President Donald Trump is engaged in a war on government records unlike any other chief executive in modern history — and he is flouting the law to suit his purposes, wrote Zeeshan Aleem in a blistering column for MSNBC published on Monday afternoon.
Some of this effort has led to the infamous "Signalgate" controversy, where Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth was found to be sharing highly dangerous military battle strategy in chats with relatives and a reporter for The Atlantic. But that's just the tip of the iceberg, Aleem wrote.
"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,'" wrote Aleem. "It's a useful lens for understanding how Trump conceals information to evade accountability and undermine democracy."
Those efforts include not just hiding government communications on Signal, but purging websites and databases the administration disagrees with, and hiding all information possible about tech billionaire Elon Musk's DOGE purge, even as Musk himself falls from grace.
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This is hardly a new trend, he noted: "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" — and it formed a major criminal case before a Trump-appointed judge in Florida helped him throw it in the garbage.
While the president is bound by records-retention laws, those 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."
The bottom line, wrote Aleem, is that "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."
