1973 federal housing discrimination case

In 1973, the U.S. Justice Department sued Trump Management for housing discrimination against African-American renters under the Fair Housing Act. The case was settled in 1975, with the company agreeing to take steps to ensure compliance and to rent more apartments to Black tenants. The Trump company did not admit wrongdoing [1].

Critics and biographers have cited the case as a formative early controversy that shaped public perceptions of Trump's business practices. Trump and his defenders have framed the settlement as a standard resolution rather than evidence of discrimination [1].

Atlantic City bankruptcies and Trump University

Between 1991 and 2009, Trump's entities filed for Chapter 11 protection six times, primarily involving his Atlantic City casinos and related entertainment properties [2]. Critics have argued the pattern undermined Trump's branding of himself as a successful businessman; Trump and his defenders have characterized the bankruptcies as standard corporate restructurings used by sophisticated dealmakers.

Trump University, a for-profit education company that operated from 2005 to 2010, was the subject of three civil lawsuits, including two class actions and a 2013 fraud case brought by then-New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman. In November 2016, weeks after winning the presidential election, Trump agreed to a $25 million settlement of all three suits without admitting wrongdoing [2].

October 2016: the Access Hollywood tape

A 2005 audio recording of Trump's pre-interview conversation with Access Hollywood host Billy Bush, in which he described aggressive behavior toward women in crude terms, surfaced on October 7, 2016, less than a month before Election Day [2]. Multiple Republican officeholders called on Trump to leave the race; he refused and issued a video apology, framing the recording as "locker-room banter".

The tape was the most public moment in a broader pattern of allegations of sexual misconduct that more than two dozen women have publicly made against Trump over decades, allegations he has uniformly denied [2]. In a civil case brought by writer E. Jean Carroll, a Manhattan federal jury found in May 2023 that Trump had sexually abused and defamed her, ordering him to pay $5 million in damages. A second Carroll case resulted in an $83.3 million judgment in January 2024 [2].

Charlottesville and the "very fine people" response (August 2017)

Following the August 11–12, 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, at which a counter-protester was killed when a white-nationalist demonstrator drove his car into a crowd, Trump told reporters there were "very fine people on both sides" of the protest [3].

Critics, including some Republican officeholders at the time, said the framing equated white nationalists with their counter-protesters. Trump's defenders, including his White House staff and Trump himself in later statements, argued the comment referred to non-extremist protesters concerned with the removal of Confederate monuments and that he had separately condemned neo-Nazis and white supremacists in the same press conference [3].

The episode has remained one of the most-cited and most-contested moments of Trump's first term.

First impeachment (December 2019 to February 2020)

On December 18, 2019, the House voted 230-197 (with one "present") to impeach Trump on two articles: abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, in connection with allegations that he had conditioned military aid and a White House meeting for Ukraine on public investigations into Joe Biden and a Crowdstrike conspiracy theory about 2016 election interference [4].

The Senate trial began January 16, 2020. On February 5, 2020, the Senate acquitted Trump on both articles. The vote on abuse of power was 52-48, with Sen. Mitt Romney becoming the first senator in U.S. history to vote to convict a president of his own party [4].

COVID-19 response (2020)

Trump's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic that began in early 2020 became one of the most-criticized aspects of his first term. Critics, including public health officials and Democratic governors, argued he had downplayed the virus's severity in early 2020, contradicted his own public health advisors, and made unsupported claims about treatments. Trump and his defenders cited Operation Warp Speed's accelerated development of COVID-19 vaccines as a generational achievement of the administration [2].

January 6, 2021, and the second impeachment

On January 6, 2021, while Congress was certifying the 2020 electoral college vote, a mob of Trump supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol. Five people died in connection with the attack, and more than 140 police officers were injured [4].

On January 13, 2021, the House voted 232-197 to impeach Trump for "incitement of insurrection," with ten House Republicans, including then-Rep. Liz Cheney is joining all Democrats in the affirmative vote. It was the first time in U.S. history that a president had been impeached twice [5].

The Senate trial concluded February 13, 2021, with a 57-43 vote to convict, ten votes short of the two-thirds majority required. Seven Republican senators joined all 50 Democrats to vote guilty, the largest bipartisan vote to convict in any presidential impeachment trial [5].

Four 2023 criminal indictments

Between March and August 2023, Trump was indicted in four separate criminal cases, an unprecedented event for a former U.S. president and major-party nominee [6, 7]:

March 30, 2023: The Manhattan grand jury indicted him on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.

June 8, 2023: A federal grand jury in Florida indicted him on 37 counts related to the retention of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.

August 1, 2023: A federal grand jury in Washington, D.C., indicted him on four counts related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

August 14, 2023: A Fulton County, Georgia grand jury indicted him on 13 counts in a state racketeering case related to election interference.

Trump pleaded not guilty in all four cases and characterized the prosecutions as politically motivated. On May 30, 2024, a Manhattan jury found him guilty on all 34 counts in the New York case, making him the first former U.S. president convicted of a felony [8].

The federal classified documents case was dismissed by Judge Aileen Cannon on July 15, 2024, because Special Counsel Jack Smith had been unconstitutionally appointed [7]. Smith filed motions to drop both federal cases against Trump on November 25, 2024, after the election, citing Justice Department policy against prosecuting a sitting president. In his final report submitted January 7, 2025, Smith stated that the evidence collected would have led to Trump's conviction at trial in the election interference case "but for Mr. Trump's election and imminent return to the Presidency" [9].

Second-term controversies (2025–2026)

On January 20, 2025, Trump granted pardons or commutations to nearly all 1,500-plus individuals convicted of offenses related to the January 6, 2021, Capitol attack, including those convicted of violent assaults on police officers [10]. Critics, including Capitol Police representatives, called the pardons a repudiation of the rule of law; Trump and his defenders characterized the actions as correcting politicized prosecutions.

On April 2, 2025, Trump invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to impose a 10 percent base tariff on nearly all imports plus higher tariffs on 57 countries. The announcement triggered a sharp stock market drop, and the administration paused many of the increases within a week [11]. In February 2026, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump that the IEEPA-based tariffs were unconstitutional, requiring the refund of roughly $166 billion collected from more than 330,000 businesses [11].

In his second inaugural address, Trump pledged that "never again will the immense power of the state be weaponized to persecute political opponents" [10]. Analysts at the American Presidency Project subsequently catalogued at least 17 first-100-days executive orders that named or directed action against law firms, former officials, and individuals associated with prior investigations or prosecutions of Trump, a pattern the same analysis described as in tension with the inaugural pledge [10].

The Department of Government Efficiency, initially led by Elon Musk, oversaw mass layoffs and program cuts across federal agencies. OMB Director Russ Vought, per NPR reporting, had said before the administration began that he wanted federal workers to feel "trauma" [12]. Trump's defenders characterized the cuts as long-overdue restructuring; critics argued they had disrupted essential federal services without congressional approval.