A daily, non-partisan record of US democratic norms — and the events that erode them.
The historical record of US democratic norms kept in public.
The Standing documents events involving authoritarianism, anti-democratic
behavior, and corruption in US governance, applied to all actors regardless of
party. No anti-democratic action is too small to record: a precinct-level
incident is filed with the same care as a national one. Every entry is anchored
to a primary source — a court filing, an agency record, a citizen-captured
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In a Wall Street Journal interview published June 5, 2026, President Trump said he has directed newly installed acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte to "start the process" of firing national-security personnel and to make the intelligence community smaller, framing the targets as career officials who served under the Biden and Obama administrations. Trump said Pulte's "acting" status leaves him "less shackled" to execute rapid cuts, and indicated he does not intend to formally nominate Pulte — who has no national-security background — for the permanent role.
On June 5, 2026, the U.S. Attorney's office in Los Angeles, led by Trump appointee Bill Essayli, said it had opened "multiple election fraud investigations" into California's elections and dispatched an assistant U.S. attorney to Los Angeles County's vote-counting center. The move followed days of evidence-free claims by President Trump that Democrats were "rigging" the slow primary count for governor, Los Angeles mayor, and Congress, and inserted federal pressure into a routine state-run tabulation that local officials said was proceeding normally.
As California carried out its routine post-election ballot count following the June 2 primary, President Trump posted on Truth Social accusing Democrats, without evidence, of trying to "steal" the gubernatorial and Los Angeles mayoral races by misusing mail-in ballots and deliberately delaying the tally. He asserted the count was "under investigation" by the U.S. Attorney's Office in Los Angeles — which declined to comment — even though California law routinely allows up to 30 days to count ballots and certify results.
On June 4, 2026, the Trump administration moved to direct roughly $700 million in federal support to the coal industry, invoking the Defense Production Act — a 1950 national-defense statute — to fund coal-fired power plants and export infrastructure. The package routes about $425 million in DPA funds to 13 existing plants across 10 states, roughly $185 million in Energy Department grants to build two new coal plants (Alaska and West Virginia) and restart a Maryland plant, and $75 million in DPA funds toward the West Gateway coal export terminal in Oakland, California. It builds on an April 20, 2026 Presidential Determination declaring coal supply chains and baseload power "essential to national defense," with the stated rationale being rising electricity demand from AI and data centers rather than a defense emergency.
On June 4, 2026, the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division announced it had opened 15 new investigations into U.S. medical schools over alleged race discrimination in admissions, expanding a campaign that had already produced adverse findings against the medical schools of Yale University and UCLA. The Division said it would examine whether the schools — each a recipient of millions of dollars in federal funding — comply with Title VI as interpreted by the Supreme Court's 2023 decision restricting race-conscious admissions. The schools under investigation were not publicly named.
Acting ICE Director David Venturella issued an internal memo on June 4, 2026 ending the agency's requirement to report and investigate deaths that occur within 30 days of a detainee's release from custody, rescinding a transparency policy adopted in 2021. The change removes a congressional accountability data stream that oversight bodies had used to track deaths connected to detention conditions. Advocates and public health experts warned the rollback would obscure the human cost of immigration detention as in-custody deaths reach a two-decade high.
On June 3, 2026, President Trump signed an executive order implementing "Schedule Policy/Career" — a revival of the first-term "Schedule F" — that reclassifies roughly 8,000 senior career federal positions, about 97% of them at the GS-15 level or above, into a new at-will category. Affected employees lose civil-service removal protections and the right to appeal adverse actions to the Merit Systems Protection Board, letting agencies fire them without cause. The Office of Personnel Management, which finalized the underlying rule, had earlier estimated up to 50,000 positions could ultimately be covered and has not ruled out expanding the pool.
On June 3, 2026, the U.S. military struck a vessel it alleged was smuggling drugs in the eastern Pacific Ocean, killing two men, according to U.S. Southern Command. The strike was part of Operation Southern Spear, the administration's open-ended military campaign against suspected traffickers begun in September 2025; the Pentagon provided no evidence the boat carried drugs and no arrest, charge, or judicial process preceded the killings. The reported cumulative death toll from the campaign's boat strikes reached at least 207.
