The future of history: Trump could leave less documentation behind than any previous U.S. president

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 is scrubbing thousands of government websites of history, legal records and data it finds disagreeable.

It has sought to expand the executive branch’s power to shield from public view the government-slashing efforts of Elon Musk’s team and other key administration initiatives. Officials have used apps such as Signal that can auto-delete messages containing sensitive information rather than retaining them for recordkeeping. And they have shaken up the National Archives leadership and even ordered the rewriting of history on display at the Smithsonian Institution.