Some of President Donald Trump's tweets might never become part of the presidential history books. | Getty Trump's fleeting tweets alarm archivists

When President Donald Trump sent out tweets Thursday blasting a refugee deal with Australia, threatening to defund the University of California at Berkeley and declaring Iran to be “ON NOTICE,” those missives went to the 23.5 million followers of his personal Twitter account.

But they didn’t show up in the tweets of his official Twitter handle @POTUS — raising questions about whether those messages from the most powerful man on Earth will be archived for posterity.


Because some of Trump's headline-grabbing, market-moving tweets might never become part of the presidential history books, archivists fear that Americans could be left with an incomplete record of how the United States was governed in the Trump era.

During recent presidencies, nearly every official comment from the chief executive has been captured for historians to parse, and the same has been done for top White House staff. But Trump has continued tweeting primarily from his private account, @realDonaldTrump, even after entering the Oval Office — dispatching 140-character political bursts nearly each morning on topics including a terrorist attack in Paris, the combat death of a Navy SEAL, imprisoned leaker Chelsea Manning and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s television ratings.

Trump’s aides have also used their own unofficial Twitter accounts to speak to voters. And on occasion, both the president and his advisers have scrubbed posts after they’ve gone up — raising questions, according to archivists, about what should and will be preserved at the end of his administration.

“To have a government that’s responsive and accountable to the people, there has to be a record of its business,” said Nate Jones, the director of the Freedom of Information Act Project at George Washington University’s National Security Archive. “And if they’re deleting posts or otherwise muddying the record, it makes that foundation of accountability shaky.”

On Friday alone, Trump began the day by tweeting, at 6:28 a.m., a warning that Iran was "playing with fire" and that he would not be as "kind" to the country as former President Barack Obama was. Six minutes after that, he decried “FAKE NEWS” for reports that he clashed in a phone call with Australia’s prime minister, then announced his plans to meet with business leaders to discuss jobs at the White House. And before 7 o'clock had hit, he'd tweeted his outrage over "professional anarchists, thugs and paid protesters,” a seeming reference to protests at the University of California at Berkeley.

His official @POTUS account happened to retweet those specific posts, but it doesn't do that consistently or predictably with all his personal tweets.

Even though Trump's tweets seem now to be everywhere and be widely available, people in future decades could still have trouble finding the complete record — or sorting fact from fiction — unless a systematic way exists to collect them and catalog them in an official repository.

After the Watergate scandal in the 1970s, Congress passed a law establishing that the records of the president, vice president and immediate staff related to their time in office belong to the United States, and thus should be retained for the public’s use. However, significant exemptions exist: not included, for example, are presidential communications that are purely political, like speeches at a Republican or Democratic party fundraiser.

Deciding what, exactly, is worth archiving is largely left up to the commander in chief, said Sharon Fawcett, assistant archivist for presidential libraries at the National Archives and Records Administration from 1969 to 2011.

“Trying to interpret the law can drive you crazy,” she said in an interview. But in the end, the statute gives the responsibility to “the president to serve as the records manager and make those determinations.”

Obama pioneered the use of social platforms to speak with voters — and his administration sought from the start to preserve every Facebook post, Snapchat selfie and tweet that he and his aides published over eight years in office, staffers said. In the early days, those preservation efforts meant staffers had to copy and paste posts from the internet to Microsoft Word documents, recalled Kori Schulman, formerly the special assistant to the president and deputy chief digital officer, in a recent interview.

Obama, like Trump, had a personal account, @barackobama, handled by the president’s political arm, Organizing for America, which doesn’t have to be archived. But the Democratic leader reserved his major pronouncements for the @POTUS account, the entire contents of which are in the process of being turned over to the National Archives. Accounts considered official by the Obama White House had disclaimers saying the Tweets may be archived. They are preserved on Twitter now.

The Obama administration “made a decision to draw a very clear line” between personal and White House accounts, said Schulman, in many cases creating new handles for incoming staffers appended with “44” to mark them as property of that administration. The official accounts were listed on the White House website, and staffers were instructed to avoid deletions.

