The
Ledger

On April 25, 2022, Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Arthur Engoron held Donald Trump in civil contempt of court for failing to comply with a subpoena issued by New York Attorney General Letitia James as part of her office's civil fraud investigation into the Trump Organization's business practices. The judge imposed a fine of $10,000 per…

Peter Navarro, a senior White House trade adviser under Donald Trump, was convicted of two counts of contempt of Congress on September 7, 2023, for defying a subpoena issued by the House Select Committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. A federal jury in Washington, D.C. returned the guilty verdict after…

Steve Bannon, who served as chief strategist in the Trump White House from January to August 2017 and remained a prominent political ally of Donald Trump, was indicted, convicted, and imprisoned for criminal contempt of Congress after refusing to comply with a subpoena issued by the House Select Committee investigating the January 6,…

Allen Weisselberg, the longtime chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, was the central figure in three separate criminal proceedings between 2022 and 2024, each of which raised questions about the scope of prosecutorial ambition directed at the Trump family business versus the Trump family itself.

On June 8, 2023, Special Counsel Jack Smith filed a 37-count indictment against Donald Trump in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida (Case No. 9:23-cr-80101) for retaining classified national defense documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate after leaving office and obstructing government efforts to retrieve them. A…

On August 1, 2023, a federal grand jury in the District of Columbia returned an indictment charging Donald Trump with four felony counts related to his conduct between the November 2020 election and the January 6, 2021 Capitol attack. The case was assigned to U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan as Case No. 23-cr-257. Trump was arraigned on…

On August 14, 2023, a Fulton County grand jury indicted Donald Trump and 18 co-defendants on 41 counts arising from an alleged conspiracy to overturn Georgia's 2020 presidential election results. The indictment alleged a coordinated effort involving pressuring state officials to reverse certified results, creating false slates of…

On August 21, 2018, Michael Cohen, Donald Trump's longtime personal attorney and fixer, pleaded guilty in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York to eight federal charges: five counts of willful tax evasion, one count of making false statements to a financial institution, one count of causing an unlawful corporate…

Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, both Soviet-born businessmen and associates of Rudy Giuliani, were arrested on October 9, 2019, at Dulles International Airport while attempting to board a one-way flight to Vienna. Federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York charged them with conspiracy to funnel foreign money into U.S. political…

Paul Manafort served as chairman of Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign from June to August 2016. On October 30, 2017, Special Counsel Robert Mueller's office indicted Manafort on charges related to his political consulting work in Ukraine, which predated his time on the Trump campaign but raised questions about the financial and…

Between 2017 and 2024, an extraordinary number of people in Donald Trump's political and business orbit were criminally charged, convicted, or pleaded guilty to federal and state crimes. No prior American president has had this many close associates face criminal prosecution during or in connection with their time in office. The scope of…

Elliott Broidy, a top Republican fundraiser and former deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee, pleaded guilty on October 20, 2020, to a federal charge of conspiring to act as an unregistered foreign agent while lobbying the Trump administration on behalf of Chinese and Malaysian interests. Broidy was one of three…

Michael Flynn served as National Security Adviser to President Donald Trump for 24 days, from January 20 to February 13, 2017. He resigned after reports revealed that he had misled Vice President Mike Pence about the nature of his conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the presidential transition period.

On February 23, 2018, Rick Gates, Donald Trump's deputy campaign chairman during the 2016 presidential election, pleaded guilty to two federal charges brought by Special Counsel Robert Mueller's office: conspiracy against the United States and making false statements to the FBI. The charges arose from Gates's work alongside Paul Manafort…

George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, pleaded guilty on October 5, 2017, to making materially false statements to FBI agents about his contacts with individuals connected to the Russian government. He was the first member of the Trump campaign to be charged and the first to plead…

On May 30, 2024, a Manhattan jury unanimously convicted Donald J. Trump of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in the first degree, making him the first former or sitting U.S. president to be convicted of a felony.

On December 6, 2022, a Manhattan jury found The Trump Corporation and The Trump Payroll Corp. guilty on all 17 felony counts for their role in a 15-year scheme to defraud federal, New York State, and New York City tax authorities. The scheme ran from approximately 2005 to 2018 and involved structuring executive compensation to avoid tax…

On August 18, 2022, Allen Weisselberg, the longtime chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, pleaded guilty to 15 felony counts in a New York State case arising from a 15-year tax fraud scheme. The charges included grand larceny in the second degree, criminal tax fraud in the third and fourth degrees, offering a false…

On October 31, 2024, five days before the presidential election, Donald Trump filed a lawsuit against CBS News and its parent company Paramount Global, demanding $10 billion in damages. The lawsuit alleged that the network had engaged in "deceptive doctoring" of a 60 Minutes interview with Vice President Kamala Harris by airing two…

Beginning in 2024 and continuing into his second term as president, Donald Trump filed or pursued a series of defamation lawsuits against major news organizations, a national pollster, and the Pulitzer Prize Board. Two of the suits resulted in multimillion-dollar settlements that press freedom advocates described as unprecedented…

On January 26, 2024, a federal jury in Manhattan awarded E. Jean Carroll $83.3 million in damages after finding that Donald Trump had defamed her by repeatedly denying her allegation that he sexually assaulted her in a Bergdorf Goodman department store dressing room in the mid-1990s and by attacking her character and motives. The…

On December 15, 2023, a federal jury in Washington, D.C. awarded Ruby Freeman and her daughter Wandrea "Shaye" Moss a total of $148,169,000 in compensatory and punitive damages after finding that Rudy Giuliani had defamed them by repeatedly and falsely accusing them of committing election fraud while they served as poll workers in Fulton…

Following the November 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump and his allies launched a sustained campaign of false claims alleging that Dominion Voting Systems and other election technology companies had manipulated vote counts to steal the election. Trump personally amplified these claims through social media posts, public…

On April 18, 2023, Fox News agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems $787.5 million to settle a defamation lawsuit, the largest publicly known defamation settlement in American media history. While Fox News was the defendant, the case exposed through sworn testimony and internal communications that Donald Trump's false claims about the 2020…

Following the November 3, 2020, presidential election, the Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee, and Trump allies filed 62 lawsuits in nine states and the District of Columbia challenging election processes, vote counting procedures, and the certification of results. Sixty-one of the 62 cases were dismissed by the courts or…

Newsmax Media, a conservative cable news network that amplified Donald Trump's false claims about the 2020 presidential election, paid a combined $107 million in defamation settlements to two voting technology companies whose reputations were damaged by those claims. Newsmax paid $40 million to settle a lawsuit brought by Smartmatic and…

In February 2019, former Trump personal attorney Michael Cohen testified before Congress that Donald Trump had routinely inflated the value of his assets when seeking favorable insurance terms. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asked Cohen directly whether Trump had ever presented inflated assets to an insurance company. Cohen…

On February 11, 2019, Donald Trump held a campaign rally at the El Paso County Coliseum in El Paso, Texas. The event required significant municipal resources, including police overtime, traffic management, and public safety personnel. The City of El Paso billed the Trump campaign $470,000 for security and related expenses. As of April…

Summer Zervos, a contestant on Season 5 of The Apprentice, accused Donald Trump of sexual assault in October 2016, alleging that Trump groped and kissed her without consent during a 2007 meeting at the Beverly Hills Hotel in Los Angeles. Zervos came forward alongside several other women who made similar allegations in the weeks following…

In 2016, Republican political consultant and television commentator Cheryl Jacobus filed a $4 million defamation lawsuit against Donald Trump in New York State court after Trump attacked her on Twitter. The case arose from a series of tweets Trump posted in February 2016 during the Republican presidential primary.

On September 17, 2013, the Donald J. Trump Foundation made a $25,000 donation to And Justice for All, a political committee supporting Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi. The donation was made during a period when Bondi's office was considering whether to join a multi-state investigation of Trump University, following New York Attorney…

Florida state regulatory records document a sustained pattern of health code violations at two of Donald Trump's most prominent properties: Trump National Doral Miami and the Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach. Between 2013 and 2019, the two properties accumulated hundreds of citations from Florida health inspectors.

