Trump staffers can't get him to stop ripping up documents he's read

The toddler in chief who requires morning “executive time” to watch his favorite TV shows on Fox has another unpresidential habit: ignoring the law that requires the preservation of documents.

The Presidential Records Act requires the White House to preserve documents handled by the president of the United States, which are then kept by the National Archives.

But according to Politico, Trump prefers his own unofficial “filing system” of literally ripping up documents after he’s read them.

After Trump reads — or, more likely, briefly skims — a letter or memo, he just tears it up and tosses it on the floor. And his staff can’t get him to stop doing that.

“Instead,” Politico reports, Trump’s staffers “chose to clean it up for him, in order to make sure that the president wasn’t violating the law.”

Solomon Lartey, a records management analyst who worked for the government for nearly three decades, described Trump’s bizarre habit as “the craziest thing ever” — and something neither he nor any of his colleagues had ever seen before.

“It felt like the lowest form of work you can take on without having to empty the trash cans,” said Reginald Young Jr., another career official who worked with Lartey.

Young and Lartey were both suddenly fired, without explanation.

It’s not a secret that Trump has no regard for the customs and traditions of the office he holds. It’s also not surprising that he cares nothing of following the law that requires preservation of the documents he handles.

That his staff is forced to pick up pieces of garbage on the floor and literally tape them back together just to keep him in compliance with the law doesn’t seem surprising. Trump, after all, has taken a sick kind of pleasure in humiliating those who serve him.

He has spent the better part of a year attacking Attorney General Jeff Sessions in tweets and interviews. He has fired several members of his Cabinet on Twitter. Many stories have emerged, since Trump took office, of the ways he mocks and insults his staff.

And because Trump and his scandal-plagued administration is such a nightmare to work for, he has lost a record 43 percent of his top advisers during his first. He’s also had the highest turnover rate in his Cabinet in a century. And the White House has a hard time finding people willing to work there.

With an impetuous, tantrum-throwing boss who literally makes his staff pick up his scraps of garbage and tape them back together to keep him from breaking the law, it’s no wonder.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.