Trump's Relentless Abuses of Power
A new installment of Executive Watch
Last month, The UnPopulist, along with its parent organization the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism (ISMA), launched Executive Watch, a new project that tracks presidential abuses of power. As we explained in the introductory post, the point of the project is to generate a comprehensive, one-stop, searchable database that anyone who wants to keep track of all the executive abuses emanating from the Trump White House can do so with a click of a button. Below is a new sampling of the abuses since our kickoff. 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
Cryptocurrency Scammer Pours Millions in Trump's Venture and Gets Charges Dropped
Feb. 27, 2025
Giving campaign contributions to a politician in the hope that he will back your agenda is one thing. Here’s something different: Chinese cryptocurrency booster Justin Sun just had a pending securities case dropped—after pouring millions into one of Trump’s crypto ventures.
According to Popular Information:
In March 2023, … the SEC accused Sun of wash trading, which involves buying and selling a token quickly to fraudulently manufacture artificial interest. Sun was also charged with paying celebrities, including Lindsay Lohan, Jake Paul, and Soulja Boy, for endorsing his crypto “without disclosing their compensation,” which violates federal law.
A few weeks after Trump won the 2024 presidential election, Sun publicly announced that he had become WLF's largest investor, buying $30 million of its tokens. Sun added that his company, TRON, was “committed to making America great again.”
Sun’s purchase put millions in Trump's pocket. …
Now, the SEC seems poised to negotiate a favorable settlement with Sun or drop the case entirely.
The concept of “conflict of interest” seems quaint given the sheer number of ways Trump has devised to benefit financially from his political supporters. The lack of any underlying value to cryptocurrency makes it especially easy for Trump cronies to directly inflate his wealth.
Musk Uses His Political Power to Force Companies to Advertise on X
Feb. 19, 2025
Advertisers fled the social media platform X (formerly Twitter) after Elon Musk bought it and made it a much friendlier place for trolls and racists. X is now trying to revive its ad revenue by using Musk’s political connections to threaten advertisers with retribution.
The Wall Street Journal reports:
A lawyer at advertising conglomerate Interpublic Group fielded a phone call in December from a lawyer at X. The message was clear, according to multiple people with knowledge of the conversation: Get your clients to spend more on Elon Musk’s social-media platform, or else.
Interpublic leaders interpreted the communications from X as reminders that the recently announced $13 billion deal to merge Interpublic with rival Omnicom Group could be torpedoed, or at least slowed down, by the Trump administration, given Musk’s powerful role in the federal government. …
“We now see brands returning in quite significant numbers, because the easiest route is to just spend a minimum viable amount on the platform,” said Ebiquity’s Schruers, “Not because they want to advertise there and run their ads adjacent to the content on X, but because they are afraid of the legal and political ramifications of not doing so.”
This is a circular trade—money for power for more money for more power—typical of the corrupt logic of authoritarian regimes. Musk uses his political connections to shake down advertisers for money, which he then uses to prop up the media platform that is the source of his political power.
Political Corruption
Trump Announces Shakedown Deal with Big Law Firm
March 20, 2025
Executive Watch has already noted Donald Trump’s threats against Big Law firms that have represented his political opponents. Now comes the news that his latest victim—a firm packed full of top-level lawyers—has nevertheless caved in to presidential extortion.
The New York Times reports:
President Trump and the head of the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP have reached a deal under which Mr. Trump will drop the executive order he leveled against the firm, Mr. Trump said on Thursday.
In the deal, Mr. Trump said, the firm agreed to a series of commitments, including to represent clients no matter their political affiliation and contribute $40 million in legal services to causes Mr. Trump has championed, including “the President’s Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, and other mutually agreed projects.” …
The firm, Mr. Trump said, also agreed to conduct an audit to ensure its hiring practices are merit based “and will not adopt, use, or pursue any DEI policies.” …
In a statement posted on social media by Mr. Trump, Mr. Karp said he is looking forward “to an engaged and constructive relationship with the president and his administration.”