Trump SoHo was a 46-story hotel-condominium tower at 246 Spring Street in Manhattan, developed through a partnership between the Trump Organization and the Bayrock Group. Beginning in 2008, Trump Organization principals publicly stated that between 31 and 60 percent of units had been sold. In April 2008, the team claimed 31 percent of…

Over a period of more than a decade, Donald Trump and his associates employed a system of nondisclosure agreements (NDAs), legal threats, defamation of accusers, and a "catch-and-kill" arrangement with American Media Inc. (AMI) to suppress public disclosure of sexual misconduct allegations. The system operated across multiple accusers…

Over roughly a decade, Donald Trump lent his name, image, and personal endorsement to at least two multi-level marketing operations: ACN Opportunity, LLC, a telecommunications MLM selling video phones, and the Trump Network, an MLM selling customized vitamin supplements. In both cases, Trump received millions of dollars in payments while…

Trump University was a for-profit enterprise launched in 2005 that marketed real estate seminars as a path to learning Trump's personal investment strategies. Despite its name, it was not an accredited university. The New York State Department of Education notified the business in 2005 that it was violating state law by using the term…

The Trump Institute was a seminar operation that launched in 2005, licensing the Trump name and image to market real estate investment courses to the public. The business was owned and operated by Irene and Mike Milin, a couple with a documented history of consumer fraud allegations spanning more than a decade. Trump licensed his name,…

Contestants, crew members, and staff who participated in "The Apprentice" and "The Celebrity Apprentice," the NBC reality television shows hosted by Donald Trump from 2004 to 2015, were required to sign non-disclosure agreements that prohibited them from publicly discussing what occurred during filming. These NDAs, enforced by both the…

In April 2016, a woman using the pseudonym "Katie Johnson" filed a federal civil lawsuit in the Central District of California against Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein. The complaint alleged that Trump raped the plaintiff at a party hosted by Epstein in Manhattan in 1994, when the plaintiff was 13 years old. The complaint further alleged…

In December 2020, tenants of rent-regulated apartments in more than 30 buildings previously owned by the Trump family filed a class-action lawsuit in New York State Supreme Court in Brooklyn. The lawsuit alleged that Donald Trump, his siblings, and the Trump Organization had operated a scheme to fraudulently inflate rent increases for as…

Donald Trump's Atlantic City casino operations accumulated a significant record of regulatory violations, fines, and citations from the New Jersey Casino Control Commission and federal regulators over approximately 25 years of operation.

Donald Trump purchased a majority stake in the New Jersey Generals of the United States Football League in August 1983. The USFL had been founded in 1982 as a spring professional football league and initially attracted solid attendance and television deals with ABC and ESPN.

Over the course of his career, Donald Trump has filed or threatened thousands of lawsuits. Legal scholars, press freedom organizations, and investigative journalists have documented a pattern in which Trump used litigation as a tool to silence critics, intimidate journalists, and deter unfavorable coverage, consistent with the…

The United States Football League was founded in 1982 as a spring professional football league designed to avoid direct competition with the NFL. The league launched its first season in March 1983 with twelve teams and initially attracted television contracts, fan interest, and stable ownership groups. Donald Trump purchased the New…

Over a period spanning four decades, Donald Trump has filed or threatened lawsuits against journalists, authors, media organizations, and critics who published unflattering information about his wealth, his business practices, or his conduct. In the most prominent adjudicated cases, Trump's claims were dismissed by courts. The pattern…

Edward Friel Jr. operated the Edward J. Friel Co., a family-owned cabinet-making business in Philadelphia that had been founded by his father in the 1940s. During the Atlantic City casino construction boom of the 1980s, Friel's company secured a contract worth approximately $400,000 to build the bases for slot machines, registration…

Donald Trump has used litigation against journalists and news organizations as a tool to suppress reporting about his finances and business conduct. This pattern spans more than four decades, predates his political career, and continued through both his presidential terms.

Donald Trump's casino operations in Atlantic City were subject to regulatory oversight by the New Jersey Casino Control Commission and the Division of Gaming Enforcement from the time Trump received his initial casino license in March 1982. Over the following three decades, the regulatory record documented a pattern of anti-money…

Over several decades, Donald Trump and entities controlled by him engaged in a documented pattern of using aggressive lease enforcement, building-condition manipulation, and litigation to pressure tenants into vacating properties. The pattern extended across residential rent-stabilized tenants, commercial lessees, and restaurant…

In 1980, Donald Trump promised to donate historically significant Art Deco architectural elements from the Bonwit Teller building in Manhattan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, then ordered the artworks destroyed instead, claiming that preserving them would have delayed the construction of Trump Tower.

The Trump Organization is not a single company but a conglomerate of more than 500 separate entities, most of them limited liability companies. When Trump filed his Federal Election Commission financial disclosure as a presidential candidate in 2015, he listed approximately 515 entities. Subsequent filings and investigations identified…

Beginning in his second term in January 2025, President Donald Trump imposed a series of tariffs on imported goods that economists across the political spectrum described as the largest effective tax increase on American consumers in decades. The tariff actions escalated rapidly and culminated in what the administration called…

Trump Media and Technology Group Corp. (TMTG), the parent company of the social media platform Truth Social, went public through a merger with Digital World Acquisition Corp. (DWAC), a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC). The merger and surrounding transactions generated SEC fraud charges against the SPAC, criminal insider trading…

Six months after leaving his role as a senior White House adviser, Jared Kushner, Donald Trump's son-in-law, launched a private equity firm called Affinity Partners and secured a $2 billion investment from Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF) despite the fund's own advisory panel recommending against the investment on multiple…

On June 9, 2016, three senior members of Donald Trump's presidential campaign met at Trump Tower in New York City with a Russian lawyer and several associates after being promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton from the Russian government. The meeting attendees included Donald Trump Jr., Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, and…

Donald Trump broke a decades-long bipartisan precedent by refusing to release his tax returns during and after the 2016 presidential campaign, then fought a multi-year legal battle to prevent Congress from obtaining them. The fight reached the Supreme Court twice and ended with the public release of six years of Trump's federal tax…

In May 2012, the Trump Organization entered into a licensing and management agreement for a luxury hotel and residential tower in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. The project, branded as Trump International Hotel and Tower Baku, was formally announced in November 2014. The Trump Organization's partner in the deal was a company controlled…

On February 16, 2024, Justice Arthur Engoron of the New York Supreme Court ruled that Donald Trump, his adult sons Donald Jr. and Eric, former CFO Allen Weisselberg, and multiple Trump Organization entities engaged in persistent fraud. They systematically inflated the value of Trump's assets on financial statements provided to banks,…

A central finding of New York Attorney General Letitia James's civil fraud case against Donald Trump, the Trump Organization, and several individual defendants was that the Trump Organization maintained financial statements that systematically inflated the value of its assets when seeking loans and insurance, while presenting lower…

The Trump Organization maintained more business entities in India than in any other foreign country. Between 2014 and 2016, the organization received an estimated $1.6 million to $11 million in licensing royalties from Indian projects. Trump's May 2016 financial disclosure reported up to $6 million in royalties from Indian deals in the…

The Trump Organization entered licensing agreements for branded towers in both the Philippines and Uruguay, creating business relationships with politically connected partners in countries where U.S. foreign policy was active during Trump's presidency.

In 2009, Donald Trump lent his name, image, and promotional endorsement to a multi-level marketing company called the Trump Network, which sold nutritional supplements, including a customized vitamin program determined by a urine test. The company was originally founded in 1997 as Ideal Health and had accumulated numerous complaints with…

The Trump Ocean Club International Hotel and Tower in Panama City, a 70-story luxury development that opened in 2011, was the subject of multiple fraud allegations involving misrepresented sales figures, connections to money laundering, and a violent dispute over management that culminated in the physical removal of Trump Organization…

On July 1, 2021, the Manhattan District Attorney's office indicted Allen Weisselberg, the longtime Chief Financial Officer of the Trump Organization, along with two Trump Organization corporate entities, on charges of criminal tax fraud, grand larceny, and falsifying business records. The indictment described a fifteen-year scheme in…

Trump University, the for-profit real estate seminar program that operated from 2005 to 2010, marketed its instructors as experts "hand-picked" by Donald Trump who would share his personal real estate strategies. Internal documents, deposition testimony, and court filings revealed that this central marketing claim was false and that the…

Between approximately 2002 and 2011, the Trump Organization maintained an extensive business relationship with the Bayrock Group, a real estate development company headquartered in Trump Tower. Bayrock's managing director, Felix Sater, was a convicted felon with ties to Russian organized crime who had previously pleaded guilty to a…

A Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation by The New York Times, published on September 27, 2020, revealed that Donald Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes in both 2016, the year he won the presidency, and 2017, his first year in office. The investigation, based on a review of more than two decades of Trump's tax information, documented…

On January 27, 2015, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), a bureau of the U.S. Department of the Treasury, imposed a $10 million civil money penalty against Trump Taj Mahal Associates LLC for willful and repeated violations of the Bank Secrecy Act. At the time, it was the largest BSA penalty ever imposed on a casino.

