The Trump Presidency Timeline

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.

Half a century after Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace, we’ve finally answered the question: how low can the bar go? According to Vice President J.D. Vance, Watergate would now be a 12-hour story, which is a polite way of saying that compared to Trump’s second-term cash grab, Nixon looks like he got impeached for forgetting to return a library book. As Rep. Jamie Raskin puts it, Watergate was a Cub Scout prank; Trump’s Washington is the fully weaponized Ponzi scheme version of public service.

Watchdog groups have now tallied the highlights of America’s first openly pay-per-view presidency: a cozy settlement between Trump and his own government that just happens to keep the IRS from auditing the Trump family, well-timed stock trades in companies directly tied to administration policy, and outside crypto ventures that have mysteriously made his net worth explode. Trump’s explanation for making zero effort to limit his family’s business dealings this term? He told the New York Times he "found out that nobody cared" and complained he got no credit for not grifting quite as hard the first time. This is not a confession; it’s a programming note.

Into this smoldering ethics crater walk Democrats like Jamie Raskin and Jon Ossoff, trying to convince voters that maybe, just maybe, the president shouldn’t be allowed to sign a deal with his own IRS and day-trade off his own policies while his kids run global side hustles. Polling shows nearly everyone thinks corruption is a massive problem and that government is working for the ultra-wealthy and well-connected — which, to be fair, the Trump family has treated as more of a business plan than a criticism. The question isn’t whether Democrats can fix ethics rules; it’s whether voters will bother to demand rules at all in a system where the president openly says he kept cashing in because the public shrugged.

The Trump State Department has apparently decided that what struggling Americans really want is to send $12 million in taxpayer cash to Jacob Rees-Mogg, Toby Young, and assorted Brexit relics so they can "rediscover our ancient culture" and "end mass immigration" from the comfort of their paneled studies. The crown jewel is $7m for a brand-new outfit called 878, a "nonpartisan" think tank incorporated in March, with a website that went live this month, and whose name comes from the year King Alfred beat the "Great Heathen Army". Nothing says modern policy like LARPing the Viking invasions with a US government grant.

Not to be left out, Toby Young's Free Speech Union International is queued up for $5m to fight "digital overregulation"—which in practice means screaming "censorship" every time a platform notices that fascist memes aren't actually a human right. The FSU loudly proclaims it "takes no government money and has no political agenda" while simultaneously lining up for government money to fund its very political agenda. Bold strategy: just say the quiet part is nonpartisan, then cash the check.

All of this is being handed out as sole-source grants—no competition, no pretense—by a State Department bureau that former officials say has been quietly hijacked by Trump-aligned operatives to shovel cash at MAGA-adjacent groups across Europe. Germany's chancellor is already publicly warning the US not to meddle in their elections, while Britain's incoming Labour PM gets to start his term by asking why Washington is bankrolling Liz Truss’s CPAC cosplay circuit and a tiny "Jobs Foundation" run by Vote Leave alumni to "counter overregulation" with its fewer-than-10 staff.

The official line is that this all supports "fundamental freedoms" and "strategic priorities". The actual strategy appears to be: convert the State Department’s democracy-promotion budget into a transatlantic slush fund for nationalist cranks, Brexit nostalgics, and professional anti-woke grievance merchants. USAID used to fund vaccines and civil society; under Trump, it funds King Alfred fan fiction and Nigel Farage’s legal defense ecosystem. Truly, America is back.

Donald Trump, a man constitutionally incapable of minding his own business or the actual Constitution, spent the World Cup working the phones like a deranged season-ticket holder, calling FIFA president Gianni Infantino multiple times to lobby for the overturning of Folarin Balogun’s red card. FIFA insists those calls had nothing to do with the ban being suspended, which is adorable, because nothing says "totally normal process" like the president dialing up the global soccer boss to complain about a ref.

US Soccer CEO JT Batson, handed the chance to say "yeah, this was inappropriate," instead went with the classic authoritarian fan-club line: "The president is able to do what the president wants to do. The president is the president of the United States." That’s less a defense than a confession. Asked again whether they regretted Trump’s involvement, Batson abruptly ended the roundtable early — because when the topic is naked political meddling, the only yellow card anyone wants to talk about is for the press.

Balogun himself handled it with more maturity than anyone in government, calmly noting the controversy and the distraction it caused his teammates. The US then went out and got flattened 4–1 by Belgium, prompting speculation that the whole circus hurt the team. So the lasting legacy of this episode: Trump managed to turn a borderline refereeing decision into yet another test of whether American institutions will ever say, "No, actually, the president can’t just do whatever he wants." Spoiler: they’re still workshopping an answer.

Robert F Kennedy Jr, Trump’s anti-vax health secretary cosplay project, has discovered a bold new way to fight childhood tobacco use: stop the scientists from meeting. The administration has frozen the US Preventive Services Task Force since March 2025, blocking updated recommendations that would have highlighted encouraging new evidence on helping kids quit tobacco — along with delays on, you know, minor topics like cervical cancer screening, perinatal depression, and autism. Nothing says "pro-life" like kneecapping the board that decides which preventive services insurance actually has to cover.

