The Trump Presidency Timeline

Anti-Trump former Republicans are learning a hard lesson in 2026: you can’t spend a career helping light the house on fire and then be shocked when the firefighters don’t hand you the hose and a leadership title. Geoff Duncan, who only discovered Trump was a problem after the attempted coup, just got absolutely steamrolled in Georgia’s Democratic primary, finishing a distant fourth behind Keisha Lance Bottoms. In Pennsylvania, Ryan Crosswell — who quit DOJ when he was told to drop a corruption case against Eric Adams, i.e., when the authoritarianism got personally offensive — lost by 20 points to a union guy backed by actual Democrats who’ve been here longer than five minutes.

The party’s new vibe is: thanks for finally admitting the sky is blue, but we remember who helped build the climate machine. Strategists openly say the Liz Cheney/Kamala Harris unity tour was a one-time experiment in "let the arsonists manage the rebuild" and that nobody’s eager to repeat it. George Conway is now trying to complete his evolution from Federalist Society lawyer to Manhattan resistance hero and is currently polling… fourth. Apparently "I was very, very wrong for 30 years" is not the closing argument Democratic primary voters were craving.

Meanwhile, Olivia Troye — who worked for the RNC, the Bush administration, and Mike Pence before deciding, belatedly, that this might all be bad — briefly ran for Congress in Virginia as "a proud Democrat" before the state Supreme Court nuked the new map. She warns Democrats not to lump her in with other ex-Republicans, because they all disagree on lots of things. That’s the problem in a nutshell: the people who nurtured the authoritarian GOP for decades now want custom onboarding packages into the party they spent their careers undermining. Voters, it turns out, are less excited about that than MSNBC bookers and Never Trump PACs.

The SAVE America Act — Trump’s dream of turning voter registration into a paperwork obstacle course — just face-planted in the Senate after months of Republicans trying to sneak it through while primaries are already underway. The bill would have required every voter to cough up a passport, birth certificate, or similar proof of citizenship, despite years of research showing noncitizen voting exists at approximately the same frequency as honest statements from Trump: microscopic.

Georgetown’s Steve Vladeck politely translated the whole thing as, "the cure is way worse than the nonexistent disease," which is law-professor for "this is a giant voter-suppression scam." Trump, naturally, branded it a "country-saving" miracle and vowed he wouldn’t sign any other legislation until Congress passed it, because nothing says limited government like holding the entire legislative process hostage until you can make it harder for millions of Americans to vote.

Some Republicans, ever loyal to the guy who lost and won’t shut up about it, floated nuking or gaming the filibuster to ram this through — you know, the same filibuster they previously worshipped as a sacred constitutional relic when Democrats wanted to protect voting rights. But Senate Majority Leader John Thune eventually admitted they just didn’t have the votes. Turns out even in Trump’s America, there’s a limit to how many senators are willing to go on record as co-signing a national voter ID poll tax in the middle of an election year.

Trump has decided that the nation’s top spy job is basically a temp gig for whichever loyalist he wants to hand a badge and a conspiracy board to this week. Enter Bill Pulte, whose main qualifications for acting Director of National Intelligence appear to be (1) Trump likes him and (2) he used his perch at the Federal Housing Finance Agency to harass Trump’s perceived enemies. National security experience? Intelligence background? Statutory eligibility requirements? Adorable that you’re still asking.

The pushback from Republicans is so strong you’d almost think they remember what laws are. Thom Tillis grilled Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent about whether he really threatened to punch Pulte, only for Bessent to proudly upgrade it to "kick his ass" on the record — and Tillis responded with a hearty "Good" before announcing he’d never vote to confirm Pulte. Marco Rubio, currently playing Secretary of State in this collapsing democracy LARP, politely noted he’d never heard of Pulte in any intelligence context, which is a Washington way of saying "this guy shouldn’t be anywhere near the nuclear codes." Even Mitch McConnell briefly woke from his long nap to remind everyone that the DNI job actually has legal experience requirements, and that Pulte does not meet them.

Trump’s response to all this? No worries, it’s just an "acting" role, he says — he doesn’t think Pulte would even want it permanently. Meanwhile he’s openly fantasizing that Pulte will "find out some things about the rigged elections" while running the intelligence community, casually advertising that the point of the appointment is to turn U.S. spy agencies into his personal election-fraud fan fiction bureau. The last DNI, Tulsi Gabbard, already test-drove this model by showing up at an FBI raid on a Georgia elections hub at Trump’s request, despite the minor detail that the DNI is banned from domestic law enforcement. She got blowback; he learned nothing.

