The Trump Presidency Timeline

The Trump Labor Secretary, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, has resigned after a speedrun of scandals that somehow managed to combine alleged affair-with-a-subordinate drama, misuse of travel funds, grant-steering to political buddies, and a husband who got banned from Labor HQ over sexual assault allegations. Naturally, she took to Instagram and X to announce that none of this is her fault; it’s all a plot by “high-ranked deep state actors” and the “one-sided news media” who are, tragically, insufficiently appreciative of her efforts to annihilate worker protections.

Inside the department, staff describe “constant turbulence,” which is a very polite way of saying “hostile work environment run by people who think unions are Antifa.” Chavez-DeRemer reportedly never even signed the required harassment policy statement, while the agency shed about 20% of its workforce, gutted international grants, and issued threats to employees about talking to the press. When the department’s social media started echoing Nazi rhetoric, the solution wasn’t to rethink the messaging; they just transferred the staffer to Homeland Security, the bureaucratic equivalent of shuffling radioactive waste to the next building.

Labor experts say she sat by while the budget was slashed, unions were targeted, and worker protections were rolled back, including overtime and minimum wage protections for homecare and domestic workers, farmworker safeguards, and even a rule that would stop employers from paying disabled workers below minimum wage. But she didn’t leave over making workers poorer and less safe; she left because the scandal finally became too embarrassing for an administration that has a three-story portrait of Trump plastered on the Labor Department building like a dictator starter kit.

Chavez-DeRemer arrived in office on a glowing endorsement from Teamsters president Sean O’Brien, who praised Trump for “putting American workers first” by nominating her. Now that she’s resigned in disgrace, the Teamsters are suddenly very busy not answering questions. Workers are left with fewer protections, more insecurity, and a department whose leadership treats them as a shadowy conspiracy rather than the people actually doing the job. Deep state, meet cheap state: fewer staff, weaker rules, and a boss who blames you on Instagram while the building is still on fire.

Donald Trump has discovered a deep moral objection to gambling and prediction markets — right around the time his own media company is gearing up to launch prediction markets on Truth Social through an exclusive deal with Crypto.com. He solemnly informs reporters that the world has become "somewhat of a casino" and that he was "never much in favor" of it, which is a bold claim from the guy whose business model for decades was literally owning casinos until they exploded into bankruptcy.

While Trump tut-tuts about people placing lucrative bets on things like an Iran war, his administration is quietly doing everything it can to juice the online betting sector. They killed a Biden-era effort to rein in Polymarket, and now the Justice Department and the CFTC are suing three states — Connecticut, Arizona, and Illinois — for daring to regulate prediction markets themselves. Washington’s position: only the feds get to protect the public from unregulated gambling, by making sure it stays conveniently under the watchful eye of a federal agency led by Trump appointees while the president’s family is financially wired into the industry.

The White House insists that Trump has "no involvement" in any business deals that might touch his constitutional responsibilities, and that he’s acting in an "ethically sound" manner — which is why his majority stake in Trump Media now sits in a nice, cozy revocable trust run by Donald Trump Jr. Junior, for his part, just happens to be an investor in Polymarket and a strategic adviser to its top competitor Kalshi, but we are told he "does not interface" with the federal government and has "no influence" on policy. The fact that the administration is bulldozing state regulators to protect prediction markets is, we’re assured, a cosmic coincidence.

To complete the morality play, Trump compared a U.S. special forces soldier allegedly using insider knowledge of a Venezuelan raid to win $400,000 on Polymarket to Pete Rose betting on his own team — and hinted he’d "look into it" because betting on yourself is apparently fine. Between the president’s nostalgia for his casino days, his son’s prediction-market side hustle, and the federal government suing states that try to regulate the whole mess, the Trump era has finally achieved perfect thematic clarity: America is the casino, the house is the Trump family, and the rest of us are just here to provide liquidity.

Doug Burgum, Trump’s Secretary of Interior and part-time fossil fuel concierge, tried to require that every wind and solar project on federal lands and waters get his personal royal blessing before moving forward. A coalition of clean energy groups pointed out that this wasn’t "oversight" so much as a slow-motion execution, accusing Burgum of deliberately rewiring agency processes to shove renewables into "second-class status" while rolling out the red carpet for coal, oil, and gas.

Chief Judge Denise J Casper took one look at this little sabotage project and slapped it with a preliminary injunction, finding the plaintiffs were likely to win because the administration’s scheme appears to, minor detail, violate federal law and cause irreparable harm. Translation: you can’t just declare that all future wind and solar must pass through Doug’s Anti-Sunshine Veto Machine so they miss their tax credits and die quietly on a shelf.

The Interior Department, bravely refusing to comment on the lawsuit it is currently losing, instead issued a boilerplate brag that America does energy "cleaner, safer, and more reliably" than anyone else—while Trump’s second-term energy plan is to gut renewable tax credits, shovel federal support to fossil fuels, and sneer at "the Green New Scam" in executive orders. Courts keep telling them this is illegal; the administration keeps responding, "What if we tried the same thing, slightly dumber?"

Clean energy groups say this ruling is just the first step toward getting stalled projects back on track so people can have fast, cheap, low-carbon power. The White House, meanwhile, is still hard at work making sure your electricity bills stay high and your grid stays fragile—just so oil and gas donors don’t have to downgrade their third yacht to a second yacht.

The Trump family’s latest innovation in public service: a sitting US president co-founding a crypto firm that’s now being sued by one of its own billionaire superfans for alleged extortion. Justin Sun – who once thought buying $100 million of Trump meme coins was a good use of money and oxygen – now claims the Trump-backed World Liberty outfit illegally froze his WLFI tokens, stripped his voting rights, and is threatening to literally burn his coins. So the project is called “World Liberty,” and the first order of business is disenfranchising your biggest mark. On brand.

