The One-Sentence Version
The American system was designed so that a president cannot do whatever he wants, because a long list of other people and institutions are positioned to stop him; this article goes through that list one item at a time and asks, for each one, what condition it is in right now.
What You Need to Know First
The version you learned in school
Three branches of government. The legislative branch makes laws, the executive branch enforces them, the judicial branch interprets them. Each can check the others. Congress can pass laws and control spending; the president can veto; the courts can strike down laws and executive actions; Congress can impeach. This is the diagram in every civics textbook.
The fuller version
The textbook diagram is real but incomplete. The actual web of oversight on a president is denser than three branches, and most of it is less famous.
Some of the checks sit inside the executive branch. The president runs the executive branch, but Congress and past presidents deliberately built watchdogs into it that are supposed to operate independently even though the president technically sits above them: inspectors general, the Office of Government Ethics, the Justice Department’s career prosecutors, the IRS’s audit independence, the enforcement divisions of agencies like the SEC, and the career civil service. These exist because the people who designed them understood that a president cannot be the only check on his own branch.
Other checks sit outside the executive branch: Congress, the courts, the free press, the state governments, whistleblower protections, and the voters. And above all of them sits impeachment, the constitutional emergency brake.
What this article is and is not
This is a structural audit, not a character study. Every president operates inside this web of constraints. The question here is not whether the current president is good or bad. It is narrower and more answerable: what condition is each constraint in right now, compared to what it is designed to do?
For each check, this article gives three things: what it is supposed to do, what has happened to it, and the source. Some readers will conclude the checks are working as intended. Some will conclude they are not. The article’s job is to lay the mechanisms out plainly enough that the reader can make that call from the documents.
A note on language: this article does not use words like “authoritarian” or “dictatorship.” Those are conclusions, and they tend to end the conversation rather than inform it. The mechanisms below are specific, dated, and sourced. They are more useful than any label.
The Checks Inside the Executive Branch
These are the watchdogs the president technically controls but that were built to act independently. They are the first line, because they are closest to the conduct they monitor.
Inspectors general
What they are supposed to do. Inspectors general are independent investigators embedded inside federal agencies. The Inspector General Act of 1978, passed after Watergate, created them to root out waste, fraud, and abuse, and to report findings to both the agency head and Congress. They are designed to be hard to fire for political reasons, with notice-to-Congress requirements before removal.[1]
What condition it is in. In the opening days of the second term, the administration removed 17 inspectors general at once, without the 30-day advance notice to Congress that federal law requires. A federal court later ruled the manner of the firings unlawful. The practical effect, regardless of the litigation, is that the watchdog offices across much of the government spent the most consequential early months of the term without their independent leadership in place.[2]
The Office of Government Ethics
What it is supposed to do. The Office of Government Ethics, created after Watergate, administers the financial-disclosure and conflict-of-interest rules across the executive branch, including for the president. It is the office that reviews whether an official’s holdings create conflicts and whether a “blind trust” is actually blind.[3]
What condition it is in. The Senate-confirmed director of the Office of Government Ethics, David Huitema, was removed by the president on February 10, 2025, about seven weeks into the term. OGE directors serve five-year terms by design, so that they overlap administrations and stay nonpartisan; Huitema had been confirmed in late 2024 and had served roughly two months. The president named Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins as interim head. The same office had publicly concluded in 2017 that the president’s announced trust arrangement was “not even close” to a real blind trust. With its independent director replaced by a sitting Cabinet secretary, the office’s capacity to make that kind of finding is reduced. The detailed financial-conflict record is covered in the corruption explainer.[3]
The Justice Department’s prosecutorial independence
What it is supposed to do. The Justice Department enforces federal law. By a norm built up since Watergate, its prosecution decisions are supposed to be insulated from White House political direction. A president sets broad policy; he does not, by custom, order the prosecution of specific enemies or the protection of specific friends. The norm is not a statute, which matters here.
What condition it is in. Three documented changes. First, the department is led by Todd Blanche, who was the president’s personal criminal defense attorney before his elevation. Second, the department’s Public Integrity Section, the unit created after Watergate to prosecute public corruption, has been reduced from roughly 36 career attorneys to two, with its open caseload dropping from around 175-200 matters to about 20.[4] Third, NOTUS reported in May 2026 the existence of an FBI team that bureau personnel call the “payback squad,” formally the Director’s Advisory Team, building cases against the president’s perceived political enemies, with an indictment of a former CIA director expected.[5] The combination is a department whose enforcement machinery points outward at the president’s opponents and is staffed at the top by his former personal lawyer.
