A Full List of Donald Trump's Corruption

Start here: the two-minute version

This page tracks two different things, and keeping them separate is what makes it credible.

Enrichment is using the office for private financial gain. It is proven with documents: disclosures, contracts, court judgments. Most of it is nearly impossible to rebut.

Entrenchment is using the office to remove whatever could constrain you: inspectors general, prosecutors, judges, journalists, statisticians, election officials. Political scientists call this executive aggrandizement. Each step is legal or arguably legal. The damage is cumulative. This is an argued case, not a recited one, and the page says so.

The single most important fact on this page: most of what follows is legal. The president is exempt from the federal conflict-of-interest statute (18 U.S.C. 208). Blind trusts are a tradition, not a requirement. The pardon power is nearly unlimited. "This is legal, and that is the problem" is a stronger claim than "this is a crime," and much harder to answer.

How to read the labels

COURT: a judge or jury made a formal finding.
RECORD: it is in a filing, signed order, financial disclosure, or sworn testimony.
REPORTED: credible news organizations reported it; no court has ruled.
DISPUTED: the facts or the law are unsettled and reasonable people disagree.
UNPROVEN: the timing or pattern looks bad; nothing has been demonstrated.

Every section ends with the administration's best answer. If a section has no good answer, the page says that too.

The ledger at a glance

$2.2 billion in income reported on his 2025 financial disclosure, roughly $1.4 billion of it from crypto, an industry his administration regulates. [RECORD]
$635 million in memecoin royalties in 2025 while nearly every other buyer lost money. [RECORD]
$187 million to the family from an Abu Dhabi-controlled buyer of 49 percent of the family crypto company, four days before the inauguration and undisclosed for over a year. [RECORD]
14 of 27 corporate ballroom donors got new or expanded federal contracts worth over $50 billion within six months of donating. [RECORD]
89 corporations saw federal enforcement investigations halted or dismissed. [RECORD]
1,800 or more pardons this term against 237 in the entire first term. [RECORD]
17 inspectors general fired in one night; a judge found it violated the law. [COURT]
4 of 4 law-firm punishment orders struck down; the government dropped its appeals. [COURT]
17 federal rulings lost in the effort to seize state voter rolls. [COURT]
6 to 3 losses at the Supreme Court on birthright citizenship and on National Guard deployments to American cities. [COURT]
227 or more people killed in strikes on alleged drug boats with no congressional authorization, as of August 26, 2026. [RECORD]
2 United States citizens killed by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis in one month, both labeled domestic terrorists by the Homeland Security secretary before the evidence was in. [RECORD]

PART A. ENRICHMENT: MONEY GOING INTO HIS POCKET

A1. The headline disclosure

RECORD His 2025 annual financial disclosure, filed with the Office of Government Ethics and released June 30, 2026, runs 927 pages and reports $2.2 billion in income. The vice president's runs 17 pages. Forbes independently estimated about $2.4 billion.
RECORD Roughly $1.4 billion came from cryptocurrency. His 2024 disclosure listed $57.4 million from crypto. That is about a 25-fold jump in one year, in an industry his appointees regulate.
RECORD He has never used a blind trust. Assets sit in a revocable trust controlled by his sons.
RECORD Income from branded watches and a sneaker and fragrance deal was "inadvertently omitted" from a prior disclosure.
REPORTED Asked July 1, 2026 why he was profiting, he said "the stock market's going up, everybody's profiting." PolitiFact rated it Mostly False: two-thirds to 80 percent of his gains came from non-stock sources.

The other side: every dollar is disclosed, which is the point of the disclosure system. Wealthy presidents have always had holdings. The law does not require divestiture.

