The Trump Presidency Timeline

The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery has quietly upgraded Trump’s wall space from "twice-impeached coup-curious president" to "vibes-only" by swapping out his photo and deleting any mention of his two impeachments and the Jan. 6 insurrection. The new portrait, courtesy of the White House photographer, comes with a new caption style that, very conveniently, no longer includes the awkward little bits about trying to overturn an election. Because nothing says "America’s Presidents" like pretending history is a choose-your-own-adventure novel.

The museum insists this is just part of "exploring quotes or tombstone labels" and a routine refresh, while declining to say whether the caption change was requested by the Trump administration. Meanwhile, the old label — which dared to mention the impeachments, the attack on the Capitol, and other actual facts — has been exiled to the internet like some subversive samizdat. But don’t worry, the Smithsonian promises the concept of presidential impeachments still exists somewhere else in the building, presumably in a broom closet behind a "woke content" warning.

White House spokesman Davis Ingle celebrated that, "for the first time in history," the Portrait Gallery is hanging an "iconic" Trump photo whose "unmatched aura will be seen and felt" throughout the halls — which is one way to describe state-curated personality cult energy. This all dovetails perfectly with Trump’s executive order demanding the removal of "improper ideology" from Smithsonian exhibits ahead of the country’s 250th anniversary. In other words: welcome to the taxpayer-funded rebrand of January 6 from "insurrection" to "incident we do not discuss" — a federally sponsored history scrub brought to you by the guy who keeps insisting he’s the real victim here.

Donald Trump has decided that antitrust law is just another content moderation tool, loudly insisting that CNN "should be sold" as a condition for any Warner Bros Discovery deal. In a stunning coincidence that is definitely not state pressure, one giant media company (Netflix) is trying to swallow Warner Bros Discovery for $82.7bn, while another (Paramount Skydance, run by David Ellison, son of Trump buddy Larry) is lunging in with a hostile $108bn bid and promising "sweeping changes" at CNN—aka giving Trump exactly what he wants. Because nothing says free press like the president personally shopping your news network to the highest sycophant.

Paramount has already run the playbook: it paid Trump $16m to settle a meritless lawsuit over a CBS interview, then installed Kenneth R Weinstein—Trump’s almost-ambassador to Japan—as a CBS "bias" monitor to soothe regulators. An FCC commissioner called this "never-before-seen" government control of newsroom decisions that violates the First Amendment, which is lawyer-speak for "this is straight-up authoritarian garbage". In the fallout, the 60 Minutes producer quit, the CBS News president quit, and Stephen Colbert’s show was cancelled just in time to smooth the path for a merger. In other words: corporate America has discovered that the easiest way to get your deal approved is to pre-cancel the jokes about the president.

Netflix, meanwhile, wants to pretend it’s the "benign" option while having its own track record of folding to political pressure—like yanking a Saudi-critical satire episode and shrugging that it’s "not in the truth-to-power business". Translation: we’ll do whatever the biggest market wants, up to and including memory-holing documentaries and political content that might upset a regime or a regulator. Handing that platform even more control over which stories exist, while Discovery’s news assets are spun into a separate corporate orphan, is how you get quiet, algorithmic censorship: fewer buyers, fewer distributors, and more executives deciding that anything "too political" just isn’t worth the regulatory headache.

The result of either deal is the same: more concentrated media power, fewer independent voices, and a president who has learned he can turn merger review into a protection racket for his ego. Give the Ellison family both CBS News and CNN, or let Netflix’s walled garden swallow another legacy studio, and you don’t just get fewer movies and higher prices—you get a media landscape where challenging journalism and dissenting stories are preemptively killed in the boardroom so they never have to be censored in public. But sure, tell us again how this is all about "consumer choice" and "efficiency" and not about killing democracy with mergers and vibes.

The Trump administration has apparently decided that the best way to handle immigration court backlogs is to just delete the courts. NPR reports that an immigration court in San Francisco is the latest to shut down after the administration fired nearly 100 immigration judges in 2025, as part of an explicit plan to "remake" the system that offers immigrants due process. Because nothing says "respect for the rule of law" like eliminating the people who apply the law.

Instead of hiring more judges or giving the system resources, Team Trump is just kneecapping it and calling it reform. Close the courts, fire the judges, then complain that the system is "broken" and needs more executive power to fix—it's the same old playbook: manufacture a crisis, then demand authoritarian solutions. In other words, they're not streamlining justice; they're suffocating it, one shuttered courtroom at a time.

President Trump has apparently decided that his second term needs a brand, and he’s going with “threats, ICE shootings, and whatever else I can get away with before lunch.” NPR politely describes it as a “provocative playbook,” because nothing says stable constitutional democracy like federal immigration agents opening fire in Minnesota while the president escalates his public threats like he’s live-tweeting a mob movie.

The headline combo tells you everything: “ICE shooting in Minnesota; Trump threats and surprises.” In other words, state violence plus presidential menacing is now just a segment on Weekend Edition, slotted neatly between the book club and the weather. The normalization is the point: an armed deportation force, a president who governs by intimidation, and the press gamely calling it a “week in politics” instead of what it is – a slow-motion demolition of basic rule-of-law norms. But sure, let’s see what “surprises” he’s got planned for next week.

Donald Trump has once again discovered maps and immediately decided other people's land should be his. This time it's Greenland, which he says the US needs to "own" to stop Russia and China from doing it first, because nothing says defending the rules-based international order like threatening to annex part of a fellow NATO member "the easy way or the hard way." The White House is openly musing about buying the semi-autonomous Danish territory, while very pointedly refusing to rule out just taking it by force. So yes, we're now workshopping colonial conquest strategies against our own alliance partners.

Denmark and Greenland have responded with the radical position that their territory is not for sale and that military action would kind of, sort of, end NATO. Meanwhile, Trump insists leases and long-term defense agreements are for losers — "countries can't make nine-year deals or even 100-year deals," he says, they have to have ownership. This is extra adorable given the US already has a permanent base there and the right to bring as many troops as it wants, but sure, let's threaten war with Denmark because the landlord-tenant relationship offends Dear Leader's real-estate brain.

Trump claims, without evidence, that Greenland is "covered with Russian and Chinese ships all over the place," which is a bold statement considering it's mostly covered with, you know, ice. But never mind: he's decided he doesn't want Russia or China as a "neighbour in Greenland" and NATO needs to "understand that" — translation: toss out the UN Charter, sovereignty, and the "inviolability of borders" so Donald can cosplay 19th-century empire-builder with melting Arctic real estate and rare earth minerals. America's allies have lined up behind Denmark to remind him that only Denmark and Greenland get to decide Greenland's status, but he's fresh off using military force to snatch Venezuela's president, so the whole "we don't invade people to steal their stuff" norm is already on life support.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio now gets to fly to Copenhagen and explain why the US president is threatening to nuke the transatlantic alliance over an island that already hosts a US base under existing agreements. In other words: NATO is scrambling to reaffirm basic international law while Trump is busy reinventing Manifest Destiny: Polar Edition. But hey, as the ice caps melt and resource fever rises, at least we know Washington's Arctic strategy is: if it looks valuable, annex first, read UN Charter later.