The Trump Presidency Timeline

Max Blumenthal flew back from covering Ali Khamenei’s funeral in Iran and landed at Dulles, where US Customs and Border Protection rolled out the red carpet for journalists the Trump administration doesn’t like: a "secondary inspection," interrogation about who funded his trip, and the casual seizure of his two phones after he refused to cough up his passwords. His laptop and cameras? Untouched. Because why bother with actual reporting materials when you can go straight for contacts, sources, and private communications like a government that’s definitely not hostile to the First Amendment.

The phones were magically returned less than 24 hours after the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee filed an emergency court motion, with the government claiming, pinky swear, they couldn’t get into them so everything’s fine. Judge Leonie Brinkema was unconvinced by the "trust us, we’re the people secretly copying your devices" routine, and ordered the government to explain exactly who had the phones, when, and what they tried to do with them. That pesky Fourth Circuit ruling saying you need a warrant for an "advanced" search of a phone? Turns out it still exists, even if Trump-world treats the Constitution like an optional app.

All this followed public calls from Trump ally Laura Loomer for Blumenthal to be taken off his plane and detained, which really helps drive home that this wasn’t a random security check so much as a fan-service stunt for the administration’s anti-press base. Meanwhile, the same government that recently tried and failed to subpoena New York Times reporters is now insisting that whatever they did to Blumenthal’s phones might be "law enforcement privileged" and therefore too sensitive to disclose. When the White House is picking out journalists for special border harassment based on their politics and identities – in this case, a "Jewish anti-Zionist" reporter – you’re not running a democracy, you’re running a petty surveillance state with worse UX.

Trump looked at the entire history of insider trading and said: why let the little guys risk prison when the president can just sell the cheat codes himself? Trump Media & Technology Group is now offering a premium "Truth API" that gives hedge funds and trading firms early access to the president’s Truth Social feed — the same feed he uses to blurt out market-moving policy and foreign affairs announcements — for up to $100,000 a month. Why leak when you can invoice?

Former SEC official Renée Jones politely notes that this looks a lot like an illegal insider-trading scheme based on misusing non-public information, while one anonymous Wall Street executive says that in any other administration, this would be considered criminal. But here in Trump’s America, we’ve streamlined the process: skip the shady tipster, just wire money directly to the president’s media company and get a front-row seat to real-time market manipulation. Regulation is for suckers; access is for sale.

Gavin Newsom, the gelled avatar of West Coast moneyed liberalism, has released more than 700 pages of tax returns to inform the nation of a shocking fact: the governor of California is extremely rich and pays a lot of taxes on his extremely rich-guy income. From 2022 to 2024, the Newsoms pulled in between $1.7m and $2m a year and cut checks of about half a million annually to federal and state tax collectors, because when your brand is "responsible rich guy who might run for president," you have to show your work.

The document dump arrives as the DOJ is investigating the couple’s finances, which Newsom insists is politically motivated, so he’s responded by performing the classic pre-presidential ritual: tax return kabuki. The money mostly comes from winery and restaurant businesses parked in a so-called blind trust, which is adorable, because the returns conveniently don’t list which businesses made what. The PlumpJack empire is now run by his sister and cousin, so the trust is less "blind" and more "I just won’t ask my relatives too many follow-up questions."

On the lifestyle side, we learn the Newsoms spent up to $44,000 a year on childcare and handed out $40,000 to $65,000 annually to charity, plus thousands in donated clothes and toys. The highlight: they offloaded $45,000 worth of Armani business wear to a racial justice organization in Oakland, presumably so activists can fight systemic inequality while dressed like they’re headed to Davos. The returns show one big spike in 2021, when they made $4.2m after selling a Marin house for nearly $6m, paid over $1m in taxes, and somehow resisted the urge to call that "middle class" on cable news.

