Probable Cause Of Trump's Predicament

Politico  |  “Part of the MAGA movement is kind of a ‘fuck you’ to the government bureaucracy, which you can interpret as the Deep State,” said one former Trump staffer. “People were really dissatisfied with the transition and the outcome of the election. This is the last piece of control that they had [while] in power.”

The weeks after the November elections were among the more chaotic for a Trump White House that had been defined by chaos. The West Wing was left reeling by Trump’s loss to Joe Biden, and the president’s refusal to concede largely froze the transition process in place.

Some aides recalled that staff secretary Derek Lyons attempted to maintain a semblance of order in the West Wing despite the election uncertainty. But he departed the administration in late December, leaving the task of preserving the needed records for the National Archives to others. The two men atop the office hierarchy — then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and Trump — took little interest in it, aides and advisers recalled. Meanwhile, responsibility for overseeing the pack up of the outer Oval and dining room, an area where Trump liked to work when not in the Oval Office, was left to Trump’s assistants, Molly Michael and Nick Luna, according to multiple former aides.

Trump, Eggleston surmised, was a victim of his own political impulses. “[H]e denied being defeated so they didn’t really engage in a transition process because he refused to let it happen,” he said. “So that meant that they were in a fairly frantic situation as the inauguration day came.”

For outgoing White Houses, there is typically a debriefing process about classified documents, and then a procedure to turn over government phones and computers. But for many of the last Trump holdouts, that process came after the Capitol riot, a stunning day of violence which triggered heightened security throughout Washington. The security obstacles erected around the White House, aides recalled, created more logistical hurdles for an already exhausted and hollowed-out staff.

Sloppiness ensued in many departments. Many staffers seemed more interested in securing copies of “jumbos” — the giant photos that adorned the West Wing’s walls — than sorting and packing up their files. Those who stayed focused on juggling the operational demands of running a country with the political whims of a president who, until just days before, was trying to cling to power.

There was, simply, not much care for protocol.

“Compared to previous administrations of both parties,” conceded a person familiar with the process, “there was less of a willingness to adhere to the Presidential Records Act.”