Several hours ago, I had to abandon my contacts for glasses. My eyes are still dry and burning. My left leg is asleep. My fingers are cramping. My phone is dead. I’m out of coffee and desperate for a bourbon or perhaps a cigarette (I don’t smoke).
I have a Google document filled with 10,000 words, more than a hundred individual stories, scores of links to dig deeper into — I’m wondering how I’m going to get my editors to read the whole thing, let alone get millions of Americans to care about it. I’ll have to get it to half that length, and maybe even shorter, before I can put it in front of anybody.
This is where I’ve landed after five more months attempting to document all the grifting, corruption, and self-dealing of the Trump administration.
I published my first piece on this topic on May 1, titled “The everything, everywhere, all at once corruption story.” When I finished that piece and read it back, I was astounded at the end result. Not because it was a particularly riveting piece of writing, but because seeing it all together in one place shifted something inside me, solidifying a perspective about this administration that won’t be easily forgotten. I was gratified to see it had a similar impact on others; it was widely read and cited, generating hundreds of thousands of views, over 1,000 comments, and a mention in The New York Times.
At the time, I was pretty skeptical about the degree to which people would care about the corruption permeating our government right now. Everyone seems so fatigued by the news that they aren’t paying attention, or they’re too comfortable in their partisan corners to break ranks, or they’re simply too overwhelmed to get worked up. Our ability to be concerned or even shocked seems diminished. But it turns out I was wrong: In what looks to me to be a historic piece of polling, Fox News recently found Americans are now putting government corruption as their #1 concern heading into the 2026 midterms, ahead of issues like inflation, immigration, and healthcare.
Even allowing for the possibility that some of those respondents are thinking of, say, welfare fraud in Minnesota, it’s undeniable that people do care about government corruption, that it does matter, and that tracking these stories is valuable.
The administration is also noticing, and going on the defensive. This week, Vice President JD Vance made the rather remarkable and preposterous claim that he’s “not seen a single shred of evidence that Donald Trump participates or sanctions in that corruption ... I’ve not once seen evidence that Donald Trump has enriched himself.”
I offered reams of evidence in May, in what I think painted a remarkable and unmissable picture of an administration built to profit from the presidency. My first piece covered the first 15 months of Trump’s second administration; as astonishing as it was seeing it all together, even as the person who wrote it, the excesses of the five months since are almost unfathomable.
More stories will come to the surface after I publish this piece, starting right now. I’m certain of this because a ceaseless barrage of stories has flowed in every week since I began tracking the administration last January. Don’t believe me? Consider just 10 stories that have broken in the last three weeks, since I finished the first draft of this piece:
- In March, 15 minutes before Trump announced a U-turn on Iran in a Truth Social post, billions of dollars of trades were placed betting oil prices would fall. The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission began to investigate insider trading — then Bloomberg reported last week that a senior adviser to the agency’s Trump-appointed chairman told them to back off.
- The Washington Post obtained a list of donors to Trump’s ballroom project, which included previously undisclosed contributors who have benefited from regulatory decisions, government contracts, and even a pardon for one donor’s family member.
- Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy nonprofit, reported that companies who benefit from cancellation of federal enforcement actions have given or pledged $210.5 million in contributions to MAGA Inc. and other Trump-aligned super PACs.
- Steve Witkoff and the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner have been attempting to negotiate a deal to end the war in Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin pushed for the deal to be contingent on a multi-billion-dollar arrangement to sell Russian energy assets. Such a deal would benefit two Middle Eastern groups who work with Kushner or Witkoff’s family and Trump donor Todd Boehly.
- While Bo Hines, the executive director of the White House’s crypto council, was leading the White House’s push to pass the GENIUS Act (a law providing a regulatory framework for cryptocurrency), the company Hines co-owned was also taking millions of dollars from Tether, a business that stood to benefit significantly from the GENIUS Act. After the bill passed, Tether hired Hines as its U.S. chief.
- Former Trump attorney Alina Habba Mildon informed the president that one of his top advisers, former Kennedy Center leader Ric Grenell, failed to deposit a multi-million-dollar donation to the Kennedy Center that her billionaire husband had made, essentially accusing Grenell of stealing the money. Subsequent reporting suggests the money did not come from Mildon but from a bank transfer from the Democratic Republic of Congo, raising even more questions.
- Two days later, The New York Times reported that billionaire Julio Herrera Velutini, a prominent Venezuelan businessman previously charged with bribery, promised Mildon $50 million to help him secure a pardon. Mildon then took a job at Concord Partners, a company started by Isabela Herrera (the daughter of the man seeking the pardon) in October of 2025. The company had no public profile at the time of the offer, and Mildon was still serving as U.S. attorney for New Jersey when she took the “job.” Trump pardoned Velutini in January.
- Katie Wiles, the daughter of White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, was reported to be working for a lobbying firm that represents Republika Srpska, a small, semi-autonomous territory in Bosnia and Herzegovina that is aligned with Russia.
- Kimberly Guilfoyle, the former U.S. ambassador to Greece, was fired after The Wall Street Journal obtained text messages showing she requested $100,000 toward a credit card payment from a Trump donor in exchange for a promise she’d get the administration to make the donor’s tax and legal issues disappear. In the leaked texts, Guilfoyle stresses the importance of not leaving a paper trail of their discussions.
- Kalshi launched an investigation into suspicious trades on their platform about whom Trump would pick as his press secretary. The platform said a series of trades accurately bet on Katie Zacharia, including two who bet around 1:41 PM ET, right before several news organizations reported Zacharia was the pick.
Again: These stories are all from the last three weeks, just in the month of October. Each one would be the kind of political bombshell that could reshape an administration in a different era, and each one surfaced after I thought I had finished collecting the stories that would comprise this article.
Despite a new scandal like this popping up on a near-daily basis, I have to stop and publish something now, to mark this moment in time, and to clear the backlog so I can begin tracking anew.
To that end, there is no real story here. I will not craft a narrative for you; there is no arc, no climax, no wonder, no mystery, no twist at the end. The information is the narrative. There is just the reality before us — the simple black-and-white facts of what has been done and what is happening, here, right now. It is remarkable in all the worst ways, brimming with details that, if you care about good governance or honesty or character, might make you angry.
But I will not tell you what to feel or how to respond or what to think.
I will not tell you how to vote, or insist you share this article, or debate you about how this government’s pervasive corruption compares to other administrations.
I will only leave you with what I’ve found.
I’ve put everything into nine different buckets, which each overlap in some ways:
- The stock trading, insider trading, and market timing
- The crypto stuff
- The legal favors
- The president’s products and side projects
- The foreign cash
- Tariffs, regulation, and favors
- The children
- The cabinet and inner circle
- Updates and closing thoughts
With all that out of the way… Here is what we have learned about President Donald Trump and his administration since May 1, 2026.
