The Anti-War President Blows Up 11 People in the Caribbean: An Executive Watch Roundup

Our early-September selection of the president's latest and greatest assaults on the rule of law

Sep 06, 2025

The Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism (ISMA), the publisher of The UnPopulist, launched Executive Watch earlier this year. This one-of-a-kind project, designed to track presidential abuses of power as they are happening, has been meticulously documenting each illicit action emanating from the White House.

Below is our biweekly selection of new entries posted in Executive Watch. You should bookmark this page that contains a chronological scroll of the abuses and this post that sorts and lists them under our 5 P categories:

After reading this roundup, tell us in the comments: Which of these abuses do you take to be the most troubling, and why?

Sept. 3, 2025

The Anti-War President Blows Up 11 People in the Caribbean in Violation of International Law and Without Congressional Authorization
Category: Policy Illegality

Donald Trump recently boasted about a U.S. airstrike against a small boat with 11 people on board, claiming that they were all “narco-terrorists” smuggling drugs to the United States. You have to read nine paragraphs into the following New York Times report on this incident to get to this extraordinary paragraph: “Pentagon officials were still working Wednesday on what legal authority they would tell the public was used to back up the extraordinary strike in international waters.”

Now we know why Pete Hegseth fired the U.S. military’s top lawyers back in February. It was to make this possible: Officials at the White House, at the Pentagon, and all the way down the military chain of command just killed 11 people, and none of them can tell you why it was not murder.

The BBC provides the analysis that the Pentagon did not:

BBC Verify reached out to a range of experts in international and maritime law, with several saying that US may have acted illegally in attacking the vessel. …
“Force can be used to stop a boat but generally this should be non-lethal measures,” Prof. Luke Moffett of Queens University Belfast said.
But he added that the use of aggressive tactics must be “reasonable and necessary in self-defense where there is immediate threat of serious injury or loss of life to enforcement officials,” noting that the US moves were likely “unlawful under the law of the sea.” …
Notre Dame Law School Professor Mary Ellen O’Connell told BBC Verify that the strike “violated fundamental principles of international law,” adding: “Intentional killing outside armed conflict hostilities is unlawful unless it is to save a life immediately.”

Of course, Trump did not ask Congress for authorization before blowing up the alleged narco-terrorists. But whether the U.S. military is required to act lawfully when it kills people is not just a question for what happens outside of the United States—given that Trump is also, with equal indifference to the law, deploying troops in our own cities.

Aug. 31, 2025

Trump’s Executive Order to Change Voting Rules Is Unconstitutional and Meant to Discredit His Potential Midterm Loss
Category: Power Consolidation

Donald Trump has pursued so many deeply unpopular policies that Republicans are almost certain to lose a large number of seats and control of Congress in next year’s midterm elections. So he is attempting to ensure this cannot happen, first by encouraging blatant gerrymandering in “red states” and now by attempting to set voting rules by executive order.

The New York Times has a report, but first a note.

The main subtitle on this report reads, “The Constitution doesn’t give the president explicit authority over election law.” Actually, the Constitution very explicitly gives authority over election rules to everybody but the president: the states and Congress. See Article I, Section 4, and Article II, Section 1. This is not a subtle difference.

The body of the article repeats the questionable phrasing but at least follows it with a more accurate description:

President Trump said late Saturday that he would issue an executive order to require voter identification for all U.S. elections, a continuation of his efforts to overhaul the nation’s election laws, which he has long attacked and falsely blamed for his 2020 election loss. …
He also reiterated his intention to restrict mail-in voting except for those who are very ill or serving far away in the military, as well as his opposition to voting machines. …
The Constitution gives the president no explicit authority to regulate elections. Rather, it gives states the power to decide the rules of elections, oversee voting and try to prevent fraud. It gives Congress the ability to override state laws on voting. …
Mr. Trump and his allies have started a wide-ranging effort to gain any advance they can ahead of midterm elections, which are set for November 2026.

Trump cannot change election rules by executive order. So what purpose is served by issuing orders he knows will not be followed? It serves to delegitimize the vote in the eyes of his supporters, claim the midterm election is stolen, and attempt to overturn its results—just as he did with the presidential election in 2020.

Aug. 26, 2025

Did the FBI Alert a Pro-Trump Media Organ of its Raid on John Bolton to Send a Message to Trump’s Critics?
Category: Presidential Retribution

Donald Trump likes to deflect scrutiny of his own misconduct by accusing others of the same crimes—and now he can use his office to launch investigations and prosecutions. Hence the raid on the home of John Bolton, Trump’s former national security advisor turned critic, based on accusations that Bolton illegally kept classified documents, a charge similar to one on which Trump was prosecuted.

