Want to protect classified government documents?

Tuck them in old bound volumes of legislative committee proceedings. Nobody will ever find and read them, guaranteed.

Unfortunately, however, people in government have a bizarre fetish for stamping every document SECRET or TOP SECRET in bold red letters at the top. Which presumably makes the person doing the stamping feel important.

And which all but guarantees the TOP SECRET document that isn’t really TOP SECRET will always get read first.

And, sometimes, kept.

That was Donald Trump’s dilemma, Tuesday afternoon, as his entourage piloted their way to Miami’s federal courthouse for his arraignment: he had succumbed to the seductive power of TOP SECRET-stamped documents. He had taken some 13,000 government documents when he was kicked out of the Oval Office, prosecutors allege, and more than 300 of them bore classified markings. Like TOP SECRET.

Trump’s problem isn’t that he was sloppy with allegedly sensitive government information. No less than Hillary Clinton did likewise, a few years back, and she was admonished by the FBI for “extremely careless handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.”

The former President’s problem is this: he took secret stuff with him when he left town, and he hid them all when politely asked to send back the secret stuff. Hell, Trump even – prosecutors say – hid his stash of classified documents in gilded bathrooms and ballrooms and bedrooms at his Mar-a-Lago compound from his own lawyer. His own lawyer!

Why? Why would he (allegedly) do something so deeply, profoundly dumb as that?

It could be that he actually believed he had already declassified them by “thinking about it,” which he has claimed presidents can do. It could be that he was convinced that the obscure Presidential Records Act – which I guarantee you he has never read, and never will – permitted him to hold onto classified information.

Could be. More likely, methinks, is that holding onto those documents – many spilling out onto the floor of a Mar-a-Lago bathroom, photos of which were helpfully attached to the indictment on 37 counts – made him feel important. It made him feel powerful.

That, certainly, seems to be the legal theory of the taciturn federal prosecutor, Jack Smith, who previously worked at The Hague and squashed war criminals like they were June Bugs. That Trump – according to the indictment he grimly received on Tuesday afternoon – showed the classified documents to Mar-a-Lago guests and said: “See, as president, I could’ve declassified it. Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret.”

Still a secret.

Ouch. That’s mens rea and actus reus right there in two pithy sentences, folks: Trump allegedly admitted he took secrets, and he knew they were secret. Boom. Gotcha.

The prosecution Donald J. Trump is facing in Miami isn’t like the one he is facing in New York City. The latter is seamy and sordid, involving alleged hush payments to a whackadoodle porn star, and a novel legal theory that seeks to magically transform state misdemeanors into federal felonies. It’ll fail.

The Miami prosecution is very, very different. Most of the time, those caught stealing U.S. government information plead guilty, because the cases are virtually impossible to defend.

If Trump had sent the classified stuff back to Washington, it wouldn’t have mattered that it was more than two years after the fact. He would’ve gotten away with it, as Hillary Clinton did.

But Trump willfully – and, yes, allegedly – took steps to hide the fact that he had TOP SECRET stuff. That’s his big, big problem. Never the break in, always the cover up: it’s the cover up that always gets you. (Take note, Justin Trudeau.)

As he contemplates possibly running for President from a cot in a jail cell, Donald Trump may well finally understand one truth. It’ll make his predicament feel way worse.

Namely, most of the government documents always stamped SECRET?

They just aren’t.

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Reason over passion.

Pierre Trudeau become famous for that one. Some academics claim that Trudeau actually said “reason before passion,” but it doesn’t really matter. The sentiment is clear.

Namely, that we should always be rational. Not emotional.

It was a nice sentiment, and one that people liked at the time. But it described a far-away world that we all aspire to live in. And not, you know, the world in which we actually do.

Because, down here on planet Earth, people continue to make a lot of important political decisions based on passion and their gut. Not reason, and certainly not intellect.

The most successful politicians understand this the best. Ontario Premier Doug Ford is one of them.

Earlier this week, when asked about the certifiably-insane decision to move convicted child murderer in Paul Bernardo to a medium-security prison, Ford said this:

“He’s nothing but a scumbag. This SOB needs to be in jail 23 hours a day. As a matter of fact, I’d go one step further – that one hour he’s out, he should be in general population. That’s what should happen to this SOB.”

In effect, Ford was likely calling for Bernardo to be killed. That’s what often happens when “skins” – sex offenders – get placed with other inmates. They get killed.

“Visceral and vituperative,” the Toronto Star’s editorial board sniffed, alliteratively. Ford was “bellowing,” the Star tut-tutted.

Elsewhere in the pages of the Toronto Star, someone with the John Howard Society – an organization that advocates for prisoners – said that “public hatred of a prisoner should not justify harsher confinement.”

Similarly, a bureaucrat who formerly oversaw the federal prison system told the Star that such prison transfers “should not be based on revenge… we, as a country, gave up torture quite a while ago.”

See that? If you are upset about a man who raped and tortured children being sent to an “open campus model” prison – well, you are a vengeful, visceral and vituperative monster who favors torture.

As such, you’re probably opposed to Bernardo getting “stress management training” at his new home. They offer that there. (More family visits and “recreation and leisure time,” too.)

So, the Toronto Star editorial board and some special interest types are okay with Paul Bernardo getting a nicer place to rest his head at night. But I’ll wager most Canadians aren’t. When pressed, most of them probably side with Doug Ford.

That’s because politicians like Ford are better at what political consultants call “the values proposition.” That is, when discussing values – hopes, fears, the ineffable stuff of life and death – conservative-minded politicians do better. Progressive politicians get tongue-tied.

A few years ago, for my book Fight the Right, I predicted that the Tea Party movement would take over the Republican Party. And that the Tea Party’s erstwhile leader, Donald Trump, would become a lot more powerful as a result.

Ironically, some Democratic Party thinkers agreed with me.

Stanley B. Greenberg, a US pollster who was married to a Democratic Party congresswoman, noted that “voters are generally turning to conservative and right-wing political parties, most notably in Europe and in Canada.” Why?

Because, he said, voters believe “government operates by the wrong values and rules, for the wrong people and purposes. The people I’ve surveyed believe the government rushes to help the irresponsible, and does little for the responsible.”

Another notable American progressive, Geoffrey Nunberg, agreed. Said he: “The Right is better at values. The Right has a natural advantage, in the modern context, because a lot of the issues they are promoting are emotional issues.” Canadian progressives, like American progressives, Nunberg told me, are basically “clueless” on the values stuff.

Which is why Doug Ford hasn’t really experienced much blowback about his comments on Paul Bernardo’s fate. Because progressives know, deep in their beating (and bleeding) hearts, that anyone who rapes and tortures and murders children on video has forfeited his life. Period.

So, sorry, Mr. Trudeau. Reason over passion is fine.

But Paul Bernardo still deserves an hour in general population.

And most of us would be there to cheer. Passionately.

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