The Trump Presidency Timeline

Jared Kushner, the real estate failson who once pitched peace in the Middle East as a kind of zoning variance, has resurfaced as Trump's "Middle East envoy" to personally fix Gaza. This time he's doing it under the banner of Trump's self-appointed "Board of Peace" — an "international organisation" that appears to consist of Trump, some letterhead, and whoever still answers Kushner's texts. The Board claims it has an agreement for the "complete disarmament" of Hamas and other armed groups in Gaza, plus an Israeli troop withdrawal and a shiny new civilian Palestinian administration, which is a lot of words for a plan Israel has already publicly torched.

Undeterred by reality, Kushner held rare talks in Egypt with Hamas leader Khalil al-Hayya, alongside Nickolai Mladenov and, because we apparently live in a cursed reboot of 2005, Tony Blair. They reportedly discussed how to actually dismantle Hamas's arsenal, get Israeli forces out, and rebuild a strip of land that has already seen more than 73,000 people killed and 1.9 million displaced. Israel's answer remains: no withdrawal until full disarmament first — and also a flat rejection of Trump's 15-point plan, just to really underline how much respect they have for America's new freelance peace corporation.

Meanwhile, eight Muslim-majority countries — Egypt, UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Turkey, Pakistan and Indonesia — issued a joint statement saying Israel's rejection threatens Trump's peace efforts, which is a polite diplomatic way of saying, "We are all pretending this Board of Peace is a real thing now, apparently." Trump, naturally, chairs this pseudo-institution himself, having expanded it from a Gaza project to a global conflict fixer, because when you've already broken American democracy, why not cosplay as the UN too? The ceasefire technically still exists, the IDF is still conducting strikes, Hamas is still accused of violations, and into this meat grinder strolls Jared Kushner, armed with vibes, spreadsheets, and his father-in-law's delusions of imperial grandeur.

The Trump administration has decided that if executive privilege is good, infinite executive privilege must be even better. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel coughed up a memo saying Trump can now cloak not just his aides, but also outside private advisers in presidential secrecy, as long as they’re whispering sweet policy suggestions into the White House’s ear. Senator Adam Schiff calls it what it is: a preemptive shield to hide Trump’s "corrupt activities" from congressional subpoenas when Democrats likely take back a chamber.

Meanwhile, Democrats are trying to remember that Congress is technically a coequal branch and not just the comment section to Trump’s X account. They’re gearing up to dig into the unfinished Epstein files, which DOJ seems to be slow-walking so hard a federal judge is openly annoyed, and they’re eyeing Trump’s personal investments in companies with major business before his own government—because why merely serve as president when you can also day-trade off your own regulatory power?

Oversight capacity, of course, has been hollowed out. Inspectors general have been fired, key watchdog jobs sit empty, and Trump just nominated Dennis Kirk—an architect of the authoritarian Project 2025 wish list—to be inspector general at Interior, the office that’s supposed to investigate waste and abuse. So the new model is: sabotage the referees, declare all your friends "privileged," and then insist the real problem is partisan oversight. Democrats talk about rebuilding Congress’s watchdog muscles; Trump is already busy defunding the gym and padlocking the doors.

Donald Trump, self-proclaimed galaxy-brain dealmaker, has managed to turn his second term into a live-action demonstration of why you don’t let a reality TV landlord run an empire. He was re-elected on the promise that "I alone can fix it", then promptly got bored by economic policy and wandered off to start a disastrous war with Iran instead. The result: inflation higher than when he beat Biden, petrol prices spiking, and his approval rating face-planting to 34%. Truly, the businessman president is once again proving that bankruptcy is not just a financial strategy, it’s a governing philosophy.

The Iran adventure is going about as well as his casinos. No regime change, no checked nuclear threat, Iran’s missiles still flying, and Tehran now holding the world economy by the throat via the Strait of Hormuz. Trump ignored his own generals’ warnings about dwindling munitions because his gut told him it would be "fast and easy" – the same gut that thought COVID would disappear and that Mexico was going to pay for a wall. He keeps announcing phantom peace deals and fake breakthroughs that evaporate within days, because the only part of foreign policy he’s interested in is the headline and the camera angle.

