How we select, verify,
and publish fact-checks.

Why this page exists

Trexit.org asks Americans to make the November 3, 2026 elections a referendum on the administration's autocratic governance: to vote, to bring two eligible voters with them, and to vote against any elected official, of any party, who they believe has enabled the administration's corruption and abuse of power. That ask rests on a factual record with three parts: false statements made publicly by the subject and contradicted by authoritative evidence, documented incidents of corruption and self-enrichment, and documented incidents of abuse of official power. The credibility of the pledge depends on the credibility of the record. This page explains, in detail, how the record is built.

We hold ourselves to a higher standard than partisan advocacy requires, because we believe the factual case for our position is strong enough to be made plainly, without exaggeration. We expect our methodology to be examined by journalists, by political opponents, and by our own signers. We have tried to make examination easy.

Who we are

Trexit is an independent journalism project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to any employer, campaign, political party, candidate, or organization, and it is maintained on its author's own time and resources. More about the project, and the disclaimer that governs it, is on the About page.

The fact-checks and incident records published here are compiled from publicly available sources, each of which is cited. The characterizations and conclusions are the author's own opinion, offered as political expression. We hold the work to a high standard and invite scrutiny: read the sources, weigh the evidence, and judge it for yourself.

What we publish

Trexit publishes fact-checks of public statements by Donald J. Trump that meet four threshold criteria:

• The statement was made publicly, in the subject's official capacity or in a public political setting: a rally, an interview, a social media post, or an official communication.
• The statement makes a factual claim. Opinions, predictions, rhetorical questions, and hyperbolic phrasing are not fact-checked.
• The statement is contradicted by evidence from at least two independent, authoritative sources, or it is a matter of established public record where contradiction is documentary.
• The statement has measurable public reach. Recorded media, viral social media activity, or coverage in at least three independent news organizations qualifies.

Statements that meet all four criteria proceed to the publication tier evaluation described below. Statements that do not meet all four criteria are not published on Trexit, regardless of how striking they may appear.

These criteria are applied on later review as well as at intake. The archive does not score opinions: where a published item turns out to be one, it comes out of the adjudicated count. In July 2026, a published statement was reclassified as non-factual opinion on review and removed from the record. A second statement, concerning the Federal Reserve, was removed alongside it in error; it meets the criteria for a checkable factual claim, and it has been restored with its evidence and its tier intact. On further review, six published statements were reclassified as predictions or opinions. Under the Documented, Not Adjudicated policy described under Publication tiers, they remain published with their evidence but carry no verdict and are not part of the adjudicated count, which now stands at 322. One near-duplicate entry was also consolidated into its fuller counterpart, which redirects from the retired address.

Beyond fact-checks of statements, the record includes two further categories. Corruption and self-enrichment entries document specific incidents of financial conflict of interest or private gain from public office, each with what happened, its evidence and legal status, the estimated dollar value where known, and the sources that establish it. Abuse of power entries document specific incidents of official power directed at critics, courts, and independent institutions, each with what happened, the sources, and the institutional or judicial outcome, including where courts have ruled an action unlawful. Both categories are held to the same sourcing and tier standards described below: each incident rests on primary documents and independent reporting, and cross-reference-only entries link to the primary record rather than duplicate it.

Some incidents implicate conduct that belongs in more than one category. The mass firing of inspectors general, for instance, is both a purge of officials and a dismantling of oversight. Where that happens, the incident is documented in full in one database, and the other carries a cross-reference to that primary record rather than a second copy of the evidence. A cross-referenced entry is listed and counted in the category it is cross-listed into, because the conduct falls within it, and it links to the record that holds the sourcing, so one incident is never presented as two independently sourced findings.

Publication tiers

We classify every reviewed item into tiers, and only Tier A and Tier B items appear on Trexit. The two categories of item use the same labels for different reasons, and it is worth being precise about the difference.

For a statement, the tier reflects how directly authoritative sources contradict the claim. Tier C statements, where the contradicting evidence is ambiguous or authoritative sources genuinely disagree, are logged internally and never published. Statements that assert future events or express value judgments are handled separately; see Documented, Not Adjudicated below.

