Documenting the Damage

Table of Contents

• Introduction

• Part I: Democracy and Government

• Part II: Civil Rights and Liberties

• Part III: Economy and Public Services [COMING SATURDAY, APRIL 26]

• Part IV: Environment and Energy [COMING SOON]

• Part V: Foreign Policy [COMING SOON]

• Conclusion [COMING SOON]

Introduction

The United States of America is a different nation than it was 100 days ago. The opening months of the second Trump administration shattered the post-World War II record for the most executive orders issued by a new President. Within the first two weeks of his second term, President Trump had already signed more executive orders than he had during the entire opening of his first term. The events of the last 100 days will affect the trajectory of American politics for at least the next 100 years.

The reforms of early 2025 constitute the most aggressive attempt at reshaping the United States government since the New Deal government of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s. But whereas the New Deal was intended to rescue the US economy from the depths of the Great Depression, the Trump agenda has focused on paralyzing the government, facilitating large-scale corruption, assaulting personal liberties, dividing the American people, polluting our shared environment, provoking conflict around the world, and redistributing money and power from the working class towards corporations and billionaires (a record number of whom serve in the administration).

Some commentators have nicknamed the opening strategy of President Trump’s second term as “shock and awe,” a reference to the military strategy of the same name which aims to “seize control of the environment and paralyze or so overload an adversary’s perceptions and understanding of events so that the enemy would be incapable of resistance at tactical and strategic levels.” In this reading, the Trump administration’s adversary is the American people, who have been rendered helpless in keeping track of the “overload” of news stories about what all has changed.

This rapid-fire approach offers several advantages to the second Trump administration. By changing such a wide variety of policies simultaneously, critics of the President’s agenda are forced to divide their efforts in a way which makes a sustained and unified critique nearly impossible. In addition, while many of these attempted reforms will be reversed through one means or another, many others will be overlooked and allowed to survive into the long-term, gradually becoming apart of what is considered “traditional” US public policy.

This project is an attempt at highlighting many of the most important policy reforms and political changes made under Trump’s 2025 “shock and awe” period. Revealing the scope and scale of these changes is intended to gather these harmful policies in one place, enabling greater public debate about the severity of our present situation. In addition, highlighting the negative changes which have occurred will hopefully help to prevent them from becoming permanent, giving future policymakers a guide towards the reconstruction of a democratic government out of the ashes of whatever President Trump leaves behind.

To create this project, I spent the first quarter of 2025 keeping track of every major policy change and political development I could identify. The result of this effort was a spreadsheet featuring more than 800 policy developments, most of which were then categorized into the 100 policy topics summarized in this report. Over the next two weeks, I will be releasing my findings in five thematic parts: I) democracy and government, II) civil rights and liberties, III) economy and public services, IV) environment and energy, and V) foreign policy.

For the sake of brevity in this introduction, I will save much of my analysis for the conclusion. But before diving into part I, here are some quick notes:

• This project aims to provide a semi-comprehensive accounting of the changes which have occurred so far, but it is still an incomplete and non-exhaustive record.

• Though many of the policies explored in this project are currently being challenged in the courts, I do not spend much time focusing on these court cases. This is primarily because of the fast-changing nature of these ongoing cases, but also because the Trump administration’s willingness to defy certain court orders calls the power of judicial review into question.

• The focus of this project is on harmful changes. I would consider a small minority of the changes which I tracked to be positive changes, but they generally represent tiny wins in the face of extremely large losses. There are several individual policies in this report which will prove to be more significant than every positive change combined.

• There is significant overlap between some of these 100 categories, but with some notable exceptions I have tried to avoid including individual policy changes in multiple different sections.

• Some people may be tempted to find this report’s contents to be demotivating, or to respond by retreating into hopelessness. I would like to encourage the opposite response. The frustration and discontent which this project may inspire within you should drive you towards action. Only through popular resistance to this administration will a reversal of these damages be possible. It is not too late.

• If you find a factual error, a misstatement, or a significant oversight in this report, feel free to make a note of it in the Medium comment sections and I will do my best to address it.

Part I: Democracy and Government

Far more so than most presidencies, the second Trump administration has focused on the demolition and restructuring of the government’s internal functions. Having learned from the significant constraints which the United States Constitution and bureaucracy placed on his first administration, President Donald Trump has sought to reshape the entire structure of the federal government. He is not just trying to be a President; he is trying to change the role of the Presidency within the US system of government.

The most significant features of these government reforms include the destruction of government institutions and practices, the centralization of executive power into the hands of the President, the replacement of independent public servants with political loyalists and for-profit contractors, the removal of restrictions on corruption and grift, a strong cult of personality around the figure of Donald Trump, and a clientelist culture of state privileges for loyal supporters and state punishments for opponents and dissidents. The large scale of these changes will shape the conditions faced by all future American presidencies, lasting decades into the future.

1. Mass Firing Government Workers

One of the most significant changes made in the last 100 days has been the hollowing out of the federal government’s workforce. Though these cuts have already harmed the quality of our public services, the full effects of this policy will not be felt for quite some time. The damage caused by this “thrashing of the bureaucracy” will be revealed gradually over the coming years as it slowly becomes clear exactly how many of the government’s critical functions have been abandoned, with no one at the wheel.

On the first day of the second Trump administration, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was created with a mandate to “maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.” Elon Musk, prominent Trump supporter and the world’s richest man, has been the de facto leader of this effort. Most of its energy has been dedicated towards firing as many government employees as possible in a senseless and arbitrary fashion, often focusing more on staffers’ personal political views than their performance as workers.

Rough estimates of the number of federal workers who have left government service range from 160,000 to 280,000, though these are likely conservative undercounts which will grow with time. Few agencies have been entirely unaffected, but some have been hit harder than others: more than half of all staffers at the Education Department have been fired, along with virtually every single employee of the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

The Trump administration and DOGE employed a variety of methods for these mass firings: direct layoffs, “buyout” offers, harassment, and more. The blanket termination of all remote and hybrid work arrangements for federal employees was intended to disrupt workers’ lives and force them out of their current positions, as evidenced by the failure to make any preparations for the mass influx of in-person workers.

There have also been substantial efforts to prevent the government from recovering from these cuts. The White House ordered a freeze on hiring to fill any existing vacancies on Trump’s first day in office. Then, they required agencies to draft their own plans for “large-scale reductions in force.” That same order made it so that only one new employee could only be hired for each four employees who left, making downsizing an inevitability.

To further emphasize their hostility towards their own staff, the government eliminated the Presidential Management Fellows Program, which sought to recruit new talent into public sector positions. Taken together, these actions guarantee that the civil service will remain chronically understaffed for years to come, as few talented workers will want to take the risk of working in a position which can be arbitrarily eliminated at the whim of an unelected billionaire. Ironically, this is a perfect recipe to reduce the efficiency of the federal government.

Mass firings are an unusual focus for what is supposedly a cost-cutting initiative, as the pay for all government employees makes up less than 5% of the federal budget—roughly the average amongst developed nations. Notably, despite the scale of DOGE’s disruptions, there has yet to be any sign that government spending has actually declined. While it is still too early to observe the effects of most polices described in this report, the government has so far spent more money this year than it did by this time last year, even after adjusting for inflation.

Despite DOGE’s apparent belief that the federal workforce is oversized, most government agencies have long been understaffed. In fact, there were fewer total federal employees in 2015 than there were thirty years earlier. Hollowing out the federal workforce is not a method to cut waste, but rather an ideological project to weaken state capacity, destroy obstacles to autocratic rule, politicize the government bureaucracy, and create new opportunities for privatization via contracting. As stated by Russ Vought, Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the administration

…want[s] the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.

DOGE has achieved an impressive level of infiltration into the machinery of the federal government. They have installed staffers in key positions which grant them control over the government’s finances, started work to build systems which can access sensitive data, and embedded their operatives within agencies so that Musk’s influence will persist even after he departs his current position. An active effort by future administrations will be necessary to reverse this damage.

2. Destroying the Independent Civil Service

Slashing the government’s state capacity through mass firings was only the beginning. The subsequent chaos and paralysis created opportunities for President Trump to politicize many parts of the government that once operated independently, replacing independent civil servants with loyalists who pledge their allegiance to the President rather than to the nation which he leads.

Deep staff cuts were accompanied by several other policies that ground much of the government to a halt. Travel restrictions and a freeze on government credit cards blocked executive agencies from being able to carry out basic government functions. DOGE’s plans to liquidate unused government real estate quickly expanded into a plan to sell off government facilities which are being used; combined with the administration’s return-to-work order, this would paradoxically require government employees to work in offices which no longer exist. The agency which exists to protect the rights of government workers is at risk of being paralyzed. Government employees also lost a major avenue for self-improvement when the administration dissolved the Federal Executive Institute, which provided leadership training for civil servants.

Perhaps the most important change was the day-one creation of a new category of federal worker: “Schedule Policy/Career,” otherwise known as “Schedule F.” Federal employees in Schedule F lack the job protections that come with traditional civil service jobs, giving the President greater control over individual employees and allowing him to fire those who he dislikes (including those who might disobey unlawful orders). At first, only about 2% of federal workers will be placed in this category, though it may expand over time. Not only will this make it easier to arbitrarily fire good workers, it will also create opportunities for corruption and abuse by radically expanding the ability of the President to influence many decisions intended to be made by an independent civil service.

