Lest We Forget the Horrors: An Unending Catalog of Trump’s Cruelties, Collusions, Corruptions, and Crimes: June 2026: Atrocities 1014-1112

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. - - - These lists, along with everything McSweeney’s publishes on this site, are offered ad-free and at no charge to our readers. If you are moved to make a donation in any amount or subscribe to our website’s Patreon , please do. This will help support this project and our other work. - - - ATROCITY KEY – Authoritarianism – 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 - - - May 2026 Main Index Trump’s first term - - - June 2026 – June 1, 2026 – The Trump administration issued a rule narrowing the Medicaid work requirement’s exemption for people who are “medically frail,” making it available only to those whose conditions “significantly impair” their ability to work. The rule states that diagnoses including cancer, HIV / AIDS , and end-stage renal disease do not by themselves qualify for the exemption. – June 1, 2026 – As Canada’s trade minister traveled to Washington for talks on the future of the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement, Donald Trump reposted a Bloomberg article about Canada’s technical recession with the comment: “51st State!” It was his first public use of the phrase in months. – June 3, 2026 – The New York Times reported that a previously undisclosed Department of Homeland Security inspector general report had found repeated mistreatment of detainees at Louisiana’s Winn Correctional Center, including an officer placing one detainee in a chokehold and another stabbing a detainee’s thumb with a pen. Investigators also said the facility later refused to provide complete video footage of some use-of-force incidents. – June 3, 2026 – New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill said federal immigration officials again refused to allow her into the Delaney Hall detention center in Newark. The day before, New Jersey had sued the GEO Group, the private prison contractor operating the facility, after it refused access to state health inspectors, as protests outside continued in solidarity with a hunger and labor strike by detainees. – June 3, 2026 – The Washington Post reported that the Trump administration had appointed pardoned January 6 rioter Elias Irizarry to the Defense Department’s Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict office, which oversees sensitive special operations and counterterrorism matters. Irizarry had pleaded guilty to entering the Capitol through a broken window while carrying a metal pole. – June 3, 2026 – Donald Trump signed an executive order stripping job protections from nearly eight thousand federal employees in policy-making roles, making it easier to fire career civil servants. A subsequent New York Times investigation found that the White House had privately pressured the Merit Systems Protection Board before a March ruling embracing the administration’s expansive view of presidential power over the civil service. As Trump signed the order, White House aide James Sherk explained that it would treat policymakers like private-sector employees: “If they’re messing up, then they can be removed quickly.” – June 4, 2026 – Mamuka Artmeladze, a forty-three-year-old man from Georgia, died in ICE custody at Winn Correctional Center in Louisiana, becoming the fiftieth person to die in immigration detention during Donald Trump’s second administration. His death came days after ICE ended a policy requiring the agency to publicly report deaths occurring within thirty days of a detainee’s release. – June 4, 2026 – Lawfare reported that at least ninety-seven January 6 defendants pardoned by Donald Trump had since been arrested for, charged with, or convicted of new crimes, more than twice the number previously documented . The study identified five cases in which Trump’s pardons allegedly enabled later crimes by releasing offenders who otherwise would likely have remained incarcerated, including one who was later sentenced to life in prison for child molestation and another who was convicted of grand larceny and burglary. – June 4, 2026 – Donald Trump pardoned Stephen Buyer, a Republican who represented Indiana in the US House from 1993 to 2011. Buyer was convicted in 2023 for trading on confidential information about a T-Mobile/Sprint merger and Guidehouse’s acquisition of Navigant, including a tip from a T-Mobile executive during a golf outing, and was sentenced to twenty-two months in prison after the judge found that he had obstructed justice by giving false explanations for his trades. – June 4, 2026 – After multiple musicians withdrew from National Mall concerts for America’s 250th anniversary, saying they had been misled about the event’s political ties, Donald Trump announced his own rally with Lee Greenwood and Christopher Macchio. Trump said the other artists had been told “to stay home,” promised a “Rally to end all Rallies,” and listed himself among the performers as “a fine and highly dignified gentleman known as, President DONALD J. TRUMP !” – June 4, 2026 – Parents of transgender children treated at Mount Sinai Health System reported that the hospital had told them it would provide their children’s medical records to the Trump administration under a federal subpoena. The reports followed a similar demand made by the administration to NYU Langone for years of records on minors treated for gender dysphoria, as well as files on the clinicians who cared for them. – June 5, 2026 – Speaking to farmers in Wisconsin as his trade and foreign policies drove up costs, Donald Trump told supporters , “I don’t need this. I got elected. What the hell do I have to be here for?” He added, “I could be home right now in the beautiful White House, enjoying watching somebody else on television talking.” Trump Addresses Wisconsin Farmers ( WKOW ) – June 5, 2026 – A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to restart asylum and immigration processing after striking down policies that had frozen asylum grants and halted immigration benefits for people from thirty-nine countries, most of them in Africa and the Middle East. “The court is reminded” that immigrants are often told to “follow the law” and “do things the right way,” the judge wrote. “This case serves as a perfect example of immigrants doing just that.” – June 5, 2026 – An auction for oil leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge ended with bids on only about 70,000 of the 689,000 acres offered, despite Donald Trump’s promises to extract “liquid gold” from a refuge he had called “the biggest find anywhere in the world, as big as Saudi Arabia.” No major international oil companies participated, and the sale raised just $3.7 million, nearly half of it from Alaska’s state-owned economic development corporation. – June 5, 2026 – The New York Times reported that the Trump administration had drafted an order directing the US Forest Service to open millions of acres of national forest land to off-road vehicles, including about five million acres mostly in Idaho and Montana that the agency had recommended to Congress for wilderness protection. – June 5, 2026 – A Washington judge dismissed the Kennedy Center’s lawsuit against jazz musician Chuck Redd,…