In an interview with far-right conspiracist Jack Posobiec (of Pizzagate fame), Pete Hegseth announced his intention to livestream the execution, by firing squad, of Nidal Hasan. Hasan, who committed the 2009 Fort Hood mass shooting that killed 13 people, is scheduled to be executed on Dec. 3 at 1 p.m., the hour, Hegseth noted, at which the shooting began. Hegseth told Posobiec he liked “the mentality we had in World War II,” which is also, as it happens, the last time the U.S. military executed anyone by firing squad. The last public execution in the country was in the 1930s.

CNN has the story:

“We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public, because people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things,” Hegseth told far-right podcaster Jack Posobiec in an interview aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln on Wednesday, drawing swift backlash from both sides of the aisle. ...

Republican Sen. Thom Tillis late Thursday called it “beyond disgusting.” He said on X, “Public executions are what oppressive dictatorships like Iran and Afghanistan do. It should not be happening in America.” Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat, is stunned—telling CNN’s Erin Burnett that public executions are “medieval.” “I mean, that’s disgusting, what is he mimicking ISIS executions?” Murphy said. “That’s what America has become? That’s pretty extraordinary.” The president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops denounced the plan on Friday calling it a “barbaric promotion of a culture of death.”

Bipartisan opposition eventually led Trump to call it off. On Oct. 15, he announced on Truth Social that the execution “will not be streamed”—a missed opportunity, the president suggested, since it “might have been a strong deterrent.” Trump’s objection, in other words, concerns the optics. That Hegseth floated the idea at all, and that it took more than a week of condemnation from senators of both parties and the nation’s Catholic bishops for the administration to drop it, says a great deal about the people now running the country’s armed forces.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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With three weeks to go before the midterms, Trump’s DOJ threatened legal action against California’s secretary of state and Los Angeles County’s top election official unless they reviewed a list of supposed noncitizens on the state’s voter rolls. The list came on a password-protected thumb drive, and DOJ wanted the mail-in ballots of anyone on that list set aside and left uncounted until their citizenship could be verified. DOJ even supplied a deadline: 48 hours.

The deadline passed with the drive unopened. The county registrar never plugged it in—because he did not consider it secure. So on Oct. 15, DOJ sued California in federal court, asking a judge to order the state to set aside the ballots of more than 20,000 alleged noncitizen voters. It is far from clear DOJ has any authority to make these demands.

NBC News explains:

Justin Levitt, an NBC News contributor who was a Justice Department official during the Obama administration, said the federal government has no authority supporting its demands. “They can send the letter,” he said. “California doesn’t have to do anything about it.” Federal law prohibits systemic list maintenance within 90 days of a federal election. At this point, less than three weeks out from Election Day, the only changes to the voter rolls can come from individualized information, like notification from the Social Security Administration that someone has died. A DOJ spokesperson said the department is asking California to sequester ballots, not change their voter list. ...

Some officials said they fear these actions were designed to set up possible legal challenges after the midterm elections. ... “Are they laying the groundwork to say that voting was fraudulent? Of course they are, 100% they are,” [Levitt] said, referring to the Trump administration. “Is the boy who cried wolf going to cry wolf? Yes, that’s what the boy who cried wolf does.”

This reeks of desperation. Republicans appear to be in deep trouble nationwide heading into the midterms. But California is an odd place to go looking for a stolen election: Trump lost the state by 20 points in 2024, a margin no noncitizen voting ring could manufacture without becoming the most formidable turnout operation in American history. Still, Trump will hold up California’s refusal as one more bit of pretext to cast doubt on the integrity of other elections and to fearmonger about supposed threats to the country.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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On Oct. 12, agents from the Department of Homeland Security raided Rep. Ilhan Omar’s Washington, D.C., home. The government declined to say what prompted the raid, but some sources said it concerns allegations of false statements and fraud in immigration paperwork. The search, conducted just 22 days before the midterm elections, also breaks with a Justice Department norm against taking investigative steps that could affect an election. Donald Trump’s claim that he had nothing to do with the raid, which he managed to undercut in the same breath, strains credulity.

The Guardian explains:

Donald Trump and key allies have accused Omar of fraud related to her family’s immigration history, fantasizing openly about denaturalizing her and expelling her from the country. When asked about the raid on Monday, Trump said he had “nothing to do with it” and the investigation is “up to the DoJ”. “I understand they’re looking at her very carefully,” Trump told reporters. “I’ve always found her to be totally crooked, personally, but that has nothing to do with me.” …

Administration officials, and the president himself, have long hinted at a federal investigation into Omar. “Let’s see what happens,” Trump said at a rally on Saturday after attacking Omar by name, adding that Vice-President JD Vance “and our people are looking at it very strongly”. …

In March, Vance told the rightwing media personality Benny Johnson: “We actually think that Ilhan Omar definitely committed immigration fraud” and that he had recently spoken to the top Trump aide Stephen Miller about “what the remedies are”. The homeland security secretary, Markwayne Mullin, told Johnson last month that there was an ongoing investigation and “something’s going to happen”.