3. Purging Government Officials

The mass expulsion of government employees included a purge of many high-ranking officials, including many who are not supposed to be removable by the President. Noteworthy examples include: the firing of more than 50 US attorneys and deputies; the firing of 17 inspectors general who serve as independent watchdogs against fraud and abuse; an illegal attempt at firing a Federal Election Commission official responsible for monitoring criminal behavior by election campaigns; the firing of Federal Trade Commission (FTC) officials who monitor corporate abuses; the firing of two of the three board members of the National Credit Union Administration; and the firing of the apolitical Archivist of the United States, who maintains official government records.

The elimination of key government officials signals a desire to further consolidate power amongst the President’s loyalists. The political nature of this purge is made clear by DOGE’s efforts to spy on multiple different government agencies for any sign of internal political dissent.

Such a political drive for loyalty makes the purge of military officials particularly concerning. In a move without parallel in American history, President Trump fired the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and five other senior Pentagon officials, along with the nation’s top cybersecurity official and the leadership of several service academies. Doing so opens significant space for the President to stack the military’s leadership with figures who are first and foremost loyal to him, not to the United States at large.

4. Centralizing Power

One of the most consistent themes defining this administration has been the centralization of all political power within the President’s office. These actions have their roots in a controversial idea known as “unitary executive theory,” which has its own origins in the Reagan and W. Bush administrations. Unitary executive theory asserts that the President has complete and total control over every aspect of the executive branch, without any internal checks on his power. Trump loyalist Lew Olowski described the idea as such: President Trump is “the living avatar of the executive power of the United States… The executive power is vested in nobody else. There is no President but the President…”

The second Trump administration has expanded the power of the President to interpret the law, demanded complete loyalty to him from government lawyers and diplomats, illegally exempted themselves from “notice and comment” requirements, centralized authority at the Justice Department (DOJ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and prompted the Supreme Court to weaken the judiciary’s power to review presidential decisions. Numerous emergency powers meant specifically for wartime have been invoked, ranging from energy policy to immigration policy. Many governmental organizations have seen their existing leadership structures bulldozed in order to increase President Trump’s power, ranging from economic institutions like the nation’s housing finance agencies to cultural organizations like the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

Particularly significant has been the President’s consolidation of power within the budgeting process, which aims to bring into practice the White House’s anti-constitutional view that it is not required to spend funds appropriated by congress. President Trump has increased his own authority within the budgeting process, and so far congress has helped him to do so. The budget bill passed by congress in March grants the administration additional power to decide how funds should be spent, sometimes even giving them the ability to repurpose funds for uses other than their intended use.

Undying loyalty to Donald Trump is the number one factor deciding who is given responsibility within the Trump administration. A loyalist who investigated Hunter Biden at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) was briefly placed atop the IRS’ criminal division, granting the President a level of access to tax investigations which has not been seen since President Nixon. Meanwhile, a DOJ lawyer who attempted to fix a wrongful deportation was suspended for failing to “vigorously advocate on behalf of” President Trump’s agenda.

The administration’s domineering approach towards state governments sits in direct conflict with the Republican Party’s traditional support for “state’s rights.” In 2012, the Republican platform declared that “Our States are the laboratories of democracy from which the people propel our nation forward, solving local and State problems through local and State innovations.” President Trump has made a clean break with this idea, speaking in favor of issuing federal orders to state governments because “the states are just an agent of the federal government.”

The administration’s demands for loyalty have also infected the internal politics of his party. Vice President JD Vance was selected to serve as the finance chair of the Republican National Committee, a highly unusual move which unifies party and government. According to Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski, the environment of fear and control coming from the White House has permeated much of the party: “you’ve got everybody just like, zip lip, not saying a word because they’re afraid they’re going to be taken down.”

The widespread distribution of power that defines American governance is rapidly narrowing. In its place is a more absolutist executive power, the very type of monarchial executive which our constitutional system was meant to keep at bay.

5. Taking Over Independent Agencies

“Independent agency” is a term used to describe the various government organizations which are purposefully kept outside of the regular chain of command in order to allow them to operate independently of the current President’s political aims. To further centralize their power, the second Trump administration has both established greater control over independent agencies and minimized their powers.

An executive order from February frames independent agencies’ “minimal Presidential supervision” as a problem in need of solving. Thus, the order states that they will now operate under “Presidential supervision,” implying greater control by the White House. This declaration conflicts with existing law, and its limits have not been tested. The President may even believe that he now has new powers over the highly independent Federal Reserve, saying that the Federal Reserve Chairman’s “termination cannot come fast enough!”

President Trump issued two executive orders seeking to either minimize or eliminate 11 organizations that operated independently of his direct authority. One such organization was the United States Institute for Peace (USIP), a think tank funded by congress and overseen by a bipartisan board of directors which nonetheless had significant autonomy in its operations. In an audacious power grab, DOGE officials forcibly broke in to the USIP offices in March, replaced the organization’s leadership, and orchestrated what USIP’s original leadership called a “takeover by force.” Later that month, the entire USIP staff was fired.

DOGE seems to be genuinely unaware of what the limits to their power are, as evidenced by their attempt at infiltrating an independent non-profit organization that formerly accepted federal grants. Because the White House lacks the legal authority to do practically any of this, they are seeking retroactive approval from the courts to validate their criminal behavior. The administration has even asked the Supreme Court to overturn the 1935 case which gave these agencies their functional independence in the first place.

6. Ignoring Court Orders

The second Trump administration’s refusal to comply with court orders is another signal of its dictatorial intentions, exhibiting new levels of defiance to constitutional checks and balances. The administration has refused to obey court orders on issues like the distribution of federal funds, journalists’ access the White House, the deportation of legal immigrants, and more. When the White House invoked the Alien Enemies Act to accelerate deportations, US District Judge James Boasberg ordered them to halt and told the DOJ: “This is something that you need to make sure is complied with immediately.” White House officials received this order, debated it, and then willfully choose to ignore it.

President Trump has called to impeach Judge Boasberg, along with other judges who have noted the illegality of his actions. Yet despite his own defiance of court orders, he is nearly alone within his administration in acknowledging the fact that the courts do have the authority to review his decisions. Most others around him have adopted a far more radical, anti-constitutional position.

Attorney General Pam Bondi stated that Judge Boasberg was “attempting to meddle in national security and foreign affairs, and he can’t do it.” Vice President JD Vance falsely claimed that “Judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power.” White House aide Stephen Miller similarly claimed that “…when the President is using his powers as commander-in-chief, those determinations are not subject to judicial review.” Border czar Tom Homan stated plainly: “We’re not stopping. I don’t care what the judges think.”

These claims are not just false; they constitute one of the most radical attempts at violating constitutional checks and balances in American history. These and other attacks on the judiciary were enough to prompt a rare rebuke from conservative Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, who issued a brief statement saying that Justice Boasberg was operating within his proper authority, and that “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.” For two centuries, but no more. This is a constitutional crisis.

7. Legalizing Corruption

No matter what kind of corruption you might want to engage in, this is the government for you. For those looking to hide their money laundering, the Treasury Department suspended enforcement of the law banning anonymous shell companies and excluded all US companies from having to comply with it. For corrupt multinational corporations, the White House announced that it is “pausing” enforcement of the law which bans foreign bribery. For foreign oligarchs, the DOJ disbanded its anti-corruption kleptocracy task force.

If you’re a for-profit lobbyist working in the Trump administration, they will designate you as a “special government employee” and then look the other way while you serve in two conflicting roles at once. If you’re a lobbyist for a foreign government, the DOJ disbanded the Foreign Influence Task Force and deprioritized enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, leading to a sharp decline in the amount of information available about the activities of foreign government lobbyists.

For the very few white collar criminals who have actually been convicted and punished for their crimes, President Trump handed out pardons left and right, especially for criminals who made large donations to his campaign.

Are you a billionaire looking to secure government policies that will make you even wealthier? Pay $1 million dollars to attend a dinner at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club, and he might just change his mind for you. If that’s a bit too pricy, why not just pay up to $200,000 to join Facebook and the New York Stock Exchange as a corporate sponsor at the White House Easter Egg Roll?

8. Loosening Ethics Rules

One part of the government’s pro-corruption agenda has been loosening the rules that govern the behavior of government employees, enabling pay-for-play politics of the worst kind. Not only has the swamp not been drained, it’s now the swampiest that it has been in a very long time.

On day one, Trump removed the ethics standards set by the Biden administration and replaced them with nothing at all. To prevent other ethics rules from being enforced, Trump fired the director of the Office of Government Ethics and slashed the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section. The President also ordered an end to the FBI’s tradition of running standard background checks on White House officials, instead shifting this responsibility to the Pentagon. Congress has gotten in on the action too, leaving the House Ethics Office without the board members it needs to monitor congressional corruption.