The IRS’s audit independence
What it is supposed to do. After President Nixon used the IRS against political enemies, Congress passed 26 U.S.C. § 7217, which makes it a crime for the president or senior White House officials to request that the IRS audit or not audit a specific taxpayer. The IRS is supposed to apply the tax code without regard to who the taxpayer is.[6]
What condition it is in. In May 2026, as part of settling the president’s lawsuit against the IRS, the Acting Attorney General signed a one-page document declaring the IRS “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED” from examining or prosecuting the tax returns of the president, his family, and his companies filed before the agreement. The full account is in the IRS settlement explainer. The relevant point for this article is structural: the executive branch has, in writing, instructed the IRS not to enforce the tax code against the president.[7]
Agency enforcement divisions
What they are supposed to do. Independent and quasi-independent agencies, the SEC, the FTC, the FCC, the NLRB, and others, enforce the laws governing markets, competition, communications, and labor. Their enforcement staff are career officials, and several of these agencies were structured by Congress to be insulated from direct presidential control.
What condition it is in. The SEC’s acting enforcement director, a 21-year veteran of the agency, departed at the end of January 2025, days into the term.[8] Across the administration, ProPublica documented roughly 3,200 financial-disclosure records showing officials with ties to the industries their agencies regulate.[9] The pattern is enforcement leadership turning over and regulated-industry figures moving into the regulators.
The career civil service
What it is supposed to do. Most federal employees are career civil servants, hired on merit and protected from being fired for political reasons. This is the system, built across the 20th century, that replaced the old spoils system in which each new president fired the government and installed loyalists. Its purpose is continuity and the rule of law: a tax examiner or a food-safety inspector keeps doing the job regardless of who won the election.
What condition it is in. A January 2025 executive order revived a policy, formerly called Schedule F and now called Schedule Policy/Career, that strips job protections from career positions deemed policy-related and converts those employees to at-will status, removable at the president’s discretion. The Office of Personnel Management finalized the rule in February 2026, with conversions beginning March 9. OPM estimates roughly 50,000 positions, about 2% of the federal workforce, will be moved into the new category.[13] The effect is to convert parts of the independent civil service back toward a loyalty-based workforce of the kind the merit system was built to replace.
The Checks Outside the Executive Branch
These do not answer to the president at all. They are the constitutional counterweights.
Congress and its oversight power
What it is supposed to do. Congress holds the strongest checks in the Constitution: it writes the laws, it controls federal spending (no money leaves the Treasury without congressional appropriation), it can subpoena documents and compel testimony, it confirms or rejects nominees, and it can impeach. Oversight is not optional decoration. It is how the elected legislature keeps the executive accountable between elections.
What condition it is in. Congress’s oversight tools are intact on paper and largely dormant in practice, because the same party controls the White House and both chambers and has declined to use them against the president. Subpoenas to the executive branch from the majority are rare. Hearings that would investigate the president’s conduct are not being held by the committees with the power to hold them. The power of the purse is the clearest example: when the administration withheld or redirected congressionally appropriated funds, the majority did not move to enforce Congress’s spending decisions. A check that exists but is not exercised provides the same practical restraint as a check that does not exist.
There is one partial exception worth noting, because it shows what the check looks like when it does engage. On May 19, 2026, the Senate voted 50-47 to advance a war powers resolution directing the president to end the Iran war, the first time that effort cleared a procedural vote. Four Republicans crossed party lines, including Bill Cassidy, who flipped to support it days after losing his primary to a Trump-endorsed challenger. The resolution still faces the Republican-controlled House and a near-certain veto, so it is unlikely to take effect. But it is the one documented instance in this period of members of the president’s own party using a formal tool to constrain him.[18] The same week, the cost of that kind of independence was also on display: Rep. Thomas Massie, who had opposed the Iran war, lost his primary to a Trump-endorsed challenger that the Defense Secretary had personally campaigned for, and Trump moved to unseat a third Republican by endorsing a primary challenger to Sen. John Cornyn. The incentive structure facing a Republican who considers crossing the president is set by those outcomes.[19]
A second, larger example of the check stirring came days later. After the Justice Department created a $1.776 billion fund to compensate the president’s allies (covered in the IRS settlement explainer), at least 25 Republican senators told the Acting Attorney General they opposed it, a House Republican filed legislation to block it, and Majority Leader Thune adjourned the Senate early rather than hold a vote that would have forced his members on the record. That is the power of the purse and the oversight function showing signs of life, prompted by a step the governing party found indefensible. It is also the exception that defines the rule: it took an arrangement this extreme to produce even this much resistance, and as of this writing the fund still stands.[21]
The courts
What they are supposed to do. Federal courts can strike down laws and executive actions that violate the Constitution or exceed legal authority. They are the check that does not depend on which party holds Congress.
