It seems a lifetime ago that Donald Trump descended the escalator in his eponymous tower, to the soundtrack of Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World,” before formally announcing his Presidential bid. Melania stood a few steps ahead of him, like a teen at the mall who doesn’t want to be seen with her parent, as the two glided into an atrium of cheering supporters, some of whom were later revealed to be hired actors. In the time that has elapsed since—just nineteen months, as it turns out—Trump has mentioned that escalator ride not infrequently. “You know the famous escalator scene, right?” he asked the crowd at a rally in Manassas, Virginia, in December, 2015. “I held my breath. I said to my wife, ‘Are you sure I wanna be doing this?’ I said, ‘Let’s go.’ And we went down that escalator. And we stood, you never saw it, it looked like the Academy Awards.” The following month, in Muscatine, Iowa: “Remember the famous escalator ride? I will tell you, that takes guts. It took guts and it took certain courage, and it’s not something I’ve ever done.” Weeks before the election, in Ocala, Florida: “Coming down with Melania, the escalator, remember, in Trump Tower. It was an amazing, that was an amazing thing.” The escalator seems to represent a simpler, happier time for Trump: the adulatory crowd; the smoothness of the ride; the absence, as yet, of any meaningful responsibility.

Currently, there are fifty-seven mentions of the escalator in the Trump Archive, an online collection of Trump’s television appearances that was recently launched by the Internet Archive. Most of the videos are appended with searchable transcripts—a fun tool for those interested in lexical tics. Trump, it emerges, is a fan of the word “sleaze,” and of the phrase “tough cookie,” which he has used to describe policemen, his opponents’ political donors, Paul LePage, “real-estate guys in New York and elsewhere,” an unnamed friend who is a “great financial guy,” ISIS, three professional football players, Reince Priebus, Lyndon Johnson, and Trump’s father, Fred. He is also fond of saying that things are “peanuts” (his company, compared to the country; the wall, compared to the rest of Mexico’s budget; waterboarding, compared to James Foley’s execution). While he has referenced the Miss Universe contest many times, there is not yet a clip in the archive of Trump using the word “feminism.” He regularly uses the phrase “I’m the only one.”

As Jill Lepore wrote for this magazine, in 2015, the Internet Archive is “a digital library, a vast collection of digitized books, films, television and radio programs, music, and other stuff.” Its centerpiece is the Wayback Machine, which holds more than two hundred and seventy-nine billion snapshots of Web pages, dating back to the nineties, which might otherwise have vanished from the public record: everything from articles in now defunct publications to Terms of Service agreements, which can (and have) been used as court evidence. Among the many now deleted or revamped pages held by the Wayback Machine is Trump’s own Web site from 2000, replete with a pixelated animation of his properties, set to a clubby soundtrack.

At the moment, the videos in the Trump Archive are curated from an existing trove of television-news recordings held by the Internet Archive, but engineers are working on a way to automatically cull relevant clips. (In the years to come, they’re surely going to need one.) The curators began the collection by turning to fact-checking sites such as PolitiFact and FactCheck.org, to help them identify videos of public interest and historical relevance. “In a time when fake news has seemed ascendant, to have a repository of factual information to ground assertions in is really helpful,” Nancy Watzman, the managing editor of the Television Archive at the Internet Archive, told me. The Trump Archive is the first of what Watzman and others hope will become a series of collections on public officials.

It occurred to me that spending time online in the Trump Archive could be a form of immersion therapy: a means of overcoming shock through prolonged exposure. Last weekend, I invited a companion to my apartment and together we dug in. The Internet Archive began recording television-news broadcasts in bulk in 2009; currently, the earliest video in the Trump Archive is from December of that year: a segment from “Your World with Neil Cavuto,” an afternoon business program on Fox News. Donald Trump—introduced by Cavuto as “another classy guy joining us”—called in to discuss the economy. “The economy is the economy,” Trump says. “We have to get it going.”

In the opening scene of “Donald Trump: All American Billionaire,” a 2010 documentary from BBC2, a visit to Trump Tower reveals a now familiar approach to décor: a copy of Trump magazine lies on the waiting-room table and magazine covers adorned with Trump’s visage cover the walls, in gold frames. Someone resembling Eric Trump walks past reception. “You don’t have to be a Trump to work here, but it helps,” the BBC2’s Emily Maitlis narrates, as the camera takes in the offices of Ivanka and Donald, Jr. “Nepotism? Well, it’s a charge they’ve always had to deal with.”

Watching these earlier clips, it was almost soothing to see Trump as solely a businessman: repeating the word “success,” discussing his net worth (“it’s very hard to say what you’re worth, but I would say well over six billion dollars”). He spoke calmly, without vitriol. Trump’s television narrative took a turn around 2011. In a clip from March of that year, from “Fox and Friends,” Trump, then “seriously considering” running for office, discusses international relations with the show’s hosts. “I dealt with Qaddafi,” he tells them over the phone. “I don’t want to use the word ‘screwed,’ but I screwed him. That’s what we should be doing. I rented him a piece of land in Bedford, New York. I rented him a piece of land, he paid me a fortune, and then I didn’t let him use the land . . . because I didn’t want to.”

We skipped ahead to 2016. There was Trump aboard his 757, telling Chuck Todd, from “Meet the Press,” that he intended to rescind DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals): “We’re gonna keep the families together, we have to keep the families together, but they have to go.” About twenty minutes into this nostalgia fest, my companion hit the space bar to pause. “How’s your heart rate?” he asked.

Ninety minutes in, I sensed that I simply couldn’t hear what Trump was saying. We were awash in Trump’s unique speech patterns; we were surfing the wave of his rhetoric, or it was surfing us. Roger Macdonald, the director of the Television Archive, told me that, for him, the archive serves an existential purpose. “It’s a touchstone to reality,” he said on a recent afternoon in the Archive’s San Francisco office, which is housed in a former Christian Science church. “I appreciate that people, for years to come, will be able to look very deeply into the history of what the heck happened.” At the same time, he admitted, “Our team has had to work on our own psychological equanimity amidst a lot of fear represented in the news that we archive.”