Trump and his allies have long been fixated on Omar. He has accused her of marrying her brother, and he has made repeated racist attacks on Somali immigrants in general and on her in particular. Just last month, Mullin came under fierce criticism from the far right for failing to go after Omar. He appears to have taken the criticism to heart. Investigators have also seized Omar’s phone and issued more than a dozen grand jury subpoenas, some of them to members of her family. It is hard to see the raid as motivated by anything other than a desire to intimidate one of the president’s political enemies, placate his critics on the far right, and energize the base ahead of the midterms. Otherwise, it would make little sense to raid a sitting member of Congress’s home three weeks before an election over immigration paperwork that is years old.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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When the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in June that Donald Trump couldn’t fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, some optimistic commentators hoped he might move on to projects less financially ruinous than ending the Fed’s independence. No such luck. The Court held that Trump had not given Cook the procedural protections the law requires, so she remains in her post while her challenge proceeds.

So Trump has now supplied the process: a White House “committee of inquiry,” staffed by his own appointees, that will hold a hearing on Nov. 5 on the same unproven mortgage-fraud accusations and report back on whether there are grounds to remove her.

The New York Times has the story:

The committee set to hear Ms. Cook’s arguments includes Kevin Hassett, the president’s top economic adviser; Keith Sonderling, the acting director of the Office of Government Ethics; and Andrea Lucas, the head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The unique nature of the arrangement—and Mr. Trump’s persistent hostility toward the Fed—sparked ire among Democrats in Congress. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, described the entire setup on Friday as a “kangaroo court” of Mr. Trump’s making. ...

… Peter Conti-Brown, an expert on Fed governance at the University of Pennsylvania, said that there was a clear pretense in the president’s renewed efforts to fire Ms. Cook. “There’s no plausible scenario where Lisa Cook is given a fair hearing, because a fair hearing is not what the Trump administration is trying to do,” he said, pointing out Mr. Trump’s oft-repeated desire for lower interest rates.

Trump has not bothered to hide what he holds against Cook. He told reporters that she is “an automatic no vote” on lowering interest rates and “that’s not a good thing.” One of the committee’s three members, Hassett (whom Steve Chapman profiled for The UnPopulist here), has already said the president has cause to fire her, which is one reason Cook’s lawyers called the panel “demonstrably biased” in an Oct. 13 letter.

Trump has, in a sense, given the Court what it asked for: a hearing, before judges of his own choosing, one of whom has already announced the verdict. Whether this is enough process to satisfy the justices remains to be seen.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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Donald Trump took to Truth Social to announce that, after a phone call with Vladimir Putin (no word on whether this one was also a “perfect” phone call), Russia would release 300,000 tons of diesel immediately and millions more over the coming months. To make that possible, the Treasury Department temporarily waived sanctions on Russian diesel, handing Putin a fresh injection of cash to fund his war on Ukraine. Lawmakers in both parties say the deal violates a 2022 law banning Russian energy imports, as Time reports:

Congress four years ago passed the Ending Importation of Russian Oil Act, which prohibits U.S. imports of Russian-origin energy products covered by Chapter 27 of the Harmonized Tariff Schedule, including diesel. Democratic Rep. Lloyd Doggett of Texas, the bill’s chief sponsor, argued Monday that Trump is “directly violating that law” by “lifting sanctions to permit the first Russian diesel imports into the United States since the law took effect, without satisfying the specific legal conditions it requires.” He suggested the lack of congressional oversight on Trump’s deal with Putin renders it unlawful, and noted how the plan showcases a sharp turn from Washington, as it comes just weeks after Trump signed a sweeping Russia sanctions bill intended to target the country’s financial institutions and the energy industry, which has largely financed the assault on Ukraine. The sanctions bill was named after Lindsey Graham, the late Republican Senator who spent the final year of his life building support for the measure. ...

In a letter sent to Trump on Tuesday, [Republican Sens. Thom Tillis, Susan Collins, and Lisa Murkowski] were joined by fellow Republican Senators Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, John Cornyn of Texas, and Alan Armstrong of Oklahoma alongside six Democratic Senators as they told the President the deal “is a gift to our adversary and a betrayal of our Allies [and] should be rescinded.” The letter came a day after Trump publicly dismissed the criticism stemming from within his own party. “Well, I think these are Republicans that can’t really be serious,” he told reporters at the White House. “Anything that could help our farmers, our ranchers, I like.”

