The Trump Presidency Timeline

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.

Trump announced that his lovingly self-branded prescription drug site, TrumpRx, is adding “over 600 affordable generics” so Americans can enjoy the convenience of navigating a presidential shopping portal to maybe pay more than they would with their own insurance or existing discount programs. According to Trump, this will give people “one source” for the “lowest possible cost” on drugs, which is a bold promise for a site that experts keep pointing out is… not actually the lowest anything.

Airbnb co-founder and now Trump’s chief design officer Joe Gebbia proudly showed off new features like “Presidential Deals” on brand-name drugs and a price-comparison tool, pitching medicine shopping like you’re booking a weekend in Cleveland: compare pills like you compare hotels, Airbnbs, or baseball tickets. Health economists, meanwhile, keep gently screaming into the void that most patients can already get cheaper versions through insurance, pharmacies, or services like Cost Plus Drugs — and that TrumpRx mostly adds confusion to an already byzantine system.

So instead of tackling the pharma lobby, patent games, or PBM abuse, the administration slapped Trump’s name on a website, bolted on a price-comparison widget, and called it reform. The U.S. drug market remains a rigged casino, but now there’s a new table where the house is branded in gold letters and the big innovation is a tab labeled “Presidential Deals”. Truly, American healthcare has never been more on brand.

Marty Davis, the self-styled plain-spoken Midwestern farmboy who just happens to run a $500 million quartz-countertop empire and belong to a billionaire dynasty, has discovered the magic of Trump-era industrial policy: why compete in a market when you can have the government kneecap your rivals for you? As CEO of Cambria and a Trump donor, Davis has been repeatedly and successfully lobbying the U.S. government to slap tariffs on imported quartz, all while wrapping himself in the language of "Main Street," "free and fair trade," and protecting the "healthy middle class." Translation: he gets protection, everyone else gets the bill.

Cambria's competitors – many of them smaller businesses that actually look like the "Main Street" Davis keeps cosplaying – say his tariff crusade is blowing up their costs, forcing layoffs, and hiking prices for homeowners who just wanted a countertop, not a lesson in oligarchic trade policy. They rely more on imported materials, so when Davis convinces the government to tax those imports, their margins evaporate while his made-in-Minnesota quartz gets a nice little artificial advantage. The result: fewer jobs at rival firms, higher prices for consumers, and one very happy Trump donor who can boast that his political investments are paying excellent returns.

All of this is, of course, draped in the usual Trump-world rhetoric about saving American manufacturing and standing up to unfair trade. The people actually getting hammered by the tariffs – small fabricators, installers, and middle-class homeowners – are just collateral damage in the latest episode of "regulatory capture, but make it patriotic." Free market capitalism, Trump edition: you too can weaponize federal power against your competitors, as long as your campaign checks clear.

The 2nd Circuit has graciously allowed President Donald Trump to keep his tiny hands off that $83 million check to E. Jean Carroll while he begs the Supreme Court to rescue him from the radical tyranny of consequences. The court hit pause on the payment as long as Trump posts an even bigger bond — now creeping up toward a cool $100 million — because if there’s one thing this era demands, it’s ever-larger piles of money being parked in escrow to cover the lies of a former president found liable for sexual abuse and defamation.

The real magic trick here isn’t the delay; it’s Trump’s legal team trying to invoke a federal statute to swap him out for the U.S. government as the defendant. Translation: he wants you, the taxpayer, to step in as the fall guy so that the judgment evaporates, because the federal government can’t be sued for defamation. He lied, a jury believed Carroll, he lost — and now his plan is to turn the United States into his personal liability shield. The appeals court has already rejected a full hearing on that stunt, but he’s marching it up to a Supreme Court that has never met a Republican fever dream it didn’t at least wink at.

Meanwhile, Carroll’s lawyer is politely thrilled that the court conditioned the stay on Trump posting nearly nine figures in bond, which is about as close as our system gets to saying, “We know you’re going to stall forever, so at least park a mountain of cash here while you do it.” This all comes on top of the separate $5 million defamation verdict he’s already appealing, because if there’s one consistent throughline of the Trump years, it’s that the presidency was treated as a four-year audition for the role of ‘America’s Most Litigated Liar’ — with the rest of us drafted as unwilling co-defendants.