Corruption and conflicts of interest
The D.C. Circuit ordered a stop to construction of Trump's $400 million ballroom on the site of the demolished East Wing, ruling 2-1 that redesigning the White House is Congress's call — 'not a matter for Executive self-help.'
Court filings revealed Homeland Security agents' texts and sworn testimony describing the August 2025 immigration raid staged outside Gov. Gavin Newsom's Los Angeles press conference as 'purely political' — federal law enforcement openly deployed against a political opponent.
Trump and his Justice Department — now run by his former criminal defense lawyer — asked the Supreme Court to throw out the $83 million defamation verdict Carroll won, arguing that because Trump smeared her while president, he is immune and taxpayers should stand in for him as the defendant.
In a 6-3 ruling along ideological lines, the Supreme Court overruled Humphrey's Executor v. United States — the 1935 precedent that protected independent agency commissioners from politically motivated firings — and upheld Trump's removal of FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter. Justice Sotomayor wrote in dissent that the majority had given the president 'a power unknown even to the English Crown.'
The White House sent Congress a supplemental spending request of $87.6 billion, the bulk of it for the Iran war Trump launched in February, just hours after he had screamed at Republican senators in a closed-door lunch over their votes on a war powers resolution. The package bundles Pentagon money for an unpopular conflict with farm bailouts and Ebola aid, daring members to vote against any of it.
Trump abruptly cancelled the Capitol Hill signing of the largest housing affordability bill in decades, telling Congress he would not sign it until lawmakers pass the SAVE America Act, his stalled bill to add proof-of-citizenship requirements to voter registration nationwide. The move ties relief for millions facing a housing crisis to passage of an unrelated measure designed to throw eligible voters off the rolls.
Postmaster General David Steiner told the Senate that under a proposed USPS rule, the Postal Service will refuse to deliver mail-in ballots in any state that declines to give the Trump administration its voter list. The policy formalizes a federal threat to disenfranchise voters in states the White House cannot otherwise force into compliance with its election-overhaul agenda.
Trump signed an executive order formally converting roughly 8,000 senior career federal employees — including agency division heads, regulation writers, policy attorneys, and chief information officers — into at-will workers who can be fired without notice or appeal, a long-planned scheme to replace nonpartisan expertise with loyalists.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told House appropriators the Justice Department was abandoning the $1.776 billion fund Trump had extracted from his own DOJ in a self-dealing IRS settlement, but the part of the deal barring the IRS from auditing Trump, his family, and his businesses remains in force.
Trump is poised to drop his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS in exchange for the creation of a $1.7 billion 'weaponization' fund — controlled by a commission he can fire at will — that can hand taxpayer money to nearly 1,600 Jan. 6 defendants and entities tied to Trump himself, with no obligation to disclose how decisions are made.
An Office of Government Ethics filing revealed Trump executed 3,642 stock trades worth $220-750 million in the first quarter of 2026, including purchases of Nvidia, Dell, Palantir, and Axon days before his administration took actions that sent those stocks soaring.
U.S. District Judge Richard Leon ruled that ICE 'likely illegally' deported Adriana Maria Quiroz Zapata to the Democratic Republic of Congo after the Congolese government had explicitly notified ICE in writing that it could not accept her because she required medical care for diabetes, hyperlipidemia, and hypothyroidism. The judge ordered the administration to bring her back.
Trump arrived in Beijing with Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Jensen Huang, and a dozen other CEOs in tow, asking Xi Jinping to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz Trump's own war had closed — while leaving a $14 billion arms package for Taiwan unsigned on his desk.
Vice President JD Vance announced the Trump administration is withholding $1.3 billion in Medicaid reimbursements to California over alleged hospice and home-health fraud, and warned that every state will soon be ordered to prove it is 'aggressively prosecuting' Medicaid fraud or have its money cut off.
FDA Commissioner Marty Makary resigned after Trump personally berated him for resisting pressure to approve fruit-flavored e-cigarettes. The agency, days earlier, had reversed course and authorized 45 flavored vape products — a policy reversal driven by Trump's desire to court young MAGA voters and demanded by the tobacco industry, over the objections of FDA scientists who warned of the risks to children.