White House officials whose behavior is particularly indefensible (like venture capitalist and “special government employee” David Sacks, who is now making policy decisions about the same things that he’s invested in) have simply been given blanket ethics waivers to do whatever they want. The guardrails have come off, and there is now practically zero ethics enforcement of any kind against top government officials.

9. Reducing Transparency

The second Trump administration marketed itself as the “Most Transparent Administration in History,” a claim which quickly falls apart upon closer inspection. The White House stopped releasing visitor logs detailing who they are meeting with, removed more than 8,000 webpages filled with information about the government from the internet, invoked state secrets privilege to hide information from the courts, and ordered the destruction of government records. The extent of the damage to transparency practices varies from agency to agency; for example, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has eliminated a long-standing transparency policy and temporarily closed the offices that respond to citizen’s requests for information.

Some government databases are now missing data which was present at the beginning of this year. When large mistakes were pointed out in DOGE’s estimates of the waste they had claimed to cut, DOGE responded by simply reducing the amount of information available about their estimates. Other DOGE activities have further reduced transparency: cuts to statistical agencies across the entire government, cuts to long-term data storage, and other disruptions will shrink the amount of information available to the public about their government’s activities.

10. Rewarding the President’s Allies

The second Trump administration has strongly embraced clientelism—rewarding friends and punishing opponents—of a variety far more blatant and worrisome than most prior presidencies. While a later section will focus on the government’s targeting of its opponents, it is also worth examining the ways in which the government has been bent to provide favorable treatment to President Trump’s allies.

Sometimes these political rewards are geographically focused. Republican Rep. Tom Cole said that “After working closely with DOGE and the Administration,” he was able to prevent the closure of three government offices within his district. He is one of several congressional Republicans to find success with this strategy; Democrats have had no such luck.

At other times, the benefits are doled out to all Republican-leaning areas. The Energy Department is hoping to focus its cuts to hydrogen energy projects to exclusively affect Democratic states, sparing the projects in Republican states. A memo from the Transportation Department announced that they would prioritize funding to Republican-leaning states: those that collaborate with federal immigration agents, have no COVID-19 vaccine requirements, and utilize the “opportunity zones” created by Trump’s 2017 tax cuts.

Some benefits given to the President’s loyalists are even less subtle. Trump’s personal lawyer landed a cushy government job. IRS agents who investigated the son of former President Biden were promoted to more powerful positions, and an employee of the Social Security Administration (SSA) who collaborated with DOGE was put in charge of the agency.

When deciding who to hire to produce a nationwide propaganda campaign against immigrants, the Department of Homeland Security bypassed the usual bidding process to hand the contract to two Republican advertising firms. Members of the military who were discharged for refusing the order to be vaccinated during the COVID-19 pandemic have been fully reinstated, along with back pay for the time during which they were inactive. And while all Presidents corruptly reward their donors with ambassador positions that they’re unqualified for, Trump has gone even further than usual.

11. Putting the President’s Friends Above the Law

President Trump’s use of state power to reward his allies also takes the form of get-out-of-jail free cards. Not only was a blanket pardon provided to all January 6th rioters, the administration is even considering reparations for them. Another blanket pardon freed anti-abortion activists who broke the law against blocking access to reproductive healthcare centers.

The President issued individual pardons for supporters such as Rod Blagojevich, the corrupt former Governor of Illinois; Brian Kelsey, a corrupt former state senator from Tennessee; Devon Archer, who testified against Hunter Biden; and more. If an ally has a legal case ongoing, President Trump will refuse to enforce the law against them: both New York City Mayor Eric Adams and Republican Rep. Cory Mills have escaped serious legal trouble thanks to the administration’s intervention. President Trump fired the law enforcement official who tried to apply the law against actor Mel Gibson, a Trump ally with a long criminal record. One Trump appointee requested that the IRS reconsider its audit of MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, who he described as a “high profile friend of the President.”

It is obvious that these get-out-of-jail free cards are not being given to those who most deserve them: one businessman who got a pardon through his connections to Trump’s son-in-law has already been rearrested for assaulting a three-year-old. The message is loud and clear: the law does not apply to the President and his friends in the same way that it applies to you and me.

12. Giving Elon Musk Special Privileges

Amongst all of Trump’s allies, no one has benefitted more from his position in the Trump administration than billionaire Elon Musk. Although the public backlash against Musk and his companies caused a record-setting decline in his personal wealth, the government is granting Musk extraordinary privileges which, over time, will more than compensate for his losses.

Many of the agencies first targeted by Musk’s DOGE were those which Musk himself has had recent conflicts with, including USAID, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. In addition, all of Musk’s most prominent companies have received preferential treatment from the second Trump administration.

As a government contractor, Musk’s SpaceX is in the perfect position to grow rich off taxpayer money. Favorable treatment from the government has helped the company to secure new government contracts and handouts from the Commerce Department, Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Space Force, and White House. The FAA suddenly started producing major wins for SpaceX soon after it was invaded by DOGE staffers: closing an investigation into one of the company’s rocket crashes, moving a SpaceX construction proposal closer to authorization, and advocating for more radio spectrum that could benefit SpaceX’s subsidiary Starlink. At the Pentagon, the firing of an inspector general may have even disrupted a probe into SpaceX’s contracting practices.

SpaceX is currently seen as the favorite to win the contract for building President Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile defense system, a bid launched in collaboration with military contractors Anduril and Palantir (the latter of which has also received special treatment from the Trump administration). According to one official, the contracting process for the Golden Dome project has been "a departure from the usual acquisition process. There's an attitude that the national security and defense community has to be sensitive and deferential to Elon Musk because of his role in the government."

SpaceX stands to gain even more if Trump’s nominee to lead the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Jared Isaacman, is approved. Musk specifically requested that Isaacman, a close friend of his, be put in charge of the agency that SpaceX does more than half of its government contracting with. This obvious conflict of interest has sparked concerns in congress about the potential rigging of NASA’s contracting process in SpaceX’s favor.

Musk’s Tesla Motors has received free advertising and promotion from the US government in blatant violation of the law. Government contracts represent another potential boost for the company: just two weeks after DOGE invaded the State Department, it was revealed that the agency had plans to purchase $400 million worth of “armored Teslas”; the now-paused order was later backdated to hide how recently this decision was made.

Musk’s social media platform X (also known as Twitter) has similarly benefitted from special treatment under the Trump White House. In a bid to drive traffic to the website, the Trump administration makes prominent use of X for official announcements and even treated an X executive as a journalist at a White House press briefing, allowing him to ask the first question of the briefing.

Musk is also being protected by the government in ways which no regular person could ever dream of. In response to acts of vandalism against Tesla dealerships, the DOJ and FBI are now prioritizing the protection of the company over other public safety concerns, singling out vandalism of Musk’s business as a form of “domestic terrorism” worthy of 40 year sentences (the average state prison sentence for murder is 14 years). The US Marshals Service has also deputized Musk’s personal security team, allowing them to function as law enforcement.

Musk’s position is both an obvious source of corruption and a serious threat to democracy, as it allows for a single government contractor to “function as a para-state capable of influencing the orders that the government gives” him. Never before has someone with so much to gain from the government been given so much power over it.

13. Trying to Freeze the Government

One of the most absurd actions attempted by the second Trump administration is one that was reversed less than a day later: trying to freeze more than 2,600 government programs, all at once. One week into President Trump’s second term, his OMB issued memo M-25-13 ordering that all federal agencies “must temporarily pause all activities” which involve “Federal financial assistance,” with an exception granted to programs that provide benefits directly to citizens. Government employees were given only 24 hours to interpret and comply with this demand.

The order was accompanied by a spreadsheet of more than 2,600 government programs that would be paused, including food assistance, support for seniors, public health programs, student loans, public education funding, infrastructure projects, emergency response services, veterans’ assistance, farm programs, and much, much more. The next day, only hours before the freeze was set to take place, the OMB issued a short question-and-answer document which raised even more questions about the freeze, directly contradicting themselves regarding which programs would be affected.

As the deadline grew closer, programs began to shutter. State governments lost access to critical systems. Just minutes before the memo was set to take effect, a judge stepped in to pause the freeze, averting what would have been the largest collapse of US government programs in history. The next day, the OMB fully rescinded their original memo. It was soon after revealed that they never told the White House that they were issuing the memo in the first place, thus explaining why the government later contradicted itself. Due to a mixture of malice and incompetence, the Trump administration came within minutes of decimating the US government.

14. Making It Harder to Vote

President Trump, who lost the popular vote in two of his three elections, has sought to create new barriers to voting. Although clearly lacking the authority to do so, the White House issued an executive order which threatens to take federal funding away from states unless they adopt a variety of measures to obstruct citizens’ access to the voting booth.

The order first demands voters to provide “documentary proof of United States citizenship” before casting their ballot. This is a response to the myth that there are non-citizens voting in national elections, a lie which has never had any credible evidence. While the President’s order won’t solve this imaginary problem, it will create a very real one: many Americans lack the specific types of identification that the order requires. A slim majority of Americans have no passport, and nearly 21 million Americans have no active drivers’ license.