Trump knows that soaring diesel prices, and their knock-on effect on the cost of nearly everything else, are hurting his popularity and his party’s chances of holding Congress in the midterms. He is already touting the deal as relief for Americans struggling at the pump, even though experts say it will do little to bring prices down. The reasoning behind the deal may be more troubling still. One report reveals Trump made his decision only after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy refused to stop striking Russian oil refineries. Trump then blamed Zelenskyy for U.S. diesel prices and declared that “it’s time for Ukraine to get a new president,” a view the Kremlin has been pressing for years. The farmers and ranchers Trump claims to be helping can expect little relief. Putin, meanwhile, gets a new revenue stream and an American president who has taken up his line on Ukraine’s leadership.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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Donald Trump’s decision to ban CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House prompted the other major networks, Fox News included, to suspend pool coverage in solidarity. An incensed Trump now has his Justice Department investigating the networks for violating antitrust law, as The New York Times explains:

In a statement on Saturday, a Justice Department spokeswoman, Emily Covington, described the five networks as having “proudly boycotted covering White House events.” “Group boycotts among commercial competitors can violate the Sherman Act,” a core antitrust law, Ms. Covington wrote. ... In its letters on Friday, the Justice Department demanded copies of communications among network officials that concerned pool coverage of Mr. Trump, along with any communications about Mr. Trump’s revocation of CNN’s access to the White House grounds, according to two people with direct knowledge of the documents. ...

Organized boycotts can be considered anticompetitive if they are aimed at achieving commercial objectives, but not if their primary objective is political speech, said William E. Kovacic, a former chairman of the Federal Trade Commission. “The critical ingredient in successful antitrust cases is to demonstrate that there is unmistakably a commercial motive and that the commercial motive predominates,” Mr. Kovacic said. “And I don’t think they would ever be able to do that here.”

The press pool exists to give the public continuous coverage of the president, which is why coordinated action among the networks that make it up is one of the few tools they have to push back against attacks on press freedom while lawsuits wind through the courts. The last time the major networks banded together this way, back in 2009, the Obama administration quickly reversed its decision to exclude Fox News from a round of interviews. Trump has opted instead to treat the networks’ solidarity as a cartel. The Sherman Act was written to break up the railroad and oil trusts of the Gilded Age. The administration is now wielding it against news organizations that declined to air footage of the president shaking hands with Xi Jinping.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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The Trump administration’s latest move against legal immigration bars eight companies, Microsoft among them, from sponsoring their employees for green cards. The companies have been suspended from the permanent labor certification process, known as PERM, which is the most common route by which workers on temporary H-1B visas obtain permanent legal status. The administration accuses the companies of abusing the process, a charge several of them, including Microsoft, contest.

Time reports:

Microsoft and software maker Adobe are among eight companies that the Trump Administration will suspend from applying to sponsor employment-based green cards. The other companies are major information technology outsourcing firms: Cognizant; Infosys; Tata Consultancy Services; Wipro; HCL Technologies; and Capgemini. “We will not accept any new or process any pending permanent labor certification applications involving these companies,” Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling said. ...

[Vice President] Vance said the suspensions would last “as long as it needs to.” The Administration is seeking to compel the companies to change their behavior. Vance accused companies of deliberately posting ineffective job ads in order to justify hiring foreign workers. “Maybe they’ll put an advertisement in a small-town newspaper. They’ll go out there and say that we have advertised for a position with our company, and nobody is responding to it. And they will use that lack of response to then go and replace American workers with what is effectively foreign indentured servants,” Vance said.

If H-1B workers really are indentured servants, the administration has chosen a curious remedy. A green card is precisely what frees an H-1B worker to change jobs and demand higher pay, so blocking companies from sponsoring their own employees for one leaves those workers more dependent on their employers than before.

The Trump administration’s immigration policy has always had two prongs. The first is a loud, public focus on illegal immigration, border chaos, and criminal behavior (real or fictional) by migrants. The second is a quiet, bureaucratic assault on as many pathways for legal immigration as the administration can shut down. At the same press conference where Vance announced the green card suspensions, officials announced subpoenas to nine universities, including Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, over their use of J-1 exchange visas. A day earlier, the Department of Homeland Security proposed charging colleges $70,000 for each student in the program that lets international students work in their field during or after their studies. With the first prong increasingly unpopular in public polling, the administration is leaning harder on the second. Even if Democrats win back power in the midterm elections, they will have a lot of work to do to protect and restore America’s legal immigration pathways.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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Cassidy Hutchinson was a 25-year-old aide to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows when she testified before the House Jan. 6 committee in June 2022. She made a number of damning revelations about Trump to the committee including that:

• Trump had been warned that some of his supporters at the Ellipse were armed, but he wanted the magnetometers removed anyway

• Anthony Ornato, then the White House deputy chief of staff, told her that Trump lunged at the steering wheel of his vehicle when his Secret Service detail refused to drive him to the Capitol, where his supporters were marching

Trump has demanded her prosecution ever since. On Oct. 8, Punchbowl News, CBS, and NBC reported that the Justice Department has begun presenting evidence to a federal grand jury in Washington with the aim of indicting her for lying to Congress.

