President Trump has had a rough week of endorsements. On Tuesday, after Trump flew to Kentucky and declared that Governor Matt Bevin’s loss would reflect poorly on him, the incumbent lost to his Democratic opponent. On Saturday, attending a University of Alabama football game in an attempt to not get booed in public, the Crimson Tide lost, breaking a 31-game winning streak at home. And on Monday, Trump tweeted his support of his Sean Spicer — “All the way with Sean!” — shortly before his former press secretary was voted off Dancing With the Stars, hereby ending the most singularly embarrassing post-Trump career move to date.
Trump, who refuses to associate himself with losing despite a long career of losing other people’s money, quickly deleted the tweet endorsing the sketchy footwork of his ex-staffer. Though entirely inconsequential, the act shows not only how petty Trump is willing to get, but how undisciplined he is in revoking his endorsements: The president has not deleted his tweets supporting Roy Moore in the 2017 Alabama senate race that were published well after multiple allegations of child molestation were made public. Trump did, however, delete tweets endorsing Moore’s primary opponent, Luther Strange, after his loss to Moore.
Though Trump has a bounty of legal and norm violations that are currently more pressing, someone in his administration may soon have to deal with the deleted tweets: His actions may be in violation of the Presidential Records Act of 1978, which lawmakers passed in order to deter Richard Nixon from destroying tapes after leaving the White House.
The president, who recently deleted a tweet for spelling his Defense Secretary’s name wrong, probably isn’t too concerned. In the first year of the administration, taxpayers covered the $65,969 salary of an executive-branch employee whose job it was to tape together all the briefings Trump had ripped up and thrown in the trash, in order to stay in compliance of the 1978 law.
