Last updated: July 16, 2026. This page lists additional cases beyond the most egregious abuses of power.
| Date | Administration Action | Why is this Unethical? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| January 2025 | Solicited corporate sponsors for his inauguration, garnering $239 million in donations. The previous record was set at $107 million for the first Trump Inauguration. Presidential inaugurations have never cost nearly that much and it is unknown what the remaining funds are being used for. | This represents an unprecedented financial relationship between the Executive Branch and large corporations, raising ethical concerns about government corruption. For example, many tech giants that donated to his inauguration benefited from tariff exemptions for electronics. | |
| April 2025 | President Trump posted on social media “IT’S A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!! DJT” hours before announcing a 90-day pause on his retaliatory tariffs. In response to the pause, the stock market jumped up. | President Trump’s company, Trump Media and Technology Group, which uses “DJT” as a stock symbol, saw its stock price rise 22% after the tariff pause. There is no evidence that this meets the legal definition of insider trading or market manipulation, but questions remain about who had knowledge of the tariff pause before it was public and their investment activities. | |
| April 2025 | President Trump asserted pressure on Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell to lower interest rates by threatening to fire him. | The Federal Reserve is designed to be shielded from political pressure. The president is not authorized to fire the Fed Chair because of a disagreement in policy, and threatening his removal is designed to intimidate. | Powell served out his term, which ended in May 2026. The pressure campaign escalated into the attempted firing of Fed Governor Lisa Cook, which the Supreme Court ruled unlawful (see the Separation of Powers page). |
| April 2025 | Solicited corporate sponsors for the annual White House Easter Egg Roll. Top sponsors included Silicon Valley tech giants like Meta, YouTube, and Amazon. Executives at these companies likewise donated to President Trump’s inauguration fund and were gifted front-row seats. | The increased financial contributions from tech giants are notable given the favorable regulatory environment President Trump has promised. | |
| April 2025 | The acting U.S. attorney in DC sent a letter to a respected, peer-reviewed medical journal demanding answers on how its editors handle “competing viewpoints” in the scientific community. | Members of the medical community viewed this as a legal threat to align the journal’s content with the political aims of the Trump Administration. | |
| April 2025 | The Department of Labor told its staff that they could face termination or criminal charges for speaking to journalists or former employees about agency business. | Criminal prosecution for agency leaks is rare, and the move is seen as an attempt to silence dissent and create an atmosphere of fear for whistleblowers. | |
| April 2025 | A Milwaukee judge was arrested for allegedly attempting to aid a man in evading arrest by immigration agents. | The arrest symbolizes an attempt from the Executive Branch to assert its authority over the co-equal judiciary, especially given that a similar case during Trump’s first term allowed a Massachusetts judge to voluntarily appear before the court and was instead subject to an ethics investigation. | |
| May 2025 | The president’s budget called for the largest reduction in NASA’s budget in American history while including an additional $1 billion for investments in Mars exploration. | This funding aligns well with Trump ally Elon Musk’s goals to send an unmanned vehicle to Mars in 2026 through his company SpaceX, which often receives grants from NASA. | |
| May 2025 | The president has not divested from his business dealings nor placed them in a blind trust, as most modern presidents have. | Wealthy individuals, including foreign billionaires, and companies have made sizable investments in his company Trump Media and Technology Group, despite it reporting a $400 million loss in 2024. Given the poor performance of the company, it is likely that these investments are being used as a way to curry favor with the president. | By mid-2026, the Trump family had realized an estimated $2.3 billion from its crypto ventures alone. |
| June 2025 | The president’s sons launched Trump Mobile, a phone service riding on the networks of carriers regulated by, and seeking spectrum approvals from, the Trump administration. | This is self-enrichment that puts regulated carriers under implicit pressure to accommodate the president’s family business. | The “Made in USA” phone claims were quietly dropped, and promised products hadn’t shipped by 2026, drawing a congressional investigation. |
| July 2025 | Threatened to revoke citizenship and deport Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor and a U.S. citizen, over political disagreements. | This represents an attempt to intimidate his opponents and their supporters. | |
| July 2025 | Threatened to deport Elon Musk, his former aide and a U.S. citizen, and revoke federal subsidies to his companies over political disagreements. | This represents an attempt to intimidate his opponents and their supporters. | |
| July 2025 | Paramount paid $16 million toward Trump’s future presidential library to settle his lawsuit over CBS’s editing of a “60 Minutes” interview — a suit legal experts widely called meritless. Three weeks later, the FCC approved Paramount’s $8 billion merger. | This is the use of regulatory leverage — FCC merger approval — to extract personal payments from a news organization. Members of Congress opened an investigation into whether the arrangement violated federal anti-bribery statutes. | An FCC commissioner and senators likened the payment to a bribe. |
| July 2025 | The Justice Department summarily fired Maurene Comey — a veteran federal prosecutor on the Epstein and Maxwell cases and daughter of James Comey — by a one-line email citing “Article II of the Constitution,” without cause or notice. | This was retaliation against a career civil servant for her family connection to a critic of the president. A federal judge allowed her wrongful-termination suit to proceed. | |
| August 2025 | Hours after the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported weak job growth, fired BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer (confirmed 86–8 by the Senate), claiming without evidence that the numbers were “rigged.” | This was retaliation against an independent statistical agency for publishing unwelcome data; the commissioner has no role in producing the estimates. Economists and former BLS heads across party lines called it a dangerous politicization of official statistics. | |
