The Trump Presidency Timeline

The Trump EPA has decided that mercury — a neurotoxin that harms babies’ brain development — is just another pesky regulation standing between America and the God-given right to run 40-year-old coal plants so AI servers can keep hallucinating cat photos. At an event in Kentucky (of course), the administration announced it will roll back Biden-era Mercury and Air Toxics Standards that were set to slash mercury pollution by 70% and toxic metals like nickel, arsenic, and lead by two-thirds. Health benefits through 2037 were estimated at $420m, but the EPA now claims the old 2012 rule is good enough and anything more is just too expensive for the poor, struggling utility companies.

This isn’t a one-off dumb idea; it’s a coordinated campaign of policy arson. Trump previously declared an “energy emergency” so he could keep decrepit coal plants open and exempt them from key air rules, then literally invited coal plants to email the government for two-year get-out-of-MATS-free cards — 68 plants happily signed up to keep spewing neurotoxins. Last week, the EPA helpfully repealed the “endangerment finding” that gave it authority to regulate greenhouse gases at all, and the White House ordered the Pentagon to buy coal power like it’s war bonds for black lung. All this to prop up an industry that now supplies less than 20% of U.S. electricity, but 100% of the administration’s nostalgia for when men were men and air was chunky.

So yes, coal plants remain among the largest sources of mercury, lead, arsenic, acid gases, benzene, formaldehyde, and dioxins — but on the bright side, some aging coal executives might squeeze out a few more quarters of profit before the planet finishes baking. The message from Trump’s EPA is clear: if you’re a fetus, a kid, or someone living downwind of a plant, your health is a rounding error in the great crusade to keep obsolete coal burners on life support for the glory of AI and campaign donors.

After spending a week LARPing as the Department of Essential Oils, the FDA has abruptly remembered that its job is to, checks notes, review vaccines. The agency has now reversed course and agreed to consider Moderna’s mRNA-based flu shot after initially refusing to even look at the application — a snub that set off alarms across the medical community and delighted the "Make America Healthy Again" anti-vax fan club.

The original rejection landed right after Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr — yes, the guy whose brand is yelling about vaccines on podcasts — helped kill a $500m federal contract for developing mRNA vaccines against bird flu and other nasty strains. FDA commissioner Dr Marty Makary dutifully claimed Moderna just didn’t follow guidance, while a senior FDA official called the trial a “brazen failure” at a press conference, because nothing says sober, science-based regulation like talk-radio adjectives.

Now, under heavy fire from health experts who see this as part of Trumpworld’s broader anti-vaccine crusade, the FDA has agreed to review Moderna’s updated filing, with a target decision date of 5 August. If approved, seniors might get access to a new flu shot before next season — assuming the administration doesn’t decide that preventing disease is too "woke" and replace the vaccine with a Maha-branded immunity prayer candle instead.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. got the Health and Human Services job by swearing up and down to the Senate that he totally loves vaccines, supports the childhood schedule, and would keep the CDC’s expert panel and recommendations intact. Sen. Bill Cassidy even vouched for him on the floor, assuring everyone that RFK Jr. would maintain the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) recommendations “without changes.” So naturally, once confirmed, Kennedy did what every Trump-world appointee does: he fired the entire vaccine advisory panel and replaced them with fellow anti-vaxx cranks, then watched as the recommendations were promptly shredded.

Under Kennedy’s new, improved, and scientifically downgraded regime, the CDC has now pulled universal recommendations for seven childhood vaccines — RSV, meningococcal, flu, COVID-19, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, and rotavirus. These are the shots that have prevented thousands of deaths and millions of illnesses, but the White House sent over a memo to "cull" the schedule and RFK Jr. dutifully obliged. Sen. Elizabeth Warren warned during confirmation that Kennedy could "kill off access to vaccines and make millions" from the resulting lawsuits. Trump’s HHS secretary appears to be testing that theory in real time, turning federal health policy into a live-fire experiment in how fast you can roll back modern medicine before the outbreaks start.

