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Twelve beats, ordered by which one moved most recently — so this list rearranges itself as the news does. The ones that have gone quiet are folded away rather than dropped, and the count says how many, because a subject cooling off is worth knowing too.
The documented record before politics — the company, the courts, the bankruptcies, the television years. No news block, because it is finished.
Too short a record to chart yet — the count is shown instead.
The Super Dots he has moved, ranked by how much of the change is actually his.
44 of the 44 subjects here have a measured figure attached. The rows start with the areas he changed most, and inside each row the subjects where his own hand is clearest come first — not the ones with the biggest numbers. Click a full-color tile to see what changed, how he changed it, where the figure comes from, and how much of the change is genuinely his. The faded tiles with dashed borders are subjects he plainly acted on where we have not yet measured by how much; they stay on the page rather than being hidden, so you can see where the counting stops.
Three findings from the dives below, chosen to cut in different directions on purpose: one unflattering, one that defuses a partisan reading, one simply structural. Every figure is its dive’s own published number.
Across both terms Gallup has published 153 job-approval readings and not one of them reaches half the country. The ceiling is 49, set in the first term; the floor is 34. Every other president in the same comparison has been above 50 — Reagan peaked at 68, Clinton at 73, George W. Bush at 90. The unusual thing is not the average, which is 40.4 and 41, but the narrowness: a 15-point range across the first term, against Bush’s 65. The dive spends its next tab testing whether thinner polling explains that, and finds it does not.
In 2024 his own campaign committee took 78.0% of its $495.9m in receipts as transfers from affiliated committees rather than as money raised directly, against 38.4% in 2016 and 37.0% in 2020. The figure that makes it readable is the control: the opposing 2024 campaign did the same thing with 45.4% of its $1.18bn. Same cycle, same rules. The practice is not unique to either, and a page showing only one of these numbers would be making an argument rather than taking a measurement.
The same filing, on the same day. Since 17 December 2024 his 114,750,000 shares have sat in the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust, of which he is the sole beneficiary — while the sole trustee, Donald J. Trump Jr., holds sole voting and investment power over everything the trust owns. Beneficial ownership and voting control are two different things, and on this record they sit in two different hands. The stake itself peaked at 64.9% in April 2024 before falling to 41.5%.
Every person we build a record for gets the same six questions, worded the same way each time. Settling the questions before choosing the person is what stops the list being tailored to suit an argument. Under those sit the extra ones that only apply to what this particular person has been: an office-holder, a head of government, and someone who ran companies. A record is not complete until all six of the first group exist, and none of the second group is written until they do.
The six had to move together or not at all, by design: publishing someone's legal record without also publishing their money, their output, their reach, their affiliations and their standing would be an attack dressed up as a template. That test has been passed — every dive above is now written, the first record at this tier where that is true.
Every phase of this record is written, so this is not a queue. Some of what follows is a limit of the sources; the rest is a decision not to publish a figure that would have to be argued rather than shown.
A gap on a page about a named person reads as “nothing to report”. It is not. Nothing here is a judgment about what the missing pieces would show, and nothing here is a promise that they are coming.
The counting rules matter more than any single figure on this page, so they are published rather than buried in a footnote. Each one is a decision that could have been made differently, and several of them change a headline number.
A figure on this page is only as good as the rule that produced it, and every rule here was chosen before the figure it produces was known.
Each linked subject owns its own full series and history; this page owns only the part attributable to this record, so where the two ever disagree, the subject page is right and this one is the error. The same record is being built for Joe Biden and Barack Obama, and the whole collection is one graph on the Dot Network.