For a corruption or abuse-of-power incident, the tier reflects the strength of the evidence establishing the dispositive fact, not the severity of the conduct. A Tier A incident is not worse than a Tier B incident. It is better documented.

Documented, Not Adjudicated. We adjudicate only claims that can be checked against existing evidence. Claims that assert future events (predictions) or express value judgments (opinions) are documented with their evidence but receive no verdict.

For incidents, the standard is different:

How incidents are selected

The corruption and abuse-of-power records are governed by rules that we apply before we know what they will produce. An incident is eligible only if all of the following are true.

• It is a discrete, dated act taken by a federal official on or after January 20, 2025. Not a pattern, not a posture, not a policy direction.
• It rests on a primary document that we have retrieved and read: a filed order, an opinion, an indictment, an inspector general report, a Federal Register notice, an official disclosure, or an agency's own published statement. A docket page is not a primary document. Neither is a tracker's summary of one.
• The dispositive fact is established by a court, an inspector general, a congressional record, or the government's own filing, rather than by our characterization of it.
• A countervailing fact is stated on the record itself, in the record's own voice.

We exclude, deliberately and by rule:

Two further rules govern how an incident is written. Where a district court ruled one way and an appellate court stayed or reversed it, both are stated; we never collapse a two-sided outcome into the half we prefer. And characterizations belong to the people who made them. Where a record calls something an abuse of prosecuting power, a false pretense, or a thinly veiled threat, those are the words of a named judge, quoted as such. They are not ours.

How complete is this record

A record of this size invites a fair question: how do you know you have not simply collected the incidents that suit you, and passed over the ones that do not? We take the question seriously enough to have tried to answer it, and honest enough to tell you where the answer falls short.

Over eight sessions we swept a roster of fifty-five sources spanning eight independent classes: litigation trackers, legal scholars across the ideological spectrum, inspectors general, the Government Accountability Office, congressional oversight products, campaign finance filings, executive-branch financial disclosures, and press-freedom and human-rights monitors. Fifty-one were harvested and classified. Three could not be reached. One was left unfinished.

The single most useful result concerns litigation. The Just Security Litigation Tracker maintains a database of federal court challenges to this administration's actions. We harvested its Blocked family: two hundred and sixty-eight federal actions that a court has blocked. Two hundred and sixty-four of them were already in this record. Four were not, and were added. That is roughly ninety-eight and a half percent coverage of the court-blocked universe, measured against a source we did not build and do not control.

We then ran three further litigation trackers against the same universe, independently: the Associated Press lawsuit tracker, the Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse, and the Court Accountability judicial-threat tracker. Each returned nothing this record did not already contain. Three trackers, three sets of editors, three sets of incentives, converging on the same set of incidents, is a stronger claim about completeness than any number of records could be on its own.

The exclusions matter as much as the inclusions. Six candidate incidents were dropped because controlling authority went the government's way. Sixteen of the seventeen suits we identified in one lane, cases the administration brought against states, were excluded as routine preemption litigation rather than abuse. Two executive orders that dominate public argument, on birthright citizenship and on transgender military service, are absent from this record because they are constitutional disputes still being litigated, not documented abuses. A record that included everything would tell you nothing.

Now the gaps, stated plainly, because a completeness argument that hides them is not one.

What the sweep establishes is not completeness. No sweep could. It establishes convergence: that eight classes of source, with different authors, different formats, different politics, and different blind spots, point at the same set of incidents. The marquee court defeats, the documented prosecutions, the grant conditions struck down, the disclosed income streams, the deaths during enforcement operations. Each recurs across sources that share nothing but the underlying facts.

One thing this record does not do is compare. Nobody has swept the record of any previous administration to this standard, including by us. The number of incidents documented here therefore supports no claim, and is offered as no claim, about whether this administration has done more of this than another. It is a count of what we found, in one place, against a stated standard, with the gaps named. What it means is for you to decide.

