The Daily Fuckup

By March 29, 2021, Donald Trump was out of office but not out of the news cycle that followed him into it. The issues around him were not resolving. They were stacking up: records requests, congressional inquiries, and the continuing effort to piece together what happened before, during and after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. None of that was new on March 29. It was the status quo.

The financial-records fight had already been re-ignited earlier in the month. On March 3, 2021, House investigators reissued a subpoena to Deutsche Bank seeking records tied to Trump’s finances. The committee said it needed the material to carry out oversight tied to national security and foreign financial entanglements, and it said the subpoena was a continuation of an earlier fight that had been stalled in court. By the end of the month, that dispute was still active — not because something new had happened that day, but because the underlying questions had not gone away.

Jan. 6 was the other open front. On March 25, committee chairs from across the House sent letters to the White House, federal agencies, law enforcement and congressional entities seeking documents and communications tied to the attack on the Capitol. Those requests covered the period before, during and after the assault and were aimed at building a record of what happened and who knew what when. The letters made clear that the investigation was still in motion, with agencies still being asked for material tied to the riot and the security breakdown around it.

That left Trump in the same position he had occupied for years: central to a series of unresolved fights that were legal, political and institutional all at once. The calendar had changed, but the basic pattern had not. His post-presidency was already defined less by any clean break than by the unfinished business of his time in office, with Congress still pressing for records and explanations and Trump still resisting the scrutiny aimed at him.