When I heard last night that the FBI had raided Trump’s garish Florida mansion, my first reaction was, “Jesus, what took them so long?”

There’s a line of thinking that the public explanation about searching for public documents Trump illegally airlifted out of the White House is merely a cover for executing a raid that very likely will sweep evidence of all sorts of other Trump malfeasance. And that would surprise exactly no one who doesn’t sleep with a Trump-as-Rambo poster over their bed.

Among all the things that have astonished me in the context of Trump’s appeal to “conservatives” is the blindered unwillingness to see the guy as the “fraud” and “con man” his fellow Republican candidates told us he was back in 2015. Why? Because Trump’s astonishing disregard for business ethics, tax laws, SEC statutes, immigration laws and, well, you name it, was abundantly well known to anyone who did business with him in New York and anyone with a passing interest in business reporting by credible national newsapers. There was never any excuse for the Rewpublican managerial class not knowing this long before he descended on the gilded elevator. It was a known fact shortly after he began stinking up the real estate/gossip column scene in the early Eighties.

And yet … to this day … the guy has never been indicted. Hell, we’re to believe his taxes from over a decade ago are still under audit!

And a bit further down the rap sheet, there doesn’t appear to be any on-going investigation of the extremely shady, Russia-assisted “banking” he did with Deutsche Bank, the only crowd of money changers willing to loan him money … even after he sued them … after he refused to re-pay the loan they gave him for Trump Tower Chicago. (I strongly encourage anyone interested to read “Dark Towers”, New York Times financial reporter David Enrich’s briskly-paced tale of the bank’s myriad nefarious executives and endeavors, including those buttressing Trump at his most desperate moments.)

Whether this raid is the first of many dominoes to fall in the clearly broadening, deepening investigation into Trump’s January 6 behavior we must wait … a while longer.

But after consuming 48 hours of reporting and pounditry on this FBI raid. my lizard mind has focused with acute fascinatioin on the nature of these Top, Top Secret documents/information the Feds clearly believe he still possessed. This the information so ultra top secret it can not even be described.

Really? Wow.

But we do know a few things abut this stuff.

A: The Feds absolutely believed Trump had the info, and convinced a Federal judge to let it raid the home of a former President to get it back.

B: Trump quite obviously lied about having whatever it is and did not include it in the 15 boxes of trinkets and souvenirs and whatever the Feds toted away last spring.

C: The Feds and the judge agreed that Trump was unlikely to ever hand it back in a polite, professional manner.

And D: They had good reason to believe Trump would destroy what they were looking for if they gave any notice that they were coming to get it.

Hence, a raid, much like kicking in the door on a meth dealer in Albuquerque.

So then I ask myself, “What would Donald Trump steal and cling to so desperately that he’d risk this scene?”

And I answer by reminding myself that we know two things about Trump with absolute certainty, namely everything is about him and money. This leads me to suspect that whatever Super Double Secret Probation information he stole has to have very high value in terms of either protecting him from some kind of prosecution and/or can be monetized in a negotiation with another party … most likely in a highly nefarious context.

(One of the facical aspects of this episode, as one national security expert pointed out yesterday, is that Trump was obviously too stupid to realize that as POTUS he had the authority to de-classify anything, including whatever the Feds are looking for now, and therefore could have avoided this whole mess.)

Finally, as fans of John LeCarre certainly understand, whatever the Feds are looking for is not one-of-a-kind. There would be copies somewhere. Which means that other than the illegality of iut, the peril her, the risk to national security is who has this information.

And in that case it is the as-yet-unindicted careeert fraud and con man Donald Trump, who long ago demonstrated he will do anything to get what he wants.