Sources & research standards

Current Congress roster

• Office of the Clerk — House MemberData XML: current House membership, districts and vacancies.
• U.S. Senate — current senators XML: current Senate membership and contact fields.
• Congressional Biographical Directory: stable Bioguide identity records.

The live chamber feeds are cached briefly for reliability and remain authoritative for current membership. A current-member supplemental dataset adds public contact, campaign-ID and social-link fields when available. The parser includes a non-DOM fallback so House and Senate do not disappear on shared hosts that lack PHP ext-dom.

Portrait standard

Featured portraits are selected explicitly in a source manifest; the site no longer discovers an arbitrary image by scraping a biography page. The portrait route includes a source-version token, creates a locally served WebP cache and preserves the source aspect ratio. Congressional portraits are keyed to Bioguide identity and periodically refreshed. Foreign-leader profiles prefer official presidency, prime-ministerial, parliamentary or institutional portraits; where only an event photograph is appropriate, it is labeled as such rather than called an official headshot. If a verified source cannot be retrieved, the site uses a neutral placeholder rather than guessing.

Trump claims archive

Donald Trump’s high-volume claims record is organized newest-first. His main profile keeps a concise current summary; detailed records are grouped by month under /people/donald-trump/claims/YYYY/MM/. Recurring controversies can also receive topic hubs without replacing the dated archive.

Each record separates What is being said from What the record shows. Primary records, official statistics, court filings, original video and the speaker’s own words are preferred; independent reporting is used for chronology, outside verification and documented disputes. Obvious AI or fantasy imagery is labeled as synthetic media and is not rated as a literal factual claim unless accompanying text makes a separate checkable assertion.

Reusable government/public-domain context images may be cached locally as credited WebP derivatives. Copyrighted news photos or illustrations are not mirrored simply because an outlet reported the story; TrumpsMouth links the reporting and uses separately sourced documentary context where useful. Long-form primary or official video is kept in a dedicated embedded-video section so the written evidence records stay readable.

Claims and political material

Administration statements and partisan material can document what was said, but are not treated as independent proof. The evidence-gap thermometer measures how closely the wording of a factual claim matches the cited record; it does not attempt to diagnose intent.