Trump’s Campaign Can’t Just Erase History on the Internet
President Trump’s overhauled campaign website looks a lot like the original: the resident in a suit and red tie, embedded tweets pillorying #FakeNews, and “Make America Great Again” hats for sale in every color (plus camo, of course). But what really stands out is what’s missing: the entire archive of content published on the site prior to January.
The Trump campaign didn’t respond to WIRED’s request for comment, but it’s hard not to see the move as a ham-fisted way of obscuring the president’s most controversial campaign promises, particularly his vow in a press release to ban Muslims from entering the country. But the web doesn’t work that way. Even when you’re president, the internet never forgets.
The purge began Monday, after one White House reporter asked press secretary Sean Spicer why the campaign website still included references to the Muslim ban. That same day, during oral arguments in the federal appeals case over the Trump administration’s executive order barring travelers from six Muslim-majority countries, Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Robert King also pressed Justice Department lawyer Jeffrey Wall about the site. Wall argued that the current ban doesn’t discriminate against people on religious grounds, but King insisted the press release contradicts that claim. “He has never repudiated what he said about the Muslim ban,” Judge King said of the president. “It is still on his website.”
Within hours it was gone. Within a day, so was every other pesky press release that might someday prove incriminating. Except that a quick scan of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine still surfaces the release in its entirety. Google “Trump Muslim ban press release” (don’t include the quotation marks), and you’ll still get a link to the URL as well as a cached version of the press release visible in its entirely. That’s to say nothing of the innumerable screenshots of the site currently cluttering the cloud and countless hard drives around the world, nor this tweet, which is still live:
For his supporters, Trump’s biggest asset as a candidate was always his willingness to “tell it like it is”—to speak first, worry about the consequences later. But as a president forced to answer for those statements in court, Trump is finding that there’s no scrubbing the internet’s long, limitless memory. That’s particularly challenging for Trump, the first president in history to use social media to provide a steady and seemingly unfiltered stream of declarations. He simply has a lot more public statements to answer for.
But attempting to hide any of it won’t do the president any good, and not only because anyone with a Wi-FI connection can easily dig it back up again. Thanks to the Streisand effect, attempting to hide just about anything in the digital age has a habit of bringing even more attention to whatever it is you’re trying to hide. The internet doesn’t just remember. It doesn’t let you forget.
[WIRED]
