The loudest political arguments are won with sourced numbers, not louder shouting. So we picked a framework, locked the baselines before the term started, and we check back every year. We show our working. We argue about the editorial. We don't argue about the data.
We're both Australian. We can't vote in the US. That's exactly why we can be objective about this stuff. We're not on a team, we don't have a horse in the race, we just find American politics riveting in the way you find a slow-motion car crash riveting.
Mike (Trump Hater) thinks Donald Trump is a deranged lunatic who is a clear and present danger to democracy and global security. He's said this loudly and consistently since 2016 and the second term has not changed his mind one bit.
Steve (Trump Lover) reckons Trump is doing the job he was hired to do. If Steve could vote in America, he would have worn the stupid red hat while doing it. He's not embarrassed about that and he'll defend it at any family BBQ that runs long enough.
We agreed the framework in November 2024, before the inauguration. Eleven concrete promises, locked baselines, locked targets, locked sources. The grades and the editorial are where we fight. The numbers are where we agree.
Every metric has four numbers: a baseline (where things stood on Day 1), a target (what he promised), the current figure, and a grade. Grading legend is fixed:
Trump 2.0 was sworn in on January 20, 2025. Not January 6. January 6 is the Capitol riot anniversary, which Trump made his own kind of monument to by pardoning roughly 1,500 of the rioters on his first day back in office. We mark both, but the yearly scorecard refreshes on January 20.
In between the locked annual scorecard, the Right Now panel on the home page updates whenever something newsworthy lands. Tariff rulings, court losses, foreign policy debacles, fresh inflation prints. The big locked numbers wait for the anniversary. The rolling stuff gets updated whenever Trump does something dumb enough to warrant it. Which is most weeks.
US government data first. BEA, BLS, Federal Reserve, EIA, CDC, CBP, OPM, FBI. Where the official numbers haven't dropped yet, we use the most credible secondary source we can find. Pew Research, Yale Budget Lab, the Council on Criminal Justice, FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, Reuters, Axios, POLITICO, Forbes.
Every claim links to its source. If a source updates, we update. If we get something wrong, we fix it on the spot. We are two cousins from Sydney with a spreadsheet, not the New York Times. If you spot a mistake, email Mike. He'll change it.
Mike writes most of the copy and Mike thinks Trump is a vandal. So the editorial framing leans hard. Steve gets a veto on anything factually wrong but he doesn't get a veto on the sass. The numbers, the baselines, the targets, the grading legend, those are all signed off by both of us. They're locked. If you want to argue with the framing, fine. If you want to argue with the numbers, take it up with the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
We made this because the loudest people in any room about American politics are usually the ones with the fewest sources. We wanted to be the opposite of that.