The UnPopulist, alongside its parent organization, the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism (ISMA), launched Executive Watch earlier this year. This project, which was designed to track presidential abuses of power as they are happening, has been meticulously documenting the illicit actions emanating from the White House.
Below is our biweekly selection of new entries posted in Executive Watch. You should bookmark this page that contains a chronological scroll of the abuses and this post that sorts and lists them under our 5 P categories:
After Neutering America’s Big Media, Trump Goes After the BBC
Category: Presidential Retribution
Donald Trump’s lawsuits against big media companies—backed up by the threat to abuse regulatory power against them—have made U.S. companies subservient and afraid to air criticism. Now he is attempting to extend his threats to punish the British media, starting with the venerable BBC.
The New York Times reports:
[T]wo senior executives who had oversight of the BBC Panorama film, “Trump: A Second Chance?”, both said they believed it never aired in the United States. They asked for anonymity because they did not have permission to speak publicly. The BBC did not respond to a question about where the documentary was distributed.
If the executives are right, that could allow the BBC’s lawyers to argue that Florida is the wrong jurisdiction to hear the case. …
The problem for Mr. Trump is that in Britain, where the film aired in October 2024, he has missed the 12-month statute of limitations for filing a libel suit. Britain would have been a less attractive venue, in any event, because the maximum damages awarded in such cases is capped at about 300,000 pounds, or $395,000. …
Beyond the BBC’s actions, lawyers said, Mr. Trump would also need to demonstrate that the editing of the film substantially altered the way people viewed the events of Jan. 6, 2021. …
The BBC acknowledged that the footage was edited to take separate statements by the president—“We’re going walk down to the Capitol,” and “We fight. We fight like hell”—which were uttered about 50 minutes apart, and made them sound like a single statement that could be interpreted as a call to arms.
BBC News has said it did not intend to mislead anyone. It said in a statement that its editing meant “to convey the key messages of the speech in a condensed format, since the whole speech was over an hour long.”
Legal experts noted that multiple documentary accounts of Jan. 6 suggested that the president incited the crowd to attack the Capitol, a conclusion endorsed by the House of Representatives, when it voted to impeach the president on a count of “incitement of insurrection.”
It is disturbing that the BBC’s first line of defense is that the documentary never aired in the U.S., because that is the whole value of having foreign media outside the reach of presidential intimidation. While they suppress criticism at home, authoritarians also need prevent it coming in from outside, particularly in their country’s own language.
Trump Pardons His Election Theft Co-Conspirators
Category: Power Consolidation
Donald Trump just pardoned Robert Henry Harshbarger for healthcare fraud, simply because he’s the husband of a congresswoman who is a loyal Trump ally. But that kind of blatant political corruption gets second billing compared to even more corrupt pardons he issued for his own co-conspirators in his attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
Politico reports:
The extraordinarily broad pardon, signed Friday but revealed Sunday night, has little substantive effect for its recipients. Trump can pardon only federal crimes, and his administration had already pulled the plug on any lingering investigations stemming from the 2020 election. Some of the clemency recipients are still facing state-level criminal charges in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Wisconsin — though some Trump allies argue the pardons could derail those cases.
The mass pardon—the first in history to cover people accused of criminally conspiring with the president who issued it—comes as Trump continues to stoke false claims about rampant cheating by Democrats and sow doubts about the integrity of future elections. And his opponents see the pardon as a permission slip for similar efforts in 2026 and 2028. …
Oyer said the pardon was written so broadly that it could apply to countless people who aided Trump’s effort to stay in power despite losing the 2020 election—and the vaguely worded document permits Martin and other Justice Department officials to decide for themselves who receives a pardon certificate.
“That’s just not how pardon paperwork is written,” Oyer said.
The move also appeared to be a way for Trump to test the well-settled boundaries of the pardon power itself, with allies like Martin and election attorney Cleta Mitchell suggesting it should cause the pending state cases to crumble. The pair argue that the presidential pardon could cover state-law crimes because the purported electors were engaged in activity related to a federal election, though legal scholars say that rationale is a stretch.
