Perhaps it’s finally dawned on former President Donald Trump that he really, really is in deeper trouble than he’d realized. According to a story in The Atlantic, he looked uncharacteristically afraid in an interview earlier in the week. An interview, it turns out, that may have exacerbated his legal troubles, according to one prominent columnist.

In his column for The Atlantic, Tom Nichols writes that Trump’s “jittery and combative” tone during his two-part interview with Fox News host Bret Baier, wasn’t what made him think the ex-president was fearful. “That’s not unusual, Nichols wrote.

Instead, what caught his attention was just how uneasy Trump seemed on what’s usually his home turf. It gave Nichols the impression that something was really going on with the former president.

“Donald Trump seems, more than anything, to be afraid,” he wrote.

Nichols added that even though Trump has frequently complained about the right-wing cable network, “Fox, after all, is the network that proved its commitment to Trump by shelling out $787.5 million as the price of supporting his fantasies about voting machines. And yet, by the end of the interview, Trump was calling Fox a ‘hostile’ network.”

Well, after all, at the end of the day, a venomous snake is still just that — venomous. Apologies to snakes everywhere.

Trump’s answer to one question, in particular, caught Nichols’s attention. And it’s a question that he believes is going to give Trump and his lawyers the panic attacks.

“In a potentially important moment, Baier pressed Trump about why he hadn’t simply returned the boxes of materials as the government demanded,” Nichols wrote.

But that’s not all Nichols observed.

“Trump, after his ritual invocation of the Divine Right of Presidential Box Ownership, said that he’d wanted to return them but hadn’t had enough time to go through everything, so he didn’t know what was in them. Bad move: Trump had already gotten his lawyers to certify that he did, in fact, know what was in them — or, more accurately, to certify that nothing classified or sensitive remained. As some legal analysts quickly pointed out, including a former prosecutor named Chris Christie, this sounds a lot like obstruction of justice.“

So perhaps Trump is becoming more afraid. If he’s not he should be. The walls are closing in on him, with two indictments (the much-mentioned hush money payments case and the classified documents case.) Then there’s the real possibility of another indictment coming out of Georgia on claims that he allegedly tried to interfere with the 2020 presidential election in the state.

It seems to me that now is as good a time as any for him to start worrying.

Baier: Why not just hand them over? Trump: Because I had boxes, I want to go through the boxes and get all my personal things pic.twitter.com/PwW85wlTzH

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 19, 2023