The Trump Archive is collecting everything he's said on video
Fact-checkers, start your engines.
Remember that time US President-elect Donald Trump said one thing years or weeks ago, then reversed his position? If your answer is "which of the many, many examples," you've been paying attention -- and now you have a handy database full of speeches, debates, interviews and other broadcasts to trace his evolving opinions. The Trump Archive is live and has over 780 video clips amounting to over 520 hours of footage to date, with more on the way.
The repository is a project by the otherwise neutral Internet Archive, known mostly for its Wayback Machine that allows users to peer backward to the early days of the world wide web via cached pages. The Trump Archive builds on the organization's experience making the Political Ad TV Archive they started in 2014. Likewise, the new collection's laser-focus on the incoming Commander-In-Chief hopes to help reporters, researchers and the general public fact-check old Trump statements from as far back as December 2009 with new ones, the Television Archive's managing editor Nancy Watzman said in a blog post.
But there's another reason for uploading the archive beyond Trump's upcoming inauguration, Watzman somberly reminds us: Things posted or broadcast on the Internet aren't inherently saved forever.
"Reporters and the public may take it for granted that a news story or a piece of broadcast video is only a google search away, but as newspapers, companies, and organizations fail and change, often vital information is lost. The web is far more fragile than is generally understood," said Watzman.
