Trump Uses the White House to Stage a Tesla Ad and Worse: An Executive Watch Roundup
Our early-April selection of the president's latest and greatest assaults on the rule of law
As The UnPopulist’s regular readers know, we launched Executive Watch, a new project that tracks presidential abuses of power, earlier this year. We are actively building a one-stop, comprehensive, fully searchable database that anyone who wants to keep track of all the executive abuses emanating from this White House can do so with the click of a button. (You can also find the tracker on the website of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, our publisher.)
Below is our biweekly selection of new entries posted in the Executive Watch. We’re covering everything from Trump’s shilling for Tesla to his dismissal of a federal prosecutor for going after a fast-food CEO friend of his, from his ongoing campaign to erode the very possibility of an independent legal system to his threat to send U.S. citizens to Salvadoran gulags—we’re chronicling all of it.
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:
Personal Grift
Trump Uses the White House to Make a Sales Pitch for Tesla in Exchange for Campaign Cash from Musk
March 11, 2025
By using DOGE to seize unchecked control over the U.S. government, interfering in other countries’ politics by supporting far-right and even violent groups and figures, Elon Musk has made himself unpopular with much of the buying public. This has driven down Tesla sales and its stock price precipitously. So Donald Trump gave his pal a helping hand by turning the White House into a stage for a Tesla ad.
NBC News reports:
President Donald Trump turned the South Lawn of the White House into a temporary Tesla showroom Tuesday in a conspicuous favor to his adviser Elon Musk, the car company’s billionaire CEO. …
Because of ethical restraints, it is extremely rare for a senior government official, let alone a sitting president, to endorse a consumer product so explicitly. In 2017, when then-Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway told Americans to buy from Ivanka Trump’s clothing line, she received a warning from a government ethics office and promised never to do it again. …
Tesla, meanwhile, has faced an extended global backlash to Musk’s increasing role in politics, most notably for his role in slashing government jobs and his recent promotion of far-right parties, including Germany’s AfD. Tesla’s shares have declined every week since Musk went to Washington, and they fell 15% on Monday before they rebounded Tuesday. Tesla facilities have faced a wave of both peaceful demonstrations and vandalism, including fires at charging stations.
Asked whether his purchase might help Tesla’s stock, Trump said, “I hope it does.”
Musk, in return, has pledged to give $100 million to Trump’s political organizations, making Trump the highest-paid pitchman in history.
Ethics rules prohibit federal employees from using their offices or positions to promote private commercial products. In the Trump administration, these rules have already been flagrantly violated, so it is no surprise to see such a massive and open violation at the very top.
Trump Uses Sovereign Crypto Fund as a Payout to Political Insiders
March 2, 2025
Highly volatile cryptocurrencies are a dubious investment for government funds to begin with. But when Donald Trump announced the creation of a “strategic crypto reserve,” investors noticed it would put U.S. funds into a few, suspiciously little-known cryptocurrencies.
The economics blogger Noah Smith explains:
Trump has just announced his intention to have the government create a strategic crypto reserve. He eventually stated that the reserve would include Bitcoin and Ether, the most widely owned cryptocurrencies (disclosure: I own both Bitcoin and Ether). But initially, the only cryptocurrencies he mentioned that would be included in the strategic reserve were the less widely used Ripple (XRP), Solana (SOL), and Cardano (ADA). …
So Trump wants to take your hard-earned money and give it to whoever owns Ripple, Solana, and Cardano. …
Who stands to gain? Well, that’s the first reason crypto is such an ingenious tool for regimes to send money to favored individuals. Crypto holdings are anonymous—the public doesn’t even know who has a bunch of XRP, SOL, and ADA. But if you have a bunch of one or more of these coins, you can go whisper in Trump’s ear: “Hey man, I own a ton of Cardano.” And if you’re someone Trump wants to pay out, he can then just include Cardano in his list of cryptocurrencies that he wants the U.S. government to buy. Everyone knows that someone got a big payday, but no one knows who, except for the parties involved. Regime crypto payouts are inherently secret, even when done in plain sight.