In September and October 2020, the New York Times published a series of investigative reports based on more than two decades of Trump's federal tax return data. The investigation revealed that Trump was personally responsible for $421 million in loans and debts, with much of the total coming due within four years, meaning it would need…

Deutsche Bank extended over $2 billion in loans to Donald Trump and the Trump Organization across a roughly two-decade period, continuing to lend to him when no other major Western bank would. The relationship persisted even as the bank faced massive regulatory penalties for facilitating Russian money laundering and as internal…

Between 1991 and 2014, entities controlled or chaired by Donald Trump filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection six times across four distinct reorganization cycles. In every case the filing entities were corporations. In every case the pattern was the same: heavy debt loads financed through high-yield junk bonds, failure to service…

Over a period spanning nearly three decades, Donald Trump lent his name to a series of consumer products and business ventures that were marketed with extravagant claims of quality and luxury, only to fail within months or a few years. The ventures shared a common pattern: Trump's personal brand was used to sell products or services with…

Between 1988 and 1991, Donald Trump financed his Atlantic City casino empire through the sale of high-yield junk bonds that promised investors extraordinary returns while exposing them to catastrophic risk. The Trump Taj Mahal, which opened in April 1990 as the largest casino in the world, was financed primarily through $675 million in…

On October 2, 2018, the New York Times published a 14,000-word investigation by reporters David Barstow, Susanne Craig, and Russ Buettner documenting the mechanisms through which Fred Trump transferred wealth to his children, including Donald Trump, through schemes that the reporters characterized as involving "dubious tax schemes" and…

In January 2025, days before his second inauguration, Donald Trump launched the $TRUMP meme coin, a cryptocurrency token from which Trump and his business partners stood to profit directly. In May 2025, Trump hosted a private dinner for the 220 largest holders of the coin, with a private White House tour for the top 25 investors,…

On June 29, 2026, Donald J. Trump signed and filed his annual public financial disclosure for calendar year 2025, the first full year of his second term. The filing, made on OGE Form 278e and certified by the U.S. Office of Government Ethics on June 30, 2026, runs to 847 pages. The reviewing official recorded two administrative notes on…

Beginning in September 2024, during his presidential campaign, Donald Trump launched a series of cryptocurrency ventures that continued to generate revenue for his family after he took office for a second term in January 2025. These ventures included World Liberty Financial, a decentralized finance platform, and two meme coins, $TRUMP…

In September 2024, during his presidential campaign, Donald Trump and his family launched World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency venture in which the Trump family holds a 75 percent share of net proceeds from token sales, along with a cut of stablecoin profits. The venture was co-founded by Zachary Folkman, Chase Herro, and members of…

While serving as a senior adviser in the White House, Ivanka Trump maintained ownership of her eponymous fashion and lifestyle brand, which held and actively sought trademarks in foreign countries, including China. On multiple occasions, the Chinese government granted or provisionally approved trademarks for Ivanka Trump's business at…

During Trump's first term, the president, his family members serving as senior advisers, and senior White House officials used official positions and government platforms to promote commercial products connected to the Trump brand or to the president's political allies. These actions violated federal ethics standards, including the…

Three federal lawsuits filed between 2017 and 2018 alleged that Donald Trump violated the Constitution's Foreign and Domestic Emoluments Clauses by continuing to profit from his hotel and business empire while serving as president. The central allegation across all three cases was that foreign governments and domestic state officials…

Trump International Hotel Washington, D.C., located in the federally owned Old Post Office building on Pennsylvania Avenue, operated throughout Donald Trump's first presidential term as a high-profile venue where foreign governments, domestic corporations, and politically connected interests spent money at an establishment owned by the…

Throughout Donald Trump's first term, his private club Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, functioned as an informal seat of government where paying members gained proximity to the president, foreign dignitaries, and classified discussions that in other contexts would have occurred in secure government facilities. The club's dual role as…

Throughout his first term, Trump directed or permitted federal government spending at properties he owned, a pattern that transferred taxpayer and government funds to his private business. The most dramatic single episode was the announced and then reversed selection of Trump's Doral golf resort for the 2020 G7 summit. Separately, the…

During his first term in office, Donald Trump played golf approximately 293 days at his own properties, generating an estimated $151.5 million in taxpayer-funded costs for travel, security, and support logistics. The spending represented a direct financial benefit to Trump's private business, as the Secret Service and other government…

Throughout both of Donald Trump's presidential terms, the Trump Organization has maintained active licensing and management agreements with foreign business partners in countries where U.S. foreign policy decisions directly affected those partners' interests. Unlike most previous presidents, Trump did not divest from his business…

Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law, served as a senior adviser to the president throughout the entirety of Trump's first term while maintaining significant financial interests that intersected with his policy portfolio, which included Middle East diplomacy, U.S.-China relations, and government modernization.

Donald Trump was the first president in modern American history to maintain ownership of a sprawling private business empire while serving in office. Every president since Jimmy Carter had either divested from business holdings or placed assets in a blind trust to avoid conflicts of interest. Trump declined to do either, instead…

During Donald Trump's presidency, House investigators and journalists documented a pattern in which foreign governments and politically connected organizations booked large blocks of rooms at Trump's Washington, D.C., hotel and other Trump properties without occupying them. These "ghost bookings," rooms paid for but never used, raised…

While running for president in 2015 and 2016, Donald Trump and the Trump Organization actively pursued a licensing deal to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, a project that could have generated over $300 million in revenue. Throughout this period, Trump repeatedly and publicly denied having any business dealings or connections with Russia.…

In May 2022, the Trump Organization completed the sale of its long-term lease on the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. to CGI Merchant Group, a Miami-based investment firm, for $375 million. The property, housed in the historic Old Post Office building on Pennsylvania Avenue, was subsequently rebranded as a Waldorf Astoria…

Trump Towers Istanbul consists of two conjoined skyscrapers in the Sisli district of Istanbul, Turkey, containing a residential tower, an office tower, a shopping mall with approximately 80 shops, and a multiplex cinema. The property was developed by Turkish billionaire Aydin Dogan under a licensing agreement with the Trump Organization.…

Between 2005 and 2016, the Trump Organization licensed the Trump name to real estate developers across multiple countries in a business model that allowed the Trump family to collect licensing fees and management contracts while bearing little or no financial risk if the projects failed. In several of these projects, buyers who purchased…

While the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. (documented in EMOL-001) became the most visible venue for foreign government spending at Trump properties, a broader pattern of foreign government payments flowed to Trump-owned properties across multiple locations before, during, and throughout Trump's presidency. A January 2024…

On January 20, 2025, his first day back in office, President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14160, titled "Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship." The order directed federal agencies to deny U.S. citizenship to children born in the United States if both parents were not U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents.…

On January 20, 2025, Acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Benjamin Huffman rescinded the Biden administration's 2021 Guidelines for Enforcement Actions in or Near Protected Areas. The rescinded policy had designated schools, hospitals, houses of worship, courthouses, domestic violence shelters, food pantries, playgrounds, and…

Beginning in January 2025, the Trump administration enacted a series of tariff actions that raised the overall average effective U.S. tariff rate from 2.5 percent to approximately 47 percent by April 2025, the highest level in over a century. The tariffs were imposed unilaterally by executive action, bypassing congressional approval, and…

On January 2, 2021, President Donald Trump placed an hour-long phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a fellow Republican, in which Trump pressured Raffensperger to alter the certified results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. The call was recorded by Raffensperger's office and published by The…

Following Attorney General William Barr's resignation on December 14, 2020, Donald Trump escalated his pressure campaign against the Department of Justice by attempting to use the department's leadership and official letterhead to advance false claims of election fraud and induce state legislatures to appoint alternative slates of…

On October 21, 2020, less than two weeks before the 2020 presidential election, President Trump signed Executive Order 13957, creating a new employment classification called "Schedule F." The order directed the Office of Personnel Management to identify federal employees in "positions of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making,…

On the evening of June 1, 2020, federal law enforcement officers used chemical irritants, rubber bullets, and physical force to disperse a crowd of protesters gathered in Lafayette Square, directly across from the White House. The protesters had assembled as part of nationwide demonstrations following the killing of George Floyd by…

In the months before the November 2020 presidential election, the Trump administration took a series of actions that degraded the operational capacity of the United States Postal Service during a period when millions of Americans were expected to vote by mail due to the COVID-19 pandemic. These actions were accompanied by explicit public…

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, President Donald Trump used the federal government's control over medical supplies and vaccine distribution as leverage against state governors who criticized his administration's response, transforming a public health emergency into a partisan confrontation. The pattern included threatening to withhold…

On February 4, 2020, President Donald Trump delivered his State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress. The evening was marked by several departures from the traditional bipartisan character of the event, turning what had been a constitutional ceremony into a venue for partisan confrontation.

Throughout 2020, the Trump administration exerted political pressure on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration in ways that undermined the scientific independence of both agencies during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In September 2019, a dispute over President Donald Trump's false claim that Hurricane Dorian threatened Alabama escalated into a documented case of political interference with federal scientific agencies. While the altered forecast map incident is documented in FALSE-006 as a falsehood, this entry addresses the broader pattern of…

On December 18, 2019, the United States House of Representatives impeached President Donald J. Trump on two articles: abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. Both charges arose from Trump's efforts to pressure Ukraine to announce investigations into his political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, while withholding approximately…

On July 25, 2019, President Donald Trump placed a phone call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The White House released a memorandum of the call on September 25, 2019, after a whistleblower complaint and congressional demands for transparency. The memorandum, which the White House noted was "not a verbatim transcript" but was…

On January 16, 2020, the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan congressional watchdog agency, issued a formal legal decision finding that the Office of Management and Budget had violated the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 by withholding $214 million in congressionally appropriated security assistance to Ukraine without…

In the months surrounding the first impeachment of Donald Trump, the administration removed multiple government officials who had testified or cooperated with the congressional inquiry into the Ukraine pressure campaign. The removals occurred before, during, and immediately after the impeachment proceedings, and were characterized by…

On February 15, 2019, President Donald Trump declared a national emergency at the southern border of the United States, invoking powers under the National Emergencies Act and 10 U.S.C. Section 2808 to redirect military construction funds to build a border wall that Congress had explicitly refused to fully fund. The declaration came after…

On October 26, 2018, nine days before the November 6 midterm elections, President Donald Trump ordered the deployment of active-duty U.S. military troops to the U.S.-Mexico border in response to a caravan of Central American migrants traveling through Mexico. Secretary of Defense James Mattis signed the deployment authorization the same…

