The Trump Presidency Timeline

The Trump administration spent an estimated $38 billion buying eleven mega-warehouses so ICE could detain up to 100,000 immigrants at once, then suddenly discovered that maybe building a nationwide archipelago of human storage units was a tad much. Under former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, they went on a detention-space shopping spree so aggressive that one Georgia town says ICE paid more than five times the property’s assessed value. Now DHS under Secretary Markwayne Mullin is pondering whether to sell off some of these monuments to cruelty and fiscal malpractice, and hoping no one asks too many questions about how any of this made sense in the first place.

The pivot is being sold as a “cultural shift” and a commitment to being a “good steward of taxpayer dollars,” which is a bold line to deploy after lighting tens of billions on fire for empty warehouses and a government-owned deportation fleet that includes a luxury Boeing 737 Max 8. Communities that never wanted these facilities, from Maryland to Mississippi to Social Circle, Georgia, are now stuck in legal fights over detention centers they tried to block from the start, while the DHS inspector general investigates whether this was all even remotely cost-effective. So yes, Trump may now want a “softer touch” on immigration — presumably the kind where you still terrorize immigrants, just with slightly fewer luxury planes and abandoned prisons dotting the countryside.

The Trump-branded "Freedom 250" concert series for America’s 250th birthday is off to a strong start, assuming the goal was to create the first music festival where half the lineup learns they’re performing from Twitter and then immediately nopes out. Within a day of the announcement, Morris Day called his supposed slot a baseless "rumor", Young MC publicly fired himself from the bill, and the Commodores politely explained that their music is not, in fact, a house band for one political cult.

It somehow got dumber from there. C+C Music Factory’s Freedom Williams had to record a bathroom video to announce that no, he does not "fuck with Trump", and only found out he’d been drafted into MAGA-palooza when horrified friends texted him. Milli Vanilli’s Jodie Rocco said the group was just as surprised as everyone else to see their name on the poster, which helpfully featured Fab Morvan, who also isn’t involved. Trump’s team essentially staged a lineup the way they ran the government: slap some names on a flyer and hope reality eventually cooperates.

Holding it all together is Freedom 250, a "nonpartisan" 501(c)(3) that exists purely by coincidence to celebrate America’s 250th birthday under the watchful orange gaze of Donald Trump. Its spokesperson insists the group is about unity and uplifting America, which is a bold line to push when your marquee on-the-record supporter is Vanilla Ice, fresh off singing "Ice Ice Baby" with Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem during an ICE crackdown. If this is what nonpartisan looks like, the FEC might want earplugs.

Trump’s end-of-term get-out-of-felony-free card for scandal magnet Elliott Broidy is really paying off. Broidy, who pleaded guilty in 2020 to secretly lobbying Trump’s own White House on behalf of Chinese and Malaysian interests, is now the proud CEO of LEO Technologies, the company that just landed a $106m Department of Justice contract to use AI to translate, transcribe, and monitor federal prison phone calls. From foreign influence peddler to taxpayer-funded surveillance czar — the American dream is alive and extremely compromised.

This is the same Elliott Broidy who previously admitted to paying nearly $1m in bribes to New York officials to snag pension fund business, got that felony later downgraded, became an RNC deputy finance chair, arranged a $1.6m payoff to a Playboy model (with a cameo from Michael Cohen), and then took $9m from a foreign national to lobby Trump and his Justice Department. Trump’s DOJ literally wrote that he agreed to lobby “the President of the United States, the Attorney General, and other high level officials” — and then Trump just pardoned him on his way out the door.

Now Broidy’s firm — whose website charmingly describes prison phone calls as “the world’s largest concentration of criminally-minded activity – all on recorded lines, all legally accessible” — gets to hoover up and algorithmically sift through incarcerated people’s conversations, courtesy of the same Justice Department his foreign clients once tried to manipulate. LEO insists Broidy had nothing to do with the bidding process, and the Bureau of Prisons says there’s no evidence his Trump ties helped. Sure. Just a total coincidence that the pardoned, twice-convicted influence peddler who thinks “life is sales” is now selling surveillance back to the government he once tried to secretly purchase.