What condition it is in. This is the check that is most clearly still functioning, and the article should say so plainly. Federal courts, including judges appointed by the current president, have repeatedly ruled against the administration: the inspector-general firings were ruled unlawful, several executive orders were blocked, and the DOJ’s campaign to extract state voter-registration data has now lost eight times out of eight, with four of those eight rulings written by judges Trump himself appointed.[22] The courts are doing their job.
The qualification is what happens after a ruling. The documented pattern is to defy, delay, or find another route. When an executive order is blocked, a new one is issued. When a lawsuit is dismissed, a different mechanism is tried. The IRS settlement is the clearest case: rather than let a judge rule on the merits of a lawsuit that a court had already flagged as constitutionally improper, the administration settled the case with itself before the deadline. A narrower but sharper example came on May 20, 2026, when ICE arrested a man inside a New York City immigration court less than 24 hours after a federal judge had ordered such arrests paused; the Department of Homeland Security said it had violated no order, relying on a narrow reading of the order’s exceptions.[20] A court can only rule on the case in front of it, and a sufficiently determined executive branch can keep changing the case or contesting what a ruling covers. Separately, several of the president’s judicial nominees declined, in Senate hearings, to affirm that the 22nd Amendment bars a third term, which is relevant to whether the courts would constrain that specific question in the future.[10]
A separate question is whether judges hearing administration cases have disclosed potential conflicts. On May 28, 2026, the Daily Beast reported that Philip Alito, 39, the son of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, has been working as an attorney-adviser in the Treasury Department since early in the second term. The position is not listed in the Treasury employee directory; Philip Alito has no public resume, no LinkedIn profile, and has not appeared in court since April 1, 2025. The Treasury Department was the named defendant in the Supreme Court tariff cases argued in November 2025 and decided in February 2026. Justice Alito did not recuse from those cases, and the Treasury Department did not disclose Philip Alito’s employment in court filings. Treasury is also the agency administering the $1.776 billion Anti-Weaponization Fund, which is the subject of pending litigation likely to reach the Supreme Court.[24]
The free press
What it is supposed to do. The press is not in the Constitution as a branch of government, but the First Amendment protects it specifically because an informed public is the precondition for every other check. Reporting is how voters, Congress, and courts learn what the executive branch is doing.
What condition it is in. Several documented pressures. The FBI under Director Kash Patel investigated a New York Times reporter who had written about Patel’s girlfriend, an episode the Times and other outlets reported in April 2026.[14] In May 2026, aboard Air Force One, the president told New York Times national-security reporter David Sanger that his Iran-war reporting was “sort of treasonous”; Sanger and the Times rejected the characterization, and CNN’s Jake Tapper called it “potentially dangerous.”[15] Separately, ABC News removed the entire published archive of FiveThirtyEight, the polling and election-forecasting operation, taking offline the citable record that journalists and academics used to evaluate election claims.[11] The press continues to function, and much of the sourcing in this very article is recent journalism, but the cost of doing the work has risen.
The states
What they are supposed to do. Federalism is a structural check. State governments run their own elections, courts, law enforcement, and budgets, and the federal government cannot simply order them around. A president who controls Washington does not control the fifty state capitals.
What condition it is in. Two documented pressure points. In Louisiana, the governor suspended the state’s congressional primaries by executive order on May 1, 2026, nullifying tens of thousands of already-cast ballots, after the president called for mid-decade map changes following the Supreme Court’s Voting Rights Act ruling.[16] In Colorado, according to Votebeat, the administration withheld unrelated federal funds to pressure Governor Jared Polis into commuting the sentence of Tina Peters, the county clerk convicted of breaching her own election system. The federal pardon the president had issued Peters had no legal effect on her state conviction, so the administration reached for the money instead.[12] Withholding congressionally appropriated funds to extract a specific action from a state is the same conduct that produced the first impeachment in 2019, a point the next section returns to.
