20 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER23, 2020
AMERICAN CHRONICLES
THE TRUMP PAPERS
What will happen to the President’s records when he leaves the White House?
BY JILLLEPORE
ILLUSTRATION BY JAVIER JAÉN
for fear of disclosure, and cannot abide
disclosure for fear of disparagement. For
decades, in private life, he required peo-
ple who worked with him, and with the
Trump Organization, to sign nondis-
closure agreements, pledging never to
say a bad word about him, his family, or
his businesses. He also extracted non-
disclosure agreements from women with
whom he had or is alleged to have had
sex, including both of his ex-wives. In
2015 and 2016, he required these con-
tracts from people involved in his cam-
paign, including a distributor of his
“Make America Great Again” hats. (Hil-
lary Clinton’s 2016 campaign required
N.D.A.s from some employees, too. In
2020, Joe Biden called on Michael
Bloomberg to release his former em-
ployees from such agreements.) In 2017,
Trump, unable to distinguish between
private life and public service, carried
his practice of requiring nondisclosure
agreements into the Presidency, demand-
ing that senior White House staff sign
N.D.A.s. According to the Washing-
ton Post, at least one of them, in draft
form, included this language: “I under-
stand that the United States Govern-
ment or, upon completion of the term(s)
of Mr. Donald J. Trump, an authorized
representative of Mr. Trump, may seek
any remedy available to enforce this
Agreement including, but not limited
to, application for a court order prohib-
iting disclosure of information in breach
of this Agreement.” Aides warned him
that, for White House employees, such
agreements are likely not legally en-
forceable. The White House counsel,
Don McGahn, refused to distribute
them; eventually, he relented, and the
chief of staff, Reince Priebus, pressured
employees to sign them.
Those N.D.A.s haven’t stopped a
small village’s worth of ex-Trump Cab-
inet members and staffers from blab-
bing about him, much to the President’s
dismay. “When people are chosen by a
man to go into government at high lev-
els and then they leave government and
they write a book about a man and say
a lot of things that were really guarded
and personal, I don’t like that,” he told
the Washington Post. In 2019, he tweeted,
“I am currently suing various people for
violating their confidentiality agree-
ments.” Last year, a former campaign
worker filed a class-action lawsuit that,
if successful, would render void all cam-
paign N.D.A.s. Trump has only stepped
up the fight. Earlier suits were filed by
Trump personally, or by his campaign,
but, last month, the Department of Jus-
tice filed suit against Stephanie Win-
ston Wolkoff for publishing a book,
“Melania and Me,” about her time vol-
unteering for the First Lady, arguing,
astonishingly, that Wolkoff ’s N.D.A. is
“a contract with the United States and
therefore enforceable by the United
States.” (Unlike the suit against Trump’s
former national-security adviser John
Bolton, relating to the publication of his
book, “The Room Where It Happened,”
Trump has made a habit of destroying documents and suppressing disclosure. there is no claim that anything in Wol- PHOTOGRAPHS: GETTY (PAPER SHREDDER); ANDREW HARRER / BLOOMBERG / GETTY (TRUMP)
D
onald Trump is not much of a note-
taker, and he does not like his staff
to take notes. He has a habit of tearing
up documents at the close of meetings.
(Records analysts, armed with Scotch
Tape, have tried to put the pieces back
together.) No real record exists for five
meetings Trump had with Vladimir Putin
during the first two years of his Presi-
dency. Members of his staff have rou-
tinely used apps that automatically erase
text messages, and Trump often deletes
his own tweets, notwithstanding a warn-
ing from the National Archives and Rec-
ords Administration that doing so con-
travenes the Presidential Records Act.
Trump cannot abide documentation
