Working research map
The strongest documented pattern is an ecosystem, not one proven secret command structure: institutions built over decades, overlapping personnel and funders, legal and policy development, media and organizing capacity, data systems, and multiple routes into government.
Overview
Use this as the bird's-eye view. The sections below separate the broad system into research branches so individual claims can be sourced and tested.
Working thesis
The pattern we are testing is: build institutions while outside government → develop policy and legal theories → recruit and train personnel → assemble data and communications capacity → enter government through appointments, contracts, litigation or political access → implement.
That can be documented without claiming that every participant knows every other participant or that one person controls the whole system.
Research rule
Shared staff, funders, offices, boards or policy goals can be highly relevant. They do not, by themselves, prove unified command. Coordination is a separate claim requiring separate evidence.
Branches of the map
These are research categories, not accusations. Each branch can contain confirmed links, disputed links and unresolved questions.
Organizations that provide staffing, administrative support, legal capacity, policy development, networking, training or physical space can function as infrastructure for a broader political ecosystem. Current research includes the Conservative Partnership Institute and organizations associated with its wider network, while keeping each entity's legal identity and activities distinct.
Repeated movement among advocacy organizations, campaigns, congressional offices, think tanks, legal groups and executive-branch positions can show how ideas and operating knowledge travel. Personnel overlap is documented first; influence is assessed separately.
One major branch examines legal theories and policy work aimed at expanding presidential control over the executive branch, then compares those ideas with appointments, executive actions, agency practice and litigation.
This branch follows voter-list systems, election-integrity organizations, federal and state litigation, government requests for voter data, election-monitoring plans and the origin of large datasets when the source can be established. Unknown sources stay labeled unknown.
We track disclosed donors, contracts, corporate interests, technology vendors, political spending and social or institutional access where public records allow it. The objective is to distinguish financial benefit from mere proximity.
The final test is not only who gains formal power. It is whether policies and institutional changes improve or reduce security, liberty, representation, economic opportunity and accountability for ordinary people.
What we are not claiming
Open questions
The Sources page explains the hierarchy used to decide what belongs on the map and what remains an open question.
