The Trump Presidency Timeline

CBS just gave a masterclass in how to be a media giant with the spine of a overcooked noodle. After Stephen Colbert taped an interview with Texas Democrat James Talarico, the network’s lawyers allegedly swooped in to say it couldn’t air on broadcast because it might trigger FCC equal-time rules. Then they reportedly told Colbert he couldn’t even talk about the decision on air. The interview ended up on YouTube, safely outside the FCC’s reach, because nothing screams "land of the free" like having to flee to a Google platform to escape your own government’s speech cops.

FCC commissioner Anna Gomez, the lone Democrat on a Trump-stacked commission, politely translated this mess for the public: this looks like “corporate capitulation” to an administration running a broader campaign to censor and control speech. She also reminded everyone that the FCC has no lawful authority to pressure broadcasters for political purposes, which is adorable given that the whole point of Trump-world is to blur the line between "lawful authority" and "things we can get away with if executives are scared enough." CBS, of course, insists it merely offered "legal guidance"—the corporate equivalent of saying you weren’t pushed, you just tripped over all that regulatory intimidation.

As a bonus subplot in the war on inconvenient speech, Trump is still pursuing his $10bn defamation suit against the BBC over a Panorama program, with a Florida judge now setting a 2027 trial date. So on one side, you’ve got a president weaponizing libel law to punish journalism; on the other, a major network preemptively muzzling its own star host over a Senate candidate interview. Call it the new First Amendment: you’re free to say whatever you want, as long as it doesn’t upset the guy who controls the regulators and the people who own the studios.

Donald Trump has discovered a bold new frontier for US sanctions: not oligarchs, not terrorists, not cartel bosses – but international judges whose job is to prosecute war crimes and genocide. ICC judge Kimberly Prost woke up to find herself lumped in with terrorists on a US sanctions list, her credit cards dead, her Amazon and Google accounts cancelled, and her day-to-day life detonated because the court dared to investigate alleged crimes by the US and its favorite client state, Israel. Nothing says "confident innocent superpower" like financially kneecapping the people trying to enforce the laws of war.

This isn’t symbolic chest-thumping; it’s a coordinated attempt to turn the global financial system into Trump’s personal vengeance machine. Eleven ICC officials – including the chief prosecutor and eight judges – are now sanctioned, with US companies facing fines or even prison if they so much as sell them a plane ticket or let them use a cloud service. Judges like Peru’s Luz del Carmen Ibáñez Carranza are now being targeted by both Russia and the United States for the same crime: participating in a court that issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin and is willing to look at what US troops and allies have done. Seventy-nine countries have already condemned the sanctions as an attack on the international rule of law, which in Trump’s America is basically a five-star Yelp review.

The message from Washington is exquisitely clear: if you investigate us, we will try to digitally erase your life. Book an Uber? Denied. Reserve a hotel? Good luck. Access basic online tools? Hope you printed everything out in 1998. By weaponizing sanctions against independent judges, the administration isn’t just putting them on a terror-style list – it’s broadcasting that any institution that tries to hold powerful states accountable will be treated like Al-Qaida. The Hague is now learning what everyone from whistleblowers to election officials already knows: in Trump’s America, the real crime is doing your job.

The Trump administration’s latest innovation in law enforcement: trial-by-missile. US forces just hit three more “alleged” drug-smuggling boats, killing 11 people and bringing the total death toll from these boat strikes to 145 since September. The only thing we know for sure is that the Pentagon posted cool-looking videos to Instagram, because nothing says sober, lawful use of lethal force like social media highlight reels with zero verifiable evidence of who was on the receiving end.

US Southern Command insists intelligence confirmed they were narco-traffickers, which is convenient, because none of the people they killed will be appearing in court to dispute that. Legal experts are pointing out that these look a lot like extrajudicial executions—no imminent threat, no due process, just the president’s say-so that they’re “narco-terrorists” and suddenly the US military has an "apparently unlimited license to kill" at sea. So the constitutional standard is now: if Trump can pronounce it, he can bomb it.

This little murder-cruise program is happening alongside Trump’s commando grab of Nicolás Maduro—snatched in Caracas and hauled off to New York for a narco-terror show trial—while a dozen US warships loitered off Venezuela under the banner of stopping drugs and illegal oil. Now some of those ships are being shipped off toward Iran for the next episode of "Commander-in-Chief Plays Risk With Other People’s Lives." The administration keeps shouting "narco-terrorism"; the evidence of actual trafficking rings remains mostly theoretical, but the body count is extremely real.