A2. Crypto: World Liberty Financial, the memecoin, and Justin Sun

RECORD World Liberty Financial was founded in fall 2024 by Trump and his sons. Its governing documents give a Trump family entity 75 percent of token-sale revenue after expenses. The family took in close to $800 million from it in 2025, and he still holds about 15.75 billion tokens.
RECORD Four days before the 2025 inauguration, an entity controlled by the deputy ruler of Abu Dhabi, who is also the UAE's national security adviser, bought a 49 percent stake. It was not made public for more than a year. It put $187 million into the family.
RECORD An Emirati fund then pledged $2 billion. Two weeks later, Trump announced the UAE could buy hundreds of thousands of advanced Nvidia AI chips, reversing security restrictions imposed under the prior administration.
UNPROVEN The timing between the $2 billion pledge and the chip reversal is documented. A quid pro quo is not.
RECORD The $TRUMP memecoin launched days before the inauguration and earned him roughly $635 million in royalties in 2025. Nearly all other investors lost money. Top holders were offered a private dinner with him.
RECORD Justin Sun, a Chinese crypto billionaire, put about $75 million into World Liberty and roughly $100 million into the memecoin, becoming its top holder and winning the dinner. The SEC had charged Sun and his companies with fraud and market manipulation and the case was near trial. In February 2025, two months after Sun's first purchase, the SEC under new leadership paused the case. In March 2026 it was resolved: a company paid $10 million and all personal charges against Sun were dismissed with prejudice.
REPORTED The New York Times reported in December 2025 that Sun's companies received materially lenient SEC treatment after he formed financial ties to Trump's crypto ventures. Three House Democrats formally raised pay-to-play concerns with the SEC chair.
RECORD The postscript: World Liberty froze Sun's tokens in September 2025. He sued in April 2026 alleging he was fraudulently induced to invest. World Liberty countersued for defamation in May 2026. Even the buyer says he was defrauded.
RECORD Binance holds more than half of World Liberty's USD1 stablecoin in circulation. Binance pleaded guilty in 2023 to money laundering and sanctions violations. Its founder was pardoned in October 2025 (see A8).
RECORD World Liberty has applied for a national trust bank charter from the OCC, which loosened its criteria. A Senate subcommittee opened an inquiry citing potential foreign emoluments violations. RE-VERIFY charter status.

The other side: the administration argues the prior SEC waged an unjustified war on crypto and that policy would be identical no matter who owned what. That is not an absurd argument. The counter: nobody can know that, and that is exactly why presidents have always divested.

A3. Market-moving posts and selling early access to them

DISPUTED On April 9, 2025 at 9:37 a.m. he posted "THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!! DJT." Four hours later he announced a 90-day tariff pause. The S&P 500 rose 9.5 percent, one of the largest single-day gains since World War II. His company's stock closed up 21.7 percent, adding roughly $410 million to his net worth.
REPORTED Unusual options volume appeared in the minutes before the announcement. AP reported in May 2026 on thousands of disclosed trades, including in companies his policies affect. CNN reported in July 2026 that he promoted companies days after buying their stock.
DISPUTED A securities law professor said the post alone was "pretty clearly not insider trading" absent evidence he traded on it or tipped anyone privately. No charges were brought.
RECORD On August 1, 2026, Trump Media launched Truth API, a paid feed that delivers posts from the ten highest-profile Truth Social accounts, including the president's, to institutional trading firms milliseconds before the public. Pricing ran up to $100,000 a month. The Wall Street Journal reported five high-speed trading firms signed up. He owns about 41 percent of the company. He announces tariffs, military action, and personnel decisions on that platform before official channels. Senators Warren and Schiff asked the SEC to investigate. RE-VERIFY SEC response.

The other side: Trump Media says the data is public, that critics conflate public and nonpublic information, and that the product is comparable to premium feeds sold elsewhere. No law has been found violated.

A4. His businesses and foreign governments

RECORD The company pledged in January 2025 not to deal with foreign governments. New deals during the presidency include a Qatari golf resort (Eric Trump's own statement named state-owned Qatari Diar as the partner), a roughly $4 billion project on state-owned land in Oman, and a Dubai tower with crypto-purchasable units. LIV Golf, funded by Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund, plays repeatedly at his courses. Jared Kushner's investment fund took $2 billion from the same Saudi fund.
RECORD In the same period the administration approved $1.4 billion in arms to the UAE and announced $142 billion for Saudi Arabia, having already approved $1.96 billion to Qatar.
RECORD In his first term, $7.8 million flowed to Trump businesses from foreign governments across 20 countries, including a Chinese state-owned bank leasing space in Trump Tower. The emoluments lawsuits were dismissed as moot when he left office. No court ever ruled on the merits.

The other side: his sons run the businesses. Licensing deals in the Gulf predate the presidency in kind if not in size. The arms sales were in the national interest on their own terms.