These restrictions on our constitutional rights would be made even worse if Congress passes the “SAVE Act,” which would mandate even stricter requirements that could disenfranchise tens of millions of voters, including as many as 69 million married women whose current last name is different from the last name on their birth certificates. All in service of fixing a problem which does not exist at any meaningful scale.

Voter registration restrictions are not the only policy within Trump’s executive order. The order would prohibit the counting of ballots which arrived late in the mail, a practice used by 17 states to ensure that everyone’s vote is counted. It could require states to count votes by hand unless they buy new voting machines that do not yet exist. The order also empowers DOGE and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to rifle through states’ voter registration lists to ensure their “consistency” with Trump’s demands. Although each of these reforms is small in their own right, they together constitute a serious effort to restrict the American people’s right to select their own leaders.

15. Weakening Election Security

Recent investments in the reliability of US elections have been yet another victim of the second Trump administration. The Republican budget bill passed in March included up to $40 million in cuts to election security grants. Earlier that same week, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency announced its own round of cuts to programs monitoring the security of US election infrastructure, programs which for now have been frozen. More recently, the administration fired regional election security officials. In an era defined by low public trust in the government and increasingly complex cyberattacks, these short-sighted cuts will only make things worse.

16. Denying the 2020 Election Results

There has never been a single shred of legitimate evidence that the 2020 Presidential election was “rigged” against Trump, yet the President has sought to keep this myth alive with a large-scale campaign of lies. He has practically never admitted the fact that he lost, and on one of the rare occasions when he did, he later said that he was speaking “sarcastically.” Democracy only works when politicians admit that it is possible for them to lose; a refusal to admit a loss is a refusal of democracy.

President Trump now hopes to reinforce this lie with state power. One former government official who was targeted by the President’s revenge campaign was punished specifically because he “falsely and baselessly denied that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen.” The purpose of this punishment is to dissuade any other government officials from pointing out the obvious holes in Trump’s lies about future elections, clearing the way for new attempts at defying voters’ choices. Election deniers are living in an alternate universe of their own making, and those of us who live in reality can now be punished for it.

17. Planning Around the President’s Ego

Any review of this administration would be incomplete without noting the profound role which President Trump’s ego and the cult of personality surrounding him plays in policymaking.

President Trump has planned a military parade which could cost as much as $92 million to take place on June 14th—his own birthday. He named a fighter jet under development the “F-47” in honor of himself, the 47th US President. He intends to use the funds he cut from museums and monuments around the country to instead build a “Garden of Heroes” dedicated to a random assortment of figures that he will personally label “American heroes.” He shared a video online imagining a massive golden statue of himself in a US-occupied Gaza Strip. When he lowered water efficiency standards for showerheads, he suggested that the counterproductive change was needed “to take care of my beautiful hair.”

One quarter of American voters believe that Donald Trump was chosen by God to win the 2024 presidential election. Trump, who shared a video online claiming that “God gave us Trump,” seems to believe the same.

18. Targeting Democratic States

More so than any prior President, Donald Trump has retaliated against US states and territories which he views as insufficiently loyal. California, New York, and Washington, DC—three of the country’s largest concentrations of Democratic voters—have all experienced real harms as a result of this vindictive behavior, putting their 60 million residents at risk.

California voted against Donald Trump 38-59; in response, the Trump administration launched an investigation targeting their high-speed rail project, interfered in their distribution of water resources, and has planned to revoke the state’s waiver authority under the Clean Air Act. New York voted against Trump 43-56; in response, the Trump administration took $80 million in FEMA funding away from New York City and blocked the city from pursuing their traffic reduction plans.

Washington, DC voted against Trump 6-90; in response, the Trump administration set up a task force to further increase policing in the nation’s most overpoliced city, and has even considered a plan to take over the local government entirely. Meanwhile, the Republican budget bill passed in March forced $1.1 billion in spending cuts upon the city (cuts which even Trump has called for the reversal of, as they could interfere with his planned police expansion).

Because the Trump administration never had much chance of winning these areas, they have apparently decided to treat them with a unique level of disdain. This explanation is consistent with the President’s actions towards these states during his first administration, as well as public reports from within the White House.

Mark Harvey, a member of the National Security Council during Trump’s first term, recounts having to show Trump how many supporters he had in California in order to convince him to send wildfire aid: “We went as far as looking up how many votes he got in those impacted areas … to show him these are people who voted for you.” Yet when Florida Governor Ron DeSantis requested disaster assistance after a hurricane in the Florida panhandle, DeSantis recalled him saying: “They love me in the Panhandle… I must have won 90 percent of the vote out there. Huge crowds. What do they need?” As of last year, President Trump has continued to suggest that he will not provide disaster aid to California.

19. Threatening Data Security

For whatever else DOGE represents, it also represents a clear threat to the security and privacy of sensitive government data. The group has sought out (and frequently acquired) access to large amounts of data from dozens of different government agencies. Providing this level of access to sensitive data to untrained DOGE employees was authorized by the White House without any concern for the federal laws protecting said data, such as the Privacy Act of 1974.

DOGE staffers who left the organization warned that it was “mishandling sensitive data, and breaking critical systems.” For a brief period of time, Marko Elez—a DOGE staffer notable for his racist social media posts—was accidentally given the ability to modify the system that tracks trillions of dollars of federal payments. Edward Coristine, another DOGE staffer with access to federal data, was previously associated with a cybercriminal ring that was in conflict with the FBI. When asked by the courts why they needed all of this government data in the first place, DOGE representatives were unable to provide “even a single reason.” 

Part II: Civil Rights and Liberties

The second Trump administration has rid itself of the ideas of “freedom” and “liberty” that have traditionally been valued so highly in American politics. In place of these ideas are authority, order, and nationalism—a rigid and hierarchical vision of the world in which a superior elite is destined to rule over the masses, while those who don’t fit in are punished relentlessly. Rather than taking a position on the proper balance of freedom and equality, Trumpism rejects both.

The second Trump administration is flatly hostile to civil rights and liberties. This approach is characterized by the targeted repression of speech and dissent, an expansion of police authority and mass surveillance, the aggressive pursuit of an ideological agenda through state coercion, a rejection of racial equality, a bottomless cruelty towards all immigrants, a reactionary view of women’s inferiority, baseless fearmongering about LGBTQ people, and cynical appeals to a deeply conservative understanding of Christianity’s role in secular politics.

20. Repressing Free Speech

The early actions of the second Trump administration have revealed their low tolerance for speech which is critical of the government.

One prominent source of free speech violations has been acting US Attorney for the District of Columbia Ed Martin, who wrongly believes that his office’s mission is to serve as “President Trump’s lawyers.” Martin launched an initiative called “Operation Whirlwind”—a name once used for the Soviet invasion of Hungary—to pursue penalties against critics of the Trump administration. In March, he sent a letter sent to Georgetown University informing them that the US Attorney’s office would no longer hire any of their graduates unless they modified what they teach to comply with the government’s priorities. In April, he sent letters to three medical journals accusing them of being “partisans in various scientific debates” and suggesting that they adopt “new norms.”

A White House memo from February called for a review of all federal funding to non-governmental organizations in order to deny funding specifically to those which “undermine the national interest.” No definition of “national interest” was provided, though President Trump’s memo makes it clear that it includes “the goals and priorities of my Administration.” For example, the White House has announced that the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program will no longer apply to employees of organizations which have “a substantial illegal purpose.” The crimes in question appear to be disagreeing with the administration on certain political issues, such as immigrant rights, a ceasefire in Palestine, and transgender rights.

Many of the administration’s immigration policies serve as mechanisms for restricting civil liberties like free speech. The White House believes that it has the authority to deport immigrants for no reason other than their political beliefs. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) hinted at the effects that this doctrine might have on free speech by posting (and then later deleting) an image stating that part of their mission is to prevent “Ideas” from “cross[ing] the U.S. border illegally.” A nation where the government is given control over the flow of ideas can be called many things, but “free” is not one of them.

21. Restricting the Freedom of the Press

New limitations on free speech have been particularly stringent against the press, who President Trump has long had an unfriendly relationship with. This approach was laid out plainly when Trump described the reporting of the nation’s three largest newspapers and five major news television stations as “totally illegal,” encouraging FBI agents to “watch for it…”

Trump suggested that one outlet which reported on him critically should “lose their license,” and called on the FCC chairman to “impose maximum fines and punishment.” The Chairman agrees, suggesting that news channels which fail to parrot narratives from White House press officials could be pursued on criminal grounds. He has recently been joined at the FCC by a far-right Trump loyalist who believes that the second Trump administration “will be a time for retribution.” FCC probes have been launched against AP, CBS, PBS, NBC, NPR, and a San Francisco news station which was coerced into removing its reporting on immigration raids from the internet.

The executive producer of CBS’ “60 Minutes” resigned in response to corporate pressure not to upset the Trump administration, citing his inability to “make independent decisions.” Threats of legal action against the President’s opponents have even forced college newspapers into removing their stories from the internet in order to avoid government retaliation.

