What it is

Factba.se (factba.se) is a comprehensive, searchable archive of Donald Trump’s public speech, statements, social-media posts, and interviews. It was originally built during the 2017-2021 administration as a real-time tracker of Trump’s words and remains one of the most extensive aggregations of his speech.

URL: https://factba.se/

Coverage

• All Trump speeches, rallies, statements (2015-present)
• Trump tweets and Truth Social posts
• Trump press conferences and gaggles
• Interview transcripts
• Daily news mentions
• Cabinet/administration speeches (limited)

Strengths

• Volume: Largest publicly searchable Trump speech aggregation
• Search: Full-text search across all Trump utterances
• Cross-platform: Links Trump speech across rallies, tweets, interviews, and statements
• Tracking timestamps: Date and time-of-day precision for many items
• Tweet/Truth Social archive: Full text of pre-ban Twitter and Truth Social

Limitations

• Provenance varies: Source links and verification quality differ across items; verify before citation
• Auto-transcription on some items: Particularly TV-only events; quality varies
• No formal API for bulk export: HTML scraping required
• Rally transcripts may be condensed: Some items appear to be summaries rather than full verbatim — flag accordingly
• Pre-2015 content sparse: Pre-political-career Trump speech limited
• Ad supported: Pages contain advertising; scraping pipelines should strip ads

Ingestion Approach

1. Source-stratified ingestion: Treat factba.se separate categories distinctly:

• Speeches and rallies (type=speech)
• Press conferences (type=press_conference)
• Tweets / Truth Social (type=social_post)
• Interviews (type=interview)
• Statements (type=statement)

1. Per-item fields:

• source_id: Factba.se item ID or URL slug
• title: Item title
• body: Full text
• author: Trump (or speaker for interview items)
• published_at: Date+time where available
• url: Stable Factba.se URL + linked source URL where available
• doc_type: As above
• extra_metadata: Original source URL, transcript quality flag, factba.se category, location

1. Verification flag: Mark items as verified only when source URL leads to a confirmable original (video, official transcript, or cross-source match)
2. Deduplication: Many factba.se items reference the same speech also covered by APP or Rev — dedup by date + speaker + title-normalized similarity, preferring APP > Rev > Factba.se when consolidating
3. Rate limit: 1-2 req/sec

Trump Tweet / Truth Social Archive

Factba.se’s tweet and Truth Social archives are valuable historical sources:

• Pre-ban Twitter (2009-2021): Full text of all public tweets, including deleted tweets
• Truth Social (2022-present): Full text of all Truth Social posts; some periods of higher volume than Twitter

For social-post analytics:

• Treat each post as a discrete ResearchDocument with doc_type=social_post
• Capture metadata: timestamp, post type (post, repost, reply), engagement counts where available
• Note: Truth Social engagement counts and reach are not directly comparable to Twitter

Verification Posture

Factba.se is best treated as Tier 2 for citation purposes:

• For published analysis, prefer APP for official events and Rev for major rallies
• Use Factba.se when no Tier 1 source exists, but verify against video/audio when possible
• Always include the linked original source URL in citations, not just the Factba.se page

Citation Convention

“Donald Trump [Event/Tweet], [Date],” via Factba.se. https://factba.se/[slug]. Original source: [original URL].

Cross-Verification

For any utterance from Factba.se used in published analysis:

• C-SPAN video where available
• Internet Archive TV News Archive (closed-captioning)
• Compare to APP and Rev for the same event
• For tweets: Trump Twitter Archive (separate, but useful for cross-check)

Maintenance

• Refresh: Daily check of new entries (Factba.se updates near real-time)
• Backfill: One-time historical pull for 2015-present
• Re-validate weekly: Spot-check 1-2% of recently-ingested items against source

See Also

• sc-overview.md
• Source Profile — American Presidency Project (UCSB)
• Source Profile — Rev Transcript Library
• Source Profile — Internet Archive (TV News Archive)