Did Trump Eat the Evidence of His Crimes? An Investigation

The hits keep coming from Omarosa Manigault-Newman’s new memoir of her time in the Trump White House. The latest wacky anecdote to gain notice involves Trump’s alleged method for “destroying evidence.”

In an excerpt from the memoir, Unhinged, published in the Washington Post, Manigault-Newman describes walking in on Trump behaving oddly as his former lawyer Michael Cohen left the office.

“I saw him put a note in his mouth,” she writes . “Since Trump was ever the germaphobe, I was shocked he appeared to be chewing and swallowing the paper. It must have been something very, very sensitive.”

According to the Post, White House aids they contacted “laughed at the assertion and said it was not true.”

There is, to put it lightly, a lot going on here. But would our president really eat evidence? Let’s look at this logically.

First, I have to wonder why Omarosa, seeing Trump put something that looked like paper in his mouth, chew it, and swallow, assumed that it was a plot to hide the evidence of a crime, and not that, say, his mind was failing. Perhaps she’s a big fan of The Good Place. Or she just pulled it out of her ass to sell books.

But even if she isn’t purposefully lying about what she saw, on what planet is eating evidence is the best way to destroy it? Admittedly, this is perhaps something that someone with gaping holes in their brain might find logical. But it’s still hard to comprehend, when there are so many other evidence-obliterating methods easily available. Why not just shred it, or if that seems too risky, burn it?

Even if we allow that Trump decided eating the evidence was the best course of action, it’s hard to believe he would put anything in his mouth that isn’t a Big Mac. As Omarosa notes, Trump is a well-known germaphobe, and his eating habits, though disgusting, tend towards the heavily processed.

No, knowing Trump, if he really believed that the evidence of his crimes could only be wiped away by stomach acid, he would have summoned an intern or whichever aide he was currently mad at to do the act for him. That would have been a much more convincing story, combining as it does two of Trump’s favorite pastimes: being incredibly corrupt, and humiliating the people under him for kicks.

But all of these theories fail to acknowledge one important fact: Trump and his cronies are terrible at hiding their own criminal activity. How many emails have we seen from those in Trumps orbit that essentially say “Hey, lets do some crimes!” I’m sure we haven’t seen the last of them.