A5. Gifts

DISPUTED Qatar gave a Boeing 747 valued around $400 million for use as Air Force One, to end up at his presidential library. The Foreign Emoluments Clause requires congressional consent for gifts from foreign states. The administration says it is a gift to the government and then to a foundation, not to him.
REPORTED The plane never entered service. He said publicly he did not fly it home from a NATO meeting because he wanted to show it to troops in Europe. The New York Times reported the actual reason: it lacks the anti-missile defenses standard on the existing fleet. That turns a contested emoluments question into a documented false public statement.
RECORD A congressional investigation found his first-term White House failed to report more than 100 foreign gifts required by law. The State Department's 2020 list contained zero gifts to Trump. Nine of the most expensive items from the 2017 Saudi trip never appeared on any filing. Golf clubs and a portrait from El Salvador remain missing. Over $250,000 is unaccounted for.

A6. The $400 million ballroom and the donor loop

RECORD The East Wing was demolished for a ballroom whose cost rose from $200 million to $400 million, funded by private donors.
RECORD The White House named 27 corporate donors, including Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Palantir, Lockheed Martin, Coinbase, and Ripple. It has never disclosed how much anyone gave. Public Citizen obtained the funding agreement through a FOIA lawsuit. It explicitly permits anonymous donors.
RECORD Fourteen of the 27 received new or increased federal contracts worth over $50 billion within six months of donating. Sixteen of the 27 face federal enforcement actions or have had enforcement dropped. Most are represented by three lobbying firms, one run by his former chief of staff. All three principals attended the donor dinner at the White House.
REPORTED Despite the "no taxpayer money" claim, public funds paid for underground security work, and Senate Republicans later introduced a bill for $400 million in federal funding. RE-VERIFY bill status.

The other side: no tax dollars fund the ballroom itself. Large companies win federal contracts every year under every president. Correlation is not a transaction.

A7. Enforcement that went away

RECORD Public Citizen found the administration halted or moved to dismiss enforcement investigations against 89 corporations.
RECORD The SEC dropped, paused, or closed cases against Justin Sun (World Liberty investor), Binance and its founder (World Liberty stablecoin partner, later pardoned), Gemini, Coinbase, and Ripple. Coinbase and Ripple are ballroom donors. Drawn as one pattern rather than five stories: invest in the family business or fund the president's building, then watch the enforcement action go away.
RECORD Elon Musk's companies faced at least $2.37 billion in legal exposure across 65 actual or potential actions at 11 federal agencies, per a Senate investigation. DOGE then cut or hobbled many of those same agencies. Five of the 17 inspectors general fired on January 24, 2025 oversaw agencies investigating his companies.
RECORD Nvidia and AMD agreed to pay the government 15 percent of revenue from certain AI chip sales to China in exchange for export licenses. Export licenses ordinarily carry no fee. There is no known precedent. The Constitution forbids taxing exports, though neither side calls it a tax.
RECORD The Justice Department spent $892,192 plus a $54,768 supplement on building banners, with line items redacted as trade secrets. USDA spent $16,400 on the same category.

The other side: prosecutorial and regulatory discretion is a real executive power. Some of the dropped cases were legally weak. The chip arrangement keeps American firms competitive against Huawei while restricting top-tier chips.

A8. The pardon economy

RECORD More than 1,800 pardons this term. The entire first term: 237.
RECORD Day one: roughly 1,600 January 6 defendants pardoned, including people convicted of seditious conspiracy and of assaulting police.
RECORD He pardoned the lawyers and organizers behind the 2020 fake elector scheme and the fake electors themselves. That group had donated about $250,000 to Trump-aligned committees.
RECORD He pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the Binance founder, on October 21, 2025. Binance works extensively with the family crypto company and holds most of its stablecoin.
RECORD He pardoned former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez, convicted of large-scale drug trafficking, while justifying lethal boat strikes as an anti-drug operation.
RECORD A pardon erases remaining restitution. The California governor's office calculated these pardons wiped out roughly $2 billion in court-ordered repayment to fraud victims. Other counts put it near $1.3 billion; the figure depends on which pardons are included.
REPORTED A lobbyist was criminally charged with extorting $100,000 from a clemency seeker. House Democrats opened a pay-to-play pardon investigation. The Pardon Attorney was fired after declining to recommend clemency for Mel Gibson.

The other side: both parties have abused clemency. Clinton pardoned Marc Rich. Biden pardoned his son after saying he would not, and issued preemptive pardons to Fauci, Milley, and the January 6 committee. The pardon power is nearly unlimited by design.