It’s no secret Trump got into office with massive financial support from crypto industry insiders, who in exchange have asked for less regulation of their speculative investments. This looks like a more specific trade, with a few insiders raiding taxpayers’ money to inflate or cash out their own holdings.
Political Corruption
The White House Fires a Federal Prosecutor Who Criticized Trump and Was Prosecuting a Trump-Supporting, Tax-Defrauding CEO
March 28, 2015
Adam Schleifer, a federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, was fired on direct orders from the White House because he criticized President Trump while running for Congress in 2020—and because he was prosecuting a fast-food CEO who is a Trump supporter.
The Los Angeles Times reports:
A federal prosecutor in Los Angeles was fired Friday at the behest of the White House, after lawyers for a fast-food executive he was prosecuting pushed officials in Washington to drop all charges against him, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter. …
Schleifer was fired via a “one line e-mail, and it came from a White House staff account.” … Schleifer is a registered Democrat who made several unflattering remarks about Trump when he ran for an open congressional seat in New York’s 17th District in 2020. …
On Friday, Laura Loomer, a right-wing provocateur who has at times served as an advisor to Trump, shared one of Schleifer’s prior critical tweets on X and called for the prosecutor to be fired. …
Another source, a former prosecutor who handled fraud cases in the U.S. attorney’s office and sought anonymity over concerns about facing professional backlash, said he believes Schleifer’s firing is “going to have an incredible chilling effect. … The message from Adam’s case is that if you’re going to indict some run-of-the-mill CEO of a company, you need to check if he’s a Trump supporter first. … It’s going to cause line prosecutors to be considerably more careful about pursuing anyone who has even tenuous connections to the president.”
Andrew Wiederhorn, the Trump-supporting CEO, was indicted by a grand jury on charges that he hid taxable income from the federal government by dispersing “shareholder loans” from the company to himself and his family.
The president and the Department of Justice are entrusted with the impartial enforcement of the law. But for Trump, the purpose of power is to punish his enemies and grant immunity to his friends. Prosecutors will now give a free pass to anyone with friends in Washington even if they are defrauding the government. How is this for fighting “waste, fraud, and abuse?”
Surprise! The Most Ethically-Challenged Administration Guts the Government Ethics Agency
Feb. 10, 2025
If this administration were truly interested in rooting out “waste, fraud, and abuse,” it wouldn’t be firing those whose job it is do just that. Yet that is exactly what it is doing! After firing a bevy of inspectors general, Donald Trump also fired the head of the Office of Government Ethics.
CBS News reports:
President Trump on Monday removed the director of the Office of Government Ethics, the independent agency responsible for overseeing ethics rules and financial disclosures for the executive branch.
“OGE has been notified that the president is removing David Huitema as the director of OGE,” the office said in a notice on its website. …
Huitema was appointed to a five-year term by former President Biden. He was confirmed by the Senate in November 2024 and sworn in on December 16, 2024. … The move to oust Huitema comes two weeks after Mr. Trump fired at least 17 inspectors general from their roles as watchdogs without explanation.
“The primary mission of the executive branch ethics program is to prevent conflicts of interest on the part of executive branch employees, by working to ensure that they make impartial decisions based on the public interest, serve as good stewards of public resources, and loyally adhere to the Constitution and laws of the United States,” OGE's mission statement reads. …
OGE collects both confidential and public financial disclosures, as well as ethics agreements and other forms from government officials, from the president and vice president to high-ranking appointees and Cabinet nominees. The office works to identify and prevent conflicts of interest.
What kind of ethics system does Trump have in mind to replace the one he is gutting? One in which Elon Musk polices his own conflicts of interests—a frank admission that this administration has no intention of enforcing any ethics rules on its favored public officials.