This is a multi-level abuse and distortion of the pardon power. First, Trump is pardoning his own co-conspirators. Second, this is an open-ended blanket pardon to a whole class of as-yet-unnamed people, not just specific individuals. And he is attempting, with no constitutional authority whatsoever, to extend his federal pardon power to bind the states.
Trump Shakes Down Company on Live TV
Category: Power Consolidation
A recent Trump press conference about a deal he negotiated to lower the price of weight-loss drugs was overshadowed by an incident in which a man in the background fainted and Trump stood by, blank and indifferent, which instantly became a kind of symbol for his presidency.
But many didn’t notice that in the middle of the event, Trump tried to shake down pharmaceutical maker Novo Nordisk on live TV.
The New Republic pulls out this exchange:
At a White House press conference Thursday announcing lower costs for weight-loss drugs, Donald Trump decided to ask for part of a company.
Trump was sitting at his desk in the Oval Office surrounded by health officials from his administration, as well as executives from pharmaceutical companies Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly. When a reporter asked the president about Novo Nordisk’s acquisition of an obesity biotech company, Trump quipped to CEO Maziar Mike Doustdar, “Maybe you should give us a piece of the company like I’ve been asking for, give the United States a nice big chunk of the company.”
Doustdar chuckled but ignored the president’s suggestion and went on to explain the acquisition. It’s unclear how serious Trump is about asking for a piece of the pharmaceutical giant, but his government has already taken stakes in several American companies, including U.S. Steel, Intel, Trilogy Metals, Lithium Americas, and MP Materials.
The deal on weight-loss drugs was secured through Trump’s illegal tariffs and an apparent threat to use the FTC to block a Novo Nordisk acquisition. Trump’s economic policy is not about free markets but about him as deal-maker-in-chief and the personal manager of the U.S. economy. In his own analogy, America is a giant store, and he owns it.
Trump’s Threats Chill Big Business Speech in Tariff Case
Category: Presidential Retribution
Sometimes, Donald Trump’s authoritarianism is demonstrated by what doesn’t happen, by the conspicuous silences. The Supreme Court just held hearings on the constitutionality of Trump’s unilaterally applied tariffs. Normally, businesses with billions of dollars at stake would be filing amicus briefs. But they are silent, because they are afraid.
CNN reports:
The battle to stop Trump’s tariffs is being waged by a group of small businesses—including a family-owned toymaker in Illinois and a New York-based wine importer. They have advanced the case to the nation’s highest court even as their larger and better-known competitors have remained notably silent. …
Even when they are not named plaintiffs, major companies often wade into Supreme Court cases with friend-of-court briefs, offering their own take on the controversy pending before the justices. … In 2019, Apple CEO Tim Cook personally signed an amicus brief at the high court supporting the continuation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program created during the Obama administration for Dreamers. …
But the big difference today is the administration’s willingness to pursue retribution against critics. …
[Cassie] Abel, who launched her company in Idaho nearly a decade ago, noted that Walmart and other retailers endured public blowback from Trump this year when they threatened tariff-related price increases.
“That was a clear signal that anyone who wants to speak out against this is going to be in the pain cave,” said Abel, who joined an amicus brief with other small businesses opposed to the tariffs.
This is another case of the capitulation of the elites, whose cowardice leaves the little guys to be the ones to stick their necks out against Trump’s authoritarianism—even as it shows big businesses why they should take a stand. And that is, of course, because authoritarianism turns out to be incompatible with capitalism.
Trump’s Thug Diplomacy Threatens European Diplomats and their Families if They Refuse to Put American Interests Ahead of their Own Countries
Category: Political Corruption
In negotiations with foreign diplomats—especially our allies—it is normal to threaten negative consequences against a country if it acts contrary to U.S. demands. Donald Trump’s unique innovation is to threaten personal consequences against individual diplomats and their families.
Politico reports:
Eight envoys, officials and civil society observers from Europe, granted anonymity to describe the fractious closed-door discussions and protect their relationships with those involved, confirmed national delegates had reported they had been threatened with personal consequences if they went against Washington.
“Our negotiators had never seen this before in any international talks,” said one European official, who had spoken to negotiators. “People being summoned to the U.S. Embassy in London—intimidation, threats of cessation of business, threats of family members losing visas.”
