The Story of Us

Trump discussing taking control of the National Archives. Plus: a thank you.

Before we start: I want to write about Trump’s proposal to ethnically cleanse Gaza and turn it into a Sandals resort. I want to write about this nonsense so hard. But as Miles Morales once said, “Don’t watch the mouth, watch the hands.”

So we’re going to talk about something much less sexy: Trump’s designs on the National Archives.

And then we’re going to talk about us. You, me, and The Bulwark. I’ve got a lot of feels today and I’m gonna share them all.

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(Composite / Photos: GettyImages)

1. Control History, Control the Future

Here’s a tiny piece of staffing news that you may have missed: Trump just made his secretary of state the acting director of . . . the National Archives?

Yeah, that’s right. Or, maybe it’s right? No one is really sure. Multiple news outlets are reporting that a couple of days after having USAID shoved into his portfolio at State, Marco Rubio is also running the National Archives now. [Update, Feb. 6, 2025, 7:30 p.m. EST: ABC News, the outlet that broke this story, has now “corrected” it to say that the archivist has not been fired and Rubio has not been given that job, although there have been “extensive discussions” about doing so.]

Anyway: We’ll get to the “Is this real?” question in a minute. First, let’s start with a different question:

Why would you have the guy in charge of outward-facing foreign diplomacy running America’s bureaucratic document repository? Oh boy, is there a reason.

Back in 2022 Rolling Stone reported that the National Archives and Records Administration are one of Trump’s revenge fantasy side-quests:

Donald Trump has identified yet another federal institution he wants to purge of qualified officials and stack with his lackeys: the National Archives.

Since this summer, Trump has told close associates that he wants to gut the nonpartisan historical agency, which the former president believes is full of anti-MAGA subversives, two sources with knowledge of the matter tell Rolling Stone. Trump has said he plans to make it a priority if he wins a second term, the sources say.

In some of these conversations, the former president has referenced specific officials—all installed during Democratic administrations—who he’d want to immediately “get rid of” and have replaced with pliable loyalists. . . .

In other instances, the ex-president has also casually solicited recommendations for conservatives to install at the National Archives and Records Administration, including for the top post of archivist. At least one Trump confidant threw out John Solomon, a Trump ally and conservative journalist, as an apparently serious suggestion, one of the people with knowledge of this matter says.

Why was Trump so horny for the National Archives? Because of the stolen-documents case against him. He believes that the National Archives snitched on him to the FBI.

And snitches get stitches.

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Trump’s desire for revenge on the National Archives wasn’t a passing fancy. During the Biden administration, both Stephen Miller and the Heritage Foundation filed lawsuits against the National Archives. In an October 2022 speech Trump prattled on about how “woke and broken” the archives was, calling it “a radical left-run agency.”

It stayed with him. In one of his pre-inauguration conversations with Hugh Hewitt, Trump stated that he intended to fire Colleen Shogan, the nonpolitical head of the National Archives.

This news spooked even National Review, which published an article urging Trump not to fire her:

Shogan has been excellent at standing up to the radical Left during her tenure as archivist. When two left-wing climate-activist vandals defaced the cases holding the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution in Washington, D.C., last year, Shogan urged prosecutors to charge them with felonies instead of misdemeanors. . . .

She then testified at the sentencing hearing for one of them in November, urging the judge to give them the maximum sentence of ten years in prison. “Anything less sends the wrong message to Americans about the rule of law, our system of government, and the principles which enable its peaceful continuity,” she said. . . .

Shogan’s insistence on law and order doesn’t stop with physical vandalism. She has also stood up to the Left’s attempts at constitutional vandalism by making clear that the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) is not eligible for ratification because its deadline has passed.

The National Review article concluded that Shogan was “exactly the right kind of person to lead the National Archives” because the job is supposed to be nonpartisan.

But of course, that misunderstands Trump’s desires. He doesn’t want the National Archives to be “nonpartisan.” He wants them to be his.

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As I write, Shogan is still listed as director of the National Archives on the Archives.gov website, but Fox is referring to her as the “now-former national archivist.”

Even more alarming: Fox says that Rubio “has been the acting archivist since shortly after Trump was sworn in as the 47th president last month.”

But no one quite knows what’s going on.

404 Media reported this morning that as of February 4, Shogan was still at her post and even held a staff meeting. No one 404 Media spoke with at the archives had any knowledge about Rubio having been connected with the department.

Employees inside NARA who spoke with The Bulwark this morning had no idea where the reports about Shogan’s replacement were coming from and had never heard anything about Marco Rubio being named acting archivist.

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2. Laundry

So why put Rubio in charge of the archives and not a crank like John Solomon?

Yes, it’s true that some of the responsibilities of the National Archives used to belong to the State Department and the secretary of state—going back to 1789, when the department was made the repository of legislation and official papers. The Declaration of Independence and Constitution now on display in the National Archives in Washington were for more than a century kept in the State Department. But I don’t think Trump has in mind a restoration of to the secretary of state of responsibilities that were handed off to the archives decades ago.

Nor do I think Trump wants a responsible steward of the archives. If that were what he were after, he would have left (would leave?) Shogan in place. Or if he wanted Shogan in particular gone, he could have just fired her without naming Rubio her acting successor. Under 44 U.S.C. § 2103, if the archivist of the United States resigns, dies, or is fired, the existing deputy archivist becomes the acting archivist until a new archivist is appointed and confirmed by the Senate.

No, Trump wants control of the archives, but doesn’t want publicity about it.