The case rests on a referral from Reps. Jim Jordan and Barry Loudermilk earlier this year. The steering-wheel story was secondhand, and Hutchinson said so at the time. That Ornato and the driver later disputed it is evidence of a dispute between witnesses, not of perjury. Hutchinson sat for more than 30 hours of sworn testimony, and the committee had every incentive to catch her in a lie if there was one. A federal judge noted in a Sept. 24 order that she was already “presently the subject of a criminal investigation.”

What sets this case apart from the administration’s prosecution of James Comey, Letitia James, and others is the choice of prosecutor. False-statement cases are typically handled by U.S. Attorney’s offices, in this instance Jeanine Pirro’s in the District of Columbia. Instead, the matter has been assigned to the Civil Rights Division under Harmeet Dhillon, whose office enforces anti-discrimination law and has no ordinary role in prosecuting congressional testimony.

The Washington Post reported that prosecutors are looking to charge her with a civil rights violation, a theory that would treat disputed testimony about the president as a crime against someone’s rights. Reporting on former Attorney General Pam Bondi’s firing in April described the Hutchinson inquiry as one of her last-ditch attempts to placate Trump. A grand jury may decline to indict. The point is that a president who spent four years calling for a witness’s prosecution now has a Justice Department willing to stretch the Civil Rights Division’s mandate to go after her.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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On Aug. 18, Donald Trump’s investment accounts bought SpaceX bonds worth between $1 million and $5 million. (Financial disclosures report each trade only as a value range.) SpaceX is Elon Musk’s rocket company and one of the federal government’s largest contractors. On Aug. 20, Trump signed a national space transportation policy directing federal agencies to speed up launch permitting and environmental review and to open federal launch facilities to commercial operators. The purchase came to light on Oct. 8, when the White House released Trump’s financial disclosure for August. It was one of 517 trades that month, totaling somewhere between $74 million and $273 million, including a purchase of up to $25 million in Meta stock the day after the space memorandum.

CNN reports:

Just two days before launching an effort to slash red tape for commercial space transportation, President Donald Trump last month purchased up to $5 million of bonds issued by SpaceX, a major federal contractor run by Elon Musk, according to ethics filings made public on Thursday.

The White House says the portfolio is run by third-party managers and that neither Trump nor his family can direct or influence any trade. Even if that is true, the problem remains. The president of the United States holds the debt of a company whose business depends on decisions his administration makes, and his administration then made one of those decisions in the company’s favor two days later. Trump has never placed his assets in a blind trust, so the public has no way to know which of his investments are sitting on the other side of which federal policies.

The president is exempt from the federal conflict-of-interest statute that binds nearly every other executive branch official. That exemption exists because the Framers and later Congresses assumed a president would not need the law to tell him to avoid profiting from his own office. Every previous modern president honored that assumption voluntarily, either by divesting or by holding only broad, diversified funds. Trump has not, and the August filing shows what that looks like in practice: a sitting president who is, among other things, a creditor to Elon Musk.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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The president and his family are hard at work enriching themselves, but they’re far from the only ones in the administration cashing in. Take Dan Scavino, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, who reported earning at least $1 million in capital gains last year from his stake in Trump Media & Technology Group, the company that runs the president’s Truth Social platform.

The Washington Sun reports:

Scavino valued his Trump Media & Technology Group stock holding at between $1 million and $5 million, according to his financial disclosure, which he filed last month and the federal Office of Government Ethics released this week. (Government officials are only required by law to disclose stock values in broad ranges.) Scavino joins recently departed White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt among White House officials who reported investments last year in a Trump business venture. Scavino previously directed White House social media efforts. He has continued to play a key role managing Trump’s social media presence, as The Washington Post reported last year, while personally profiting from his stake in Trump’s social media outfit. ...

Scavino’s financial disclosure also indicates that he earned up to $100,000 in capital gains from stock in financial platform company Robinhood Markets, which he valued at between $100,000 and $250,000. Robinhood has partnered with the U.S. Treasury to serve as broker for Trump Accounts, a tax-advantaged government investment account designed to help American children build wealth. The company also contributed $2 million to Trump’s 2025 presidential inauguration. Its stock price is up more than 100% from when Trump began his second term.

