The Trump Presidency Timeline
Documenting the chaos since day one. 364 entries and counting.
trump pays wind developers to go drill more oil, calls it 'protecting the environment'
Artist’s rendering of Trump’s energy strategy: a wind turbine being paid to turn into an oil rig while Interior officials high-five a refinery smokestack.
Source: nytimes.com
trump wildfire czar allegedly discovers taxpayer-funded private fire department
Trump wildfire official heroically defends the most vulnerable community of all: his own 480-acre ranch.
Source: theguardian.com
florida discovers medicaid is actually a republican pac
Ron and Casey DeSantis, bravely standing up for the right of Medicaid settlement dollars to pursue their true passion: funding Republican PACs.
The jurors describe a “sophisticated scheme to fund political activities” in which absolutely no one can remember who decided to send $10 million in public money to Hope Florida. Everyone involved apparently caught the same rare condition where you can approve eight figures of taxpayer cash but not recall basic details like who ordered it, why, or where it went. They still found “insufficient evidence” to charge anyone, which is a polite legal way of saying: we see the heist, we see the money trail, but the culprits all successfully role-played amnesiac houseplants.
DeSantis, naturally, says the only real crime is the leak of the report, insists the whole thing was “legally sound,” and claims there was “no diversion of any Medicaid funds” because it was just a private contribution that somehow emerged from a Medicaid settlement with a state contractor and then just happened to land in a foundation branded with his wife’s pet project. Casey DeSantis, we are assured, knew nothing – she just “championed” the initiative that conveniently sat at the center of the money pipeline.
Meanwhile, current attorney general and former DeSantis chief of staff James Uthmeier is named in the report as being in a “position of authority” over the settlement and involved in directing the money after it reached Hope Florida. His PAC, Keep Florida Clean – which is a delightful name for a fund allegedly rinsed with Medicaid settlement cash – was the “prime recipient of the majority” of the $10 million. Uthmeier now says he can’t comment, but assures everyone that if the report is true, it just proves nobody did anything wrong. Ashley Moody’s office signed off on the deal without doing basic due diligence, and now swears they had no idea how the money would be spent. The grand jury’s recommendation? Florida should pass a law saying state money has to go into General Revenue and that there should be actual consequences for violating it – a bold, experimental concept in a state currently operating under the honor system for people who demonstrably have none.
Source: theguardian.com
don jr discovers a revolutionary new asset class: dad
Donald Trump Jr, hard at work demonstrating how efficiently you can grow a venture fund once you cut out the middleman and invest directly in your father’s government.
Congressman Jamie Raskin would like to know how 1789 Capital went from "serially investing in total market flops" to suddenly nailing every company about to be showered with Trump administration money. The firm’s assets under management jumped from $150m in 2024 to $3.5bn by May 2026, shortly after it hired one (1) Donald Trump Jr as partner. Apparently the only thing this fund needed to beat the market was a direct bloodline to the guy signing the checks.
The miracle doesn’t stop at domestic grift. Roughly 40% of the cash is from foreign investors, who seem very excited to invest in a fund that just happens to buy into companies right before they get massive Pentagon loans, Commerce grants, or billion-dollar defense contracts. Vulcan Elements, an "unproven startup" that somehow scored a $620m Pentagon loan and a $50m Commerce grant, is one such beneficiary. Another is Anduril, run by Trump ally Palmer Luckey, which has seen billions in contracts while 1789 Capital quietly takes a stake and its friends land on the Defense Policy Board overseeing the very sector they’re profiting from. Regulatory capture is so 20th century; this is full vertical integration of the grift.
Trump, naturally, went on CNBC to brag that his kids have "inside information" because his policies touch every part of the economy, but insisted he tells them to "stay away"—which is a bold claim for a family that keeps showing up on the receiving end of federal money like it’s Amazon Prime. Don Jr, for his part, swears he only talks to his father every few weeks, never about business, and holds no official role in the administration. Just a private citizen whose fund keeps buying into companies right before dad’s government dumps hundreds of millions into them. Pure coincidence, say the people who have never once met a coincidence they couldn’t monetize.