Mr. Trump said he was taking the action to punish the firm for its ties to a lawyer who had pushed for him to be indicted and another who had brought a lawsuit against Jan. 6 rioters. The order barred the firm’s lawyers from dealing with the federal government and raised the possibility that its clients would lose their government contracts.
In short, a major law firm with a history of litigating civil rights cases is now in the pocket of the very government it is supposed to be challenging in court.
The abuse of executive power does not just depend on the executive. It depends on all the people in positions of power and influence who refuse to fight for their own rights and comply in advance. Many of leaders have proven too timid and complacent to defend their own institutions.
We have to look for new leaders with the actual courage to fight and rebuild new institutions around them.
Trump Gives the Green Light to American Companies to Engage in Corruption Abroad
Feb. 10, 2025
Given his own penchant for personal grift, Donald Trump seems to see bribery and political corruption as the normal way of doing business. So it’s no surprise that one of his first acts in office is to suspend enforcement of a law against bribing foreign officials.
The New York Times reports:
President Trump on Monday ordered a pause in the enforcement of a federal law aimed at curbing corruption in multinational companies, saying it creates an uneven playing field for American firms.
The law, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, makes it illegal for companies that operate in the United States to pay foreign government officials to secure business deals. Though the law was enacted in 1977, federal authorities have more heavily enforced it since around 2005, cracking down on bribery, especially in countries where it is a common business practice.
Mr. Trump has objected to the law, which has led to charges and huge fines against some of the world’s largest companies. …
Mr. Trump has been among the critics who have argued that the law’s reach has left American companies at a competitive disadvantage abroad. He said in a 2012 CNBC interview that “the world is laughing at us” for enforcing the law, and in 2017 he nominated Jay Clayton, a lawyer who had expressed skepticism about U.S. antibribery policies, to run the S.E.C.
The Constitution tasks the president to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed”—not to suspend enforcement of the ones he doesn’t like. But asking Congress to change the law would require getting a majority to endorse an open season for foreign bribery.
Presidential Retribution
Trump Announces that Negative Coverage of Him Is Illegal and Threatens Networks
March 15, 2025
The Department of Justice is typically insulated from direct control by the president to prevent politically motivated prosecutions. In a speech at the DOJ, Donald Trump threw out that tradition and laid down a roadmap of the politically motivated prosecutions he wants.
The Associated Press reports:
The appearance marked Trump’s clearest exertion yet of personal control over the country’s federal law enforcement apparatus, which is normally run by appointees who keep at least an arm’s length from the president to avoid the appearance that politics are governing prosecutorial decisions. Trump, instead, embraced the notion of the agency as his own personal tool of vengeance.
“As the chief law enforcement officer in our country, I will insist upon and demand full and complete accountability for the wrongs and abuses that have occurred,” Trump told the audience. …
Trump named lawyers and a legal nonprofit that he has tangled with over the years, which could serve as a roadmap for people he would like prosecuted by the officials in the room with him. …
“I believe that CNN and MSDNC, who literally write 97.6% bad about me, are political arms of the Democrat Party. And in my opinion, they are really corrupt and they are illegal. What they do is illegal.”
This was a remarkable moment—the president of the United States telling his Department of Justice that he believes the media are illegal because they write bad things about him.
Needless to say … the First Amendment allows political groups to criticize a rival politician. It certainly allows the media to do so, regardless of any perceived ideological bias.
That “needless to say” is self-refuting. The First Amendment protects the freedom of the press and the right of lawyers to “petition the government for a redress of grievances”—and that is going to need a lot of restating in answer to Trump and anyone at the DOJ who follows these orders.
Trump Revokes the Green Card of a Pro-Palestinian Campus Activist Without Any Criminal Charges
March 8, 2025
Donald Trump vowed to crack down on campus protests and specifically to deport foreign students. His first step goes beyond that: arresting and deporting a protest leader who is not on a student visa but holds a green card and is a legal permanent resident of the U.S.
The Associated Press reports:
Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student at Columbia until this past December, was inside his university-owned apartment Saturday night when several Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents entered and took him into custody, his attorney, Amy Greer, told The Associated Press.
