Executive Watch meticulously tracks and documents presidential abuses of power. 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?
Oct. 15, 2026
Trump’s DOJ Sues California in Latest Effort to Subvert the Midterm Elections
Category: Power Consolidation
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.
Oct. 15, 2026
Trump Regrets He Had to Cancel Pete Hegseth’s Plan to Livestream an Execution Due to a Backlash
Category: Power Consolidation
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.
Oct. 14, 2026
Trump’s DHS Raids Ilhan Omar’s Home to Investigate Immigration Fraud in the Latest Weaponization of Government Against His Political Enemies
Category: Presidential Retribution
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.
Oct. 13, 2026
Trump Defies a Federal Ban on Russian Energy Imports to Let Putin Sell Diesel and Fund His War Against Ukraine
Category: Policy Illegality
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.
Oct. 13, 2026
Trump Convenes a Handpicked Panel to Manufacture a Case Against Fed Governor Lisa Cook and Fire Her
Category: Power Consolidation
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.
Oct. 10, 2026
Trump’s DOJ Is Abusing Antitrust Law to Investigate News Networks That Boycotted Pool Coverage After He Banned Outlets He Disliked
Category: Presidential Retribution
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.
Oct. 9, 2026
Trump Administration Continues its Jihad Against Immigration by Barring Microsoft and Seven Other Companies From Sponsoring Workers for Green Cards
Category: Power Consolidation
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.
Oct. 8, 2026
Trump Bought Up to $5 Million in SpaceX Bonds Two Days Before Signing a Space Policy That Benefits SpaceX
Category: Personal Grift
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.
Oct. 8, 2026
Trump’s DOJ Is Punishing Cassidy Hutchinson, the Jan. 6 Witness Who Testified Against Him, by Trying to Indict Her for Lying to Congress
Category: Presidential Retribution
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.
Oct. 7, 2026
Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino Helps Run Trump’s Truth Social Feed and Profits From the Company Behind It
Category: Political Corruption
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 UnPopulist, 2026
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It seems there is lots of evidence her immigration saga is steeped in fraud, starting with her date of birth. Several Trump skeptical legal analysts suggest there is real fraud. It would seem easy enough for her to disprove.