The Archivist Who Was Fired and the Presidents Who Refused to Mention Trump: A Quiet Coup Wrapped in History
(SeaPRwire) – By: Gavin Thorne
The American presidency is supposed to be about power. What happened this year shows how thoroughly that idea has been gutted. Three former presidents wrote essays about leadership. None of them named the current one. That silence was louder than any sentence they could have written.
George W. Bush chose to celebrate George Washington, the man who handed power back to the people twice and set the standard for every president since. He wrote about Washington choosing to step down rather than cling to the throne. Barack Obama picked Abraham Lincoln. Bill Clinton wrote about Theodore Roosevelt’s fight against corporate greed. All of them addressed the very question of how power should be used. Every one of them pointedly declined to mention the president currently holding it.
The project itself is called “In Pursuit.” It was designed to mark the 250th anniversary of American history. Colleen Shogan curated it. She told every contributor to stay nonpartisan and ideological. She said they all took that instruction seriously. The essays ended up covering 43 presidents and 30 first ladies. They were published weekly into December. Joe Biden and Donald Trump were left out as too recent to appraise. The series hit more than one million cumulative views on Substack. Shogan’s podcast logged 160,000 audio downloads and nearly 64,000 YouTube views. A documentary is scheduled for PBS in October.
Shogan was fired by Trump in February 2025. There was no explanation. Congress was not notified, even though the law requires it. She still has not been told why. The National Archives is the central repository for federal documents. Its leader controls which records are preserved and displayed. Shogan called the position nonpartisan, the way the Librarian of Congress and the secretary of the Smithsonian are supposed to be. The White House did not respond when asked why she was fired or whether the administration would tell Congress.
Behind the scenes, the project reveals a deeper game. Trump has long resented the archives for notifying the Department of Justice about his alleged mishandling of classified documents after his first term. Shogan was not working for the agency then. Still, the firing looked political. The project looked like a counter-move. The former presidents wrote essays about humility, law over loyalty, and the expansion of democratic rights. All of it was a quiet rebuke without a single name being spoken.
The political structure of American institutions is fraying at the edges. A nonpartisan archivist was fired for doing her job. The essays she curated became a way for former presidents to address the current crisis without crossing a line they did not want to cross. That line is the most important one in American politics today. Who gets to define the presidency, and who gets to be left out of the story.
The next essay in the series will continue the pattern. More presidents, more first ladies, more quiet commentary on what power should look like. The audience keeps growing. The message is clear. The current occupant of the White House is being assessed by history and being ignored in real time.
Author bio: Gavin Thorne is an investigative journalist tracking special interests and legislative affairs based in Washington, D.C.