We launched Executive Watch early in Trump’s second term, and it has been meticulously documenting this White House’s illicit actions ever since. Below is our biweekly selection of new entries. Bookmark this page, which contains a chronological scroll of the abuses. And also this post, which sorts and lists them under our 5 “P” categories:
After reading the following entries, tell us: Which of these abuses is the most troubling, and why?
Sept. 14, 2026
Whistleblower Reveals DHS’s Politically Motivated ‘Election Integrity’ Initiative May Have Broken State Law Thousands of Times
Category: Policy Illegality
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; on Monday, 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.
Sept. 10, 2026
Trump Offers $5,000 Bribe Per Adult for Voting Republican in the Midterms
Category: Political Corruption
During the president’s rambling speech on the opening night of his midterm convention, he unveiled yet another gimmick in a desperate attempt to avoid what is shaping up to be a pretty disastrous midterm cycle for his party: a $5,000 check to Americans if Republicans keep a majority in both the House and the Senate. At the level of intended psychological impact, it’s a clear attempt at vote-buying, clear enough that even National Review, which has never been accused of suffering from “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” is willing to call it bribery. And the proposal would be incredibly costly and economically damaging.
The Associated Press, via Fortune, explains:
The dubious promise would most likely cost more than $1 trillion and require congressional approval, and would further exacerbate the country’s nearly $1.8 trillion annual budget deficit and concerns about inflation.
“If the Republicans win, you win with us and you get $5,000,” Trump said during the GOP’s midterm convention in Dallas. “It will be called the Trump Dividend.” He likened the payments to a corporation’s distributions to shareholders, citing “our tremendous strength and success economically.”
Within an hour, Vice President JD Vance appeared to try to walk back Trump’s proposal, at least in part, by suggesting the dividend payments would not go to the wealthy. Vance suggested it could be paid for by U.S. tariff revenues, though the suggested payment dwarfs what the U.S. has taken in through the protectionist measures.
Marc Goldwein, the senior policy director at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, said Trump has no authority to send money to Americans without approval from Congress. Goldwein added that dividends are something that companies pay when there’s a surplus, but the U.S. is running $2 trillion annual deficits and has $40 trillion in debt. “The idea that we’ve had fiscal success is backwards and bordering on laughable,” he said. “We don’t have surpluses to give away.”
This isn’t the first time this president has promised to send money to the American people, including payouts based on supposed savings from DOGE cuts and from tariff revenue. Neither of those payouts ever materialized. So there’s not much reason to believe these checks would ever be sent, even if Republicans did somehow manage to hang on to both houses of Congress after the midterms. But that doesn’t make his attempt to buy votes by using taxpayer dollars to bribe taxpayers any less pernicious.
Sept. 9, 2026
Trump Praises German Far-Right AfD Party’s Election Victory
Category: Power Consolidation
Donald Trump, who not that long ago accused China of meddling in U.S. elections, has no such qualms about meddling in the elections of our liberal democratic allies.
POLITICO Europe reports:
U.S. President Donald Trump has congratulated Alternative for Germany (AfD) Tuesday for its landslide victory in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, where the far-right party won nearly 44 percent of the votes on Sunday.
“Wow! The Populist Party in Germany just had a really big night,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “They finally got tired of the absolutely horrible Immigration rules and regulations which have hurt Germany so badly.” He concluded his message with a German variant of his Make America Great Again acronym, “MGGA!!!”
It is unusual for a sitting U.S. president to comment on German state elections, however the Trump administration has cultivated close ties with the AfD. U.S. Vice President JD Vance met the party’s co-leader Alice Weidel at the Munich Security Conference in February 2025 and criticized Germany’s “firewall” against the party. AfD officials visited the White House later that year, and senior Trump allies and administration figures have repeatedly backed the party.
AfD scored a historic victory in Saxony-Anhalt’s state election on Sept. 6, winning 43.8 percent of the vote, more than twice its 2021 result. It grants the party 39 of the 83 seats in the state parliament, leaving it three seats short of an outright majority and raising the prospect of Germany’s first far-right state government since World War II.
