Early in President Trump’s first term, McSweeney’s editors began to catalog the head-spinning number of misdeeds coming from his administration. We called this list a collection of Trump’s cruelties, collusions, corruptions, and crimes, and it felt urgent to track them, to ensure these horrors—happening almost daily—would not be forgotten. Now that Trump has returned to office, amid civil rights, humanitarian, economic, and constitutional crises, we felt it critical to make an inventory of this new round of horrors. This list will be updated monthly between now and the end of Donald Trump’s second term.
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ATROCITYKEY
– Constitutional Illegalities, Collusion, and/or Obstruction of Justice – Environment – Harassment, Bullying, Retribution, and/or Sexual Misconduct – Lies and Misinformation – Musk Madness – Policy – Public Statements and Social Media Posts – Trump Family Business Dealings – Trump Staff and Administration – White Supremacy, Racism, Misogyny, Homophobia, Transphobia, and/or Xenophobia
– September 1, 2025 – The Trump administration deported Orville Etoria and five other men with criminal records to a prison in Eswatini despite the fact that none of the men hold Swazi citizenship. A Jamaican citizen with legal residency in the US, Etoria was convicted of murder in 1996. After Etoria’s release from prison in 2021, immigration officials allowed him to stay in the US, provided he completed annual check-ins. As of The New York Times’s publication, Etoria was being held indefinitely without charges, had not seen a lawyer, and had had little contact with his family since arriving in Eswatini. Neither Eswatini nor the US could explain why Etoria was being held, and Jamaican officials contested the Trump administration’s claim that their country had refused to accept Etoria.
– September 1, 2025 – The Trump family made roughly $5 billion when trading opened for a digital token belonging to its primary cryptocurrency venture, World Liberty Financial. Last year, the Trump family helped launch World Liberty Financial along with current presidential envoy Steve Witkoff and a corporate entity owned by the Trump family that holds a 60 percent stake in the company. Since taking office, Trump has pushed for weaker crypto industry regulations, and critics have argued that World Liberty partners and investors have sought to curry favor with the Trump administration. According to public disclosures, Trump family members, including Trump himself, hold 22.5 billion $WLFI tokens, just under a quarter of the total $WLFI tokens in existence. The Wall Street Journal called the trading debut “most likely the biggest financial success for the president’s family since the inauguration” and said that “WLFI is likely now the Trumps’ most valuable asset, exceeding their decades-old property portfolio.”
– September 1, 2025 – Hundreds of Labor Day demonstrations took place across the country to protest against Trump administration policies and in support of workers’ rights. The protests, many of which were organized as part of the “Workers over Billionaires” call to action, denounced the Trump administration’s mass deportations, cuts to the social safety net, efforts to undermine unions, and deployment of National Guard troops in American cities, among other concerns. In Manhattan, activists carrying anti-Trump posters and chanting “lock him up” protested outside Trump Tower. “Protests are how you channel energy into activism,” said Andrew Lisa, chair of the Seminole County Democratic Party in Florida. “We are taking that energy and saying, ‘You’ve protested, you’ve taken two hours out of your day. Can you spend two hours knocking on your neighbors’ doors?’”
– September 2, 2025 – President Trump announced that the US had carried out a strike against a Venezuelan boat with “a lot of drugs” and had killed eleven “terrorists” on board. Trump did not provide any evidence to support his claim about the drugs or the identities of the people on board, and it was unclear whether the people on board were given a chance to surrender. Later that afternoon, Trump posted more details on social media along with a video showing what appeared to be an explosion on a crowded speedboat: “Earlier this morning, on my Orders, U.S. Military Forces conducted a kinetic strike against positively identified Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists… the strike occurred while the terrorists were at sea in International waters transporting illegal narcotics, heading to the United States.” Later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio contradicted Trump’s account, claiming that the boat was likely headed to the Caribbean, not the US. The strike represented a major shift in drug interdiction, which typically focuses on seizing drugs and identifying suspects to build a criminal case. Congress has not authorized an armed conflict against Tren de Aragua or Venezuela, and experts have questioned the legality of the attack.
