The Trump Presidency Timeline

The Republican Congress celebrated Trump’s second term by doing what it does best: shoveling money to the rich, militarizing everything that moves, and rewriting the rules to make sure nobody can stop them next time. Trump’s “big, beautiful” tax bill is now permanent, because nothing says fiscal responsibility like locking in a $4.5 trillion tax cut that disproportionately benefits the highest earners while everyone else gets the patriotic honor of paying for it later.

But wait, there’s more: the bill rockets the Pentagon over the $1 trillion mark and tosses in $170 billion to supercharge ICE raids and mass deportations, turning immigration policy into a federally funded terror campaign. To help pay for this, they took a chainsaw to Medicaid and clean energy funding—because if there’s one thing Republicans hate more than poor people getting health care, it’s the planet not being on fire.

Meanwhile, Congress went on a deregulation bender, using the Congressional Review Act like a legislative wood chipper to shred 22 Biden-era rules on everything from consumer protection to cybersecurity. Then Senate Republicans decided minority rights were cute but inconvenient, nuking rules to ram through Trump nominees in giant en-bloc batches and creatively redefining what 51 votes can do. In other words, they’re not just passing laws—they’re rebuilding the system so the next round of looting and authoritarian cosplay is even easier.

Donald Trump, standing next to Benjamin Netanyahu like it’s an Axis of Impunity reunion tour, used a press conference to call Fed chair Jerome Powell a “fool” and muse about firing him and suing him for “gross incompetence” – because nothing says independent central bank like the president threatening to can the guy who won’t juice the economy hard enough for your re‑election party. He again lied about the cost of the Federal Reserve’s building renovation, nearly doubling the real $2.5bn figure to $4.1bn, then declared it “the highest price in the history of construction,” which is an interesting take from a man whose own businesses have specialized in overbilling, underdelivering, and occasionally not existing.

Trump also forgot to mention the tiny detail that he was the one who first appointed Powell in 2018, instead blaming Biden for reappointing “a fool” – a convenient bout of amnesia from the self-proclaimed hiring genius whose administration was basically a revolving door of future defendants. He then contrasted the Fed project with his own “magnificent, big, beautiful ballroom” replacing the demolished East Wing, bragging that it’s “under budget and ahead of schedule” before immediately admitting the cost has jumped from $200m to $400m. In other words: Powell is incompetent because his numbers are real; Trump is a visionary because his numbers are made up on the fly.

Having now decided the new ballroom will host the inauguration, Trump blamed the doubled price on “all bullet-proof glass” and a “drone-free roof,” as if the Fed’s problem is not inflation but insufficient gold plating. Meanwhile, he keeps dangling the idea that he “might still” fire Powell and is openly salivating over picking the next Fed chair in January – presumably someone willing to run monetary policy off a Truth Social poll. But sure, tell us more about how the real threat to democracy is technocrats quietly trying to keep the economy from turning into a meme stock.

US media in the Trump era is apparently a group project between angry billionaires and a vengeful president, and somehow the only ones not invited are readers and the truth. While Murdochs, Bezos, Soon‑Shiong, and the very Trump‑friendly Ellison clan play Monopoly with newsrooms, they helpfully “guide” coverage so it aligns with their pet projects, personal feuds, and investment portfolios. Because nothing says “independent press” like your boss’s hobbyhorse turning into the editorial line.

On the other side, Trump is running his own quality-control department, where “quality” means “does it flatter me.” He’s using frivolous defamation suits and weaponized regulatory agencies to squeeze outlets that offend his delicate feelings: a giant settlement out of CBS over a banal Kamala Harris edit, a lawsuit against the New York Times for being mean in print, and an FCC chair threatening ABC’s broadcast license over a comedian’s joke. In other words, it’s not censorship if you just bankrupt or de-license everyone who laughs at you.

Under pressure from both their billionaire owners and Trump’s retribution machine, big outlets are dialing everything down to legally vetted mush—soft-pedaled coverage, hedged language, and opinion sections that read like hostage notes to shareholders and the White House. The result: worse journalism at the exact moment the country needs better. But don’t worry, The Guardian would like you to know that they don’t have a billionaire owner, they’re not pulling punches, and they answer to readers instead of oligarchs or the guy threatening broadcast licenses. Also, please click the big donate button to help fund this rare, non-captured corner of the press.

