The Trump Presidency Timeline

Lonnie G. Bunch III, the first Black and first actual historian to run the Smithsonian, is stepping down just as the Trump administration is trying to convert the place from the nation’s attic into a taxpayer-funded MAGA scrapbook. The Department of the Interior helpfully sent a threatening letter warning that the National Museum of American History is infected with a "radical institutional ideology" — also known as accurate history — because it mentions awkward little details like Benjamin Franklin enslaving people and Europeans showing up as a colonizing force, not a tour group.

The White House has already rolled out an executive order charmingly titled "Restoring Trust in the Smithsonian Institution," which translates to: museums must stop teaching history and start doing vibes. Under the new rules, the Smithsonian’s job is to produce "patriotic admiration" for "great men" and a "shared American identity" built on praising founders while quietly shoving slavery, genocide, disenfranchisement, and white supremacist terror off behind the gift shop. Fascist regimes have literally written this script before — Hitler complained Weimar history education didn’t generate enough "national enthusiasm" and demanded a cult of heroic leaders. The Trump crew apparently read that part and thought it was a how-to manual.

The same administration screaming about "indoctrination" in K–12 is simultaneously demanding that museums serve up state-approved propaganda and helping restore Confederate traitors to places of honor, because nothing says "patriotic education" like celebrating the guys who killed Americans to preserve slavery. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court keeps whittling down voting rights while the administration works overtime to erase the history of disenfranchisement that might make people notice. As Kimberlé Crenshaw and Jason Stanley point out, this isn’t just bad curriculum design; it’s the classic playbook Du Bois described — use feel-good lies about the past to justify rolling democracy backwards and reinstalling white rule.

So when the country’s flagship museum system is told its job is to make the powerful feel heroic and the oppressed invisible, and its historian-in-chief exits under that cloud, that’s not culture-war fluff. That’s the state seizing control of the story to make sure the next time we slide "back towards slavery," the official tours will say it’s freedom. Those who don’t learn history are doomed to repeat it; those who refuse to teach it accurately are clearly planning the rerun.

James Talarico, the Democrat running for Senate in Texas, showed up in Dallas with an Epstein survivor and 3.5 million pages of DOJ files to ask a very unfair question: why is Ken Paxton, the state’s top law-enforcement officer, ghosting victims of a serial child predator? Survivors reportedly asked to meet with Paxton about using his office to help pursue justice; Paxton’s response was to demonstrate his famous “law and order” brand by doing absolutely nothing and hoping everyone gets distracted by the Trump convention across town.

The exhibit of Epstein files, which critics say both doxxes some victims and still manages to hide key material, has become a backdrop for Democrats pointing out the obvious: when allegations reach rich, connected men like Donald Trump and their political ecosystem, the justice system suddenly develops a chronic fear of stairs. Survivor Sharlene Rochard politely demanded that investigators follow the evidence all the way to powerful people, Republican or Democrat — which in MAGA country is tantamount to suggesting witchcraft.

While Talarico and others talked about accountability for sexual abuse, Trump was inside promising Americans a totally-not-a-bribe $5,000 “dividend” if Republicans win Congress, adding one more imaginary payout to the growing pile of fantasy checks he’s written on the full faith and credit of his ego. Democrats like Beto O’Rourke and Robert Garcia called it what it is — a desperate gimmick from a “known liar” whose previous tariff, Doge, and even Air Force One “dividends” all vanished on contact with reality. Meanwhile, Ken Paxton continues to demonstrate that in Trump’s America, justice isn’t blind — it just looks away when the predator has the right friends.

Trump has apparently moved on from dismantling democratic norms to conquering cartography. After demanding that Lake Ontario be renamed “Lake America”, the White House watched Apple Maps and Google Maps quietly fall in line, helpfully rewriting reality so Dear Leader’s trade-war tantrum can be immortalized in your GPS. Who needs treaties when you have push notifications?

Enter Trey Parker and Matt Stone, who responded by renaming their own show from “South Park” to “South America” in honor of Apple and Google’s courageous decision to roll over for a guy who thinks geography is a branding opportunity. They even thanked their parent company, now dubbed “a Skydance Capitulation,” because when your media conglomerate is Trump-approved, you might as well lean into the humiliation.

Corporate America and the executive branch are now collaborating on fanfic maps while an animated series about foul-mouthed fourth graders is the one pointing out how deranged this is. When the most stable institution in the country is the show where the president impregnates Satan, you might want to check on your republic.

