"Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute." -- George Orwell, 1984
Peter Nicholas, Megan Shannon and Megan Lebowitz at NBC:
The White House has removed official transcripts of President Donald Trump’s public remarks from its government website, replacing them with selected videos of his public appearances.
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.
....
Others questioned the rationale the White House official put forward. The real motivation may be that Trump’s frequent digressions — which he calls “the weave” — can come off as gibberish in written form, critics said.
Perhaps the White House “didn’t want ‘the weave’ exposed,” said Mike McCurry, a press secretary in Bill Clinton’s White House.
The last presidential event that the White House transcribed and made public happened more than two months ago — an Oval Office meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte.
Though some videos of Trump's appearances are available on the White House's website, many are not.
The site shows 10 videos in April, including events with Ohio State University’s football team, the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team, the Philadelphia Eagles football team and the Italian and Norwegian prime ministers.
