Trump is a lame duck president on day one. You can interpret this one of two ways: he has no political capital and will be running on authoritarian fumes for his whole term, or his political capital is limitless because he can’t run again and has unshakable blind loyalty from nearly half the country. Since it’s Trump, the worst option is almost certainly correct. Trump will never run out of political capital.
I get what you’re saying, but internal company communications (especially for publicly traded companies) still should be accessible to valid legal inquiries, otherwise there is absolutely no hope for any kind of accountability. Having IMs between end-users be off the record by default seems totally reasonable and good to me, but internal communications should not be deletable at all, let alone manually by executives. The US Government has record retention schedules, through which non-records (water-cooler talk or the digital equivalent) are kept private and real records are identified and preserved. This is the kind of thing that Congress needs to regulate for private companies. Google blatantly and actively deleted conversations they knew would be relevant to the case, that’s unacceptable.