The Trump administration has looked at the Constitution’s command to count the “whole number of persons in each state” and apparently decided: what if we just… didn’t? The new proposal for the 2030 census would exclude noncitizens without green cards from the numbers used to apportion House seats and Electoral College votes, because if you can’t win over voters, you can always surgically delete them from reality. It’s a direct collision with the 14th Amendment masquerading as “data policy.”

They’re not stopping at erasing immigrants. Trump officials also want to stop asking about race and ethnicity on the census for the first time since 1790, neatly crippling enforcement of the Voting Rights Act and other anti-discrimination laws. If you don’t collect data on racial disparities, then—presto—no racial discrimination to see here. As a bonus, they’re trying to block any census questions that could produce meaningful LGBTQ+ statistics, including sexual orientation, so civil-rights protections for queer people can be undermined with the same plausible-deniability spreadsheet magic.

So the plan is: cook the apportionment numbers by cutting out millions of people the Constitution says must be counted, blindfold the government on race, and make LGBTQ+ Americans statistically invisible, all while funneling power and money toward the whiter, redder parts of the map. It’s not subtle. It’s not legal. It’s not democracy. It’s just the Trump White House grabbing the core machinery of representation and trying to turn the census into a long-form gerrymander.

The Republican Party has decided that if Trump isn’t technically on the ballot, they’ll just pretend he is and call it strategy. Hence “Trumpapalooza,” a made-up midterm convention in Dallas where the president headlines both nights of an event that traditionally does not exist, because normal parties don’t need to create emergency ego-festivals to drag their base to the polls.

Trump is openly telling voters to imagine his name on the ballot, while a Trump-aligned dark money group, Securing American Greatness, is airing midterm ads that barely acknowledge other Republicans exist, but do feature generous helpings of slow-motion Dear Leader footage. Convention organizers swear this is about “lowering the cost of living” and “securing the border,” but the speaker list is basically Trump, Vance, Ken Paxton, and a smattering of loyalists, while many Republicans in actual competitive races are quietly staying home to do the unglamorous work of campaigning for themselves.

So as Democrats head into the midterms more energized, the GOP’s grand plan is to stage a two-night personality cult telethon in Texas and hope voters mistake it for governance. It’s less a political party and more a touring production of The Trump Show: Midterm Edition, with the rest of the ticket reduced to background extras praying they don’t get booed off their own ballot lines.

John E Sununu, who once wrote an op-ed calling Donald Trump a "loser" and backed Nikki Haley, has now emerged as Trump’s handpicked Senate candidate in New Hampshire. Apparently, all is forgiven as long as you’re willing to help keep the upper chamber safe for tariffs, wars without plans, and ever-expanding executive power. Principles are for suckers; endorsements are for people who know which way the authoritarian wind is blowing.

On the trail, Sununu is doing the delicate "I’m totally independent from the guy who just endorsed me" dance: criticizing Trump’s tariffs, tut-tutting about executive overreach, and calling the Iran war a "tactical mistake" because they didn’t properly think through the Strait of Hormuz. Bold stance: not that launching a war was wrong, just that it wasn’t project-managed correctly. Meanwhile, Trump’s approval in the state is at 38%, so everyone’s pretending this is about "issues" and not about whether the Senate will keep rolling out the red carpet for presidential power grabs.

The RNC dutifully insists Republicans are "laser-focused" on affordability and security, which is an interesting way to describe controlling a legislature in a state where they haven’t actually won a Senate race since 2010. Now Sununu faces Democrat Chris Pappas in a race Democrats basically have to win if they’d like even a theoretical chance of checking Trump’s next round of constitutional experiments. New Hampshire may be a "sleeper risk" for Democrats, but for Trump it’s just another test of how many former critics he can convert into reliable votes for more presidential impunity.

The Trump administration has decided that if you’re going to wage a high-stakes conflict in the Gulf while juggling global commitments, you might as well also blow up your own chain of command for fun. Enter Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, the Fox News green-room escapee now running the Pentagon like it’s a primetime segment about “woke generals” ruining America’s God-given right to blow things up.

Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll – the guy actually trying to modernise the force with drones and lessons from Ukraine – just resigned after repeatedly clashing with Hegseth, who responded to concerns about readiness by firing the people raising them. Driscoll joins a long line of top Army, Navy and Air Force leaders who’ve been removed or sidelined, as Hegseth “un-wokes” the military by tearing up diversity programmes, railing against “fat generals”, and scrapping “stupid” rules of engagement that mildly inconvenienced war crimes.

