THE DONALD

Legal & policies

Sources and Methodology

How official and secondary materials are ingested, labeled, and ranked.

Last updated: August 5, 2026

This page is a working draft prepared for attorney review. It is not legal advice and has not been certified as attorney-approved unless separately stated by counsel.

Purpose

This page explains the methodology used to gather, normalize, score, and present materials. It is a transparency document, not a warranty that every public document is mirrored here.

Primary source classes

  • White House and official executive communications when available through public channels.
  • Federal Register presidential documents and related official notices.
  • Congress.gov legislative records and related metadata.
  • GovInfo packages and National Archives materials.
  • Frozen historical archives such as trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov, treated as historical.
  • Official video platforms when embeds or references are permitted.

Pipeline principles

  1. Discover or receive a candidate item from a registered source.
  2. Fetch safely with SSRF protections, size limits, and respectful rate limits.
  3. Normalize metadata (title, dates, canonical URL, identifiers, source fingerprint).
  4. Deduplicate against known identifiers and similarity signals.
  5. Classify for relevance, risk, and topic signals.
  6. Require human review when auto-publish confidence is insufficient.
  7. Publish with source labels and links back to originals when available.

Scoring and review

Items may receive internal scores for source trust, official-document strength, historical value, policy value, duplication risk, copyright risk, safety risk, and related signals. Scores guide workflow; they are not public grades of people or viewpoints.

High-risk categories require review or exclusion from automated publication.

Secondary media

Secondary publishers may be used when allowlisted and clearly labeled. We do not scrape indiscriminately. Publisher terms, robots rules, and copyright limits apply.

Limitations

Feeds can lag, APIs can change, and some official pages may be incomplete or temporarily unavailable. Absence of an item is not a claim that the event did not occur.

Readers should consult original official sources for authoritative text.

Public source status

Operational status for enabled sources may be summarized on a public Source Status page when that module is online.