Another European Commission official added that diplomats returned home rattled after the meetings: “We had feedback from a number of people involved in the negotiations about the pressure they faced.” …
The U.S. strategy was laid out publicly ahead of the meeting, with a press release signed by the U.S. secretaries of state, transportation, and energy. On top of threats of tariffs, port fees and visa restrictions on crews, the U.S. said it would also look at “sanctions on officials sponsoring activist-driven climate policies.”
To offer personal threats and incentive for a government official to put his personal interests above the interests of the country he represents is the very definition of corruption. Yet rule by bribes and threats is Trump’s view of the normal operation of government, and it is what he is asking his minions to establish as the basis for American diplomacy.
Trump Has Instructed the Department of Justice to Look for Evidence to Support His Stolen Election Lie
Category: Power Consolidation
Donald Trump’s white whale is his refusal to accept his election loss in 2020. He wants to set the precedent that any election in which the people don’t choose the way he likes is invalid. So Trump is ordering the DOJ to keep promoting his lie that the 2020 election was “stolen.”
The Washington Post reports:
In recent private meetings, public comments and social media posts, Trump has renewed demands that members of his administration find fraud in the five-year-old defeat that he never accepted. He recently hired at the White House a lawyer who worked on contesting the 2020 results. Administration officials and allies have asked to inspect voting equipment in Colorado and Missouri. Others are seeking mail ballots from Atlanta in 2020, when Trump became the first Republican presidential candidate to lose Georgia since 1992. …
[Fulton] county, which includes part of Atlanta, was the epicenter of false allegations of voter fraud during the 2020 election, arising from a water leak at the ballot counting facility and wheeled ballot containers that were mischaracterized as unauthorized suitcases. Two election workers won a defamation case against Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani for spreading falsehoods about them that led to threats. …
On Thursday, Harmeet Dhillon, a former Trump campaign legal adviser who now heads the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, followed up by requesting to inspect the ballots. The letter, obtained by The Post, said the division is investigating compliance with federal laws on administering elections.
Robb Pitts, chairman of the Fulton County Board of Commissioners, said he was confused by the Justice Department’s involvement in efforts to review ballots from an election that has already been repeatedly scrutinized.
“It makes no sense to me to continue to look at the 2020 elections,” he said. “Audit after audit, review after review, where does it end? One more time? Two more times?”
This report quotes Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, who names the motive for these bogus investigations: “Trump can finally be able to say … ‘My lies were actually the truth.’” Trump is using the DOJ, not just for an attack on justice, but for an attack on the truth itself.
Trump Is Refusing to Disclose the Names of All the Favor-Seeking Donors Contributing to his Ballroom
Category: Political Corruption
Donald Trump’s giant gilded ballroom is a place where rich guys in tuxedos can flatter him and buy and sell special favors. This actually started before the ballroom has even been built, as giant companies with business before the administration give millions for the ballroom in order to buy Trump’s favor. The kicker is that Trump is also keeping these donors secret from the public.
The New York Times reports:
President Trump’s aides have promised transparency about the funding of a new ballroom, but the White House withheld the identities of several donors to the project, including some with business before the administration, The New York Times found.
A list released last month by the White House of more than three dozen donors omitted donation amounts, as well as the names of several individuals and companies that collectively have billions of dollars riding on the outcome of administration policy decisions. …
Among the donors not disclosed by the White House are a pair of health care companies seeking to protect or expand Medicare reimbursement for their products, as well as the Wall Street powerhouse BlackRock, whose bid to acquire a stake in Panama Canal ports has been supported by Mr. Trump amid opposition from China. Another is Jeff Yass, a major investor in TikTok’s parent company who could benefit from a Trump-backed deal to keep the social media app up and running in the United States.
Still others attended a dinner at the White House last month for donors who gave $2.5 million or more to build the ballroom, but their presences were not disclosed by the administration, and not all of them have…publicly acknowledged whether they donated.
The public listing of donors is a crucial curb for corruption, because it allows the public to connect presidential actions to the donations that motivated them. Under Trump, the White House has been literally up for sale, and he knows who its buyers are—but the American people are kept in the dark.
