The Daily Show - The Donald J. Trump Presidential Twitter Library

Late on the afternoon of Monday, June 30, 1941, Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke at the dedication of his newly constructed presidential library at Hyde Park, New York, the first of its kind in American history. To bring together the records of the past... where they will be preserved for the use of men and women in the future, a Nation must believe in three things, President Roosevelt told the crowd. It must believe in the past. It must believe in the future. It must, above all, believe in the capacity of its own people so to learn from the past that they can gain in judgment in creating their own future.

It wasnt exactly a Twitter-friendly message. But FDRs point, if verbose, was simple: Thanks to his efforts then, our generation today would be wiser than the one that elected him. And whos to say he was wrong?

Given the 2016 presidential election and its aftermath, I am. As a presidential historian, I might have been asked to pen an introduction to the libraries of Roosevelt or Kennedy or one of the Bushes. But instead, my assignment, which I for some reason accepted, is to write 750 words on The Donald J. Trump Presidential Twitter Library. The J. stands for John, and per my lawyer counts as a word.

So Trump may not be FDR, but that is not to say his ever-growing collection of tweets is without historical value. On the contrary. Commanders-in-chief have always been early adopters of the latest means of communication. Lincoln installed a telegraph in the War Department. In 1877, the first White House telephone line enchanted Rutherford Hayes. Calvin Coolidge, notoriously a man of few words, used up a handful of them to reach 23 million radio listeners in his 1925 inaugural, and of course Roosevelts fireside chats ushered in the now familiar practice of staring dead-eyed at an electronic media device and hoping to feel something, anything. Truman became the first president to deliver a televised address in 1947. Bill Clinton brought the Oval Office into the Digital Age, sending the first presidential email, though it was later mysteriously deleted by an unknown party in his household.

And now the digital ruminations of the 45th president give us that rarest thing: a running record of a presidents moods and musings. While Woodrow Wilson once observed that a presidency offers its occupant the opportunity to be as big a man as he wants to be, the Trump canon is a chronicle of just how small a president can be. Trump is not the first president to obsess over his opponents and to rant about the seeming injustice of the world. Hes just the first to make the rest of us listen in as he does it.

With that in mind, the closest parallel to President Trumps tweets should give him no comfort, for the precedent is not FDRs millions of cubic feet of records or Lincolns reams of manuscripts or Jeffersons thousands of letters. It is the covert White House recordings of Richard M. Nixon, who destroyed his own presidency by allowing his darkest machinations to be captured on audiotape.

Trump partisans, of course, demur, arguing that he (or as he might put it, he alone) understands how Twitter eliminates the filter of a hostile press, giving the people what they want: All Trump, All the Time.