The Trump Presidency Timeline

Donald Trump has announced on Truth Social that AI risk is just another hoax, bravely taking on the combined paranoia of every major AI lab and most of the people who actually build the stuff. While Anthropic and friends are out here weakly suggesting a coordinated global slowdown so humanity doesn’t accidentally self-delete, Trump explains that all we really need is a president with a very high IQ — specifically, his — because somewhere deep inside every AI model is a default-off switch that kneels before the US president. Checks notes: the plan is literally “Trump will mind-control the supercomputers.”

Meanwhile, actual experts and even tech bros are saying there’s maybe a 10% chance we all die in the next decade, which apparently still ranks below “two crypto billionaires cut a £72m check to hard-right grifters” on the political panic scale. The UK government responds by assuring everyone there’s no need to get ‘hyperbolic’ about global extinction, while boasting about an AI Security Institute that depends on American and Chinese companies voluntarily handing over their code — something they have zero intention of doing because there are obscene profits to be made before the robots flip the table.

So we’re left with a familiar Trump-era governance model: ignore the experts, mock the risks, and replace regulation with the unshakeable faith that a deeply insecure septuagenarian’s self-reported genius will save the species. If humanity does go extinct, it won’t be because AI outsmarted us — it’ll be because we let a guy who can’t pass the Turing test claim he can out-think the machines and everyone else nodded along on cable news.

The Trump administration has heroically solved the Pennsylvania measles crisis by deploying its favorite medical intervention: changing the numbers. After three apparent measles-related deaths in the state – including two infants and a 40-year-old woman whose coroner says she would still be alive without the infection – the CDC quietly switched how it counts measles deaths. Instead of using the normal National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System that tracks actual cases in real time, they’re now leaning on the National Center for Health Statistics, a system designed for long-term trend analysis that, conveniently, currently shows zero 2026 measles deaths as an “underlying cause”. Problem solved, if you define “solved” as “buried in a spreadsheet.”

This sudden outbreak of statistical creativity arrived right after reporting that HHS secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr – yes, the anti-vax guy now running federal health policy – pressured CDC director Erica Schwartz not to count the earlier Pennsylvania deaths in the official tally. The day after Reuters exposed that little chat, the CDC’s data source magically changed. Former CDC chief medical officer Debra Houry calls the move “puzzling” and says the system they switched to is not meant to confirm individual cases, which of course makes it perfect for an administration trying to turn a lethal outbreak into a rounding error.

On the ground, Pennsylvania has at least 676 confirmed measles cases and a coroner who says he can “100% guarantee” the real numbers are higher. He’s begging people to get vaccinated to protect babies, pregnant people, and the immunocompromised – the very people this administration is hanging out to dry while RFK Jr posts about fitness and screen time instead of explaining why his department is massaging death stats during an outbreak fueled by the anti-vaccine movement he helped build. Officially, HHS swears the MMR vaccine is still recommended. Unofficially, the message from the top is clear: if measles deaths make the anti-vax secretary look bad, they simply don’t count.

American politics has achieved such a peak state of derangement that a pediatrician, Dr Annie Andrews, is running for Senate in South Carolina on the radical platform of believing in vaccines while measles tears through the state. Her opponent? Darline Graham, handpicked by Donald Trump to inherit big brother Lindsey’s seat like it’s a family timeshare and not, you know, a constitutional office. Because if there’s one thing this era needed, it’s more literal political dynasties chosen by a guy who thinks hydroxychloroquine is a food group.

Andrews is part of a broader push by 314 Action to elect 100 doctors by 2030, which sounds ambitious until you remember the context: Medicaid is getting hacked down to the bone, scientific research is being gutted, and the federal government is doing immigration raids in hospitals. National health agencies are collapsing under partisan sabotage, so the new strategy is to airlift physicians directly into statehouses and Congress and hope they can triage the damage before the next outbreak or executive tantrum.

There are already 20 doctors in Congress, but most of the prominent ones on the right – looking at you, Rand Paul – treat "science" as more of a suggestion than a method, happily spreading vaccine misinformation while cashing their government paychecks. So now Democrats are trying to build a pipeline of doctors who don’t think Facebook memes are peer-reviewed studies. The catch: actually qualified physicians are usually buried under medical school debt, while the ones rich enough to run tend to be conservative and oddly chill about dismantling the healthcare system their patients need to survive.

The result is a 2026 midterm landscape where health and science are suddenly "salient" because people are, minor detail, getting sick and dying amid foodborne outbreaks, vaccine-preventable diseases, and shredded safety nets. The experts who warned this would happen are now running for office to clean up a mess created by politicians who insisted they knew better than epidemiologists. It’s less a functioning democracy and more a code-blue situation where the doctors have to wheel the crash cart straight onto the Senate floor.

Donald Trump has signed an executive order telling states to offer separate measles, mumps, and rubella shots instead of the standard combined MMR vaccine, while simultaneously declaring the triple jab "quite lethal"—a bold claim, given that the lethality in question mostly describes his administration’s IQ. There’s just one tiny snag: those separate vaccines don’t exist in the US, don’t have licenses, and drug companies have already said there’s no science to justify them. So what he’s really offering parents is a choice between a safe, effective vaccine and panic fueled by a Fox News fever dream.

