The firing of the Archivist of the United States

Hot take on an unprecedented action

The Archivist of the United States is the chief administrator of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), an independent agency in the executive branch. The position requires Senate approval and has no set term length, making it unique in the executive branch. The longest serving Archivist was Wayne Grover, who was in the post from 1948-1965.

The Archivist does serve at the pleasure of the president, although the norm is that the position stays clear of the hurly-burly of partisan politics. This year that changed.

President Trump fired Biden-appointed Archivist Colleen Shogan last week — she had served for under two years. (Full disclosure: the author worked with Dr. Shogan for several years at the Library of Congress.)

The firing — not a great surprise, but …
Dr. Shogan’s firing was both expected and unexpected, in a sense. It was expected given that she was a Biden appointee and, as a result, would be a logical candidate for the chopping block. It was unexpected for a few reasons.

First, as noted above the Archivist is not considered a partisan position. Previous archivists have straddled administrations of different parties, including Shogan’s predecessor, David Ferriero, who was nominated by President Obama in 2009 and served through his terms and through Trump’s first term.

Second, Dr. Shogan approached her job in the traditional way, including resisting inappropriate political pressure. In the storied case, she refused President Biden’s fatuous effort to get her to publish and certify the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the Constitution. The amendment did not meet the ratification requirements for certification (or even close to it), which she had previously pointed out publicly.

And third, Dr. Shogan had received considerable criticism from within the agency for taking actions with respect to exhibits that put a “rosy spin” on American history, as described in an October 2024 Wall Street Journal article. This among other things caught the attention of Dominic Pino of the conservative National Review. In an op-ed titled “Don’t replace the National Archivist,” he commended her for her actions regarding the ERA as well as efforts to tamp down what he felt were the woke-ish tendencies of some of her workforce, as described in the WSJ article.

The Trump brand
But none of that mattered to President Trump. So what do we make of this?

During politics-as-usual a president would welcome a political appointee of the opposing party who demonstrated her independence and received praise from his fellow partisans. In the transactional world of politics-as-usual, the advantage of bringing moderates of the other party to your side would be obvious, politics-as-usual being a game of addition.

But the Trump phenomenon flies in the face of politics-as-usual. Instead it thrives on an oppositional ethos. In fact that ethos is at the core of the brand — bureaucrats and anybody associated with Biden being the “other,” the essential deep state-force Trump is meant to confront. Any accommodation, any backing down, contains the seeds of the brand’s demise.

Trump, election denial, and party capture
To flesh out what the Trump brand means, we need to take a closer look at the 2020 election.

The take among many of the conservative commentariat was that Trump needed to concede graciously. He would come out of the defeat with honor and be able to hit the ground running in the lead up to the 2024 campaign.

We all know what he actually did. He argued, cajoled, threatened, and pretty much everything else including incitement, all in an effort to overturn the result. Most disturbingly he tried to put the screws to then-VP Pence to do his bidding during the congressional certification of his defeat.

Then came the impeachment and the February 2021 Senate trial. Republican Leader McConnell resisted calls to rally enough Republicans to convict (which would have ended Trump’s electoral career) on the grounds — best anyone can tell — that the fallout from January 6 had rendered Trump un-nominatable and un-electable. McConnell had condemned Trump’s actions on January 6 in the strongest terms, but didn’t think conviction on the impeachment charges was necessary.

Of course his words of condemnation weren’t forgotten by Trump. And, as ensuing events showed, the former president was able fairly easily to regain his grip on the Republican party. This not in spite of but rather because of the defiant us-against-them stance he took on the 2020 election. Post-impeachment Trump rose in the estimation of the Republican rank and file, while Pence and McConnell sunk like rocks. Criticizing Trump and accepting the results amounted to political death.

In short, the Trump brand operates outside politics-as-usual. As suggested above, accommodation weakens his brand. Had he conceded in 2020, would he have crushed his opponents in the primaries as he did by taking the defiant approach? We’ll never know for sure, but we do know for sure that anyone running who accepted the 2020 result didn’t get very far. How many delegates did Pence get? Chris Christie? Asa Hutchinson?

Shogan and Trump
Back to Dr. Shogan. She conducted herself honorably under politics-as-usual rules. But this is not the game being played by the Trump administration. Maintaining the defiant stance on anything Biden-related and the so-called deep state is essential to the political hold Trump has on his party. That hold is what has enabled him to effectively close agencies, nominate the people for high office he is nominating, and make the foreign policy pronouncements he makes, all with barely a peep from his fellow travelers in Congress.