Sun says he backed the whole thing because of the Trump name and their shared love of unregulated digital monopoly money, only to discover that co-founder Chase Herro and friends were using that name as a "golden opportunity" to profit through fraud. Meanwhile, WLFI has cratered from 31 cents to under 8 cents, the firm is reportedly borrowing against its own junk token like a discount FTX tribute act, and Trump’s other great tech triumph, Truth Social, just fired Devin Nunes as CEO after the stock lost almost two-thirds of its value. The Trump presidency continues to be less a government and more a sprawling, publicly traded yard sale where every grift eventually sues every other grift.

Donald Trump looked at a nursing home owner who diverted $39 million in employee payroll taxes while residents were neglected, injured, and dying, and thought: now there’s a guy who deserves mercy. Joseph Schwartz, whose empire allegedly left families like Doris Coulson’s with dead relatives and unpaid judgments, got a Trump pardon after admitting to the federal tax crime. The White House helpfully explained that Schwartz was the victim of “over prosecution” and that prison would be hard for a rich older man, which is apparently now a constitutional defense.

The families who sued Schwartz? They got a nearly $19 million wrongful death judgment that he never bothered to pay while he allegedly kept tens of millions in assets tucked safely out of his own name. Workers at his collapsing homes bought food for residents with their own money and discovered their health insurance premiums were taken but never funded, while Schwartz quietly spent over $1 million on lobbyists to secure his golden ticket from Trump — who, the White House assures us, definitely does not issue pardons at the request of lobbyists. Totally unrelated coincidence that the guy with seven figures for influence-peddling got “grace” and the people with dead parents got paperwork.

Even after the federal pardon, Arkansas squeezed out a nine-month sentence for Schwartz over Medicaid fraud, which turned out to be less of a punishment and more of a brief layover. A reporter tried to reach him in prison; the Coulson family’s lawyer tried to serve a subpoena to finally track his assets. Then, like clockwork, another lobbyist appeared, the parole board sprang him in under three weeks, and the reporter’s letter bounced back as undeliverable. The system moved with cheetah speed to shorten his punishment, but when it came to helping the people he allegedly damaged, the machinery suddenly remembered how to be very, very tired.

Donald Trump is in "talks" with the IRS to resolve his $10 billion lawsuit over leaked tax records, because of course the man who paid $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017 now wants a life-changing lotto payout from the same taxpayers he barely contributed to. The suit claims the leak caused him "reputational and financial harm" and "public embarrassment," which is a bold way of saying: people found out what he actually pays and didn’t clap.

Trump, his two adult failsons Donald Jr. and Eric, and the Trump Organization are all listed as plaintiffs, because if there’s a pot of public money on the table, the whole family crime syndicate has to get in line. The leak came from an IRS contractor, Charles Littlejohn, who already pleaded guilty and got five years in prison for stealing the tax records of Trump and thousands of other rich guys, including Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. The IRS called his actions “unacceptable,” but not nearly as unacceptable as the part where the president now wants taxpayers to cut him a check for having his own numbers exposed.

Democrats, apparently tired of watching this administration treat the U.S. Treasury like a Mar-a-Lago ATM, introduced a bill to ban presidents, vice presidents, and their families from pocketing settlement money from the government. Elizabeth Warren called it an effort to close loopholes that enable this "apparent corruption" and stop Trump and future presidents from "stealing Americans’ hard-earned money"—which is a very polite way of saying "absolutely not, you are not suing the IRS to get richer off your own presidency." Trump, ever the philanthropist on other people’s dime, says he’d donate any payout to charity. The catch: it’s still your money he’s generously giving away.

Donald Trump has discovered a bold new way to support crime victims: take their money and give it to white-collar criminals. Since returning to office, he’s issued 117 pardons and commutations that don’t just wipe convictions, but also vaporize the fines and penalties that are legally supposed to flow into the federal Crime Victims Fund. At least $113 million that should have gone to domestic violence shelters, rape crisis centers, child abuse treatment programs, and gun violence survivors has instead been converted into a loyalty rewards program for fraudsters and money launderers.

The crown jewel of this little experiment in upside-down justice is Trump’s corporate pardon of HDR Global Trading Limited, parent company of the BitMEX crypto exchange. The company owed a $100 million fine for ignoring anti–money laundering laws; Trump swooped in hours before the payment was due and signed a pardon that explicitly remits “any and all fines, penalties, forfeitures, and restitution.” That’s not mercy, that’s a $100 million smash-and-grab from the Crime Victims Fund, which was created under VOCA to help people pay for funerals, medical bills, and lost wages after violent crime.

The language here matters: “remission of any and all fines” is not standard pardon boilerplate. Trump barely used it in his first term; now roughly a third of his second-term pardons include this magical debt eraser for corporate criminals. Prosecutors are left wondering why they should spend years building complex white-collar cases if the president can just shred the financial penalties with a signature, while states scramble to plug the holes in victim services budgets because the guy who cosplays as the toughest man on crime keeps canceling the cash.

By comparison, Biden’s pardons interrupted less than $1 million in financial penalties, most of which had already been paid. Trump’s tally in just 14 months dwarfs that, and doesn’t even include the big fines that never got imposed because he pardoned people before trial. So the math is simple: corporations and rich defendants get their slates wiped clean; survivors of shootings and other violent crimes get shorter waitlists, fewer services, and state budgets duct-taped together to cover the federal betrayal. It’s a perfect encapsulation of Trump’s justice philosophy: protect the money, not the people who got shot.