Follow the Grift
How we count

Methodology

Follow the Grift tracks money that has reached Donald Trump and people close to him since Election Day 2024. It is built from public financial disclosures, court and congressional records, and published reporting.

How a number gets on the board

  1. Collect. Software checks public news feeds every few hours. Headlines are never published as they come in.
  2. Research. An AI model (Anthropic's Claude) reads promising leads, searches for the original reporting and for independent confirmation, and drafts a line item with exact quotes from its sources.
  3. Verify. Plain software, not the AI, then checks the draft. Every quote must appear word for word in the article as retrieved, and the amount must appear in a quote. A “Reported” item needs two independent, established news organizations; a “Disclosed” item needs a government or court record. Allegations, items outside our time window, possible duplicates and loaded wording are never published automatically.
  4. Publish or hold. A draft that passes every check is added and marked “Added automatically”. Anything that fails waits for a human and is not published.
  5. Add up. A person's figure is the sum of their counted line items. We never publish a standalone estimate of someone's total.

Earlier line items were researched and checked by hand. Every change to the ledger, automatic or manual, is recorded in its version history.

Confidence tiers

Disclosed
On a primary record: an official financial disclosure (OGE Form 278e), an SEC filing, a court record, or the party's own statement.
Reported
Reported by established news organizations and not contradicted on the record. Amounts may be the outlet's estimate.
Alleged
Asserted in a lawsuit, complaint, or single-source report and not independently confirmed.

What kind of money

Paid out
Income, royalties, sale proceeds, fees and settlement money paid to the person or an entity they own.
Gifts
Property given to the person or slated to pass to them or their library.
Contracts
Guaranteed future payments under a signed agreement.
Equity stakes
Paper value of shares received, at the valuation the source gives. It moves with the market.
Capital raised
Outside money raised into a fund or firm the person runs or is a partner in. Partners share in its fees and profits; the capital itself is not their income.
Lobbying fees
Fees paid to a lobbying firm the person owns, as reported on federal lobbying disclosures. Firm revenue for lobbying the administration, not take-home pay.
Donations
Money given to committees, funds or projects the person controls or directs, such as an inaugural committee or library foundation. Not personal income.
Federal awards
Contracts, grants and other awards from the U.S. government to a company the person owns, runs, advises or invests in, at the amount the government has committed so far. It is the company's revenue for goods and services, not the person's income, and their share of it is unknown. Each line says how the person is tied to the company.

What the default view counts

The leaderboard counts Disclosed, Reported and Alleged items, including paid out, gifts, contracts, equity stakes, capital raised, lobbying fees, donations and federal awards. Every line item with a stated amount is counted, including allegations, which are marked “Alleged” wherever they appear. Use the controls on the leaderboard to change that.

Government contracts

Federal contracts, grants and other awards are listed when they went to a company that a person on this site owns, runs, sits on the board of, advises for a stake, or invests in through a fund they are a partner of, and were signed on or after Election Day 2024. That includes new orders placed after Election Day under contracts signed earlier, such as the yearly orders that keep a detention center or a launch program running: each order is a fresh commitment of money, and its line names the older contract it falls under. Each line uses the amount the government has obligated, that is, committed to pay so far, from USAspending.gov or the agency's own announcement, and shows any larger potential value separately. Each line says how the person is tied to the company and, where the record says so, whether the award was competed. The money pays a company for goods or services and the person's share is not known, so awards are company revenue, like lobbying-firm fees, not personal income. They are counted in the default total because the companies belong to or are run by people in or close to the administration that awards them; use the “Federal awards” control on the leaderboard to leave them out. They are collected on Government contracts.

Most people on this site are Trump's family, officials in his administration, or advisers and associates. A few are listed as donors and allies: people who founded or run a company that received federal awards and who are tied to Trump by large political donations (such as $1 million or more to his super PAC or inaugural fund, personally or through their company) or by a documented close working relationship. Their line items say what the tie is, and they are marked “Donor & ally”.

Where sources disagree

When outlets report different amounts, we use the figure tied most closely to a primary record and explain the gap in a note on the line item. Amounts marked Est. are the source's estimate, such as the paper value of shares on a given day.

What we leave out

We leave out claims we cannot trace to a named source, deal sizes reported as if they were payments, money a person invested rather than received, and deals where the reporting itself says the person does not stand to profit. Notable exclusions are explained on Checked and left out.

Who paid

Each line item names the payer when the source does: a company, a foreign government, a donor or a group such as lobbying clients. When the source doesn't say who paid, for example a sale of shares to an undisclosed buyer, the line item says so. The leaderboard's “By payer” view adds up the counted total by kind of payer.

Responses

Where a person or their representative has responded on the record, the response appears under the line item, marked “Denies” for a denial and “Response” for other statements. A denial is shown next to the evidence; it never removes or reduces a line item. What decides whether money is counted is what the records and reporting show, not whether the people involved dispute it. Before we add a line item that isn't already covered by a major news organization, we ask the person for a response and record the date we asked.

Duplicates

Every build checks the ledger for possible double counting: two line items for the same person and payer, in the same category, with amounts within 10% and dates within 60 days are flagged for an editor. Aggregate estimates, such as a family's total crypto earnings, are never added on top of the line items they summarize.

Other trackers

Others track this money too, and their work informed ours:

Follow the Grift differs in three ways: it ranks individual people, including officials and allies outside the family; it lists every line item with its sources, confidence tier and any response; and it lets readers choose what to count. Our totals can differ from theirs because we count only individually sourced items and leave out estimates we can't trace.

Open data

The full ledger is free to download as JSON or CSV. New line items are published to an Atom feed.