The Trump Presidency Timeline

NPR sits down with Slate's Molly Olmstead to marvel at a truly American achievement: after years of Trump, QAnon, and a Republican Party mainlining Facebook memes, conspiracy culture is now so baked into our politics that even parts of the left are wandering into "deep state did the White House Correspondents' Dinner shooting" territory. When your entire information ecosystem has been turned into a fog machine, eventually everyone starts seeing shapes in the smoke.

This isn’t a story about new Trump crimes; it’s the hangover. After an administration that called the press the "enemy of the people," pushed election lies as official policy, and made up terrorist attacks on TV, the baseline for reality has been permanently lowered. Now NPR is doing somber segments about left-wing conspiracies, as if the firehose of right-wing disinformation, stochastic violence, and state-enabled lying was just a quirky prequel instead of the reason everyone's brains are scrambled.

Sen. Thom Tillis briefly cosplayed as a defender of Federal Reserve independence, blocking Trump’s Fed chair nominee Kevin Warsh while the Justice Department ran a sketchy investigation into current chair Jerome Powell. After weeks of righteous concern that DOJ might be used as a political bludgeon, Tillis emerged on Meet the Press to announce that, good news everyone, he got some “assurances” from the very DOJ he was worried about. Problem solved, nothing to see here, please enjoy your pre-approved Trump Fed chair.

The Justice Department conveniently dropped its investigation into Powell on Friday — an inquiry that had somehow inflated a headquarters renovation project into a federal case — and by Sunday Tillis was back on TV clearing the runway for Warsh’s confirmation “on time.” The message is crystal clear: as long as the executive branch promises it definitely isn’t weaponizing law enforcement against an independent central bank, the Senate is delighted to wave through the president’s handpicked money man. Checks and balances? No, just checks, and Trump’s friends will handle the balances.

As the 60-day War Powers Act deadline on Trump's Iran adventure lumbers into view, Congress is doing what it does best: holding conversations about maybe, possibly, at some indeterminate point, considering whether to assert the authority the Constitution already gave them. The law says they’re supposed to vote on this war. The political consultants say, "Have you considered a strongly worded bipartisan letter instead?" Guess which side is winning.

Meanwhile, Trump’s approval ratings are the other supposed safeguard, because when Congress refuses to check a president’s power, Gallup becomes the last branch of government. NPR politely notes what the polls say; the real story is that as long as his numbers aren’t subterranean, Republicans will keep handing him blank checks for foreign adventures, and Democrats will keep issuing outraged press releases like they’re legally binding documents. The War Powers Act remains, as always, more of a suggestion than a law.

The Trump administration finally noticed that Rwanda’s military has been doing war crimes like it’s a competitive sport in eastern Congo and slapped sanctions on the Rwanda Defence Force (RDF) and senior officials. That instantly turned the Armée Patriotique Rwandaise Basketball Club – yes, the team literally owned by the sanctioned military – into a walking OFAC violation inside the NBA’s shiny Basketball Africa League. APR was quietly yanked from the tournament, replaced by the RSSB Tigers, because nothing says "clean break from authoritarianism" like swapping the army’s team for one owned by the state social security board.

The awkward part? The NBA has spent the last decade turning Paul Kagame into a courtside statesman, not a ruthless authoritarian who wins elections with 99% of the vote and exports chaos, massacres, and mineral plunder into the DRC. Kagame’s former aide Claire Akamanzi now runs NBA Africa, "Visit Rwanda" is slapped on the Los Angeles Clippers, and Kagame does the All-Star Game networking circuit while his army and proxy militias displace hundreds of thousands back home.

NBA deputy commissioner Mark Tatum has been insisting they just "follow the lead of the US government" on where to do business. The second that same government made the RDF legally radioactive, the league suddenly discovered that maybe the general’s team shouldn’t be in their feel-good Africa expansion project. For now, the NBA is technically in compliance, still happily partnered with the dictatorship itself, just not the bits of it Treasury has highlighted in red. The message: war crimes are bad, but if you move the logo from the army to the pension fund, we can still run the playoffs in Kigali and call it development.