A Democracy Drive Project
A dated, sourced record of the norms, laws, and institutions being tested — what happened, when, and the proof. Draw your own conclusions.
49 topics · 1,125 sourced entries · every entry links back to its origin.
The lie that he really won in 2020 — where the tactic comes from, how repetition turns it into an identity, and how the government is now being used to manufacture the proof no court ever accepted.
Clemency for January 6 defendants, crypto executives, corrupt politicians, donors, and a foreign president — the lobbyists cashing in to broker it, and what some recipients did once they were free.
Turning the Justice Department against the people who investigated and prosecuted him — indictments brought by a loyalist with no prosecutorial experience, then thrown out as unlawful.
Executive orders rewriting voter rules, lawsuits to seize voters’ private data, and a campaign against mail ballots and voting machines — a federal drive to control elections the Constitution leaves to the states.
Loyalty enforcement inside his own party — the Republicans who crossed him on the Iran war, spending, and impeachment, and the primary challengers, retirement threats, and personal insults he used to drive them out.
An agency built to be independent, bent to serve one man — case quotas to juice stats, prosecutors told the president is their ‘chief client,’ and TV personalities installed to run it.
After losing the 2020 election, Trump and his allies filed roughly 62 lawsuits to overturn it. They won essentially one — a narrow Pennsylvania technicality that changed nothing. No court, in any state, found the fraud he claimed.
Sanctioning judges and freezing their bank accounts, suing them, and vowing to “dismantle” the International Criminal Court — punishing the courts outside U.S. control that dare to investigate the president, his allies, or Israel.
Defying court orders, threatening and stripping the power of federal judges, floating the suspension of habeas corpus, and turning on his own Supreme Court appointees — the campaign against the U.S. courts that try to check him.
Antifa, protesters, and activists in the administration’s crosshairs.
Federalizing the National Guard and deploying soldiers into U.S. cities — Los Angeles, Washington, Memphis, Portland, Chicago — over the objections of governors and mayors, and what the courts said about it.
Masked agents, deaths in detention, U.S. citizens shot and detained, toddlers deported — a chronological, sourced record of what Immigration and Customs Enforcement and its sister agencies have done since January 2025, and who paid the price.
Asylum shut at the border, humanitarian protections stripped from hundreds of thousands, legal pathways closed one by one — a chronological, sourced record of the administration's drive to slam America's doors shut on immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers.
From an executive order barring transgender athletes and a purge of LGBTQ+ health information, to defunding an LGBTQ+ youth suicide line and an attempt to strip Medicare and Medicaid from any hospital that treats transgender minors — a running record of federal action against transgender and LGBTQ+ Americans.
Purging career officials and filling the Justice Department, intelligence, health, and other agencies with loyalists and donors — often unqualified, frequently bypassing Senate or judicial review — and what some did once in place.
The 900-page Heritage blueprint Trump claimed to know nothing about — now roughly half-enacted, and run by the people who wrote it.
A vaccine skeptic running the nation’s health agencies — mass layoffs, a measles outbreak, the CDC vaccine panel purged, mRNA research cancelled, and junk science elevated.
Gutting research, denying climate change and vaccines, purging scientists, and elevating quackery — a chronological, sourced record of the administration's assault on science and expertise.
Elon Musk's “Department of Government Efficiency” — an unelected billionaire's chainsaw taken to the federal government: seizing sensitive data, gutting agencies, firing (then scrambling to rehire) nuclear and safety staff, and claiming savings that mostly weren't real. Trump blessed all of it.
How the family built a multibillion-dollar crypto empire from the White House — a memecoin, a stablecoin, foreign money, mining and treasury companies, and a pardon.
Cartoon NFTs, $399 sneakers, $60 Bibles, $100,000 watches, $249 cologne and a $499 phone — licensing the name to whatever sells.
Firing the watchdogs, pausing the bribery law, dropping cases against donors, taking a $400M jet, and parking oil money offshore — dismantling the guardrails and selling the favor.
Roughly doubling his net worth in office, promoting his properties on the public dime, pocketing foreign gifts before favorable decisions, and trademarking his name.
The president’s sons and son-in-law turning the family name and his power into resorts, crypto ventures, billions in Gulf money, and Pentagon contracts for companies they’re invested in.
The pattern is documented: the president moves markets with a post or a threat — tariffs on, tariffs off; bombs away, then a ceasefire — and fortunes are made in the minutes around each announcement. His own disclosures show his accounts bought 327 stocks the day before he paused the tariffs and told the world “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY.” His family runs the crypto coins whose insiders cashed in seconds before launch. And his Justice Department dismantled the units built to police it.
