Federal records are all recorded information, regardless of form or characteristics, made or received by a Federal agency under Federal law or in connection with the transaction of public business. Federal records must be preserved by an agency – as evidence of the organization, functions, policies, decisions, procedures, operations or other activities of the United States Government or because of the informational value of the data in them.

“Federal Records Management”/The National Archives

Sometime during our childhood, we were all introduced to an exercise called, “Telephone.”  Participants would stand in a line or circle.  The process began with the facilitator whispering a message in the ear of one of the players.  That person would then repeat the message to the person standing next to him or her.  And so on, until the penultimate participate whispered the message to the last person in line.  That individual would then share the message he/she received followed by the facilitator restating the original message.  The teaching moment involved a demonstration how a rumor passed from one person to another morphs with each iteration to the point where it is largely unrecognizable from the original source.

As well documented, the Trump administration has changed the rules.  No longer do they need a communications conga line to turn a given set of facts into a conspiracy or a lie. The president has usurped the role of originator, ultimate recipient and every participant in between.  Perhaps the best example was his claim millions of dead people, some older that the USA itself, were still getting social security payments.  A legitimate story about the outdated COBOL computer program to track Social Security accounts became a scandal of unbelievable proportions.  By March 6, 2025, during Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress, he had convinced himself the Social Security Administration was still making payments to over 16 million people over the age of 110, including one who was 360 years old.  Trump was right.  It WAS unbelievable because it was not true.

But as Arlo Guthrie would say, “That’s not what I came here to talk about.”  More importantly, as we learned this week, the Trump administration has spent the last two years perfecting a new game.  For lack of a better name, I will call it “Telegraph.”  Here is how it works.

• Since the days of Newt Gingrich, aggrieved Republicans or now MAGA cultists have been making a list of governmental institutions, programs, officials or laws they believe are the source of their grievance.
• American oligarchs created and funded the Heritage Foundation to be the keeper of the grievances and to construct a comprehensive plan to eliminate all the barriers to shape the government, economy and culture in their own image.
• The oligarchs then needed a useful idiot who would run for president on their platform.
• Next, pack the Supreme Court with justices who would give their useful idiot free rein.
• In what turned out to be an unsuccessful dry run in 2017, the oligarchs wrongly assumed their useful idiot could build a team to implement their agenda.
• Therefore, for their second attempt in 2020, the oligarchs commissioned the Heritage Foundation to draft a 980-page, step-by-step manual for addressing personal grievances and anointed their own vice-useful idiot.
• Finally, they filled every major position in the executive branch either with one of their own or other useful idiots who would do exactly what the chief useful idiot told them to do.

So why do I call the new game “Telegraph.”  Because anyone who was paying attention no longer had to speculate what a second Trump administration would bring.  The oligarchs and their puppets “telegraphed” exactly what would happen.  There is no more proof of this than the case of the security lapse on Signal by useful idiots Vance, Hegseth, Gabbard, Waltz and Ratcliffe.  Which begs the question, “Why was Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent there?”  He obviously served two purposes.  First, he was the designated oligarch (a former hedge fund manager) to protect his fellow oligarchs’ interests.  Second, he was one of the architects of Project 2025 and, therefore, it was his responsibility to ensure the useful idiots followed the script verbatim.

And follow it they did.  Which explains why the Yemen confab was conducted on the Signal app.  One of the MAGA petty grievances from Trump 1.0 was the Presidential Records Act, the Federal Records Act and the Freedom of Information Act, which Trump and his benefactors claimed provided fodder for Congressional oversight and the media.  To avoid a repeat of this legal “inconvenience,” government officials began using alternative communications channels to circumvent the requirements contained in these three legislated prerogatives.  The danger to governmental transparency and oversight were clear as laid out in a 2021 analysis of the practice by SUNY-Stony Brook professor Jessica Wittman.

Recent litigation has highlighted why courts, attorneys, and other legal researchers must consider social media as a primary source of government information, particularly when records may become inaccessible once a social media post is modified or deleted, or when technology becomes obsolete…Until clear and consistent retention policies exist and there are systemic ways to access and preserve social media as government information, the definition of a “record” becomes irrelevant.

Knowing everything Trump and his sycophants say is either an admission of guilt or projection, the creation of “policy chats” on Signal proved their denunciations of Hillary’s emails and Hunter’s laptop were merely a roadmap how they would use non-traditional channels to expunge the record of improper or even illegal abuses of executive power.

Project 2025 is nothing more than a 980-page telegram of what the oligarchs and their useful idiots plan to do to change the sacred constitutional and legal foundations that made the United States exceptional as a role model for self-governance.  They could have saved a lot of time, energy and paper if only they had sent the following Western Union condolence telegram.

Unfortunately, nobody including the voters, Congress, the Supreme Court and both political parties responded by pointing out the word “STOP” was omitted at the end of the message.

For what it’s worth.
Dr. ESP