The Independent Databases Archiving the Trump Administration

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The Independent Databases Archiving the Trump Administration

A January 2025 screenshot of the Trump White House’s 404 error message for a web page that is no longer active. Credit – TIME

President Donald Trump has promised Americans “radical transparency”—but his government has taken a number of steps that observers say make it anything but the self-described “

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”

In his first term, which the nonpartisan Sunlight Foundation described as “

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,” the White House

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,

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, and

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. So far, the second-term Trump Administration has

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,

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, and used

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for high-level communications that typically should be retained for posterity. The Associated Press reported last week that “

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,” and the Freedom of the Press Foundation said the Trump Administration “

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.”

Most recently, this week the White House removed official transcripts of the President’s remarks, which are now only available as videos—a departure from a common practice across Democratic and Republican administrations over decades. The only transcript that is now available on the White House website is

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.

“You must be truly f-cking stupid if you think we’re not transparent,” White House communications director Steven Cheung

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when asked about the latest move.

In the void of official archives, a number of independent record-keepers have taken matters into their own hands, offering the public a cache of data and documentation to sift and search through without fear of sudden removal. Still, these mostly collect only previously-made public records, and transparency advocates remain concerned about those that the public may never see.

Here are some of the databases available.

American Presidency Project

What started out in 1999 as a project by then-graduate student Gerhard Peters and professor John Woolley at the University of California, Santa Barbara, for students of political science has since turned into a valuable comprehensive digital repository of presidential public documents dating back to George Washington.

The nonprofit, nonpartisan

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hosts copies of Trump’s speeches and executive orders, social media posts, press pool reports, media interviews, and more—from both his terms as well as his campaigns and transition periods.

Data.gov Archive

Harvard Law School’s Library Innovation Lab, which developed the web-archiving tool,

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, released in February

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of more than 300,000 data sets from

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, the U.S. government’s repository of open data. “We’ve built this project on our long-standing commitment to preserving government records and making public information available to everyone,” the lab said in announcing the project.

Data Rescue Project

The

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is a collaboration between organizations like IASSIST, RDAP, and members of the Data Curation Network. The project, which started out in February on a

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Doc, aims to “serve as a clearinghouse for data rescue-related efforts and data access points” for public U.S. governmental data that it deems “currently at risk.”

Data it harvests, including from government agencies like the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Education, is maintained in the searchable archive

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, the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research’s crowd-sourced repository hosted by the University of Michigan.

Factba.se

Started in 2017 by Virginia husband and wife Bill Frischling and Jennifer Canty to empower the public to factcheck Trump’s statements for themselves,

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collects videos of Trump’s speeches, as well as press gaggles and other appearances. “How could you argue something is not true if you could see not only what this person said but the entire context around it?” Frischling

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.

The database was acquired by FiscalNote and is now hosted by FiscalNote’s policy news site Roll Call. It also has a collection of Trump’s tweets and social media posts, going as far back as 2009, as well as the President’s public schedule and emailed press releases from the White House.

Federal Environmental Web Tracker by EDGI

Formed in 2016 to document changes to “vulnerable” federal environmental data, the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) is a research collaboration of professionals advocating for environmental awareness. Its website-monitoring team created a

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for changes to environment-related federal pages. Since returning to office, the Trump Administration has

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information or text related to the climate crisis on many government websites.

Internet Archive

The

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is a nonprofit that provides users free access to its expansive digital library. Since beginning in 1996, the archive has a collection of more than 835 billion web pages, 44 million books and texts, 15 million audio recordings, 10.6 million videos, 4.8 million images, and a million software programs. “Our mission is to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge,” it says on its site.

In 2017, it launched the

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, which collects “TV news shows containing debates, speeches, interviews, rallies, and other reporting related to Donald Trump, before his first presidency and throughout subsequent years.”

But anybody can contribute. Described by

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as “a tech-support professional” in Kansas, a man identified only as Andrew—who uses the moniker Grumpy—began downloading videos from federal agencies on February 1 in response to takedowns by the Trump Administration. The videos are available on his Internet Archive account,

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.

The Internet Archive also operates the

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, a tool that preserves timestamped snapshots of websites. Like the Internet Archive’s other databases, individuals can contribute to the Wayback Machine, too. Its director

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that six weeks into Trump’s second term, some 73,000 government web pages (and counting) were cataloged before being expunged, including reportedly the only copy of the House Jan. 6 Committee’s interactive timeline of the 2021 Capitol Riot.

The Wayback Machine has also hosted since 2008 the

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, which “collects, preserves, and makes accessible United States Government websites at the end of presidential administrations.”

Rev

AI-powered speech-to-text company Rev hosts a free

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that includes searchable transcripts of

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going back years.

Trump’s Truth

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, a project by the Never-Trump-Republican founded nonprofit group Defending Democracy Together, archives all of Trump’s posts on his platform TRUTH Social. While Trump’s TRUTH Social posts are publicly available, the Trump’s Truth site

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that the President’s posts on his own platform “may be deleted at any time.” The archive checks for new  posts “every few minutes” and

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video transcription and image descriptions to enable greater search ability.

“We believe this is an essential part of the historical record, and that it must be preserved for its educational, journalistic and research value,” the site says.

Contact us at *****@*****.tld.

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#Independent #Databases #Archiving #Trump #Administration

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