Surely, Trump’s own narcissistic and sociopathic urges made him keep the documents in the first place. He doesn’t seem to have an actual legal case to explain why he had them or why he should have been able to keep them. If he had a case like that to make, one would think he would have challenged the original subpoena in court. In a rambling, defiant talk in New Jersey a few hours after his arraignment, he focused on … Hillary Clinton.

Loading

The plan, it seems, is to deliberately use this indictment to maintain his image as a martyr and secure himself the Republican presidential nomination. The legal proceedings will, of course, cause him problems in the general election but, in Trump’s tactical playbook, that is a problem to be faced another day.

He and his minions are flailing around, crying bitter tears and making all manner of outlandish claims. You will hear that the prosecutor is a political hitman. (Smith has actually prosecuted quite a few Democrat politicians. And note that the grand jury of private citizens that indicted Trump was in red-state Florida.) You will hear babbling about how something called the Presidential Records Act allowed him to keep the documents. (It doesn’t, and whose word would you take on this: Trump’s – or a federal prosecutor’s?)

You will hear the chestnut about how Trump supposedly declassified the material before he left the White House. (There’s no evidence he did; he had ample time to have litigated this point previously, which again he didn’t; and in any case the statute under which he is charged refers to national defence information, which should not leave government hands.)

The newest line of defence – trotted out in the past few days by craven Marco Rubio, a senator from Florida – is that there’s no evidence the sensitive information leaked, so there’s no harm done. (That’s not how the law works.) It’s sad to see these strained rationalisations already turning up in the Trump-friendly Murdoch media, including in Australia. Sky News had a guy on who likened what Trump did to having “overdue library books”. Let’s see if a jury agrees.

In the meantime, the rest of us are stuck in that metaphorical car ride with Donald Trump. It won’t be easy, but the Hamptons, as it happens, are lovely this time of year.

Bill Wyman is a former arts editor and assistant managing editor of National Public Radio in Washington. He teaches at the University of Sydney.