Source: theguardian.com
trump’s ‘great economy’ mostly great for people who own yachts
Trump gestures at a roaring stock chart while the rest of the country checks the price of toilet paper and pretends that’s the same thing as prosperity.
Ronald Reagan once asked, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” Donald Trump heard that and apparently took it as a challenge. Tariffs are quietly siphoning about $1,100 a year from every household so that Trump can cosplay trade warrior while you pay 14% more for clothes and shell out extra for cars and new homes. Inflation? Those tariffs alone have juiced it by up to 0.7 percentage points, because of course the self-proclaimed king of debt also knows how to tax you without ever saying the word “tax”.
Then there’s Trump’s little Iran adventure, which helpfully turned the Strait of Hormuz into a supply-chain chokehold and your power bill into a horror movie. Energy bills are rising three times faster than inflation, the average monthly utility bill has hit $280, and the White House solution is to kill clean energy subsidies and shovel more money at fossil fuels and AI datacenters that guzzle water and electricity. Naturally, corporate profits are exploding – S&P 500 earnings up 50% year over year – while average Americans are deciding whether to pay for groceries, gas, or the privilege of keeping the lights on.
On the social Darwinism side of things, Trump’s tax cuts for corporations and the ultra-rich are being financed with cuts to Medicaid and Medicare, plus sabotage of the Affordable Care Act so millions lose health insurance. He’s even ordering the MMR vaccine split into three shots – no scientific rationale, just extra doctor visits and higher costs because governing by Fox segment is the new normal. Meanwhile, the regime burned $464 million on a no-bid contract for special deportation jets that almost never fly, but sure, tell us more about how there’s “no money” for healthcare.
Trump brags that the economy is doing “unbelievably from the standpoint of Wall Street,” which is true if you’re in the top 1% hoarding over half of all stock value. For everyone else, consumer sentiment is tanking, jobs are shrinking, wage growth is slowing, and people are leaving the workforce altogether. So when Democrats ask voters whether they’re better off than before this presidency, the honest answer is: only if you’re a billionaire donor, a pharma executive, or one of the lucky few cashing in on this government-by-grift. Everyone else got the bill.
Source: theguardian.com
trump turns oklahoma into a $4 billion aluminum loyalty test
Artist’s rendering of $4 billion worth of aluminum and ego, powered entirely by taxpayer subsidies and Republican primary panic.
Source: npr.org
trump personally declares war on wind, dolphins, and union pensions
Union wind worker contemplates how many executive orders it will take for Trump to personally ban sunsets.
Source: theguardian.com
trump mobile invents the quantum phone: always shipping, never arrives
Artist’s impression of the Trump Mobile T1: a flag-wrapped IOU rendered in 4K disappointment.
As the year went on, though, the T1 started behaving less like a product and more like a crypto white paper. The manufacturing location? Mysteriously flexible. The design? Evolving. The delivery date? A conceptual art project. Key details kept changing, but one thing stayed rock solid: they kept the money, while some customers are still waiting for the device like it’s Half-Life 3.
So we’ve basically arrived at the logical endpoint of Trump-era capitalism: a "made in America" phone that may or may not be made in America, may or may not exist in its advertised form, and may or may not ever ship, promoted by a family that treats reality like a terms-of-service agreement. No refunds, but thank you for supporting the brand.
Source: bbc.co.uk
trump’s cheap meat stunt turns the gop ranch caucus feral
Ground beef on display, soon to be joined by a mystery-meat trade deal even the cows didn’t see coming.
Source: nbcnews.com
transportation secretary launches bold new infrastructure plan: his own reality show
The Secretary of Transportation bravely inspects America’s infrastructure: his marriage, his kids’ personal brands, and the sponsor logos on the RV.
