Trump Attacks Minneapolis, Venezuela, and Threatens Greenland: An Executive Watch Roundup
Our mid-January selection of the president's latest and greatest assaults on the rule of law. These two weeks have been a bumper period for abuses since Trump took office.
The Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism (ISMA), along with its flagship publication, The UnPopulist, launched Executive Watch early in Trump’s second term. This project, designed to track presidential abuses of power as they are happening, has been meticulously documenting the illicit actions 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 postthat sorts and lists them under our 5 P categories:
After reading this roundup, tell us in the comments: Which of these abuses is the most troubling, and why?
Jan. 18, 2026
The Pentagon has Reportedly Called In 1,500 Active Duty Soldiers to Suppress Residents Protesting ICE Brutality in Minneapolis
Category: Power Consolidation
The surge of militarized ICE and border patrol agents into Minneapolis already amounts to an occupation of a major American city by our own government—exactly as many of us warned. Now Trump is planning an official military occupation.
The Washington Post reports:
The Pentagon has ordered about 1,500 active-duty soldiers to prepare for a possible deployment to Minnesota, defense officials told The Washington Post late Saturday, after President Donald Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act in response to unrest there.
The soldiers are assigned to two infantry battalions with the Army’s 11th Airborne Division, which is based in Alaska and specializes in cold-weather operations. …
The Insurrection Act, a federal law dating to 1807, permits the president to take control of a state’s National Guard forces or deploy active-duty troops domestically in response to a “rebellion.” Invoking the act would be an extraordinary move and mark the first time a commander in chief has done so since President George H.W. Bush called on the military during the Los Angeles riots of 1992 that killed dozens of people and caused widespread destruction.
Typically, invoking the Insurrection Act is considered a last resort, when law enforcement personnel are unable to keep the peace during times of civil unrest.
Trump threatened Thursday to invoke the law, saying on social media that unless officials in Minnesota could stop protesters from “attacking” agents with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he would “institute the INSURRECTION ACT” and “quickly put an end to the travesty that is taking place in that once great State.”
These troops are not being prepared to suppress riots. They are being prepared to crack down on protests. Trump keeps claiming that his opponents are turning America into a “Third World country.” But he’s the one giving us all the trappings of a tin-pot dictatorship, where the strongman’s rule has to be enforced by soldiers on the streets.
Jan. 17, 2026
Trump Abuses His Tariff Power, Violates Treaty Obligations, and Breaks His Own Deal to Extort NATO Allies to Hand Over Greenland
Category: Policy Illegality
Donald Trump is supposed to go to Congress if he wants to do any of three things: raise tariffs, engage in military conquest, or repudiate our treaty obligations to our allies. Instead, he’s doing all three by his own decree. He is unilaterally raising tariffs on Europe, throwing out a deal with them last year, to pressure them into letting him seize Greenland.
The Associated Press reports:
President Donald Trump said Saturday that he would charge a 10% import tax starting in February on goods from eight European nations because of their opposition to American control of Greenland, setting up a potentially dangerous test of U.S. partnerships in Europe.
Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Finland would face the tariff, Trump said in a social media post while at his golf club in West Palm Beach, Florida. The rate would climb to 25% on June 1 if no deal was in place for “the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland” by the United States, he said. …
The tariff threat could mark a problematic rupture between Trump and America’s longtime NATO partners. …
There are immediate questions about how the White House could try to implement the tariffs because the EU is a single economic zone in terms of trading, according to a European diplomat who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity. It was unclear, too, how Trump could act under U.S. law, though he could cite emergency economic powers that are currently subject to a U.S. Supreme Court challenge.
“It is unclear” is overly cautious journalism speak for “blatantly illegal.”
This is an expression of complete contempt for Congress. Trump is pushing America into a dangerous and destructive conflict with our closest allies without making the slightest effort to gain the approval of the American people or their representatives.
Jan. 15, 2026
Trump Threatens to Invoke the Insurrection Act and Impose Military Rule on Lawful Protests Against Lawless ICE in Minneapolis
Category: Power Consolidation
Since his first term, Donald Trump has been itching to deploy troops onto the streets of America’s cities to crush protests. After an ICE agent shot one such protester in Minneapolis, Trump again threatened to send in the military against all protesters there.
The Washington Post reports:
President Donald Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act in Minnesota on Thursday, raising the prospect of sending U.S. troops into Minneapolis to quell protests over a recent federal immigration enforcement surge.
