Democrats and anti-Trumpers on the conservative side are both sharing a segment from a recent Donald Trump interview with Newsmax. In the edited clip, Trump returns to the “famous socks case” — as he refers to it on the stump — concerning Bill Clinton‘s treatment of interview audio tapes from his time in the Oval Office, which were reportedly kept in his sock drawer.
[NOTE: The “socks” case is important to Trump and his legal team in the federal documents case against him because of Clinton’s having designated the recordings as personal records, not official presidential records, and so not subject to being logged at the National Archives and Records Administration under the Presidential Records Act.]
But Trump antagonists are sharing the video because of the former President’s assertion that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Trump’s opponent in the 2016 presidential race, used “acid” to hide and destroy documents and data that she would otherwise have had to turn over.
Trump says Hillary Clinton used acid that would essentially destroy everything within 10 miles and Bill Clinton took classified material in his socks pic.twitter.com/2s6vtlJEcY
— Acyn (@Acyn) March 14, 2024
Trump said of Clinton: “By the way they released Hillary Clinton. She hammered her phones. She used all sorts of acid testing and everything else. They call it BleachBit but it’s essentially acid that will destroy everything, you know, within ten miles.”
Tom Nichols, Atlantic writer and former professor at the U.S. Naval War College, wrote about the video saying: “Imagine how long we’d have to discuss Joe Biden’s belief in some special crime-covering acid with a ten mile radius. Trump firehoses this stuff out every day, and it’s never the main story.”
BleachBit, which Trump calls “essentially acid,” is not acid but software that protects privacy, shreds files, and frees disk space on computers. Being software, it also does not operate outside computer systems and has no collateral environmental impact — not for an inch or “ten miles.”
Trump is using figurative language. Trump’s opponents assert that his figurative language is misleading and irresponsible because it is often taken literally. They also assert, as Nichols does above, that his wild claims are indicative of Trump’s lack of intellectual acuity.
Perhaps it is relevant vis-a-vis the criminal charges in the federal documents case against Trump that destroyed BleachBit files are no longer available and can’t be shared or sold or even returned to the National Archives and Records Administration. The maker of BleachBit describes its application in the paragraph below:
“BleachBit guards your privacy. With BleachBit you can free cache, delete cookies, clear Internet history, shred temporary files, delete logs, and discard junk you didn’t know was there. Designed for Linux and Windows systems, it wipes clean thousands of applications including Firefox, Adobe Flash, Google Chrome, Opera, and more. Beyond simply deleting files, BleachBit includes advanced features such as shredding files to prevent recovery, wiping free disk space to hide traces of files deleted by other applications, and vacuuming Firefox to make it faster. Better than free, BleachBit is open source.”