Digital age risks paper trail of acccountability

Donald Trump could leave less documentation behind than any previous US president. Will Weissert of the Associated Press reports

- 

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 Donald 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, California. "He wants to control what Americans find out about the truth of his administration, and that's dangerous."