The last two weeks have produced a torrent of evidence of then-President Donald Trump’s brazen and systematic violations of the Presidential Records Act. Between his habitual, illegal destruction of documents, and his shepherding out of the White House, and down to Mar-a-Lago, at least 15 boxes of public records — some marked “Top secret” — Trump’s serial violations of the act demonstrate yet again his attitude that laws just don’t apply to him.
The Department of Justice has a clean, solid case it could bring against Trump. Moreover, the case would be, in prosecutor’s lingo, righteous. Preserving presidential records may sound like no more than a bureaucratic rule, but it is crucial to democratic self-governance. It makes the people the stewards of their own history and ensures presidential accountability. Trump aimed to foil the public’s ability — and history’s — to know and judge his conduct in the White House.
Trump’s actions also encapsulate the two elements of his essential wickedness as president: his treatment of the office as a tool for his own aggrandizement and his mania for the obstruction of any kind of oversight.