On June 2, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court granted Alabama's emergency request to use its Republican-drawn congressional map for the November 2026 midterms, a map with a majority-Black population in only one of the state's seven districts. The unsigned emergency-docket order, decided 6-3 along ideological lines, overrode a three-judge federal panel that had found the map intentionally discriminated against Black voters in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment and displaced the court-drawn districts used in 2024. The three liberal justices dissented, with Justice Sotomayor warning that the decision "disregards both democratic values and the rule of law."
On June 2, 2026, the Department of Defense confirmed it had placed Elias Irizarry — who pleaded guilty to a charge stemming from the January 6, 2021 Capitol attack and, like other January 6 defendants, was later pardoned — as a political appointee in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict (SO/LIC), within its irregular-warfare and counterterrorism section. The post oversees sensitive special-operations activity and requires a top-secret clearance. The appointment drew internal alarm over entrusting someone convicted in the Capitol assault with a national-security role; the Pentagon defended the hire, calling Irizarry a "qualified, patriotic young professional."
On June 2, 2026, President Trump named Bill Pulte — director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, with no intelligence background — acting Director of National Intelligence, succeeding Tulsi Gabbard, who plans to resign effective June 30. The acting designation lets Pulte lead the 18-agency intelligence community without Senate confirmation while he keeps his FHFA post and his chairmanship of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Federal officials announced a "summer surge" of the DC Safe and Beautiful Task Force, requesting roughly 1,500 additional National Guard members to raise the federalized troop presence in Washington, D.C. to about 5,000 (up from ~2,800) ahead of the America 250 / July 4, 2026 celebrations. The plan keeps Guard members on Title 32 orders under the D.C. National Guard and folds militarized enforcement tools — high- visibility patrols, drones, tactical K-9 units, and helicopters — into routine policing of the capital, with no announced end date.
On May 31, 2026, U.S. Southern Command struck a vessel in the eastern Pacific Ocean it described as a drug-trafficking boat, killing three men in the fourth such strike of the week. SOUTHCOM said the boat was "engaged in narco-trafficking operations" and operated by a designated terrorist organization but provided no evidence, and said the strike came at the direction of Gen. Francis L. Donovan, the top U.S. commander in Latin America. The strike is the latest in an open-ended military campaign begun in early September 2025 whose reported death toll has now reached roughly 205, carried out with no judicial process and no congressional authorization for hostilities against Latin American drug-trafficking organizations.
On May 30, 2026, President Donald Trump published a 700-word Truth Social post demanding that U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper "be brought up on charges" and impeached over Cooper's ruling that the Kennedy Center board lacked authority to rename the institution after Trump. Trump asserted the judge had "a total Conflict of Interest," citing the political affiliations of Cooper's wife, attorney Amy Jeffress, rather than any finding of judicial misconduct. The demand to prosecute and remove a sitting judge specifically for how he ruled is a direct pressure campaign against judicial independence.
On May 30, 2026, the ACLU, the ACLU of Texas, the Texas Civil Rights Project, and the law firm Farella Braun + Martel filed a federal class-action suit in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement over conditions at Camp East Montana, the nation's largest immigration detention facility — a tent camp on the Army's Fort Bliss base in El Paso. In under a year of operation the facility has recorded at least three detainee deaths, including one the El Paso County medical examiner ruled a homicide with no one charged, a nearly month-long measles outbreak, and roughly 49 detention-standards violations documented by ICE's own inspectors. The Department of Homeland Security called the inhumane-conditions claims "categorically false."
On May 29, 2026, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper ruled in a 94-page decision that President Trump's handpicked Kennedy Center board acted unlawfully when it unilaterally added Trump's name to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, holding that only Congress can rename the congressionally chartered institution and ordering the name removed from the building and website within 14 days. The court also enjoined the board's March 2026 vote to close the center for two years, calling it an "ill-informed and seemingly preordained decision" reached through "an insufficient, one-sided presentation of information." The ruling authoritatively establishes that the Trump-chaired board overstepped its statutory authority.
