Trump Presidency Archives: The Temptation of Housekeeping?

When the White House is preparing to change tenants, Wednesday, January 20, the day of the inauguration of Joe Biden, the specialists of the archives of the American presidential residence fear that Donald Trump will erase certain presidential documents. As pointed out The Guardian, the outgoing president is however obliged by law to keep traces of his archives, to which the general public will not have access for five years. The British daily reports that historians are worried that a “gaping hole” has been discovered and that these have partly disappeared.

And for good reason, members of his staff say they saw him tear and throw documents, which they had to piece together and glue back together. “They told him to stop doing it. He didn’t want to stop, ”Solomon Lartey, a former White House archives analyst, told The Associated Press. Between 2016, the year of the start of Donald Trump’s mandate, and mid-2018, at least ten documents should have been glued. Another example of the American president’s desire to erase archives, Donald Trump would also have confiscated the notes of an interpreter after one of his conversations with Vladimir Poutin.

“Historians will probably suffer from many more holes than the norm,” warns Richard Immerman of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. Under the Trump presidency, “not only was record keeping not a priority, but we have numerous examples that show that certain documents have been withheld or destroyed,” he also adds. Currently, two American historical associations, the National Security Archives and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington have launched legal proceedings to prevent him from destroying e-mails or official messages exchanged on private accounts.


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