Sources we rely on

We draw evidence from sources that meet standard journalistic criteria for authority and independence. These include:

• Primary documents: court filings, government records, agency reports, sworn testimony, contemporaneous transcripts and recordings.
• Peer-reviewed scholarly research from established academic and scientific institutions.
• Reporting from news organizations with a documented track record of accuracy, source attribution, and corrections policies. We do not treat any single outlet as authoritative on its own; we look for corroboration across multiple independent sources with different editorial perspectives.
• Statements by government officials, including from administrations of both major parties, when those statements are made on the record and supported by documentary evidence.
• Fact-checking work by established independent fact-checking organizations that meet the principles of the International Fact-Checking Network.

We do not rely on anonymous sources for primary factual claims, on partisan advocacy organizations as authoritative voices, or on social media reports without independent corroboration.

Our review process

Every fact-check published on Trexit passes through five stages before going live. The process is documented, named, and signed off at each stage. Completed checklists are filed with the fact-check record and made available to counsel on request.

For journalists and researchers, the operational checklist that guides each stage is available on request from editorial@trexit.org.

What we do not do

We hold ourselves to the following limits, and we ask our readers to hold us to them:

How we handle corrections

We make mistakes. When we do, we correct them prominently and document them publicly. Our corrections policy works as follows:

• Corrections are added to the original fact-check page at the top, with a clear notice of what was corrected and when.
• All corrections are logged in our public Corrections page, with the original text, the corrected text, the date, and a brief explanation.
• If a correction materially changes the conclusion of a fact-check, we notify our email list and update any social share content associated with the original.
• If a fact-check is retracted entirely, the original page remains accessible with a clear retraction notice. We do not delete the historical record of our mistakes.

A retraction is not the same as a scope reclassification. A retraction means we published a fact-check and got it wrong, so the page stays accessible with a notice saying so; a reclassification means the statement does not meet the archive's definition of a factual claim in the first place, so it leaves the archive together with its page, and the removal is recorded in the note under What we publish above rather than on a page that no longer stands as a fact-check.

How we handle disputes

If you believe a fact-check on Trexit is inaccurate, we want to hear from you. Send your concern to corrections@trexit.org, with the URL of the fact-check, the specific factual point you believe is wrong, and any evidence you can provide. Our editorial team reviews every correction request. We will respond, in writing, within seven business days. If your evidence supports a correction, we will make one. If it does not, we will explain why.

Privacy and signer data

This page concerns our fact-checking methodology. Our privacy and data practices for pledge signers are described in detail on our Privacy Policy page. In brief: we do not display individual pledge-signer names publicly without explicit opt-in, we do not sell pledge-signer data under any circumstances, and we honor data deletion requests promptly. The pledge count we display reflects confirmed, deduplicated pledges (those who completed email confirmation) only, and the counting methodology is published. We will never display a count we cannot independently verify.

Funding and independence

Trexit is an independent journalism project, self-funded by its author and unaffiliated with any employer or organization. It carries no advertising, runs no sponsorships, and solicits no donations. No outside party (employer, campaign, party, or organization) funds it or has any influence over which statements are fact-checked, what conclusions are reached, or what is published.

Why a pledge

Some readers will ask why we publish fact-checks on a campaign site at all, rather than in a standalone research outlet. The answer is straightforward: the factual record we are building is the basis for the pledge's call to action. We believe that documented patterns of factual misstatement by a holder of high office are legitimately relevant to the public's evaluation of whether that officeholder should remain in office. We do not ask you to take our word for that. We ask you to read the fact-checks, evaluate the evidence, and decide for yourself.

The pledge itself calls for accountability through the most fundamental constitutional mechanism there is: the vote. Signers commit to participate on November 3, 2026, to bring two eligible voters with them, and to apply a published, conduct-based standard (documented falsehood, votes against lawful oversight, the excusing of self-dealing) to every incumbent and candidate on their ballot, regardless of party. We do not advocate for any extra-constitutional action. We name no candidate and endorse no candidate. Our position is that the public is entitled to know what has been said and what has not been true, and to act on that knowledge where the Constitution says verdicts are rendered: at the ballot box.