Pentagon Releases Video Showing US Strike on Alleged Drug Boat Near Venezuela (ABC News)
– September 2, 2025 – As President Trump prepared to send National Guard troops to other American cities, US District Judge Charles Breyer ruled that Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Los Angeles over the summer was illegal. The judge found that Trump’s actions had violated the Posse Comitatus Act, which limits the power of the federal government to use military force in domestic matters. In response, Trump threatened to send troops back to Los Angeles. “President Trump’s recent executive orders and statements regarding the National Guard raise serious concerns as to whether he intends to order troops to violate the Posse Comitatus Act elsewhere in California,” wrote Breyer, who further warned that the Trump administration ran the risk of “creating a national police force with the President as its chief.”
– September 3, 2025 – The New York Timesreported that the Trump administration had discussed offering jobs to Eric Adams and Curtis Sliwa so that they would leave the New York City mayoral race, clearing the field for Andrew Cuomo to take on Democratic front-runner Zohran Mamdani. According to later reports, Adams was being considered for an ambassadorship to Saudi Arabia and, despite Adams’s claims to the contrary, had indicated his openness to ending his campaign in exchange for a formal offer. In response, Mamdani said that he was confident he would win the election but criticized what he described as “backroom deals” and “corrupt agreements,” calling them “an affront to our democracy, an affront to what makes so many of us proud to be Americans, that we choose our own leaders.”
– September 4, 2025 – In what officials have called the largest-ever immigration raid at a single location, nearly five hundred workers, most of them South Korean nationals, were arrested at a construction site for an electric vehicle battery plant in Ellabell, Georgia. The plant, which was still under construction, was owned by two South Korean companies, Hyundai Motor Group and LG Energy Solution. Some of those arrested included US citizens, lawful permanent residents, and South Koreans with visas or visa waivers. The move, which was heavily criticized by South Korean newspapers and the South Korean government, also revealed tensions in Trump’s push to seek Korean manufacturing investments amid ongoing tariffs and immigration crackdowns. “The economic activities of our investment companies and the rights and interests of our citizens must not be unjustly violated during US law enforcement proceedings,” said a spokesperson for South Korea’s Foreign Ministry.
Massive ICE Raid Shuts Down Hyundai Battery Site | Hundreds of Korean Workers Arrested (APT)
– September 5, 2025 – During his confirmation hearing, Stephen Miran, Trump’s nominee to fill a Federal Reserve vacancy, said he did not plan to resign from his White House role if confirmed and would instead take a leave of absence. The current chief of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisors, Miran assured the committee he would act independently if confirmed. However, he refused to go on the record to state that Trump had lost the 2020 election, and he ducked questions about whether the president was correct in claiming that officials had faked jobs data for political reasons. Calling Miran a “puppet,” Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren excoriated the nominee, “You have made clear that you will do or say whatever Donald Trump wants. That may work in a political position, but it will take an axe to Federal Reserve independence.”
– September 5, 2025 – In a stark contrast to Trump’s campaign promises to enact “America First” isolationism, his own self-styling as an “antiwar president,” and his stated desire to win a Nobel Peace Prize, Trump signed an executive order renaming the Department of Defense the “Department of War,” a name that was used from 1789–1947. “We won the First World War, we won the Second World War, we won everything before that and in between. And then we decided to go woke, and we changed the name to the Department of Defense,” Trump said at the signing. Added Pete Hegseth in an awkward spoken-word performance: “We’re going to go on offense, not just on defense. Maximum lethality, not tepid legality. Violent effect, not politically correct.” Although the move was largely symbolic, critics argued that the name change exposed Trump’s hypocrisy and underlined his increasingly aggressive use of the military. “[Trump] ran as the supposed antiwar candidate, but has proved to be just the opposite,” said Matt Duss of the Center for International Policy. “This stunt underscores that Trump is more interested in belligerent chest-thumping than genuine peacemaking—with dangerous consequences for American security, global standing and the safety of our armed services.”