Scavino, a longtime Trump loyalist, has served across both of Trump’s terms as director of social media, senior adviser for digital strategy, and deputy chief of staff for communications. Few people understand better how the president uses his online presence, including to make money, as Trump has attempted to do by selling advance access to his posts. Scavino has helped run Trump’s account while holding a seven-figure stake in the company that hosts it, so every post he puts up on Truth Social is, in a modest way, a deposit in his own portfolio. The White House says it has “no further concerns” about Scavino’s holdings, a standard it has applied with admirable consistency to the president’s own business dealings.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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In April, the NAACP sued Elon Musk’s xAI under the Clean Air Act. The suit alleges that the company has been running dozens of gas turbines without required permits at a power plant in Southaven, Mississippi, that supplies its massive “Colossus 2” data center. (Mississippi regulators say no permits were needed.) In June, the Justice Department moved to intervene and have the suit thrown out, the first time the federal government has entered a citizen suit against a private company in order to end it. When the district court didn’t rule, DOJ appealed to the Fifth Circuit on September 18, calling the delay an “effective denial.” The government argues that xAI’s Grok, which the Pentagon uses, is crucial to national security, a justification the administration increasingly invokes to escape judicial review. It also claims that its statutory right to intervene in citizen suits carries with it the power to dismiss them

As Steve Vladeck, who sits on the board of Earthjustice, co-counsel for the plaintiffs, explained when DOJ first made the argument in June, the implications reach far beyond one data center:

[M]ost gallingly, DOJ is making this argument in a context in which it is making no argument that xAI is acting legally. In other words, the central premise of DOJ’s submission is that xAI can be flagrantly breaking the law (and heavily damaging the environment), and only the executive branch of the federal government has the constitutional authority to do anything about it. ... But the legal theory the government is advancing reaches far beyond one (massive) data center and the power plants being built to power it. It is an Article II argument—rooted in the President’s duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed”—that, taken to its logical limits, would give the executive branch unilateral authority to shut down any citizen suit under any environmental statute, against any defendant, whenever the government decides that non-enforcement better serves its policy goals. …

Ultimately, the Trump administration is asking a federal court to hold that the government’s unwillingness to enforce the law is itself a reason no one else may. That is not a national-security argument, however it is packaged. It is a claim about who gets to hold power accountable—and the answer the government is offering, for the first time in the citizen suit’s half-century history, is “only us, and only when we choose to.”

Some conservative and libertarian scholars have long questioned whether citizen suits square with Article II, and that’s a legitimate debate for Congress and the courts. The administration is asking for something far broader: a standing executive veto over lawsuits Congress expressly authorized, exercised case by case on behalf of whichever defendants it favors. Its first beneficiary is a company owned by the world’s richest man. A president who can decline to enforce the law and also forbid anyone else from enforcing it gets to decide what the law requires and whom it binds.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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A string of recent TV ads praising Donald Trump carry an unusual disclaimer: “Paid for by the U.S. government.” In one, Trump declares “America will never be a communist country” as the song “Love Me” plays. Another nearly copies a 2024 campaign video, with Trump calling supporters to his “final battle” against “the fake news media.” The White House insists the spots are “public service announcements.”

But as NBC News confirmed, the money came from border security funds:

The Trump administration paid for TV ads showing him in a favorable light using money intended for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, an official and a top Republican senator confirmed to NBC News. ... The unusual ads — one of which is nearly identical to a 2024 Trump campaign ad — include disclaimers stating they were paid for by the U.S. government. The administration’s apparent use of taxpayer money to produce ads that resemble campaign advertisements has drawn bipartisan criticism. “It’s a great message. I like the message,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., told reporters Monday of the most recent ad, “but it shouldn’t be paid for with taxpayer dollars.” …

Speaking to reporters Tuesday, Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, confirmed the official’s account of the source of the funds, saying that “it was taken out of funding that was supposed to be for Customs and Border Protection” in Trump’s so-called big, beautiful bill, which Republicans passed along party lines in 2025. Collins, who faces a difficult re-election bid this fall, said the Appropriations Committee she chairs had no role in the money that the White House used. In fact, she said appropriations bills to fund the government typically have restrictions against using one account for another purpose. “That’s why the administration went around the appropriations process and used an account that was part of the reconciliation bill,” Collins said in the Capitol.

The story has grown since. The New York Times reported that Trump personally instructed budget director Russ Vought to find the money inside the government, which produced a $20 million contract funded through CBP. CNN has identified at least 13 such ads, made in-house by the White House video team. Sen. Thom Tillis summed it up: “It feels like Viktor Orbán talking to the Hungarian people.”

Trump is effectively forcing taxpayers to fund his party’s midterm campaign.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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On September 18, Trump announced that he was banning CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House over their “constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS!,” which he absurdly called “a threat to our National Security.” The next day, their press credentials were deactivated. As evidence of the supposed security threat, the White House later pointed to stories about the Iran war, the East Wing ballroom, and even the GOP’s midterm convention. Well, the three outlets sued—and U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee, issued a 14-day temporary restraining order. Kelly found the ban likely violated their due process rights.

The White House let the reporters back in, but it has kept finding ways to punish the outlets, including barring CNN from Air Force One. With the restraining order set to expire on October 8, the outlets are asking the court to keep the ban blocked until the case is resolved.

