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A new Associated Press analysis of President Donald Trump's many methods for destroying records raises the remarkable possibility that the Trump administration could "leave less for the nation’s historical record than nearly any before it." It's a useful lens for understanding how Trump conceals information to evade accountability and undermine democracy.
As the AP notes, there are many different ways that Trump is making it impossible to track what his administration is doing:
The Trump administration is scrubbing thousands of government websites of history, legal records and data it finds disagreeable. It has sought to expand the executive branch’s power to shield from public view the government-slashing efforts of Elon Musk’s team and other key administration initiatives. Officials have used apps such as Signal that can auto-delete messages containing sensitive information rather than retaining them for recordkeeping. And they have shaken up the National Archives leadership and even ordered the rewriting of history on display at the Smithsonian Institution.
This all comes as HuffPost recently estimated that the White House has declined to release transcripts for about 80% of the president’s speeches and interactions with the press so far.
And Trump's first term involved many extraordinary attacks on recordkeeping, including reportedly routinely discarding papers in the White House fireplace, deriding his staff for taking notes and tearing up documents into tiny pieces. Trump also improperly stored classified material at Mar-a-Lago after he left office.
Much as a mob boss detests a paper trail, Trump is averse to the idea of keeping records.
As The Associated Press observes, the president is legally required to "keep up the historical record." But retention laws are difficult to enforce, which means that a lot of compliance with them effectively relies on the honor system.
Trump's view of honor systems, of course, is that they are for suckers. And he knows that he stands to benefit from keeping the public in the dark and avoiding mechanisms for accountability.
One way is that Trump gets to lessen real-time accountability to the public for his own positions. Refusing to track and publish public remarks and circumventing traceable policy recordkeeping makes it easier for the president and those around him to shirk responsibility for lies, broken promises, policy flip-flops or rhetoric that ages poorly. It allows him to reinvent and massage reality in his favor.
Trump also gets to avoid accountability for future investigations, whether from Congress or elsewhere. Much as a mob boss detests a paper trail, Trump is averse to the idea of keeping records of everything he and his inner circle are considering, as he constantly pursues schemes that push up against or transgress the law. Think about how text messages helped make the impeachment case against Trump's attempted quid pro quo with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Trump's first term. Think about testimony revealing that then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows burned documents during the same period that Trump made efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Trump isn't just keeping the public, the media and the courts in the dark. He's also making it harder for future generations of scholars to study our political era and understand how his government worked — and didn't work.