A lot has changed since George Washington took his papers with him to Mount Vernon. Now, former President Trump is getting hard lessons about the changes which began about 80 years ago when President Franklin D. Roosevelt donated his records to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).
Then, just before WWII, the federal government began to designate certain documents as classified. Now, Trump is the first president since Richard Nixon to try to keep his papers. It didn’t work for Nixon.
Ronald G. Shafer wrote in a Special to the Washington Post: ‘Mutilated by rats,’ burned, trashed: 200 years of presidential papers lost