I received an email from Satan yesterday evening challenging me to post today about Trump’s revocation of Biden’s security clearance. On the one hand, it was just another in a series of petty moves by a puny man as retribution against those who hurt his feelings. On the other hand, it’s inconsequential, as the limited utility of a former president maintaining his security clearance and getting occasional briefings only applies under normal circumstances, where a current president seeks the advice of a predecessor in office or uses a former president as an envoy for foreign affairs.

Trump won’t be asking anything of Biden, so there will be no need for Biden to be kept up to date during Trump’s term. Maybe the next president will seek Biden’s help. He or she can restore Biden’s security clearance then. Sure, there’s the irony that Trump will give access to state secrets to unvetted kids in Musk’s wake, but that’s a different issue. It’s just a slap in the face of a former president by a current president who uses power as payback like a butthurt child.

But what Satan missed was Trump’s firing of Colleen Shogan. Remember her, the National Archivist who said no to Biden when, on the way out the door, tried to pretend that the Equal Rights Amendment was enacted? The last piece of the ERA puzzle was for the Archivist of the United States to certify that the amendment was enacted and the Twenty-Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution. A “loyal” archivist might have done what Biden wanted. Shogan, however, was not loyal to Biden, but to the Constitution. She refused.

Now she’s gone.

The director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office, Sergio Gor, announced in a social media post Friday that Archivist of the United States Colleen Shogan had been removed from her position.

“At the direction of @realDonaldTrump the Archivist of the United States has been dismissed tonight,” Gor wrote on X. “We thank Colleen Shogan for her service.”

What possible reason could there be for such a petty narcissist to do such an inane thing?

President Donald Trump has fired the head of the National Archives, after complaining for nearly two years about the agency’s role in the Justice Department’s investigation and eventual prosecution of him over a slew of classified documents kept at his Mar-a-Lago home following his first term.

It is the function of the National Archives to keep track of classified documents. Most would view this as a good thing. Of course, most have a functional understanding of the importance of maintaining the nation’s confidences. But even worse, Trump’s anger over the National Archives involvement in his hiding top secret documents after claiming to have returned them focused on Shogan when she wasn’t even the Archivist at the time.

Shogan, 49, was not the archivist at the time the agency was attempting to retrieve boxes of presidential records from Trump’s estate in 2021 and 2022. But Trump has viewed NARA with suspicion since the investigation and has openly described its top staff as complicit in efforts to damage him politically.

As with Trump’s purge of inspectors general, there is law that is supposed to apply to such actions as the naming and terminating of the archivist, not that Trump either knows of or care about such trivial matters.

A former director of litigation at the Archives, Jason R. Baron, said he was troubled by Shogan’s ouster. He noted that federal law says the Archivist must be appointed “without regard to political affiliations and solely on the basis of … professional qualifications.” The statute also says the president must notify Congress about why the archivist was dismissed.

There is, of course, no basis for Shogan’s removal, Trump’s factual failing of not know that she wasn’t the archivist at the time he was investigated for his keeping and concealing secret documents.

“No good reason exists for firing Dr. Shogan, as she has faithfully carried out her duties in a nonpartisan fashion in the short time since being appointed U.S. Archivist by President Biden,” said Baron, now a professor at the University of Maryland. “Dr. Shogan had nothing to do with the prior actions NARA staff took in connection with the successful return of boxes of presidential records that had been improperly transferred to Mar-a-Lago at the end of President Trump’s first term.”

But it is her faithful performance of her duties that Trump can’t stand. After all, what if he needs her to be loyal to him and there she is, faithfully performing her duties to the United States of America rather than the Darth Cheeto?

“Notwithstanding what President Trump might choose to believe, NARA is a completely nonpartisan agency, and NARA staff at all times have conducted themselves thoroughly professionally in ensuring that our Nation’s history is properly preserved,” Baron said.

Baron might be wrong again here. NARA was a nonpartisan agency, and is meant to remain a nonpartisan agency. Americans need it to be a nonpartisan agency. Americans need a National Archivist to say no to a president who, like Biden, wants to make a failed amendment part of the Constitution. But will NARA be nonpartisan with whomever Trump names to replace Colleen Shogan given that Trump values nothing more than sycophantic loyalty to him and him alone? Are you happy now, Satan?