Trump’s latest democracy-remodeling project, the so-called SAVE America Act, now has 50 Republican senators on board, which is impressive for a bill whose central innovation is: make it way harder for millions of actual citizens to vote so Trump feels better about his election losses. The bill would force every state to demand proof of citizenship to register and photo ID to vote — including for mail ballots — even though noncitizen voting in federal elections is already illegal and vanishingly rare. The Brennan Center estimates it would knock more than 20 million eligible Americans, disproportionately poor and nonwhite, off the playing field. Very bold strategy: if you can’t win over the electorate, just shrink it.

Sen. Mike Lee is treating this as the last stand of the republic, declaring that passing the bill will "save" it and failing will mean we "roll the dice" — which is a poetic way of saying he doesn’t trust Americans to vote without a thick layer of bureaucratic hurdles. Susan Collins, after her ritual period of concern, signed on as the 50th GOP vote once the bill was tweaked so some people might, eventually, maybe, be allowed to register if they can navigate the paperwork maze. She then solemnly defended the filibuster as a sacred minority right — which is doing a lot of work here, given that Democrats are using that same tool to stop a federal voter-suppression package from being rammed through by a bare partisan majority.

Meanwhile, Republicans like Lisa Murkowski and Mitch McConnell are pretending to be shocked, simply shocked, that a party that’s been screaming about "election fraud" for years is now pushing a national voter ID and proof-of-citizenship regime from Washington. Murkowski calls it the kind of "one-size-fits-all mandate" Republicans usually complain about, and McConnell is quietly clutching his states’-rights pearls. But the broader project is obvious: Trump and JD Vance want to nationalize voting rules in a way the old Voting Rights Act never dreamed of — only this time the federal government swoops in to restrict the franchise instead of protecting it.

The only thing standing between this and Trump’s desk is the 60-vote filibuster rule, which Trump wants scrapped so he can sign his very own Jim Crow reboot — or as Chuck Schumer more politely calls it, "Jim Crow 2.0." So now we have the spectacle of Mike Lee fantasizing about a "talking filibuster" to exhaust Democrats into surrender, John Thune warning that would take a lot of work (so that’s out), and an 83% poll number on generic "photo ID" being waved around to justify a bill that goes far beyond that into paperwork purgatory. The message from the MAGA wing is crystal clear: if you’re poor, can’t easily access a birth certificate or passport, or just don’t have time to navigate a federal obstacle course to exercise your rights — this republic is not for you.

While the country mourns Rev Jesse Jackson – a man who spent his life trying to make America less racist and less violent – Trump’s immigration goon squad is out in Minneapolis allegedly treating city streets like a live-fire training exercise. Customs and Border Protection officers have shot and killed three people in about two weeks, including Alex Pretti, and now the FBI has decided that the public’s right to know is classified. Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension politely asked for evidence, and the feds responded with the transparency of a brick wall.

Instead of cooperating with state investigators, the FBI has formally told Minnesota that information and evidence about the Pretti shooting will not be shared. So we’ve arrived at the stage where Trump’s federal enforcers kill people in a U.S. city and then tell local authorities: you don’t get to see what we did, just trust the same system that keeps clearing itself. Governor Tim Walz summed it up: “Trump’s left hand cannot investigate his right hand” – though given this administration’s record, it’s less left vs right and more trigger finger vs everyone else.

All of this is happening under the nostalgic gaze of an America that once produced leaders like Jesse Jackson, who literally risked his life confronting state violence, while today’s White House treats unaccountable armed agents as a campaign accessory. The contrast is almost poetic: a civil rights icon dies at 84, and the federal government honors his legacy by making sure no one can even investigate why people keep getting shot by immigration cops in the middle of Minneapolis. Truly, the dream lives on – just heavily redacted.

Donald Trump has officially yanked the U.S. out of the World Health Organization for the second time, because nothing says America First like sabotaging the very global health system your own government quietly keeps using. Publicly, Trump is ranting Farage-style about a tyrannical WHO that supposedly forced lockdowns and stole everyone’s freedoms; privately, his team is still on the phone with Geneva asking for disease intel like a teenager who "ran away from home" but keeps coming back to do laundry.

