There's Reportedly A White House Team Devoted To Taping Up Documents Trump Tore Up
Sometimes I feel like I'm living in a simulation of America because there's no way half the things President Donald Trump has said and done could be real. For instance, a new report says that Donald Trump keeps ripping up important documents, and there's a team that has to tape them back together. Yes, you read that correctly.
According to Politico, Trump reportedly has an affinity towards ripping up documents and papers he's done with — a habit that is supposedly referred to as his personal "filing system." The problem is, that when you're the president a lot of those papers are official documents and letters that are required, by law, to be preserved. However, Trump reportedly rips those up too.
What's more bizarre than Trump running around ripping up official documents? That there are reportedly an entire team of people who have been tasked with collecting all the bits of paper and taping them back together. Although all documents, memos, letters, and other papers that the president touches legally have to be retained under the Presidential Records Act, the president reportedly couldn't be convinced to break his habit of just tossing things he was done with — so staffers would reportedly collect all the scraps from around the White House and send them over to the Old Executive Office Building across the street where a team could piece them back together like a "jigsaw puzzle," according to Politico. Elite Daily reached out to the White House for comment on the report, but did not hear back by the time of publication.
Solomon Lartey, who worked as an official government records management analyst for nearly 30 years told Politico that he spent the first five months of Trump's administration taping paper back together. The papers that reportedly landed on Lartey's desk included everything from news clippings marked up by Trump, invitations, and letters from lawmakers and constituents. “It was the craziest thing ever. He ripped papers into tiny pieces," Lartey said.
“We got Scotch tape, the clear kind,” Lartey told Politico. “You found pieces and taped them back together and then you gave it back to the supervisor.”
It just doesn't sound real, and it's even more ridiculous when you think about how Trump blasted Hillary Clinton over her email scandal. During the 2016 campaign trail, it seemed like Trump's one defense was to constantly call "Crooked Hillary" out on her emails and handling of classified information — because she used a private server while serving as Secretary of State to President Barack Obama. Even after Trump snagged the win, he still couldn't let it go. One of his favorite topics was the accusations that Clinton had made efforts to destroy supposed evidence about her mishandling of emails, so it's a little ironic now that he's reportedly tearing up important documents and throwing them away.
A little hypocritical don't you think? Others sure did. And more than a few people were just baffled by the whole thing.
Not only is it a degrading job to have to tape up pieces of paper, but the whole thing is kind of worrisome if you think about it. Trump is the president and he can't even manage to keep from ripping up papers, even though it's illegal? That's not a comforting thing to hear about the current commander in chief. And by the looks of it, none of the other presidents had that problem.
Lisa Brown, President Barack Obama's first staff secretary, told Politico that Obama's "filing system" was very different. She explained that all documents for the president would be meticulously labeled.
[Papers] would go in a folder with labels — one color for decision memos, for example, and another one for letters. Documents would go out to the president and then come back to the staff secretary’s office in the same folder for distribution and handling. It was a really structured process.
Brown added that, as far as she can remember, Obama never threw any official documents in the trash. "All the official paper that went into [the Oval Office], came back out," she said.
Trump, on the other, doesn't have the same system. A source told Politico that Trump would reportedly tear up "anything that happened to be on his desk that he was done with." Well, uh, that's one way to show you're done.
To borrow from the great Freddie Mercury, is this real life or is it an extremely clever Saturday Night Live sketch?
