The Trump Presidency Timeline
Documenting the chaos since day one. 1108 entries and counting.
state department cancels visas, renews commitment to petty authoritarianism

Rodrigo Chaves smiles onstage with his chosen successor Laura Fernández, secure in the knowledge that if Costa Rican institutions won’t fully bend to him, Marco Rubio’s State Department is happy to help apply pressure from the north.
Source: theguardian.com
turns out you can’t gaslight gas prices

Behold: the real approval rating tracker of the Trump administration, now at $5.29 a gallon and rising.
Trump’s overall approval is down to 37% with 59% disapproval, the worst numbers he’s ever managed in this particular poll — a truly impressive achievement for a man whose brand is nonstop underperformance. The collapse isn’t just among the usual suspects; he’s bleeding support from rural voters, white non-college voters, people making under $50,000, parents, Millennials, even white evangelicals who usually wouldn’t abandon him if he started charging admission to communion. Republicans are still mostly on board, but even there the approval gap has dropped 15 net points in about a year, suggesting that $5 gas has done what a coup attempt, 91 indictments, and a pandemic body count could not.
All of this has gifted Democrats a 10-point edge on the generic congressional ballot six months before the midterms, plus a lead on enthusiasm — a rare moment where the party that usually campaigns on “we’re not actively setting things on fire” gets to run on “also, we’d like you to afford groceries.” The war in Iran that Trump sold as a masterstroke of strength is now a political anchor, dragging his approval down faster than his lawyers’ hourly rates can go up. Turns out when your foreign policy doubles as an oil-price sabotage plan, voters eventually notice that the Dear Leader’s greatness does not, in fact, fill their gas tank.
So yes, the poll confirms that Americans are furious about prices, furious at Trump, and increasingly open to the radical idea that maybe electing a chronically indicted reality show landlord to run a war-and-tariff economy was not the genius move Fox News promised. The good news for Trump is that he still has time before November — to blame immigrants, windmills, and electric stoves for OPEC, while the rest of the country just wants to get to work without taking out a second mortgage.
Source: npr.org
project freedom pauses, global economy continues screaming into a pillow

Map helpfully showing where President Trump and Marco Rubio decided to rerun the Iraq War DLC as a maritime choke-point minigame.
Source: bbc.com
eeoc bravely defends oppressed white guy from new york times

The Trump-era EEOC heroically charging into battle to protect America’s most vulnerable population: white male editors at the New York Times.
Source: theguardian.com
the crime now is seashells

Trump listens intently, possibly trying to hear what the seashell is saying about him.
The Secret Service arrested an FAA contractor who allegedly used his work computer to Google "I am going to kill Donald John Trump" and how to sneak a gun into a federal facility, then politely asked IT to delete his search history like this was a bad day on Pornhub, not a federal crime. He also allegedly emailed the White House from his personal computer to announce his intent to "neutralize/kill" Trump, because subtlety is dead and so are competent plots.
On its own this is just one unhinged guy with three guns and zero operational security. The bigger picture: the DOJ says there have been three other prosecutions for Trump threats this week, including former FBI director James Comey being charged over an Instagram photo of seashells that prosecutors claim was a threat. So yes, we’ve hit the part of the authoritarian arc where the president’s Justice Department is hunting for coded messages in beach decor while bragging about "zero tolerance" and "maximum punishments" for speech, even as actual violent extremists marinate happily in the background.
Meanwhile, a South Carolina man was arrested after literally writing "Headed to Wsh to kill the pres" on his car like a rolling confession, and a Florida man pleaded guilty to threatening Trump and other officials. All this comes less than two weeks after a gunman stormed the White House Correspondents’ Dinner allegedly trying to kill Trump and other government officials. The country is spiraling, the temperature is off the charts, and the administration’s answer is to turn threat prosecutions into a loyalty spectacle where an ex-FBI director’s seashell post gets treated like the Zapruder film.
schrödinger’s nukes: rubio pretends israel’s arsenal is hypothetical

