As ballots continue to be tallied across several battleground states three days after Americans hit the polls to select their next president, knives are coming out among some of Trump’s detractors. A new initiative dubbed the “Trump Accountability Project” is compiling names of administration officials and the president’s high-profile supporters and donors, insisting “we must never forget those who helped further the Trump agenda.”
While the project doesn’t say how it will use its blacklist to ensure “accountability,” the registry has already swelled to hundreds of names, including dozens of sitting judges, and continues to grow as others in the anti-Trump orbit come around to the idea. The list was publicly viewable for a brief time, but was locked by its creators on Friday evening without explanation, evidently defeating its purpose altogether.
Among the project’s supporters is Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (New York), who called to document the “tweets, writings [and] photos” of “Trump sycophants” so that they can’t “deny their complicity” with the current administration.
The congresswoman soon prompted a response from Obama administration alum Michael Simon, a member of the Accountability Project team, who vowed to compile the names of “every administration staffer, campaign staffer, bundler, lawyer who represented them – everyone.”
In a stroke of irony, Simon sent his reply down the memory hole in a matter of hours, telling mathematician and commentator Eric Weinstein the tweet was too “strident” after the latter mockingly suggested “solitary confinement” and “executions” for those on the blacklist. Simon’s deleted post was preserved for posterity in screenshots, however – as one netizen pointed out, “the internet is forever.” Simon later scrubbed his response to Weinstein as well, and shortly thereafter locked his entire Twitter handle from the prying eyes of the public.