Trump, in a Truth Social post, put the onus on Minnesota politicians to stop protesters from “attacking” Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. Trump wrote that if the state couldn’t calm the protesters, whom he referred to as “insurrectionists,” he would “institute the INSURRECTION ACT, which many Presidents have done before me, and quickly put an end to the travesty that is taking place in that once great State.”
By invoking the Insurrection Act, a president empowers the military to make arrests and perform searches domestically, functions that the military is generally otherwise prohibited from performing in the United States.
Federal agents have flooded the streets of Minneapolis in recent days, detaining people, pulling them from their vehicles, stopping U.S. citizens and—as of Wednesday evening—shooting two people.
Remember that Trump incited his own insurrection against the U.S. government on Jan. 6, 2021. So for him to wail about “insurrection” now is hypocritical—and only serves the goal of a further insurrection against law and order by imposing military rule to suppress lawful dissent.
The full scope of Trump’s intentions can be gauged by the increasingly bloodthirsty public statements of his Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, who has promised ICE agents “federal immunity” for abuses and is also threatening to use them to investigate alleged “networks” of domestic political opposition.
Trump may not actually impose the Insurrection Act and try to rule through military force, but it is an abuse of power merely to threaten it, repeatedly, in response to political opposition from the public.
Jan. 13, 2026
Trump Opens a Bogus Investigation Against the Fed Chief for Refusing to Slash Interest Rates
Category: Presidential Retribution
Donald Trump has long been putting political pressure on the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates to give a short-term boost to the economy that would help Trump politically (at the long-term cost of higher inflation). He has already ordered his underlings to trump up bogus criminal charges against a Fed governor, and now he is targeting the Fed’s chairman for retribution.
The New York Times reports:
The U.S. attorney’s office in the District of Columbia has opened a criminal investigation into Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, over the central bank’s renovation of its Washington headquarters and whether Mr. Powell lied to Congress about the scope of the project, according to officials briefed on the situation.
The inquiry, which includes an analysis of Mr. Powell’s public statements and an examination of spending records, was approved in November by Jeanine Pirro, a longtime ally of President Trump who was appointed to run the office last year, the officials said. …
The Fed chair warned that the investigation signaled a broader battle over the Fed’s independence. “The threat of criminal charges is a consequence of the Federal Reserve setting interest rates based on our best assessment of what will serve the public, rather than following the preferences of the president,” Mr. Powell added. “This is about whether the Fed will be able to continue to set interest rates based on evidence and economic conditions—or whether instead monetary policy will be directed by political pressure or intimidation.”
The independence of the Federal Reserve has been one of the few remaining holdouts against Trump’s attempt to centralize all power in his person and have every agency run by his lackeys. In this case, Trump’s takeover of the Justice Department, which is no longer insulated from direct presidential control, makes this next takeover more likely.
Jan. 13, 2026
Trump Investigates Another Senator, Also a Veteran, for Reminding the Military to Ignore His Illegal Orders
Category: Presidential Retribution
Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona is suing Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth for violating his First Amendment rights by censuring him for participating in a video restating established policy that members of the U.S. military are required to refuse illegal orders. Now, they’re opening an investigation into the senator—Elissa Slotkin, Democrat of Michigan—who organized the video.
The New York Times has the story:
Ms. Slotkin, a Democrat, said in an interview on Monday that she found out about the inquiry from the office of Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia and a longtime ally of President Trump’s. In an email sent to the Senate’s sergeant-at-arms, Ms. Pirro’s office requested an interview with the senator or her private counsel.
A spokesman for Ms. Pirro’s office declined to confirm or deny any investigation, and it is unclear exactly what officials have identified as a possible crime related to the video.
Ms. Slotkin organized the video, which Mr. Trump and other administration officials have described as “seditious,” along with five other Democratic lawmakers who are also military veterans. Its message that military officers are obligated to ignore illegal orders is a fundamental principle of military law. …
Ms. Slotkin, a former C.I.A. officer who served three tours in Iraq, described the investigation as an effort by an authoritarian president to weaponize the federal government and intimidate her into silence. “Facts matter little, but the threat matters quite a bit,” she said. “The threat of legal action; the threat to your family; the threat to your staff; the threat to you.”
