Introducing the Trump Action Tracker website!

With the help of amazing volunteers, I've converted my Trump action tracker spreadsheet into an easy to use website - now up to 740 actions and counting

Today I’m launching TrumpActionTracker.info - a live, searchable list of authoritarian‑style actions from Trump’s second term (over 740 actions so far).

Logging actions of the Trump administration across five broad domains of authoritarianism

I’ve been doing my best to track actions of the Trump administration that are authoritarian-like since the start of his second term in January 2025. In February 2025, I introduced five broad domains of authoritarianism that covered the recorded actions:

• Undermining Democratic Institutions & Rule of Law; Dismantling federal government

• Dismantling Social Protections & Rights; Enrichment & Corruption

• Suppressing Dissent & Controlling Information

• Attacking Science, Environment, Health, Arts & Education

• Aggressive Foreign Policy & Global Destabilization; Nationalism

I then mapped the actions onto a Venn Diagram. Since then, I have continued writing about further actions, and groups of actions since, such as attacks on science, universities, democracy, and suppressing dissent. However, as the number of authoritarian-like actions has continued to grow (now at more than 740), I wanted to create a web resource that lets anyone explore the actions I am logging. With the help of two amazing volunteers Sandy Laping (who helps me find actions to log) and Pete Duncanson (who built the website), this is now live at trumpactiontracker.info!

The Trump Action Tracker website

The website starts with a quick overview of all actions logged, how many have been logged by month and the distribution of action within authoritarian domain by month.

It is immediately obvious that the number of actions logged has been increasing each month. While it’s possible that this is because Sandy and I have been better at capturing actions as time has gone on, I believe this trend is mostly due to the Trump administration in fact escalating its actions across each domain, partly as actions taken early on in the term lead to further actions, each meriting their own inclusion¹.

The other interesting observation is that the Trump administration has continued to attack across all domains over time - it is not that one month is focused on science and academia while another is focued on reducing civil rights. This means it remains hard for media outlets to cover the range of attacks and for people to absorb the scale of what is going on. It is exactly this ‘overview gap’ that I hope this website helps fill.

The Venn Diagram

There are simply too many actions now to show them with labels on a Venn diagram. Instead we now show each action as a dot - hovering over a dot gives a description of the respective action. For me, the main advantage of the Venn diagram is a quick overview into how actions distribute across the five broad domains, including intersections².

The list of actions

The actions are listed in chronological order, with the most recent at the top by default. The icon to the left of each action shows the website of the associated news story, and clicking on the action will take you to that news story. The date of the news item is shown underneath, along with the authoritarian domain(s) the action has been allocated to.

To the left are options to filter this list of actions. You can filter by category, and/or by date range, and/or by a text search of the action descriptions. This is a very useful way for looking for actions that happened within a certain time period or for particular topics. The Venn Diagram will also update to show filtered actions. So for instance, in the screenshot below, I’ve filtered on actions from 2 May to 6 June 2025 and only those allocated to at least one of: Undermining Democratic Institutions, Suppressing Dissent, and Dismantling Social Protections and Rights. In this case, Action 479 (cancelling federal funding to California) is shown because while it is allocated to the deselected Science and Academia (much of the threatened funding is to state universities), it is also allocated to Undermining Democracy (because it is an attack on the independence of States)³.

Not all actions are equal, and some might seem more minor than others (e.g. defunding a museum vs imposing global tariffs). However, I believe it is important to track the smaller but nonetheless authoritarian actions alongside the larger⁴. You can read more about how actions are allocated on our About page.

My hopes for the website - and how others can help!

I already use the website a lot when trying to understand what’s happening in America, or when writing and researching my Substack articles. I hope that others will find it similarly useful, particularly journalists, or those working in public policy / politics, or academics.

Over time, and with Pete’s help, I hope to expand the website functionality. For instance, including a further resources page to other useful websites, including more analysis within individual domains, or showing where actions over time are linked to each other.

I am frankly frightened that we have already reached almost 750 actions only six months into Trump’s second term. And the rate of actions is accelerating. Sandy and I are committed to doing our best to continue to track and log actions for the rest of Trump’s term as far as we can. But the scale of the task is daunting, particularly if adding extra functionality and analyses.

I am open to offers of help! In an ideal world, this would be in the form of some sort of funding to allow dedicated, paid-for, person time to help track, explain, and analyse the actions; create novel visualisations of the data and trends; and maintain and update the website. Anyone in a position to do this, please do get in touch!

Other very useful things - if you have some experience of research and are prepared to support the effort to find actions, that would also be very useful (and get in touch). That said, as long as I am doing this in my spare time, I do not have the time or bandwidth to manage many volunteers at once and so this approach has its limits. Sharing the website far and wide would also be much appreciated - we’ve created this resource for the public good and so the more people who see it and potentially use it, the better.

The amazing volunteers

And finally a heartfelt and sincere thank you to Sandy and Pete. Both of them have spent hours and hours of their time over the previous several months bringing this together. Without Sandy, the tracker would be far sparser and much more lonely to maintain. Without Pete’s website skills and patience with my many requests, it would have remained a hard-to-use and mostly forgotten spreadsheet. So thank you so much to both of them. You can follow both Sandy and Pete on BlueSky too!

1. Note that because actions can fall into more than one domain, the total number of actions is less than the total of actions within each domain.

2. A five circle Venn is pretty complicated to draw, and it is not feasible to show every intersection. Where there are infeasible intersections, we’ve prioritised domains to plot the action in the most important domain(s).

3. Note that not all intersections can be shown. In this case, the remaining dots that look like they are only in “Science and Academia” are actually also in “Suppressing Dissent”. This can be seen from the list of filtered actions.

4. Another example is that I include all reports Sandy or I find about deportation of individuals on e.g. valid visas for expressing dissent, or sending people to foreign prisons without due process. While all fall under a broader category of nationalistic immigration policy, I believe it is important to bear witness to individual cases and also to be able to track the escalation in arrest, detention and deportation over time.