The Trump Presidency Timeline

Laura Loomer, professional MAGA fire alarm and Trump’s favorite conspiracy megaphone, just got a guided tour of war-ravaged Ukraine — red carpet, rubble, and all. For years she’s called Ukraine a "Nazi state" and railed against US aid, but after being flown around the destruction like it’s a very bleak influencer collab, she’s now decided she was duped by "Russian propaganda" and is suddenly very sorry to President Zelensky.

The BBC politely calls this a "shift in stance"; the rest of us call it what it is: a test run for the Trump-era foreign policy model, where geopolitics is outsourced to whichever loyalist with a ring light and a Telegram channel can get five minutes with Trump between golf holes. Ukrainian officials clearly see Loomer as a potential backchannel into a future Trump White House, because nothing says "serious ally in a major land war" like courting the woman whose brand is being too unhinged for most right-wing platforms.

So now, instead of dealing with diplomats, policy experts, or people who can find Ukraine on a map without squinting, we’re looking at Zelensky trying to secure his country’s survival by managing the vibes of the MAGA influencer ecosystem. If Trump wins, State Department cables might as well be replaced with DMs to whoever last rage-posted about "globalists" on Truth Social — and Loomer just auditioned for the role.

Donald Trump briefly decided to turn the Strait of Hormuz into his own EZ-Pass toll road, announcing a 20% "United States Reimbursement Fee" on all cargo like a mob boss who just discovered maritime law exists. A few hours and several panicked calls from Gulf monarchs later, the toll vanished and was magically replaced with unspecified "MASSIVE" trade and investment deals flowing into the US – also known as: pay us quietly and we’ll pretend this wasn’t extortion.

The part that didn’t change? The US is still resuming a naval blockade of Iranian ports, while trading missile strikes with Tehran and helping freeze one of the world’s most vital energy chokepoints. Trump has now declared the US the "guardian" of the Strait of Hormuz and announced it is "open to ALL Ship traffic except for Iran", which is a poetic way of saying Washington just unilaterally decided who gets access to a global artery and who gets economically strangled.

As tanker traffic drops to a two‑month low and oil prices spike, Trump is on Truth Social boasting that "oil is flowing like never before, thanks to the awesome Power of the United States Military" – a perfectly normal sentence if your foreign policy is a blend of protection racket, hostage‑taking, and late‑stage empire cosplay. Iran vows retaliation, Israel’s Netanyahu promises an even "more powerful" response if hit first, and the rest of the world gets to watch a nuclear‑adjacent region turned into a live‑fire demo of how fast one unhinged presidency can weaponize global commerce.

The planet is currently running a double feature: a real-time climate horror film where Europe cooks under a lethal heatwave and infrastructure melts like a Republican’s spine when asked to stand up to Trump, and a deeply cursed feelgood side plot where Donald J. Trump accidentally nudges the world off fossil fuels by screwing up yet another military adventure.

Trump’s bungled attack on Iran with Israel has helped choke off the Strait of Hormuz, blocking roughly 20% of the world’s oil and gas supply. The genius result: governments are suddenly rediscovering that maybe depending on volatile petro-dictators and a maritime chokepoint for basic civilization fuel is not a brilliant long-term strategy. So while some scramble back to dirtier fuels in the short term, a lot of serious people are now talking about speeding up renewables and electrification in the name of energy security and lower costs — the kind of conversation they should have had years ago, but apparently it took Trump playing geopolitics like a drunk guy speedrunning Risk to get there.

Meanwhile, renewables are doing the thing the fossil lobby swore was impossible without grid collapse and communism. Solar, wind, and hydro have already overtaken coal as the leading source of global electricity, non-fossil power is at 42%, solar is exploding, battery storage is rocketing up, and countries like Pakistan are cancelling LNG imports because solar is just cheaper and less of a hostage situation. So yes, the climate horror story is very real — thousands dead from heat, nuclear plants shutting down because rivers are too hot, and a future that looks like a sweaty dystopia. But the accidental hero subplot is pure Trump era: the man tried to project strength, almost triggered an energy crisis, and may end up remembered as the guy who finally made oil look so dangerous and stupid that the world sprinted for the exits.

The much-hyped Trump–Iran "memorandum of understanding" is aging about as well as a Trump casino. Hours after fresh U.S. strikes on Iranian targets, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard returned the favor with drones and ballistic missiles aimed at Bahrain and Kuwait, because nothing says "durable ceasefire" like everyone immediately bombing each other again.

