Norms as a binary matrix

The transparency & conflict-of-interest checklist

The fairest chart in the genre: identical yes/no questions asked of every president, answered from the public record, with zero estimation. Norms aren't laws, each was voluntary, which is precisely what the matrix measures: what the office's guardrails were made of, and what happens when someone declines them.

Yes complied Partial complied with significant exception (noted below) No declined the norm

Norm	Clinton	Bush	Obama	Trump I	Biden	Trump II
Released full tax returns	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	No
Divested, blind-trusted, or held conflict-free assets	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	No
Released White House visitor logs	Partial	Partial	Yes	No	Yes	No
Presidential/federal records preserved without adverse findings	Partial	Partial	Yes	No	Partial	No
No immediate family in senior government roles	Partial	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Partial
Ethics pledge / conflict rules applied to own White House	Yes	Yes	Yes	Partial	Yes	No

The exceptions, spelled out (this is where the fairness lives)

Clinton, visitor logs: pre-dated the voluntary-release policy; logs surfaced mainly through litigation. Records: his former National Security Advisor was later convicted of removing classified documents from the Archives. Family: Hillary Clinton chaired the healthcare task force, the modern precedent for a family member in a major policy role, litigated at the time.
Bush, visitor logs: fought release in court. Records: about 22 million White House emails from 2003 to 2005 went missing from the White House's own archiving system; they were located and restored from backup tapes after a records lawsuit that settled in 2009.
Biden, records: classified documents from his vice presidency were found at his home and office; he cooperated fully and the special counsel declined charges, a genuine lapse with a cooperative resolution, marked Partial rather than Yes for symmetry with how Trump's case is scored.
Trump I, records: the Mar-a-Lago documents case: hundreds of classified documents retained after office, a grand-jury subpoena resisted, an indictment on 40 counts (later dismissed on the special-counsel-appointment ruling and mooted by election, charged conduct, never tried). Also documented in-office practices of tearing up records staff then taped together. Family: Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner held senior advisor roles, without modern precedent at that seniority. Ethics: signed an ethics pledge, waived it repeatedly.
Trump II, ethics: declined to sign the ethics-pledge executive order his predecessors (including his own first term) issued; conflict rules around the crypto ventures rejected outright. Family: sons run the businesses whose value his policies move, and none of his children holds a government post. Son-in-law Jared Kushner worked as an informal envoy for about a year and was named a special envoy in February 2026; two in-laws hold appointed posts (see family in government roles). Scored Partial, as with Clinton, because one immediate relative holds a formal role, against two senior White House advisors in the first term.

Analysisthe site's reading · optional

What the matrix shows that no bar chart can

Read column-wise, four presidencies are nearly solid green with scattered genuine Partials, the exceptions above are real, bipartisan, and worth knowing. Two columns are nearly solid red. The matrix's power is that it required no estimates, no dollar conversions, no crisis attributions, and no contested definitions: every cell is a public, checkable fact about whether a voluntary guardrail was accepted or declined. It also states the genre's deepest finding in its plainest form: the presidency's ethics regime was never law, it was a checklist everyone agreed to until someone didn't, and every other panel in this gallery is downstream of the red cells in these two columns.