The Trump administration has discovered a bold new frontier in public health: if you can’t kill vaccines outright, just quietly make it impossible to approve new ones. The FDA has refused to even review Moderna’s application for a new mRNA flu shot – a vaccine that produced stronger antibody responses and no safety concerns – because the trials compared it to standard flu shots instead of the suddenly preferred high-risk formulas. Small problem: for people under 65, that high-dose option is not the standard of care. So the agency’s excuse is not just flimsy, it’s factually wrong. Science has been replaced with vibes.

To really sell the farce, the refusal-to-file letter was personally signed by Vinay Prasad, the Trump-appointed head of the FDA’s biologics division, even though this kind of bureaucratic kneecapping is usually done by the review team. No formal rules have changed, but a leaked email shows Prasad promising to “revise” the flu vaccine framework, while HHS has already downgraded routine flu shots for kids to a “shared clinical decision-making” maybe-kinda-sorta recommendation – all without consulting outside experts. The EU, Canada, and Australia are reviewing the same vaccine like normal countries, while the US moves toward a new standard of care: politics first, medicine eventually, if the base allows it.

The message to vaccine makers is clear: invest years and millions into R&D, run trials the FDA helped design, show your product is safe and more effective, and then watch Trump’s health bureaucracy slam the door in your face because it’s busy auditioning for a Tucker Carlson segment. The administration isn’t just undermining public health; it’s methodically turning vaccine approval into a partisan loyalty test, with Americans’ immune systems as collateral damage.

Robert F Kennedy Jr is running HHS and has decided the best way to prove he was always right about vaccines is to, checks notes, let measles and polio come back and see what happens. His handpicked chair of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), Kirk Milhoan, is now "reconsidering" all vaccine recommendations and musing on podcasts about how school vaccine requirements are basically "medical battery"—because nothing says "evidence-based public health" like turning a 60-year-old expert committee into a Facebook comments section.

As measles cases spike—416 in the first three weeks of 2026 after the worst year in three decades—Milhoan cheerfully describes it as a "real-world experience" to measure hospitalizations and deaths among unvaccinated kids. Public health experts call this "so dangerous as to approach criminality"; the Trump administration calls it "medical freedom". In other words, your child is now a data point in RFK Jr’s giant natural experiment in how fast we can reverse a century of progress.

To sell this, Milhoan pretends that making recommendations is "authoritarian" and that CDC "has to basically canonize" whatever ACIP says, which is not how any of this works. States actually set school vaccine rules through long, boring, evidence-based processes—at least they did, before Republicans and anti-vax crusaders started gleefully "decoupling" from federal guidance. So now we have a federal vaccines committee that thinks recommending vaccines is tyranny, state lawmakers chasing conspiracy clout, and a measles outbreak being treated as a teaching moment. But sure, tell us more about how masks were the real authoritarian overreach.

Donald Trump saw a massive winter storm barreling across half the country and decided it was the perfect time to log on to Truth Social and yell: “WHATEVER HAPPENED TO GLOBAL WARMING???” Because nothing says serious national leadership like confusing the weather outside your window with global climate trends that every major scientific body on Earth has been screaming about for decades.

Scientists, who tragically still think facts matter, point out that this very storm is linked to a disrupted polar vortex and an Arctic that’s heating up to four times faster than the rest of the planet. In other words, the thing Trump is using to mock climate science is being made worse by the climate crisis he insists is a hoax. Winters in the US are warming faster than other seasons, cold snaps are getting shorter, record hot days are crushing cold ones, glaciers are disappearing, ski resorts are dying—but sure, one big blizzard totally cancels out physics, decades of data, and basic literacy.

So while 230 million Americans brace for freezing temperatures, icy roads, and power outages, the guy who was president and wants the job back is publicly insisting that reality doesn’t exist if it’s snowing. Fossil fuels keep burning, the planet keeps heating, and Trump keeps doing what he does best: weaponizing full-stupid anti-science nonsense to give polluters cover, because nothing screams “America First” like making sure your grandkids inherit a climate that wants them dead.