While Trump tries to wrest control of the Strait of Hormuz from Iran with a force increasingly cobbled together from whoever hasn’t been purged yet, retired officers warn that Hegseth has “hollowed out” leadership at the exact moment the U.S. probably needs a functioning military. One critic even compares the top-brass shake-up to Xi Jinping-style political purges – except Beijing at least pretends it’s about anti-corruption, not an emotional support culture war for a president who gets his defence policy from cable news.

Donald Trump, a man who has never met a video edit he couldn’t morally bankrupt, shared a deceptively cut clip of King Charles on Truth Social that makes it look like Charles shrugs and strolls away from a fainting worker. The full footage – the part that accidentally contains reality – shows Charles reaching out to the man and staying nearby while he gets medical attention. Naturally, that part hit the cutting-room floor, because it didn’t fit the narrative of "only Trump cares about people, roll the hero montage."

The propaganda reel then pivots into a greatest-hits compilation of Trump hugging veterans, honoring fallen troops, and shaking hands with law enforcement, like a campaign ad directed by a guy who just discovered iMovie. It’s pure authoritarian fan fiction: world leaders are callous monsters, while Trump is the lone empath wandering through Normandy. Buckingham Palace declined to comment, the White House also said nothing, and the president of the United States just kept pumping out edited reality on his personal social network like state TV with worse graphics.

This is not some harmless boomer meme; it’s the same old strongman toolkit: distort video, erase context, and flood the zone with glossy lies that recast Trump as the only moral authority on the planet. When the commander-in-chief is basically running a low-budget psy-op from his phone, you don’t have an information ecosystem, you have a cult newsletter with nuclear codes.

The lawyer for Lindsay Clancy — the Massachusetts woman accused of killing her three children — went on national TV to ask Donald Trump for a pardon, which is a bold move given that the president has zero constitutional authority over state convictions. But who can blame him for the confusion? In the Trump era, the law is less a framework and more a suggestion, like a salad section on a Cheesecake Factory menu.

This isn’t happening in a vacuum. The article notes that Colorado governor Jared Polis already “succumbed” to pressure from Trump and his cultists and cut loose Tina Peters, a convicted state-level election conspiracy enthusiast. So now we’ve reached the stage where defense attorneys openly treat Trump as a kind of roaming national parole board, hovering over state courts and juries like an orange deus ex machina. Separation of powers? Federalism? That’s adorable. We now do criminal justice by presidential mood ring on cable TV.

The president, apparently bored with losing a war in Iran and watching gas prices spike, has moved on to the truly pressing work of American governance: trying to rename New Mexico to “New America” on social media. Donald Trump posted AI-generated images of himself slapping a "New America" sticker over a "Welcome to New Mexico" sign while doing the little rally dance that screams "stable genius" and not "grandpa found the filter button." He justified it by calling New Mexico "one of the great vote cheating states of all time" and declaring that "NEW AMERICA" is more "prestigious" and "beautiful."

This is not an isolated brainwave. It’s the latest episode in Trump’s cartographic fan fiction saga, where the guy who couldn’t find Kansas on a map has already signed executive orders renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the "Gulf of America" and Lake Ontario to "Lake America" as part of his trade war cosplay with Canada. He also re-renamed Denali back to "Mount McKinley," infuriating Alaskans, including Republicans, because nothing says "respect for local sovereignty" like a Florida man in Washington deciding what Indigenous Alaska should call its tallest mountain.

New Mexico Democrats, who have apparently read their own constitution, reminded him that a president can’t just Sharpie a state’s name change into existence. Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham noted that New Mexico’s name predates the United States and pointed out that while the White House is "coloring on maps," the state is busy doing quaint socialist things like free childcare and college. Deb Haaland, running to replace her, politely translated Trump’s stunt as "my opponent is running for New America, I’m running for New Mexico," while Sen. Ben Ray Luján went with the more efficient Spanish: sinvergüenza y corrupto. Representative Melanie Stansbury dispensed with diplomacy altogether and went full "Oh hell no."

Constitutionally, of course, New Mexico keeps its name unless its own voters change their state constitution. Trump can only order federal agencies to use his made-up labels in their databases, turning official U.S. records into a kind of state-sponsored fan wiki for his culture-war fantasies. So no, he can’t erase "Mexico" from the map with a Truth Social post — but he’s doing his best to condition his base to see anything with Spanish in it as not quite American, while his administration quietly rewrites reality in federal paperwork. The maps may be fake, but the authoritarian impulse to literally rename the world to fit his grievances is very, very real.