Beginning in 2018 and escalating through his second term, Donald Trump conducted an unprecedented public campaign to undermine the independence of the Federal Reserve and to pressure its chair, Jerome Powell, into lowering interest rates for political benefit. This campaign included public insults, threats of removal, and ultimately the…

During the Trump administration, the U.S. State Department was used in ways that blurred the line between official diplomacy and personal political activity. Three interconnected episodes illustrate this pattern: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's partisan speech at the Republican National Convention delivered from Jerusalem during an…

During his first term, President Donald Trump intervened in the security clearance process to grant access to family members over the objections of career intelligence and security officials, and separately revoked the security clearance of a former CIA director who had publicly criticized him. These actions raised concerns about the use…

In the spring of 2018, the Trump administration disbanded the National Security Council's Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense, the White House unit responsible for coordinating the federal government's response to pandemics and biological threats. The directorate had been established in 2016 by the Obama administration…

The Trump administration took a series of actions regarding the 2020 census that career officials warned would compromise its accuracy, that federal courts partially blocked, and that ultimately resulted in a documented undercount of Black, Hispanic, and Native American communities. The actions included an attempt to add a citizenship…

Multiple reports from former White House officials, investigative journalists, and government records indicate that President Donald Trump conditioned or delayed federal disaster relief based on whether the affected areas were politically supportive of him, rather than on the severity of the disaster or the needs of the affected…

Over the course of his two terms, Donald Trump's use of the presidential clemency power followed a documented pattern of benefiting political allies, individuals convicted in investigations connected to his own conduct, and participants in the January 6, 2021 Capitol attack. Legal analysts and former Justice Department officials noted…

In February 2020, during a London extradition hearing, lawyers for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange alleged that the Trump administration had offered Assange a presidential pardon in exchange for publicly stating that Russia was not the source of the hacked Democratic National Committee emails published by WikiLeaks during the 2016…

On August 2, 2017, President Trump reluctantly signed the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) into law. The legislation, which imposed mandatory sanctions on Russia, Iran, and North Korea, had passed the Senate by a vote of 98 to 2 and the House by a vote of 419 to 3, margins that would have easily overridden…

In July 2017, the General Services Administration canceled a long-planned relocation of FBI headquarters from its aging J. Edgar Hoover Building on Pennsylvania Avenue in downtown Washington, D.C., to a new suburban campus. The decision reversed more than a decade of planning and approximately $20 million in site preparation. The…

Throughout his presidency and his 2024 campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly questioned the United States' commitment to NATO's mutual defense obligations under Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which provides that an attack on one member state is considered an attack on all.

In 2018, the Trump administration announced its intention to add a citizenship question to the 2020 decennial census. The administration's stated rationale was that citizenship data was needed to better enforce the Voting Rights Act. This justification was later undermined by documentary evidence showing that the true purpose of the…

The Hatch Act of 1939 prohibits federal employees from engaging in partisan political activity while on duty, using their official authority or influence to affect an election, or using government resources for political purposes. During the Trump administration, the Office of Special Counsel (OSC), a nonpartisan federal agency charged…

Throughout his first and second terms, Donald Trump publicly and repeatedly demanded that the Department of Justice investigate, prosecute, and punish his political opponents. These demands were made in public statements, social media posts, and press conferences, creating a documented record of presidential pressure on the nation's law…

On three documented occasions between 2016 and 2019, Donald Trump publicly solicited foreign governments to investigate or obtain information damaging to his domestic political opponents. These incidents were captured on video, confirmed by contemporaneous reporting, and, in the case of the Ukraine matter, resulted in Trump's first…

Donald Trump has engaged in a pattern of actions and public statements that undermine the independence of the federal judiciary, including personal attacks on judges who ruled against him, the reversal of Senate precedent to rush a Supreme Court confirmation in the weeks before an election, and public commentary suggesting that judicial…

Throughout his political career, Donald Trump cultivated a relationship with evangelical Christian leaders and the Christian nationalist movement that blurred the constitutional boundary between church and state. This relationship was characterized by an explicit exchange: Trump promised policy outcomes favorable to the religious right…

Allen Weisselberg, the longtime Chief Financial Officer of the Trump Organization, pleaded guilty on March 4, 2024 to two felony counts of perjury in the first degree for lying under oath during the New York civil fraud trial presided over by Justice Arthur Engoron. The perjury charges arose from testimony Weisselberg gave on October 12…

During multiple simultaneous legal proceedings in 2023 and 2024, Donald Trump used social media platforms, primarily Truth Social, to publicly attack witnesses, prosecutors, judges, and court staff involved in his cases. The attacks prompted prosecutors to seek gag orders in at least two proceedings, and judges in both cases imposed…

Across multiple civil and criminal proceedings in 2023 and 2024, Donald Trump repeatedly attacked jurors, witnesses, prosecutors, judges, and their family members on social media and in public statements, leading to gag orders in multiple jurisdictions and formal findings of contempt of court.

In October 2021, former President Donald Trump filed a lawsuit to prevent the National Archives and Records Administration from complying with requests by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. Trump asserted executive privilege over White House records from his presidency,…

White House records turned over to the House Select Committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol revealed a gap of seven hours and 37 minutes in the official log of calls placed to or by President Donald Trump during the critical hours of the Capitol breach. The gap covered the period from 11:17 a.m. to 6:54…

Text messages sent and received by U.S. Secret Service agents on January 5 and 6, 2021, the two days surrounding the attack on the U.S. Capitol, were deleted as part of what the agency described as a planned device-replacement program. The Department of Homeland Security Inspector General reported that the deletion occurred after his…

Mark Meadows served as White House Chief of Staff during the final year of the Trump presidency. The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol obtained 2,319 text messages from Meadows's personal phone, spanning the period from Election Day 2020 through January 6, 2021, and beyond. These…

On the evening of June 19, 2020, Attorney General William Barr issued a press release announcing that Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, was "stepping down" from his position, effective July 3, 2020. Barr stated that Jay Clayton, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission with no prior…

During the House of Representatives' first impeachment inquiry in 2019 and throughout his presidency, Donald Trump pursued an unprecedented strategy of blanket defiance of congressional oversight, refusing to comply with subpoenas, blocking administration officials from testifying, withholding documents, and asserting a theory of…

On July 25, 2019, President Donald Trump spoke by phone with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in a call that would become the basis for his first impeachment. During the call, Trump asked Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, and referenced military aid to Ukraine that the administration had placed on hold.…

Roger Stone, a longtime political adviser and self-described confidant of Donald Trump, was indicted on January 25, 2019, by a federal grand jury on seven counts: one count of obstruction of an official proceeding, five counts of making false statements to Congress, and one count of witness tampering. The charges arose from Special…

Paul Manafort, Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign chairman, entered into a cooperation agreement with Special Counsel Robert Mueller's office on September 14, 2018, as part of a guilty plea to conspiracy charges. Within weeks, Mueller's team determined that Manafort had breached the agreement by lying to federal investigators on…

On July 8, 2017, the New York Times reported that Donald Trump Jr. had met with a Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, at Trump Tower on June 9, 2016, after being promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton from a Russian government source. In response, President Trump personally dictated a public statement attributed to his…

Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III was appointed on May 17, 2017, to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and any related matters, including potential obstruction of justice. Volume II of the Mueller Report, released by the Department of Justice on April 18, 2019, documented ten discrete episodes of…

On May 9, 2017, President Donald J. Trump terminated FBI Director James B. Comey by delivering a dismissal letter to FBI headquarters while Comey was in Los Angeles. Comey learned he had been fired from television news. At the time of the firing, the FBI was conducting an active counterintelligence investigation into Russian interference…

On January 30, 2017, President Donald Trump fired Acting Attorney General Sally Yates, ten days into his presidency. The firing occurred less than two hours after Yates issued a letter instructing Department of Justice attorneys not to defend Executive Order 13769, commonly known as the "travel ban" or "Muslim ban," which suspended entry…

Michael Cohen, who served as Donald Trump's personal attorney for over a decade, provided testimony to Congress and to the Special Counsel's office alleging that Trump was directly involved in efforts to obstruct investigations and conceal information from lawmakers.

Across multiple investigations and legal proceedings, Trump and employees of his organizations were accused of destroying, concealing, or attempting to destroy evidence relevant to pending investigations. The allegations span his presidency, his post-presidential handling of classified documents, and the operations of the Trump…

Tom Barrack, a billionaire real estate investor and one of Donald Trump's closest personal friends, was indicted on July 20, 2021, on federal charges of acting as an unregistered agent of the United Arab Emirates, obstruction of justice, and making false statements to the FBI. Barrack had served as chairman of Trump's Presidential…

Beginning in the summer of 2015, Donald Trump, his personal attorney Michael Cohen, and David Pecker, then chairman and CEO of American Media Inc. (AMI, publisher of the National Enquirer), entered into a coordinated scheme designed to suppress stories damaging to Trump's personal reputation before and during the 2016 presidential…

On January 13, 2021, the United States House of Representatives impeached Donald Trump for a second time on a single article charging incitement of insurrection. The vote was 232 to 197, with ten Republicans joining all Democrats, making it the most bipartisan presidential impeachment vote in American history.