It began with a deal: give me $1 billion, Trump told oil executives, and I'll erase Biden's climate rules. This is the payback — “drill, baby, drill,” gutted pollution limits, dying coal plants forced to run, wind and solar killed off, and the climate science itself censored.
The machinery built to protect the country’s air, water, wildlife, and public land is being dismantled piece by piece — pollution rules repealed, watchdog offices closed, climate science defunded, and millions of acres of protected land thrown open to drilling, mining, and logging.
Withdrawal from the Paris accord, a coal revival, canceled clean-energy grants, and the defunding and silencing of federal climate science — a systematic effort to strip climate change out of U.S. policy, and even off the government’s own websites.
The agency created to protect American air and water is being run by a man who calls its grant money “gold bars” to be clawed back. A 65% budget cut, 31 pollution rollbacks in a single day, the environmental-justice offices closed, and the scientific finding that gives the EPA power over greenhouse gases at all marked for repeal.
How the nation’s flagship cultural institution was remade from the top down.
How a handful of owners, paywalls, and the attention economy reshaped American news — and how lawless conduct gets “sanewashed” into normal-sounding coverage.
How the administration tried to force an AI company to drop its safety limits — and what it did when the company refused.
Lawsuits, paid settlements, license threats, an FCC enforcer, and barred reporters — a sustained campaign to punish coverage he dislikes.
The president of the United States now uses AI-generated video and images as propaganda — to glorify himself as a golden idol and a pope, to humiliate opponents with fabricated arrests and racist caricatures, and to degrade the Americans who protest him. Synthetic media, broadcast from the official presidential account.
He branded himself the president of peace — the man of “no new wars.” Then he started this one. Since combat began on February 28, 2026, the same war has been called won, over, nearly finished, and indefinitely ongoing — sometimes in the same week.
Over eleven months, pressure on a NATO ally's territory escalated from an offhand annexation threat to refusals to rule out military force, tariff threats against Europe, leaked private messages, and a hospital ship.
The most powerful foreign-policy lobby in Washington spent more than $100 million in a single election to purge its critics from Congress — reaching Republican money into Democratic primaries — and collected near-unanimous support for arms, immunity, and money flowing to Israel from both parties in return.
Since retaking office the president has repeatedly floated absorbing Canada as the “51st state” — needling its leaders and, in July 2026, posting a doctored image of the country draped in the American flag.
A promise to release everything, followed by closed investigations, blocked votes, redacted names, a convicted associate moved to a lower-security prison, and missed deadlines.
A $16 million no-bid “beautification” became green water, peeling paint, and arrests — with the blame aimed at the public instead of the contractors.
Decades on the record — the Access Hollywood tape, the E. Jean Carroll verdicts, demeaning insults, and an administration that follows suit.
A jury found Donald Trump liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll and defaming her; a second jury added $83.3 million for his continued lies. Everything since has been the Roy Cohn playbook — deny, attack, delay — a rich and powerful man bending the courts and the powers of his office to make sure a woman he was found to have abused never gets justice.
A chronological catalog of the schoolyard taunts, cruel nicknames, and crude personal attacks the president has aimed at opponents, allies, reporters, foreign leaders — even the Pope. Only insults that came from his own mouth or his own posts are included.
The 22nd Amendment limits presidents to two terms. A running record of the times he has floated a third anyway — and the efforts to make one possible.
The rules Roy Cohn — mob lawyer, McCarthy henchman, and Trump's mentor — taught him, and Trump running them in plain sight: demand loyalty, admit nothing, attack, and never concede defeat.
His own words, in full — the rambling, self-aggrandizing, anti-expert monologues that reveal how the president actually thinks, from the nuclear-and-“good genes” speech to “nobody knew health care could be so complicated.” Further down: the running glossary of his favorite words, slogans, all-caps outbursts, and verbal tics.
From the racist “birther” lie to AI videos of the Obamas as apes, from branding his predecessor a traitor to hiding his portrait from the White House — a fifteen-year fixation, tangled up with Trump’s naked envy of the Nobel Peace Prize Obama won and he never has.
Ask him about anything — ISIS, taxes, courts, drones, renewables, infrastructure, social media — and he is, by his own account, the single greatest living expert on it. A running catalog of a man who has never met a subject he didn’t already know more about than everyone who studies it.
He wants his face on the money and on Mount Rushmore, his name on a triumphal arch, a $30 million military parade on his birthday, and a gold ballroom where the East Wing used to be. A catalog of a president trying, in real time, to carve himself into the permanent iconography of the country — some of it on the taxpayer’s dime, some paid by corporations and donors angling for his favor.