Will Donald Trump Be Allowed to Destroy His Records?

Illustration by Ricardo Tomás Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story Donald Trump has long chafed at demands that he preserve Presidential records. During his first term, he had a habit of tearing documents into tiny pieces after he was finished with them; he persisted despite two chiefs of staff and the White House counsel urging him to stop, leaving White House employees with the task of taping them back together for archiving. “He didn’t want a record of anything,” a former senior Trump official told the Washington Post. “He never stopped ripping things up.” Maggie Haberman, in her 2022 book, “Confidence Man,” described how Trump, during his first term, “would periodically throw print paper into the toilet, which would clog the pipes and require engineers to clear them; staff sometimes found clumped-up paper themselves, with his handwriting on it, and recalled it happening on some foreign trips.”

Trump’s apparent frustration with government demands for his records erupted after he left office, when he was investigated by the special counsel Jack Smith and charged with improper retention of classified documents. (The charges were eventually dismissed by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, on the ground that Smith had been improperly appointed.) Boxes from the White House, some containing classified material, had been found crammed into a bathroom at Mar-a-Lago, next to a toilet and below a crystal chandelier. The Times reported that, according to several of Trump’s advisers, when officials from the National Archives pressed for the return of the records, Trump said, “It’s not theirs; it’s mine.”

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