About Page
Who We Are
This project is led by Professor Christina Pagel, a UK-based health services researcher and science communicator. She created and maintains the dataset underlying the tracker, drawing on her background in data analysis and evidence-based policy to monitor and document the authoritarian trajectory of Trump’s presidency. She started the project in February 2025, at first to help herself make sense of the actions of the Trump administration and then later to share with others.
Prof Pagel writes about the Trump administration on her Substack and Bluesky. She introduced the five domains of authoritarianism in her analysis of the first three weeks of the presidency. She has further written about the attacks of the administration on DEI, science, universities and democratic norms.
She is supported by a small team of brilliant volunteers who help make this work!
Sandy Laping is a science communicator and is helping to track the actions and maintain the underlying spreadsheet.
Pete Duncanson is a software developer and built this website in his spare time to help him sleep a little more soundly at night with the knowledge that he was at least doing "something" in this moment.
How to Help (Prof Christina Pagel)
In an ideal world, we would receive 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. I have plenty of ideas for new analyses using this data. Anyone in a position to do this, please do get in touch!
Other useful ways to help - if you have some experience of research and are prepared to support the effort to find or analyse actions, please also 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.
Allocation of Domains (Prof Christina Pagel)
I originally decided on only five domains since any more would be difficult to visualise in a Venn Diagram, and these five captured the range of actions. There is always some element of subjectivity in assigning actions to different domains, but below is a brief overview of how we do the allocation. Note that any single action can be allocated to more than one domain - so far about a third of actions are allocated to at least two domains.
Undermining Democratic Institutions & Rule of Law; Dismantling federal government
There are a few different types of actions included in this domain:
- Any action weakening democratic checks and balances such as restricting press freedom, undermining the authority or oversight of Congress, reducing the independence of arms length bodies, violating political norms, making it harder to hold power to account, or restricting access to public information
- Any action undermining States' rights
- Any action that reduces the ability of government to perform its functions, such as wholesale dismantling of federal institutions
- Any action that undermines the Rule of Law, such as violating court orders or the Constitution, circumventing Congressional appropriated funds, attacking law firms or judges.
- Any action that weaponises executive power against perceived enemies, such as January 6th prosecutors, threatening rivals with legal action or deportation, starting investigations
Suppressing Dissent & Controlling Information
This includes:
- actions that directly suppress dissent, such as intimidating, threatening or punishing opponents or rivals, taking out law suits against critics or making it harder for others to take out law suits against the state, instituting loyalty tests on employees or making access / visas dependent on scrutiny of e.g. past actions, beliefs or social media.
- actions that control information, such as manufacturing or massaging evidence to support the state policy, or ignoring, contradicting, restricting access to, or stopping publication of, evidence that might contradict state policy.
Dismantling Social Protections & Rights; Enrichment & Corruption
There are a few different types actions included this domain:
- Any action removing civil rights protections (including data privacy) from groups, such as LGTBQ+ communities, immigrants or women. This includes actions to accelerate detention and deportation of 'undesirable' immigrants (e.g. undocumented immigrants or overseas students).
- Any action attacking diversity and inclusion initiatives
- Any action attacking civil rights organisations
- Any action directly contravening fundamental rights such as the right to due process
- Any action that directly enriches the president, his family, his cabinet or senior cronies.
- Any action that is potentially corrupt, such as trading leniency for political support or trading political or business favours for money or wealth
Attacking Science, Environment, Health, Arts & Education
There are a few different types actions included this domain:
- Any action that undermines the independence of universities
- Any action that undermines education more generally (such as rules against teaching 'anti-American' topics)
- Any action that restricts scientific activity to align with state ideology, for instance restricting research on climate change or vaccine hesitancy
- Any action that goes against environment evidence for administrative geopolitical objectives, such as expanding oil and gas drilling or weakening pollution protections.
- Any action that attacks the health of populations, such as cutting infectious disease surveillance, reducing accessibility of vaccines, terminating grants that target improving health of marginalised populations, cuts to foreign AID such as HIV treatments or childhood vaccination.
- Any action that attacks the the arts, humanities or social sciences
Aggressive Foreign Policy & Global Destabilisation; Nationalism
Actions in this domain include:
- Aggressive threats or actions against other countries, particularly allies, such as threatening the independence of Canada and Greenland, using tariffs or trade policies to extract concessions, or restricing access to the US through increased visa scrutiny
- Any action that interferes directly in another country's rule of law or democratic processes, such as expressing preferences in elections or declaring opinions on formal investigations
- Any action deliberately destablising the international world order, such as withdrawing from WHO or the Paris Climate Treaty, undermining NATO or aligning with anti-democratic rivals such as Putin.
- Any action that is explicitly Nationalistic, such as using language that demonises immigrants, celebrating dehumanising conditions in detention facilities, or militarising the US border.