The right-wing party advocates a sharply restrictive immigration policy, alongside a nationalist and socially conservative agenda. It also opposes further military support for Ukraine, calls for an end to sanctions on Russia and closer ties with Moscow.
Trump’s praise has already sparked a backlash in Berlin. Dirk Wiese, the chief whip in the Bundestag of the center-left Social Democratic Party, the coalition partners of Chancellor Friedrich Merz, said Trump’s comments were “not acceptable.” He added: “I don’t think we can put up with that, at least as the federal government.”
It shouldn’t be surprising that Trump himself is now praising the AfD, given that Elon Musk has publicly backed the party as well. But it’s a stark reminder of how deeply we have separated ourselves from our erstwhile European allies—not to mention our own bedrock liberal commitments.
Sept. 7, 2026
Trump SHAMEs America by Renaming Lake Ontario to Punish Canada for a Trade War He Started
Category: Power Consolidation
President Trump remains, as ever, laser-focused on the things that really matter to Americans: renaming things on the map after America, or himself. The latest victim is Lake Ontario, renamed by executive order on Aug. 27 after a breakdown in trade talks with Canada left Trump saying the U.S. doesn’t “expect to be doing much business with Ontario any longer.” The petulance would be one thing if it were free. But of course it isn’t.
Newsweek explains:
A useful comparison comes from the CBO concerning the “Gulf of America” change, adopted on the first day of Trump’s second term. In analysis of a bill aimed at codifying the January 20 executive order, the nonpartisan agency said that it would cost up to $500,000 over five years to update all necessary federal documents and maps. During debates in May, however, Democrats on the House Rules Committee noted that there would also be major associated outlays for the nation’s schools and municipal services.
At the state level, New York, the only state with a shoreline on Lake Ontario, has no plans to implement any changes following Trump’s order. But Michael C. Dorf, a professor of law at Cornell, writes that the change could still burden the Empire State, as it will be forced “to take expensive steps in coordinating state and federal programs, training personnel, and alerting the public to the fact that ‘Lake America’ and ‘Lake Ontario’ refer to the same body of water.”
And, beyond replacing signage, Mike Shriberg, director of the University of Michigan’s Water Center, offered an analysis for the environmental website Circle of Blue, in which he estimated that the change would disrupt decades of environmental data sets and scientific collaboration, while costing agencies and researchers millions of dollars. “The important question, it seems to me, is whether there is any substantive benefit to a given name change,” said Joyce. [Philip G. Joyce, a University of Maryland public-policy professor and former CBO analyst] He told Newsweek that any rebrand which fails to lower costs, improve government performance or offer citizens any “substantive benefit” would “represent the very definition of waste.”
New York, the state that actually borders the lake, isn’t even bothering to comply. And that’s before counting the mayor of Oswego, a Republican, who publicly refused to go along with it, citing “several thousand dollars” in costs his city of 17,000 can’t spare.
The public isn’t fooled by the “honoring American greatness” framing, either. A Reuters/Ipsos poll found only 14% of the country supports the change, versus 63% opposed, including a plurality of Republicans.
Some of you may remember that the mnemonic for the names of the five Great Lakes, Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior, used to be HOMES. With the new name for Lake Ontario, the only word that still works is SHAME.
Sept. 6, 2026
Trump Threatens NBC’s Kristen Welker with Punishment from the FCC for a True Statement
Category: Presidential Retribution
In the latest assault on press freedom from the second Trump administration, Donald Trump took to Truth Social to threaten NBC’s Kristen Welker for describing his primary endorsement record as having “mixed results.” It appears FCC Chair Brendan Carr has taken the threat seriously.
The Hill reports:
His comments come after President Trump urged the agency to punish NBC News’s Kristen Welker. She angered the president last Sunday while teasing an upcoming episode of “Meet the Press” on its Washington, D.C., affiliate earlier in the day. She said Trump is “going to loom large over” the midterm elections while also noting that Trump-endorsed candidates have had “mixed results” during the Republican primaries.