Trump Openly Defies a Court Order by Refusing to Release SNAP Contingency Funds During the Government Shutdown
Category: Policy Illegality
It’s an old game for the president to try to win a government shutdown fight by cutting off payments for whatever he doesn’t like, while mysteriously finding money to pay for the things he still wants to do. As usual, Donald Trump is taking this to a new level, not just using his presidential discretion but violating the law.
In this case, he illegally shifted around funds to pay salaries in the military, while refusing to spend a contingency fund specifically set aside by law to pay SNAP food subsidies.
MSNBC reports:
President Donald Trump can prevent nearly 42 million Americans from losing funding for their food aid benefits on Saturday. And he’s done it before.
That’s the view of experts who follow government appropriations, including a former government official, who say the administration is making a political choice by asserting its hands are tied and that benefits will run dry. …
“The crucial point here is that the Trump administration is choosing to violate the law and choosing not to spend money it has available to it to pay for food for poor people,“ said Samuel Bagenstos, former general counsel to the Office of Management and Budget, referring to requirements laid out in the Food and Nutrition Act. …
The Food and Nutrition Act states that the U.S. Department of Agriculture, or the USDA, must provide assistance to all eligible households that make applications. According to the 2024 and 2025 appropriations bills passed into law, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP, has what’s called a contingency reserve pot of money that totals around $6 billion, and $3 billion of it remains available until Sept. 30, 2026, while roughly another $3 billion is available to be legally used by the administration until 2027.
The USDA agreed to pay some of this money to fund SNAP partway through the month after a court ordered it to do so. But Trump has since declared that they won’t pay it, openly defying the court’s order.
Trump Is Just Murdering Random People in the Caribbean While Showing Utter Contempt for Basic Congressional Oversight
Category: Policy Illegality
Donald Trump has imposed a reign of terror on the Caribbean by targeting supposed drug-smuggling boats, not for interdiction or arrest, but for deadly airstrikes. Yet Trump has never offered evidence that his targets are drug smugglers, and the evidence is mounting that he is just ordering the U.S. military to murder people at random.
The New York Times reports:
Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the administration’s decision to exclude his party from a secret briefing on Wednesday about the campaign was “corrosive to our democracy.”
Frustration is growing among Democrats on Capitol Hill as the Trump administration refuses to provide a legal justification for attacking boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific. The U.S. military strikes have killed at least 61 people since early September.
Visibly agitated, Mr. Warner said that the Republicans-only meeting was a violation of a law requiring bipartisan briefings of congressional leaders on national security matters. …
On other side of the Capitol, military legal experts had been scheduled to testify in a closed-door bipartisan briefing for the House. But the Trump administration decided not to send them. …
Representative Sara Jacobs, Democrat of California… said Pentagon officials said they needed to prove only that the targeted people were connected to designated terrorist organizations, even if the connection is “as much as three hops away from a known member” of a designated terrorist organization.
If they are targeting people with three degrees of separation from known gangs, that almost certainly includes completely innocent people. But the most dangerous part is that Trump is refusing to share information about this with Congress, giving briefings only to Republicans and imposing non-disclosure agreements on military officers to restrict the flow of information to elected officials.
To be sure, Republicans in Congress are cooperating in their own irrelevance. On Oct. 16, the admiral overseeing this campaign in the Caribbean suddenly announced that he was resigning. No one knows why he resigned, leading to speculation that he did not want to be liable for war crimes—and Republicans have refused to ask him to testify before Congress.
In short, the Donald Trump is ordering people to be killed, nobody knows who or why—and Congress seems to be helpless to discover this information.
The Trump Administration Circulates Fradulent Videos About Criminal Aliens and Antifa Terrorists to Justify His Crackdown on Blue Cities
Category: Power Consolidation
In addition to Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem reposting AI-doctored footage that falsely portrayed Black teens threatening ICE, her agency has been justifying its escalating attacks on Democratic cities by posting a flood of false and misleading videos, systematically lying to the American people.