As with Kelly, there is little chance of successfully prosecuting Slotkin merely for restating what is already established law. But in both cases, the process is the punishment, intended to deter others, especially those who are more vulnerable than U.S. senators, from opposing the administration.
Jan. 13, 2026
Trump’s Lackey Continues to Identify as a US Attorney, Defying a Court Ruling That Found Her Improperly Appointed
Category: Policy Illegality
A court ruled that one of Donald Trump’s personal lawyers is not legitimately serving as the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia because she was not properly appointed to the job. Now that lawyer is insisting she still fulfills the role despite the court’s order.
Politico explains:
The Trump administration told a federal judge on Tuesday that attorney Lindsey Halligan remains the interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, despite a recent court ruling that disqualified her.
The Justice Department laid out its position in an unusually fiery filing before U.S. District Judge David Novak, who ordered officials earlier this month to explain why Halligan continues to act and to identify herself in court papers as the U.S. attorney for the district. …
“To answer the Court’s inquisition directly: ‘the basis for Ms. Halligan’s identification of herself as the United States Attorney, notwithstanding Judge Currie’s contrary ruling’ is that, in the Government’s view, Ms. Halligan is the United States Attorney,” the Justice Department wrote. …
Currie’s November ruling held that Halligan’s appointment violated the Constitution’s appointments clause; invalidated all actions flowing from the defective appointment; and held that the power to appoint a top prosecutor to replace Halligan “lies with the district court until” the Senate confirms a nominee.
This is an attempt to evade the “advice and consent” clause that requires Senate approval for executive appointments, so that Trump can appoint a lackey in place of a qualified candidate.
Also, note that this tussle is happening in a totally unrelated bank robbery case, raising the possibility that Trump’s DOJ will let a bank robber off the hook on a technicality, for lack of a legitimate prosecutor, because it wanted to use this case as a battleground against the power of Congress.
Jan. 13, 2026
Trump DOJ’s Witch Hunt Against Renee Good’s Widow Instead of the ICE Officer Who Killed Her Triggers Mass Resignations
Category: Political Corruption
Donald Trump has been systematically tearing down the barriers that are supposed to prevent the Department of Justice from being used as an instrument of crude political manipulation by the president. But he may find it a hollow victory, because DOJ staff keep resigning in protest, most recently over the politicization of the ICE shooting in Minneapolis.
Here the story at MS Now (formerly MSNBC):
At least six leaders of a Justice Department unit that investigates police killings have resigned in protest over the administration’s handling of the fatal shooting of a motorist in Minneapolis by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer, according to three people briefed on the departures.
Top leaders of the criminal section of the Civil Rights Division have left their jobs to register their frustration with the department after the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon decided not to investigate the ICE officer’s fatal shooting of Renee Good last week. The criminal section of the division would normally investigate any fatal shooting by a law enforcement officer and specializes in probing potential or alleged abuse or improper use of force by law enforcement.
The departures–including that of the chief of the section, as well as the principal deputy chief, deputy chief and acting deputy chief–represent the most significant mass resignation at the Justice Department since February. At that time, five leaders and supervisors of the department’s Public Integrity Section, which investigates public officials for possible corruption, resigned rather than comply with an appointee of President Donald Trump’s orders to dismiss the bribery case against then-New York mayor Eric Adams.
Trump’s DOJ won’t investigate the shooter, but it will investigate the victim.
NPR reports that this has led to another wave of resignations:
[T]he source I mentioned tells me there are several reasons for the mass resignations. As we mentioned, top Justice Department officials have been pushing the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office to investigate Becca Good. She is the widow of Renee Macklin Good, the woman killed by ICE agent Jonathan Ross last week. The investigation allegedly centers around any possible ties to activist groups she may have. That, of course, is protected First Amendment activity. The Trump administration maintains that the agent was acting in self-defense when he shot and killed Macklin Good, but video evidence contradicts claims that she presented a threat.
Put these stories together, and it is clear that, under Trump, the Department of Justice is no longer in the business of justice but is instead tasked with creating propaganda to support Trump’s authoritarian ambitions.
Jan. 12, 2026
The Pentagon Illegally Disguised a Military Aircraft as a Civilian Plane—and Killed 11 People in the Caribbean
Category: Policy Illegality
Donald Trump’s bizarre campaign to attack random boats off the shore of South America is a series of war crimes nested within other war crimes. In one notorious strike, Trump’s minions committed the crime of executing shipwrecked sailors. But it turns out they did it using unmarked military planes, which is a whole other violation of the laws of war.