The show’s big twist isn’t the plot (there isn’t one) but the financing: the government swears no taxpayer money was spent, which is technically comforting until you notice the sponsors include Boeing, Toyota, and Waymo — you know, companies regulated by the Department of Transportation. That fun little arrangement was enough for CREW to file an ethics complaint, because turning your regulatory portfolio into a branded content package is slightly different from cutting a ribbon at a highway rest stop. Naturally, the "Great American Road Trip" spends less time on, say, Arizona, and more time on the Duffys renewing their wedding vows on camera and offering relationship advice, all while shoehorning in a glowing visit to Waymo that delicately omits the part where its cars block ambulances at mass shootings.
Every episode promises history and geography but delivers family lore and soft-focus prayer circles, with the Liberty Bell and the Grand Canyon reduced to background extras in the Sean & Rachel Cinematic Universe. When Duffy tries to draw a deep metaphor about buffalo herds and family unity, a tour guide has to gently inform him they’re actually bison, which doubles as a neat summary of the entire project: glossy, self-important, and wrong on the facts, but absolutely certain it deserves a platform. The end result is a government-commissioned reality pilot masquerading as patriotic programming — a perfect Trump-era blend of state media, influencer culture, and regulatory capture, all wrapped in a family road trip no one asked for.
Source: theguardian.com
press secretary clocks out of white house, clocks in at trump dark-money laundromat
Karoline Leavitt, fresh off government payroll, warms up for her new role translating billionaire money into patriotic-sounding press releases.
Karoline Leavitt is leaving her job as White House press secretary to spend more time with her family — and by "family," of course, we mean Trump’s super PAC, MAGA Inc. After a grueling 18 months of explaining why the president’s latest rant was actually 12‑dimensional chess, she’s headed right back to the Trump-aligned cash machine that pretends to be an "independent" political committee.
She’ll be one of Trump’s "top outside advisors" now, which is a very poetic way of saying: doing campaign work with unlimited money while everyone keeps a straight face about coordination rules. The same person who just finished speaking for the president from the White House podium will now speak for the super PAC backing the same president’s candidates, but don’t worry, the FEC’s comatose watchdogs are totally on it.
Leavitt assures reporters they’ll still see her around Washington and even back on Air Force One for the GOP’s midterm convention — just not as a government employee anymore, which is convenient when you’re shuttling between taxpayer-funded optics and billionaire-funded influence. America’s campaign finance system wasn’t so much broken as repurposed, and this is what it looks like when you stop even pretending there’s a line between the government and the donors who own it.
Source: nbcnews.com
trump’s tax cuts finally send the bill, it’s $40 trillion
The U.S. Capitol, bravely standing guard over $40 trillion of "fiscally conservative" decisions and one very large donor-class receipt.
Source: theguardian.com
commander-in-helipad
Trump proudly showcasing the newest White House amenity: valet service for his ego via helicopter.
Source: bbc.co.uk
world’s most expensive presidential side hustle
Donald Trump, thoughtfully considering whether to deposit his latest presidential profits in a bank, a golf course, or another doomed crypto scheme.
Congress, having discovered that oversight is hard and fundraising is fun, has mostly decided to treat this as a spectator sport. Trump’s Justice Department even tried to help him kneecap the IRS and secure immunity from past audits that could save the family about $100m, until an Obama-appointed judge rudely remembered what laws are. Over at Truth Social, the president is now selling early access to his market-moving posts for $100,000 a pop, a sort of presidential insider-trading subscription box that media groups say is blatantly unconstitutional — so naturally it’s moving full steam ahead.
Two-thirds of Americans tell pollsters they know he puts personal gain over the country, his approval has cratered to 33%, and historians are already calling this the most openly corrupt administration in US history. Yet Trump calmly explains that the only real check on his power is his own morality, which is like saying the only thing restraining a raccoon in a dumpster is its sense of decorum. Until voters hand Democrats enough seats to do basic oversight, the toddler remains elbow-deep in the presidential cookie jar, and everyone else just gets to watch their democracy get itemized as a business expense.
Source: theguardian.com
america first, privacy last: trump demands africa’s medical charts for ‘aid’
Marco Rubio, freshly promoted to Secretary of State, explains that America doesn’t do colonialism anymore—we just do ‘data sharing agreements’ with a side of coercion.
