Support the Archive
Dear reader,
This project didn't start as "transcribe one president." It started because there's no single place where you can search the actual words of every U.S. president, side by side, the same way you can search a book. That's what The Transcript Library is building toward — one complete, word-for-word, human-verified archive per president, from George Washington's earliest recorded remarks through whoever is speaking today.
Where things stand
Two archives are actively under construction right now. Trump's is substantially built out — 571 speeches, each either taken from the official government record or checked against the original recording. Biden's is underway behind it. The other 43 haven't been touched yet. That's the honest state of it: this is a long project, and it's going to stay long, because every entry gets checked by a real person against real audio or video before it's published. Nothing here is AI output pretending to be final.
What's left to do
We've completed full audits of both active archives — Trump's and Biden's — so we know exactly what's still missing from each, and we're working through that list now, verifying every remaining appearance against the original recording. The other 43 presidencies haven't been audited yet; that's the work ahead once these two are further along. If you want the specific numbers, each president's own page keeps a running tally of exactly what's done and what's left for that archive.
What it actually costs
The part of this that costs real money is human review — a person listening to every recording and checking it word-by-word. Based on what we've learned auditing the first two archives, a single presidency's backlog can run from the tens of thousands into six figures once you account for professional transcription rates. Multiply that across every administration still ahead of us, and you can see why this only moves as fast as it's funded.
Where your support goes
Every contribution goes directly toward paying transcribers to work through the backlog — starting with whichever archive is currently active, then moving to the next. We publish the specific numbers for each in-progress library — right now, Trump's and Biden's — on that president's own page, updated as their audits and verification work move forward. As each additional presidency gets its own audit, it gets added here too.
This is a citizen-built record of the spoken word. If that's worth having, it's worth funding.