Instead of letting experts talk to each other, Kennedy fired task force leaders, called them "lackadaisical and negligent for 20 years," and then somehow forgot to appoint replacements while HHS mumbles about an "unprecedented number of nominations" as if the inbox is the real public health crisis. Meanwhile, Trump’s second-term wrecking crew has shut down the CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health, killed a 14-year anti-smoking ad campaign, removed the FDA’s top tobacco regulator, and rolled out a new FDA policy greenlighting flavored vapes right after a Reynolds American subsidiary dropped $5 million into a Trump-aligned Super PAC. Pure coincidence, obviously — just a little minty-fresh democracy.

The supreme court helpfully clarified in 2025 that Kennedy can stack and purge the task force at will, a ruling born from right-wing groups arguing that HIV PrEP is a drug for "risky lifestyles" and therefore shouldn’t be guaranteed. Now that the guardrails are off, test and device makers are openly lobbying and petitioning for guidelines that would just happen to benefit their products, while outside health groups say they have no idea what is going on inside their own government. As one health policy expert put it, it’s “somewhat humorous, but also sad” that everyone has to guess what’s happening. Funny how "small government" always turns into "no government for public health, concierge service for donors."

Donald Trump just took his first joyride on the new Air Force One, also known as the “Qatar Frequent Briber Miles” program. The $400m Boeing 747-8, which Qatar couldn’t unload on the open market, has now been lovingly repurposed as the president’s personal sky-palace, courtesy of a foreign government that has been, in Trump’s words, “very good to us” – which is a fascinating way to describe a country that just gave the US head of state an aircraft the size of a small office park.

Trump bragged that the US “couldn’t build a plane like this” because we “wouldn’t be willing to spend the kind of money necessary” – a bold statement about a jet that required roughly $1bn in US taxpayer-funded upgrades to make it “appropriate for a president”. Apparently when a foreign monarchy buys the hull, every dollar of conversion costs magically stops counting as corruption and transforms into “very little” spending. The White House insists this is all perfectly legal and not at all the “definition of corruption”, as Democrats keep calling it, while critics point out that the conversion tab might cannibalize funding from the already-delayed Sentinel ICBM modernization program. Nuclear deterrence can wait; the president needs his leather seats.

The air force swears the upgrades focused on operational readiness and that the interior is only “minimally changed”, although Steven Cheung rushed to post glamour shots of the conference tables and plush seating on X like he was listing the thing on Zillow. Trump, naturally, declared it “maybe the greatest commercial plane ever built” and “really quite something”, which is one way to describe a flying monument to the Emoluments Clause being treated as a restaurant suggestion. America used to worry about foreign powers buying influence in Washington; now they can just buy the plane.

The Trump administration’s dream of an official “anti-weaponization fund” for MAGA martyrs hit a bipartisan wall, so naturally they’ve moved on to Plan B: quietly running January 6 rioters through the Federal Tort Claims Act like it’s a rewards program for assaulting cops. The same people who shoved, sprayed, and beat police officers at the Capitol — and then got pardoned by Trump — are now filing FTCA claims for millions because they say they were "unfairly" prosecuted. The Justice Department, conveniently under Trump’s control, has essentially unchecked discretion to settle these claims out of a perpetual pot of taxpayer cash known as the Judgment Fund. You know, the exact same bucket his $1.8 billion slush fund was going to drain.

We’ve already watched this movie with Michael Flynn and Carter Page, who each walked away with $1.25 million after the Trump DOJ decided, with shocking generosity, that they deserved it. Now a Trump pal, Florida lawyer Peter Ticktin, has fired off around 400 FTCA claims for January 6 defendants, while Mark McCloskey — the rifle-on-the-lawn guy from Missouri, naturally — is helpfully explaining that FTCA is better than the scrapped weaponization fund because there are fewer pesky competitors for the money. Among the aspiring beneficiaries: men convicted of assaulting police with their bodies, bear spray, and a whip-like weapon, all insisting they were victims of malicious prosecution despite grand jury indictments, guilty pleas, and judge-signed sentences.

Former DOJ officials are politely screaming that this risks turning the Judgment Fund into exactly the kind of political payoff pool Congress tried to stop, warning that as long as someone files a bogus claim and Treasury looks the other way, there’s no real limit on what Trump’s people can do. Meanwhile, the same crowd that chants "back the blue" is now arguing that the real injustice is what happened to the guys who maced and tackled the blue on Trump’s behalf. The administration is technically moving to dismiss at least one of these lawsuits on procedural grounds, but the bigger story is clear: under Trump, the federal government isn’t just forgiving insurrectionists — it’s workshopping ways to cut them checks for their trouble.