Documented incidents of official power used against critics, courts, and institutions during the second Trump term. Each entry records what happened, its evidence and legal status, and the institutional or judicial outcome, with the sources that establish it. Choose a sub-category below to read its record on the merits.
Investigations, prosecutions, and pardon and clemency decisions that use federal law-enforcement power to target the president's critics and to shield the president and his allies from legal accountability.
Actions against news organizations, journalists, protected speech, law firms, and universities, from license threats and access revocation to executive orders and funding cuts compelling concessions under threat of federal penalty.
Removals and loyalty screening of career officials, watchdogs, and civil servants, together with the seizure of federal payment, data, and personnel systems and the shutdown or gutting of established agencies.
Refusals to comply with court orders, subpoenas, and congressional oversight, including where courts found the conduct unlawful.
Actions concentrating control over election administration and the machinery of federal power, and deployments of federal or military forces into American cities and civilian law-enforcement roles.
Unlawful or abusive acts carried out by cabinet officials, agency heads, and appointees at the president's direction, with his authorization, or with his knowledge and inaction.
About the tiers. Tier A: an official record establishes what makes the conduct abuse of power, such as a court, inspector general, GAO or congressional finding; the government's or the president's own documents or words; or a filing the law requires to be made to a federal regulator. Tier B: the conduct is documented by independent reporting or disclosures, but no official record establishes it. Cross-referenced incidents are documented in full elsewhere in the record and linked. We publish all, labeled.