WS Chronicle

By Dr. James B. Ewers Jr.

There was a game that we played in my neighborhood called hide and seek.

You remember hide and seek, don’t you?

Simply explained, it was a game where we would hide until someone found you. We had some pretty interesting hiding places. We might be in the bushes or in someone’s backyard. The main goal was not to get caught.

Of course, all of us would get caught eventually. For some of us, it simply took longer to get caught.

At the beginning of the game, we would boast about how we weren’t going to get caught. We thought we could out-smart everyone else. Our thinking was that we had better places to hide and we were just “cooler.” After we were apprehended, we would laugh about it and then go and get a snowball.

We vowed to do better the next time because, you see, it was only a game.

In a strange way, the former president of the United States of America was playing a game of hide and seek.

As his presidency started, he bragged about how good he was. That he never made mistakes and he was always at the top of his game.

Many Americans believed his testimonies of self-adulation. Along this ego-filled presidential journey, he made several mistakes in my opinion. The first error in judgment was he confused loyalty to the country with loyalty to him. In the past several months, the former president has seen his appointees be loyal to the country.

The second mistake he made was that he took the office of the president lightly. He wasn’t serious about the tasks at hand. Several reports say that he did not like to read documents and that his desk was always clean except for a diet soda. He didn’t realize that reading was fundamental to the position that he held.

As we know now, the former president’s home at Mar-a-Lago was searched last week by the FBI. Reports say that they recovered 11 sets of classified documents, including some that were identified as top secret.

It begs the question: why were these sensitive documents at his house?

In my opinion, there is no logical reason for them to be there.

His lawyers are saying that all classified materials were returned in June. What else could his lawyers say?

Mr. Trump had a penchant for mishandling and misplacing documents. John Bolton, a former Trump national security adviser, said, “It worried people all of the time.”

Aides say that sometimes he would trash documents and they would have to retrieve them from the waste basket.

Am I missing something by using the president of this nation and waste basket in the same sentence?

They were talking about the then president of the world’s most powerful country.

The search warrant, questionable by some, was unsealed largely based upon the public opinion attached to it. U.S. Attorney General Garland Merrick said, “The department filed the motion to make public the warrant and receipt in light of the former president’s public confirmation of the search, the surrounding circumstances, and the substantial public interest in this matter.”

Events having Trump’s name attached to them have only just begun.

It is my opinion that the Department of Justice has gotten his full attention. Sleepless nights, nerves on edge and lots of diet sodas will be on his menu for the foreseeable future.

I wonder if Mr. T played hide and seek as a child? If he had, he would have known that he would eventually be found.

The United States Department of Justice has found him.

This may just be his last game of hide and seek.

James B. Ewers Jr., Ed.D., is a former tennis champion at Atkins High School in Winston-Salem and played college tennis at Johnson C. Smith University, where he was all-conference for four years. He is a retired college administrator. He can be reached at overtimefergie.2020@yahoo.com.