Trump has compiled a 96-percent winning record in this year’s primaries, according to Ballotpedia. Those who have lost include Georgia Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, Rep. Randy Feenstra (R-Iowa), MyPillow founder Mike Lindell and South Carolina Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette.
“How can anyone be allowed to say this, working for freely given Public Airwaves?” Trump wrote last week on Truth Social. “Results are attached. Because of this purposeful inaccuracy, she will be reported to the FCC for rebuke or punishment.”
NBC News said it stands by Welker, calling her “one of the best in the business.”
Welker’s characterization wasn’t “purposeful inaccuracy,” it was simply true. Four candidates Trump endorsed lost, which is enough to make “mixed results” an understatement if anything. Trump isn’t punishing a lie; he is punishing an accurate account he didn’t like, while complaining about it as if it were a lie.
Carr, for his part, appeared on Fox News days later and said the FCC is “looking at a lot of actions” to police “fake polls and partisan coverage” ahead of the midterms. The FCC’s own commissioner, Anna Gomez, a Democrat, has pushed back directly: “the FCC has no authority to punish journalists this administration doesn’t like,” she said, calling the threats “dangerous” to the foundation of American democracy. Notably, so has at least one prominent Republican: Senate Commerce Committee Chair Ted Cruz previously called Carr’s threats against ABC over the Jimmy Kimmel suspension “dangerous as hell.”
Even if Carr’s threatened actions never materialize, or are successfully fended off in court, the chilling effect is real and dangerous.
Sept. 5, 2026
Trump Is Set to Hand the Contract for Venezuela’s Oil Extraction to a Corruption-Tainted Crony With Pentagon Taking a Cut
Category: Political Corruption
The Trump administration has struck a deal with Delcy Rodríguez, Nicolás Maduro’s former vice president who has proved pliable enough to hold power since the U.S.-backed ouster of her old boss, giving Washington an unprecedented equity position in Venezuelan oil. The vehicle for the deal is North American Blue Energy Partners (NABEP), a Barbados-headquartered company whose 100-year concession over 17 Venezuelan oilfields, granted by Rodríguez’s government, covers 65 billion barrels of proven reserves. That would make NABEP the second-largest oil company on Earth, with reserves roughly four times the size of ExxonMobil. And it would hand the U.S. government, through a Pentagon equity stake plus preferential purchase rights, effective control over most of its output.
The company’s CEO, Alejandro Betancourt, is not exactly a reassuring choice of partner. CNBC explains:
The U.S. official said the Trump administration partnered with NABEP because its CEO is a “good oil operator” who in “the past has been helpful to the United States government.”
But Betancourt has faced money laundering and corruption allegations. He has not been charged with a crime and has denied wrongdoing. “I’m not nominating anyone for sainthood here,” the U.S. official told reporters when asked about Betancourt’s past.
That’s a remarkable thing for an administration official to say, unprompted, about the man now entrusted with reserves bigger than any major American oil company.
Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., called the arrangement “a blatant abuse of power and taxpayer dollars” for turning the U.S. military into an oil investor. Tyler Priest, a University of Iowa oil historian, said partnering with “a shady businessman concessionaire in a country known for endemic corruption” raises “all sorts of red flags.” Even the legal footing looks improvised: days before the deal was announced, the Pentagon told reporters its Office of Strategic Capital didn’t have the authority to take equity stakes in private companies at all. Then the White House confirmed it had done exactly that.
The American right, which has spent decades warning about the dangers of state control over industry, is now led by a president who has engineered a state-owned oil enterprise built on a corruption-tainted middleman and a legal rationale the government can’t consistently explain.
