But now the State Department is cutting archivists completely out of the process: Instead, it will start using machine learning algorithms to separate the “historic” from the “temporary.” Going forward, it is not even planning to turn these records over to the National Archives — a clear violation of the Federal Records Act. And so far there has been no public acknowledgment or discussion of this plan.

What is driving this mad rush to delete or destroy the historical record, rather than preserve it for future generations? It is not just the Trump administration. For more than a decade Congress has simply been unwilling to pay for such preservation. Since 1985, the volume of archived paper records has more than tripled. The number of data records has gone from fewer than 13 million to more than 21 billion. But the National Archives has fewer employees now than it did then. Adjusted for inflation, it has a smaller budget than it did a decade ago, and Congress has cut that budget every year for the last three years.

Is it any wonder that, according to a new policy announced last year, the National Archives does not plan to maintain any more presidential libraries? At the George W. Bush Library, the last of its kind, approximately 158 million pages of records await review. With the current staff, it is estimated it will take nearly 250 years.

Some even suggested they would support some version of an armed uprising or violent attacks.

James Barnes, a Facebook employee who was dispatched to work closely with the campaign, told me Parscale’s political inexperience made him open to experimenting with the platform’s new tools.

But in the Trump era, an important shift has taken place. Instead of trying to reform the press, or critique its coverage, today’s most influential conservatives want to destroy the mainstream media altogether. “Journalistic integrity is dead,” Boyle declared in a 2017 speech at the Heritage Foundation. “There is no such thing anymore. So everything is about weaponization of information.”

It’s a lesson drawn from demagogues around the world: When the press as an institution is weakened, fact-based journalism becomes just one more drop in the daily deluge of content—no more or less credible than partisan propaganda. Relativism is the real goal of Trump’s assault on the press, and the more “enemies of the people” his allies can take out along the way, the better. “A culture war is a war,” Steve Bannon told the Times last year. “There are casualties in war.”