Think about it: Trump uses a klaxon for everything he does, but Shogan gets quietly fired (if all of the reporting is correct) and Rubio is slipped into place (same caveat) under cover of night?

As “acting director” Rubio wouldn’t actually be able to do much. His plate is already full with State and USAID. So he’d have to delegate decision-making at the archives.

Now tell me: Do you think Rubio would make decisions about delegation himself? Or do you think they’d be imposed on him by the real MAGAs, the way his hiring of America’s saddest white nationalist was?

Rubio’s relative normie status would be a way to launder a fairly radical takeover of an important repository of institutional knowledge.

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What does Trump intend to do with the National Archives? I don’t know.

Maybe it’ll be as simple as making sure he’s allowed to do whatever he wants with classified documents. Or using the archives to make trouble for his enemies regarding their past uses of classified docs.

But maybe not. Maybe he’ll be looking to expunge certain things from the national record.¹ Or prevent the inclusion of certain new items into the national record. Or lock down opponents’ or disfavored groups’ access to the archives.

After all, who controls the past, controls the future. And who controls the present, controls the past.

I doubt Trump ever read Orwell—or even knows who Orwell is. But that’s the thing about authoritarians. They don’t need to learn about power from books. They understand it instinctually.

Every authoritarian is born with the ability to write the entire authoritarian playbook from scratch, as if they were downloading it from the cosmic recesses of their lizard brains.

It’s the rest of us who have to learn, prepare, and fight.

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Programming reminder:

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3. Us

New York magazine wrote a very nice piece about The Bulwark today. You can read it here.

We have so many new faces here that something like half of you may not know The Bulwark’s origin story. I’ll give that to you another time. I promise. But right now I want to say thank you.

This community has grown like a weed. The growth has been steady: Since the day we opened up the shop, we’ve never gone backwards. We’ve been adding members, every day, for years on end.

Over the last year or so, the influx of new members has accelerated. That’s due to a couple of factors, some nice and some not so nice.

The not-so-nice reason is that everything is terrible. Liberal democracy has been balanced on a knife’s edge for the better part of a decade. Every day more people wake up to the fact that they suddenly have to care about politics.

I wish this weren’t the case. It’s not healthy for a society. And I’d trade our growth for a healthy society every day of the week and twice on Sunday.

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Then there are the nice reasons. The Bulwark has grown because we started doing more. We brought in great writers, like Will Saletan. We added serious reporters, like Joe Perticone. We pushed into YouTube, because we’re mission-focused and determined to meet people where they are.

If you do more stuff, and you do it well, you grow your audience.

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But the biggest reason we’ve grown—in my view, at least—is because of the type of audience. It’s because of who you guys are, as people.

We did not set out to be a community-minded enterprise. That was not the plan or the objective. But The Bulwark community more or less self-organized around us.

It started as email correspondence between readers and me. Then some of you started a Discord channel, and then a subreddit. Then we stood up the comments section here. And what happened is that you didn’t use it like a shouty Facebook group. You turned this space into a place for conversation, discussion, solidarity, and even charity.

New people might not know it, but after the United States pulled out of Afghanistan, this community raised a ton of money to help refugees, which is great. But specifically, this community came together and pooled enough money to save the lives of a family and get them out of Afghanistan and resettled in America.

And how did we do that? Because a Bulwark reader who became a Bulwark writer, Will Selber, had served in Afghanistan. He knew this family. And after the fall, he and his military brethren threw themselves into saving as many of their Afghan comrades as they could. (They’re still doing it, by the way.)

Look at how extraordinary this is: We started a website. An airman deployed to Afghanistan starts reading it. He emails us and we become friends. He becomes active in the comments on the site. Then starts writing for the site. And when he needs resources to save lives, the site’s community jumps into action and makes it possible.

I’ve never seen anything like it. This isn’t how a media company works; it’s how a family works.

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One more thing about The Bulwark family: It’s pretty well known that this is not a pay-to-play operation. If people can’t afford a membership, they just email us and we bring them into the fold.

We can do this because we have a whole class of members who volunteer to pay extra. These are our founding members and while they get a couple bonus things, it’s not a value proposition. These are people who have a little extra, and so they volunteer to give a little extra, so that no one ever gets left behind.

Again: That’s not how media companies work.

But it’s how we roll here.

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I am overwhelmed with gratitude for you guys today. Thank you to every Bulwark+ member who supports us and makes this possible. Thank you to our Founders and Navigators for going the extra mile. Thank you to everyone who emails me, leaves comments here, or shares our work.

Thank you for being thoughtful and kind and genuine. I hope that I mirror that back to you, most days.

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Toward the end of the New York mag piece, the writer asked if I was afraid of what’s coming The Bulwark’s way in the coming years. She had asked Sarah the same question and Sarah, who is a warrior, said Fuck no.²

But when the writer asked me, this is what I told her:

“I am pretty fucking terrified of lawsuits or, I don’t know, whatever’s coming,” said Last. “If it got to the point where I felt like we couldn’t be saying the true things, and that point may come, then at that point [I’ll] just stop doing it. Find something else to do.”

Here is something I wish I had added: At this point, I’m not doing this for America any more. I believe in liberalism and I believe in democracy. But I’m not certain that “America” writ large believes in either of those things—or is even worthy of them.

I’m doing it for us. For the people I work with. For the community that’s grown up around this thing of ours. I’m doing it for my family.

Thanks for riding with me, fam.

1. He is currently attempting to expunge the historical record of January 6th at the Department of Justice.

2. Sarah did not literally say “Fuck no.” I’m paraphrasing.