| August 2025 | Revoked Secret Service protection for Kamala Harris, his 2024 opponent. | This is the use of discretionary control over protective resources to punish a political rival — part of a pattern of stripping protection and security clearances from critics. | |
| August 2025 | One week after two days of private meetings between convicted sex-trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell and the Deputy Attorney General (Trump’s former personal defense lawyer), Maxwell was transferred to a minimum-security prison camp — below the security level federal policy requires for sex offenders — where whistleblower documents describe “concierge-style” treatment. | This is the appearance of official favors toward a witness with potential information about the president; senators have demanded the still-unexplained transfer records. | Maxwell has filed a commutation application with the administration. |
| September 2025 | FBI Director Kash Patel fired agents who had knelt to de-escalate a 2020 protest (conduct internal reviews found proper) and purged agents and analysts who had worked on Trump-related investigations. | These are political-loyalty purges of law enforcement. Three senior former officials sued, alleging Patel privately admitted the firings were retaliatory and directed by the White House; the FBI Agents Association said the firings violated the law and agents’ constitutional rights. | |
| September 2025 | Reporting revealed that hidden FBI cameras had recorded “border czar” Tom Homan in 2024 accepting $50,000 in cash in a takeout bag and agreeing to steer future government contracts. After Trump took office, the Justice Department shut down the investigation. | This is weaponization by omission — killing a corruption case against a senior administration ally who was caught on tape; members of Congress demanded the recordings. | |
| September 2025 | A senior Justice Department official directed U.S. attorney offices in at least seven states to prepare investigations of George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, days after the president publicly called for prosecuting Soros. | This is ordering prosecutors to build cases against a designated political enemy rather than following evidence; parallel efforts aimed at stripping tax-exempt status from liberal nonprofits drew IRS-weaponization warnings from tax-law experts. | |
| October 2025 | Demolished the White House East Wing for a roughly $300 million ballroom funded by private donations the president personally solicited from corporations and billionaires. | A watchdog analysis found 14 of 27 corporate donors received $50+ billion in new or increased federal contracts within six months, and 16 of 27 faced federal enforcement actions, many of which were suspended. | Senators opened an inquiry into “corrupt access.” |
| October 2025 | Commuted the 87-month fraud sentence of former Rep. George Santos — a vocal loyalist who pleaded guilty to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft — freeing him after roughly three months. | This is clemency as a loyalty reward, bypassing Justice Department pardon standards (see the pay-to-play clemency entry on the main page). | |
| October 2025 | After an FBI raid on his home and office, John Bolton — Trump’s estranged former national security adviser and prominent critic — was indicted on 18 counts of mishandling classified information. | The case’s genesis is entangled with retaliation: the president had long threatened to jail Bolton over his book and revoked his security detail, and the raid came amid the administration’s campaign against critics. | Unlike the Comey and James cases, courts found no prosecutorial misconduct, and Bolton pleaded guilty to one count in June 2026 — this entry is included with that caveat. |
| November 2025 | Issued blanket federal pardons to 77 people involved in the effort to overturn the 2020 election, including Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows, Sidney Powell, John Eastman, and the “fake electors.” | This is the use of the pardon power to absolve co-conspirators in a scheme to keep the president himself in power. | The pardons are largely symbolic federally — most charges were state-level — underscoring their political-signal purpose. |
| November 2025 | After newly released Epstein emails mentioned him, the president publicly directed the attorney general to investigate Jeffrey Epstein’s ties to Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, Reid Hoffman, and JPMorgan; the attorney general complied within hours. | This is ordering criminal investigations of named political adversaries as deflection; the on-demand compliance illustrates the Justice Department’s loss of independence. | |
| November 2025 | After six Democratic lawmakers released a video reminding servicemembers they must refuse illegal orders, the president posted that this was “SEDITION, punishable by DEATH”; the Pentagon then opened an investigation of Sen. Mark Kelly (a retired Navy captain) and said it could recall him to active duty for court-martial. | This is threatening military prosecution of a sitting opposition senator for constitutionally protected speech — using the Pentagon as a personal enforcement arm to chill dissent. | |
| December 2025 | Pardoned former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, serving 45 years for trafficking tons of cocaine into the U.S. in league with the Sinaloa cartel — announcing it as part of his endorsement of a candidate in Honduras’s election. | This is the pardon power deployed as a foreign-election lever, freeing a convicted narco-trafficker to serve the president’s political aims — contradicting the administration’s own drug-war rationale for its lethal boat strikes. | |
| April 2026 | A grand jury subpoenaed former senior intelligence and FBI officials in the Justice Department’s criminal probe of ex-CIA Director John Brennan; the career prosecutor handling it, who doubted the case, was removed and an 81-year-old Trump ally installed to run it. | This continues the enemies-list prosecutions — the president had named Brennan among those who should be charged — and replacing a skeptical career prosecutor with a loyalist mirrors the pattern courts condemned in the Comey and James cases. | Brennan is suing the Justice Department over the probes. |
| May 2026 | The Justice Department opened a criminal investigation touching E. Jean Carroll — who won $83+ million in defamation and sexual-abuse verdicts against Trump personally — examining possible perjury over litigation funding. | This aims criminal machinery at the private citizen who won civil judgments against the president — prosecution as personal revenge. The U.S. attorney’s office named in reports publicly denied opening the probe, deepening concerns about its irregularity. |