Some of this has already been reported by the Daily Beast and by AFP, but the most comprehensive analysis is from The Washington Post:
Some videos that purported to show the fiery chaos of Trump-targeted cities included footage from completely different states. One that claimed to show dramatic examples of past administrations’ failures instead featured border crossings and smuggling boats recorded during Trump’s first term. …
The administration’s intense digital strategy has helped grab Americans’ attention and shape discussion around current events, with some of its videos now capturing bigger audiences on social media than mainstream news reports. A White House video claiming Chicago was “in chaos,” which used footage from other states, has been viewed more than 1.4 million times across Instagram, TikTok and X. …
The freelance journalist Ford Fischer was scrolling through X earlier this month when he saw a DHS video overlaid with a message saying “antifa terrorists” had stormed federal facilities in Portland, Oregon. But he recognized the footage because he’d captured it himself days earlier, outside an ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois.
The video, which The Post verified, had been cropped to remove Fischer’s watermark. And it seemed to bolster Trump’s claim that the Oregon city was overwhelmed by violent leftists who were “burning [it] to the ground.”
But Fischer had recorded the footage 1,700 miles away, at a prominent protest zone outside Chicago, where federal agents routinely scuffle with protesters seeking to block an ICE facility’s gate.
Politicians have always lied. What is different about this is the use of the official organs of government to flood the country with false claims and propaganda, deliberately undermining the public’s ability to make informed decisions.
Trump Uses Foreign Investments Extracted From Countries by Threatening Tariffs as a Slush Fund to Direct Investment Toward His Pet Projects
Category: Power Consolidation
Despite his complaints about socialism, Donald Trump’s vision of the U.S. economy is not a free market. It is an economy personally managed by him, as the supreme deal maker-in-chief telling everyone else what to make, who to hire, and what to buy. In his recent trip to Asia, while accepting a crown, Trump abused his illegal power over tariffs to make this vision come true.
You’ll find this buried a little ways into a New York Times report on the trip:
Until Wednesday, talks had been hung up in large part over the investment provision. The United States wanted a cash investment, but South Korea expressed concern that committing such a sizable sum of money could destabilize its currency.
According to Mr. Kim, the United States will now lower import tariffs on South Korean goods to 15 percent from the 25 percent rate that went into effect in August. In addition, he said the United States agreed to accept cash investments of up to $20 billion a year, and set aside another $150 billion to invest in its American ship building operations. …
South Korea scored more concessions and landed a generally less onerous deal than Japan, which has agreed to invest $550 billion in the United States under its trade deal. A memorandum of understanding between Washington and Tokyo stated that Mr. Trump will select how the money will be invested. If Japan goes against his wishes, he will have the right to impose higher tariffs.
The key sentence is: “Mr. Trump will select how the money will be invested.” The foreign policy of the United States, including tariff policy, is supposed to be used to benefit the United States, not to extort an investment fund to be managed personally by the president.
This is a key part of Trump’s program of authoritarian power consolidation. He wants to be able to direct investments toward those who support him—who donate to his White House ballroom or buy media companies that give him flattering coverage—and to direct it away from anyone who does not bend the knee.
Borrowing a Page From Socialist China, Trump Forces New Nuclear Reactors to Hand Over Part of Their Profits to Uncle Sam in Exchange for Government Subsidies
Category: Power Consolidation
One of the signatures of Trump’s second term is that he caterwauls about “socialism” while making deals with private companies in which he gives them government subsidies in exchange for partial government ownership—an approach reminiscent of the Chinese Communist Party. Now he’s doing it again with his new push for nuclear power.
The Washington Post reports:
The Trump administration will take a stake in at least $80 billion of new nuclear reactors that it sees as key to continuing to develop AI technologies through a deal it inked with the parent companies of nuclear developer Westinghouse.
The partnership is designed with “profit sharing mechanisms” that provide U.S. taxpayers returns “once certain thresholds are met,” according to the announcement.
Under the agreement, after the U.S. government signs final contracts for the construction of at least $80 billion in Westinghouse reactors, it would be entitled to receive 20 percent of Westinghouse returns in excess of $17.5 billion.
The U.S. could also require Westinghouse to go public if the company’s valuation surpasses $30 billion. If it does go public, U.S. taxpayers would be entitled to a 20 percent equity stake in the company, according details released by Brookfield.
This is another example of Trump’s centralized, command-and-control approach to the economy—and as is usual with this approach, it could turn out to be a boondoggle. Nuclear power plants are very expensive and take a long time to build, making it unlikely this venture will turn a profit and even less likely that new plants will come online in time to provide the energy needed for the current AI frenzy.