On December 22, 2022, the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol released its final report, exceeding 800 pages. The committee's central conclusion stated: "The central cause of January 6th was one man, former President Donald Trump, who many others followed. None of the events of…

On January 6, 2021, Rudy Giuliani, serving as Donald Trump's personal attorney, spoke at the "Save America" rally at the Ellipse near the White House before a crowd of thousands of Trump supporters. During his speech, Giuliani made the following statement: "Let's have trial by combat." The remark came in the context of Giuliani's…

Following the 2020 presidential election, election workers across the United States experienced an unprecedented surge in threats, harassment, and intimidation. The Department of Justice's Election Threats Task Force reviewed more than 2,000 reports of threats against election workers in the years following its creation in June 2021.…

This entry documents a sequence of events spanning from September 2020 to January 2025, connecting Donald Trump's public statements about the Proud Boys, their seditious conspiracy convictions for the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, and Trump's subsequent clemency for the convicted leaders.

In the days following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police on May 25, 2020, protests erupted across the United States. As demonstrations reached Washington, D.C., President Donald Trump discussed using the military against domestic protesters and, according to his own Secretary of Defense, asked whether the military could…

On April 17, 2020, President Donald Trump posted a series of tweets targeting three states led by Democratic governors that had implemented stay-at-home orders in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The tweets read: "LIBERATE MINNESOTA!" followed by "LIBERATE MICHIGAN!" and "LIBERATE VIRGINIA, and save your great 2nd Amendment. It is…

Multiple individuals who committed or attempted acts of domestic terrorism in the United States between 2018 and 2022 explicitly cited Donald Trump's rhetoric as a motivation, used language that mirrored Trump's public statements, or expressed allegiance to Trump in connection with their violent acts. While Trump did not directly order…

Beginning in 2018 and escalating through his 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump engaged in a documented pattern of amplifying QAnon, a conspiracy movement that the FBI has classified as a domestic terrorism threat. The amplification occurred through social media activity, rally programming, and private events at which…

On the evening of August 11, 2017, white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups marched with torches through the University of Virginia campus in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting slogans including "Jews will not replace us." They clashed with counterprotesters near the Rotunda, and several people were pepper-sprayed or struck with lit…

Throughout his presidency and political career, Donald Trump used social media platforms to promote, endorse, or appear to celebrate political violence. The most significant single incident occurred on May 29, 2020, when Trump posted a tweet about protests following the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.…

On August 9, 2016, at a campaign rally in Wilmington, North Carolina, Donald Trump made remarks about Hillary Clinton's potential Supreme Court nominations that were widely interpreted as suggesting that gun owners could take violent action against her.

Throughout his political career, Donald Trump has directed threatening, dehumanizing, and eliminationist rhetoric at political opponents, government officials, and perceived adversaries. This rhetoric has escalated over time, moving from campaign rally chants to public suggestions that political enemies deserve imprisonment or death.

On March 1, 2016, Donald Trump held a campaign rally at the Kentucky International Convention Center in Louisville, Kentucky. During the event, several protesters were physically pushed, shoved, and struck by Trump supporters in the crowd. Three individuals who attended the rally to protest peacefully, Kashiya Nwanguma, Molly Shah, and…

Throughout his political career, Donald Trump has publicly and repeatedly praised authoritarian leaders who have been documented by international human rights organizations as responsible for political repression, extrajudicial killings, suppression of press freedom, and the elimination of democratic opposition. Trump's praise has…

Donald Trump has used dehumanizing language about immigrants throughout his political career, beginning with his 2015 presidential campaign announcement and escalating through his 2024 campaign. The rhetoric is documented through video recordings, official transcripts, and contemporaneous reporting.

Throughout his political career, Donald Trump has repeatedly amplified conspiracy theories from fringe sources, lending the authority of a presidential candidate and later the presidency to baseless claims. This pattern spans multiple topics and is documented through Trump's own public statements, social media posts, and media…

From the launch of his first presidential campaign in June 2015 through his 2024 campaign and second term, Donald Trump has used dehumanizing language about immigrants that historians, linguists, and genocide scholars have identified as consistent with the rhetorical patterns that have preceded mass violence in other countries and…

Multiple academic studies and federal law enforcement statistics documented significant increases in hate crimes in the United States during and after Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and throughout his presidency. While the relationship between political rhetoric and hate crimes involves complex causation, the body of evidence…

Beginning during the 2016 presidential primary campaign and continuing through his third presidential campaign in 2024, Donald Trump made a series of documented public statements encouraging physical violence against protesters, political opponents, and journalists. The statements were made at campaign rallies, in television interviews,…

After losing the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden by 306 to 232 electoral votes and approximately 7 million popular votes, Donald Trump launched a sustained campaign of false claims asserting that the election had been stolen through widespread fraud.

Beginning in the spring of 2020 and continuing through his second presidential term, Donald Trump made repeated false claims that voting by mail leads to massive fraud. These claims were contradicted by his own administration's officials, by Republican state election administrators, by nonpartisan research, and by his own personal use of…

During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Donald Trump made a series of documented public statements minimizing the severity of the virus that directly contradicted statements he made privately. The gap between his private assessments and his public communications was established through recorded interviews with journalist Bob…

On September 1, 2019, as Hurricane Dorian approached the southeastern United States, President Donald Trump posted on Twitter that "South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, will most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated." By that date, no National Hurricane Center forecast showed Dorian threatening Alabama. Eight…

On April 2, 2019, during a speech at the National Republican Congressional Committee dinner in Washington, D.C., President Donald Trump stated that noise from wind turbines causes cancer. His exact words were: "If you have a windmill anywhere near your house, congratulations, your house just went down 75 percent in value. And they say…

Throughout his presidency and subsequent campaigns, Donald Trump made repeated claims about three signature accomplishments that are contradicted by the documented record. Each claim was stated in absolute terms that exceeded what the evidence supports, and each was fact-checked by nonpartisan organizations using official government data.

The Veterans' Access to Care through Choice, Accountability, and Transparency Act of 2014, commonly known as the Veterans Choice Act, was signed into law by President Barack Obama on August 7, 2014. The legislation, championed by Senators John McCain and Bernie Sanders, passed the Senate 91-3 and the House 420-5. It allowed eligible…

Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico on September 20, 2017, causing catastrophic damage to the island's infrastructure. The Trump administration's response to the disaster generated multiple documented falsehoods and policy actions that contradicted the administration's public claims of effective relief.

Throughout his presidency, Donald Trump employed a recurring rhetorical formula in which he projected his own lack of knowledge onto the entire nation, using the phrase "nobody knew" or its variants to reframe his personal unfamiliarity with policy subjects as a shared condition. The pattern appeared across multiple major policy areas…

On January 21, 2017, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer held his first official briefing and declared that Donald Trump's inauguration had drawn "the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe." This claim was demonstrably false. Aerial photographs comparing Trump's 2017…

The Washington Post Fact Checker team, led by Glenn Kessler, tracked and catalogued every public false or misleading claim made by Donald Trump during his first presidential term from January 20, 2017 through January 20, 2021. The final count reached 30,573 false or misleading claims over 1,461 days in office.

Donald Trump repeatedly and falsely claimed that he inherited a failing economy from President Barack Obama and that his policies produced an economic turnaround of historic proportions. Federal data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and other government agencies show that the economic trends Trump…

Donald Trump claimed on more than twenty occasions that he was named "Man of the Year" in Michigan. He made the claim at rallies, in interviews, and in public remarks spanning from at least 2016 through 2024. The claim was false. No evidence has ever been produced that Trump received any such award, and multiple independent…

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly promised a massive infrastructure investment plan. In an October 2016 speech in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, he outlined a plan to "launch a national rebuilding program" and "invest $1 trillion in infrastructure." The promise resonated across party lines, as infrastructure…

From the launch of his first presidential campaign in June 2015 through his second term, Donald Trump has made repeated false claims about crime rates in the United States and about the relationship between immigration and crime. These claims have been systematically documented and contradicted by FBI crime data, academic research, and…

Throughout his political career, Donald Trump has made a series of demonstrably false or misleading claims about trade policy, including characterizations of NAFTA, the nature of his replacement trade deal, who pays tariffs, and the trajectory of the U.S. trade deficit with China. These claims are contradicted by economic data,…

From the launch of his 2016 presidential campaign through his second term in office, Donald Trump repeatedly claimed to have, or to be on the verge of producing, a comprehensive plan to replace the Affordable Care Act. No such plan was ever produced or enacted.

