According to advisers, confidants and former aides, Trump is a “pack rat” who tends to leave the actual packing to underlings. At the end of the day, they clear his desk of paperwork — notes, scribbles, newspaper clippings, printed-out-emails, the new tree alignment for a golf course, a new grill for Mar-a-Lago — and the contents are placed in a box on the floor.
It was no different when he was president: Trump would board Air Force One or his Marine One helicopter, and his body man or valets would be toting boxes packed with briefing papers he’d ripped from binders, random papers that someone might have handed him, press clippings, defense memoranda, daily intelligence briefings or other classified material, according to former White House aides.
“They cover the gamut of everything,” a former White House aide who witnessed the spectacle said, declining to comment on the record because of the federal investigation.
Another former White House aide said that Trump was never much concerned about record management. “He’d have no awareness,” this person said. “When he was done with a piece of paper, he’d rip it up and throw it on the ground. That was his way of saying he’s done … [but] the narrative [that] he was ripping up documents like he was his own personal shredding machine is not accurate — he’d rip it in half, not usually into a thousand pieces.”