Revolving Door Project | A Portal into Pandemonium

We’re tracking Trump’s disasters in the making, and who makes money from them.

This newsletter was originally published on our Substack. Read and subscribe here.

Years ago, during the first Trump administration, our organization led a Swamp Tour of DC, taking a bus around the city and describing how various swamp monsters earned their spot on a tour of DC’s most corrupt and self-serving political operatives. Today, as our Jeff Hauser and Timi Iwayemi recently wrote in The American Prospect, the swamp runneth over: we are living through by far the most corrupt presidency in U.S. history.

This newsletter is not a swamp tour, per se, but a tour of the tools we’ve developed so far this year for understanding the pandemonium of Trump’s second term.

Chronicling the Corrupters

As our regular readers know, we publish a Corruption Calendar on Fridays, chronicling Trump’s abuses of power to enrich himself and his loyalists, and pointing out how that corruption harms people’s lives in material ways. We’ve been tracking how this administration has taken lawlessness to new lows, including by refusing to comply with court orders. Check out our interactive timeline compiling reports of the Trump administration deliberately disobeying court orders on immigration.

This administration’s carnival of cruelty—arresting firefighters and traumatizing children—is brought to you by the wealthiest-ever ruling clique. Trump appointed a record thirteen billionaires to serve in his administration. Even without Elon Musk included in the mix, their combined net worth is almost $600 billion. We are tracking these Oligarchs in Trump World, from Trump’s political appointees to his donors and allies. Together with Demand Progress Education Fund, our “No Corporate Cabinet” website hosts profiles of some of the rich insiders hollowing out the government from within.

Our Trump and Musk Watch homepage collects our many resources tracking the Trump administration’s assault on public service. While Musk has retreated from the headlines after one of the world’s most expensive temper tantrums earlier this summer, my colleague Will Royce reminded us that Musk’s retreat from DOGE is decidedly fake, as Musk’s loyalists continue to lead DOGE’s efforts to jeopardize Americans’ social security numbers and generally make the government work worse. As our Kenny Stancil wrote, “DOGE Is Going to Kill a Lot of Americans.” Meanwhile, we’ve also been documenting the rise of state-level DOGE copycats in at least 15 states.

Scrutinizing Silicon Valley’s Rightward Turn

One of the marked differences between Trump’s first and second terms is the overt sympathy today between Big Tech, Big Oil, and Trump’s nakedly authoritarian project. The attraction is only natural, given how much these greedy lawbreakers have in common. As our Henry Burke and Dylan Gyauch-Lewis explained, Trump has learned a lot from Silicon Valley’s unabashed “move fast and break things” ideology: “Blitzscaling, exemplified by Uber and other venture capital–backed tech companies, is now being put to use by the Trump administration and its techno-fascist staffer class.”

Kenny has elaborated on Big Oil and Big Tech’s deregulatory ambitions and their connection to the abundance agenda in The Sling, and Dylan wrote about how artificial intelligence is on a collision course with the green transition in The American Prospect. Trump’s Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has his foot in both the tech and fossil fuel worlds, as I wrote in “Trump’s Energy Czar Is All In on AI,” and is poised to profit personally from advancing their joint agenda at the expense of America’s public lands.

Not only is the Trump administration attempting to fulfill the AI industry’s wishlist, including by threatening to withhold federal funds from states that attempt to regulate AI; it is also embedding AI within the administration to erode the power of unionized federal workers, and decrease transparency and accountability of the government. We are tracking the Trump administration’s uses of AI for authoritarian ends across federal agencies.

Tech billionaire Marc Andreessen’s blatantly anti-democratic ambitions and outsized influence in the Trump administration make him an important figure for understanding the agenda (and moral philosophical rot) of Trump-aligned AI boosters. We have mapped all of his firm’s investments in cryptocurrency companies that have broken the law or otherwise been involved in backroom dealings in order to trace “the real world impact of the crypto portfolio of Silicon Valley’s angry would-be philosopher king.”

Documenting Disasters in the Making

The Trump administration’s attacks on public services and the social safety net are going to cause a profound amount of needless suffering. We are tracking that destruction as its reach and consequences become visible.

We have interactive timelines documenting the White House’s pre-disaster recklessness and post-disaster cruelty, and a map showing how Trump’s FEMA is handling requests for major disaster declarations state by state. Kenny has a report on Trump’s homicidal hurricane policy, which is leaving millions of people vulnerable to disaster by destroying the government’s weather forecasting and disaster planning capacity. And as Kenny reminds us in another important piece, extreme heat is the leading cause of weather-related deaths, and Trump is ensuring that there will be more victims. Air pollution, which causes tens of thousands of premature deaths in America every year, is also set to worsen because of the administration’s attack on the Clean Air Act, as my colleague Toni Aguilar Rosenthal explained.

Natural disasters intensified by climate change are not the only threat to which the Trump administration’s policies are making us more vulnerable. We have been tracking the Trump administration’s anti-vaccine actions, and outbreaks of infectious diseases including bird flu and measles. Aviation disasters are also on the rise, and the Trump administration has been meddling with the capacity of federal agencies responsible for aviation safety, including the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board. As my colleague KJ Boyle has documented, since the start of the Trump administration—and DOGE’s meddling in air traffic control staffing—there have been no fewer than 108 aviation disasters killing a total of 249 people.

Though the Trump administration’s war on public data may not be easily visible in our daily lives, it is a profound disaster in the making. The Trump administration is laying off the staff that implement Freedom of Information Act requests, making it harder for journalists and the public to understand what the government is doing, as our Andrea Beaty and Will have explained. And the administration is systematically gutting public data that helps us understand the nation’s health and safety, climate and environment, economy and workforce, immigration, education, and even basic demographics.

As our former colleague Xaver Clarke eloquently wrote:

The loss of public data isn’t just a transparency issue, it’s a direct threat to the public’s ability to know, to question, and to decide. When access to shared empirical reality disappears, so does the foundation of democracy. Without reliable data, self-governance becomes nearly impossible. Consensus fractures. Policy failure, corruption, and inequality become harder to see, let alone fix. A population cut off from facts becomes easier to mislead, easier to divide, and easier to control. Worsening crises become caricatured as inexplicable phenomena rather than the consequences of deliberate policy choices. That’s the point. Trump fills the void with the information needed to quench his authoritarian ambition.