Ugh this is so repulsive. It may seem comparatively minor but the attitude behind it is…hideous.
Solomon Lartey spent the first five months of the Trump administration working in the Old Executive Office Building, standing over a desk with scraps of paper spread out in front of him.
Lartey, who earned an annual salary of $65,969 as a records management analyst, was a career government official with close to 30 years under his belt. But he had never seen anything like this in any previous administration he had worked for. He had never had to tape the president’s papers back together again.
Why did he have to do that? Why do people still have to do that? Because Trump tears everything into bits even though he’s legally required to preserve it.
Under the Presidential Records Act, the White House must preserve all memos, letters, emails and papers that the president touches, sending them to the National Archives for safekeeping as historical records.
But White House aides realized early on that they were unable to stop Trump from ripping up paper after he was done with it and throwing it in the trash or on the floor, according to people familiar with the practice. Instead, they chose to clean it up for him, in order to make sure that the president wasn’t violating the law.
So people paid large salaries go around picking up piles of torn up paper and other people paid large salaries tape them back together because that fucking peasant hates the written word that much.
Lartey said the papers he received included newspaper clips on which Trump had scribbled notes, or circled words; invitations; and letters from constituents or lawmakers on the Hill, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
“I had a letter from Schumer — he tore it up,” he said. “It was the craziest thing ever. He ripped papers into tiny pieces.”
Because he’s a stupid angry empty balloon of a human and he hates the sight of knowledge. He likes fried chicken and ice cream and Fox News, and everything else is the enemy to be torn to atoms.
[Lisa] Brown [Obama’s staff secretary] described a regimented process for dealing with presidential records. She said all paper that was going to the president “would go in a folder with labels — one color for decision memos, for example, and another one for letters. Documents would go out to the president and then come back to the staff secretary’s office in the same folder for distribution and handling. It was a really structured process.”
Brown said Obama had an eye on preserving documents for history — even ones he was not technically required to send to the National Archives. “I remember the day he sent down to me his race speech from the campaign, handwritten,” she said. “All of the campaign material didn’t need to come into the White House or go to Archives.”
Trump, in contrast, does not have those preservationist instincts. One person familiar with how Trump operates in the Oval Office said that he would rip up “anything that happened to be on his desk that he was done with.” Some aides advised him to stop, but the habit proved difficult to break.
No, the “habit” didn’t prove “difficult to break” – he just ignored what he was told and did what he felt like, which was destroying written knowledge. He’s ignorant as pig shit and he can’t stand the sight of WORDS on paper.
He goes to meetings like the G7 and sits there empty-handed while everyone else has papers and a tablet. He thinks he already knows everything.