Presidential Retribution
In an ongoing quest to deny his political opponents the right to counsel, Donald Trump has already intimidated one big law firm into becoming his compliant lackey. Now he is targeting yet another firm, Jenner & Block.
The Washington Post reports:
Legal scholars say no previous U.S. administration has taken such concerted action against the legal establishment, with Trump’s predecessors in both parties typically respecting the constitutionally enshrined tenet that everyone deserves effective representation in court and that lawyers cannot be targeted simply for the cases and clients they take on.
Trump has used executive orders to target powerful law firms that have challenged him. The latest came Tuesday against Jenner & Block, which employed attorney Andrew Weissmann after he worked as a prosecutor in Robert S. Mueller III’s special counsel investigation of Trump in his first term.
The firm “has participated in the weaponization of the legal system against American principles and values. And we believe that the measures in this executive order will help correct that,” White House staff secretary Will Scharf said as he handed Trump the order to sign, calling out Weissmann by name.
The orders have sought to strip law firms of their business by banning their lawyers from government buildings and barring companies that have federal contracts from employing the firms.
This is no longer about what might happen. It is already happening. The Post reports that “Biden-era officials said they’re having trouble finding lawyers willing to defend them,” and “legal resistance to Trump administration actions” is receiving less pro bono support from large firms.
A Trump Memo Threatens Any Lawyer Who Dares to Sue His Illegal Executive Actions
Mar. 22, 2025
Donald Trump’s attempts to target specific law firms associated with the political opposition has widened into a threat against literally any lawyer who brings a case against the U.S. government, as directed in a memo sent by the White House to the Department of Justice.
The Washington Post reports:
A White House memo issued late Friday night orders Attorney General Pam Bondi and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem to pursue ethics challenges against lawyers who they accuse of bringing meritless cases or making arguments that are not backed up by fact, including in immigration courts.
The memo told Bondi to consider taking actions against law firm partners for perceived misconduct by junior attorneys and to review cases against the government from the past eight years to look for “misconduct that may warrant additional action.”
The directive comes as the Trump administration faces more than 130 lawsuits over its efforts to dismantle agencies and diversity programs, freeze spending, fire federal workers and deport immigrants without due process. …
New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin, who has led several lawsuits against the Trump administration and joined with a coalition of state attorneys general in other cases, called the memo “an unprecedented and frankly outrageous attempt to threaten lawyers simply for doing their jobs.”
Given the administration’s recent losing record in the courts, we have wondered what would happen if Trump’s own DOJ were held accountable for “arguments that are not backed up by fact.” But this is clearly a plan to intimidate and harass any lawyer who dares to argue against the federal government.
Power Consolidation
Trump Tells DHS to Spend Millions on Political Ads Thanking Him for Closing the Border
Feb. 21, 2025
While Elon Musk and DOGE cut funding and staff for vital government programs at random, the Trump administration has found a few places where it definitely wants to spend more money: on pro-Trump political ads. Some $200 million of it.
Rolling Stone reports:
The Department of Homeland Security has budgeted up to $200 million to run anti-immigrant ads in the United States and overseas that repeatedly thank President Donald Trump for leading an immigration crackdown. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Friday night that these ads were Trump’s idea, and during the administration’s transition to power, the president asked her to star in ads thanking him “for closing the border.”
The ad campaign amounts to an extremely expensive taxpayer-funded propaganda blitz to scare off migrants and to flatter Trump on television.
Government spending is supposed to serve a public purpose, advancing the interests of the United States, not politicians. By law and custom, public officials are supposed to separate their official duties from electioneering. Donald Trump has a long history of crossing that line.
Trump Guts the Independence of Key Federal Agencies, Paving the Way to their Politicization
Feb. 18, 2025
The executive branch contains agencies created by Congress to be independent, controlled by bipartisan commissions. Acting on a theory that concentrates power solely in the Oval Office, Donald Trump has been asserting his supremacy over these independent agencies.