Across the Atlantic, Nigel Farage is running the same nationalist-populist software, just on a smaller, stickier keyboard. He quit his Clacton seat in a tantrum over a standards probe, then immediately re-ran for it as a performative grievance circus – and even then refused to show up to his own victory announcement, allegedly over a "credible threat" that the police say doesn’t exist. This is the same Farage who claims he needed an undeclared £5m gift from crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne for "security", yet somehow still couldn’t manage to feel safe standing next to a man dressed as a bin. Now that he’s back in parliament, the investigation into his murky finances has resumed, including gifts linked to convicted fraudster George Cottrell. Another byelection is on the horizon, this time with real parties running – not just aristocrats in trash costumes.

Strip away the flags, the shouting about elites, and the cosplay patriotism, and the common thread is obvious: these guys are unbeatable at performance politics and utterly useless at governing. Trump can’t win his own war, Farage can barely win a by-election without fleeing the stage, and both are staring down investigations and public backlash. The populist strongman project keeps promising history-shaping victories and keeps delivering… higher fuel prices, endless conflict, and a couple of fragile egos hiding from a standards committee and a bloke in a novelty bin suit. Turns out the real "deep state" problem is that none of these people knows how to do the job they fought so hard to steal.

Donald Trump spent January 2025 using executive orders like a blunt instrument, declaring DEI dead in the federal government and warning corporations that if they didn’t drop their diversity policies, the state would happily lean on them. Google, Goldman Sachs, McDonald’s, Walmart and the rest of the courage caucus immediately folded like a cheap lawn chair in a hurricane, loudly announcing the end of their DEI programs to appease the world’s most fragile strongman.

The joke, as usual, is on the authoritarians. New research by UC Berkeley’s Jacob Grumbach shows that the companies that refused to panic — firms like Costco, Apple, and Delta that kept their DEI policies or voted down anti-DEI shareholder tantrums — did just as well financially as the ones who sprinted to obey. In the days right after Trump’s anti-DEI orders, the noncompliers even outperformed the corporate bootlickers on the stock market. So much for "go woke, go broke"; turns out it was more "go scared, stay mediocre".

This all comes after years of right-wing culture-war cosplay: Bud Light boycotts, Target hysteria, Ron DeSantis trying to turn Disney World into a fascist HOA, and the supreme court helpfully opening the litigation floodgates by nuking affirmative action. Corporations read the room, panicked, and quietly gutted a lot of the DEI promises they made after George Floyd’s murder — not because it hurt profits, but because an authoritarian-leaning executive branch and a reactionary court made it legally and politically terrifying not to.

The punchline? Grumbach’s data shows that when big companies simply don’t obey the executive branch’s culture-war demands, they’re fine. No financial apocalypse, no mass shareholder revolt — just business as usual with fewer fascist vibes. So we’ve now empirically confirmed that Trump’s anti-DEI crusade was never about economic reality; it was about using state power to bully civil society into line. The market didn’t punish diversity. It mostly just watched the government try to.

Nevada Judge Mary Kay Holthus has decided that six Republican fake electors who signed and submitted a forged certificate claiming Donald Trump won the state in 2020 weren’t really trying to help steal an election — they were just doing a little political improv. The yearslong case accusing them of forgery and filing a false instrument has been tossed, because when you livestream your attempt to subvert democracy, apparently it becomes performance art instead of a crime.

The defendants, including Nevada GOP chair Michael McDonald, insisted their bogus electoral certificate was mere "political theater" to "preserve their rights" and not an effort to trick Mike Pence into counting fake votes on January 6. Prosecutors argued that yes, the point was exactly to have the fake paperwork mistaken for the real thing, but the judge said there wasn’t enough evidence of intent to deceive — and also dinged the state for failing to disclose exculpatory evidence to the grand jury. Accidentally trying to overturn an election: now with legal precedent.

This brings Nevada in line with Michigan, Georgia, and temporarily Arizona, where fake elector cases have also been dismissed or derailed, turning the multi-state conspiracy to keep Trump in power into a sort of accountability whack-a-mole the justice system keeps losing. Nevada AG Aaron Ford plans to appeal, while defense lawyers accuse him of playing politics, which is bold coming from a crew whose idea of civic engagement was signing counterfeit Electoral College certificates like it was a Mar-a-Lago merch table.

So the message for 2026 is clear: if you want to help a president cling to office after losing, just call it "theater," do it on camera, and hope a judge decides that coups don’t count if the cast remembers to smile for the livestream. Democracy: now an optional genre.

Donald Trump has discovered a bold new way to handle national security: privatize the cyber war and hope the Terms of Service cover it. A new national security memo invites US companies to carry out offensive cyber-attacks against foreign "transnational criminal organizations" – but don’t worry, it’s all under the "direction, control and authority" of the same government that once thought Sharpies could edit hurricanes.