At The Bulwark, Ben Wittes explains how this investigative power is being abused:

At 7:14 a.m., nine minutes after I started my livestream, the New York Post tweeted out a story about the search. I looked around. I was still by myself. Yet somehow, a mere nineteen minutes after the police action began on that street in a D.C. suburb, the New York tabloid was reporting details of the operation overtly sourced to administration officials.
In other words, part of the point of the exercise was that people should know about it. Part of the point was to create a theatrical display of law-enforcement power deployed against a critic of the administration. When Vice President Vance was asked about this display a few hours later, he didn’t even bother to pretend that there was some wall of separation between the Justice Department’s investigative functions and the administration’s political brass. He talked about the investigation as though it were something perfectly natural for him to know about—as though vice presidents normally know about why former officials five years out of office are under investigation. …
The message is that if you criticize Trump, the government is coming for you.

Bolton is a controversial figure and a foreign policy hawk who can certainly raise hackles with his overbearing, high-handed style. But that is not a criminal offense. His real crime is that he is an unsparing critic of Donald Trump’s and so needs to be taught a lesson.

Aug. 25, 2025

Trump’s Edict Banning Flag Burning Is Performative and Illegal But that Doesn’t Mean it Can’t be Used to Harass Americans
Category: Policy Illegality

No law in the United States bans burning the American flag. State laws that did so were struck down by the Supreme Court in 1989 as a violation of freedom of speech. A federal ban was struck down for the same reason in 1990. Yet Donald Trump is pretending to ban flag-burning by executive order.

The New York Times reports:

Signing the order in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump delivered tough talk about punishing those who desecrate the national symbol: “If you burn a flag, you get one year in jail, no early exits, no nothing,” he declared.
But there was a significant disconnect between the president’s words and the order he signed. The text says nothing about putting people in prison for a year. Instead, it acknowledges that the Supreme Court in 1989 ruled that flag burning is a form of political expression protected by the First Amendment. …
In his order, Mr. Trump instructed Attorney General Pam Bondi to look for ways to prosecute people who desecrate the national symbol “to the fullest extent permissible under any available legal authority” without running afoul of the First Amendment. The order offers some ideas: prosecuting “violent crimes; hate crimes, illegal discrimination against American citizens, or other violations of Americans’ civil rights.”

Banning flag-burning may be a pretense, but Trump has made a career of turning pretense into reality. Thus, an army veteran who burned the flag as a deliberate act of protest against this executive order was promptly arrested outside the White House not for burning the flag but igniting an object in a designated U.S. Park, which is illegal.

Trump cannot ban flag-burning by executive order. What he can do is give his attorney general a mandate to legally harass people for constitutionally protected acts of protest—which in itself is a dangerous precedent.

Aug. 23, 2025

Trump Is Planning an Illegal Military Occupation of Chicago, the Illinois Governor Pritzker Warns
Category: Power Consolidation

After deploying the National Guard and the U.S. Marines to Los Angeles, which was found to be illegal by a federal judge, Donald Trump deployed them in Washington, D.C., and is now planning to deploy them to Chicago, with no justification and over the objections of the city’s mayor and the governor of Illinois.

The Washington Post reports:

The deployment would come as federal authorities look for new ways to intensify the identification and deportation of undocumented immigrants, including an expansion of ICE and efforts to challenge “sanctuary” policies, as they seek to meet a directive from White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller to make at least 3,000 arrests per day.
“After using Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. as his testing ground for authoritarian overreach, Trump is now openly flirting with the idea of taking over other states and cities,” [Illinois Governor J.B.] Pritzker said. “Trump’s goal is to incite fear in our communities and destabilize existing public safety efforts—all to create a justification to further abuse his power.” …
Pritzker said in a statement Saturday night after this story was published that the state of Illinois had received “no requests or outreach from the federal government asking if we need assistance, and we have made no requests for federal intervention.”
He added that there is “no emergency that warrants the President of the United States federalizing the Illinois National Guard, deploying the National Guard from other states, or sending active duty military within our own borders.”

Some of us warned that Trumps’ “mass deportation” plan would require a militarized police state. It looks more like it is providing him with the excuse to impose such a police state in an attempt to suppress big cities that he sees as strongholds of his political opposition.

Aug. 22, 2025

Trump Borrows a Page From China’s Communist Rulers and Misuses Congressional Appropriations to Give Uncle Sam a Stake in Intel at Below Market Rate
Category: Power Consolidation

Earlier this month, Donald Trump demanded the resignation of Lip-Bu Tan, the Malaysian-American CEO of Intel, because of Tan’s personal investments in Chinese companies. Now we know what that threat was actually about, because Trump subsequently announced a deal that gives the U.S. government 10% of the microchip manufacturer’s shares.

CNBC reports:

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said on Friday that the U.S. government has taken a 10% stake in embattled chipmaker Intel, the Trump administration’s latest effort to exert control over corporate America.
Intel, the only American company capable of making advanced chips on U.S. soil, said in a press release that the government made an $8.9 billion investment in Intel common stock, purchasing 433.3 million shares at a price of $20.47 per share, giving it a 10% stake in the company. Intel noted that the price the government paid was a discount to the current market price.
Of the total, $5.7 billion of the government funds will come from grants under the CHIPS Act that had been awarded but not paid, and $3.2 billion will come from separate government awards under a program to make secure chips.
“The United States paid nothing for these Shares, and the Shares are now valued at approximately $11 Billion Dollars,” President Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. “This is a great Deal for America and, also, a great Deal for INTEL.”