Across the Atlantic, Donald Trump is once again doing his favorite impression: a wrecking ball in a commander-in-chief costume. He’s musing about ditching NATO, threatening to seize Greenland from Denmark like it’s a foreclosed golf course, and offering Ukraine all the reliability of his marriages. The lesson for Britain’s new PM Andy Burnham is helpfully simple: the US under Trump is not a security guarantor, it’s a rolling security hazard with its finger on both the nuclear button and the tariffs panel.

European states, having noticed that the guy who can’t read a briefing memo now controls the alliance, are quietly building their own grown-up table. The EU is turning itself into a “security community,” pooling hundreds of billions for joint defence procurement, arming Ukraine, coordinating on energy, cyber, vaccines, climate and migration – basically all the stuff Washington used to pretend to care about before it got distracted by its latest culture war. Meanwhile, post-Brexit Britain is standing outside the club, insisting it’s very sovereign while watching all the industrial and strategic benefits flow to EU members instead.

Trump’s tariffs and economic tantrums are the other fun subplot: he’s weaponising globalisation from the US end while China tightens its grip on rare earths, and the UK discovers that being a mid‑sized economy alone in a knife fight between giants is less “Global Britain” and more “discount client state”. The op-ed’s big reveal is that the only way for Britain to reduce its exposure to Trump’s whims is to do the one thing its Brexit arsonists swore was unnecessary: rebuild deep political, economic and security integration with Europe, so one unstable US president can’t tank its economy or its security every time he gets bored.

Gianni Infantino, the human reflection off a freshly waxed bowling ball, has decided the World Cup should work more like the Trump administration: hollow out the institution, flog the assets to private investors, and hope no one notices the Kushner connection. FIFA’s plan would sell stakes in the World Cup via a $4.2bn vehicle fronted by Donald Trump’s son-in-law’s brother, because apparently there is no corner of public life these people won’t try to turn into a strip mall REIT.

The problem for Infantino is that he tried to run the full Trump playbook without Trump’s one actual skill: counting votes. UEFA’s 55 national associations just voted unanimously to boycott FIFA tournaments if this goes ahead – meaning Spain and Portugal would boycott their own men’s World Cup. Even Concacaf and the Asian Football Confederation are clutching their pearls, with Bahraini royal Sheikh Salman suddenly discovering the joys of “ethics and good governance”, which is like getting a lecture on sobriety from a Jägerbomb.

Meanwhile, JP Morgan, having solemnly promised after the European Super League fiasco that it had “learned from this”, is back at the center of the bonfire, helpfully stapling a Wall Street term sheet to the sport’s face. Trump, too busy declaring himself the architect of “historic” Middle East peace via his cosplay Board of Peace (where Infantino eagerly played background extra), hasn’t weighed in yet – but his influence is written all over this. It’s personality cult as cargo cult: Infantino and the rest of the Trump-adjacent betas watched him defy political gravity and concluded they, too, could cash out the commons and walk away whistling.

Turns out they can’t. When even global football federations, JP Morgan’s PR department, and a Bahraini prince allegedly linked to hunting down dissident athletes all think you’ve gone too far, you’ve really nailed the late-stage oligarchy vibe. Trumpism has officially expanded from looting the U.S. government to trying to securitize the World Cup. The only thing missing is a press conference at Four Seasons Total Football.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has apparently discovered a new superpower: divining the citizenship status of hundreds of thousands of voters using data he won’t show anyone, from sources he won’t identify, via methods he won’t explain. Ahead of Trump’s latest primetime “the elections are rigged, trust me bro” speech, Mullin told four states — Nevada, Pennsylvania, California, and New Jersey — that they were harboring over 250,000 noncitizens on their voter rolls, then publicly threatened officials with prison time if they didn’t “secure their elections.” Because nothing says “confident in our evidence” like menacing state officials on TV while refusing to show your work.

State election chiefs, including Republicans, are now politely asking the obvious question: what the hell are you talking about? Nevada’s Cisco Aguilar and Pennsylvania’s Al Schmidt both pointed out that DHS doesn’t even have the unredacted voter rolls the Justice Department is currently suing to obtain, yet somehow it’s matching Social Security numbers and declaring people noncitizens. California’s Shirley Weber went a step further and asked Mullin to cough up the names of anyone who illegally handed over Californians’ private voter data, since that’s a crime under state law. She also asked whether DHS used artificial intelligence, which is a nice way of saying, “Did you let ChatGPT disenfranchise my voters?”

