Last updated: July 16, 2026. This page lists the most egregious cases. See also additional abuses of power.
| Date | Administration Action | Why is this Unethical? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| May 2025 | Accepted a roughly $400 million Boeing 747-8 from the Qatari royal family for use as Air Force One, with the plane to be transferred to the Trump Presidential Library Foundation by 2029. The Air Force spent hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars retrofitting it; the president took his first flight on it in July 2026. | Because the jet ultimately goes to the president’s own library foundation, ethics experts call it a textbook Foreign Emoluments Clause problem: a personal gift from a foreign government, accepted without the congressional consent the Constitution requires. | Qatar is simultaneously a Trump Organization business partner (see the foreign deals page). |
| May 2025 | The president attended an exclusive gala dinner at his golf course for 220 investors of his $TRUMP memecoin, a cryptocurrency that directly benefits Trump’s pocketbook. The top 25 buyers got a VIP tour of the White House. | This move not only abuses his position as president to promote an investment for self-interest, it also signals that financial tributes are a legitimate way to get face-time with the president — including for anonymous and foreign buyers. | It has been estimated that the president’s crypto ventures increased his wealth by $2.9 billion in six months. A second, larger gala for top coin holders was held at Mar-a-Lago in April 2026; watchdogs estimate at least $350 million has flowed to Trump-linked wallets from the coin. |
| May 2025 | The Trump family business has conducted a range of foreign deals that directly benefit the president’s pocketbook. | During his first term, Trump pledged not to make any foreign deals as president, but his second term pledge only mentioned foreign governments. These deals violate both pledges. | Click here for examples. By 2026, the family’s foreign licensing revenue had grown roughly 900% since Trump returned to power. |
| June 2025 | Elon Musk, former advisor to President Trump and former head of DOGE, acted in his official capacity while maintaining billions of dollars in conflicts of interest. Musk’s companies receive billions in federal contracts and were subject to the oversight of the government offices that he helped cut. | This is not only a substantial abuse of power, but it implicates laws against federal employees influencing policy in which they have a financial interest and the use of government for private financial gain. | |
| September 2025 | The Trump family’s World Liberty Financial launched its WLFI token; by mid-2026 the family had extracted an estimated $1–2.3 billion from its crypto ventures (75% of net token-sale proceeds go to the family), while outside investors lost an estimated $2.3 billion. | This is massive self-enrichment through an asset class the president actively regulates and champions. The SEC dropped its investigation of a major WLFI backer after he bought $75 million of the family’s tokens. | A UAE state-backed fund routed a $2 billion transaction through the family’s stablecoin (see the foreign deals page). |
| September 2025 | Forced out the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia after he concluded there was insufficient evidence to charge James Comey or Letitia James; publicly posted to the attorney general that Comey, Schiff, and James are “all guilty as hell,” demanding prosecution; and installed his former personal lawyer Lindsey Halligan — who had never prosecuted a case — to “get things moving.” | This is the most direct documented instance of a president ordering the Justice Department to prosecute named political enemies and purging the prosecutor who refused — a collapse of prosecutorial independence. | A regulator allied with the president lodged the mortgage-fraud referrals behind several of these cases against three of the president’s prominent adversaries. |
| September 2025 | Days after the president’s directive, Halligan personally obtained indictments of former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James — who had won a $450 million civil fraud judgment against Trump. | These were revenge prosecutions executed by an unqualified loyalist after career prosecutors found no case. In November 2025, a federal judge dismissed both indictments as “unlawful exercises of executive power” brought by an unconstitutionally appointed prosecutor; a magistrate judge separately found a “disturbing pattern of profound investigative missteps.” | Two separate grand juries then refused to re-indict James — something ordinary grand juries almost never do. |
| October 2025 | Pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, who had pleaded guilty to money-laundering violations. Binance wrote the code for and hosts the Trump family’s USD1 stablecoin, and a UAE fund used $2 billion of USD1 to buy a Binance stake — deals generating tens of millions for the Trump family. | The pardon power was exercised for a business partner of the president’s family; a former Justice Department pardon attorney called it “corruption.” | The president later said of Zhao: “I don’t know who he is.” |
| October 2025 | Confirmed he is seeking roughly $230 million from his own Justice Department as “compensation” for the Russia and Mar-a-Lago investigations — with approval authority resting with two of his own former personal defense lawyers. | This is self-dealing with no precedent: the claimant controls the agency deciding the claim. Ethics lawyers described it as “writing one’s own check.” | Senate Judiciary Committee members opened an inquiry. |
| January 2026 | Sued the IRS for $10 billion over the leak of his tax returns; his own Justice Department then “settled” the case, creating a $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund for the president’s allies and an order purporting to bar future IRS audits of Trump and his family. | In July 2026, a federal judge voided the settlement as self-dealing, finding the suit was brought “for an improper purpose — to gain the imprimatur of judicial legitimacy,” and holding the no-audit provision “directly contravenes” the federal law that criminalizes presidential interference with IRS audits. She ordered sanctions and referred the signing lawyers — including the acting attorney general — to state bars. | A separate judge had already blocked the fund, barring payments from money Congress never appropriated for that purpose. |
| April 2026 | A grand jury indicted James Comey a second time — now for allegedly threatening the president via a 2025 Instagram photo of seashells arranged as “86 47” — months after courts threw out the first case. | This is a second, escalated attempt to imprison the same critic after the first prosecution was judicially condemned, built on a plainly protected social-media post; First Amendment experts note the Supreme Court’s “true threat” standard makes the theory extraordinary. | The lead prosecutor subsequently left the case. |
| 2025–2026 | Operated what investigations describe as a systematic pay-to-play clemency pipeline: a Reuters review found 96% of second-term clemency grants failed Justice Department guidelines, with many recipients hiring Trump-connected lobbyists or making large donations — one man was pardoned weeks after his mother attended a $1-million-a-plate fundraiser. | This is monetization of the pardon power — clemency flowing through payments to the president’s political operation and allies rather than merit review. | In July 2026, the president pardoned a major donor and Clean Air Act violators; a congressional pay-to-play investigation opened in May 2026. Individual pardons (Zhao, Santos, Hernández, the 2020 fake-electors) are covered separately. |