The Trump Presidency Timeline

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?