The White House consolidated its power over the White House press corps, taking over the authority to assign journalists to press conferences and to decide where they sit. They restricted access for wire news services like Reuters and have even begun censoring certain news reports from the press pool’s mailing list. The most concerning effect of these changes is the White House’s newfound ability to choose who gets to report on them. In one notable incident, The Associated Press was barred from the Oval Office. In another, the White House removed the liberal HuffPost from the press pool’s rotation while granting additional access to conservative press outlets.

To underline their hostility, the Trump administration cancelled government subscriptions to news services which published unfavorable stories. They also launched an investigation aimed at independent public media outlets like NPR and PBS (which the President would “love to” defund) while congress holds hearings to berate these outlets for not focusing on the same stories prioritized by conservative media outlets. When the Warner Bros Discovery company reached out to the White House looking for ways to get on the President’s good side, the government reportedly suggested adding more pro-Trump figures to CNN’s news programs.

Budget cuts have gutted the US Agency for Global Media, home to a variety of state media outlets like Voice of America (VOA) which advocate for the US government’s position abroad. There are some early signs that this propaganda agency will now work on behalf of the President’s personal agenda. Trump’s first appointee to run the agency was conservative media critic L. Brent Bozell III, whose son was sentenced to prison for participating in the Capitol riots of January 6th, 2021; the nomination was later withdrawn to appoint Bozell to another position. Responsibility for the agency has now been given to Trump ally and 2020 election denier Kari Lake, who told a crowd of conservative activists that VOA could serve as a “weapon” in “an information war.”

22. Attacking Opponents

President Trump’s very first action of his second term was an executive order declaring that the Biden administration “engage[d] in a systematic campaign against its perceived political opponents.” This allegation was followed by the exact same type of “systematic campaign” which they decried. This campaign of revenge is the most extensive such campaign since at least the presidency of Richard Nixon. Indeed, the White House appears to have set up an internal team dedicated specifically to attacking the President’s enemies. Many of these targets were featured in an enemy list drafted in 2023 by now-FBI Director Kash Patel, though the administration’s attacks have gone far beyond this list.

The same day that he spoke out against “the Weaponization of the Federal Government,” President Trump signed an order stripping security clearances from 51 government officials who signed a letter criticizing the President (along with John Bolton, the first of several of Trump’s former-staffers-turned-foes to be targeted). Next came the news that security clearances were also being revoked for other former government officials, including all three of Trump’s electoral opponents: Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris.

The FBI froze the bank accounts of multiple environmental non-profits and launched criminal investigations into them for participating in a Biden-era government program; congressional Republicans have done the same. The President also considered removing the tax exempt status of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, an anti-corruption watchdog group which has investigated cases of corruption in both Trump administrations.

A range of retaliatory actions were taken against several major law firms who worked on legal cases involving Trump (Perkins Coie, Paul Weiss, Covington & Burling, Jenner & Block, WilmerHale, and Susman Godfrey), acts of revenge which drew a rare condemnation from the country’s top legal association. Paul Weiss and multiple other law firms were able to escape these punishments by gifting the White House roughly $1 billion in free legal services for the President to use for causes of his choice. This extortion racket seems to have been largely successful in chilling the willingness of other law firms to challenge illegal behavior by the Trump administration.

The legal campaign against the President’s perceived opponents affects both those inside and outside of the government. For those on the outside, the White House announced “sanctions against attorneys and law firms” which file certain lawsuits to challenge government policies. Within the government, Trump fired multiple DOJ lawyers who had previously investigated his crimes.

Local officials who don’t bend over backwards for the Trump administration are being put under investigation. The state of Maine is under threat of having their K-12 education funding cancelled in retaliation for a spat with the White House. An FBI analyst on Kash Patel’s enemy list was put on leave without explanation. Associates of former National Institutes of Health (NIH) official Anthony Fauci were fired. Multiple whistleblowers have faced government intimidation for their attempts at flagging potentially illegal behavior.

As previously mentioned, the White House believes that it has the authority to deport people specifically because of their political views. This means that being a critic of US government policy is now sufficient grounds for deportation. Immigration activist Jeanette Vizguerra was arrested outside of her job. When a Cornell student sued the Trump administration over the deportation of student activists, ICE went after him next. Meanwhile, the attacks directed at the free speech of Palestine supporters and foreign students are so extreme as to merit their own separate entries on this list.

23. Targeting Palestine Activists

The second Trump administration is engaged in a systematic assault on the freedoms of pro-Palestine activists. Some of these actions have been quite broad, such as the additional visa vetting requirements for everyone who has visited Palestine’s Gaza Strip since 2007. But most of the repression has been aimed specifically at student activists. The administration applied tremendous pressure on college administrators to crack down on so-called “illegal protests,” including letters sent to 60 colleges demanding that they restrict the free speech of their student bodies. The White House’s new “Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism” has dedicated zero effort towards actually combatting antisemitism, but has instead focused on limiting First Amendment rights on college campuses.

There have been widespread deportations of people here on student visas who spoke out against the ongoing genocide in Palestine. This began with the kidnapping of Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil in front of his pregnant wife, and act of retaliation for his non-violent activism. Khalil was present in the United States legally and has not been accused of violating any laws—instead, his life has been torn apart simply for expressing an opinion which the government dislikes. President Trump called Khalil’s kidnapping “the first arrest of many to come.” Many more foreign students have come under attack since then, as detailed in a later section of this report.

Columbia University has been a site of particularly intense repression, including searches of dorm buildings by federal agents who acquired warrants under false pretenses. The Trump administration also sent a letter to Columbia demanding a free speech crackdown on campus: expulsions and suspensions for protestors, limits on the “time, place, and manner” of protests, expanded student conduct guidelines which treat criticism of the Israeli government as discrimination, the “arrest or removal” of dissenters, and more. It is likely that many faculty at Columbia are currently under investigation, as is the case in the University of California school system.

According to Marianne Hirsch, a member of Columbia University’s Jewish Faculty Group, “it should be obvious to everyone that what is happening on this campus, or to this campus, is not about protecting Jews.” Given that one Trump official involved in the university crackdown has shared antisemitic social media content from a neo-Nazi account, Hirsch’s argument is hard to argue with. These blatant violations of our rights in service of protecting the reputation of a foreign power engaged in mass human rights violations is one of the most ominous signs of the US’ rapid descent into authoritarianism over the last 100 days.

24. Exploiting Anti-Terrorism Policies

While reducing their focus on genuinely violent domestic terrorism, the second Trump administration has expanded their operative definition of “terrorism” to help justify their campaign of repression against their opponents.

The White House Senior Director for Counterterrorism suggested that people criticizing the government’s immigration policies may be “aiding and abetting” terrorists by doing so, implying that such criticism would be a felony. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche has referred to peaceful campus protests in support of Palestinian human rights as “support of terrorism,” and the Justice Department launched a joint task force to criminalize these activities. The President and the Attorney General have described acts of vandalism against Musk’s Tesla Motors company as domestic terrorism. A French scientist was denied entry into the US because of anti-Trump messages on his phone that US authorities believed “can be described as terrorism,” according to French diplomats.

These political abuses of the already-nebulous term “terrorism” enable the Trump administration to apply draconian security policies passed in the wake of the September 11th attacks to suppress acts of dissent which cause no physical harm to any human being, further importing the authoritarian practices which defined the Global War on Terror onto United States soil.

25. Expanding Government Surveillance

The Trump administration has taken several steps to expand the government’s ability to spy on the public. First, President Trump fired enough members of the bipartisan Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board to deprive it of a quorum, thereby paralyzing it in its role as a watchdog advocating for privacy rights. Similarly, the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties was also downsized within the DHS. With these watchdogs neutered, the surveillance state has been busy.

Some of the most authoritarian parts of the federal government are now pouncing on the chance to expand mass surveillance. ICE recently solicited bids from contractors for a system which would monitor critics of the agency, including their name and location, work and school affiliations, facial identification scans, and “any identified possible family members or associates.” ICE is also setting up a separate database gathering information about people with extraordinary levels of detail, including location data. Among the beneficiaries of these plans are the nation’s largest private prison company and a highly controversial military contractor, both of whom are making millions off of new mass surveillance systems.

Creating databases filled with detailed information that could be used to monitor people seems to be a major interest of the second Trump administration. They have been planning to centralize all of the government’s various datasets so that they will have hundreds of datapoints on every single person in the country, all stored in the same place. Vulnerable populations are particularly threatened by this government monitoring, as exemplified by the NIH’s effort to create a “comprehensive” registry of people with autism using their private medical records.

The second Trump administration has been demanding the social media and phone data of immigrants and visa holders. The DHS now openly admits that it is monitoring immigrants’ social media presence for unapproved opinions. Like many other violations of freedom which affect immigrants first, these invasive digital searches have already begun to expand to citizens: a US lawyer representing protesters was recently detained at the Detroit airport, where federal agents demanded that he turn over his phone so that they could examine his contacts list.

It would be foolish to believe that the massive expansion in government surveillance unfolding at the US-Mexican border will only affect immigrants, or that the spying on students will only affect foreign students. The demand for mass surveillance reaches deep inside of our borders. Look no further than a recent effort by the FBI to monitor citizens’ criticism of big corporations as a form of “terrorism.” To Big Brother, quaint notions of “citizenship” are meaningless.