From at least 2011 through September 2016, Donald Trump was the most prominent and persistent promoter of the "birther" conspiracy theory, which falsely claimed that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States and was therefore constitutionally ineligible for the presidency. Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii on August 4,…

For decades, Donald Trump publicly claimed that he built his real estate empire from a modest start, telling audiences that he received only "a small loan of a million dollars" from his father, Fred C. Trump, and turned it into a multi-billion-dollar fortune. This narrative was central to Trump's public identity as a self-made…

Washington Post reporter David Fahrenthold documented a pattern in which Donald Trump appeared at charitable events to which he had contributed nothing, positioned himself among genuine donors for photographs, and allowed or encouraged the impression that he was a benefactor. The most vivid documented incident occurred in 1996, when…

For decades, Donald Trump publicly claimed to be a self-made billionaire who built his fortune from "a small loan of a million dollars" from his father, Fred Trump. This claim was a central element of his public persona, his business brand, and his 2016 presidential campaign. Tax records and financial documents obtained by the New York…

Over a period spanning more than four decades, Donald Trump systematically misrepresented his net worth to journalists, lenders, insurers, and the public. The pattern has been documented through audio recordings, tax records, financial filings, deposition testimony, and a civil fraud judgment. The falsehoods ranged from posing as a…

For more than a decade, Donald Trump routinely contacted journalists while posing as a publicist or spokesman using the aliases "John Barron" and "John Miller." Under these false identities, Trump planted favorable stories about himself, inflated his wealth, fabricated details about his romantic life, and disparaged business rivals. The…

Donald Trump has made numerous public claims about his academic record and intelligence that are contradicted by available evidence or that cannot be verified because he has taken active steps to prevent the release of his academic records. This pattern of inflated claims and suppressed documentation has been investigated by multiple…

Donald Trump has made a series of false or misleading claims about his relationship to military service that span from the Vietnam War era to his presidency. These claims concern his avoidance of the draft, his statements about military honors, and his assertions of superior military expertise.

During the criminal and civil proceedings against him in 2023 and 2024, Donald Trump repeatedly targeted the family members and staff of presiding judges through social media posts and public statements. These attacks prompted multiple gag orders, judicial findings of violations, and monetary fines. The pattern was documented through…

Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Wandrea "Shaye" Moss, were Fulton County, Georgia election workers who processed absentee ballots during the 2020 presidential election. Beginning in December 2020, Donald Trump and his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani publicly and repeatedly accused the two women of committing ballot fraud during the vote…

On November 15, 2019, former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch testified publicly before the House Intelligence Committee as part of the first impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump. While Yovanovitch was actively testifying, Trump posted a tweet attacking her professional record. The tweet stated: "Everywhere Marie…

In September 2019, a federal intelligence community whistleblower filed a formal complaint alleging that President Trump had abused the power of his office by soliciting interference from Ukraine in the 2020 presidential election during a July 25, 2019 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The complaint triggered…

Throughout the 2020 and 2024 presidential campaigns, Donald Trump conducted a sustained public campaign targeting members of Joe Biden's family, employing personal ridicule directed at Biden's lifelong stutter, derogatory references to Hunter Biden's struggles with addiction, attacks on Biden's age and mental acuity, and the deployment…

On July 14, 2019, President Donald Trump posted a series of tweets directed at four first-term Democratic congresswomen of color, telling them to "go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came." Although Trump did not name the targets in his initial tweets, the remarks were widely understood to be…

In June 2019, days before a state visit to the United Kingdom, Donald Trump was informed during an interview with the Sun newspaper that Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, had said during his 2016 campaign that she would move to Canada if Trump were elected. Trump responded: "I didn't know that she was nasty."

Beyond the family separation policy documented in INDIV-001, the Trump administration implemented several additional immigration policies that subjected asylum seekers and immigrants to documented harm. These policies were enacted during Trump's first term, partially reversed under President Biden, and reinstated in his second term…

On October 2, 2018, at a campaign rally in Southaven, Mississippi, President Donald Trump publicly mocked Christine Blasey Ford, the psychology professor who had testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee days earlier that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her when they were teenagers. Trump performed a…

John Kelly, a retired four-star Marine general, served as Donald Trump's Secretary of Homeland Security from January to July 2017 and as White House Chief of Staff from July 2017 to January 2019. Kelly's son, Second Lieutenant Robert Kelly, was killed in action in Afghanistan in 2010. After leaving the White House, Kelly became one of…

Jeff Sessions, a Republican senator from Alabama, was one of the first members of the U.S. Senate to endorse Donald Trump's presidential candidacy, doing so in February 2016 when most of the Republican establishment opposed Trump. After winning the election, Trump nominated Sessions as Attorney General, and he was confirmed in February…

In April 2018, Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued a memorandum directing all U.S. Attorney's offices along the Southwest border to adopt a "zero tolerance" policy for illegal entry offenses. When adults traveling with children were criminally prosecuted, their children were classified as unaccompanied minors and transferred to the…

Across both terms, the Trump administration proposed and implemented policies that reduced federal protections and funding for people with disabilities, drawing sustained criticism from disability rights organizations.

Donald Trump has engaged in a documented pattern of publicly attacking, demeaning, and seeking to destroy the reputations of former allies, appointees, and associates who fell out of favor, criticized him, or failed to demonstrate sufficient personal loyalty. This pattern spans both terms of his presidency and is documented through…

Donald Trump's treatment of Mitt Romney over a period of seven years illustrates a documented pattern of courting, humiliating, endorsing, and then attacking members of his own party who subsequently criticized him. The sequence of events is recorded through primary sources, including photographs, debate footage, social media posts, and…

Donald Trump has a long-documented pattern of publicly threatening lawsuits that are never filed, using the prospect of litigation as a tool of intimidation against individuals who accuse him of wrongdoing, media organizations that publish critical reporting, and investigators who examine his conduct. This pattern has been documented by…

Across a period spanning from the 2016 presidential campaign through Trump's second term, a documented pattern of attacks on Gold Star families, wounded veterans, prisoners of war, and senior military officers distinguished Trump's conduct from any prior president or major party nominee in recent American history. The targets included…

Throughout his political career, Donald Trump has directed personal attacks against individual journalists by name, targeting their physical characteristics, professional competence, and identity. The pattern is documented through video recordings, social media posts, and contemporaneous reporting spanning from his 2015 campaign launch…

Over the course of his public career and political campaigns, Donald Trump has made a series of statements that have been widely characterized as racist or racially charged. Each statement documented here was made on the record, in public settings, and is preserved in video, audio, or confirmed contemporaneous reporting. The statements…

Natasha Stoynoff, a staff writer for People magazine, alleged that Donald Trump physically assaulted her in December 2005 during a visit to Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida. Stoynoff was at the resort to conduct an interview with Trump and his wife Melania, who was pregnant with their son Barron, for a feature on the couple's first…

At least 26 women have publicly accused Donald Trump of sexual misconduct, with allegations spanning from the 1970s through the 2010s. The accusations include rape, sexual assault, groping, unwanted kissing, and walking into dressing rooms unannounced. Trump has denied all allegations and threatened legal action against his accusers.

On October 7, 2016, The Washington Post published a video recording made in September 2005 in which Donald Trump, then a private citizen and television personality, spoke with Access Hollywood host Billy Bush while traveling to an NBC studio lot in a tour bus. Trump was preparing to appear as a guest on the NBC soap opera Days of Our…

Between 2004 and 2015, Donald Trump served as the host and executive producer of The Apprentice and its spinoff, The Celebrity Apprentice, on NBC. During that period, multiple former contestants, crew members, and production staff described a workplace environment in which Trump routinely engaged in sexist behavior, including rating…

In May 2023, a federal jury in the Southern District of New York found Donald Trump liable for sexually abusing writer and advice columnist E. Jean Carroll in the mid-1990s and for defaming her in 2022 when he denied the assault and attacked her character. The jury awarded Carroll $5 million in total damages: $2 million for sexual…

Donald Trump owned the Miss Universe Organization, which included the Miss Universe, Miss USA, and Miss Teen USA pageants, from 1996 to 2015. During that period, multiple contestants reported that Trump entered dressing rooms while contestants were undressed. Trump himself described this practice in a recorded 2005 interview with radio…

Donald Trump's documented interactions with Native Americans span more than two decades and reflect a pattern of treating tribal nations as business competitors, questioning the racial identity of tribal members, and using a Native American name as a political slur in a setting meant to honor Native American veterans.

On April 25, 1997, Jill Harth filed a federal lawsuit against Donald Trump alleging a pattern of sexual harassment and assault spanning from 1992 to 1997. The complaint alleged hostile and offensive sexual behavior on multiple occasions.

In May 1989, Donald Trump paid for full-page advertisements in four New York City newspapers, including the New York Times, the New York Daily News, the New York Post, and Newsday, calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty in New York State. The ads were published in response to the arrest of five Black and Latino teenagers in…

In 1981, Donald Trump purchased 100 Central Park South, a 14-story residential building, alongside the adjacent 38-story Barbizon Plaza Hotel for approximately $65 million. His stated goal was to demolish both structures and construct a luxury condominium tower. The building housed roughly 60 occupied units, with approximately half under…

Jessica Leeds alleged that Donald Trump sexually assaulted her during a first-class flight from either Dallas or Atlanta to New York in the late 1970s. Leeds was in her late 30s at the time and working in sales. She stated that a flight attendant escorted her from coach to first class, where she was seated next to Trump. The conversation…

During the first months of Donald Trump's second term, beginning in January 2025, multiple federal judges issued orders directing the administration to halt spending freezes, reinstate fired federal workers, and restore funding to programs that had been cut or frozen by executive action. The administration's response was characterized by…

Beginning on the first day of his second term on January 20, 2025, Donald Trump pursued an aggressive campaign to restructure the federal government by gutting agencies, mass-firing career civil servants, granting unprecedented access to government data systems to political operatives, and, in multiple documented instances, defying or…

On January 20, 2025, Donald Trump was inaugurated for a second term as President of the United States. The inaugural address and the executive actions that followed departed from the historical norms governing the transfer of presidential power in several documented ways.

