When we first learned that Donald Trump had allegedly incriminated himself through remarks on an audio recording capturing his mishandling of classified documents, it looked really bad for the former president. When the federal indictment against him included that recording as a major piece of evidence, it looked worse. Now that we can hear the audio itself — audio the jury in his trial is expected to hear — it’s looking really, really bad for him.
To be clear, Trump’s peril here is legal, not political. As I’ve written before, even the most damning indictment is unlikely to derail Trump with his adoring base. But the two-minute recording, in which Trump can be clearly heard referring to a “secret” document with his aides and people working on a memoir for former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, clearly conveys his knowledge, intentions and mindset about the documents he held. It blows a giant hole in his claim that the remarks referred to newspaper articles instead of classified documents. And the tone of his remarks suggests a gleeful disregard for the rules governing possession of the documents. It is difficult to conceive of a more damning piece of evidence as he faces criminal charges over mishandling classified documents — or a pithier summary of how Trump’s ego leads him into extraordinary predicaments of his own making.
The problem for Trump lies not just in what he said, but in the way it was documented.
The most striking new details from the recording, which captures a conversation Trump had in 2021 at his resort in New Jersey, illuminate how he knew what kind of documents he had and how he was apparently showing them to people he shouldn’t have been showing them to. Last week, when only a partial transcript of the tape was public, Trump told Fox News that he was discussing “newspaper stories, magazine stories and articles.” But in the recording, Trump can be heard shuffling through papers that he says include “secret” and “highly confidential” information. He then says “these are the papers” — referring to what he claims was a plan from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, about a potential attack on Iran. He can repeatedly be heard saying “look” as he audibly shuffles papers, and he says “this totally wins the case” that Milley, not he, had conceived of plans to attack Iran, indicating that he’s showing what he believes to be dispositive proof — something that would make sense only as a reference to actual Pentagon documents. And the recording goes some way toward explaining Trump’s motivation to hold on to the documents, because it showcases how he views them as a tool to defend his legacy.
The problem for Trump lies not just in what he said, but in the way it was documented. When news emerged that prosecutors had a recording, Carol Lam, a former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of California, explained why recorded audio can be particularly compelling for a jury: “A voice recording of a target of a criminal investigation can be powerful evidence because, unlike witness testimony, a recording is unchangeable and can be played over and over in a courtroom. Emails and text messages can be helpful to a prosecutor’s case, but voice recordings allow jurors to also assess a defendant’s tone, such as enthusiasm, reluctance or assertiveness.”
If you listen to the recording, Trump’s tone and asides are indeed likely to help the prosecutors’ case. One can hear shocking flippancy as he seems to confess that he could’ve declassified the document back when he was president but didn’t. Amid apparently discussing national security secrets with people unauthorized to hear them, he cracks jokes about former congressman Anthony Weiner’s being a “pervert.” One can also hear an almost childlike sense of excitement in Trump’s voice as he reveals the documents, as if he’s showing off a secret treasure he found to his friends at recess. “It’s so cool,” Trump marvels. “You almost probably didn’t believe me, but now you believe me.” A few seconds later his attention is elsewhere, demanding that someone “bring some Cokes in, please.”
It’s a perfectly Trumpian moment: an obsession with vindication, excitement about possession of power, and seamless shifts between rule-breaking and irreverence.
Trump’s response to the release of the recording has been to double down on an increasingly implausible claim. Asked by Fox News on Tuesday how what he said in the released recording could square with his claim last week that he was merely showing newspaper articles in that conversation, he only doubled down: “I said it very clearly — I had a whole desk full of lots of papers, mostly newspaper articles, copies of magazines, copies of different plans, copies of stories, having to do with many, many subjects, and what was said was absolutely fine and very perfectly. We did nothing wrong. This is a whole hoax.” But Trump’s defense just doesn’t make any sense. There’s no explicable reason for him to describe newspaper articles as “highly confidential.”
We don’t know how the trial will turn out, but this recording is bad news for Trump. Usually, when he spits on the rules and says outrageous things, he faces few serious consequences — and many times he’s rewarded for it politically. In this case, it could finally be used against him.