Marco Rubio carefully not seeing Israel’s nuclear weapons, as required by centuries-old Washington tradition and this administration’s allergy to telling Congress anything useful.
Rubio and the rest of Trump’s diplomacy-by-cosplay crew are clinging to Washington’s decades-long game of "Israel’s nuclear arsenal doesn’t exist if I squint hard enough," even as former US officials like Robert Gates and Israeli ministers have basically said the quiet part out loud. One Israeli minister even floated nuking Gaza as "one of the possibilities" – but sure, let’s pretend we’re in an epistemological fog. Meanwhile, the administration openly acknowledges nukes in the UK, France, India, Pakistan, Russia, China, and North Korea, but when it comes to Israel, everyone suddenly develops amnesia and a classification fetish.
The Democrats point out that this officially sanctioned pretending isn’t just insulting; it shreds any pretense of a coherent nonproliferation policy. Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman is already on record saying he’ll chase the bomb if Iran gets one, but the Trump-Rubio line is that transparency would be the real problem here. So Congress is left trying to oversee a nuclear tinderbox while the executive branch insists the matches are classified.
Source: theguardian.com
trumpworld insists barron isn’t a time traveler, just surrounded by people stuck in 2016

Lara Trump carefully explaining that time travel isn’t real, unlike UFO murder plots, illegal wars, and her career in Republican leadership.
Source: theguardian.com
title ix becomes title nope: trump doj hunts trans women at smith

The Department of Education bravely shields America’s young women from the unspeakable horror of inclusive admissions policies.
The Trump education department has decided that the real crisis in American schools isn’t guns, crumbling buildings, or student debt – it’s Smith College letting trans women exist. The Office for Civil Rights proudly announced it is investigating the women’s college for the crime of admitting, quote, “biological males into women’s intimate spaces,” because nothing says “limited government” like Washington micromanaging who can pee in a Northampton dorm bathroom.
Assistant secretary for civil rights Kimberly Richey helpfully clarified that Title IX’s single-sex exemption only applies to "biological sex difference, not subjective gender identity" – a legally creative way of saying: we will rewrite civil-rights law on the fly to match the vibes of the Christian right. Smith, which has admitted trans women since 2015 after, you know, actually talking to students and alumnae, is now being told that educating women of all kinds means it might not count as a women’s college anymore. Schrödinger’s woman: female enough for discrimination, not female enough for protection.
This latest stunt slots neatly into the administration’s ongoing project of driving trans people out of every public space: bans on trans military service, lawsuits against states that let trans kids play sports, attempts to kill gender‑affirming care, and passport rules that must match birth sex. Now, with an assist from rightwing group “Defending Education” – whose entire business model is screaming “indoctrination” at any school that acknowledges marginalized people exist – the federal government is using Title IX, a law meant to fight sex discrimination, as a weapon to enforce it instead. Truly a bold new era of civil rights: everyone is equal, as long as they’re the right kind of woman.
Source: theguardian.com
doj discovers drugs-for-votes, quickly prescribes ‘look away’

DOJ officials carefully examining evidence of a drugs-for-votes scheme before filing it directly in the ‘too politically awkward’ shred bin.
Source: propublica.org
trump’s floating firing squad hits 188 ‘maybe drug dealers’

The US military helpfully demonstrates its new probable-cause standard: if it floats, it explodes.
Source: theguardian.com
trump spends millions to protect his favorite gerrymander

Trump gestures majestically in Indiana while super PACs light $12 million on fire to teach local Republicans the dangers of insufficient gerrymander worship.
Source: nbcnews.com
diplomacy is for losers, says real estate government