A Reuters investigation by Pulitzer-winning national reporter Ned Parker, amplified this week as Parker discussed his findings on Democracy Now!, documents how the Trump administration is using the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department, and the FBI to assert federal control over election administration in at least eight states — demanding voter rolls, attempting to access voting machines, and raiding county election offices on the basis of long-debunked 2020 fraud claims.
The Justice Department deployed the Westfall Act to ask the Supreme Court to substitute the federal government for Trump as defendant in E. Jean Carroll's defamation case — a maneuver that would make the $83.3 million judgment disappear, since the U.S. government cannot be sued for defamation.
Trump-backed challengers unseated five Republican Indiana state senators who had voted against his demand to redraw the state's congressional maps, in a $13.4 million primary spending blitz that demonstrated the cost of crossing the president.
A new executive order builds an Iran-style secondary sanctions regime targeting Cuba, exposing any foreign company or financial institution that does business with the Cuban economy to U.S. blocking sanctions. The order layers on top of an embargo that has failed to topple the Cuban government for more than six decades.
Public Law 119-21, signed at a White House ceremony with B-2 flyovers on July 4, makes Trump's 2017 tax cuts permanent, raises the debt ceiling by $5 trillion, and pays for it with the largest Medicaid cut in the program's 60-year history. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the law will add $3.4 trillion to the deficit and strip health insurance from at least 10 million Americans by 2034.
The Trump administration formally accepted a $400 million Boeing 747-8 luxury jet from the Qatari royal family to be retrofitted as Air Force One and, after Trump leaves office, transferred to his presidential library foundation. Reporting later showed the Pentagon — not Qatar — initiated the request; Attorney General Pam Bondi (a former registered Qatar lobbyist) signed off on the legal memo blessing the deal; and the retrofit cost has been hidden inside a nuclear-missile modernization program, with internal Air Force estimates running as high as $1.5 billion.
Trump fired USAID Inspector General Paul Martin one day after his office reported nearly $500 million in food aid was at risk of spoiling due to the administration's gutting of the agency.
Four days into his second term, Trump dismissed 17 of the federal government's independent inspectors general by mass email late on a Friday night, citing 'changing priorities' and ignoring the 1978 Inspector General Act's 30-day notice requirement to Congress. A federal judge later ruled the firings unlawful but declined to reinstate the watchdogs, leaving cabinet departments responsible for trillions of dollars in spending without independent oversight at the start of the most aggressive remaking of the federal government since the New Deal.
On the Friday before his second inauguration, Trump launched $TRUMP — a personal cryptocurrency whose 800 million tokens were retained by his own companies and whose buyers, anywhere in the world, could anonymously deposit value into accounts the president-elect controlled.
In a 6-3 decision authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court ruled that former presidents enjoy absolute immunity for 'core' constitutional acts and presumptive immunity for all other official acts — a doctrine found nowhere in the Constitution and explicitly designed to delay Jack Smith's election-subversion case past the 2024 election.
A Manhattan jury convicted Donald Trump on all 34 counts of falsifying business records, making him the first former U.S. president to be convicted of a felony.
After a months-long bench trial, New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron ordered Donald Trump and his co-defendants to disgorge $355 million in fraud proceeds — a figure that grew to over $464 million with pre-judgment interest — and barred Trump from serving as an officer or director of any New York corporation for three years. Engoron's 93-page opinion called the defendants' 'complete lack of contrition and remorse' 'pathological' and said they were highly likely to commit fraud again.
A New York judge ruled that Donald Trump committed fraud for years by inflating the value of his real estate assets on financial statements, ordering the dissolution of some of his business entities and setting the stage for a trial on remaining claims.
Special Counsel Jack Smith unsealed a 37-count federal indictment charging Trump with willful retention of national defense information, obstruction of justice, and making false statements related to classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago.
A Manhattan grand jury indicted Donald Trump on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to hush money payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels, making him the first former president ever indicted on criminal charges.
FBI agents executed a search warrant at Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach, Florida, seizing boxes of classified documents including materials marked top secret and sensitive compartmented information.