On May 29, 2026, the U.S. Postal Service issued a notice of proposed rulemaking (published in the Federal Register June 2) that would require state election officials to submit the names and ballot barcodes of voters who request mail-in or absentee ballots to a new federal "Federal Ballot Mail Portal," and would direct USPS to deliver ballots only to voters on the resulting lists. The rulemaking implements President Trump's March 31 executive order (EO 14399) asserting federal control over mail voting — authority the Constitution's Elections Clause reserves to the states and to Congress, not the president. The proposal is not final and faces legal challenge; the act recorded here is the executive directing a federal agency to claim that authority, not the (contingent) disenfranchisement that would follow if it takes effect.
On May 29, 2026, the New Jersey State Police — deployed by Gov. Mikie Sherrill — took over the security perimeter outside Delaney Hall, the GEO Group-run ICE detention center in Newark where roughly 300 detainees had been on a hunger and labor strike since May 22 over conditions they called inhumane. Sherrill framed the takeover as a de-escalating move to establish "protected protest zones" and remove ICE from nightly clashes, but over the following weekend state troopers deployed tear gas, pepper spray, flashbangs and mounted units, arrested demonstrators, and enforced a half-mile nightly curfew around the facility. Immigrant-rights advocates said the troopers used excessive force against peaceful protesters and were "no different than ICE," a characterization the state disputed as lawful crowd control.
An Associated Press investigation published May 27, 2026 found that at least 10 people have died by suicide in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody since January 2025 — a pace far outstripping the growth of the detained population and unprecedented in the agency's two-decade history, against a historical baseline of roughly zero to one such death per year. Seven of the deaths have occurred since October 2025, already the most in any single fiscal year, and suicides now account for nearly a fifth of the 51 deaths in ICE custody over the period. AP's review of ICE data, autopsy reports, coroner's rulings, and police records found facilities repeatedly violated ICE's own detention standards on intake screening, suicide-risk monitoring, mental-health care, and access to materials that could be used for self-harm.
In a report released May 27, 2026, Human Rights Watch documented that between January 20, 2025 and March 9, 2026 the Trump administration deported more than 18,000 third-country nationals, nearly 13,000 of them to Mexico under an undisclosed US-Mexico agreement; Cubans were the largest group, with 4,353 sent to Mexico. HRW found that none of the 53 deportees it interviewed were given any opportunity to contest their country of removal, a violation of due-process requirements under the Immigration and Nationality Act and international law, and that detainees faced overcrowding, denial of medical care, and guard violence in US custody before being left stranded in southern Mexico.
On April 14, 2026, U.S. Southern Command (Joint Task Force Southern Spear) carried out a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel it described as a suspected narco-trafficking boat in the eastern Pacific Ocean, killing four men. Reported as the 51st strike in the open-ended Operation Southern Spear campaign and the fourth in roughly five days, it brought the campaign's cumulative reported death toll to at least 175. SOUTHCOM released aerial video and said intelligence confirmed the vessel was on known trafficking routes, but the administration again provided no public evidence for its "narco-terrorist" designation.
On April 15, 2026, U.S. Southern Command said Joint Task Force Southern Spear conducted a "lethal kinetic strike" on a vessel it alleged was operated by designated terrorist organizations in the eastern Pacific, killing three men it described as "narco-terrorists." It was the fifth lethal U.S. boat strike in five days and raised the reported death toll from Operation Southern Spear to at least 178 across roughly 53 targeted vessels since September 2025. The Pentagon released an unclassified video but offered no evidence the boat carried drugs, and no arrest, charge, or judicial process preceded the killings.
On April 24, 2026, U.S. forces operating under Joint Task Force Southern Spear struck a vessel they alleged was engaged in narco-trafficking in the eastern Pacific Ocean, killing two people, U.S. Southern Command said. SOUTHCOM asserted the boat was operated by "Designated Terrorist Organizations" but, consistent with the entire campaign, released no public evidence that the vessel carried drugs and no arrest, charge, or judicial process preceded the killings. The strike was part of Operation Southern Spear, the open-ended military campaign begun in September 2025 whose reported cumulative death toll had reached at least 183.
