The Trump Presidency Timeline

Remember when "virtue-signalling" meant some liberal on Twitter reminding you to say chairperson? Adorable times. Trump looked at that and decided the real growth market was vice-signalling: performative racism and misogyny as a brand strategy. From his 2015 "they're rapists" campaign launch to posting a video of the Obamas depicted as apes, the man didn’t just dog-whistle, he brought an airhorn to a Klan rally and called it authenticity.

This is now an established rightwing business model: constantly violate basic norms, gorge on free media coverage, then claim you’re bravely "saying what everyone’s thinking" when you’re really just saying what the actual bigots are thinking. Trump’s Access Hollywood "pussy-grabbing" tape didn’t end his career; it opened the door for JD Vance’s "childless cat ladies" spiel and Tucker Carlson’s escalating misogynist cosplay. Each stunt makes the next one worse and more acceptable, a kind of hate-based multi-level marketing scheme where the product is social collapse.

The article walks through how this vice-signalling arms race has turned politics into a contest over who can be the most proudly cruel, with Trump as the trendsetter and Farage, Berlusconi & friends as the international franchisees. The point isn’t policy; it’s to show your base you’re willing to dehumanize the right targets and dare anyone to object. Call it the new conservative value system: family, flag, and publicly test-driving fascist rhetoric for clicks.

The annual bipartisan gathering of the nation's governors — one of the last places where red and blue could sit in the same room without a security perimeter — is disintegrating because Donald Trump has decided that only Republican governors get to come to the White House. The National Governors Association, whose entire job is "represent all 55 governors, not just the ones who like Truth Social posts," has now pulled the plug on its formal meeting with Trump after the White House tried to turn it into a GOP-only business session.

Democratic governors responded by announcing a boycott of the traditional White House dinner, politely saying they "will not be attending" instead of the more accurate, "we're not showing up to be extras in your campaign ad." Even NGA chair and Oklahoma Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt had to send around a letter explaining that when you exclude half the country’s governors from a supposedly institutional event, it kind of stops being an NGA thing and starts being a party fundraiser with better table linens.

Press secretary Karoline Leavitt helpfully explained that Trump "has discretion to invite anyone he wants" because the White House is both "the people's house" and also his house, a fascinating new constitutional doctrine where public institutions become Airbnbs for whichever strongman currently has the nuclear codes. Meanwhile, the NGA’s CEO called it an "important tradition" ruined by the administration’s decision to make it openly partisan, which is a very polite way of saying: this White House looked at one of the last functioning bipartisan forums and thought, "How do we break that?"

This all comes after last year’s performance, when Trump threatened to withhold federal funds from Maine because Democratic Gov. Janet Mills wouldn’t obey his order on transgender athletes, then confidently predicted her political career was over. She’s now running for Senate, the NGA is fracturing, and the "bipartisan" governors' conference has been repurposed into yet another loyalty pageant. American federalism: brought to you by the guy who thinks separation of powers is a bad TV ratings metric.

The Trump administration has discovered a bold new frontier in public health: if you can’t kill vaccines outright, just quietly make it impossible to approve new ones. The FDA has refused to even review Moderna’s application for a new mRNA flu shot – a vaccine that produced stronger antibody responses and no safety concerns – because the trials compared it to standard flu shots instead of the suddenly preferred high-risk formulas. Small problem: for people under 65, that high-dose option is not the standard of care. So the agency’s excuse is not just flimsy, it’s factually wrong. Science has been replaced with vibes.

To really sell the farce, the refusal-to-file letter was personally signed by Vinay Prasad, the Trump-appointed head of the FDA’s biologics division, even though this kind of bureaucratic kneecapping is usually done by the review team. No formal rules have changed, but a leaked email shows Prasad promising to “revise” the flu vaccine framework, while HHS has already downgraded routine flu shots for kids to a “shared clinical decision-making” maybe-kinda-sorta recommendation – all without consulting outside experts. The EU, Canada, and Australia are reviewing the same vaccine like normal countries, while the US moves toward a new standard of care: politics first, medicine eventually, if the base allows it.

The message to vaccine makers is clear: invest years and millions into R&D, run trials the FDA helped design, show your product is safe and more effective, and then watch Trump’s health bureaucracy slam the door in your face because it’s busy auditioning for a Tucker Carlson segment. The administration isn’t just undermining public health; it’s methodically turning vaccine approval into a partisan loyalty test, with Americans’ immune systems as collateral damage.

Donald Trump has discovered a bold new frontier in economic statecraft: threatening to barricade a jointly owned $4.6bn international bridge and only later learning who paid for it. After raging online that the Gordie Howe International Bridge has “virtually no US content” and that Canada “owns both ends”, Mark Carney gently explained reality to him like a tired parent correcting a child who insists the moon is made of cheese. Canada fronted the cash, Michigan co-owns it, and yes, U.S. steel and workers were involved. So much for the big patriotic boycott of American jobs.