Beginning in January 2025, operatives affiliated with the Department of Government Efficiency, an initiative led by Elon Musk and established by executive order at the start of President Trump's second term, accessed sensitive data systems at multiple federal agencies. These systems contained personally identifiable information belonging…

Beginning in late January 2025, the Trump administration, working through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) led by Elon Musk, initiated the largest mass firing of federal employees in modern American history. Approximately 25,000 probationary federal workers, employees in their first or second years of government service,…

Beginning on January 20, 2025, the Trump administration undertook the systematic dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), a federal agency established by President John F. Kennedy in 1961. The process culminated in the agency's official closure on July 1, 2025, when remaining operations were…

Across his first and second terms, Donald Trump used the presidential pardon power to grant clemency to individuals whose offenses were directly connected to his own political interests, personal relationships, or legal exposure. This pattern included pardons for associates convicted of crimes related to investigations of Trump himself,…

Following his defeat in the November 3, 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump became the first president in American history to refuse to concede and to actively obstruct the transfer of power to his successor. Joe Biden won 306 electoral votes and approximately 81 million popular votes. Trump received 232 electoral votes and…

The peaceful transfer of presidential power following an election is one of the foundational norms of American democracy, observed in every transition since John Adams yielded the presidency to Thomas Jefferson in 1801. Donald Trump's conduct following his defeat in the 2020 presidential election broke this norm in multiple ways, the…

Following his loss in the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump undertook a sustained campaign to overturn the results by pressuring state election officials, encouraging state legislatures to override the popular vote, and ultimately calling for the "termination" of constitutional provisions governing elections. These actions…

On multiple occasions between 2020 and 2023, Donald Trump publicly attacked the foundational principles of constitutional governance, including the peaceful transfer of power, the authority of the Constitution itself, and the distinction between democratic and authoritarian rule. These statements are documented through Trump's own public…

During the final months of the 2020 presidential campaign, the Trump administration used the White House and official government powers as backdrops for political campaign events on multiple occasions, in a pattern that ethics experts, government watchdogs, and the Office of Special Counsel found violated both the spirit and, in some…

Throughout the 2020 presidential election cycle and into his second term, Donald Trump mounted a sustained campaign against mail-in voting, claiming without evidence that it was inherently fraudulent. He called mail-in voting "mail-in cheating," described it as "the greatest Rigged Election in history," and repeatedly asserted that…

On February 15, 2019, President Donald Trump declared a national emergency under the National Emergencies Act to redirect approximately $6.5 billion in funds that Congress had not appropriated for border wall construction along the southern U.S. border. The declaration came after Congress explicitly declined to provide Trump's requested…

Throughout his first term, President Donald Trump used the U.S. military as a political instrument in ways that blurred the longstanding norm of separation between the armed forces and partisan politics. This pattern was documented through official military records, congressional testimony, contemporaneous reporting, and statements from…

An unprecedented number of senior officials who served in the Trump administration subsequently issued public warnings that Trump was unfit for office, dangerous to democratic governance, or both. The list includes his longest-serving chief of staff, two secretaries of defense, his secretary of state, two national security advisers, his…

The Trump administration pursued two distinct but related efforts to alter the composition of the decennial census in ways that critics argued would reduce the political representation of immigrant communities and benefit the Republican Party. Both efforts were blocked by courts. The citizenship question effort was blocked by the Supreme…

During his first term, Donald Trump declined to attend the Kennedy Center Honors for three consecutive years, from 2017 through 2019, becoming the only president in the ceremony's history since its inauguration in 1978 to miss the event more than once. The absences represented a departure from a bipartisan tradition in which every…

During his first term, President Donald Trump refused to attend the White House Correspondents' Dinner in 2017, 2018, and 2019, becoming the first president to skip the event since Ronald Reagan missed it in 1981 after being shot in an assassination attempt. Unlike Reagan's absence, which was the result of a near-fatal injury, Trump's…

On February 17, 2017, less than a month into his first term, Donald Trump posted on Twitter: "The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!" This was the first use by a sitting American president of the phrase "enemy of the people" to describe journalists and…

On January 27, 2017, one week after taking office, President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 13769, titled "Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States." The order suspended entry to the United States for nationals of seven majority-Muslim countries for 90 days: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria,…

During Donald Trump's first term, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was transformed from an agency focused on counterterrorism, disaster response, and border management into a vehicle for the administration's political priorities, particularly immigration enforcement. This transformation was characterized by the deployment of…

In January 2017, President Donald Trump appointed his son-in-law Jared Kushner as Senior Adviser to the President and his daughter Ivanka Trump as Adviser to the President, giving both unpaid positions with broad portfolios and access to classified information. The appointments raised direct questions about the federal anti-nepotism…

The Presidential Records Act (44 U.S.C. Sections 2201-2209) requires the preservation of all presidential records, including documents, correspondence, and memoranda created or received by the president or his staff in the course of official duties. During and after Donald Trump's presidency, multiple sources documented a pattern of…

Throughout the Trump administration, senior White House officials, including members of the president's family serving in official capacities, conducted government business using private communications channels in violation of the Presidential Records Act. The PRA, enacted in 1978 following the Watergate scandal, requires that all…

Across both his first and second terms, Donald Trump conducted systematic purges of career diplomatic personnel at the U.S. State Department, replacing institutional expertise with political loyalty, leaving critical posts unfilled for extended periods, and diminishing the capacity of the United States to conduct professional diplomacy.

During his first term, President Donald Trump relied on "acting" officials to fill Senate-confirmed positions to an extent that exceeded all modern precedents, effectively circumventing the constitutional requirement that senior executive branch officials receive the advice and consent of the Senate. The Government Accountability Office,…

During his first term in office, Donald Trump signed executive orders at a pace that exceeded most of his modern predecessors, using presidential directives to implement policies that Congress had declined to authorize or fund through legislation. In his first 100 days, Trump signed 32 executive orders, the most of any president in that…

During his first term as president, Donald Trump used his personal Twitter account as a primary instrument of governance, bypassing traditional channels of policy development, interagency review, legal counsel, and official communication. Over four years, Trump posted more than 26,000 tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account, including…

The Washington Post Fact Checker maintained a database of false or misleading claims made by Donald Trump throughout his first presidential term, from January 20, 2017, through January 20, 2021. The final count was 30,573 false or misleading claims over 1,461 days, an average of approximately 21 per day. The rate accelerated over time:…

Between January 2017 and July 2018, President Donald Trump engaged in a pattern of publicly undermining, contradicting, and circumventing U.S. intelligence agencies across multiple documented incidents.

Throughout his presidency, Donald Trump undermined the U.S. intelligence community through a pattern of actions that included sharing highly classified intelligence with Russian officials, compromising a high-value CIA source inside the Russian government, and publicly attacking intelligence community leaders by name when their findings…

Walter Shaub Jr. served as the Director of the United States Office of Government Ethics from January 2013 through July 19, 2017. OGE is an independent executive branch agency responsible for overseeing the financial disclosure process, administering ethics agreements, and providing guidance on conflicts of interest for the executive…

Throughout both terms in office and during campaigns, Donald Trump has systematically attacked the legitimacy of voting processes in the United States, making repeated false claims about voter fraud, opposing mail-in voting without evidence, supporting restrictive voter identification laws, opposing federal voting rights legislation, and…

Throughout his presidential campaigns and presidency, Donald Trump engaged in a sustained pattern of public attacks on federal judges, questioning their legitimacy, impartiality, and competence. The attacks were documented through video recordings, tweets, official statements, and press conference remarks. The pattern included targeting…

Donald Trump broke two long-standing norms of presidential financial transparency during his 2016 campaign and presidency. He refused to release his federal tax returns, ending a practice followed by every major-party presidential nominee since Richard Nixon in 1973, and he refused to divest from his business holdings, rejecting the…

Donald Trump introduced a level of profanity, personal insult, and crude language into the presidential platform that is without precedent in the modern era. Academic researchers, linguists, and presidential historians have documented this shift extensively, and the data shows both a qualitative departure from prior norms and a…

Beginning in early 2025, the Trump administration took a series of actions targeting the tax-exempt status of nonprofit organizations that had been critical of or had come into conflict with administration policies. These actions raised First Amendment concerns and represented an expansion of executive power into an area where federal…

In January 2025, devastating wildfires swept through the Los Angeles area, destroying thousands of structures and displacing tens of thousands of residents. As the fires raged, President Donald Trump publicly threatened to withhold federal disaster relief from California unless Governor Gavin Newsom complied with demands unrelated to…

Following his 2020 election loss, Donald Trump created a political fundraising apparatus that raised hundreds of millions of dollars from supporters under the banner of fighting election fraud, then spent the bulk of those funds on legal bills, personal expenses, and political activities unrelated to the stated fundraising purpose. The…

The 58th Presidential Inaugural Committee, organized as a nonprofit 501(c)(4), raised a record $107 million in donations for events surrounding Donald Trump's January 20, 2017 inauguration. The DC Attorney General filed a civil lawsuit on January 22, 2020, alleging that the committee misused nonprofit funds in violation of DC nonprofit…

Donald Trump has a documented history of publicly claiming charitable generosity that is not supported by the available evidence, including inflated claims about personal donations, publicized presidential salary donations to agencies whose budgets he simultaneously proposed cutting, and a broader pattern of claiming credit for…

On January 28, 2016, Donald Trump skipped a Fox News Republican primary debate in Des Moines, Iowa, and instead held a competing televised fundraiser billed as a benefit for veterans' organizations. Trump announced that the event had raised $6 million for veterans' groups, including a $1 million personal pledge from Trump himself.

