The filings first: financial disclosures, the Federal Register, court dockets, contract awards. Established news organizations second. Nothing goes up without a source, and the source is the point. The record is a map to the evidence, not a substitute for reading it.
A small team, working from one rule: no source, no receipt. A receipt needs a documented transfer, deal, pardon, contract or act of government, and a link that supports it as written. The Methodology page spells out the rule. Hold us to it.
We fix it where everyone can see. The correction is attached to the record it changes: what changed, why and when. Nothing is quietly swapped out. Wrong figure, dead link, a receipt we are missing: write to corrections@grandtheftamerica.us. We read all of it.
The site makes one claim: Trump is using the presidency to get rich, and taking apart whatever could stop him. That is a claim about things he did, each with a date and a source. It is not a claim about a party. If you think a receipt is wrong, open the source. If you think we are missing one, send it.
No. We are saying what happened and what the law says about it: money moved to the man who could affect its value, the people whose job was to stop that were removed, and in many of these cases a statute names the act. Whether it is prosecuted is a different question. The Justice Department that would bring those cases now works for the people on the receipts, so for now the record is the only place it is written down.
Software reads the public record and drafts receipts. Nothing it drafts is published until a person has opened the source and confirmed the receipt says what the source says. Everything with a point of view, the explainers, the five stories on each desk, this page, is written by a person. There is so much grand thefting going on that this is the only way to keep up.
This counts on being too boring and too fast to follow. So don't let it be. Read one receipt. Open its source. Send it to someone who assumes none of this is actually documented. Then vote, and bring people with you.
Money that moved because of the office: cash, gifts, deals, pardons and contracts tied to Trump, his family and the people around him, each with a date, a figure where there is one, and a source. Ninety-four receipts so far. No rumors and no estimates of our own.
Not like this. A meme coin on inauguration weekend. A foreign sovereign fund putting two billion dollars through the family's stablecoin. A pardon after a daughter's three-million-dollar donation. A four-hundred-million-dollar jet from a government with business before the administration. These are not a relative's ordinary dealings. They happen while the family holds the power to decide the outcome.
The first is cash in the family's pockets: income and gifts actually received, counted once. The second is everything else around them: the value of deals and stakes, and the taxpayer contracts that went to companies tied to the family and its donors. That money is real and it moved, but it is not in anyone's pocket yet, or it went to the crew rather than the family. We never add the two together, because one big number would say something the record doesn't.
Because a pardon can be worth more than a check. A dropped case, a commuted sentence, a rule rewritten for one company: real stakes, no price tag. We log them for what was at stake and keep them out of both totals, so the totals stay honest.
The moves in the playbook. Every receipt is tagged to one, like "settle your lawsuits with companies that need your approval" or "pardon donors and fundraisers." A filled box has at least one receipt behind it. An empty one is a move from the historical playbook that has not shown up in the record yet.
Things the government did, or set in motion, that make it harder to investigate, restrain or remove the people running it. One hundred fifty-four so far, each dated, sourced and checked. Threats count when they come from the people who can carry them out. Insults and commentary do not.
Neither. We don't predict. We count. The record shows the boxes in the strongman's playbook being checked, front by front, and how fast. Where a box is empty, it stays empty until there is a receipt.
Normal politics is a fight over what the government does. This is a fight against the machinery that can remove a government. Watch the target. Policies are one thing; the referees are another.
Fair question, and we take it seriously, because if every outrage is the end of the republic, the words stop working when you need them. Our answer is no, for a specific reason: the guardrails that held in the first term were mostly people, and those people have been removed on purpose. What exists now did not exist then.
Sometimes, and the record says so. Blocked is a status here, and a court stopping an action is tracked to the same standard as the action. Minnesota keeping its Guard is in the record. So is the fact that the ruling usually arrives after the plane has landed.
Five ways of taking power: fire anyone who can stop him, make it too expensive to hold him accountable, point the law at critics, put troops in American cities, decide who gets to vote and who counts it. Each front is a checklist of boxes from the authoritarian playbook. Each action carries a status: underway, starting, done, blocked or threatened. There is no score. The boxes and the statuses are the read.