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Los Angeles Times
20-05-2025
- Politics
- Los Angeles Times
The future of history: Trump could leave less documentation behind than any previous U.S. president
WASHINGTON — For generations, official American documents have been meticulously preserved and protected — from the era of quills and parchment to boxes of paper to the cloud, safeguarding snapshots of the government and the nation for posterity. Now, the Trump administration has sought to expand the executive branch's power to shield from public view key administration initiatives. Officials have used apps like Signal that can auto-delete messages containing sensitive information rather than retaining them for record-keeping. And they have shaken up the National Archives leadership. To historians and archivists, it points to the possibility that President Trump will leave less for the nation's historical record than nearly any president before him. Such an eventuality creates a conundrum: How will experts — and even ordinary Americans — piece together what occurred when those charged with setting aside the artifacts properly documenting history refuse to do so? The Trump administration says it's the 'most transparent in history,' citing the president's fondness for taking questions from reporters nearly every day. But flooding the airwaves, media outlets and the internet with all things Trump isn't the same as keeping records that document the inner workings of an administration, historians caution. 'He thinks he controls history,' says Timothy Naftali, a presidential historian who served as founding director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda. 'He wants to control what Americans ultimately find out about the truth of his administration, and that's dangerous.' Trump long refused to release his tax returns despite every other major White House candidate and president having done so since Jimmy Carter. And, today, White House stenographers still record every word Trump utters, but many of their transcriptions are languishing in the White House press office without authorization for release — meaning there's no official record of what the president says for weeks, if at all. 'You want to have a record because that's how you ensure accountability,' said Lindsay Chervinsky, executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library in Mount Vernon, Va. The Presidential Records Act of 1978 mandates the preservation, forever, of White House and vice presidential documents and communications. It deems them the property of the U.S. government and directs the National Archives and Records Administration to administer them after a president's term. After his first term, rather than turn classified documents over the National Archives, Trump hauled boxes of potentially sensitive documents to his Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, where they ended up piled in his bedroom, a ballroom and even a bathroom and shower. The FBI raided the property to recover them. The case was later scrapped. Trudy Huskamp Peterson, who served as acting archivist of the United States from 1993 to 1995, said keeping such records for the public is important because 'decision-making always involves conflicting views, and it's really important to get that internal documentation to see what the arguments were.' President George H.W. Bush's administration destroyed some informal notes, visitor logs and emails. After President Clinton left office, his former national security advisor, Sandy Berger, pleaded guilty to taking copies of a document about terrorist threats from the National Archives. President George W. Bush's administration disabled automatic archiving for some official emails, encouraged some staffers to use private email accounts outside their work addresses and lost 22 million emails that were supposed to have been archived, though they were eventually uncovered in 2009. Congress updated the Presidential Records Act in 2014 to encompass electronic messaging — including commercial email services known to be used by government employees to conduct official business. But back then, use of auto-delete apps like Signal was far less common. 'It's far easier to copy — or forward — a commercial email to a dot-gov address to be preserved, than it is to screenshot a series of messages on an app like Signal,' said Jason R. Baron, a professor at the University of Maryland and former director of litigation at the National Archives. There were efforts during the first Trump administration to safeguard transparency, including a memo issued through the office of White House counsel Don McGahn in February 2017 that reminded White House personnel of the necessity to preserve and maintain presidential records. The White House now points to having recently ordered the declassification of bevies of historical files, including records related to the assassinations of Kennedy, his brother Robert and Martin Luther King Jr. The Trump administration says it also ended a Biden policy that allowed staffers to use Microsoft Teams, where chats weren't captured by White House systems. The Biden administration had over 800 users on Teams, meaning an unknown number of presidential records might have been lost, the Trump administration now says. But the White House did not answer questions about the possibly of drafting a new memo on record retention like McGahn's from 2017. Chervinsky, author of 'The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution,' said Congress, the courts and even the public often don't have the bandwidth to ensure records retention laws are enforced, meaning, 'a lot of it is still, I think, an honor system.' 'There aren't that many people who are practicing oversight,' she said. 'So, a lot of it does require people acting in good faith and using the operating systems that they're supposed to use, and using the filing systems they're supposed to use.' Angered by the role the National Archives played in his documents case, meanwhile, Trump fired the ostensibly independent agency's head, Archivist of the United States Colleen Shogan, and named Secretary of State Marco Rubio as her acting replacement. Peterson, the former acting national archivist, said she still believes key information about the Trump administration will eventually emerge, but 'I don't know how soon.' 'Ultimately things come out,' she said. 'That's just the way the world works.' Weissert writes for the Associated Press.