On January 28, 2016, Donald Trump boycotted the Fox News Republican presidential primary debate in Des Moines, Iowa, citing what he called biased treatment by debate moderator Megyn Kelly. As an alternative, Trump organized a fundraiser for veterans' organizations at Drake University, held simultaneously with the debate at a venue…

On November 7, 2019, New York Supreme Court Justice Saliann Scarpulla issued the final judgment in the case brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James against the Donald J. Trump Foundation, Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump, and Eric Trump. The ruling ordered Trump to pay $2 million in restitution and documented a…

Washington Post reporter David Fahrenthold, whose investigation into Trump's charitable claims won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, documented a pattern in which Donald Trump used charity golf tournaments held at his courses to generate publicity for his generosity while the actual charitable contributions were minimal,…

Washington Post reporter David Fahrenthold conducted a systematic investigation into Donald Trump's charitable pledges between 2015 and 2016, contacting more than 400 major charities to verify whether Trump had followed through on public promises of personal donations. The investigation found that between 2008 and May 2016, only one…

In 2016, Washington Post reporter David Fahrenthold conducted a systematic investigation into Donald Trump's history of charitable giving. The investigation, which won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, found a pattern of Trump publicly claiming to donate to charities but not following through, and of the Trump Foundation…

As part of the broader dissolution case against the Donald J. Trump Foundation, the New York Attorney General documented multiple instances in which Trump used charitable funds to purchase personal items that were displayed at his for-profit properties or retained for his personal use.

Beginning in 2007, Eric Trump hosted an annual Golf Invitational fundraiser at the Trump National Golf Club in Westchester County, New York, to raise money for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. Eric Trump publicly promoted the event by emphasizing that the Trump Organization donated the use of the golf course at no cost, allowing…

For more than a decade, Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida, served as a venue for charity galas hosted by prominent nonprofit organizations, including local chapters of the American Red Cross, the American Cancer Society, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, the Palm Beach Zoo, the…

Over more than a decade, Donald Trump exhibited a documented pattern of inserting himself into other organizations' charitable activities for personal publicity, while simultaneously using his private club, Mar-a-Lago, as a venue that generated revenue from charities and facilitated self-dealing through the Trump Foundation.

Over nearly two decades, Donald Trump made a series of false or unsubstantiated claims about his actions and experiences related to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, including claims that he helped at Ground Zero, that he witnessed large-scale celebrations by Muslims in New Jersey, and that he lost "hundreds of friends" in the…

Despite publicly claiming a net worth of $10 billion or more throughout his presidential campaigns and presidency, Donald Trump never signed the Giving Pledge, the public commitment created in 2010 by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett in which billionaires promise to donate the majority of their wealth to philanthropy. More significantly,…

The Donald J. Trump Foundation, a tax-exempt private foundation incorporated in 1988, was dissolved by court order in December 2018 after the New York Attorney General's office established a pattern of illegal conduct spanning more than a decade.

Over a period of decades, Donald Trump cultivated a public image as a generous philanthropist. Investigative reporting, primarily by David Fahrenthold of the Washington Post, revealed that Trump's personal charitable giving was far more limited than claimed, and that the Donald J. Trump Foundation was funded primarily by other people's…

In January 2021, the Trump administration's Department of Labor finalized a rule that narrowed the test for determining whether a worker is an employee or an independent contractor under the Fair Labor Standards Act. The rule, published on January 7, 2021, reduced the analysis to two "core factors": the nature and degree of the worker's…

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Trump administration issued Department of Labor regulations that significantly narrowed the scope of paid sick leave and emergency family leave protections established by the Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA), which Trump signed into law on March 18, 2020. The regulations carved out large…

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Trump administration's Occupational Safety and Health Administration declined to issue any emergency temporary standards to protect workers from the virus, despite receiving formal requests from labor unions, congressional Democrats, and public health organizations. OSHA received more than 8,000…

On December 22, 2017, President Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) into law, the most significant overhaul of the federal tax code since 1986. Trump and congressional Republicans promoted the legislation as a benefit to working families and the middle class. Trump stated it would be "one of the great Christmas gifts to…

The Trump administration's Department of Labor rolled back two significant Obama-era worker protections: a rule that would have extended overtime pay eligibility to more than four million additional workers, and a regulation that prevented employers from taking workers' tips through mandatory tip pooling arrangements.

Across both his first and second terms, Donald Trump compiled a documented record of actions that weakened organized labor, rolled back worker protections, and restructured the federal labor relations apparatus in favor of employers. These actions are documented through executive orders, NLRB decisions, federal rulemaking, and…

Across both terms of his presidency, Donald Trump pursued an aggressive program of environmental deregulation and weakened workplace safety enforcement that has had measurable impacts on workers, public health, and communities. These actions are documented through official regulatory actions, government reports, and data on inspection…

Over a period spanning a decade, Donald Trump took contradictory positions on whether the federal minimum wage should be raised, whether it was too high, whether it was too low, and whether it should exist at all. Throughout his first term and into his second, the federal minimum wage remained at $7.25 per hour, where it has been since…

In 2014, The Paint Spot, a small Miami-based paint supply company owned by Juan Carlos Enriquez, supplied paint and related materials for a renovation of Trump National Doral Miami, a golf resort owned by Trump Endeavor 12 LLC. The materials were part of a larger renovation contract involving the repainting of five of the resort's ten…

Workers at the Trump International Hotel Las Vegas, a 64-story luxury hotel and condominium tower on the Las Vegas Strip, engaged in a multi-year fight for union representation and a collective bargaining agreement that was marked by repeated unfair labor practice findings against the hotel.

Between 2013 and 2019, Trump-owned properties, primarily the Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida, repeatedly used the H-2B temporary visa program to hire foreign workers for seasonal positions as cooks, servers, housekeepers, and waitstaff. The H-2B program requires employers to demonstrate that qualified American workers are…

Between 2016 and 2018, multiple investigations by journalists and workers' rights organizations documented labor abuses at overseas factories producing merchandise for the Ivanka Trump brand. The investigations found that workers in Indonesia and China were subjected to conditions that violated both local labor laws and the brand's own…

In 2002, architect Andrew Tesoro was commissioned to design a new clubhouse at the Trump National Golf Club in Briarcliff Manor, Westchester County, New York. The project spanned four years and was completed in 2006. Upon completion, Tesoro submitted a bill for approximately $140,000 in outstanding fees, which included roughly $80,000 in…

In December 2018, the New York Times reported that Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, had employed undocumented immigrants for years, with at least some supervisors aware of their immigration status. Two workers, Victorina Morales and Sandra Diaz, came forward publicly to describe their experiences, providing…

Trump Model Management was a modeling agency founded in 1999 and operated under the Trump Organization umbrella until it closed in April 2017. The agency represented models primarily in New York and connected them with domestic and international clients. Beginning in 2016, investigative reporting by Mother Jones and the Daily Beast…

In the early 1990s, Donald Trump attempted to use the power of government eminent domain to seize the home of Vera Coking, an elderly widow in Atlantic City, New Jersey, so that he could demolish it and build a limousine parking lot for his adjacent Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino. When Coking refused to sell, Trump enlisted a state agency…

Multiple law firms and individual attorneys have publicly alleged that Donald Trump refused to pay legal bills for services rendered, a pattern that spans decades and extends through his presidency and post-presidency legal battles.

Across multiple properties and decades, Donald Trump and the Trump Organization engaged in a documented pattern of opposing unionization, fighting existing union contracts, and preferring non-union labor for construction and operations. This pattern has been substantiated through National Labor Relations Board rulings, federal court…

In 1989, J. Michael Diehl, owner of the Freehold Music Center in Freehold, New Jersey, was contracted to supply approximately $100,000 worth of grand and upright pianos to the Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City. It was one of the largest single sales in the store's history.

In early 1980, Donald J. Trump and the Trump Organization contracted with Kaszycki & Sons Contractors, Inc. to demolish the Bonwit Teller department store at 725 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, clearing the site for the construction of Trump Tower. To meet an accelerated schedule, the contractor employed approximately 150 to 200 undocumented…

A pattern of non-payment to contractors, vendors, and workers by Donald Trump and the Trump Organization has been documented across multiple decades and projects. The most comprehensive examination was a June 2016 investigation by USA Today, which reviewed court records, lien filings, and government documents spanning more than 30 years…

Across multiple decades, workers at Trump-branded properties have alleged, and in some cases proven through legal settlements and government investigations, that they were denied proper wages, forced to work unpaid overtime, had tips confiscated, or were paid below minimum wage. The documented cases span Trump's construction projects,…

Donald Trump made repeated public claims that asbestos was safe and that opposition to asbestos was driven by mob interests rather than health science. These claims contradicted federal environmental and health documentation and were made in the context of Trump construction and renovation projects where workers were exposed to asbestos…

On October 15, 1973, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a civil rights suit in the Eastern District of New York against Fred C. Trump, Donald J. Trump, and Trump Management, Inc. The suit alleged systematic violations of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 across a portfolio of roughly 14,000 apartments in New York City.