Build a Wall Chart with Rebecca Solnit
Mapping the connections between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin
Our friend Rebecca Solnit asked us to lend our visualization skills to a pressing and dangerous problem: the nature of the relationship between President Donald Trump and President Vladimir Putin. We worked with her and some of her students to outline the complex web of orientations that characterize their relationship, along with many of the relevant people who form nodes in their network. We identified six different kinds of relationship to map: pays, hacks/leaks, blocks, kills, employs, met with, and established a visual vocabulary showing which directions these relationships were oriented around. It didn’t take too long to identify that the person with the most connections between the two men was Paul Manafort. A few months after we made this map, Manafort was sentenced to 47 months in prison.