DEPARTMENT OF WAR (The White House)
– September 5, 2025 – Trump announced that he would host next year’s G-20 summit at his Doral golf resort in Florida. “I think that everybody wants it there because it’s right next to the airport. It’s the best location. It’s beautiful,” Trump said, claiming that he would “not make any money” from hosting. During his first term, he backed down from a similar plan after facing widespread criticism over the possibility that hosting the summit at his property might violate the emoluments prohibition of the Constitution. Asked at the time whether it was appropriate for the European Union to spend public funds on a Trump business at the summit, the European Council President at the time, Donald Tusk, answered simply, “Not at all.”
– September 5, 2025 – A second weak jobs report in as many months undercut Trump’s claims of a booming economy and showed that the labor market was stalling. The economy added only 22,000 jobs in August, and unemployment rose to 4.3 percent, an almost four-year high. Analysts implicated a number of Trump’s policies for the slowdown, including tariffs, immigration crackdowns, federal job cuts, and canceled grants and contracts. “We’ve got a private sector that’s caught in a pinch here between these higher cost pressures and reduced demands,” said Gregory Daco, chief economist for EY-Parthenon. In response to the weak numbers, Trump again attacked the Fed chair, Jerome Powell, in a social media post: “Jerome ‘Too Late’ Powell should have lowered rates long ago. As usual, he’s ‘Too Late!’”
– September 6, 2025 – The president threatened deportations and declared war against Chicago. Alluding to the movie Apocalypse Now, Trump wrote on Truth Social, “‘I love the smell of deportations in the morning.’ Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.” The post also included a doctored photo depicting Trump as one of the movie’s antagonists, Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore, over a background of fire and helicopters with the text “Chipocalypse Now” superimposed in the foreground. In response, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson wrote, “The president’s threats are beneath the honor of our nation, but the reality is that he wants to occupy our city and break our Constitution. We must defend our democracy from this authoritarianism by protecting each other and protecting Chicago from Donald Trump.”
– September 8, 2025 – The Supreme Court ruled the Trump administration could resume its sweeping ICE raids in Los Angeles, overriding concerns over civil liberties violations. SCOTUS lifted a restraining order from US District Judge Maame E. Frimpong, who found that immigration agents were conducting indiscriminate stops on people solely based on their race, language, job, or location. In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, “Countless people in the Los Angeles area have been grabbed, thrown to the ground, and handcuffed simply because of their looks, their accents, and the fact they make a living by doing manual labor.” One of the plaintiffs in the case, Los Angeles resident Brian Gavidia, was shown in a June 13 video being seized by federal agents as he yelled, “I was born here in the States. East LA, bro!”
– September 9, 2025 – The Trump administration worked to dismantle efforts by the IRS to shut down aggressive tax shelters used by America’s biggest multinational corporations and the wealthiest Americans. The administration bowed to pressure from industry groups and congressional Republicans to roll back IRS law enforcement efforts. The IRS announced plans to rescind Biden administration rules requiring companies to report tax shelter strategies to the agency, a change that will make it more difficult for auditors to identify these transactions. The agency also eased a pair of rules that targeted abusive shelters, including one that imposed penalties on wealthy Americans who used an insurance tax scheme that multiple courts have tossed out. The Biden rules were projected to raise more than $100 billion over ten years.
– September 10, 2025 – Charlie Kirk, a right-wing activist and ally of Donald Trump, was shot and killed during a speaking event at Utah Valley University in Orem. Kirk was the CEO and cofounder of Turning Point USA, a conservative youth organization that worked to rally young Republican voters. Immediately before the shooting, Kirk was taking questions from an audience member about mass shootings and gun violence. In an evening video address, Trump blamed “the radical left,” saying, “For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today.” In the video, Trump connected Kirk’s death to other recent attacks on political figures, all of them Republicans. He made no mention of attacks on Democrats, including Melissa Hortman, the former Democratic speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives, who was shot and killed along with her husband Mark in June.