A row of empty State Department offices, recently vacated to make room for the president’s third-favorite fundraiser’s cousin.
The State Department is discovering a fun new HR trend: when you replace career diplomats with golf buddies and campaign donors, the people who actually know how to run foreign policy start sprinting for the exits. Normally, about two-thirds of U.S. ambassadors come from the career foreign service; under Trump, that ratio has been flipped into a loyalty test with a flag pin.
Senior career diplomats, seeing their jobs handed to politically connected amateurs whose main qualification is writing big checks and praising Trump on TV, are taking the hint and retiring early. Why spend decades learning languages, negotiating treaties, and managing crises when you can be passed over for the guy whose main international experience is owning a condo in Cancun?
This isn’t just petty patronage; it’s systematic hollowing-out. By sidelining professionals in favor of donors and sycophants, the administration is turning the State Department from a diplomatic corps into a networking event for rich people who like ambassadorships more than tax brackets. American foreign policy gets weaker and more chaotic, but hey, at least the cocktail parties are great.
Source: npr.org
trump discovers new axis of evil: the pope and italy

Marco Rubio heads to the Vatican to explain that US foreign policy is totally stable and normal, aside from the part where his boss is threatening Italy and subtweeting the pope with AI Jesus fan art.
Donald Trump has now expanded the axis of evil to include: Iran, the pope, and Italy. After Pope Leo dared to condemn the US-Israeli war on Iran, Trump called the first US-born pontiff "weak" and "not doing a very good job" — bold words from a man whose spiritual practice consists of rage-posting and confusing an AI Jesus selfie with a medical headshot. He blasted out an AI-generated image depicting himself as Christ, then tried to claim it was actually him as a doctor, because nothing says humility like, "I’m either your savior or your surgeon, I forget which."
Vice-president JD Vance helpfully joined the clown mass, telling the Vatican to stick to "matters of morality" while also warning the pope to be careful when talking about theology and war — a neat trick that boils down to: talk about morality, unless it makes our war look bad. Meanwhile, Trump turned on one of his loudest European fans, Giorgia Meloni, threatening to yank US troops from Italy because her government wouldn’t cheerlead his Iran strikes or his tantrum at Leo. US basing rights and NATO posture are now just another item on the Mar-a-Lago grievance menu.
Into this holy tire fire walks Secretary of State Marco Rubio, dispatched to Rome to "thaw" relations with the Vatican and Italy — which is diplomatic code for, "Sorry the president screamed at you and compared himself to Jesus again." Rubio will privately meet Pope Leo and Italian leaders while pretending the administration’s foreign policy is something other than a loyalty test for worshipping Trump’s image, AI-enhanced or otherwise. The pope, for his part, says he doesn’t fear the US administration and will keep speaking out against the war, which in Trump’s America now counts as both a moral act and a national security risk.
Source: theguardian.com
trump admin discovers 14,000 imaginary ferraris on food stamps

Brooke Rollins bravely battling the epidemic of poor people secretly being rich, armed with nothing but a tweet, a think tank that won’t show its homework, and a burning desire to cut your groceries.
While Rollins and her cheering section (Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Tim Burchett, and James Woods, because of course) scream "fraud" on social media, actual experts note there’s no evidence of widespread abuse and that SNAP fraud is, according to USDA itself, relatively rare. What is widespread? Hunger. Food insecurity hit 13.7% of US households in 2024, the highest in a decade, right as the Trump administration helpfully ended the federal household food security report. When the data shows you’re starving people, the obvious solution is to stop collecting the data.
Rollins boasts that 4.3 million people have been kicked off SNAP after Trump’s "big, beautiful bill" jacked up work requirements and dumped administrative costs on states, then waves her hands and implies they were probably all scammers anyway. Researchers point out that 67% of counties already fail to reach everyone under the poverty line and that up to 19% of US households rely on SNAP at some point, but sure, let’s pretend the real scandal is the mythical Bentley-driving single mom buying generic cereal. The policy is simple: invent fraud, amplify it through right-wing media, then use it as cover to take food away from millions of low-income families, children, veterans, and seniors. It’s not "government accountability"; it’s starvation by talking point.
Source: theguardian.com
rubio brings a gun to a famine

Marco Rubio explains to a starving planet that what they really need isn’t food or medicine, it’s a vibrant marketplace and a Goldman Sachs breakout session.
Source: theguardian.com
land of the free* (*offer not valid if you criticized israel)