26. Waging War on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

The second Trump administration has declared war on anything and everything having to do with “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI), a term which generally refers to movements for racial justice, LGBTQ rights, women’s equality, and so on. Among the many civil servants who have been fired are thousands who have been let go simply because their job titles include DEI-related words. This is part of a broad, government-wide censorship effort: the administration is reviewing all government documents in order to purge those which use a list of nearly 200 words deemed “woke” by the Trump administration. These include the phrases “ethnicity,” “equality,” “female,” “gender,” “mental health,” “minority,” “Native American,” “pollution,” “victim,” and “women.”

In agencies like the Defense Department (DOD), this censorship campaign has meant the erasure of information on Black war heroes, the deletion of pages about Holocaust remembrance, purges of libraries at military academies, and the flagging of a photo for removal because it used the word “gay”— as in “Enola Gay,” the plane which dropped a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima. While some of these removals were reversed, many more records remain missing. At least one critic of these policies has been blocked from speaking at the US Naval Academy.

The White House is now closely policing the government’s use of language, including memos demanding the replacement of all uses of the neutral term “noncitizen” with the far-spookier “alien.” They even appear to have spent the time necessary to create a formal policy against responding to emails from any sender who lists pronouns in their email footer.

The White House’s opposition to diversity, equity, and inclusion is being imposed upon the education system as well. One executive order threatened to cut off funding to public schools which teach students about the issues of race and gender, instead requiring them to promote “patriotic education.” The Education Department is enforcing this propagandistic order, launching an investigation into more than 50 universities for their attempts to promote diversity, inclusion, and equity on campuses. Even private sector organizations have been targeted by the government’s anti-DEI crusade, with the FCC investigating media companies for “promoting invidious forms of DEI…”

Another executive order makes it clear that this war on DEI is a thinly-veiled attempt at pushing a culturally conservative agenda on the American people. Attempts at highlighting the long history of injustice in the US are dismissed out of hand as a “revisionist movement” which seeks to “rewrite history”—quite a claim from an administration that is literally rewriting history. Thus, the Trump administration demands that the Smithsonian museum system censor itself and redirect its focus towards America’s “extraordinary heritage.” While claiming to fight the “ideological indoctrination” of their opponents, the Trump administration is now mandating ideological indoctrination.

27. Reversing Civil Rights

The second Trump administration has reversed several major civil rights policies, including some created during the original civil rights movement. An early executive order from the White House overturned EO 11246, which was implemented in 1965 to prevent racial discrimination in federal hiring. The Minority Business Development Agency, created by Republican President Richard Nixon in 1969 to promote economic opportunities for minority-owned businesses, was one of many agencies which Trump “eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.” The US Commission on Civil Rights, created in 1957, is currently being hijacked by the Trump administration to push right-wing culture war grievances.

Under Trump, the federal government has effectively halted all enforcement of civil rights laws. Lawyers at the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division were told to halt the filing of any new civil rights complaints, and some were moved out of the division entirely. The President fired two commissioners on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, further obstructing federal civil rights actions. Public schools have been urged to reduce their own enforcement of civil rights policies, and the President has redirected the work of the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights towards the crackdown on college protests.

28. Launching Mass Deportations

An extremely aggressive mass deportation effort was one of the centerpieces of Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. The President is making good on this promise with a target of one million deportations this year. As a result, communities are being torn apart, lives are being ruined, the economy is weakening, and fundamental rights are being violated.

The first month of the second Trump administration laid the groundwork for mass deportations. The administration expanded the use of “expedited removal” procedures to bypass immigrants’ due process rights, removed protections for “sensitive” zones so that authorities could raid schools and churches, redirected law enforcement efforts away from serious crimes to instead focus on deportations, paused federal funding to cities which welcome immigrants, paid for anti-immigrant advertising, and briefly moved some migrants to the notorious US torture facility at Guantanamo Bay (including those with no criminal records). Plans have been made to charge some undocumented immigrants nearly $1,000 a day for their presence, and to block mixed-status families from public housing.

Congress gave the administration an early boost by passing the Laken Riley Act, a misguided law which mandates the detention of migrants who are accused of even minor crimes like shoplifting and greatly expands the ability of state governments to sue the federal government for immigration policies they dislike. Congress also gave the White House an additional $485 million in deportation funding, though this is far too small for what the administration has in mind: they are planning for a nationwide expansion of detention facilities that could cost more than $45 billion. In April, ICE announced its largest ever contract for detention camps. The largest beneficiaries of this funding are private prison companies, who are using ICE funding to expand and to reopen closed detention centers.

The vast majority of the victims of this mass deportation campaign are people who pose no threat to others whatsoever. Federal agents were sent to elementary schools to interrogate children. One immigrant was sent to Guantanamo Bay for riding his bike down the wrong side of the road. The government used a photo of a teenager holding a water gun as evidence that he is a gang member. The White House has argued that it has an “inherent” authority to deport anyone, regardless of legal justification.

So eager was the administration to deport that it even sent accidental deportation letters to US citizens (and Ukrainian refugees). Many accidental deportation orders appear to have gone to immigration lawyers, suggesting that immigration officials sent the orders out to everyone they had in their records, regardless of their circumstances. Government harassment of immigration lawyers is on the rise. So too is the number of US citizens being forcibly held in immigrant detention centers, a problem which affects Latino citizens in particular.

Several parts of the administration’s deportation strategy make implicit admissions of the enormous value that immigrants contribute to the US. Sharing immigrants’ IRS and Medicare data with ICE while deleting their Social Security records is an admission that undocumented immigrants pay nearly $98 billion in taxes each year, much of which goes to programs that they will never receive benefits from (including $26 billion in taxes to Social Security and $6 billion to Medicare). The President’s suggestion that farmers could request exemptions from deportation for their farmworkers is an admission that the US agricultural system would collapse without the labor of undocumented immigrants who subsidize our lifestyle.

Many of those kidnapped by ICE are not properly processed, effectively being “disappeared” without any way for their families and friends to know what happened to them. The widespread failure of ICE to respect constitutional due process protections has led to the deportations of multiple US citizens, including one man in Chicago who was kidnapped off the street, shoved in a van, and detained for 10 hours before anyone bothered checking to see that he was a citizen. Yet by far the most disturbing human rights violations of the mass deportation campaign are those caused by the Alien Enemies Act.

29. Invoking the Alien Enemies Act

On March 15th, the Trump administration invoked the authorities of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to accelerate their deportation campaign. The law, intended to be used only in wartime, was last activated during World War II to imprison more than 120,000 Japanese-American people in internment camps based purely on their ancestry. The current White House seems to aspire to human rights violations of comparable severity.

The government first used its new powers to deport more than 280 people who the government claimed were members of a Venezuelan gang, sending them to an infamous mega-prison (CECOT) run by the dictatorship of El Salvador. No prisoner has ever been released from CECOT, where torture is common and tens of thousands are used as slaves. These deportations were in direct violation of a court order which the White House chose to ignore.

Banishment to a foreign gulag would be morally disgusting even if it was used on gang members. But it was not. The government identified gang members using a checklist that encouraged authorities to round people up on extremely flimsy grounds. Specifically, according to one ICE agent, they were “finding and questioning everyone who has tattoos.”

Those deported to Salvadoran torture chambers included a soccer player with a tattoo of his favorite team; a teenager who got a rose tattoo because he “thought it looked cool;” and a man who got an autism awareness tattoo in celebration of his autistic brother. At least one deportation case cited the logo of the Chicago Bulls basketball team as a gang sign. In another instance, an ICE agent who mistakenly detained the wrong person was informed by a fellow agent: “No, he’s not the one.” A third ICE agent intervened: “Take him anyway.”

Andry Jose Hernandez Romero, a gay make-up artist who fled Venezuela, was detained by ICE for having tattoos which read “Mom” and “Dad.” He had no criminal record. Romero was deported to the Salvadoran mega-prison, where US journalists later observed him being beaten by guards while he prayed to God and cried out for his mother. The report accusing Romero of gang affiliations was signed by disgraced former police officer Charles Cross Jr., who had previously been flagged by prosecutors for his dishonesty and fired after drunkenly driving his car into a family’s home. Romero is still imprisoned in El Salvador.

At first, the Trump administration insisted that it had “carefully vetted each individual alien to ensure they were in fact members” of a gang. They acknowledged that they often found no evidence of gang affiliations, but argued that the lack of proof was proof: “…the lack of specific information about each individual actually highlights the risk they pose.” Less than two weeks later, the government finally admitted that some of the deportees were not gang members, but were instead “involved in activities that were not productive to the United States.”

The entirety of the government’s false narrative soon fell apart. Between 75% and 90% of the deportees currently sitting in the Salvadoran torture prison have no known criminal records. The deportation operation was so rushed and unorganized that it accidentally included eight women who had to be flown back to the US. Yet the White House has continually refused to comply with a court order to bring back Kilmar Abrego Garcia—an immigrant included in the deportations by “administrative error.” When asked by a US Senator why they were continuing to detain Garcia, the Salvadoran Vice President said that the Trump administration was paying them to do so. Garcia’s wife was forced into hiding after the DHS posted her address online.

