The Trump Administration Is Trying to Erase Its Own History; The Atlantic, April 8, 2026

David A. Graham, The Atlantic ; The Trump Administration Is Trying to Erase Its Own History

If a new legal opinion stands, Donald Trump will be on track to become one of the most poorly documented presidents ever.

"The history of Nixon’s presidential record also shows the value of the law, even long after a president leaves office. Nixon loyalists controlled the former president’s library for years, and presented a whitewashed version of Watergate to the public. But the law required that the warts-and-all records be preserved, and when control of the library was finally wrested away and handed to Tim Naftali, a professional historian, in 2006, the library began presenting a more accurate account and providing access to historians, who have in turn presented more complete chronicles of Nixon’s career.

Trump is the most corrupt and scandal-plagued president since Nixon; indeed, his fiascoes eclipse Nixon’s, but many of them remain mostly or somewhat hidden, thanks in part to a much more acquiescent Republican Congress than the one Nixon had. In Watergate, the crimes were known; the question was, in the words of Senator Howard Baker Jr., “What did the president know and when did he know it?” With the Trump administration, the situation is perhaps the reverse: We know much about the president’s stated motivations and beliefs, but we do not have a full accounting of what he and his aides have done. Keeping a record would allow the nation to fully understand his actions and their consequences—if not now, then at least later."

Trump attacks Watergate laws in massive shift of ethics system; The Washington Post, June 21, 2025

 Naftali Bendavid, The Washington Post; Trump attacks Watergate laws in massive shift of ethics system

"Then-Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman was 32 when, as a member of the House Judiciary Committee, she voted in 1974 for three articles of impeachment against President Richard M. Nixon. She spent the next few years as part of a Congress that passed wave after wave of laws to rein in future presidents.

A half-century later, Holtzman, a New York Democrat, is watching as President Donald Trump takes aim at post-Watergate reforms on transparency, spending, conflicts of interest and more. By challenging and disregarding, in letter or in spirit, this slew of 1970s laws, Trump is essentially closing the 50-year post-Watergate chapter of American history — and ushering in a new era of shaky guardrails and blurred separation of powers.

“We didn’t envision this,” Holtzman said. “We saw Nixon doing it, but he hadn’t done it on this vast a scale. Trump is saying, ‘Congress cannot tell me what to do about anything.’”...

This broad rejection of the post-Watergate laws underlines the country’s shift from an era focused on clean government and strict ethics to the rise of a president whose appeal stems in part from his willingness to violate such rules and constraints.

“There has been a collapse, at least temporarily, of the kind of outrage and ethical standards that were prevalent during the days of Watergate,” said Richard Ben-Veniste, who headed the special counsel’s Watergate Task Force."