US immigration officers bravely defending freedom by scrolling your old tweets for insufficient enthusiasm about a foreign government.
The Trump administration has discovered a bold new innovation in immigration policy: if you want to live in the United States, you’d better love not just America, but also whichever foreign government the White House is currently stapling to the First Amendment. Per new internal guidance reported by the New York Times, green card applicants can now be flagged and denied for "anti-American" or "antisemitic" ideology — where "antisemitic" is helpfully redefined to include saying "Stop Israeli Terror in Palestine" or showing an Israeli flag crossed out. Attending a pro-Palestinian protest? Congratulations, you’ve just auditioned for deportation.
Because nothing says "constitutional republic" like immigration officers — excuse me, "homeland defenders" — trawling your Twitter history for signs you failed the loyalty test to both Washington and Jerusalem. Burning a U.S. flag, holding a sign that could be interpreted as calling for overthrow of the government, or just criticizing Israeli war crimes now become potential red marks on your green card application. The Supreme Court has said for 80 years that noncitizens here have First Amendment rights; the Trump team has responded: what if we just pretended they don’t and see who stops us?
This isn’t happening in a vacuum. The administration has already been working hand-in-hand with anti-Palestinian outfits like Canary Mission and Betar to dox and help target students for detention and deportation over campus speech, including Tufts student Rümeysa Öztürk, who was literally grabbed off the street by masked agents for co-writing a pro-Palestine op-ed citing UN reports and human rights groups. Meanwhile, Melania Trump is demanding ABC punish Jimmy Kimmel for a joke, because the First Lady of Christian Nationalism apparently believes the U.S. is a monarchy where late-night hosts answer to the royal household.
So the message is clear: if you’re a noncitizen, your political rights now come with a giant asterisk and a content moderation team in uniform. Today the forbidden opinions are about Israel and flag burning; tomorrow, as the ACLU points out, it can be any dissent the regime finds inconvenient. Free speech in Trump’s America is still technically legal — as long as you never actually exercise it, never post about it, and definitely never try to get permanent residency afterward.
Source: theguardian.com
america’s mayor, trump’s fall guy

Rudy Giuliani flanked by Kash Patel and Howard Lutnick at a 9/11 event, a visual reminder that even national tragedy can be repurposed into background scenery for the Trump Cinematic Universe.
Rudy Giuliani is in “stable but critical condition” in the hospital, and Donald Trump’s first instinct is to use his longtime fixer’s medical crisis as yet another chance to repeat the same debunked lies about the 2020 election. Because when your movement is built on grift and delusion, every event — even a supporter’s life-threatening illness — is just more content.
The BBC politely recalls Giuliani’s 9/11 leadership and honorary knighthood, then has to fast-forward to the part where "America’s Mayor" spent his twilight years touring the country alleging imaginary voter fraud, smearing two Georgia election workers so badly a jury handed them a $148 million defamation verdict. Trump, naturally, responds by declaring Rudy “the Best Mayor in the History of New York City, BY FAR” and then immediately blaming Democrats for "what happened" to him, as though a car accident and a collapsing legal career were all part of some DNC master plot.
So Giuliani lies for Trump, torches his reputation, gets financially vaporized in court, and now becomes a prop in yet another post about the election supposedly being "stolen." Leopards Ate My Face PAC continues to operate at full capacity, even from the ICU.
Source: bbc.com
american public discovers emperor is naked, still somehow in office

