Build a beautiful wall? Check. One that is paid for by Mexico to boot? Check. You can now verify and tick these entries, along with other Donald Trump's promises, in a website recently launched to evaluate the new president's declared plans that catapulted him to the White House with actual actions taken.
Based On The Donald Trump Covenant
The entries that will be monitored by the website now called as Track Trump are based on Trump's released covenant in the thick of the presidential campaign period dubbed as Donald Trump's Contract With The American Voter.
The great wall, for instance, has been lumped with a number of immigration promises that include the so-called extreme vetting, the deportation of two million criminal immigrants, new immigration procedures, and the cancellation of funding for sanctuary cities, among others.
Aside from immigration, there are seven other categories: trade, energy and climate, federal government, economic policy, education, healthcare, and safety. Track Trump will be presenting each promise under these headings in a dashboard style to clearly update developments made within the next 100 days.
Non-Partisan Trump Dashboard
The team behind Track Trump stressed that the website is a non-partisan mechanism that will hold Trump accountable for his promises. The initiative was founded by Sam Altman, president of Y Combinator, a leading startup incubator. One should, however, note that Altman got help from Alec Baum, who has been identified with Hillary Clinton's campaign in the recent election cycle.
The Track Trump team is quite explicit in stating that the website would like to cut through the noise and controversies that seem to hound Trump and simply present a level-headed and real-time monitoring of policymaking under the Trump presidency.
Rhetoric Vs. Action
According to Altman, the website will reject political theater and rhetoric and will instead focus on actions taken.
"Part of the impetus for this is that I think a lot of people have been trying to figure out how they should spend their time and resources in face of the administration because it's so unclear what they're actually going to do," Altman said. "We just wanted a way to monitor. And if you look at a dashboard every day, you often begin to notice trends," he adds.
Track Trump also provides running snippets of policies and executive actions through what it calls as Roundup. For example, in a Roundup post titled Jan. 20, 2017, important developments were reported such as the confirmation of cabinet appointees, suspension of the creation of regulations, and the issuance of an executive order that will pave the way for the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, among others.
