Before Donald Trump was the president, he was a businessman. He came to office leading a vast business enterprise that includes real estate, casinos, and a lucrative branding operation. “The network is huge,” says designer Kim Albrecht, whose riveting data visualization Trump Connections attempts to untangle it all.
Albrecht used data from BuzzFeed’s TrumpWorld investigation into the president's 1,500-odd business connections to create two visualizations. The first places Trump at the center of an enormous web. The other, which resembles a family tree, deconstructs that network person by person, business by business. “It’s a complete mess if you look at the entire dataset,” Albrecht says.
An interactive version of the data viz lets you click on a name or business to view an expanded list of connections. For instance, clicking on Donald Trump brings up what seems like an endless list of corporations of which he is president. Albrecht organizes the data into a tree denoting the president's relationship people in the organization.
Anyone with more than one connection is bolded and hyperlinked, dropping you into a rabbit hole of connections. Clicking on Josh Kushner (Jared's brother), leads to page listing familiar tech companies he's involved in. Click on Melania Trump and you'll see all the way's she's connected to her husband's businesses.
Albrecht doesn’t offer any commentary on the data, only a means of making a massive dataset accessible to anyone interested in reaching their own conclusions. But the president's byzantine business interests and his refusal to divest himself from them create a diversified portfolio of potential conflicts of interest. The man who promised to "drain the swamp" is himself a hub of potential corruption---as Albrecht's visualizations so vividly illustrate.
