Trump is notorious for his “filing system”: when he is finished with a
piece of paper, he tears it into tiny pieces and throws it away, which
is fine if you’re a CEO (maybe), but is radioactively illegal under the
Presidential Records Act, because the President works for the public,
and is required by law to archive their official papers and save them
for public scrutiny.
White House staffers gave up on trying to explain this to Trump, who
just kept on tearing up everything, from official letters from Senators
to letters from constituents to notes and other paperwork.
The staffers – paid nearly $70,000 year – ended up with full-time jobs
retrieving scraps of paper from Trump’s trash-can and piecing them back
together with clear tape so they can be filed in the National Archives.
Some of these staffers were eventually fired; they’ve spoken to
Politico about their year in the Trump administration as paper-tapers.