Sept. 3, 2026
The DOJ Fired the Prosecutor Investigating an ICE Officer Who Shot a Non-Violent Immigrant and Then Lied About it
Category: Power Consolidation
Back in January, ICE agent Christian Castro shot Julio Sosa-Celis in the leg through the closed door of a Minneapolis home—which state charging documents say Castro knew was occupied by several people. Castro claimed self-defense, but the government’s account of what actually happened has been unraveling ever since. On top of quashing a civil rights charge against Castro in favor of a lesser false-statements charge, the DOJ fired the prosecutor who objected to that call.
CBS News reports:
A federal prosecutor in Minnesota who was investigating an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer for possible civil rights crimes has been fired. … Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Evans was investigating ICE officer Christian Castro over the shooting of a Venezuelan immigrant earlier this year.
Earlier this week … Evans told attorneys for the man who was shot, Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, and other victims to prepare for Castro to only be charged with making false statements. … ProPublica quoted directly from an email it said Evans had sent to the attorneys. “This is being directed by the Main Justice and the US Attorney,” the email from Evans reportedly said. “I objected in the strongest possible terms and fought it as hard as I could. It wasn’t enough.”
The civil rights charge that got quashed existed for a reason. From the same CBS News report:
After Sosa-Celis was shot in the leg, federal prosecutors charged him and one other man—Alfredo Alejandro Aljorna—with forcibly assaulting, resisting or impeding federal officers. But the federal government’s description of the leadup to the shooting has shifted, and ICE later accused its agents of lying about the incident.
Initially, the Department of Homeland Security said Sosa-Celis fled a traffic stop on foot, and when an ICE agent tried to arrest him, two other men attacked the agent with a shovel and a broomstick. DHS said Sosa-Celis then broke free and started attacking the agent, too, leading the agent to fire a “defensive shot to defend his life.” …
A month after Aljorna and Sosa-Celis were charged, the Justice Department dropped the case and said “newly discovered evidence” was “materially inconsistent” with the allegations against them. Todd Lyons, who led ICE at the time, said a review of video evidence showed two ICE officers had made “untruthful statements” in sworn testimony.
This creates an absurd situation in which the government admits its own agent lied about what justified the shooting—which is more than enough reason to investigate the shooting itself—while simultaneously punishing the prosecutor who tried to do exactly that.
Sept. 3, 2026
Trump Is Lowering Recruiting Standards for ICE, FBI Hires
Category: Policy Illegality
The Trump administration is clearly lacking in qualified candidates willing to work for them in a wide variety of roles, including critical law enforcement positions. Rather than address the underlying problems—like worsening work environments, political persecutions of career staff, or buffoonish leadership—the administration’s response is to simply lower standards in order to get new Trump-friendly applicants in the door. A whistleblower who oversaw ICE recruit vetting, a 17-year agency veteran and a longtime Republican who voted for Trump in both 2020 and 2024, filed a formal complaint describing not just careless hiring but selective treatment.
The New York Times reports:
In addition to the vetting concerns, he also mentioned in the complaint that Trump administration political allies had received favorable treatment and obtained security clearances even though troubling information about them had surfaced in background checks. He cited Corey Lewandowski, a former top adviser to D.H.S.
The concerns about Mr. Lewandowski had been outlined in a memo written last year by the D.H.S. head of security and was viewed by the whistle-blower, who told The Times that a higher-up had asked him to vet Mr. Lewandowski for an ICE credential. The red flags in the memo included allegations that Mr. Lewandowski had been paid years earlier for work by a Chinese government agency, according to the whistle-blower and a report last year in the Daily Mail. That allegation has not been substantiated outside of that memo.
Lewandowski has denied ever being vetted by ICE and denies the underlying allegation. But the shape of the complaint stands regardless of how that particular claim shakes out: ordinary recruits were pushed through with no meaningful vetting at all, while a Trump-connected figure’s red flags reportedly got smoothed over rather than resolved.
Meanwhile, CBS News reports that FBI’s internal hiring standards no longer treat even stealing from employers as automatically disqualifying:
In June, the FBI quietly lowered some of the standards it uses when it conducts background checks on would-be federal agents and other personnel. According to multiple sources briefed on the matter, the FBI did so to facilitate hiring in some cases, even if candidates acknowledged they engaged in sexually deviant activities or stole from an employer.