NPR explains:

Three news outlets that President Donald Trump abruptly banished from White House grounds this month asked a federal court to block the ban until the case is resolved, saying the administration has “persisted in unpredictably and inconsistently implementing its ban” despite a judge’s restraining order—including selectively barring CNN from White House pool duties. ... [Attorney General Todd] Blanche defended [the Air Force One exclusion], too. “The president has every right to decide who gets to fly on his plane,” he said in the Sunday interview. He added that Trump was “sick and tired of certain media outlets just refusing to report accurate news.” He added that news coverage he described as “misinformation” amounted to a national security issue.

“That is what is a national security problem, when you have complete misinformation coming out of the White House,” he said. Kelly threw cold water on that argument in his ruling last week granting the temporary restraining order against the White House ban. “The court is skeptical … that defendants’ interest in safeguarding national security is the actual motivation” for removal of access, Kelly wrote.

The press pool fight shows how the administration is working around the court. When CNN was first barred from pool duty, the other four networks in the TV pool, Fox News included, refused to take its place. That led to absurdities like this press conference with no audio.

Kelly’s order covers access to the White House grounds. It doesn’t reach Air Force One or the president’s travel, where the White House picks the reporters who come along. So the White House kept CNN off Air Force One and, days later, pulled it from the pool for a trip to Texas and Oklahoma, leaving that trip with no television pool coverage at all. And in an October 2 filing, the Justice Department argued that Trump may ban the outlets because he determined they failed to meet “minimum requirements of professionalism.” A president who gets to decide which outlets meet his standard of professionalism also gets to decide which coverage the public sees.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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In March 2025, Trump moved to shut down Voice of America’s parent agency, and most of its staff were put on paid leave. Congress refused to go along, funding the agency at $643 million in a bill Trump signed. This past March, a federal judge ruled the layoffs invalid and ordered the staff back to work. The administration then asked an appeals court to pause that order while it appeals, and the court agreed. The result is a limbo: The administration can’t fire these employees. And it won’t let them work. A new State Department inspector general report found that 420 of them were still on paid leave as of July, at a cost of about $1.6 million a week.

Politico reports:

At the time, USAGM cast the moves explicitly as an effort to protect taxpayers. ... But rapidly cutting the agency did not necessarily mean the government stopped paying for it. …

A separate property audit found USAGM went at least seven months without an operational property management system after terminating the one it had used. Of 1,531 disposed items auditors examined, the agency could not provide supporting documentation for 1,512.

Congress debated VOA’s future, cut its budget by about a quarter, but kept it alive. That’s how spending decisions are supposed to be made. The administration instead tried to kill the agency by executive order without weighing the costs. Taxpayers are now paying to kill VOA while also paying to keep it alive.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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According to David Perdue, the U.S. ambassador to China, Donald Trump asked Chinese leader Xi Jinping whether he’d like to buy American weapons. Meanwhile, the administration is holding up a record arms package for Taiwan, the democracy those weapons are meant to protect from China.

The New York Times has the story:

President Trump has asked Xi Jinping, the leader of China, whether he would like to buy American weapons, David Perdue, the American ambassador to China, said in a television interview on Sunday. “President Trump continues to say, ‘Hey, we sell arms to other people around the world,’” Mr. Perdue said on “Fox News Sunday” while discussing the state visit by Mr. Xi to Washington last week. “He actually asked President Xi would he like to buy some at one point.” ... When asked for comment, the White House said through a U.S. official that the United States had no plans to sell arms to China. The State Department said in a statement that “U.S. law prohibits arms sales to China and there is no offer or plan to sell arms to China.” …

Mr. Trump has been withholding a $14 billion sale of weapons to Taiwan, even though the U.S. government has been required by law since 1979 to send arms of a defensive nature to the island. The latest arms package was put together by State Department officials and was approved by congressional leaders early this year, but has since languished at the department, The New York Times reported. ... On Wednesday, Mr. Rubio was asked by reporters in New York about the withholding of the Taiwan arms package. He said the sale was being reviewed in light of the need for “balancing our industrial capacity and our military-industrial base” and determining whether the United States needed the arms for itself. It is unclear how Mr. Trump’s offer to sell arms to China is consistent with that reasoning.

Trump’s own response makes Perdue’s account easy to believe: after first denying it, he mused that selling China weapons might be “a good idea.” It fits his record of fawning over dictators and undercutting allies. He has called Taiwan’s arms a “negotiating chip,” and he approved the sale of advanced AI chips to China over the objections of China hawks, including some in his own party.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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Last year, Donald Trump canceled $4.9 billion in congressionally approved foreign aid with a “pocket rescission.” The maneuver works by asking Congress to rescind funds so close to the end of the fiscal year that the money expires before lawmakers can act. The Supreme Court let that cancellation stand. Ruling at an early stage of the case, it held that the plaintiffs likely couldn’t sue to force the spending, and it never decided whether the tactic itself was legal. Having gotten away with it once, Trump is doing it again. On September 25, five days before the fiscal year ended, the White House announced it was canceling roughly $810 million more, which it rounds up to “nearly $1 billion.”