The Trump administration has discovered a bold new twist on humanitarian aid: give us your people’s health data or enjoy your pandemics in peace. Eight Democratic senators just sent a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio asking why the U.S. is conditioning up to $1.7 billion in health aid to countries like Uganda on letting Washington (and its contractors, naturally) jack directly into their national health data systems. Historically, U.S. global health programs like PEPFAR used anonymized, segregated systems. Now Team America First wants logins and “secure access mechanisms” straight into foreign government databases, because nothing says compassion like turning HIV treatment into a data-mining opportunity.
Rubio’s State Department insists this is all anonymized, harmless, and absolutely not a giant surveillance and commercialization playground for U.S. companies or AI models. The problem is the agreements are vague, secret (despite federal law requiring they be public), and written so loosely that experts say the data could be re-identified, misused, or monetized without anyone’s consent. The senators are asking whether any of this goldmine of health data will be shared with U.S.-based third parties, including to train AI, and what privacy rights—if any—foreign citizens will have when their most intimate medical information is floating around on some contractor’s server.
All of this flows from the “America First Global Health Strategy,” which proudly promises to make America “more prosperous” and “promote American health innovations”—a poetic way of saying: we dismantled USAID, gutted CDC global health work, fired the experts, and then put a health-tech entrepreneur, Brad Smith, in charge of reinventing foreign aid as a data acquisition scheme. After overseeing $67 billion in cuts to HHS, Smith is now fronting a model where lifesaving aid is used as leverage to extract pathogen samples and population-level health data, with Africans getting treatment and Americans getting a new training set for their algorithms. Truly a win-win, if you’re a biotech investor and not an actual human with a medical record.
Meanwhile, the administration’s own cyber strategy sermonizes about the sacred privacy of American citizens’ data, while casually experimenting on foreign populations with barely any safeguards. In regions where disclosing someone’s HIV status, abortion history, or mental health treatment can lead to discrimination or violence, Washington is playing privacy roulette behind closed doors. It’s a neat trick: dismantle real aid infrastructure, then rebuild it as a global health panopticon and call it efficiency. The State Department’s response? They don’t comment on congressional letters, but trust them, everything’s fine. What could possibly go wrong with a secret, AI-adjacent, for-profit friendly health surveillance pipeline run by the Trump-Rubio brain trust?
Source: propublica.org
trump to 45m acres of old-growth forests: have you tried being oil instead
The administration’s bold new wildfire strategy: fewer forests, fewer fires, problem solved.
The US Forest Service dutifully filed a proposal to completely rescind the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which currently keeps some of the country’s last old-growth forests from being turned into logging roads, drilling pads, and future wildfire tinder piles. Environmental groups like the Sierra Club and NRDC pointed out that these forests provide wildlife habitat, clean water and air for millions, and, minor detail, actually still exist — a status that tends not to survive industrial clear-cutting.
The administration insists this is all about "forest health" and wildfire prevention, because if there’s one thing that stops fires, it’s carving roads into remote areas so more people and heavy machinery can roll in and start them. Forest Service chief Tom Schultz helpfully waved around wildfire hazard stats, while ignoring the part where roads are a major source of new ignitions and the roadless rule already allows targeted fuel treatments. As Sierra Club’s Alex Craven noted, this isn’t about safety; it’s about using wildfire fear as a handy PR costume for opening up Tahoe, Tongass, and forests along the Appalachian Trail to industrial exploitation on the taxpayer’s dime.
So the sales pitch is: dismantle protections for some of America’s wildest remaining public lands, pretend it’s disaster mitigation, and hope nobody notices that "active forest management" has been redefined as cut it, drill it, pave it, and send the profits somewhere far from the smoke.
Source: theguardian.com
florida-19th holds open casting call for pardoned felons and political drifters
John Strand, a Jan. 6 rioter turned Trump-pardoned influencer, auditions on Capitol Hill for his next role: Congressman From Whatever District Will Have Him.
