Diplomacy is Easier When You Delete Receipts

Published on: Sat, 07 Feb 2026 10:00:00 GMT
Original Story: State Department will delete X posts from before Trump returned to office – NPR

The Digital Great Purge: Foggy Bottom Style

There is a certain, relatable magic in the “Delete” button. As an Elder Millennial who has spent the last fifteen years watching my soul slowly evaporate in a cubicle, I get it. We’ve all had that moment—usually after three double-espressos and a passive-aggressive “per my last email” from a supervisor named Brayden—where we just want to wipe our entire digital existence and move to a yurt in Vermont. But while I’m just trying to hide my 2009 Facebook photos where I’m wearing a fedora, the State Department is doing it on a much more… “authoritarian chic” scale.

According to NPR, the State Department is currently busy scrubbing its X accounts (formerly Twitter, for those of us who still remember joy) of any posts made before the current administration’s inevitable “pivot.” It’s the ultimate corporate rebrand. Forget “Continuity of Government”; we’re moving straight into “Continuity of Gaslighting.” It turns out that diplomacy is a lot easier when you don’t have a decade-long paper trail of promises, condemnations, and awkward selfies with foreign dignitaries who are now on the “do not call” list.

In the corporate world, we call this “streamlining the narrative.” If the previous department head’s initiatives didn’t yield a 10% Q4 growth, you simply delete the PowerPoint presentations and pretend they never existed. The State Department is just applying this logic to global geopolitics. It’s the digital version of burning the files in the parking lot before the new CEO arrives to “disrupt” the industry. And by disrupt, I mean fire everyone and replace them with an AI chatbot that only speaks in slogans.

The justification, of course, is “archiving.” They’ll tell us these posts are being moved to a dark, dusty corner of the National Archives where they will be preserved for “history”—which is government-speak for “a basement in Maryland where no one will ever look at them again.” It’s the political equivalent of putting your childhood trophies in a box in your parents’ attic. You aren’t *throwing them away*, you’re just making sure no one ever sees that you took third place in a 1996 spelling bee.

For those of us suffering from terminal corporate burnout, there’s a dark envy here. Imagine if we could just delete every “circling back” or “touching base” email we’ve ever sent. Imagine if we could purge the record of every Zoom meeting that should have been an email. The State Department is living the dream. They get to walk into the office on Monday morning with a clean slate, pretending they never said anything about anything to anyone. It’s not just dismantling the bureaucracy; it’s dismantling the very concept of a chronological timeline. Honestly? I’m not even mad. I’m just wondering if they can show me how to do it to my student loan records next.

Related Coverage:

• Opinion – Trump’s Obama Derangement Syndrome (via The New York Times)
• Italy says cannot join Trump’s ‘Board of Peace’ because of constitution (via Al Jazeera)
• Trump’s Racist Post Deserves Outrage (via Christianity Today)