Whistleblowers
What they are supposed to do. Federal whistleblower-protection laws exist so that employees who see wrongdoing can report it without losing their jobs or facing prosecution. Whistleblowers are often the only way misconduct inside a closed agency becomes known.
What condition it is in. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard referred an intelligence whistleblower for criminal prosecution in early 2026. The whistleblower complaint concerned NSA intercepts related to Jared Kushner’s influence on Iran policy. Referring a whistleblower for prosecution, rather than protecting the disclosure, is the kind of action that legal experts said would chill future whistleblowers from coming forward.[17] Gabbard announced her resignation on May 22, 2026, citing her husband’s cancer diagnosis, with a final day of June 30; her deputy Aaron Lukas will serve as acting director. Her departure does not undo the referral or restore the protections it eroded.[23]
Impeachment: The Ultimate Check, and What Happened to It
What it is for
Impeachment is the Constitution’s emergency brake. The House can impeach a president by majority vote for “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors,” and the Senate can remove him from office with a two-thirds vote. It is the mechanism the Framers built for conduct that the ordinary checks cannot reach. It has been used against a president four times in American history. Two of those were against the current president, in 2019 and 2021. Neither produced a Senate conviction.
The pattern now
The useful way to see impeachment’s current condition is to compare conduct that previously triggered it against what happens when similar conduct occurs now.
Withholding appropriated funds for a personal favor. In 2019, the House impeached the president for withholding $391 million in congressionally approved military aid to Ukraine to pressure its government into announcing an investigation of a political rival. In May 2026, according to Votebeat, the administration withheld federal funds from Colorado to pressure its governor into commuting a specific person’s sentence. The conduct is the same in structure: appropriated money used as leverage to extract a personal or political favor. The first time, it was an impeachment article. The second time, it produced no congressional action.[12]
Self-dealing and payments from the government. Concerns about the president profiting from his office were the subject of lawsuits and proposed impeachment articles in the first term. In May 2026, the Justice Department settled the president’s lawsuit against the IRS by creating a $1.776 billion fund and signing a document barring his own audits, detailed in the IRS settlement explainer. No impeachment proceeding followed.[7]
Using law enforcement against opponents. The weaponization of the Justice Department against political enemies is close to the center of what impeachment was designed to address. The “payback squad” reporting, the Public Integrity Section reduction, and the installation of the president’s personal lawyer as Acting Attorney General are documented above. No impeachment proceeding followed.[4][5]
Why the brake does not engage
Impeachment is not gone. It is dormant, and the reason is mechanical, not mysterious. Impeachment requires a House majority willing to vote for it and a Senate supermajority willing to convict. Both chambers are controlled by the president’s party, and that party has shown no inclination to use the tool against him. The offenses did not stop being impeachable. The people positioned to act on them have declined to.
This is the hinge of the whole article. Each individual check above has a defense that depends on some other check catching what it misses. Inspectors general report to Congress, so a weakened inspector general matters less if Congress is doing oversight. Congress can decline to act, but the courts can still rule. The courts can be evaded, but the voters can still respond, informed by a free press, after a whistleblower surfaces what happened. The system was built with redundancy on purpose. Impeachment is the backstop for when the ordinary checks fail. When the backstop itself is held by the same party that controls the conduct being checked, the redundancy stops being redundant.
The Cumulative Picture
Take any single item in this article and there is a reasonable response to it. The inspector-general firings are being litigated. Congress could hold hearings if it chose to. The courts are still ruling against the administration. The press is still publishing. Each of those responses is true.
The argument of this article is not about any single check. It is about what happens when they are weakened at the same time. Every individual defense above relies on the same move: this check is impaired, but another one will catch it. That move works when the other checks are healthy. It stops working when they are all impaired together, because the thing each defense points to as the safety net is itself compromised.
That is the precise claim, and it is worth stating carefully so it can be argued with. The claim is not that oversight in the United States has reached zero. The courts demonstrably still function. The press demonstrably still publishes, including the reporting this article is built from. Some states are pushing back. The claim is narrower and harder to dismiss: the checks on presidential power are weaker simultaneously than at any point in modern American memory, and several of the internal watchdogs designed to be the first line have been removed outright. A reader can accept that claim and still believe the system will recover. A reader can accept it and conclude the opposite. What is hard to do, looking at the mechanisms one at a time, is conclude that nothing has changed.
Common Claims and What the Evidence Shows
Claim 1: “Every president expands executive power. This is normal.”