Trump stares at a polling chart going straight down, convinced it’s just another "perfect" line the fake news refuses to understand.
Donald Trump has hit a new personal best in the "everyone hates this" department, clocking a 62% disapproval rating as voters gaze upon his Iran war, oil shock, and four-year-high gas prices and decide: actually, this sucks. His approval sits at 37%, which, considering he started a deeply unpopular war that tanked the global economy, is less a political achievement and more a damning indictment of partisan brainworm loyalty.
On the war with Iran, Americans disapprove 66% to 32%, which is what happens when you treat the Middle East like a Call of Duty map and then act surprised when the price at the pump looks like a Silicon Valley seed round. A full 76% disapprove of his handling of the cost of living, but Trump can at least take comfort in the fact that his base still loves him: 85% of Republicans approve, even as the share who strongly approve quietly shrinks, like their 401(k)s.
Trump’s “tough on the border” cosplay is faring only marginally better. Despite his controversial deployment of federal immigration and border agents into cities — a fun little experiment that racked up thousands of detentions and killed two American citizens — he still only manages 45% approval on the border and 40% on immigration overall. So after unleashing a quasi-paramilitary show of force and flirting with full-blown police state aesthetics, he’s still underwater. Fascism really isn’t delivering the polling bump the strongman influencers promised.
Meanwhile, voters are lining up to oppose his greatest hits: ending birthright citizenship, slashing medical research funding, jacking up defense spending, and yanking temporary legal status from migrants fleeing war zones. About seven in ten say he’s not honest or trustworthy, and six in ten say he doesn’t have the mental sharpness to be president — which raises the obvious question: if this many people think he’s a lying, cognitively diminished warmonger who crashes the economy, what does it say about the system that he’s still sitting behind the nuclear codes?
Source: theguardian.com
trump eyes taiwan fire sale to xi’s bargain bin

Donald Trump walks into Beijing with Taiwan’s future in one hand and a Sharpie in the other, ready to see what Xi will give him for it.
This is happening while U.S. intelligence has warned that Xi told the PLA to be ready for an invasion by 2027, China rehearses blockades around Taiwan, and its military is in the middle of top-down purges that usually precede something terrible. Taiwan’s opposition parties are obligingly blocking a $40bn defense budget, flying to Beijing for photo ops with Xi, and getting showered with economic "carrots" while China turns the intimidation dial up to 11. Hong Kong already demonstrated how "one country, two systems" works in practice: you get one country, and your system goes straight into the shredder.
Into this strolls Trump, whose track record on Taiwan is a cocktail of bragging, bluffing, and random policy swings that make allies wonder if their survival depends on what he had for breakfast. Beijing seems convinced the U.S. is in decline and that this administration is too distracted, too munitions-poor, and too chaotic to stand firm. A small rhetorical wobble from Trump in Beijing — a little "maybe Taiwan should work something out" here, a "we’ll see" there — could be weaponized by Xi as proof that unification is inevitable. So yes, the fate of a frontline democracy, global supply chains, and regional security may once again hinge on whether Trump decides he wants a short-term headline that says "HISTORIC DEAL" more than he wants to pretend he defends freedom.
Source: theguardian.com
trump doj shells out felony charges over instagram beach art

James Comey’s criminal co-conspirators, seen here arranged as seashells on a beach, bravely spelling out a felony for the Trump DOJ.
Legal experts across the spectrum — including conservatives who normally cheer when Trump breathes in the general direction of a Democrat — are calling the case a transparent attempt to punish one of Trump’s favorite hate-objects after a previous case against Comey already collapsed. Career DOJ lawyers apparently agreed and quietly noped out of the investigation, leaving prosecution duties to a former New Jersey city councilman and an acting U.S. attorney whose pre-Trump experience with federal prosecution is best described as “theoretical.” Meanwhile, even Republican senator Thom Tillis is out here saying, on camera, that if this is really about a picture in the sand, it’s nonsense.
Blanche, who very much wants to turn "acting" attorney general into "permanent" attorney general, has been racing through Trump’s enemies list like it’s Black Friday at the Banana Republic of America. Adam Schiff calls the Comey case the weakest he’s ever seen and predicts it will be tossed before a jury even gets a whiff of it. So naturally, the Trump DOJ is doubling down — because nothing screams "confident, legitimate government" like trying to send a former FBI director to prison over seashells while pretending there’s a secret mountain of evidence just out of public view. Authoritarian cosplay with beach props, coming soon to a courtroom near you.
Source: theguardian.com