Trump has finally achieved the dream of every mid-tier mobster and overleveraged landlord: he sued the federal government for $10bn, then "settled" by giving himself a $1.776bn taxpayer-funded slush fund and a get-out-of-taxes-free card. His own acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, helpfully produced a memo waiving Trump’s current and future IRS liabilities and trying to wall off every other agency from touching him. Roy Cohn would be proud; the rest of us get to pay for it.

Meanwhile, the East Wing is gone, replaced by a billion-dollar bunker-ballroom hybrid that Trump tried to label "critical national security infrastructure" after yet another assassination attempt. Republicans only found a spine long enough to strip the public funding when they got spooked about the midterms, but the private donors lining up for contracts and regulatory favors are doing just fine. The Trump family’s billions in crypto profits and a $400m Qatari jumbo jet for a handy $5.5bn resort deal are just background noise in this full-time kleptocracy.

The real innovation isn’t the corruption; it’s the impunity. With the Supreme Court’s "presumptive immunity" ruling as a backdrop, this IRS deal flirts with blanket immunity for everything else, forever. Legal experts are openly wondering how, or if, it can even be stopped before the money is gone and the recipients disappear into redacted PDFs. Trump has figured out he doesn’t need votes, a party, or public approval—just power and a direct line to the Treasury. As his approval numbers crater, his demands for public cash to fund vanity arches, bunkers, and monuments only grow. The message is clear: he breaks the law in broad daylight so often that you’ll eventually stop believing law exists at all.

That creeping cynicism—moving off the grid to read novels while the president loots the country—isn’t a side effect, it’s the strategy. Autocracy doesn’t always arrive with tanks; sometimes it shows up as a president "suing himself" and then quietly turning your tax dollars into hush money and loyalty payoffs while everyone shrugs and changes the channel.

Donald Trump, Commander-in-Chief and father of the year, told reporters he’ll "try" to attend Don Jr.’s Bahamas wedding but that it’s "not good timing" because he has "a thing called Iran and other things." When you’ve started an Iran war so ill-conceived you describe it like a calendar reminder you forgot to snooze, family events do get tricky.

Trump explained that if he goes to the wedding, "I get killed," and if he doesn’t go, "I get killed, by the fake news, of course" — bravely framing his son’s nuptials as yet another heroic battle in his eternal war against accountability. The marriage itself is being spun as a "big win" for Don Jr., which is how this clan describes both elections and engagements, presumably because in Trumpworld every human relationship is just another branding opportunity.

Adding to the farce, Don Jr.’s ex-fiancée Kimberly Guilfoyle is safely parked as U.S. ambassador to Greece, a prestigious diplomatic post that in a functioning democracy would not double as the "sorry we broke up" severance package. But here we are: war with Iran in the background, a destination wedding in the Bahamas, and ambassadorships being handed out like parting gifts on a game show. American foreign policy as a messy blended-family drama is certainly one way to run a superpower.

Donald Trump, Commander-in-Chief of Photo Ops, signed an executive order a year ago to build housing for 6,000 homeless veterans in Los Angeles. Advocates looked at the new budget to see how many of those vets would actually get housing and found the answer was a mathematically elegant zero. Not 5,000, not 600, not even 6 symbolic units of "we pretended to care" — just a clean, empty spreadsheet where funding should be.

This is the Trump governance formula in its purest form: announce big, do nothing, blame someone else. Veterans were good enough to stand behind him at rallies and in campaign ads, but when it comes time to convert executive-order theater into actual shelter, the administration suddenly discovers fiscal restraint. The message from the self-proclaimed champion of the troops is clear: thank you for your service, please enjoy continuing to sleep on the streets of the richest country on earth.