Trump, however, has saved his most influential tweets for a personal account that he could simply choose not to archive at end of his presidency on the grounds that it contains merely political communications. The law ultimately leaves it up to the president to decide what to archive, and so far, his administration has offered no indication as to how much of his expansive digital footprint he’ll ultimately save. When asked about its archiving practices, a White House spokeswoman responded only: “We do not discuss internal security policies.”

Archivists have struggled in recent years to keep up with the flood of social media produced by official Washington. One 2015 National Archives training presentation obtained by POLITICO was titled, “Social Media Capture: Everyone’s Nightmare.”

The document argues that posts on platforms like Twitter and Facebook should be kept if they meet certain standards of significance — if, for example, they “contain evidence of an agency’s policies, business, or mission,” or convey information that’s only available on social media.

As president, Trump has frequently been known to break news of administration policy on Twitter — and to delete and post revisions after the public has seen them.

Since Inauguration Day, he’s deleted tweets because of misspellings — “I am honered [sic] to serve you, the great American People,” read one such later-polished tweet — or to heighten the drama. A Jan. 24 tweet was deleted and replaced to add capitalization and switch the placement of an exclamation point to read, “Big day planned on NATIONAL SECURITY tomorrow. Among many other things, we will build the wall!”

The Trump administration is only the second to deal with the issue of Twitter archiving. Obama didn't start using Twitter himself until 2015, though others tweeted for him before that. Historians and others depend on presidential records — originally on paper with an increasing migration to digital and now social media.

To Jones of the National Security Archives, “you can certainly argue that every tweet from the president is historically significant, even with a typo in it.”

Some transparency advocates have placed faith in Politwoops, a site maintained by the news organization ProPublica that aims to capture politicians’ disappeared tweets. “What makes deleted tweets particularly important is that they can be more reflective of someone’s immediate impulses,” said Derek Willis, who maintains the service.

But the service doesn’t capture every deletion because of weaknesses in existing technology. And at the moment, it’s only tracking a handful of White House staff, and even then not every account they’re using.

Both of the accounts used by Trump — his long-standing @RealDonaldTrump handle and the @POTUS account handed to him by Obama — are tracked on Politwoops. “To get the full Donald Trump experience on Twitter, you need to be aware of both,” Willis said. But when it comes to the rest of the West Wing, the service is only keeping tabs on @KellyannePolls, the long-standing personal account of counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway, and @PressSec, the account assigned to White House press secretary Sean Spicer.

However, @SeanSpicer, the eight-year-old personal account the former Republican National Committee spokesman has also frequently used in recent weeks, isn’t tracked on Politwoops. “We probably should,” Willis said.

(One added wrinkle: the sometimes-contested agreement between Politwoops and Twitter over which tweets can be captured only really gives permission when it comes to elected officials. Willis says that he’s of the belief that if White House staffers are engaging in policy-making on social media, they’re fair game.)

Shortly before the Obama administration wrapped up, it contracted with a North Carolina startup called ArchiveSocial to recreate a complete record of that White House’s tweets and other social media posts. The company, says CEO Anil Chawla, is right now in the process of putting that cache in the hands of the National Archives.

Chawla says his company has not had contact with the Trump White House, “but obviously we think we can help him tremendously, so we’d love to get in touch.”

Even some close Trump allies are keeping a watchful eye of how his White House preserves what it does on Twitter.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), who was a frequent critic of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal email server, said in an interview that the administration should be given time to get up to speed. But, the Republican lawmaker added: “We have to work with this administration to create bright lines of responsibility, to have a system in place to ensure that they are lived up to by all persons at the White House.”

“We’re going to err on the side of capture,” or records preservation, he said.

In the end, according to the National Security Archives’ Jones, even if Trump and his team fail to abide by the letter or spirit of the rules, it’s unlikely they’ll ever pay a price.

“The federal records laws are violated dozens, even hundreds, of times a day,” said Jones, “and no one is ever punished for it.”