Documented

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…

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On January 20, 2025, Acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Benjamin Huffman rescinded the Biden administration's 2021 Guidelines for Enforcement Actions in or Near Protected Areas. The rescinded policy had designated schools, hospitals, houses of worship, courthouses, domestic violence shelters, food pantries, playgrounds, and…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

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,…

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…

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…

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 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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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 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…

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…

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.

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…

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.…

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…

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…

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 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 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…

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…

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 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…

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…

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…

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 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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.

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…

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 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…

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…

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 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.…

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 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 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 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…

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…

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…

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.

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.

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…

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.

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…

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…

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 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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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 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…

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…

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…

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.…

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…

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…

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 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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.

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…

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 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 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 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…

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 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.

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…

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…

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.…

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…

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.

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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.

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.

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…

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 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 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.

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…

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…

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 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…

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…

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 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…