No more transcripts of Trump remarks on the White House website (and the old ones are gone, too)

Videos will replace official written transcripts of Trump’s remarks on The White House’s website, NBC reported Wednesday night:

As recently as Sunday, transcripts of Trump’s speeches and comments were still showing up in the “Remarks” section of WhiteHouse.gov. The next day, they were gone, snapshots of the site from an internet archive show. The only transcript appearing now is of Trump’s inaugural address on Jan. 20.

Government stenographers are still recording and transcribing Trump’s remarks, a White House official said. But in an internal policy change in recent days, the White House took down the transcripts in favor of audio and video of his appearances.

The idea behind the move is that people will get a fuller and more accurate sense of Trump by watching and listening to him as opposed to reading a transcript, which they may not be inclined to do anyway, the official said. Purging the transcripts and switching to audio and video of Trump’s remarks was intended to create “consistency” across the website, the official said.

Some historians NBC spoke with “denounced the move to do away with public transcripts that have long served as the definitive record of what the president says in public.” The move raises questions about whether official videos of Trump appearances could be doctored — though transcripts can be edited as well.

The Huffington Post reported last week that, even before the new policy, transcripts of about 80% of Trump’s speeches and interactions with journalists were not being published:

Trump’s White House posted transcripts for only 11 of the 40 speeches in which Trump did not take questions from the media, and for only one of his six formal news conferences, according to a HuffPost review. And of the 98 media “availabilities” in which Trump took questions from reporters informally — a practice that his aides point to as proof of his great accessibility — only 15 of the transcripts have been made public.

Previous White Houses, going back decades, made all of the transcripts compiled by the non-political stenography office, staffed by career civil servants, available in printed form, via email and on the White House website, as a matter of course. Trump’s first-term staff also published all his remarks, with the exception of his speeches at rallies and fundraisers. Trump’s second-term White House stopped emailing transcripts to its press list just five days after taking office, and of late has largely stopped posting them on the website, too.

If you need a Trump transcript, you still have options — check out Roll Call’s Factba.se.