PART B. ENTRENCHMENT: REMOVING WHAT COULD CONSTRAIN HIM

B1. The Justice Department as a personal instrument

COURT He sued the IRS for $10 billion over the 2019 leak of his tax returns. The Justice Department settled rather than fight. The settlement was signed by his former defense lawyer, then a senior Justice official. It created a $1.776 billion fund and made the IRS permanently unable to audit him, his family, or his companies. On July 13, 2026, a federal judge threw out the entire arrangement as a sham, sanctioned the lawyers, and referred one to the Florida Bar.
RECORD The acting attorney general cancelled the fund and narrowed the tax immunity to secure confirmation votes. Tax experts said the narrowed version was still worth about $100 million to him. On August 8, 2026 that lawyer was confirmed as attorney general 50 to 49, with Republicans Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski voting no and citing the fund and the Epstein files. RE-VERIFY whether the fund or the immunity has been revived since confirmation.
RECORD Separately he asked the Justice Department to pay him $230 million for the investigations into him. In the Oval Office: "I am sort of suing myself. It sort of looks bad."
REPORTED In April 2026 he fired Attorney General Pam Bondi, reportedly for insufficient aggression against political opponents.
COURT James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James were indicted days after he publicly demanded action. The prosecutor was his former personal attorney, who had never tried a case. A judge dismissed both indictments as unlawfully brought. The dismissal was without prejudice.
RECORD The department then charged Comey a second time over a photograph of seashells posted online, and charged the Southern Poverty Law Center. RE-VERIFY status of both.
RECORD Also under federal investigation: John Bolton (home and office searched), Senator Adam Schiff, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, Governor Gavin Newsom, and Jack Smith.
COURT He tried to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, the first attempt in the Fed's 111-year history. The Supreme Court blocked it 5 to 4.
RECORD On July 23, 2026, three items landed in one week: the IRS settlement, a move to end a Louisiana school desegregation decree, and a Ku Klux Klan Act suit against activist Mahmoud Khalil. Individually each is discretion. Together they are a pattern of discretion pointed in one direction.

The other side: a referral is not a finding. Public figures are not immune from investigation. Declining to investigate an opponent would itself be favoritism. Prosecutorial discretion is a real executive power. And the courts caught the worst of it.

B2. Dismantling the watchdogs

COURT Four days into the term he fired 17 inspectors general in one night with identical two-sentence emails, skipping the 30-day notice the law requires. A judge ruled the firings violated the law.
RECORD He removed the head of the federal whistleblower protection agency. The federal employee appeals board lost its quorum. Schedule F, renamed Schedule Policy/Career, reclassifies an estimated 50,000 policy-influencing employees as at-will. Ninety-four percent of more than 40,000 public comments opposed it.
RECORD In August 2025 he fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics hours after a weak jobs report, calling the data "rigged" without evidence. His own first-term statistics chief said the accusation was implausible because the commissioner has no access to the data collection. The following month's report was worse.
RECORD Data was removed or altered across hundreds of federal websites. The Office of Personnel Management stopped publishing the racial composition of the federal workforce.
DISPUTED DOGE staff accessed Social Security, IRS, Medicaid, and Veterans Affairs systems. Five judges found likely Privacy Act violations. The Supreme Court lifted the restrictions 6 to 3 while the cases continue.
RECORD The Government Accountability Office issued multiple formal findings that the administration broke federal law by refusing to spend money Congress appropriated.
RECORD In August 2026 the GAO found DOGE's savings claims unreliable: of $61 billion in claimed contract savings, nearly $35 billion either was never cancelled or could not be verified, and DOGE did not use its own stated method for 96 percent of claimed grant savings. DOGE closed July 4, 2026.
RECORD Grand jury subpoenas were served on New York Times reporters one day after publication, seeking phone records of two spouses and one reporter's mother. They were withdrawn after a judge signaled they would be quashed. Five days later, the official who issued them was confirmed as Director of National Intelligence.

The other side: presidents may remove inspectors general; the dispute was notice, not authority. BLS response rates had genuinely deteriorated. Career staff can and do obstruct elected policy, and democratic accountability requires a president who can direct the executive branch.