The Trump administration has discovered a bold new frontier in free speech: using the State Department to try to deport people who expose hate, lies, and extremism online. Imran Ahmed, head of the Center for Countering Digital Hate and a lawful DC resident with an American wife and infant daughter, was suddenly informed he faces removal from the US. His crime? Daring to hold social media and AI companies accountable, which so enraged Elon Musk that X tried—and failed—to sue his group, then apparently found a friendlier venue in Trump’s deportation machine.

Ahmed is one of five Europeans, including former EU commissioner Thierry Breton, slapped with visa bans for allegedly leading “organised efforts to coerce American platforms to censor…American viewpoints.” In other words: they pushed platforms to deal with hate speech, disinformation, and extremist content, so Trump’s people labeled that “censorship” and tried to throw them out of the country. A State Department official even bragged on X that if you “spend your career fomenting censorship of American speech, you’re unwelcome on American soil” — because nothing says robust marketplace of ideas like the government exiling critics at the request of billionaires.

A federal judge has temporarily blocked Ahmed’s detention or removal, but he spent Christmas separated from his family because, as he notes, others whose green cards were yanked in recent months have been arrested and shipped hundreds or thousands of miles away from their support networks. Meanwhile he calmly points out that this isn’t about partisan politics but about tech companies with “sociopathic greed” using their money and connections to corrupt the system so they can never be held accountable. Trump gets to cosplay as the defender of “American viewpoints,” Musk gets fewer pesky reports about rising racism and extremism on X, and anyone who documents the damage done by social media and AI learns that in Trump’s America, the algorithm doesn’t just shadowban you—it calls ICE.

Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff and newly christened "Susie Trump" (because nothing says healthy democracy like your top White House aide being absorbed into the family brand), has apparently decided that now is the perfect time to start whispering that the president has "an alcoholic’s personality" and a vindictive streak a mile wide. In a marathon 9,500-word Vanity Fair profile based on 11 on-the-record interviews, Wiles calls JD Vance a conspiracy theorist, labels Elon Musk an "odd, odd duck" while trashing his dismantling of USAID, and dishes on the rest of the regime like she’s doing exit interviews for a collapsing startup instead of an administration.

Wiles is publicly insisting she was the victim of a "hit piece" and "selective quoting", because of course the first woman White House chief of staff in this mess has to speedrun the "I enabled it, but with a raised eyebrow" defense. Meanwhile, veterans like Rick Wilson point out there is exactly "0.000 chance" that a hyper-seasoned operator did 11 taped interviews by accident. In other words, Susie is trying to negotiate a plea bargain with history: yes, she helped manage the revenge-obsessed, conspiracy-curious, USAID-dismantling White House, but she got the joke, you see, so she’s not one of the bad authoritarians.

The whole thing offers a neat little window into Trump’s court: a vengeful president, a Q-pilled vice-president, a billionaire wrecking US foreign aid for funsies, and a chief of staff who wants credit both for keeping the machine humming and for quietly recognizing that the machine is a meat grinder for democracy. But sure, she’s "not an enabler"—she just schedules the enabling, staffs the enabling, and calls reporters to make sure history understands she found the enabling a bit gauche.

Historians and political scientists have delivered some terrible news for Donald Trump and his friends in the "presidents should be kings now" caucus: mass protests work. From emancipation to civil rights to marriage equality, people taking to the streets has repeatedly forced the US government to stop being quite so openly terrible. In Trump’s America, that started with the 2017 Women’s March – the largest single-day protest in US history – which did more than generate pink-hat selfies. It helped trigger an explosion of women running for office and a measurable shift in votes toward Democrats in the 2018 midterms. In other words, a bunch of women showed up with signs and proceeded to rearrange Congress, which is presumably not what the Access Hollywood Administration had in mind.

The research is annoyingly clear: when lots of people protest, elections move. Counties with bigger Women’s March turnouts saw higher support for Democrats and more votes for women and candidates of color; Tea Party protests did the same for Republicans in 2010, proving that public rage is a bipartisan force multiplier. One study even notes that adding one more protester does more for a cause than adding one more voter – because nothing says "functional democracy" like having to stand in the cold with a cardboard sign just to get basic rights. And looming over Trump’s second-term fantasy of hereditary rule is the famous 3.5% rule: if roughly 3.5% of the population mobilizes against a regime, it tends to fall. With the new "No Kings" protests drawing historic crowds, the message is clear: you can pack the courts, gut the agencies, and flirt with autocracy all you want – but if a few million people decide they’re done with your cosplay monarchy, the streets start doing what the institutions won’t.