The supposed big scandal is that the WHO isn’t politically obedient enough. It refused to launder MAGA talking points about vaccines causing autism, paracetamol in pregnancy causing autism, and climate change being fake, and it also pushed back on pressure from Israel over Gaza and from Russia over Ukraine. So the Trump response is to punish the organization the U.S. literally helped build, after decades of bipartisan American leadership on smallpox, polio, HIV/Aids, Ebola, and child mortality. Now, U.S. academics are too scared to talk on the record about any of this because their funding and jobs are on the line. Freedom!

The punchline: the WHO has already reformed its financing and locked in about 85% of its budget for 2026–27, while the U.S. creates a leadership vacuum that the EU, China, and Russia are all rushing to fill. Trump gets his domestic propaganda win, Farage gets a talking point, and the rest of the world gets to watch the former global health leader cosplay as a sovereign loner while still sneaking back to the multilateral table for crucial data. Publicly screaming "we don’t need you" while privately begging for help is less a strategy than a cry for attention, but it does perfectly summarize Trump’s foreign policy.

The president who bankrupted casinos is now lecturing New York and New Jersey about fiscal responsibility, announcing that the federal government won’t pay a single dollar of cost overruns for the long-delayed Gateway tunnel project. This comes just days after a federal judge had to step in and block his administration from withholding money for the $16 billion tunnel in the first place. Normal presidents use infrastructure to create jobs and modernize transit; Donald Trump uses it the way he uses everything else: as leverage for personal branding and revenge.

NBC News previously reported that Trump’s team told Chuck Schumer that maybe, just maybe, the money could flow if Penn Station in New York and Dulles Airport in Virginia were renamed after Trump. Today, Trump insists the idea was totally not his, merely something floated by “certain politicians and construction union heads,” because when you think union guys, you definitely think: let’s name the train station after the guy who tried to kill our pensions. The White House line is now that the tunnel could be “financially catastrophic” — unlike, say, holding a multi-state transportation network hostage to the president’s fragile ego.

The petty doesn’t stop at naming rights. Last fall, budget director and professional culture warrior Russell Vought proudly froze funding for the project, claiming the money might be tainted by “unconstitutional DEI principles.” On the same day, he slashed billions more from infrastructure in states that Kamala Harris carried in 2024, because nothing says “serious stewardship of taxpayer dollars” like turning the federal budget into a loyalty rewards program. Infrastructure in blue states is being treated as a luxury item, subject to cancellation whenever Trump needs a new vendetta or a fresh surface to slap his name on.

The National Institutes of Health — you know, the place that helped fund HIV treatments, Covid vaccines, and cancer drugs — is now being run like a mid-level Wendy’s with a 200% turnover rate. Of NIH’s 27 institutes and centers, 16 don’t have permanent directors. That’s not a staffing issue; that’s a controlled demolition. Trump’s second-term health czar Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has discovered that if courts and Congress block your budget cuts, you can just quietly remove the people in charge and replace them later with whoever thinks vaccine inserts are the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Former NIAID director Jeanne Marrazzo — Fauci’s successor — is out after having the gall to defend vaccines and object to canceling NIH research. She was put on leave and then fired, and is now suing NIH and HHS for illegal retaliation, while NIAID just sits there without a real director. This follows Kennedy firing CDC Director Susan Monarez after 29 days for not rubber-stamping his vaccine “revisions,” then gutting childhood vaccine recommendations and rewriting the CDC’s autism page to flirt with anti-vax mythology. The message to scientists is clear: shut up, nod along, and don’t say ‘evidence’ too loudly.

HHS, meanwhile, insists it’s all about “gold-standard science” and “strengthening scientific rigor,” which is a bold statement from an operation that can’t keep more than half of NIH’s top jobs filled and keeps purging anyone who remembers what a clinical trial is. With courts blocking the 40% budget cut and Congress refusing to let Trump and Kennedy chainsaw NIH into eight obedient fiefdoms, the backup plan is a leadership vacuum that can be quietly refilled with loyalists. It’s not exactly subtle: starve the expertise, then claim you’re just ‘reforming’ a broken system.

So the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research is now a parking lot for acting directors, whistleblowers, and people waiting to be fired for saying vaccines work. America’s chronic diseases are still here, but at least the administration is finally treating its real long Covid: a lingering infection of independent science.