Rather than admit he doesn’t understand how bridges, ownership, or maps work, Trump blamed Barack Obama for “stupidly” approving the project — a project he himself once demanded be built “expeditiously” during his first term. Local officials, like Windsor’s mayor Drew Dilkens, called the rant “insane”, which is Canadian for “we are screaming into a polite void.” Meanwhile, business leaders are pointing out that threatening to choke off one of North America’s key trade arteries is a self-own of historic proportions, but this White House has never met a supply chain it didn’t want to set on fire.

Because one tantrum is never enough, Trump also revived his Canada grievances Greatest Hits: dairy, tariffs, and now the deranged claim that if Canada signs a trade deal with China, Beijing will somehow abolish ice hockey and seize the Stanley Cup. Yes, the sitting U.S. president is suggesting that China’s master plan is to invade Canada’s national pastime via customs paperwork. Canadians responded by roasting him online and reminding everyone they haven’t won the Cup since 1993, so if China wants to “eliminate” it, they’re a few decades late to that party.

Ontario’s populist premier Doug Ford, not to be out-populisted, vowed to “double down” on banning U.S. liquor from provincial shelves unless Trump drops his tariffs, turning cross-border trade into a hostage swap between whiskey and welded steel. What’s left is a president casually threatening to weaponize a critical international bridge, slap 100% tariffs on a neighbor, and rewrite trade policy based on a conspiracy theory about Xi Jinping cancelling hockey night in Canada. But sure, tell us again how this is all about protecting American workers.

The Trump administration has discovered a bold new way to own the libs: make your electricity more expensive and your air less breathable. Four federal judges – including a Trump appointee who apparently read the law at least once – have had to slap temporary injunctions on Interior’s attempts to kneecap five offshore wind projects in Virginia, New York, and New England that are already billions of dollars in and nearly ready to go online. At the same time, Trump’s energy team is issuing "emergency" orders to keep five decrepit coal plants on life support, forcing costly repairs so Americans can pay extra for the privilege of inhaling 20th-century pollution in 2026.

While the administration smashes the brakes on cheap wind and solar, it’s flooring the gas pedal on liquefied natural gas exports. Result: a 22% jump in LNG exports and US households shelling out an extra $12 billion for natural gas in just the first nine months of 2025, according to Public Citizen. Energy secretary Chris Wright – a former oil and gas CEO, because of course he is – has been flying to Europe to lobby for weaker methane rules so his buddies can ship more LNG. Those buddies include fracking billionaire Harold Hamm, who helped host a Mar-a-Lago fundraiser where Trump pitched fossil fuel CEOs on a $1 billion campaign donation in exchange for a "sweeping" pro-fossil fuel agenda. They ponied up about $75 million and, what do you know, policy now looks like it was written by a refinery lobbyist with a Sharpie.

Experts keep pointing out the obvious: if you want lower electricity prices, you don’t stall wind and solar projects that are already under construction and revive coal plants regulators decided were too expensive and unnecessary. But Trump, still swooning over "beautiful clean coal" and calling wind the "scam of the century", slashed solar tax credits in his One Big Beautiful Bill Act and is using the Energy Department to overrule utility regulators whose actual job is to consider cost and reliability. The result is a donor-driven energy agenda that raises power prices, worsens the climate crisis, and shovels hundreds of millions in extra costs onto consumers – all so a handful of fossil fuel billionaires can squeeze a few more quarters out of a dying business model.

Trump has unveiled TrumpRx, a government-branded prescription drug site he’s bragging up as “the largest reduction in prescription drug prices in history” – a bold claim for a portal that lists just 43 drugs, many of which are old, off-patent, and already cheaper pretty much everywhere else. One example: Protonix is a cool $200.10 on TrumpRx, while the generic version is $6.07 on Mark Cuban’s Cost Plus Drugs. That’s not a savings, that’s performance art.

Experts point out that patients could usually do better by just asking their pharmacist, using existing sites like GoodRx or Cost Plus, or – wild idea – relying on insurance. TrumpRx is even reportedly powered by GoodRx, which makes this whole thing the healthcare equivalent of screenshotting someone else’s website and calling it innovation. In some narrow cases, like a few fertility drugs or a specific weight loss med, the deals are decent – but they’re often identical to the manufacturer’s own offers, and the GLP-1 discounts for Wegovy and Ozempic expire in a month or two and only apply to the lowest dose.

Meanwhile, Republicans are pushing nearly $1bn in Medicaid cuts and letting ACA tax credits expire, making healthcare more expensive while Trump stands in front of a podium yelling about imaginary 578% savings on Novo Nordisk drugs. The actual site quietly admits the discounts are more like 74–85% off list price, which is still not as good as many people already get through insurance. As one advocate put it, the administration is pretending it just saved America, when in reality many people who use TrumpRx will pay more than they needed to. It doesn’t fix drug pricing, it doesn’t increase transparency – it just adds one more confusing, misleading layer to a broken system and calls it victory.