The nightmarish ordeal suffered by those falsely accused and shipped off to be beaten for the remainder of their lives is itself sufficient grounds for a complete impeachment and removal of President Trump, as well as a trial for crimes against humanity. Yet this state violence is not limited to immigrants; the government wants to make it clear that it can do this to citizens too.

The dictator of El Salvador offered to open his mega-prison to detain not only immigrants, but also “U.S. citizens or legal residents,” according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Asked about the idea of sending imprisoned US citizens to the gulag, President Trump replied “Well, I love that… I have suggested that, you know, why should it stop just at people who cross the border illegally?” Asked again whether he was considering subjecting citizens to this barbaric treatment, Trump replied: “…yes, that includes them. What, do you think there’s a special category of person?”

One plan under consideration in the White House would allow for US citizens to be stripped of their citizenship and deported to the gulag. Behind these same closed doors, the administration also concluded that the Alien Enemies Act allows them to break into peoples’ homes and arrest them without a warrant, regardless of the Fourth Amendment.

In a unanimous Supreme Court decision demanding that the administration return the wrongfully-deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted that the White House’s position “implies that it could deport and incarcerate any person, including U.S. citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene.” The White House, which is still trying to organize more deportations under the Alien Enemies Act, has so far defied this court order and insisted that the innocent people sent to El Salvador “should stay there for the rest of their lives.”

30. Militarizing the Border

Another component of President Trump’s war on immigrants is the extreme militarization of the US-Mexico border. Borders have always been zones of authoritarianism where normal laws don’t apply: for example, US Border Patrol agents have long been able to violate the rights of anyone within 100 miles of a border—an area covering two-thirds of the US population. By deploying the military to the border, President Trump is going even further, turning the southernmost area of the US into a military occupation zone.

After declaring a national emergency to expand his powers, President Trump sent thousands of troops to the US-Mexican border alongside AI surveillance systems, radar equipment, surveillance drones, armored vehicles, helicopters, and a Navy destroyer. During the first month and a half, this operation cost about $6.4 million a day, for a total of $328 million. Such an occupation will likely last for “years, not months,” according to US Northern Command.

The President has given the military authority to occupy federal lands and create “National Defense Areas” on the US side of the border, a zone in which soldiers are authorized to detain and arrest people on civilian territory (and if this deployment is anything like the one in Trump’s first term, soldiers will likely also have the ability to use lethal force). This move was carefully crafted to avoid the requirements of the Posse Comitatus Act, which has kept military and civilian law enforcement separated since 1878. The barriers between soldier and cop were designed to prevent a military dictatorship, but have long been under assault by American politicians. Now, ICE and the military are cooperating more than ever before, with the military even being used to evade court orders.

The expansion of military authority into non-military matters is a hallmark of authoritarianism, one which the Trump administration has happily adopted. The brief detention of immigrants at the illegal and notoriously brutal Guantanamo Bay detention center made little sense as a practical matter, but the logistics were not the point: the point was to declare that the military now has free reign to brutalize immigrants, and perhaps even free reign to brutalize any citizens who stand in their way. One idea under consideration by the Trump administration is invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807, which would give the President newfound powers to use the military to repress protests led by the American people.

31. Targeting Child Migrants

The sadistic treatment of minors which characterized the first Trump administration has come back in full force. The second Trump administration has relaunched its earlier family detention practices, reopened private detention centers for children, and eliminated the executive order which created a task force to reunite the families separated during Trump’s first term. Any semblance of concern for these young lives has gone out the window: the government has eliminated funding for both care services and legal aid for migrant children.

As many as 1,360 children were never reunited with their parents after being separated from them by the first Trump administration, leaving them orphaned by the US government. This number will only grow in the coming years.

32. Terrorizing Legal Immigrants

The modern Republican party has long sought to convince the public that they only have a problem with “illegal” immigrants, and that they have no issue with foreigners who come to the United States through legal processes. The second Trump administration has permanently shattered this myth with an unprecedented assault on non-citizens who are in the country legally.

First, the pathway to legal immigration has narrowed. In his first week, President Trump shut down an app which simplified the process of applying for asylum. The Citizenship and Integration Grant Program, which provided legal immigrants with civic education about the US, has been eliminated. All South Sudanese immigrants have had their visas cancelled, not because of anything they’ve done, but as an act of retaliation against the war-torn government of South Sudan for not sufficiently facilitating US deportation flights. And though it was predictably blocked by the courts, the Trump administration also sought to eliminate a basic constitutional principle in its attempt to end birthright citizenship.

New restrictions have been placed on the freedom of movement for all foreigners in the US, regardless of legal status. The government is demanding that all immigrants register themselves with the Department of Homeland Security. To stay in compliance with this totalitarian order, all adult noncitizens will be required to carry proof of their registration with them “at all times.”

The government has targeted many “green card” holders, pausing many green card applications and aggressively harassing those who already have them. An elderly Filipina woman who has been living in the US with a green card for fifty years was captured by ICE and detained in a private prison. A German man with a green card was “violently interrogated” at a US airport, deprived of sleep and access to his medications, and given so little water and food that he had to be admitted to a hospital.

Refugees who came here legally have been punished for doing so: the government is specifically targeting people who registered for the US’ humanitarian parole program for deportation. One such target was Maksym Chernyak, a Ukrainian refugee with no serious medical history who died of “bleeding from the brain” after being detained in an ICE detention center where at least two others have died.

Even tourists have been caught up in the terror. Law enforcement has been using increasingly “extreme” tactics against visitors to the US, prompting travel warnings from the governments of Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Two teenage backpackers were detained and deported for not making hotel reservations before their arrival in Hawaii. Multiple tourists have been detained in severe conditions, including a Canadian woman who was forced to sleep on the cement floor of a detention cell for two weeks despite having legal authorization to enter the US. Canadian visitors are now required to register with the US government when staying for longer than 30 days, a new restriction on visitors from the former US ally. Across the Atlantic, European tourism to the US is currently in freefall.

There is only one type of foreigner which the Trump administration is willing to tolerate: the rich. Plans are currently underway to replace the EB-5 visa with a “gold card” program offering a path to citizenship for the price of $5 million. “Wealthy people will be coming into our country by buying this card,” said President Trump. The only immigrants who are safe in the United States right now are millionaires.

33. Attacking Foreign Students

The campaign of repression against immigrants who are legally present in the US has been particularly noticeable on college campuses, where the Trump administration has launched a comprehensive assault on free speech activities. The government has bragged that at least 1,800 students here on student visas have fallen victim to its “Catch and Revoke” program, many but not all of whom participated in pro-Palestine protests. US officials have been desperate to justify this blatant violation of free speech, accusing those who participated in peaceful rallies of engaging “in acts of rebellion and riots on campus.”

Those affected include:

• Mahmoud Khalil, kidnapped by immigration agents in front of his pregnant wife for engaging in non-violent pro-Palestine activism. The government has consistently failed to produce any evidence of any wrongdoing by Khalil, and the case against him is based on tabloid reporting and obvious falsehoods. Still, the government is arguing that a McCarthyist law from 1952 gives them the power to jail and deport him for his political views. Khalil was denied a temporary release to be present for the birth of his first child.

• Rumeysa Ozturk, kidnapped off of the street by masked federal agents for an op-ed she wrote for her student newspaper defending “the equal dignity and humanity of all people.” Prior to her capture, the State Department had already concluded that there was no evidence of her espousing antisemitic or pro-terrorism views; her only offense was “engag[ing] in anti-Israel activism.”

• Yunseo Chung, a green card holder who has lived in the US since the age of 7. Chung maintained a 3.99 GPA at Columbia University, where she engaged in peaceful pro-Palestine activism.

• Mohsen Mahdawi, a green card holder and student activist who was legally complying with the process for becoming a US citizen until he was captured by ICE at an official interview for citizenship.

• Kseniia Petrova, a Harvard medical researcher who fled from Russia to avoid persecution after protesting against the invasion of Ukraine. There is no record of her participating in any activism in the US; instead, she has been detained by ICE for a failure to properly declare a scientific sample at airport customs, an offense usually punishable by fine.

• Alireza Doroudi, a Ph.D. student who has been accused of posing “significant national security concerns” despite never once participating in any campus protest.

34. Turning Our Backs on Refugees

The notion that the United States should serve as a beacon of hope for those fleeing violence and oppression around the world is one which President Trump categorically rejects. Accordingly, the White House has been dismantling policies which once provided safety to those who fled from persecution at home.

Under President Trump, the US has closed the Refugee Admissions Program and removed various protections for refugees from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Ukraine, and Venezuela, leaving hundreds of thousands of people vulnerable to deportation back to situations where their lives will be in danger. Another 900,000 people who legally applied for parole are now being asked to “self-deport.”

For those at the US-Mexico border waiting to apply for asylum status, the Trump administration has encouraged judges to reject them without hearings. They have also reinstated the “Remain in Mexico” policy of Trump’s first term, trapping asylum seekers in dangerous refugee camps without access to basic services. If this decision goes anything like how it did last time, thousands of people will be exposed to entirely avoidable harm.