B3. Retaliation against private institutions

COURT He signed executive orders punishing five major law firms for the clients they had represented. Four federal judges struck them down, unanimously. The Justice Department dropped its appeals, making the rulings permanent.
RECORD Nine other firms avoided litigation by cutting deals pledging roughly $1 billion in free legal work on causes the administration selects. He lost every case and still got what he wanted. That is the lesson of this section: coercion often works before the ruling arrives.
RECORD Federal research funding was frozen at Columbia before any finding of wrongdoing. Columbia paid $221 million plus changes to admissions, hiring, and academic oversight. Brown paid $50 million. Harvard refused and lost billions in grants. RE-VERIFY Harvard settlement talks.
RECORD Disney paid $15 million, Paramount $16 million, Meta about $25 million, and X about $10 million to settle his lawsuits. Paramount needed federal approval for an $8 billion merger while the FCC chair was investigating CBS. The merger was approved on a party-line vote shortly after the settlement. The Wall Street Journal reported Paramount executives discussed internally whether the payment risked liability for bribing a public official.
RECORD A whitehouse.gov page lists named journalists and creators as offenders, calling one with millions of subscribers "a known liar."
RECORD The EEOC suspended federal-sector class complaints.

The other side: universities that tolerated harassment faced real Title VI exposure. Settlements are voluntary. The law-firm orders lost in court, which is the system working.

B4. Elections and voting

COURT In Trump v. Slaughter the Supreme Court gave the president power to remove officials at independent agencies without cause. He then removed the remaining bipartisan members of the Election Assistance Commission, which had refused to add a citizenship question to the federal voter registration form.
RECORD Funding was cut for the network that warns election officials about cross-state threats, along with roughly 130 staff at the cybersecurity agency he created in 2018. On the attorney general's first day, the FBI unit that tracks foreign election interference, created during his first term, was dissolved.
COURT The Justice Department demanded every state's voter rolls and sued 30 states. It lost 17 federal rulings, eight of them from Trump-appointed judges.
COURT His 2025 executive order on elections was permanently blocked. The judge ruled the president has no authority over elections and that the department failed to demonstrate the fraud it claimed.
DISPUTED Executive Order 14399 (March 2026) directs the Postal Service to deliver mail ballots only to people on a federal citizenship list. Twenty-three states sued. It is blocked in one circuit and allowed in another. The Supreme Court question is whether the challenges were premature, not whether the order is legal. RE-VERIFY: do not report a Supreme Court ruling here as a merits decision.
RECORD Georgia Republicans, pressured by the governor and the president to redraw the state map, refused.
RECORD He has repeatedly said the 2026 midterms should be cancelled and raised serving a third term. He has no authority to do either. Elections are run by thousands of local officials under state law.

The other side: the Slaughter ruling is a constitutional holding about removal power, not a voting-rights case. Citizens should have to prove citizenship to vote; audits show noncitizen voting is rare but not zero. States have always been free to redraw.

B5. Civil liberties and due process

COURT In March 2025 he invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to send more than 280 Venezuelan men to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador. The flights left after a judge ordered them turned around. Many had no criminal record; several were identified as gang members primarily by tattoos. In December 2025 the judge ruled their rights were violated: "By any measure, the detainees surely fell victim to constitutionally inadequate process." The government did not dispute the due process violation, only what it owed. Human Rights Watch documented families unable to locate deportees.
RECORD Removals to third countries, including Uganda, Rwanda, Eswatini, and South Sudan, proceeded on as little as six hours' notice without affirmative screening for fear of persecution.
REPORTED Legal residents and visa holders, including graduate students, were detained or targeted for removal over political speech.
REPORTED United States citizens have been detained in immigration operations, some for days. There is no evidence of a deliberate program to detain citizens.
COURT He tried to end birthright citizenship by executive order on day one. Every lower court blocked it, including Republican appointees. The Supreme Court struck it down 6 to 3 on June 30, 2026 in Trump v. Barbara.
COURT He sent federalized National Guard troops into Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago over the governors' objections. A judge he appointed called the Portland justification "untethered to facts." On December 23, 2025 the Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 in Trump v. Illinois that he had not invoked any statute exempting the deployments from the Posse Comitatus Act. Troops were withdrawn.
RECORD Before 2025, the last president to federalize a state's Guard over a governor's objection was Lyndon Johnson in 1965, protecting civil rights marchers from George Wallace.
RECORD He has repeatedly threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, which has never been used for immigration enforcement, even though the joint DHS-DOD report his own January 2025 order required recommended against it.

The other side: he ran openly on mass deportation and won the popular vote. Tren de Aragua is a real transnational gang. Federal property and personnel needed protection where local authorities declined to act. And again, the courts stopped the worst of it.

