'Really irresponsible': Outrage as White House has disappeared almost every Trump transcript

22 May

U.S. President Donald Trump with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in the White House Oval Office on May 6, 2025 (The White House/Flickr)

When a new presidential administration takes over in the United States, the official White House website typically gets a makeover. That happened after former President Joe Biden left office on January 20 and President Donald Trump started his nonconsecutive second term.

Now, four months after Trump's return to the White House, the White House website has, according to NBC News and the Daily Beast, been "scrubbed…. of almost every single transcript of the president's official remarks."

According to NBC News reporters Peter Nicholas, Megan Shannon and Megan Lebowitz, "As recently as Sunday, (May 18) 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 January 20."

The Daily Beast's Janna Brancolini notes that "some transcripts" on WhiteHouse.gov "have been replaced by videos of Trump's speeches and appearances, though dozens of events are completely unaccounted for."

"An unnamed official told NBC the move was part of an internal policy change to give people a fuller and more accurate sense of the president, and that switching to video created 'consistency' across the website," Brancolini reports. "But presidential transcripts have long served as the definitive record of what a president says in public, leading historians and former White House officials to condemn the move."

Trump calls his speaking style "the weave," and Mike McCurry — who served as White House press secretary under former President Bill Clinton during the 1990s — told NBC News that perhaps the Trump White House "didn't want 'the weave' exposed."

Beck Dorey-Stein, an ex-White House stenographer under former President Barack Obama, told NBC News that removing those transcripts from the White House website "seems really irresponsible and a self-inflicted wound."

"With a transcript," Dorey-Stein noted, "(Trump) can say, 'This is exactly what I said.'"

Read NBC News' full article at this link and the Daily Beast's reporting here (subscription required).

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