Yahoo
18-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Presidential historian calls for end to 'silly' Presidents' Day, compares it to celebrating a king's birthday
Presidential historian Lindsay Chervinsky argued on Monday, Presidents' Day, that the holiday shouldn't be celebrated during a conversation on MSNBC, suggesting the actions of different presidents should be celebrated, but not the people themselves. "It is a little bit silly. I mean, we have had some real duds, so I'm not sure we really want to be celebrating all presidents. And the tradition actually comes from celebrating birthdays, which is a celebration that we inherited from celebrating the king, and I'm just not sure that that's exactly what we want. I think instead, it makes a lot more sense to celebrate actions," Chervinsky, who is also the executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library, said. Presidents' Day occurs on the third Monday of every February, and celebrates all U.S. presidents, though it originally celebrated George Washington's birthday, which was on Feb. 22. MSNBC host Ali Vitali asked Chervinsky to explain why she felt the holiday was "ridiculous." "Let's celebrate Washington returning his command and ensuring that there wasn't a military dictatorship. Let's celebrate Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. Things that they actually had control over as opposed to their birthday," she added. Msnbc Legal Analyst Pushes Back On 'Morning Joe' Co-hosts Sounding Alarm On 'Constitutional Crisis' Vitali then brought up something Chervinsky said earlier in the show, "the idea that Trump posted something just over the weekend where he quoted Napoleon Bonaparte-esque saying, 'He who saves his country does not violate any law.'" Read On The Fox News App "It feels like exactly the example of what you're saying we should push against," Vitali added. Chervinsky agreed and said a president shouldn't be celebrated just because they exist. "I think if we think of a president as someone to celebrate just because they exist, which is what the king was, and that's why they celebrated the king's birthday, then you kind of - it does evolve into that argument that they can do no wrong," Chervinsky continued. Click Here For More Coverage Of Media And Culture Protests broke out across the country today over Trump's policies, according to reports, including outside the Capitol in Washington, D.C. Vitali asked Chervinsky about the "star power" often needed to win the presidency. "I think it's worth acknowledging, like, really excellent skills. It's worth respecting those things. But I think that if we see them as somehow other, it causes us to believe that we shouldn't criticize, we shouldn't analyze, we shouldn't hold accountable," Chervinksy said. She concluded that presidents should be celebrated for specific actions and leadership, not just because they're the person in article source: Presidential historian calls for end to 'silly' Presidents' Day, compares it to celebrating a king's birthday
Fox News
17-02-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
Presidential historian calls for end to 'silly' Presidents' Day, compares it to celebrating a king's birthday
Presidential historian Lindsay Chervinsky argued on Monday, Presidents' Day, that the holiday shouldn't be celebrated during a conversation on MSNBC, suggesting the actions of different presidents should be celebrated, but not the people themselves. "It is a little bit silly. I mean, we have had some real duds, so I'm not sure we really want to be celebrating all presidents. And the tradition actually comes from celebrating birthdays, which is a celebration that we inherited from celebrating the king, and I'm just not sure that that's exactly what we want. I think instead, it makes a lot more sense to celebrate actions," Chervinsky, who is also the executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library, said. Presidents' Day occurs on the third Monday of every February, and celebrates all U.S. presidents, though it originally celebrated George Washington's birthday, which was on Feb. 22. MSNBC host Ali Vitali asked Chervinsky to explain why she felt the holiday was "ridiculous." "Let's celebrate Washington returning his command and ensuring that there wasn't a military dictatorship. Let's celebrate Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. Things that they actually had control over as opposed to their birthday," she added. Vitali then brought up something Chervinsky said earlier in the show, "the idea that Trump posted something just over the weekend where he quoted Napoleon Bonaparte-esque saying, 'He who saves his country does not violate any law.'" "It feels like exactly the example of what you're saying we should push against," Vitali added. Chervinsky agreed and said a president shouldn't be celebrated just because they exist. "I think if we think of a president as someone to celebrate just because they exist, which is what the king was, and that's why they celebrated the king's birthday, then you kind of - it does evolve into that argument that they can do no wrong," Chervinsky continued. Protests broke out across the country today over Trump's policies, according to reports, including outside the Capitol in Washington, D.C. Vitali asked Chervinsky about the "star power" often needed to win the presidency. "I think it's worth acknowledging, like, really excellent skills. It's worth respecting those things. But I think that if we see them as somehow other, it causes us to believe that we shouldn't criticize, we shouldn't analyze, we shouldn't hold accountable," Chervinksy said. She concluded that presidents should be celebrated for specific actions and leadership, not just because they're the person in power.