B6. War powers and the military

RECORD In June 2025 he struck Iran's nuclear sites citing only Article II authority; the War Powers notification cited no statute at all. On February 28, 2026 the United States and Israel struck again, killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Republican Congressman Thomas Massie: "This is not constitutional." In June 2026 both chambers passed a war powers resolution for the first time in this conflict. RE-VERIFY: confirm the resolution's form and whether it reached his desk before describing a veto.
RECORD On January 3, 2026, United States forces captured Nicolas Maduro in Caracas and brought him to a Brooklyn jail. Venezuelan officials reported around 100 dead. There was no declaration of war or authorization. The UN Secretary-General said he was "deeply concerned that rules of international law have not been respected." Trial is set for June 1, 2027.
RECORD Since September 2025, United States forces have struck alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific: 68 strikes and at least 227 people killed as of August 26, 2026. A follow-up strike killed two survivors clinging to wreckage. The military's senior lawyers had been fired earlier in 2025. John Yoo, author of the Bush-era interrogation memos, wrote that killing helpless men in the water is "simply murder." Republican-led Armed Services committees opened investigations. Senator Thom Tillis said ordering the second shot violated "ethical, moral or legal code."
RECORD He pushed to annex Greenland, threatened 25 percent tariffs on eight European allies over it, refused to rule out military force, then walked it back at Davos on January 21, 2026 citing a "framework" that Denmark says never included sovereignty. Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and France sent troops to Greenland. He reiterated the claim at the July 2026 NATO summit.
DISPUTED The United States Ukraine peace plan primarily calls for Ukrainian concessions. Two of the negotiators sent to the Kremlin were a co-founder of the family crypto company and a son-in-law whose fund took $2 billion from Saudi Arabia.

The other side: presidents of both parties have struck without authorization; Speaker Johnson raised Obama's drone program on the boat strikes. Maduro was an indicted trafficker running a stolen election. Interdiction at sea is a decades-old mission, if not by missile.

B7. The Epstein files

RECORD He promised release in the 2024 campaign and reversed in July 2025, calling the matter a hoax. Marjorie Taylor Greene broke with him over it.
RECORD Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act 427 to 1 in the House in November 2025. He signed it. The Justice Department missed the deadline. Officials claimed hundreds of thousands of pages released; NBC News counted under 10,000. At least 16 files were then removed from the department's website, including a photograph of Trump with Epstein. They were later restored.
RECORD The bulk arrived January 30, 2026: three million pages, over a month late. The department identified about six million potentially relevant pages and released roughly half. Documents show he flew on Epstein's plane at least eight times.
UNPROVEN In March 2026 the department released FBI notes from a woman alleging an assault by Trump in the 1980s when she was a minor. The allegation is uncorroborated and this page treats it as such.
RECORD Ghislaine Maxwell was moved to a lower-security facility after speaking with the Justice Department and absolving Trump. In March 2026 the House Oversight Committee, under Republican control, voted to subpoena the attorney general over the files. RE-VERIFY compliance status.

The other side: the law itself permits withholding child sexual abuse material, victim-identifying details, and privileged documents. Appearing in files is not evidence of wrongdoing, a standard this page applies to everyone.

PART C. THE RECORD BEFORE THE PRESIDENCY

C1. The 2020 election and January 6

RECORD January 2, 2021, recorded: "I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have." He also pressured Michigan legislators, Arizona officials, and Justice Department leadership: "just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me."
RECORD Alternate elector slates in seven states signed certificates falsely claiming he won. Several participants pleaded guilty in Georgia state court. The federal case was dismissed after the 2024 election under the policy against prosecuting a sitting president, without prejudice and never resolved on the merits.
RECORD Special counsel Jack Smith testified under oath on January 22, 2026 before the House Judiciary Committee: "Our investigation revealed that Donald Trump is the person who caused Jan. 6, that it was foreseeable to him and that he sought to exploit the violence." He said he had proof beyond a reasonable doubt and that the case relied heavily on Republican witnesses.
COURT More than 1,500 people were charged over January 6. Hundreds were convicted, including leaders convicted of seditious conspiracy. He pardoned nearly all of them on day one.
COURT The Colorado Supreme Court found he engaged in insurrection. The United States Supreme Court reversed on the narrow ground that states cannot enforce the disqualification clause. It did not disturb the factual finding.