The strongest version. True, and bipartisan. President Obama’s Justice Department wrote legal memos justifying drone strikes on American citizens. President Bush asserted sweeping war powers after September 11. President Biden was told by the Supreme Court he lacked authority for student-loan forgiveness and pursued versions of it anyway. The expansion of executive power is a century-long trend under presidents of both parties.
What the records show. The difference is not that this president uses executive power aggressively. It is what the power is aimed at. The actions documented here are aimed at the oversight mechanisms themselves: the inspectors general, the ethics office, the Public Integrity Section, the IRS’s audit independence, the enforcement divisions. Expanding executive power to pursue a policy goal, even an aggressive or illegal one, is different in kind from using executive power to disable the institutions that check executive power. The first is a contest the other branches can still referee. The second changes the referees.
Claim 2: “The courts are still working, so the system is fine.”
The strongest version. Also true. Federal courts, including the president’s own appointees, have repeatedly ruled against the administration, and the administration has, in most cases, not openly defied a final court order.
What the records show. The courts are a real and functioning check, which this article states plainly. The qualification is the workaround pattern. A court rules on the specific case in front of it. The IRS settlement shows what happens when the administration prefers not to receive a ruling: it resolved the case on its own terms before the judge could decide the merits. Courts are reactive by design. They cannot reach conduct nobody brings to them, they move slowly, and a determined executive can change the facts faster than litigation resolves. “The courts still work” is true and is not, by itself, evidence that the rest of the system does.
Claim 3: “He was elected. This is what voters wanted.”
The strongest version. He won the 2024 election. Elections are themselves a check, arguably the most important one, and the voters chose this president knowing his record.
What the records show. Elections are one check. This article is about the others, the ones that operate between elections, because the Framers understood that elections every few years are not enough to constrain a president day to day. An election result does not authorize disabling the inspectors general or instructing the IRS not to audit the president. It is also worth noting that the president has repeatedly suggested he may seek a third term, which the 22nd Amendment prohibits, and that several of his judicial nominees declined to affirm that the amendment bars it. The “voters wanted this” defense assumes future elections remain a reliable check, which is the precise thing several sections of this article document pressure on.[10]
Claim 4: “This is partisan. Democrats did the same things.”
The strongest version. Democrats have expanded executive power, floated court-packing, used aggressive executive orders, and pursued investigations of political opponents that Republicans considered partisan. Partisan use of government power is not unique to one party.
What the records show. The test is not whether a party uses power aggressively. It is whether it dismantles the internal watchdogs that constrain its own branch. The specific, documented actions in this article, removing 17 inspectors general at once, removing the ethics-office director, cutting the public-corruption prosecutors from 36 to two, signing a document barring the president’s own tax audits, are not on the record for prior administrations of either party. A reader who believes both parties are equally aggressive can still check whether both parties removed their own watchdogs. The documents say one did.
Claim 5: “Impeachment failed twice already. It clearly doesn’t work.”
The strongest version. The president was impeached in 2019 and 2021 and acquitted both times. The tool has been tried against him and did not remove him.
What the records show. Impeachment did not fail because the conduct was found acceptable. It failed because conviction requires a two-thirds Senate supermajority, a threshold designed to be hard to reach, and the president’s party held enough seats to block it both times. That is not evidence the brake is broken. It is evidence the brake requires cross-party agreement that does not currently exist. The relevant change since 2021 is that the president’s party now controls the House as well, so the process does not begin at all. The tool is not disproven. It is unused.
Where Things Stand Now
This section is a status line for each check. It is the part of the article most likely to change as events develop.