The deal Trump bragged about earlier this month was supposed to freeze tensions for 60 days while they sorted out tiny details like the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports, shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, sanctions relief, and Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium. Instead, Kuwait is shooting down Iranian missiles, Bahrain has an eight-story residential building blown open near its international airport, and diplomats are standing in front of microphones insisting this is all fine and normal.

Bahrain’s Foreign Ministry called the Iranian attack a “dangerous escalation” and a “systematic pattern of repeated aggression,” which is diplomatic-speak for "this ceasefire is a joke and we all know who handed Iran the match and the gasoline." Meanwhile, Trump’s team gets to keep pretending that lurching between blockade, airstrikes, and photo-op agreements is some kind of genius strategy, rather than the world’s most expensive temper tantrum in the world’s most sensitive shipping lane.

The Trump administration just got its first big test of the "who needs professionals when you have vibes" doctrine. After literally kidnapping Nicolás Maduro in a January special forces raid and installing a more compliant Delcy Rodríguez, Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are now trying to run a massive disaster response in Venezuela without the US Agency for International Development, which they helpfully gutted and folded into the State Department. Thousands of experienced aid workers? Laid off. Regional networks and NGO relationships? Shredded. But don’t worry, Marco says it’ll be "big, fast, effective" – like a used car ad, but for earthquake relief.

Trump is busy congratulating himself for this "happy country" where people are supposedly "dancing in the streets" between aftershocks and mass casualties, proudly noting that the US has "taken out millions of barrels of oil" and "paid for the war many times over." So yes, the official line is: we toppled your government, siphoned your oil, and now that 920+ people are dead in earthquakes, we’re generously sending $150m in disaster aid and some search-and-rescue teams so the interim regime we like doesn’t collapse on live TV. This isn’t humanitarian assistance; it’s a loyalty rewards program for compliant governments, with the State Department cosplay­ing USAID because Trump decided multilateral health cooperation and professional disaster infrastructure were for losers.

Experts politely point out that the US has already blown previous crises by torching international partnerships – like the Ebola outbreak the US learned about late after ditching the WHO – and that the old USAID mission in Colombia went from 144 staff to 14, taking decades of local ties down with it. Now the same hollowed-out apparatus is trying to manage a Haiti-level disaster while the White House frantically overcompensates to avoid another paper-towel-throwing moment. The administration calls it a "whole-of-government" response; everyone else recognizes it as a live-fire demonstration of how you turn a humanitarian tool into an extension of regime-change policy and oil accounting.

JD Vance shuffled into the White House briefing room and did a rare thing for a Republican: he mildly scolded Israel. The vice-president reminded everyone that two-thirds of the missiles keeping Israel afloat in the US–Israeli war on Iran were bought with American tax dollars, then gently suggested that maybe – just maybe – Benjamin Netanyahu shouldn’t spend his days knifing the only sugar daddy he has left. This is what passes for a rupture in the Trump era: the guy running a regional war machine complains his subcontractor is being rude about it.

Trump, for his part, has been leaking to every reporter with a pulse that Bibi is “fucking crazy” and has “no fucking judgment” – bold words from the man who let Netanyahu talk him into a catastrophic war on Iran that tanked the global economy, shut the Strait of Hormuz, and set half the Middle East on fire. After years of shoveling tens of billions in unconditional aid and weapons to Israel as it leveled Gaza, bombed Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Qatar and Iran, Trump now claims he “calls all the shots” while still refusing to do the one thing that would prove it: turn off the weapons spigot.

The result is pure Trump-era foreign policy: US intelligence is warning that Netanyahu will likely sabotage the new Iran peace talks, Iran is threatening to walk and re-close Hormuz unless Israel stops its rampage in Lebanon, and Israel is busy testing how much ethnic cleansing it can get away with under the label “security zone.” After a joint US–Israeli attack killed Iran’s supreme leader, Hezbollah fired rockets, Israel invaded southern Lebanon, displaced over a million people, and then commemorated an April ceasefire by launching “Operation Eternal Darkness” – a ten-minute bombing spree across Lebanon that killed at least 350 people and injured 1,200.

Western leaders, including Trump, responded to Israel’s open promise to apply the “Gaza model” to Lebanon – mass displacement, flattening homes, schools, hospitals, and then occupying the rubble – with their usual steely resolve: a few sternly worded shrugs. Now Trump needs a deal with Tehran so he can declare victory and pretend the Iran adventure was 57-dimensional chess instead of a geopolitical faceplant. But he’s still too addicted to being Israel’s arms dealer-in-chief to actually restrain Netanyahu. The peace talks aren’t a test of statesmanship; they’re a test of whether Trump cares more about avoiding a global recession or upsetting the guy he just called “fucking crazy.” Place your bets.