Note that Trump is using subsidies allocated by Congress under the previous administration—but doing so for his own aggrandizement and attaching strings to it that were never authorized by Congress.

Trump’s supporters are still issuing dire warnings about the threat of “socialism,” and Trump keeps using the Chinese government as an all-purpose boogeyman. Yet, ironically, he is adopting the distinctive policy of the Chinese Communist Party: extensive state ownership of nominally private businesses.

Aug. 20, 2025

Federal Housing Chief Abuses His Office to Dig Up Dirt on a Federal Reserve Governor Refusing to Obey Trump to Justify Firing Her
Category: Power Consolidation

The president can only fire the heads of independent agencies “for cause”—for actual, substantial misconduct in office. The Supreme Court has already let Donald Trump erode this protection, but the justices have hinted that they would preserve it for the Federal Reserve.

So Trump has turned to inventing a fake “cause” to fire a Federal Reserve governor, getting one of his lackeys, Federal Housing Finance Agency head Bill Pulte, a real estate mogul, to go onto social media to make accusations of mortgage fraud against the Fed’s Lisa Cook. She is refusing to step down, challenging Trump’s authority to fire her.

The BBC reports:

“His attempt to fire her, based solely on a referral letter, lacks any factual or legal basis,” Cook's lawyer said on Tuesday. “We will be filing a lawsuit challenging this illegal action.”
Cook said in a statement that Trump “purported to fire me ‘for cause’ when no cause exists under the law, and he has no authority to do so.”
“I will not resign. I will continue to carry out my duties to help the American economy as I have been doing since 2022,” she added.

Georgetown University law professor Adam Levitin explains the bigger story at a credit and finance blog:

What troubles me here is not the possibility of garden variety fraud by a federal official in her personal capacity. Instead, the real problem here is that Pulte used the apparatus of the FHFA to target a political opponent. Pulte's abuse of office is a far, far greater offense than any personal mortgage occupancy fraud by a federal official.
I want to emphasize how absolutely extraordinary this is. Pulte's letter to DOJ with a criminal referral is curiously silent on how FHFA learned of the alleged occupancy fraud. Dollars to donuts, however, issues with Cook's loan file weren't caught in some routine audit or the like. No one ever goes back and examines loan applications on performing loans for occupancy fraud; that would entail expenses for no benefit. Instead, the only way anyone would have noticed a problem with Cook's loan application is that Pulte, as head of FHFA, directed Fannie or Freddie to pull her application. That is unheard of.
And do you really think that Lisa Cook was the only one targeted?... That's got to be how the DOJ indictment of Senator Adam Schiff and NY Attorney General Letitia James arose too. …
[I]f Cook, Schiff, and James can be targeted, what stops Pulte from threatening to review the mortgage application of anyone who speaks out. And if politicized mortgage application reviews are somehow ok, won't politicized IRS audits be next?

Donald Trump himself has been convicted of multiple counts of fraud, so it is clear that this is merely a pretext for persecuting political opponents, abusing control of federal agencies to go on fishing expeditions and dig up dirt on anyone who crosses him.

Aug. 11, 2025

Trump Uses the Assault in Washington, D.C. of a Former DOGE Staffer as a Pretext to Militarily Commandeer the Nation’s Capital
Category: Power Consolidation

Donald Trump used a late-night attack on a former DOGE employee as his pretext to take over the D.C. police and send the National Guard onto the streets of the American capital. As usual, he is claiming emergency powers where there is no emergency: the DOJ’s own website declares that violent crime in D.C. is at a 30-year low. (See a deep dive from an expert on crime statistics.)

The New York Times reports:

President Trump significantly escalated his efforts to exert federal authority over the nation’s capital on Monday, saying that he was temporarily taking control of the city’s police department and deploying 800 National Guard troops to fight crime there.
At a White House news conference, the president painted a dystopian picture of Washington—including “bloodthirsty criminals” and “roving mobs of wild youth”—that stood in sharp contrast to official figures showing violent crime in the city is at a 30-year low. … A White House official said the takeover was intended to last for 30 days. …
Mr. Trump also threatened to expand his efforts to other cities, including Chicago, if they did not deal with crime rates he claimed were “out of control.”

Trump has already been sending FBI agents to patrol against ordinary local crime, but, more ominously, he is also sending ICE and the Border Patrol. There is no reason to think immigration is feeding crime in D.C., so this just confirms that these agencies are being built up as Trump’s personal goon squad.

The threat to expand this to other cities—as he has already done in Los Angeles—indicates that Trump is attempting to normalize the military occupation of U.S. cities at his arbitrary whim. That is an even more ominous precedent to set in D.C., where controlling the streets with troops could be used (as was attempted recently in South Korea) against Congress.

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Judi Lakin

Wow! I knew of all of these events, but seeing them listed like this with the dates is really powerful and seems so obviously impeachable! Please keep doing this and when the saner people get back in power, maybe something can be done.

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