like a New York sewer rat, that’s when he’s at his most dangerous. “This is nothing short of a $50,000 shakedown demand merely to expedite release of the ‘definitely not classified’ records that Mr. Trump concealed from the Government at Mar-a-Lago,” Zaid’s co-counsel Brad Moss said. “This is not 1920s Chicago and Mr. Trump is not Al Capone. We will not accede to this demand and we will contest it vigorously in court.”
Add it to the list of things scaring Trump and driving his desire for total control before he loses all control of his mental and physical health. Chalk it up to JD Vance and Project 2025 to try and solidify control.
On Wednesday, as the government shutdown took hold, it was Vance who appeared in the Brady Briefing Room to field questions. Not Trump. The vice president was an effective (and younger) liar untethered by the scandals of his boss.
On Wednesday, as the government shutdown took hold, it was Vance who appeared in the Brady Briefing Room to field questions. Not Trump. The vice president was an effective (and younger) liar untethered by the scandals of his boss. Vance blamed the shutdown on radical left Democrats who want to give illegal immigrants health care. It’s a blatant lie, but he was more energetic delivering it, which, to some of the MAGA crowd, makes him more believable.
I’d say to check that signpost up ahead — our next stop is the Twilight Zone. But I think that’s just the vice president’s bearded visage.
Trump’s fear and his declining health show us, at the very least, that Vance is capable of pinch hitting for the sultan of political swat.
That is ultimately everyone’s greatest concern. On Thursday, Trump reportedly told Congress that the U.S. is in a state of “armed conflict” with drug cartels. If Vance can step up and, in the words of his own staff after Wednesday’s press briefing, “look very presidential,” then the administration’s despotic nature will continue to amp up even as Donald Trump continues to wind down.
At some point in the not-to-distant future, I was told by a source close to Trump, there is a growing fear that someone in his own inner-circle may whisper the words “25th Amendment,” end the Trump presidency and usher in “The Age of Ultron” — I mean Vance.
That, more than anything else, has Puff Donny scared.