CBS News
26-01-2025
- Politics
- CBS News
Trump's first week: Congress, courts consider their "checks and balances"
President Donald Trump descended on Washington last week weathering a cold front that pushed his inauguration indoors. But the winter winds were no match for the flurry of executive orders, pardons, and pens he let fly. Mr. Trump swept away Biden administration policies with each jagged stroke. To many in Washington, it seems like history is unfolding before us. "Absolutely," said presidential historian Lindsay Chervinsky, executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library in Mount Vernon, Va. "The thing that's really interesting about studying history is when people are living through historic moments, they know it. "There's no doubt that seeing a president come back after being defeated in an election, that's only happened one other time, and came back after being indicted on dozens of felony charges, and was involved in an insurrection to overthrow the previous election. These are just not things we've seen before," Chervinsky said. "And so, there's no doubt that we are living in a historic moment." On his first day in office, Mr. Trump pardoned some 1,500 January 6th defendants, and broke the record for signing executive orders, issuing even more in the days that followed. They range from re-naming the Gulf of Mexico … to ending diversity efforts in the federal workforce … to exiting the Paris climate accords and the World Health Organization … and reinstating anti-abortion policies from his first term. He has also tried to upend the constitutional right to citizenship for all children born on American soil. But a federal judge already put that change on hold. Chervinsky said, "We are in a system that has separation of powers. There are supposed to be checks and balances. And it is essential that both Congress and the court do their job to check the president, as the president checks them. That is how the system was designed to work. And I think that should give Americans comfort that they occasionally still want to actually do that role." Executive orders have often been pivotal, and controversial. Think of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, or FDR's funding of the Manhattan Project, and his internment of Japanese Americans in 1942. Recall Eisenhower's deployment of troops to desegregate Southern schools, and Kennedy's creation of the Peace Corps. In the past decade, there has been a back-and-forth, with Obama, Trump and Biden reversing each other's policies. Chervinsky said, "When a president needs to use executive orders to get most of their agenda done, it means either that the agenda is not particularly popular, or it is a reflection of the ills in our current political system. Congress doesn't do much. They don't pass that much legislation. They're kind of a broken institution. So, what we see is that a president is trying to go around that. And until Congress tells them not to, they're going to continue doing it. "There have always been periods of fighting, to be sure," Chervinsky said. "American politics is messy." "You've even called it 'vicious,'" I said "That would be an accurate description!" Chervinsky laughed. It all recalls Benjamin Franklin's answer when asked whether America was a monarchy or a republic. Franklin said, "A republic, if you can keep it." I said, "We've been through all of this in the past, and here we are today, carrying on." "So far!" Chervinsky laughed. "One of the things that's great about history is it reminds us that we can be in really bad periods but come out of it. What I think about our current moment perhaps is different is that we have forgotten that nothing is absolute and nothing is permanent. "The founding generation, they had skin in the game because they had fought in the war, or they had been in Congress when this government was founded. And so, no matter how terrible it was, they never wanted to throw it out completely, because they had tried to build this thing from scratch. "I think a lot of Americans today take for granted that we will always be here," Chervinsky said.
