President Donald Trump’s second time period as president will certainly go down in historical past, although after all, simply six months into his four-year time period, a lot of this story has but to be written.
However it’s already clear that the majority Individuals won’t be able to learn precisely what Trump has mentioned, as they’ve with earlier presidents, throughout his present time period within the White Home.
The White Home has eliminated the official transcripts of Trump’s public remarks from its authorities web site, NBC News reported in Could 2025, changing the written transcripts with choose movies and audio of Trump’s public appearances.
White Home officers told NBC News that this swap ought to assist folks get a fuller, extra constant and correct sense of Trump by watching and listening to him, quite than studying what he says verbatim at official occasions.
Authorities stenographers are additionally nonetheless recording and transcribing all of Trump’s remarks, although these are now not being revealed on the White Home’s web site or elsewhere. It’s not clear the place or how these transcriptions are being saved.
For years, translators, reporters, college students, historians and presidential scholars like me have used official presidential transcripts to grasp a president’s precise phrases and monitor authorities choices. With out these written transcripts, it turns into more durable to get the complete story of precisely what the president has carried out or mentioned.
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A partial historical past
A nation’s historical past is etched in its information. The preservation of official proceedings supplies the bedrock for understanding a rustic’s previous and navigating its future.
A rising refrain of historians, public officers and transparency advocates is raising alarms about how the Trump administration is curating and probably manipulating the federal government’s information and actions.
The White Home’s current choice to not share official, written transcripts of what the president has mentioned is not the first time this situation has emerged below Trump.
As I wrote in 2021, the primary Trump administration didn’t persistently submit the transcripts of the president’s political rally speeches to the National Archives, as was the customized with earlier presidents. The Nationwide Archives is an unbiased authorities company throughout the government department that preserves the nation’s historical records.
This official recordkeeping is necessary, and it’s greater than a practice – it’s a authorized obligation. A legislation known as the Presidential Records Act of 1978 says that every little thing a president does in workplace – from making speeches to writing emails – belongs to the general public.
This contains not simply formal speeches, but in addition public remarks and oral exchanges, that are historically included in a compilation of presidential documents.
My examination of this compilation for 2025 seems to point out a spot in such information from mid-April 2025 onward. Whereas the transcript of Trump’s full remarks when talking with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni was published on this government site on April 18, for instance, publicly out there paperwork from Could solely embody a guidelines of White Home press releases, a digest of White Home bulletins and a listing of acts that the president signed into legislation.
Within the absence of full official information from authorities sources, exterior, unbiased organizations that additionally monitor the presidency, like The American Presidency Project on the College of California, Santa Barbara, have change into essential repositories.
The American Presidency Undertaking diligently logs and, when transcripts are unavailable, supplies video of public presidential messaging, striving to create as full a document as doable for all curious viewers and readers.
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Washington’s letters up in flames
The battle over preserving an sincere document of presidents is an issue that comes up time and again in American historical past.
Maybe probably the most highly effective instance of dropping historic information comes from the nation’s very first president, George Washington. He knew he was setting an instance for all future presidents and saved very cautious information. He wished to depart an entire story of his life and his work for the longer term.
However there’s little or no of it left.
After Washington died, his spouse, Martha, burned most of the letters they wrote to one another to maintain their lives personal.
Washington left his official papers to his nephew, Supreme Court docket Justice Bushrod Washington. However Bushrod gave a lot of them to Chief Justice John Marshall, who was writing a ebook in regards to the president. The papers were not treated rigorously, and plenty of have been broken. To make issues worse, Bushrod would typically tear off scraps of Washington’s writings and provides them to folks as souvenirs.
The result’s that Individuals have an incomplete image of their first president. What now exists is a weaker model of the true story, created extra by what different folks did than by what Washington himself had deliberate.
Reminiscences fade, and persons are not round endlessly.
The principle means that the U.S. can protect its story is thru correct information. The present arguments over saving transcripts and official papers are about extra than simply guidelines. They’re in regards to the future. The information that Trump and different presidents depart behind will resolve if folks sooner or later see them as they actually have been, or simply how they wished others to view them.