The one actual error found — in New Jersey — involved a Motor Vehicle Commission software screwup that registered about 6,600 self-identified noncitizens and resulted in roughly 400 votes over two years, a very real problem that still comes in at about one-seventh of the 35,000 Mullin claimed for the state. New Jersey’s governor Mikie Sherrill told the feds they’re not getting detailed voter info, prompting Assistant AG Harmeet Dhillon to jump on X and vow that DOJ will pry it loose “through all legal means!” The Trump administration is once again screaming about “election integrity” while using secret lists, dodgy data, and federal muscle to intimidate states and challenge the eligibility of actual citizens. It’s less about finding noncitizen voters and more about building a pretext to purge the rolls — and, if needed, the election results.

The Trump administration would like you, the taxpayer, to reach into your wallet and tip an extra $10 million for its Freedom 250 spectacle — a Christian nationalist prayer rally, a lopsided "Great American State Fair," and a July Fourth Trump speech/fireworks show that somehow managed to set money on fire even faster than the rockets. This is part of a larger $113 million "reimbursement" request for America's Semiquincentennial, because nothing screams fiscal conservatism like turning the national birthday into a VIP donor experience and then sending the bill to everyone else.

Sen. Jeff Merkley helpfully spelled it out in a letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum: Freedom 250 exists because Trump created his own vanity commission to bypass the bipartisan one that already existed, then used it to stage events critics say whitewash U.S. history and sell access to the president. Now Interior admits it wants $10 million just to pay back the National Park Service for "routine" costs — cops, overtime, monitoring, and fixing the damage — even though Congress already set aside money for this in last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. So donors get the photo ops, Trump gets the branding, and the public gets the invoice.

Freedom 250 was supposed to celebrate 250 years of democracy; instead it’s a live reenactment of how grift became the state religion. The White House invented a parallel celebration machine, pumped it full of ideology and donor money, and when the numbers still didn’t add up, they went back to Congress with a straight face and asked for a bailout. Happy birthday, America — your present is paying for the party you weren’t invited to.

Shocking news from the country currently on fire: three-quarters of Americans have noticed that Donald Trump is far more focused on turning Washington DC into a taxpayer-funded Trump-branded theme park than on the actual problems wrecking their lives. Only 34% approve of his performance, tying his post–January 6 insurrection low, which is quite an achievement considering you really have to work to be as unpopular as trying to overthrow an election while you’re also busy starting an unpopular war.

The Iran adventure is going about as well as every other Trump project that doesn’t involve gold leaf and unpaid contractors. Just 28% approve of his handling of the war, a mere 25% think it’s been worth the cost in money and American lives, and 74% say soaring gas prices are causing hardship. So yes, the president who promised cheaper everything has delivered body bags, $6 gas, and a Pentagon scrambling to explain away a casualty cover-up. Mission accomplished.

Even his signature cruelty brand is losing market share. Only 39% approve of his hardline immigration policies, and a majority say he’s gone too far with mass deportations. Turns out that ripping families apart and turning communities into ICE scavenger hunts doesn’t play so well once people see it up close. Meanwhile, just 17% feel good about his latest shrine-to-self projects: a taxpayer-funded White House ballroom, a botched reflecting pool renovation, and plans for a grand ceremonial arch so subtle it might as well just read “ALL THIS IS ABOUT ME.”

Asked if Trump understands the problems Americans face in their daily lives, 73% said no, presumably pausing between extra shifts and rationing groceries to answer the phone. Only 38% consider him an effective world leader, and 57% say the 80-year-old president lacks the stamina and sharpness to serve effectively. So the guy who’s too tired to process a briefing but always energized enough to redesign the capital in his own image is cruising into the midterms with a platform of war, higher prices, personality cult architecture, and deportation theater. What could possibly go wrong for him?