Source: npr.org
president puts war, markets, and sailors behind a paywall
Trump, hard at work re-rigging the system, bravely day-trading through a war he lied the country into.
Jon Ossoff went to Atlanta and basically read out loud the crimes section of the Trump presidency like it was an audiobook. He torched Trump’s "uniquely despicable" Iran war — the one built on lies, padded with propaganda, and generously seasoned with record-length deployments for sailors on the USS Abraham Lincoln while the commander-in-chief complains they haven’t been stuck at sea long enough. The troops get exhaustion, mental health crises, and nine months on a floating anxiety attack; Trump gets tee times and a Gulf-funded flying palace for himself and Natalie Harp.
Ossoff then walked through the part where the president allegedly looked at the global economy and said, "How can I day-trade this?" Trump announces clown-tariffs, tanks the market, buys the dip, then magically cancels the tariffs right after telling his followers it’s a "great time to buy" — triggering a historic rebound and, coincidentally, padding his own portfolio. This is followed by the logical next step of any healthy democracy: a subscription service charging up to $100,000 a month for early access to the president’s thoughts on war and economic policy. The stock market, foreign governments, and defense contractors now get the premium tier, while the rest of the country gets whatever’s left after the whales cash out.
Ossoff’s pitch is basically: yes, American politics is corrupt and coin-operated, but Trump didn’t drain the swamp — he installed a VIP lounge, put the nuclear football behind a paywall, and turned the entire system into his personal options-trading side hustle. When the sitting president’s decisions on war and peace are delivered first to paying customers, that’s not just corruption; that’s a live demo of how to speedrun a democracy into a kleptocracy.
Source: theguardian.com
strong national security requires a really nice ballroom, actually
Pictured: the future "security structure" where national security will bravely tango with the donor class under crystal chandeliers.
Instead of just admitting he wants another gilded party box for himself and his paying courtiers, Trump is trying to launder it through the language of national security — a convenient label that just so happens to justify more government resources and Secret Service integration into his private, for-profit club. Call it infrastructure week for the banquet industrial complex.
This is the Trump doctrine in miniature: take something blatantly for personal benefit, slap a "security" or "official" sticker on it, and dare anyone to complain while taxpayer-funded protection gets further entangled with his private revenue stream. The line between public duty and private ballroom keeps getting blurrier, but as long as the checks clear and the band plays, the regime calls it safety.
Source: today.com
trump brings the receipts, forgets to read them
Trump proudly displays a Washington Post article that proves Joe Biden’s policies worked, which in this White House apparently counts as a self-own performance art piece.
The Trump White House spent the day blasting out a photo of Donald Trump proudly waving a Washington Post article about prescription drug prices hitting their biggest drop in 60+ years, declaring it proof of his economic genius. Tiny footnote: the article itself explicitly credits Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act and its Medicare drug price negotiations, and quotes multiple experts saying Trump’s policies probably had nothing to do with it. Minor detail, easily solved by simply not linking to the story and hoping no one can read past a headline.
During a carefully staged tarmac photo-op, Trump strutted up to reporters, brandished a printout showing the headline and first few lines, and demanded they capture the moment like he’d just split the atom. "I told you that was going to happen," he bragged, omitting the part where it happened because Biden signed a law forcing Big Pharma to negotiate with Medicare. The same article notes that the Bureau of Labor Statistics data he’s celebrating comes from an agency whose former chief Trump fired last year for producing job numbers he didn’t like, which really ties the whole "facts are whatever I say they are" aesthetic together.
Over on X, White House communications director Steven Cheung posted a screenshot of the Post headline with the caption, "All thanks to President Trump!" and, crucially, no link to the actual piece that contradicts him. The official White House accounts joined in with "POV: you bring the receipts," which is a bold slogan for a team that apparently considers reading comprehension an optional elite hobby. It’s not policymaking so much as government-by-screenshot: strip out the context, slap Trump’s name on Biden’s reforms, and hope the propaganda beats the truth to everyone’s feed.
Source: theguardian.com