Politico reports:

In a move that will almost certainly set up an ugly government funding battle after the midterms, Trump has again claimed the power to execute a so-called “pocket rescission” to nix money Congress has already enacted. The funding the president declared canceled is for immigration services, support to foreign countries, education programs, health research efforts and assistance for businesses owned by minorities. The Senate’s top Republican appropriator, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, immediately blasted the move as illegal, saying in a statement Friday night that “any effort to rescind appropriated funds without congressional approval is a clear violation of the law.”

“This move shows that OMB intentionally withheld these funds for months to execute this unlawful cancellation of appropriations that were approved on a bipartisan basis and signed into law,” Collins added, pledging to work with other lawmakers “to address these illegal actions.” ... Top Republicans have rejected Democratic demands to undo Trump’s cancellation last summer of billions of dollars in foreign aid by pushing off the expiration date for that cash. They have also rebuffed the idea of preventing Trump from executing another pocket rescission this year by barring the president from sending a clawbacks request in the last quarter of the fiscal year.

Days later, the Government Accountability Office reaffirmed that pocket rescissions are unlawful. Fiscal conservatives might happily cut some of these programs, but Congress has to be the one doing the cutting, as it did when it passed a $9 billion rescissions package through the normal process last year. If a president can void a spending law simply by sitting on the money until the clock runs out, appropriations become suggestions. Republican appropriators call the maneuver illegal, yet their leaders declined to take the one step that would have prevented a repeat. That choice is letting the power of the purse drift from the branch the Constitution gave it to.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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On the same day the TV networks suspended pool coverage in solidarity with CNN, the White House rolled out its own replacement. “Trump TV: The Essentials Station” is a 24/7 YouTube stream of the president’s speeches, appearances, and administration-produced highlights. The White House was explicit about its purpose: “Not every big moment has made it on your TV, now it can.”

The Guardian explains:

With major US networks agreeing to not cover the president while the dispute continues, on Monday the White House announced the new 24/7 YouTube live stream, which it promised would feature “top past moments, announcements, and the latest and greatest from the administration all in one place”. The anchor-less channel dispenses with traditional broadcast norms. With no schedule, no on-screen description of what is being shown, and zero context for where or when a clip was recorded, the effect of having the channel on in the background is less like watching a news network and more like installing Trump wallpaper—a 24-hour fever dream of self-soothing propaganda for the Maga faithful.

On Tuesday, the stream swung wildly between cinematic replays of Trump attending a UK state banquet, emotional footage of Laken Riley’s mother praising Trump as “a man of his word”, an 18-month-old clip of Melania Trump at an awards ceremony, and Trump delivering a long, rambling press conference in February 2025 in which he casually advocated for the US taking over Gaza and absorbing Canada as the 51st state.

Presidents have long streamed their speeches and events through official channels, and there’s nothing wrong with the White House posting its own footage. Trump TV is troubling because of its timing and its pitch. It arrived just as the administration was locking independent outlets out of the White House, and it was openly marketed as a way to reach viewers without them. Official footage shows what the administration wants seen, while independent cameras capture the tough questions, the stumbles, and the moments officials would rather edit out. A government that decides who may film the president, and then offers its own feed in their place, is building the kind of curated reality that state-run media provides in autocracies like Russia.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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The Trump administration has spent months trying to force the Smithsonian Institution into ideological alignment, including threatening to cut off its federal support. In July, Trump signed an executive order directing the National Park Service to install signs on the walkways outside the National Museum of American History. The signs would tell visitors that the museum’s exhibits are inaccurate and direct them elsewhere for “accurate information.” Now the Interior Department is moving to put them up.

As The New Republic explains:

According to reporting by The Atlantic, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is mobilizing the National Park Service to display at least a dozen signs around the National Museum of American History warning visitors of “ideologies that distract from a coherent and accurate presentation of America’s story” before they step foot on the premises. The signs are projected to cost at least $84,000. ... When he announced the signs to Senators Jeff Merkley and Lisa Murkowski, Burgum said that the “informational signage therefore will provide visitors with important context about the exhibits they are about to encounter and the personal viewpoints that the curators of the exhibits are seeking to advance.” “We believe the public should enter the museum fully equipped with the information needed to evaluate whether to invest their time in viewing these exhibits and programming,” he wrote in a letter to the senators.

It is not yet clear what exactly the “information needed” will be. The text of the signs or the plans for their physical structure is still undetermined, but [Burgum’s] letter suggests direct attacks on Smithsonian leaders, including [Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie] Bunch and museum director Anthea Hartig.

The letter makes those attacks explicit. “Visitors should be aware of Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch’s history of invidious discrimination and anti-white animus,” it reads. Bunch, the founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, announced on September 8 that he will retire at the end of the year, though he says the administration’s pressure did not influence his decision.