The New York Times reports:
The Pentagon used a secret aircraft painted to look like a civilian plane in its first attack on a boat that the Trump administration said was smuggling drugs, killing 11 people last September, according to officials briefed on the matter. The aircraft also carried its munitions inside the fuselage, rather than visibly under its wings, they said.
The nonmilitary appearance is significant, according to legal specialists, because the administration has argued its lethal boat attacks are lawful—not murders—because President Trump “determined” the United States is in an armed conflict with drug cartels.
But the laws of armed conflict prohibit combatants from feigning civilian status to fool adversaries into dropping their guard, then attacking and killing them. That is a war crime called “perfidy.” …
A U.S. Navy handbook says lawful combatants at sea use offensive force “within the bounds of military honor, particularly without resort to perfidy,” and stresses that commanders have a “duty” to “distinguish their own forces from the civilian population.”
There is a reason the Trump administration has been threatening reprisals against politicians and veterans who are reminding the U.S. military of the duty to refuse illegal orders. The administration is already issuing such orders, in clusters and on a regular basis.
Jan. 9, 2026
The Trump Administration Unleashes a Firehose of Falsehoods to Smear the Woman ICE Killed in Minneapolis
Category: Power Consolidation
The unjustified killing of a citizen by the state is a massive abuse of power. But there is a whole separate abuse of power in government officials systematically lying to the public about what happened in an effort to shield the government from accountability. That is exactly what Donald Trump and members of his administration have been doing.
Much of the mainstream American media coverage is overly deferential to the government, presumably for fear of reprisal, so you have to look to overseas coverage to get a sense for the scope of the administration’s baldface lies. Here is a thorough fact-check in The Guardian:
The killing of a US citizen by a federal immigration agent in Minneapolis was a five-alarm fire for the Trump administration. But a torrent of untruths, half-truths, smears, and innuendo has been unleashed by the White House, and amplified by its social media and cable television acolytes, in an attempt to douse the flames. …
Good, Noem said, without presenting evidence, had been “stalking and impeding” Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) officers before using her car as a weapon to try to run down the agent who killed her. …
Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary of the homeland security department, a regular administration spokesperson for ICE, declared in a post on X that “one of these violent rioters weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them—an act of domestic terrorism.”
Multiple ICE officers were hurt, she insisted, when videos of the shooting showed no such thing.
Donald Trump repeated the claims in an inflammatory post on his Truth Social platform on Wednesday afternoon, and in a later interview with the New York Times, adding the disprovable assertion that: “she didn’t try to run him over, she ran him over.”
All politicians bend the truth, of course, or try to put their own spin on the facts. But public officials who systematically spread falsehoods and reverse truth and falsehoods in their official capacity are a different thing altogether. They undermine the American system by using the megaphone of the state to broadcast a Big Lie and to prevent the people from knowing that truth about what their own government is doing.
Jan. 8, 2026
The Trump Administration’s Justifications for Renee Good’s Murder Are Textbook Police State Tactics
Category: Power Consolidation
The Trump administration has already launched a campaign to designate anyone with pro-immigration views as a “domestic terrorist“ and specifically to target observers and protesters of ICE immigration raids. In Minneapolis, that campaign produced its result, emboldening an ICE agent to shoot and kill a woman who posed no direct threat to the agents.
Like most mainstream news reports, the Washington Post account uses mealy-mouthed terminology about how video of the shooting “raises questions,” but if you just read the facts it reports, they provide damning answers to those questions:
In the aftermath, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem said the woman had committed an act of “domestic terrorism,” first disobeying officers’ commands and then weaponizing her SUV by attempting to “run a law enforcement officer over.” President Donald Trump said the woman “violently, willfully and viciously ran over the ICE officer.”
A frame-by-frame analysis of video footage, however, raises questions about those accounts. The SUV did move toward the ICE agent as he stood in front of it. But the agent was able to move out of the way and fire at least two of three shots from the side of the vehicle as it veered past him, according to the analysis. …
The agent who was first seen behind Good’s SUV reemerges in front of the vehicle, still appearing to hold up a phone. The SUV quickly pulls forward, and then veers to the right, in the correct direction of traffic on the one-way street.
As the vehicle moves forward, video shows, the agent moves out of the way and at nearly the same time fires his first shot. The footage shows that his other two shots were fired from the side of the vehicle.
