Everything about Donald Trump is on some level simply ridiculous, so sometimes it seems like a waste of time to take anything about him seriously. But hoarding extremely sensitive documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate is something can’t be ignored.

Now, I knew that the FBI searched the premises and found documents in both a storage closet and his personal office, but I didn’t have more than a vague idea of how secure these locations were. Thankfully, the New York Times has fulfilled my desire to have a clearer picture. They’ve created a 3-D representation of the grounds and layout of the Palm Beach resort. They’ve also looked at a lot of photographs taken by guests who attended scores of events held at Mar-a-Lago since Trump left office.

By matching these things up, it’s clear that the storage closet was not remotely secure. The doors leading to the closet were wide open in many of the photos the Times examined, and anyone could have wandered in and starting poking around. Some of these events had as many as 800 guests, so you can imagine what level of vetting was going on. The main security for these documents was simply the hope that no one foreign intelligence agency knew they were there.

The documents in his office, which were located in both his desk and in a container in a closet, were easily accessible by both an external and an internal staircase, both of which were in heavily trafficked public spaces. There were no guards posted in any of the photos, and generally no barriers to the stairs either. Trump also invited scores of people into his office where they posed for photographs. The main security for the documents in his office was simply the risk of being caught there without an invitation.

Presumably, the storage area and the office were regularly locked when no one was using them, but after the FBI complained about the security at the storage area, the Trump team responded by adding an additional lock. Of course, chairs and umbrellas were also stored there, so it’s unlikely that access to the keys was strictly limited to those with the highest security clearances.

Now, I know there are Trump supporters who think the former president had the right to declassify anything he wanted and to hold on to any documents he wanted. But I don’t think anyone can honestly feel that the way Trump treated these documents was responsible.

I mean, Jesus, the man didn’t even use a safe.

At least half the problem here is that Trump never took his job very seriously, which is why highly classified documents wound up packed haphazardly in boxes containing clothes, mementos, magazine articles and newspaper clippings. They ultimately showed up not just at Mar-a-Lago but in a West Palm Beach storage unit containing documents shipped from a Northern Virginia office “used by Trump staffers.”

If he’d followed basic protocols about safeguarding national security secrets, his staffers in Northern Virginia wouldn’t have possession of them, and they wouldn’t be packing them up on pallets filled with “gifts, suits and clothes.”

It pays to remember that this is a broken promise. Trump very successfully and with some justification made a giant issue during the 2016 campaign about Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server to store sensitive government documents and communications. He said she should be locked up for her negligence. The premise was that he’d do a much better job of protecting our country’s secrets, and it’s obvious that he did an immeasurably worse job.

Trump is in trouble because of this carelessness. But if he is prosecuted over his handling of documents, it will be mainly because he lied about it and obstructed justice. None of this should be necessary, but his actions have made it impossible to give him a pass.