A new online database created by an international team of academics is drawing attention in legal and policy circles for systematically tracking what it describes as authoritarian actions taken by President Donald Trump since the start of his second term in January 2025.
The platform, known as the Trump Action Tracker, is run by British academic Professor Christina Pagel and a team of researchers. It catalogues executive actions, policy decisions, and public statements that the project argues undermine democratic governance, civil liberties, and the rule of law.
The database was recently highlighted in a viral social media video shared by user @theresasdaughter, bringing renewed public attention to the project.
According to the project’s creators, the Trump Action Tracker is designed as a live, continuously updated database that logs and categorizes presidential actions in near real time. Each entry is classified into one of five broad categories:
- Undermining democracy,
- Suppressing dissent,
- Attacking civil rights,
- Targeting science and academia, and
- Destabilizing foreign policy.
Supporters of the initiative argue that the tracker serves a legal and civic function by documenting patterns rather than isolated incidents.
“The solution is to map the flood,” the narrator of the viral video said, describing the tracker as a way to reveal trends that may be less visible when actions are viewed individually.
Legal scholars have long warned that democratic erosion often occurs incrementally, through the normalization of extraordinary measures. By organizing presidential conduct into defined legal and constitutional categories, the Trump Action Tracker aims to provide lawyers, journalists, and civil society organizations with a centralized evidentiary resource.
The database includes timelines and charts showing how frequently actions in each category occur over time. Its authors say this structure allows users to assess whether certain types of conduct—such as challenges to judicial independence or restrictions on protest activity—are increasing, decreasing, or remaining constant.
While the tracker has been praised by some academics and civil rights advocates as a transparency tool, critics argue that such projects risk blurring the line between documentation and activism. Supporters counter that the database relies on publicly verifiable information, including executive orders, agency directives, official statements, and court filings, rather than anonymous claims or speculation.
The project emerges at a time of heightened legal scrutiny of executive power. The Trump administration has faced multiple court challenges since January 2025 over immigration enforcement, civil service restructuring, federal education policy, and the scope of presidential authority over independent agencies. Several of those disputes are ongoing in federal courts.
In the viral video promoting the tracker, the speaker argued that the platform fills a perceived gap left by what she described as limited mainstream media coverage. She urged viewers to share the resource widely and directed followers to alternative platforms, including Substack, for further legal and political analysis of upcoming elections.
Professor Pagel and her team have not publicly framed the tracker as a partisan tool, instead presenting it as a research-driven effort to document governance trends with legal implications. The website states that its goal is to support accountability by making information accessible to the public and to professionals who rely on accurate records of government action.
As legal challenges to executive authority continue to unfold, resources like the Trump Action Tracker are likely to remain part of broader debates over transparency, constitutional limits, and the role of independent monitoring in democratic systems.