- Inspectors general: 17 removed early in the term; firings ruled unlawful; offices operated without independent leadership during the litigation.[2]
- Office of Government Ethics: Senate-confirmed director removed February 2025, replaced by a sitting Cabinet secretary as interim head.[3]
- DOJ prosecutorial independence: led by the president’s former personal lawyer; Public Integrity Section cut from ~36 attorneys to two; “payback squad” building cases against opponents.[4][5]
- IRS audit independence: executive branch has signed a document barring audits of the president’s pre-settlement returns.[7]
- Agency enforcement: turnover in enforcement leadership; regulated-industry figures in regulator roles.[8][9]
- Civil service: ~50,000 career positions being reclassified to at-will status under the revived Schedule F rule, with conversions starting March 2026.[13]
- Congress: oversight tools intact, mostly unexercised by the governing majority, with two May 2026 exceptions: the Senate’s 50-47 vote to advance an Iran war powers resolution,[18] and a Republican revolt against the $1.776 billion fund that drove the majority leader to recess the Senate rather than vote.[21] The same week, two Republicans who crossed the president lost their primaries.[19]
- Courts: functioning; ruling against the administration (the DOJ’s voter-data suits are now 0 for 8); evaded through workarounds, narrow readings of orders, and settlement rather than open defiance.[10][20][22]
- Press: publishing; under documented investigative and rhetorical pressure.[11][14][15]
- States: some pushing back; documented funding and election pressure in Louisiana and Colorado.[12][16]
- Whistleblowers: the DNI referred an intelligence whistleblower for criminal prosecution; that DNI (Tulsi Gabbard) resigned May 22, 2026 citing her husband’s cancer, effective June 30.[17][23]
- Impeachment: available but dormant; both chambers controlled by the president’s party.
The checks were built with redundancy because the people who designed them assumed any one of them could fail. The open question, the one this article cannot answer for you, is what happens to a system built on redundancy when the redundancy is spent.
Sources
1. Inspector General Act of 1978 and the role of inspectors general — Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency and Lawfare: Trump Fired 17 Inspectors General — Was It Legal?
2. Federal News Network: Trump unlawfully fired 17 agency IGs, judge finds, but won’t reinstate them (September 2025) and NBC News: Fired inspectors general sue Trump over their ‘unlawful’ termination. Judge Ana C. Reyes ruled on September 24, 2025 that the January 24, 2025 firings violated the Inspector General Act’s 30-day-notice requirement.
3. CNN: Trump removes top government ethics czar David Huitema (February 10, 2025) and CBS News: Trump ousts director of Office of Government Ethics; the 2017 “not even close” finding is in Walter Shaub’s Brookings remarks (PDF), and the financial-conflict record is in the corruption explainer.
4. NOTUS: The Justice Department had 36 lawyers fighting corruption full-time. Under Trump, it’s down to two. and NBC News: Firings, pardons and policy changes have gutted DOJ anti-corruption efforts, experts say
5. NOTUS: FBI created ‘Payback Squad’ to handle political cases, sources say (May 12, 2026)
6. 26 U.S.C. § 7217 prohibits the president, vice president, and their senior staff from requesting that the IRS conduct or terminate an audit or investigation of a specific taxpayer. Cornell Legal Information Institute: 26 U.S.C. § 7217
7. Guardian: US justice department ‘forever’ bars IRS from auditing Trump’s past tax returns (Sam Levine, May 19, 2026) and Associated Press: Justice Department announces a $1.7B fund to compensate Trump allies (May 18, 2026); full account in the IRS settlement explainer.
8. SEC press release: Departure of Acting Enforcement Director Sanjay Wadhwa (January 17, 2025)
9. ProPublica: Documents reveal web of financial ties between Trump officials and regulated industries
10. Common Dreams: Trump’s third term — illegal — and his judicial nominees won’t say so (May 5, 2026); court rulings against the administration are catalogued in the 2026 midterm elections explainer.
11. New York Times: FiveThirtyEight articles removed from ABC News website (May 16, 2026)
12. Votebeat: Polis commutes Tina Peters’ sentence amid Trump pressure (May 19, 2026)
13. NPR: New rule expands Trump’s power to fire federal workers (Schedule F, February 6, 2026) and CNN: Trump administration plans to reclassify 50,000 federal workers, making them easier to fire (February 5, 2026)
15. HuffPost: New York Times’ David Sanger fires back after Trump ‘treason’ accusation (May 16, 2026)
16. Common Dreams: Louisiana governor suspends elections (May 1, 2026); full account in the 2026 midterm elections explainer.
17. CBS News: Whistleblower complaint over NSA intercept sources (DNI referral) and NBC News: Details reveal whistleblower complaint involving Tulsi Gabbard
19. Slate: Thomas Massie’s primary loss and Trump’s hold on the GOP (May 2026) and Politico: Ballroom won’t be funded after Senate GOP drops $1 billion Trump security request (May 20, 2026)
21. The New Republic: Republicans flee work early to avoid voting on the Trump slush fund (May 21, 2026) and The New Republic: Trump rages at GOPer as slush fund prompts GOP revolt (May 21, 2026)
24. Daily Beast: SCOTUS Justice’s Son Landed Secret Trump Job (Leigh Kimmins, May 28, 2026)