Rewriting history to suit those in power and appease dominant groups is a staple of the authoritarian playbook. Trump calls it “restoring trust.” In practice, it means spreading regime propaganda.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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A whistleblower has accused the Department of Homeland Security of directing its own agents to misrepresent themselves—and, in the process, potentially violate state law—while sifting through state rolls for voters to investigate. This stems from DHS’s Unlawful Voter Initiative, a politically motivated pre-midterm dragnet billed as an election integrity measure. The whistleblower submitted their account to Sen. Alex Padilla of California; yesterday, Padilla and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer made the report public. NPR explains:

The report details that last month the Department of Homeland Security began surging personnel for what it called the Unlawful Voter Initiative. Those enlisted federal agents then began scouring voter rolls, plugging personally identifiable information (PII) into public-facing state websites to check for an individual’s voter history.

But, the report says, “employees may be required to use the PII to make false attestations that they are the voter or are acting with the voter’s express authorization, in order to access these individual voters’ records. Such false representations would likely violate relevant state law.” Virginia, for instance, is one state that includes such an attestation when searching voter rolls.

“The Whistleblower has reason to believe that, with the knowledge and at the direction of leadership at headquarters, the Unlawful Voter Initiative has potentially already committed thousands of violations of state law in an effort to improperly access individuals’ voter records,” the report says.

According to the whistleblower’s account, the Office of Chief Counsel at DHS’ U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services provided guidance that said federal agents could use state voter websites for “adjudicative or investigative” purposes.

The initiative’s own materials describe a process built to prioritize speed over accuracy. Agents are held to a quota of at least five subjects per hour and 40 per day, leaving roughly 12 minutes to determine someone’s citizenship status—all the while relying on a dataset the training materials themselves acknowledge is unreliable. That’s, again, on top of the whole directing-our-own-agents-to-commit-crimes element. In light of these serious design failures, Schumer and Padilla called on the Trump administration to halt the initiative. They pointed out it could disenfranchise eligible voters rather than catch fraudulent ones. Maybe that’s the point all along?

It’s hard not to read this as suppression camouflaged as election integrity, just the latest in a pattern for this administration that includes the mail-in ballot portal story we’ve been tracking for weeks.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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In May, Donald Trump Jr. married Bettina Anderson in the Bahamas. “It was really small, like, just really close friends,” he later said on his podcast. One of those friends was Umar Kremlev, a Russian oligarch close to Vladimir Putin who speaks limited English and was in China with Putin’s delegation in the days before the wedding. He attended the celebrations with a large contingent of Russian guests, and he helped pay for them.

ProPublica reported on Kremlev’s involvement:

Kremlev footed the bill for hundreds of thousands of dollars of wedding expenses, according to records reviewed by ProPublica and interviews with three people familiar with the event. The oligarch paid to rent out one of the private islands, where a reception was held and where guests slept. He also covered other big-ticket items, like the fireworks show, and his team helped plan the event. Kremlev is the head of the International Boxing Association, a scandal-plagued sports group that has been financed by the Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom. The wedding payments came from an IBA-affiliated entity in Dubai that the boxing association uses for financial transactions. ... National security experts expressed alarm at Trump Jr. accepting the oligarch’s largesse, saying it raised an urgent question: What motivated Kremlev to spend a fortune cultivating the connection?

“If I’m paying for your wedding, at some point, you’re going to owe me something,” said Frank Montoya Jr., a retired career FBI official who held senior counterintelligence roles. Oligarchs like Kremlev often act in coordination with the Russian government. While it’s unclear if that happened here, Trump Jr. put himself in a precarious position, Montoya said. “This should be unthinkable for the son of the president. End of story.”

The couple confirmed the payments, calling them an “extraordinarily generous wedding gift” from a friend. The president first dismissed the story as “Not a big deal!” and said he doesn’t know Kremlev. Then, as Republicans like Sen. John Curtis called it “corruption,” he announced that his son had repaid Kremlev.

Kremlev’s background makes the arrangement more troubling. He reportedly joined the Night Wolves, the government-backed ultranationalist biker club, eventually taking a leadership role. The club brought him close to the man who now runs Putin’s security service. Ukraine has sanctioned him personally, citing his closeness to Putin and Russian security services. He is also heavily involved in Healthy Fatherland, a group run by his wife’s twin sister that Ukraine has sanctioned for its alleged role in abducting Ukrainian children from occupied territories. And he wants something from the Trumps. After the International Olympic Committee stripped his boxing association of its Olympic role, Kremlev wrote to the president asking him to look into the matter ahead of the 2028 Los Angeles Games. After hosting Trump Jr. at a boxing event in Istanbul last year, the association announced that “this alliance will not remain symbolic.” Paying the money back after getting caught does nothing to change that.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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