Greer said she spoke by phone with one of the ICE agents during the arrest, who said they were acting on State Department orders to revoke Khalil’s student visa. Informed by the attorney that Khalil was in the United States as a permanent resident with a green card, the agent said they were revoking that instead, according to the lawyer. …
Khalil’s attorney said they were initially informed that he was being held at an immigration detention facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey. But when his wife tried to visit Sunday, she learned he was not there. Greer said she still did not know Khalil’s whereabouts as of Sunday night. …
The Department of Homeland Security can initiate deportation proceedings against green card holders for a broad range of alleged criminal activity, including supporting a terror group. But the detention of a legal permanent resident who has not been charged with a crime marked an extraordinary move with an uncertain legal foundation, according to immigration experts.
“Uncertain legal foundations” is one way of putting it. Trump is effectively creating, by executive edict, a political test for immigration and citizenship. And while he says he’s doing it to fight antisemitism, his own administration has been hiring right-wing antisemites.
A commenter on Bluesky provides the best response:
If you find yourself reluctant to support the guy at Columbia because you find some of the politics he espoused distasteful or even abhorrent, you should know that this is exactly the reaction that they hoped for in choosing him as a target for unlawful detention based on political speech.
Power Consolidation
Trump Fires Watchdogs Who Track Public Corruption While Claiming He's Fighting 'Waste, Fraud, and Abuse'
Jan. 27, 2025
In his first week in office, Donald Trump fired more than a dozen inspectors general in defiance of federal law. The independent inspectors are tasked with monitoring government agencies to search out evidence of waste, fraud, and abuse—and also corruption.
CBS News reports:
The Trump administration purged at least a dozen federal inspectors general overnight Friday, multiple sources confirmed to CBS News. It is an unprecedented move that will likely result in legal challenges. …
Mark Greenblatt, who was nominated to be inspector general of the Interior Department by Mr. Trump during his first term, told CBS News in a phone interview Saturday that he was “stunned” when he received the notification.
Asked why he thinks Mr. Trump fired him and others, he responded, “The most charitable interpretation is that he doesn't believe in our independence or our fairness. The least charitable interpretation is that he wants lackeys to rubber stamp what he's trying to do.” …
Federal law requires the White House to give Congress a full month of warning and case-specific details before firing a federal inspector general.
Inspectors general are tasked with finding waste, fraud, abuse and misconduct in the federal agencies. They would be tasked with monitoring President Trump's agencies and appointees.
This should increase our skepticism about whether Elon Musk’s DOGE program is really about “waste, fraud, and abuse” given that Trump has fired all the people who are supposed to monitor those things. Instead, this looks like an attempt to prevent anyone from discovering corruption.
Trump Aide Dictated Terms of Facebook Overhaul
Jan. 16, 2025
After Donald Trump was elected, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made a rightward turn and complained loudly about pressure supposedly put on him by the outgoing Biden administration. But it was all a lie: Zuckerberg’s new message was in fact dictated in response to threats from Trump aides.
TechDirt draws our attention to this detail from a New York Times profile of Trump aide Stephen Miller:
Mr. Miller told Mr. Zuckerberg that he had an opportunity to help reform America, but it would be on President-elect Donald J. Trump’s terms. He made clear that Mr. Trump would crack down on immigration and go to war against the diversity, equity, and inclusion, or D.E.I., culture that had been embraced by Meta and much of corporate America in recent years.
Mr. Zuckerberg was amenable. He signaled to Mr. Miller and his colleagues, including other senior Trump advisers, that he would do nothing to obstruct the Trump agenda, according to three people with knowledge of the meeting, who asked for anonymity to discuss a private conversation. Mr. Zuckerberg said he would instead focus solely on building tech products. …
Earlier this month [January], Mr. Zuckerberg’s political lieutenants previewed the changes to Mr. Miller in a private briefing.
Add to this a whistleblower’s report that Facebook tried to build a censorship system to satisfy China’s dictatorship, and Zuckerberg looks like a frightened courtier trying to satisfy whoever holds power—which is exactly what Trump is demanding from media companies.
