| President Donald Trump ripped up papers constantly while in office. Some of his defenders said it was a nervous tic. But Trump knew there was a law against doing so. After he left office, he took 15 boxes of official records with him rather than handing them over to the federal government for preservation. This is all in violation of a law — one he knew about — requiring him to preserve his records, The Washington Post reports.  Trump with a letter he said was from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in January 2019. (Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images) | The law is called the Presidential Records Act, and Trump is the most egregious violator of it in the law's 44 years of existence, historians say. Here's why this is important. It requires what the name suggests: The law says White Houses must hold on to documents, emails — anything of historical significance — and hand it over to the federal government at the end of a president's term. The National Archives takes it from there, putting much of the documents in a president's library. Why it's important: The law was passed in 1978, in the wake of Richard Nixon holding on to so many documents, to codify that what happens in the White House really belongs to the American people. Ignoring this law is a way to obscure history. Without it, presidents would get to selectively decide what to share about their stories and, thus, cold shape history in the way they wanted it to be told. (Nixon's presidential library originally framed Watergate as a persecution of him, rather than his own abuse of power.) How it's enforced: By relying on the good faith of presidents. There's no archivist in the Oval Office looking over the president's shoulder, collecting paper every day. So every president has violated it in some way. But what Trump did is on a whole other level. According to Post reporting, he tore up hundreds of documents — perhaps more — indiscriminately. His aides used burn bags to destroy documents rather than hand them over. There's not much to hold Trump accountable, because the creators of norms such as the Presidential Records Act probably didn't envision a president smashing through them. "Many things in Washington are able to be done because there are understandings that this is how they are done," said James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association, "because we all believe the government has to operate." Trump is really the first modern president who doesn't seem to care whether the government works. Why this photo of Stacey Abrams is touching a nerve on the right  Abrams posted this photo to her campaign Twitter, then deleted it. (Abrams campaign) (Stacey Abrams campaign /TWP) | Abrams is a Democratic star and is running for governor in Georgia again. She recently tweeted — then deleted — a photo of herself, maskless, posing with masked students. It's a sequence we've seen before: A Democrat who supports mask mandates or shutdown restrictions appears to violate one of those rules, and the political right swiftly attacks. See: Rep. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser and, most recently, L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti (who said he was holding his breath for a recent photo taken in a stadium). In the case of Abrams, her campaign said she removed her mask only for photos and to speak to students watching remotely. But it's a tough time to be seen as hypocritical on mask mandates, as the political winds start to shift on whether masks should be required in schools at all. Two Democratic-led states, New Jersey and Delaware, will lift their school mask mandates in the next month. New York may do the same. Some prominent infectious-disease experts recently called for an end to mask mandates in all schools, arguing the cost now outweighs the benefit. As an article in the Atlantic recently pointed out, the CDC has little to no data on the effectiveness of masks in schools and schools never became the center of coronavirus outbreaks many had feared.  D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser (D). (Astrid Riecken for The Washington Post) | That potentially puts Democrats in an awkward position. Since the start of the pandemic, they've strongly supported masking in schools. That allowed them to be seen as hypocritical when they didn't follow mask mandates to a T, or when they changed their minds on whether mandates are necessary. Republicans have tried to play into that weakness as they continue their quest to get schools to drop mask mandates. They recently won the Virginia governor's race after portraying Democrats as trying to control what children do in schools. Republicans have tried to cast Democrats as making the rules for one set of the population and then living their own lives rather freely. That argument is what turned a fringe recall effort of California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) last year into a serious battle. The whole fight feels like a natural extension of Trumpism, which contends that liberals look down on the rest of America. And Abrams walked right into that by posting a photo of herself with her mask off in a school. | 
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