President Trump Delivers Remarks on Charlie Kirk (The White House)
– September 11, 2025 – Senate Republicans destroyed precedent and changed the rules to break a Democratic blockade of Trump’s executive branch nominees. The move, known as “the nuclear option,” was aimed at undercutting the Senate’s future role in vetting executive branch officials. The change passed along party lines and lowered the existing sixty-vote threshold for considering a group of presidential nominees to a simple majority. Republicans resorted to the move in an effort to weaken the ability of individual senators to block nominees they find objectionable. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said the change would do irreparable damage to the Senate and its constitutional prerogatives, rendering it “a conveyor belt for unqualified Trump nominees.”
– September 12, 2025 – Under pressure from Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the FDAannounced it will examine rare cases involving the deaths of young people after they received COVID vaccines. Kennedy has repeatedly made unfounded claims that the inoculations are deadly. The FDA’s review followed years of exhaustive work by government officials and academic researchers worldwide who have validated the safety of the vaccines. A 2023 analysis published in JAMA Pediatrics reviewed seventeen studies, which included over ten million children ages 5 to 11 who were vaccinated with mRNA shots from Pfizer and Moderna. The shots were shown to reduce the risk of infection and hospitalization in vaccinated children. Kennedy recently fired all the members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and replaced them with his own handpicked members.
– September 12, 2025 – An ICE officer shot and killed a man who resisted arrest and dragged an officer by his car during a vehicle stop in the Franklin Park suburb of Chicago. The man, Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez, was an undocumented immigrant who feared for his safety. An ICE spokesperson alleged the officer suffered severe back injuries, lacerations to his hand, and tears to his knee. The Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights said ICE’s operations “jeopardize the safety of everyone, citizens and non-citizens alike, and disrupt the very fabric of our communities.” ICE officials stated that Gonzalez had a “history of reckless driving.” The only Cook County cases for a man with Villegas-Gonzalez’s name are citations for driving with an expired license, speeding, and driving an uninsured vehicle. Bodycam videos from Franklin Park police officers showed the hurt ICE agent describing his own injuries as “nothing major.”
Surveillance Videos Capture Deadly ICE Shooting in Franklin Park, Illinois (CBS News Chicago)
– September 12, 2025 – The EPAproposed eliminating the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program. Implemented in 2009, the program required large, industrial polluters to report their planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions to the government. Since the program started, US industry has collectively reported a 20 percent drop in carbon emissions. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin called the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program “burdensome.” The proposal would end requirements for thousands of coal-burning power plants, oil refineries, steel mills and other industrial facilities. Zeldin also said, “Alongside President Trump, EPA continues to live up to the promise of unleashing energy dominance that powers the American dream.” He added that ending the program could save American businesses up to $2.4 billion in compliance costs over the next decade.
– September 13, 2025 – Trump announced he was ready to sanction Russia over its three-year war in Ukraine, but only if all NATO allies agree to halt buying oil from Moscow. He chided NATO officials on social media, saying, “I am ready to do major Sanctions on Russia when all NATO Nations STOPBUYINGOILFROMRUSSIA.” The demand followed a visit to Brussels by US Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, who urged the EU to wean itself off Russian energy and agree to a lopsided trade deal in which the EU would pledge to buy $750 billion of US oil and gas....
– September 1, 2025 – The Trump administration deported Orville Etoria and five other men with criminal records to a prison in Eswatini despite the fact that none of the men hold Swazi citizenship. A Jamaican citizen with legal residency in the US, Etoria was convicted of murder in 1996. After Etoria’s release from prison in 2021, immigration officials allowed him to stay in the US, provided he completed annual check-ins. As of The New York Times’s publication, Etoria was being held indefinitely without charges, had not seen a lawyer, and had had little contact with his family since arriving in Eswatini. Neither Eswatini nor the US could explain why Etoria was being held, and Jamaican officials contested the Trump administration’s claim that their country had refused to accept Etoria.