Policy Illegality
Trump's Anti-DEI Inquisition Targets Georgetown, a Private University
Feb. 17, 2025
The Trump administration’s campaign against DEI is now trying to dictate the policies and even the content of teaching at private universities with a letter by the United States Attorney Ed Martin threatening Georgetown University Law School.
New York Times columnist David French describes the case:
On Monday, Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, sent the dean of Georgetown University Law Center, a Catholic law school, a letter that said, “It has come to my attention reliably that Georgetown Law School continues to teach and promote D.E.I. This is unacceptable.”
Martin said that he’d begun an “inquiry” into the school and demanded to know whether it had eliminated all D.E.I.—which he does not define, but in right-wing circles tends to refer to any action at all designed to increase diversity or honor historically marginalized people—from the school and its curriculum. He also asked, “If D.E.I. is found in your courses or teaching in any way, will you move swiftly to remove it?”
This short letter, which was addressed to William Treanor, the dean of the law school, continued with the declaration that “no applicant for our fellows program, our summer internship or employment in our office who is a student or affiliated with a law school or university that continues to teach and utilize D.E.I. will be considered.”
Even a first-year law student knows that the federal government cannot dictate the viewpoint and curriculum of a private Christian school, yet here was a federal prosecutor opening an inquiry into a Jesuit school’s protected speech.
French connects this to other cases and notes the irony that an administration that claimed to be defending “free speech” is now clamping down on it—and the further irony that an administration that claimed to protect Christianity is now targeting Christians who challenge its orthodoxy.
This also serves to consolidate power by targeting a law school the administration’s lawyers view as hostile to their agenda and to the expansion of their power.
Trump Withholds Congressionally Mandated Spending in Defiance of the Constitution
Jan. 28, 2025
The Constitution unambiguously gives Congress the power to appropriate funds—to write budgets and determine how much of the taxpayers’ money gets spent on what. But Donald Trump has been overriding those decisions and blocking spending on programs he doesn’t like.
Here is a New York Times overview:
In his first week in office, Mr. Trump barred spending on certain initiatives whose mission he disagreed with, including programs involving “diversity, equity and inclusion” and funding to nongovernmental organizations he believes undermine the national interest. He also ordered a 90-day freeze on all foreign aid spending to review it for any conflicts with his priorities, making exceptions for military assistance to Israel and Egypt.
That freeze has jeopardized a broad swath of congressionally authorized aid, like military assistance to Ukraine in its fight against Russia’s invasion, helping pay the salaries of a Kurdish-led militia guarding Islamic State detainees in northeast Syria and the distribution of anti-H.I.V. medication in Africa and developing countries.
By the start of his second week, Mr. Trump signaled an escalation. On Monday, the White House, in a memo, ordered a temporary halt to “all federal financial assistance” like loans and grants on domestic soil as well. While Social Security and Medicare were exempted, the memo said it would apply to as much as $3 trillion in government programs and activities.
Presidents and Congress have often disagreed about what the government should or should not spend money on. But the Constitution gives Congress the “power of the purse.” And it’s not really clear what power Congress actually has if it does not have power to control federal spending.
© The UnPopulist, 2025
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I’m all for this, but how about some perspective? Trump may be the worst, and I suspect he is, but how about an actual *Executive* watch that provides a catalog of the abuses of power by the many modern presidents who have, well, abused their power? Instead of making this about a man, how about making it a useful compendium about what has become of the office? From Watergate to Whitewater to WMDs to drone killings to crony capitalism to family corruption and hidden dementia, there’s a lot to go around. And a large part of it lies at the feet of the people and their legislature; that, it seems to me, is the lesson here, not “ohmygodTrumpdidevenmorebadstuff!”
Nature may abhor a vacuum, but corrupted power adores one.
I am also extremely tired of hearing how Trump is Hitler/the devil/democracy's end/etc. without providing any solutions. I want to hear how we can fight the whole phenomenon, and keep the rotten bastards on the other side from piling on once they get into office. How about some workable ideas to reduce presidential power?