Traditionally, hacking foreign targets was the job of, you know, actual government agencies with laws, oversight, and annoying things like accountability. Now, vetted private firms can run "cyber surveillance" and "cyber effects" operations – up to and including the destruction of information systems and infrastructure – so long as they post a $1m bond like it’s a cover charge for becoming a state-sanctioned cyber mercenary. What could possibly go wrong when profit-driven companies are encouraged to propose their own cyber ops in a global digital battlefield already primed for escalation?

The White House calls it "unleashing the private sector"; legal experts call it "are you people out of your minds". With DHS and DOJ allegedly supervising this corporate hack-a-thon, the administration is quietly building a world where foreign policy is a joint venture and cyberwar is just another line of business. If you ever wanted Blackwater, but for your routers and water treatment plants, congratulations: the future is now.

The Trump administration marched into federal court pretending to be the great defender of Jewish and Israeli students at Harvard, and Judge Richard Stearns just responded with the legal equivalent of, "you've got to be kidding me". The lawsuit claimed Harvard was basically running an antisemitic free-for-all after the Gaza war; the judge noted the complaint was built on a handful of alleged incidents from March 2025 that were "too isolated and episodic" to show any ongoing civil-rights violation. Translation: you can't scream "systemic discrimination" with a napkin full of anecdotes and a press release.

This was never about protecting students; it was about turning the Civil Rights Act into a stage prop for Trump’s campus-culture crusade. Instead of doing the hard, boring work of actually enforcing civil-rights law consistently, the administration tried to cosplay as champions of equality while using the federal government as a blunt object against a disfavored university. The courts, annoyingly for the White House, still require things like facts and plausible claims, so the whole performance ended where most Trump legal stunts do: in the trash can, next to Rudy Giuliani’s hair dye.

Karoline Leavitt, 28-year-old chief stenographer for Dear Leader, is bailing out of the James Brady Briefing Room at the end of the month, after spending Trump’s second term explaining why things you saw with your own eyes didn’t technically happen. Official reason: spend more time with her beautiful young children and family, the classic Washington phrase meaning “I’ll still be doing the same politics, just with fewer ethics rules.”

Trump proudly announced she’ll now be one of his “top outside advisors” and a major GOP voice as they attempt to “defy History” in the midterms — which is a poetic way of saying she’s moving from government payroll to full-time campaign and party propaganda, where the Hatch Act goes to take a long nap. Why merely mislead from the podium when you can help coordinate the whole party’s message machine with even fewer constraints?

Leavitt framed the job as “the honor and adventure of a lifetime,” which is one way to describe standing at a lectern fielding questions about corruption, retribution fantasies, and whatever Trump posted on Truth Social at 3 a.m. She’s now the latest in a long line of Trump press secretaries who discover that defending authoritarian impulses and daily nonsense on live TV is not, in fact, compatible with a functional personal life — though it’s apparently perfect training for a permanent role in the GOP’s disinformation ecosystem.

South Carolina is holding a special GOP primary to decide who gets to cosplay as Lindsey Graham 2.0, and — plot twist — it’s Lindsey’s sister, Senator Darline Graham, who’s advanced to a runoff for the seat she was appointed to finish. She’s running on a bold platform of "I ran a state agency once," "I passed a Russia sanctions bill," and the real qualification that matters: a golden endorsement from Donald Trump, plus backup from Governor Henry McMaster and Senate majority leader John Thune. American meritocracy, now available in convenient family-pack size.

Her rivals are busy proving who loves authoritarian paperwork the most. Congressman Ralph Norman is touting the Trump-backed "Save America Act," which would slap federal citizenship-proof mandates on voter registration and put state voter rolls under federal oversight — because nothing says "small government" like Washington rummaging through every state’s voter list. He’s also bragging about trying to strip housing funds from cities that don’t sufficiently worship ICE. Meanwhile, Russell Fry is running for both Senate and his House seat at the same time, because why only hoard one office when you can treat public service like a BOGO sale?

In the background, former governor Mark Sanford is wandering through the wreckage talking about fiscal responsibility and the national debt like it’s still 2010 and his party hasn’t turned into a personality cult with a side hustle in voter suppression. The winner of this little family feud plus power grab will face Democrat Annie Andrews, a pediatrician, in November — so naturally the GOP is racing to nominate whoever can best combine Trump worship, dynastic entitlement, and creative new ways to make voting harder.