On April 26, 2026, U.S. Southern Command announced a lethal strike on a vessel in the eastern Pacific Ocean that it described as an alleged drug-trafficking boat, killing three people. SOUTHCOM posted a video of the strike on X and said the boat was transiting "known narco-trafficking routes," but provided no public evidence that it carried narcotics. The attack was the latest in the Trump administration's open-ended boat-strike campaign, which by late April had killed at least 186 people across the eastern Pacific and Caribbean.
On April 28, 2026, the U.S. State Department sent a worldwide diplomatic cable ordering consular officers to ask every nonimmigrant visa applicant two new verbal questions -- whether they have suffered harm or mistreatment at home and whether they fear harm if returned -- and to deny the visa to anyone who answers "yes" or refuses to answer. The directive, which covers tourist, student, and temporary-worker visas, converts an expression of protection-need into an automatic disqualifier and is part of a broader effort to screen out applicants who might later seek asylum.
By late April 2026, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had quietly returned agent Jonathan Ross — who fatally shot unarmed Minneapolis mother Renée Good on January 7, 2026 — to active administrative and investigative duty in another state with no disciplinary consequence. ICE's internal-affairs review remains frozen pending a stalled FBI probe, after the DOJ Civil Rights Division under Harmeet Dhillon declined to open a civil-rights investigation into the shooting.
A federal grand jury in the Eastern District of North Carolina indicted former FBI Director James Comey on April 28, 2026, on two counts arising from a May 2025 Instagram post of seashells arranged to read "86 47," which the Justice Department casts as a death threat against President Trump. The charges follow the 2025 collapse of an earlier DOJ case against Comey and the dismissal weeks earlier of Attorney General Pam Bondi, whom Trump faulted for not pursuing his agenda aggressively enough.
White House senior counselor Peter Navarro personally asked the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Capital to approve a $620 million loan to Vulcan Elements, a North Carolina rare-earth-magnet startup — the only one of dozens of companies under consideration whose deal was initiated by a top White House aide. Donald Trump Jr.'s venture-capital firm had taken an undisclosed stake in Vulcan about three months before the deal was announced, and the company's valuation rose roughly tenfold afterward. The White House role was revealed by a ProPublica investigation published May 28, 2026.
On April 28, 2026, the Federal Communications Commission ordered The Walt Disney Company to file early renewal applications within 30 days for the eight ABC-owned broadcast television stations it operates, licenses not otherwise due for renewal for years. The order came one day after President Trump publicly demanded that ABC fire late-night host Jimmy Kimmel over a joke about First Lady Melania Trump. The FCC cited an open investigation into Disney's diversity, equity and inclusion policies, a rationale widely viewed as pretextual given the timing.
The U.S. State Department revoked the U.S. tourist visas of five of the seven board members of La Nación, Costa Rica's leading watchdog newspaper, in what the paper and press-freedom groups describe as retaliation for its critical editorial line. The board members received no formal notice or explanation — the department cited visa-record confidentiality — and reportedly first learned of the revocations through pro-government Costa Rican media. The move followed Secretary of State Marco Rubio's visit to Costa Rica and the paper's scrutiny of President Rodrigo Chaves, a Trump ally.
CNN reported on May 5, 2026 that the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs opened internal investigations into employees who attended vigils for Alex Pretti — a VA nurse killed by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis in January 2026 — and who spoke to the news media about him. Becky Halioua, a recreational therapist and union leader at the Charlie Norwood VA Medical Center in Augusta, Georgia, was investigated for giving a media interview without prior approval; investigators emailed her news photographs of herself at the January 28 vigil with her face circled and labeled. At least three other VA employees were investigated over press contacts, and unions called the probes a "scare tactic" to silence outspoken staff.
The Board of Immigration Appeals reinstated removal proceedings against Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian lawful permanent resident and Columbia University student activist, overturning an immigration judge's February dismissal of the case. The government had pursued Mahdawi's deportation under a rarely used foreign-policy provision invoked by the Secretary of State, after he was detained in 2025 over his pro-Palestinian advocacy and released by a federal court without being charged with any crime.