– September 1, 2025 – Hundreds of Labor Day demonstrations took place across the country to protest against Trump administration policies and in support of workers’ rights. The protests, many of which were organized as part of the “Workers over Billionaires” call to action, denounced the Trump administration’s mass deportations, cuts to the social safety net, efforts to undermine unions, and deployment of National Guard troops in American cities, among other concerns. In Manhattan, activists carrying anti-Trump posters and chanting “lock him up” protested outside Trump Tower. “Protests are how you channel energy into activism,” said Andrew Lisa, chair of the Seminole County Democratic Party in Florida. “We are taking that energy and saying, ‘You’ve protested, you’ve taken two hours out of your day. Can you spend two hours knocking on your neighbors’ doors?’”
– September 4, 2025 – In what officials have called the largest-ever immigration raid at a single location, nearly five hundred workers, most of them South Korean nationals, were arrested at a construction site for an electric vehicle battery plant in Ellabell, Georgia. The plant, which was still under construction, was owned by two South Korean companies, Hyundai Motor Group and LG Energy Solution. Some of those arrested included US citizens, lawful permanent residents, and South Koreans with visas or visa waivers. The move, which was heavily criticized by South Korean newspapers and the South Korean government, also revealed tensions in Trump’s push to seek Korean manufacturing investments amid ongoing tariffs and immigration crackdowns. “The economic activities of our investment companies and the rights and interests of our citizens must not be unjustly violated during US law enforcement proceedings,” said a spokesperson for South Korea’s Foreign Ministry.
– September 5, 2025 – During his confirmation hearing, Stephen Miran, Trump’s nominee to fill a Federal Reserve vacancy, said he did not plan to resign from his White House role if confirmed and would instead take a leave of absence. The current chief of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisors, Miran assured the committee he would act independently if confirmed. However, he refused to go on the record to state that Trump had lost the 2020 election, and he ducked questions about whether the president was correct in claiming that officials had faked jobs data for political reasons. Calling Miran a “puppet,” Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren excoriated the nominee, “You have made clear that you will do or say whatever Donald Trump wants. That may work in a political position, but it will take an axe to Federal Reserve independence.”
– September 5, 2025 – In a stark contrast to Trump’s campaign promises to enact “America First” isolationism, his own self-styling as an “antiwar president,” and his stated desire to win a Nobel Peace Prize, Trump signed an executive order renaming the Department of Defense the “Department of War,” a name that was used from 1789–1947. “We won the First World War, we won the Second World War, we won everything before that and in between. And then we decided to go woke, and we changed the name to the Department of Defense,” Trump said at the signing. Added Pete Hegseth in an awkward spoken-word performance: “We’re going to go on offense, not just on defense. Maximum lethality, not tepid legality. Violent effect, not politically correct.” Although the move was largely symbolic, critics argued that the name change exposed Trump’s hypocrisy and underlined his increasingly aggressive use of the military. “[Trump] ran as the supposed antiwar candidate, but has proved to be just the opposite,” said Matt Duss of the Center for International Policy. “This stunt underscores that Trump is more interested in belligerent chest-thumping than genuine peacemaking—with dangerous consequences for American security, global standing and the safety of our armed services.”
– September 11, 2025 – Senate Republicans destroyed precedent and changed the rules to break a Democratic blockade of Trump’s executive branch nominees. The move, known as “the nuclear option,” was aimed at undercutting the Senate’s future role in vetting executive branch officials. The change passed along party lines and lowered the existing sixty-vote threshold for considering a group of presidential nominees to a simple majority. Republicans resorted to the move in an effort to weaken the ability of individual senators to block nominees they find objectionable. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said the change would do irreparable damage to the Senate and its constitutional prerogatives, rendering it “a conveyor belt for unqualified Trump nominees.”