This is corroborated by multiple eyewitnesses.
Even more terrifying are justifications blaming the victim from multiple Republican members of Congress, including this from Texas Rep. Wesley Hunt: “The bottom line is this: when a federal officer gives you instructions, you abide by them and then you get to keep your life.”
This is the motto of a police state, not a free society.
Jan. 7, 2026
Trump Illegally Commandeers Venezuelan Oil and Unconstitutionally Gives Himself Control Over its Proceeds
Category: Power Consolidation
Donald Trump’s coup in Venezuela, in which he seized the country’s leader and installed a new dictator, is the most naked act of imperialist mercantilism committed by the United States in a long time. But it also has implications for our domestic balance of power, as Trump uses the U.S. military to extort a stream of revenue that he thinks will be independent of the U.S. Congress.
The White House reposted Trump’s announcement:
I am pleased to announce that the Interim Authorities in Venezuela will be turning over between 30 and 50 MILLION Barrels of High Quality, Sanctioned Oil, to the United States of America. This Oil will be sold at its Market Price, and that money will be controlled by me, as President of the United States.
The part about the money being controlled directly by the president is what is unconstitutional. Any measure that raises revenue has to be both approved by Congress and directed by it, not the president.
The New York Times has more details on Trump’s plan:
Earlier in the day, Mr. Trump’s energy secretary, Chris Wright, said the United States intended to maintain significant control over Venezuela’s oil industry, including by overseeing the sale of the country’s production “indefinitely.”
“Going forward we will sell the production that comes out of Venezuela into the marketplace,” Mr. Wright said at a Goldman Sachs energy conference near Miami. …
“If the only way for a country to access the global market to sell its oil and get around U.S. pressure economically and militarily is to let the U.S. run its oil industry and capture a very large share of the wealth created, that is unprecedented in recent oil market history,” Mr. Bordoff said.
It was unclear what legal authority the administration would rely on to commandeer the oil money to use as it saw fit, nor was it apparent what exactly had been agreed. The Constitution gives Congress control over government expenditures, barring any money from being spent except as appropriated by legislation.
That last part is crucial. One of Trump’s central quests in his second term has been to secure a source of revenue independent of Congress, to be used as his own slush fund to pay for his priorities and to buy votes and special favors—precisely what our Founders wanted to prevent a president from doing when they wrote the Constitution.
Jan. 7, 2026
Trump Freezes Funding to Punish Blue States for Welfare Fraud While Leaving Red States Untouched
Category: Presidential Retribution
There is a real and long-recognized scandal concerning fraudulent schemes to siphon off welfare spending in Minnesota. But the Trump administration is using this as an excuse to yank funding selectively, only for states run by Democrats, on the mere assertion of fraud.
The Washington Post reports:
The Department of Health and Human Services announced Tuesday that it had frozen grants that provide food and child care assistance to low-income residents in New York, California, Colorado, Illinois and Minnesota, saying that it has “serious concerns about widespread fraud and misuse of taxpayer dollars in state-administered programs” and that the states may be wrongfully providing services to illegal immigrants. …
Democratic leaders said the funding cuts were politically motivated. …
Freezing federal funds to child care providers across an entire state is “unprecedented,” said Ruth Friedman, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a progressive think tank, who directed the HHS office that handles child care under the Biden administration. Typically states handle fraud investigations, she said, since they are the ones distributing the funds to providers.
“You don’t harm hundreds of thousands of families and take away their child care assistance based on unproven allegations,” Friedman said.
There have been welfare-fraud scandals in Republican-led states, too, including one in Mississippi that is similar to the case in Minnesota. To pre-emptively remove funding only for states run by Trump’s political opponents is a nakedly political abuse of funds whose expenditure is mandated by Congress.
© The UnPopulist, 2026
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I find the DOJ defiance of court orders the most troubling. Lindsey Halligan is one example. The DOJ's assertion that no US court can compel release of the Epstein Files is another. If open defiance of the courts is countenanced by the Supreme Court, democracy is doomed.
I'm sorry, but what's going on in Minnesota is not ICE being bad, but rather police not actually enforcing the law (kind of important for "the rule of law") against people harassing and attacking people for supporting ICE, or, even worse, just not saying anything. They're creating checkpoints. But yeah, sure, it's Trump who's so terrible