In early May 2026, MS NOW reported — with corroboration from PBS NewsHour, TheWrap, Poynter and Democracy Now — that the FBI had opened a criminal "insider threat" investigation into the sourcing behind Atlantic reporter Sarah Fitzpatrick's story documenting FBI Director Kash Patel's excessive drinking and erratic conduct. The probe is highly unusual: it does not stem from any disclosure of classified information and instead targets leaks to a journalist, a posture in which reporters have historically been treated only as witnesses. FBI agents assigned to the matter reportedly objected that they were not supposed to pursue it, and the bureau publicly denied the investigation.
Before dawn on May 13, 2026, Homeland Security Investigations agents executed search warrants at the homes of volunteers of VC Defensa, a Ventura County, California immigrant-rights coalition that patrols neighborhoods to alert residents to ICE operations. Agents searched multiple locations, seized electronic devices, and briefly detained at least two volunteers, who were released the same day. The group's attorney called the operation "completely unconstitutional" and an intimidation tactic against protected organizing and said VC Defensa will sue; DHS said the warrants were part of an "ongoing investigation" and cited prior arrests of unnamed members, though no charges have been filed in connection with the searches.
A May 18, 2026 internal directive from a senior National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases official, obtained by CNN, restricted U.S. infectious-disease researchers to attending World Health Organization meetings only in groups of three or fewer and only in a "listening capacity," with any research questions or countermeasure ideas routed through HHS's chain of command. The limits were imposed during active Ebola and Hantavirus responses; current and former officials called barring direct scientist-to-scientist coordination during an emerging public-health emergency unprecedented.
A May 20, 2026 Defense Department memorandum signed by Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness Anthony Tata cut the military's list of officially recognized religious affiliation codes from roughly 211 to 31, dropping an estimated 180 minority faiths and worldviews — including atheists, humanists, pagans, Wiccans, Druids, Heathens/Asatru, deists, Unitarian Universalists, and spiritualists. The reduction, directed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, preserves majority faiths while removing the de-recognized groups' access to formal chaplain support.
On May 26, 2026, DHS General Counsel James Percival issued a memo directing ICE attorneys in the Office of the Principal Legal Advisor to develop "anti-fraud policies" for "robust enforcement" of the document-fraud statute (8 U.S.C. § 1324c), stating the effort should include enforcement against immigration attorneys who file false asylum claims. The memo explicitly invoked President Trump's March 2026 directive seeking sanctions against lawyers who bring "frivolous" litigation against the government.
The Trump Justice Department reversed the prior administration's position and gave notice it will release audio recordings and transcripts of former President Joe Biden's interviews with ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer — material gathered during special counsel Robert Hur's classified-documents investigation — to the conservative Heritage Foundation and the House Judiciary Committee on June 15, 2026 unless a court intervenes. Biden sued the Department on May 26, 2026 to block the release, arguing the recordings contain private conversations, including about his late son Beau's death.
On May 27, 2026, President Trump declared on Truth Social that prediction-market firms Kalshi and Polymarket "will thrive" under his leadership and that the federal government is "setting the rules of the road" as the "gold standard for the States," while his administration actively backs the companies against state regulators. The CFTC and Department of Justice have sued Connecticut, Arizona and Illinois — and contested Minnesota's first-in-the-nation ban — to block states from regulating the operators as gambling. Donald Trump Jr. is a paid strategic adviser to both firms and his venture firm 1789 Capital is a major Polymarket investor, so the favorable federal posture directly benefits the president's family.
On May 29, 2026, the U.S. Postal Service issued a notice of proposed rulemaking (published in the Federal Register June 2) that would require state election officials to submit the names and ballot barcodes of voters who request mail-in or absentee ballots to a new federal "Federal Ballot Mail Portal," and would direct USPS to deliver ballots only to voters on the resulting lists. The rulemaking implements President Trump's March 31 executive order (EO 14399) asserting federal control over mail voting — authority the Constitution's Elections Clause reserves to the states and to Congress, not the president. The proposal is not final and faces legal challenge; the act recorded here is the executive directing a federal agency to claim that authority, not the (contingent) disenfranchisement that would follow if it takes effect.