So the pattern continues: treat statutory limits as suggestions, use "acting" titles as a cheat code around Senate confirmation, and hand the keys to the intelligence community to whichever sycophant is willing to weaponize it for Trump’s grievances. The only thing truly "acting" here is the pretense that any of this resembles a functioning rule-of-law government.

Donald Trump, America’s leading expert in projecting his own emotions onto other people, informed CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that she had “hatred in her eyes” after she committed the unforgivable journalistic crime of asking him hard questions. The NPR piece notes what anyone with a functioning memory already knows: when Trump goes after the press, he especially goes after women reporters, reserving his most personal, sneering attacks for the people who don’t smile and nod through his nonsense.

This isn’t just a guy having a bad day at a press conference; it’s a years-long pattern of trying to discredit the free press by turning female journalists into villains, heckling targets, and props for his base. Rather than answer questions, he critiques tone, demeanor, and alleged “hatred,” because it’s easier to call a woman “nasty” than explain why your administration is a rolling constitutional tire fire. Authoritarians go after the press; insecure authoritarians go after women in the press.

So the White House press area remains what it’s been for years: a stage where Trump acts out his fragile masculinity in front of cameras, and every woman with a press badge becomes fair game for public humiliation. The message to the rest of the media is clear—challenge him and you’ll be smeared; stay quiet and you might be allowed to keep your seat. Truly, a golden age for the First Amendment.

NPR's Steve Inskeep sits down with Jonah Goldberg to ponder the eternal question of the Trump era: do the president's many controversies interfere with his legislative agenda, or are they just the agenda dressed up in a clown wig? Rather than dwell on the whole "undermining democracy, obstructing oversight, and governing via tantrum" thing, the conversation politely frames it as a scheduling issue, like the problem is time management and not the guy taking a chainsaw to the rule of law.

So we get the usual Beltway translation: corruption becomes "controversy," constitutional demolition becomes "distraction," and the central concern is whether Trump can still push bills through while setting everything on fire. The building is collapsing, but the panel would like to know if it might delay the infrastructure vote.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent shuffled up to the House Ways and Means Committee to defend Trump’s fiscal 2027 budget, where the big, bold economic vision is: slash Treasury’s domestic programs by 12 percent while inflation and affordability concerns are spiking during an Iran war. Because when a conflict is driving up prices, what you really want is fewer tools, less capacity, and a weaker department in charge of the country’s finances. Very "tighten your belts, peasants, the donors are thirsty" energy.

Lawmakers also revisited Bessent’s adorable past beef with Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte — a man Trump just decided should be acting Director of National Intelligence, because who better to oversee America’s spy agencies than a housing guy with Twitter drama and a direct line to the president’s ego. The appointment has sparked backlash from people who still vaguely remember the concept of "qualifications," but the White House appears focused on its real priority: consolidating power in loyalists while pretending austerity is fiscal responsibility, not just another way to make ordinary people pay for Trump’s forever-war cosplay.

America’s most famous ticking stopwatch just got tossed in the trash because Scott Pelley made the mistake of treating CBS like it was still a news organization and not a subsidiary of the Trump 2028 Brand Management Committee. After three decades at the network and years as the public face of 60 Minutes, Pelley told management what everyone in the building already knew: Bari Weiss, handpicked by tech heir and Trump-praised owner David Ellison, is “murdering 60 Minutes” by demanding falsehoods and partisan spin in politically sensitive stories. Management responded to this bold act of honesty the way any healthy democracy-adjacent media conglomerate would: they fired him “for cause.”

This slow-motion execution of a storied newsroom didn’t start with Pelley. Weiss — whose broadcast experience could fit on a Post-it — has been busy purging respected reporters, yanking an investigation into brutal conditions at an El Salvador prison holding Venezuelans deported by the Trump administration (while CBS’s parent company had business before that same administration), and generally turning the show rightward until Donald Trump started praising the new ownership. When you’re getting rave reviews from the guy whose allies benefit from your corporate censorship, you’re not doing journalism; you’re running PR.

The staff literally stood up and applauded when Pelley called out Weiss and the new executive producer to their faces, which tells you how bad it’s gotten inside the building. Leadership’s takeaway from that moment of collective conscience was not “maybe we’re destroying an institution,” but “time to make an example of the guy with integrity.” So Pelley walks out as a symbol of what journalism used to be, while CBS News settles comfortably into its new role as a glossy, ad-supported reminder that when corporations and presidents need protection, truth is always the first budget cut.