35. Encouraging Police Violence

Despite the scale of the Black Lives Matter protests which drew attention to the United States’ epidemic of violence and abuse by law enforcement, fairly little has changed in American policing in recent years. Still, the second Trump administration is attempting to undo the incremental reforms which did occur, giving police officers and federal law enforcement additional power to violate our rights with impunity.

The White House first revoked a 2022 executive order which made some progress towards addressing the violent behavior of federal law enforcement, with several different effects. First, federal law enforcement is now free of several restraints meant to protect human life, including a ban on lethal chokeholds, the requirement that force should only be used as a last resort, and restrictions on the use of controversial “no-knock raids” (which have even drawn criticism from conservative organizations). It also had the effect of shutting down the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database, which collected information about police misconduct to make it harder for rouge police officers to find new law enforcement jobs after being fired elsewhere for severe misconduct.

These changes are likely to worsen the culture of violence within US law enforcement. The potential for increased state violence is particularly high in Washington, DC, where the acting US Attorney for the District of Columbia issued a letter further loosening of police accountability measures. These actions include the weakening of the “Lewis List” which monitors police misconduct, as well as a promise to “stand up” to public defenders and judges who try to hold police officers accountable. The fact that these actions have been taken specifically within the nation’s capital city suggest that the move will allow for an intensified repression of political protesters.

36. Expanding the Death Penalty

An executive order issued on the first day of Trump’s second term resumes death penalty executions and calls for an expansion of the death penalty within the federal justice system, telling the Attorney General to “pursue the death penalty for all crimes of a severity demanding its use.” In addition, the White House has demanded that those on death row be treated in cruel and unusual ways prior to their execution, “to ensure that these offenders are imprisoned in conditions consistent with the monstrosity of their crimes and the threats they pose.” One potential victim of this killing spree could be alleged CEO killer Luigi Mangione, who the DOJ is already describing as a guilty party despite his ongoing trial.

Before this escalation, the United States was already one of the world’s leading executioners of its own people. The death penalty is both unethical and ineffective at stopping crime, but the Trump administration’s embrace of the practice highlights an equally significant case for its abolition: the tremendous potential for abuse associated with giving an authoritarian leader the power to choose which of his citizens to kill.

37. Worsening Mass Incarceration

The second Trump administration hopes to expand mass incarceration in the United States, which is already among the top five nations in the world for jailing its own people. One DOJ memo calls on prosecutors to pursue the most aggressive charges possible, including “those punishable by death, or those with the most significant mandatory minimum… and the most substantial recommendation under the Sentencing Guidelines.” This will worsen the prevalence of excessive sentencing within the United States, leading to greater prison overpopulation at the expense of an effective justice system.

By rescinding the ban on private prisons, Trump has once again opened the door for the use of facilities which are inhumane, wasteful, and corrupt. By dropping a legal case against a private prison company which retaliated against its inmates, the President is also signaling that prisoners can be abused without consequence. Because private prisons have a profit incentive to maximize the number of people incarcerated, they frequently lobby for excessively harsh criminal justice policies, further worsening mass incarceration. Their return to the federal justice system will also have the effect of rewarding the private prison industry for the more than $1 million they contributed to Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.

38. Restricting Abortion

Following the reversal of the historic Roe v. Wade case by the US Supreme Court (including all three justices appointed during President Trump’s first term), the White House sought to further reduce abortion access. Protections put into place by the previous administration were eliminated, funding for Planned Parenthood and other reproductive healthcare centers was frozen, the informational resource reproductiverights.gov was deleted, abortion coverage in military healthcare plans was reduced, and a federal lawsuit requiring government-funded hospitals to provide abortions during medical emergencies was dropped.

President Trump also made it easier for extremists to harass reproductive healthcare providers and block patients from accessing them, a trend with a long and deadly history. The White House has said that it will now only enforce the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act in “extraordinary circumstances,” and 23 anti-abortion activists who broke the law have been pardoned.

The administration’s opposition to abortion has affected US foreign policy as well. The US rejoined the Geneva Consensus Declaration, an anti-abortion statement supported almost exclusively by dictatorships and nations with a poor record on women’s rights. Even more concerningly, the White House reimplemented the global gag rule (also known as the “Mexico City Policy”), which denies foreign aid to all organizations providing abortion counseling, advocating for legal abortion, or offering abortion services (although a separate policy has always blocked US aid funds from paying for abortions directly). Researchers have repeatedly found that this policy disrupts women’s healthcare around the world, resulting in thousands of preventable deaths and disease infections each year while also failing to reduce abortion rates.

39. Weakening Sexual Assault Protections

Under the second Trump administration, the Education Department has weakened its enforcement of Title IX protections against sexual harassment on school and university campuses. By reverting back to earlier regulations, the change makes it harder to report and address cases of sexual assault and harassment in schools, forces victims to face cross-examination by their assaulters, and eliminates protections for trans students.

Schools aren’t the only place where policies to address sexual assault are being reversed. The administration also closed the National Prison Rape Elimination Act Resource Center. Next up could be the US military, where officials are considering the removal of sexual assault protections for soldiers as part of the administration’s deregulatory campaign.

This policy is particularly atrocious when viewed next to the White House’s embrace of multiple alleged and confirmed sex offenders, including rapist Conor McGregor, alleged statutory rapist Matt Gaetz, accused sex traffickers Andrew and Tristan Tate, alleged molester Steven Munoz (who repeatedly ran afoul of Title IX protections), and even the President himself.

40. Undermining LGBTQ Rights

On his second day in office, President Trump eliminated anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ federal contractors, along with anti-discrimination protections for transgender contractors and employees. Homophobic and transphobic discrimination in the workplace is now effectively legal against approximately 100,000 LGBTQ contractors and 14,000 transgender civil servants. Meanwhile, the White House’s forthcoming budget proposal would eliminate the suicide hotline for LGBTQ youth, a service helps more 2,100 young people in crisis every day.

The anti-LGBTQ agenda of the second Trump administration applies overseas as well. The White House revoked an existing memo which declared that the US shall “pursue an end to violence and discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or sex characteristics.” US embassies have also been banned from flying the LGBTQ flag. Through these actions, the administration has made it clear that the United States government does not believe in LGBTQ rights at home or abroad.

41. Attacking Trans People

Transgender people have faced an extremely disproportionate amount of cruelty under the second Trump administration. The trans community makes up 0.6% of the nation, yet by my count at least 2.7% of the administration’s policies so far has something to do with them. In other words, the proportion of Trump’s policies focused on trans people is more than four times larger than the proportion of Americans who are trans.

The White House has sought to end the enforcement of anti-discrimination protections for trans people, ban them from military service, bar them from receiving accurate passports, and to endanger trans women by transferring them to men’s prisons. After defunding research on trans healthcare, the government is now commissioning propaganda about trans people’s “regret” after medically transitioning (the actual rate of regret is below 1%). Worst of all, the government has effectively denied the very existence of transgender people through a scientifically illiterate executive order declaring that human sex is binary and “not changeable.”

Trans youth, who already face widespread discrimination and bullying, must now contend with a new onslaught from their own government. President Trump’s actions have eliminated protections and resources for trans students at schools, blocked them from receiving age-appropriate medical care, and restricted their participation in school sports. This transphobic extremism has gone so far as to deny $175 million in funding to the University of Pennsylvania for having one single trans athlete, four years ago. The intended purpose of these actions is to turn trans people into second-class citizens and erase them from public life entirely, crushing personal freedom and destroying thousands of lives.

42. Weakening Separation of Church and State

In February, the White House announced the creation of the White House Faith Office (WHFO) as an office which works alongside “faith-based entities, community organizations, and houses of worship.” The White House already had an office which served that purpose: the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, which Trump had dissolved several weeks earlier.

This shake-up was only the first sign that the new WHFO would be a different beast entirely. Trump’s appointee to lead the Office is Paula White, the leader of a Christian ministry which she named after herself.

Speaking on the television show of notorious scam artist Jim Bakker in 2019, White said that Christians who do not support Trump will “have to stand accountable before God one day.” She is associated with a far-right Christian movement which believes that the church must take direct control of the US government. When early results from the 2020 election revealed that President Trump was likely to lose his reelection campaign, White stated that it was the result of “demonic confederacies… attempting to steal the election from Trump” and called upon an “angelic reinforcement” to intervene. While an appointee to her new White House position, she has offered “supernatural blessings” to anyone who donates more than $1,000 to her ministry.

It is interesting to note what exactly the Trump administration considers a risk to religious liberty. An executive order on the matter mentioned “anti-Semitic, anti-Christian, and additional forms of anti-religious bias,” a statement conspicuously absent of any mention of Islamophobia. Of course, even the mention of antisemitism is insincere; the only religion considered worthy of protection by this government is Christianity. The DOJ created a “Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias” to combat the imaginary anti-Christian discrimination within the US government (Christians are already overrepresented in high-ranking government positions like congress). This has created a bizarre environment for the remaining employees of Departments like State and Veterans Affairs, who are now being encouraged to tattle on one another for any activity which might resemble “anti-Christian bias.”