The White House brain trust powering this stunt? A disgraced British ex-doctor, Andrew Wakefield—who helped trigger the original MMR panic in 1998 and now enjoys folk-hero status in Texas anti-vax circles—and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the man who turned vaccine paranoia into a full-time lifestyle brand. Together with Trump, they’re pushing to shrink the US childhood vaccine schedule, pointing to Denmark as their model while conveniently skipping the part where Denmark has universal healthcare and functioning public health systems, unlike the for-profit chaos they’re busily sabotaging.

Public health experts worldwide say no country recommends single measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines, but Trump’s executive order is designed to muddy the water just enough that confused parents conclude the combined jab must be dangerous—and maybe no jab is better. That’s how you get falling vaccination rates, rising measles cases, and kids paying the price for a president who thinks epidemiology is something you cure with a Truth Social post. Trump keeps waxing poetic about "beautiful, healthy, lovely, delicate little children" while building policy on YouTube comments and RFK Jr podcasts. The only thing being immunized here is the administration’s ego—against facts.

Trump’s war on reality has officially reached the marmots. A 60-year ecological study tracking yellow-bellied marmots in the Rockies was about to be strangled to death after the administration froze more than $700m in science grants and installed a blacklist of forbidden words like “climate” and “women” — because nothing says ‘serious governance’ like turning the National Science Foundation into a vibes-based loyalty test.

So the scientists did what any responsible researchers in a collapsing democracy would do: they opened an OnlyFans. OnlyMarms features fully clothed marmots waddling around rocks while America’s president rakes in roughly $635m from his own meme coin and his science advisor, Silicon Valley bro Michael Kratsios, declares that real research money will go to AI and robots, not boring things like ecosystems or wildlife. When OnlyFans brought in a mere $6,000, an anonymous crypto cult spun up a marmot meme coin on Solana and, in two weeks, accidentally did more for long-term field biology than the federal government, coughing up another $88,000.

The result: about $100,000 to keep one of the world’s longest-running animal monitoring projects alive for a single extra year, while the marmots themselves are getting fatter in longer summers, then freezing to death in low-snow winters caused by the very climate crisis Trump has ordered his agencies not to mention. The researchers openly admit that begging the internet for horny-sounding subscriptions and riding meme-coin volatility is not a substitute for stable public funding — but under Trump’s science policy, it apparently counts as a happy ending.

Scientists dug 56 million years into the past and found that when you dump massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, forests don’t hold hands and sing hymns to Exxon. They collapse. Up to 60% of standing forest biomass vanished during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, turning a lush planet into something closer to a sepia filter. So yes, the planet did get greener – if you count charred scrub and dying trees as an aesthetic.

The timing is perfect, because Trump’s Interior secretary Doug Burgum is on Fox Business explaining that CO₂ “was never a pollutant” and that plants “thrive with more CO₂,” while the administration simultaneously moves to erase the federal government’s own power to address climate change. Energy secretary Chris Wright helpfully adds that there are “pluses” to global heating, presumably referring to the booming market in air purifiers and wildfire respirators.

This isn’t just garden-variety ignorance; it’s state-sponsored climate denial weaponized to justify regulatory arson. The administration is literally citing cartoon-level science to dismantle the EPA’s ability to regulate the gas that, according to actual evidence, helped wipe out ancient forests. They’re using fossil-fueled fairy tales to lock in fossil-fueled collapse. The trees are already dying back, burning, and being cut down – and Trump’s team is sprinting to make sure they can’t recover, but the oil companies can.

Donald Trump has signed an executive order trying to personally overrule the CDC’s childhood vaccine schedule, because when you think "lifesaving immunization policy," you obviously think "guy who stares at eclipses." The order attempts to strip down routine recommendations, shove key vaccines into a vague "shared clinical decision-making" purgatory, and pretend the White House now outranks decades of epidemiology. Executive orders can’t magically erase science or state school requirements, but Trump is once again betting that chaos and intimidation can do what the law can’t.

The showpiece stunt: demanding the MMR vaccine be broken into three separate shots and spaced out across separate doctor visits, despite there being no such individual vaccines licensed in the US and zero evidence this does anything except cost families more time and money. Trump solemnly warned that combined vaccines are “quite lethal” and described a soda-bottle-sized injection being poured into children, which is not how medicine works but is a great preview of what happens when Facebook memes become federal policy. He also nodded to the long-debunked autism lie, because why not revive a conspiracy that already helped bring back measles?

To round out the authoritarian cosplay, the order tells the attorney general to go after state laws that conflict with Trump’s fantasy schedule, even though school mandates are set by states and executive orders don’t apply to the public. Vaccine law experts note this should have no direct operational effect, but that’s not really the point: the goal is to crank up political pressure on states, undermine trust in vaccines, and turn public health into another loyalty test. Herd immunity is out; herd delusion is the new official guideline.