The Biden Justice Department reversed the Trump-era DOJ position and concluded that the House Ways and Means Committee was entitled to obtain Trump's tax returns, ending a years-long legal battle.
Allen Weisselberg, the longtime CFO of the Trump Organization, was indicted along with the company itself on charges of running a 15-year tax fraud scheme involving unreported employee compensation.
The Manhattan District Attorney's office expanded its investigation of the Trump Organization into a full criminal probe, examining potential bank and insurance fraud, tax fraud, and falsification of business records.
In an Oval Office meeting with attorney John Eastman, Trump pressed Vice President Pence to reject certified electoral votes on January 6. When Pence refused on legal grounds, Trump publicly attacked him as a 'wimp' — and tweeted that Pence lacked 'courage' minutes after being told the Capitol had been breached and the mob was chanting 'Hang Mike Pence.'
Two days after his Senate acquittal, Trump fired Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman and Ambassador Gordon Sondland in apparent retaliation for their testimony during the impeachment inquiry.
A whistleblower revealed that Trump had pressured Ukraine's president to investigate political rival Joe Biden during a July phone call, while withholding military aid, leading to Trump's first impeachment by the House of Representatives.
After Trump falsely tweeted that Alabama would be hit by Hurricane Dorian, displayed a NOAA forecast map crudely altered with a black Sharpie to support his claim, and refused to retract the error, the Commerce Department forced career meteorologists at NOAA to issue an unsigned statement disavowing the Birmingham National Weather Service's accurate forecast — a textbook case of political pressure overriding scientific judgment in a public-safety agency.
After Congress refused to fund his border wall and the longest government shutdown in U.S. history failed to force their hand, Trump declared a fabricated 'national emergency' to seize billions in military funds — a brazen end-run around the constitutional power of the purse.
Trump shut down the federal government for 35 days — the longest shutdown in U.S. history — after demanding $5.7 billion for a border wall Mexico was supposed to pay for. Roughly 800,000 federal workers went without paychecks, TSA officers visited food banks, the economy lost an estimated $3 billion, and Trump ended the standoff with nothing to show for it but a fake national-emergency declaration.
Under court supervision and after a state lawsuit detailed 'a shocking pattern of illegality,' the Donald J. Trump Foundation agreed to dissolve, distribute its remaining $1.78 million in assets to other charities at the New York Attorney General's direction, and submit Trump and his children to ongoing legal restrictions on charitable activity in the state.
Trump's longtime personal attorney Michael Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison for campaign finance violations, tax evasion, and lying to Congress, telling the judge he committed the crimes 'at the direction of' the president.
Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the largest overhaul of the U.S. tax code in three decades, which slashed the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% and delivered the majority of its benefits to corporations and the wealthiest Americans.
Seven months into his presidency, Trump issued his first pardon — to former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who had been convicted of criminal contempt for defying a federal judge's order to stop racially profiling Latino drivers. Trump skipped the DOJ pardon review process entirely, pardoned Arpaio before he was even sentenced, and set the template he would use to pardon Manafort, Stone, Flynn, and ultimately the January 6 defendants.
In a Rose Garden announcement built on fabricated economic numbers, Trump pulled the United States out of the global climate accord, abandoning the only nonbinding framework the world had agreed on for limiting warming. He framed the withdrawal as standing up for 'Pittsburgh, not Paris' — a city whose mayor immediately reminded the country it had voted 80 percent against him.
Trump cleared the Oval Office of other officials and asked FBI Director James Comey to end the investigation into Michael Flynn, telling him 'I hope you can let this go' — a request Comey documented in a memo that became central evidence in the obstruction of justice case.
Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and campaign chair Paul Manafort met at Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer and an ex-Soviet intelligence operative after an email pitched the meeting as 'part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump.' Trump Jr. replied 'I love it.'
Trump declared a $916 million loss on his 1995 income tax returns, a deduction so large it could have legally allowed him to avoid paying any federal income taxes for up to 18 years.
Roy Cohn — Joseph McCarthy's henchman turned New York mob fixer — became Trump's mentor in the 1970s, teaching him the tactics that still define him: attack relentlessly, admit nothing, deny everything, counter-sue, weaponize the media, and never, ever apologize.
