Shell-shocked and self-pitying, Donald Trump and Boris Johnson finally face the consequences of their actions

At the heart of the criminal case against former US president Donald Trump lies one utterly gobsmacking fact.

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Donald Trump and Boris Johnson. The great manbabies of our time, swaddled in Teflon, forever whining about their charmed lives while faceplanting upwards. They discovered new depths of self-pity this week, having been introduced, so very belatedly, to the consequences of their own actions.

“Today we witnessed the most evil and heinous abuse of power in the history of our country,” Mr Trump declared after his arraignment on a string of criminal charges for allegedly stealing sensitive national security documents and keeping them, among other dubious places, next to a Mar-a-Lago loo. Odd, right? Most people prefer their toilet paper quilted.

You haven’t lived until you’ve wiped your bum with something highly classified. Picture: Department of Justice/AFP

“I had every right to have these documents! I did everything right, and they still indicted me!” Mr Trump added.

It’s a fitting quote for his political gravestone, don’t you think? I was the best president ever, and the voters still rejected me! I’m a very stable genius, and my own staff still called me an unhinged buffoon! I handled the Covid pandemic perfectly, and a million people still died! How baffling this all is. It must be a communist socialist left-wing cuckservative judicial deep state big tech conspiracy to destroy me. It’s the simplest explanation.

The older Mr Trump gets, and the greater his time apart from real power, the more tragic he becomes. Look past the sustained assholery that makes it so difficult to empathise with him and you see a man who just can’t stop sabotaging himself. He can’t even comprehend that he is sabotaging himself. He is so utterly incapable of self-reflection that it’s doomed him to a life of hapless bewilderment.

So, the case against him. The most striking thing about it is how pointless Mr Trump’s alleged crimes were.

(I should stress that all the allegations are just that: allegations. They have not been proven. Mr Trump denies any wrongdoing, and will have every chance to defend himself in court, with the sort of legal resources available only to someone of his obscene wealth.)

The conspiracy theorists on Twitter and MSNBC are titillating themselves by speculating that he planned to sell American secrets to foreign adversaries. Nothing in the indictment supports that. It isn’t clear he wanted to do anything at all with the documents, other than wave them around to impress the occasional Mar-a-Lago guest, like a cat proudly presenting a dead rat. The cat shouldn’t have a dead rat, and everyone but the cat knows it. But nothing you say to the cat will make it understand.

According to the prosecution’s witnesses, Mr Trump had an almost childish attachment to “his boxes”; he genuinely believed the documents inside should be his personal property and was too pig-headed to give them back, to the exasperation and horror of his lawyers. I risk overdoing these metaphors but imagine a toddler who has stolen his sibling’s toys and refuses to return them. “No! My boxes! Mine!”

It’s mystifying. Mr Trump allegedly broke the law not to enrich himself, nor to further some dastardly criminal plot, but merely to soothe his ego. Could there be a dumber, pettier reason to end up in prison? It’s the clumsy crime of a fool, not a schemer. It would be among the most staggering self-owns in history.

My boxes! Mine! Picture: Rob Carr/Getty Images

And that really is the central point here: he’s done it to himself. At every turn, Mr Trump had an easy way out. If he’d just acted like a normal, clear-thinking person and returned the documents, the entire mess would have gone away. Note that he has not been charged for any of the classified papers he did return in January of 2022, having kept them for a year. He got a pass for that indiscretion. The charges all concern those he allegedly hid away after that point. The road in front of him led straight off a cliff, yet he ignored every potential off ramp, instead choosing to jerk the government around, and lie, and obscure, and treat the security of his nation with contempt.

What was the government supposed to do? Let this belligerent senior citizen stash the country’s military secrets, which are meant to be locked up in secure facilities, in the bathroom of his tacky resort, a hive of influence peddlers and mediocrities, where god knows who could easily stroll in and read them? Pretend they didn’t know he was lying?

Mr Trump claims he’s been treated harshly and unfairly, because that is what he always claims about everything. Perhaps a jury will agree with him. But if the government’s account is even half-accurate, it handled him with kid gloves – appropriate, given his juvenile behaviour – and far more patience than he deserved. It spent months bending over backwards to ask nicely for his co-operation, and only resorted to firmer methods out of necessity. Any other person who’d stolen classified information and refused to give it back would have found the FBI banging on their door long before the raid of Mar-Lago in August of 2022.

So spare us the self-pitying tantrums. Mr Trump’s existence since he lost the presidency has been one long, eardrum-rending primal scream of victimhood. He stops to draw breath only for his daily round of golf, then it’s right back to bellowing in all-caps about the imagined injustices he’s suffered. It’s desperately sad.

Donald Trump hasn’t been exactly dignified since he left the White House. Picture: Brandon Bell/Getty Images/AFP

Here’s another manbaby: Britain's Boris Johnson. Picture: Daniel Leal/AFP

I did mention Mr Johnson as well, at the start of all this. Parallels are drawn between the two men far too often, but in this respect they are twins: nothing is ever their fault.

In a damning report released on Thursday, the Privileges Committee of Britain’s parliament concluded Mr Johnson had repeatedly “misled” MPs about his knowledge of illegal parties in Downing Street during the Covid pandemic, which breached his own government’s lockdown rules. (His staff were enjoying workplace piss-ups while ordinary Brits were banned from seeing their dying loved ones to prevent the virus’s spread.)

The parliamentary language is too charitable. Mr Johnson lied, brazenly and repeatedly. A committee dominated by his own party has concluded as much. If he hadn’t announced his resignation from parliament, the Conservative-dominated House of Commons would have voted to suspend him, and he likely would have faced a by-election in his Conservative-dominated seat. He chose to bail instead of offering his neck to the voters.

It isn’t a politically-motivated witch hunt, nor is it a sinister plot from the public service. Mr Johnson, like Mr Trump, did this to himself. He pushed and pushed and pushed, crossing new frontiers of deceit, until even his own party could no longer stomach the stream of tripe he was feeding them.

“This decision means that no MP is free from vendetta, or expulsion on trumped up charges by a tiny minority who want to see him or her gone from the Commons,” he fumed after the report was released. Technically, it should not be possible for a written statement to be spittle-flecked, yet here we are.

“For the Privileges Committee to use its prerogatives in this anti-democratic way, to bring about what is intended to be the final knife-thrust in a protracted political assassination – that is beneath contempt.”

Anti-democratic! An elected parliament using its oversight powers for their intended purpose is “anti-democratic” now. Again, what was parliament supposed to do here? Let the prime minister lie to it without sanction?

Mr Johnson has always been quite the political contortionist, twisting this way and that into structurally dubious pretzels of hypocrisies and contradictions, but this final circus act is surely his most impressive. I’ve been assassinated by the thrust of a knife, he complains – having somehow managed to stab himself in the back.

Twitter: @SamClench