Walter Olson describes the implications:
The February 18 executive order moving to assert White House supremacy over federal regulation is momentous, but not for the reason mistakenly surmised in some early reports. In declaring a general presidential authority to pronounce on legal interpretation, in particular, the order does not aim to aggress against the role of the courts in saying what the law is. Rather, the order seeks to conquer and subdue what separate interpretive authority has resided in independent agencies, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). …
If the Trump administration can make all this stick, it’s momentous. For example, the president could impose interpretations of broadcast law that Federal Communications Commission executives think are wrong but that serve his political objectives. …
[T]o the extent that this or any future administration embarks on a policy of regulatory retaliation against businesses or other entities it perceives as enemies, controlling the full portfolio of regulatory agencies will enable retaliation to be fuller, more comprehensive, and sometimes more focused than if it controlled only a large share of them.
As Olson points out, in multiple areas, Trump is acting as if he has already won landmark Supreme Court rulings altering the whole balance and structure of powers in our constitutional order. But he is doing so by personal fiat, with no input from Congress or the courts.
Policy Illegality
Trump Threatens to Send U.S. Citizens who Protest to the Salvadoran Gulag
Mar. 20, 2025
Donald Trump is now combining multiple strains of executive abuse. He has already attempted to prop up his biggest supporter, Elon Musk’s, tanking Tesla sales by holding a photo-op at the White House. He has also been sending immigrants to prison in El Salvador without due process. It’s inevitable that he would try to combine the two.
CNBC reports:
President Donald Trump suggested Friday that people found guilty of attacking Tesla properties could serve their sentences in El Salvador prisons, sharply ramping up his rhetoric in defense of Elon Musk’s company amid an intensifying backlash. …
“I look forward to watching the sick terrorist thugs get 20-year jail sentences for what they are doing to Elon Musk and Tesla,” Trump wrote in the social media post Friday morning.
“Perhaps they could serve them in the prisons of El Salvador, which have become so recently famous for such lovely conditions!” he wrote, referring to his administration’s controversial deportation of alleged gang members. …
None of the defendants has been charged with “domestic terrorism,” which is not a federal offense.
To send citizens to a foreign prison, outside U.S. jurisdiction and the protection of our laws, would take the violation of their rights by this administration to yet new heights. It’s also a reminder that the cruelty of Trump’s policy toward immigrants is a preview of what he will do to the native-born.
The Trump Administration Defies Judge Demanding Basic Details about Those it Is Deporting
Mar. 17, 2025
In addition to defying a federal judge’s order to stop the deportation of alleged gang members, Department of Justice lawyers are now refusing to provide information to a federal judge and denying any due process or judicial review of executive actions.
The New York Times reports:
The Trump administration on Monday stonewalled a federal judge seeking answers about whether the government had violated his order by deporting more than 200 people over the weekend, including those officials identified as members of a Venezuelan criminal gang.
The hearing in Federal District Court in Washington escalated a conflict between the White House and the courts that threatened to become a constitutional crisis.
A Justice Department lawyer refused to answer any detailed questions about the deportation flights to El Salvador, arguing that President Trump had broad authority to remove immigrants from the United States with little to no due process under an obscure wartime law known as the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. …
Even before the hearing began, Justice Department officials tried to have it canceled, writing to Judge Boasberg in the late afternoon to tell him there was no point in coming to court since they did not intend to provide him with any additional information about the deportation flights.
The issue isn’t whether these particular people are gang members or not. Our government is asserting the power to grab anyone off the street, put him on a plane, and imprison him in a foreign dictatorship—without providing any evidence or even verifying the victim is not a U.S. citizen.
Under this precedent, no one is safe.
© The UnPopulist, 2025
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Along with all of his other failures both moral and intellectual, Trump simply has no class whatsoever. Zero.
Excellent download. Very concise.