C2. The business and personal record

COURT May 2024: a Manhattan jury convicted him on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, the first criminal conviction of any United States president. He was sentenced to an unconditional discharge. The conviction stands and is under appeal.
COURT A judge found he fraudulently inflated his assets for years to obtain better loan and insurance terms. In August 2025 an appeals court vacated the roughly $454 million penalty as excessive but left the fraud findings largely intact. He does not owe $454 million; that is the most common error made about his record.
COURT Juries found him liable for sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll ($5 million) and for defaming her again ($83.3 million). In July 2026 the Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal of the first verdict, making it final. The second remains on appeal.
COURT December 2022: two Trump Organization entities were convicted on 17 felony counts including criminal tax fraud and fined the $1.6 million statutory maximum. The company was convicted, not Trump personally.
COURT The Trump Foundation was dissolved by court order in 2018. In 2019 he was ordered to pay $2 million for misusing charitable funds, including a veterans fundraiser that benefited his campaign.
COURT He paid $25 million to settle fraud claims over Trump University weeks after the 2016 election. It was not a university and had no accreditation.
RECORD 1973: the Justice Department sued his company for racial discrimination in apartment rentals. 1998: the Taj Mahal casino was fined $477,000 for anti-money-laundering violations. 2022: his inaugural committee paid $750,000 to settle claims it misused nonprofit funds, including by overpaying his own hotel.

PART D. THE OTHER SIDE, TAKEN SERIOUSLY

This page would not survive a fair reader without this section.

"Voters knew." He ran openly on retribution, mass deportation, and dismantling the administrative state, and won the popular vote. A mandate is a real defense against "illegitimate," even if not against "illegal."
"The courts are working." Count the losses on this page: birthright citizenship, the Guard deployments, the law firms, the election orders, the IRS settlement, Lisa Cook, Comey and James, 17 voter-roll rulings. The counter: it is slow and expensive, and as the law firms show, the coercion often succeeds before the ruling arrives.
"Presidents have always done this." Obama's drone program. Clinton's pardon of Marc Rich. Biden's pardons of his son and of officials preemptively. Roosevelt's court-packing attempt and internment. The honest counter is scale, systematization, and self-dealing, not novelty.
"The conflicts are legal." They largely are. That is the strongest point on this page, not the weakest. The scandal is what is legal.
"It's all politically motivated." Some prosecutions came from elected Democrats. Concede it. Then look at who else appears on this page: Trump-appointed judges, 6 to 3 Supreme Court majorities, Republican-led Armed Services investigations, John Yoo, Thom Tillis, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Marjorie Taylor Greene, his own first-term BLS commissioner.

PART E. WHAT THIS PAGE DELIBERATELY LEAVES OUT

A ledger that includes everything is a grievance list. A ledger that excludes aggressive-but-legitimate uses of authority survives a challenge.

Excluded: aggressive uses of legitimate authority. Trade investigations under Section 301, sanctions legislation, pressure campaigns on allies. These belong in a conversation about executive power, not in a corruption ledger.
Excluded: policy with a fact-check attached. Health policy decisions, however wrong, are policy, not corruption.
Excluded permanently: proximity without evidence. Deaths, associations, and rumors that connect to Epstein or anyone else by proximity only, with no charging document or official finding. We looked and declined to run them.
Held, single-sourced: a journalist's phones reportedly confiscated at the border after an Iran reporting trip. Not published until a second source confirms.
Handled with caution: Capital One's July 31, 2026 court filing says it closed more than 300 Trump-linked accounts in 2021 after an anti-money-laundering review. That is the bank's account, in its own defense, in a lawsuit Trump filed. Nobody has proven anything, the judge is a Trump appointee, and the bank had its own AML penalties. Anything stronger is not supportable.

Method and sources

Primary sources come first: Office of Government Ethics disclosures, court opinions on CourtListener, Government Accountability Office decisions, the Office of the Pardon Attorney, congress.gov, Public Citizen's ballroom and enforcement data, Senate investigative reports, and House Oversight reports on foreign gifts. Where a news organization is the source, it is named. Aggregated lists are treated as leads, not sources; every item was chased to a primary document or a wire report.

The checklist applied to every entry: Did a court rule, or did someone file? Is the ruling still good law, or was it stayed, reversed, or vacated? Is this the primary document or someone's summary? Would this sentence hold up if the administration's best lawyer heard it?

Corrections are welcome at purplepoliticalbreakdown.com/contact. When we get something wrong, the correction goes on this page with a date.