As a writer, there’s one cliche that I never particularly liked.
A picture is worth a thousand words.
I’m not sure that’s true, but there are certainly photographs that once seen can never be forgotten. I will never forget several from Vietnam, the Viet Cong being shot in the head and the naked girl running down the street after the napalm attack. Then of course there’s the shot of the Twin Towers burning.
The newest one isn’t in the same category. For one thing, it’s a still life.
But once you know what it is, it is extremely evocative.
At first glance, a bathroom full of boxes looks white trashy, but once you notice the marble floor and the fixtures, once you see the chandelier hanging from the ceiling, once you see at least 30 stacked file boxes in a completely inappropriate place for file boxes, you have a picture that will stay with you for a long time.
It isn’t as if the bathroom was the only place stolen documents were stored.
There were at least five or six different rooms in Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago with dozens of boxes of documents misappropriated from the White House. The fascinating part of it is that the earliest photos of documents released to the media made it look as if all Trump had stolen was a few folders.
Instead, we’re getting stories about Trump showing boxes and boxes of documents to guests at Mar-a-Lago. And we’re hearing that many of the documents Trump stole are quite serious defense papers.
No matter how far ahead he seems to be now, when it comes time to elect a president in a little less than 17 months, the winner isn’t going to be Donald Trump.
When his much-maligned Russia connection turns out of be true, even folks on the far right will abandon him.
It’ll be more than just his papers that are in the toilet.