The longer that Trump and his appointees are at the helm of our national security and law enforcement agencies, the more damage they will do to the professionalism, competence, and ethical norms of those agencies, and the closer they will come to turning them into armies of loyalists.
Sept. 1, 2026
A Post Office Whistleblower Revealed That the Agency Defied Court Orders to Implement Trump’s Illegal Demands to Restrict Mail-in Ballots
Category: Power Consolidation
While a federal judge kept a block on the mandatory core of Trump’s mail-ballot rule in place just yesterday, a whistleblower revealed that the Postal Service was forging ahead with constructing the mail portal that Trump hopes to use to reject mail-in ballots, defying that same judge’s earlier order halting the work.
The New York Times has the story:
The official at the Postal Service, describing their work on the portal in the whistle-blower report, raised “grave concerns” that the portal’s verification process could reject tens of thousands of ballots in a bulk-mailing batch if “even one bar code on one single ballot” failed to properly scan, and that the rushed, “slapdash” development of the portal would significantly increase the chance of errors and other failures in the verification process.
“Potentially millions of American voters may not receive their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner, or at all,” the official said in the report, which was prepared with the assistance of Whistleblower Aid, a nonprofit group that represents people seeking to expose potential lawbreaking. … In the whistle-blower report, the federal official raised concerns that the Postal Service had violated several court orders that should have halted work on the new system. At one point in June, the report said, work on the project was halted in response to a court order. But a month later, the project was “suddenly resumed without explanation of what authority permitted U.S.P.S. to ignore the court order.”
Our own Andy Craig has written in more detail about the proposed rule, its legal status, and its implications for election integrity. While the Supreme Court has not refused to bless Trump’s proposal, the administration is clearly hoping that it will one day—and has rushed to put the technological architecture in place for that eventuality.
Sept. 1, 2026
A Trump-Appointed Army Secretary Quits Over Hegseth’s Purge of Respected Military Officials Because He Dislikes Them Or They Are Minorities
Category: Power Consolidation
The resignation of the Secretary of the Army might not be the most attention-grabbing piece of news coming out of the Trump administration, but there’s good reason to pay attention to what the resignation, and the man himself, tells us about the state of the American military under Pete Hegseth. Before he left, Dan Driscoll met with Trump to discuss his concerns about the damage Hegseth has done to the military.
The New York Times reports:
In a meeting with the president, Mr. Driscoll complained that Mr. Hegseth had fired some of the Army’s most combat-tested leaders, imperiling its efforts to modernize the force, military officials said.
He also warned Mr. Trump that the firings and blocked promotions have damaged morale, causing some in the military to question the fairness of a promotion system that is supposed to be apolitical and merit-based, senior officials said.
Mr. Hegseth’s purge does not appear to be driven by job performance, but rather is part of a broader effort by the defense secretary to fashion a force, particularly at senior levels, that is aligned with his political and ideological views, according to military officials.
That ideological alignment has a specific shape: NPR reports Hegseth also blocked the promotions of Black and female Army officers who had Driscoll’s backing. When Hegseth took over, the Army had 10 four-star generals on active duty; it now has five. Across the military more broadly, Hegseth has fired or blocked the promotions of more than 80 generals and admirals, roughly 10% of the armed forces’ top officer corps, with no sign of slowing down.
Driscoll is far from the caricatured version of woke, weak leadership that Hegseth continually insists our military leadership is full of. He’s a personal friend of JD Vance and a Trump political appointee, and he was leading modernization efforts, including a much-needed focus on drone warfare, that even Trump praised. But according to officials, that wasn’t enough to survive a purge aimed less at performance than at loyalty. The fact that Hegseth’s demands for compliance with his own personal agenda override even a Trump political appointee is a deeply worrying sign for the state of our military.
© The UnPopulist, 2026
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