Drafted with AI and reviewed by Noah.

It was a Friday night and I had nothing going on. I’ve always loved the whole -maxxing thing (looksmaxxing, sleepmaxxing, whatever-maxxing). It’s hilarious. Then I saw that the Justice Department’s public list of Trump’s pardons had gone blank. That list is the running record of everyone he has let off the hook, plenty of them donors and allies.

So I built Pardonmaxxing: Trump’s pardons, priced and sourced.

One Prompt

This is the part that blows my mind. The entire site came to life from a single prompt to Claude Opus 5.5 on high reasoning. I’ll probably write a separate post on how that went, because it is crazy how easy it was.

Here’s what’s on it:

  • The Ledger: every pardon, with court records.
  • The Lineup: 36 case files with photos and dollar amounts.
  • The Menu: nine high-profile cases, each with a price tag: the donations and spending around Trump that came with it.
  • The Brokers: rate cards from pardon brokers caught on hidden camera.
  • The Quote Engine: a tool that compares similar cases.

By the site’s count, that’s 1,746 people granted clemency and $1.7 billion in restitution, fines, and forfeiture erased. Everything is sourced to court records, campaign finance filings, House Judiciary Committee Democrats, and CBS’s 60 Minutes.

The DOJ list came back the next day, and they blamed “a technical issue.” Could be. But the site keeps its own archived copy through the Internet Archive, so the next time the government’s version goes blank, the record won’t.

Enable the Populace With AI

The government can spin up stupid websites and fake propaganda in no time now, and it will keep doing it. The same technology is sitting in front of the rest of us.

So it’s our responsibility to use this wonderful technology to throw it back at them: to build the infrastructure and technology that shines a light on all the gross things they’re doing. In a very short amount of time, one person can put up a data-driven, informative website that the government doesn’t own and can’t blank out. You don’t need a newsroom or a dev team. You need a public record, a source for every claim, and a Friday night.

So here’s the call to action: pick something they’d rather you not look at, and build it. Then go price out some pardons.