The Trump Presidency Timeline

Ray Epps, a former Trump-loving, Oath Keepers–adjacent, Fox News superfan, discovered the hard way that being part of the MAGA hive doesn’t mean they won’t turn around and accuse you of being a secret government plant. After Fox and Tucker Carlson pushed the fantasy that Epps was an undercover fed sent to frame Trump supporters for the January 6 insurrection Trump actually incited, Epps and his wife got so many threats they sold their ranch and fled into an RV. You know, the classic American dream: serve in the Marines, watch Fox religiously, then get chased out of your life by people who think you’re Antifa in a cowboy hat.

A federal judge has now dismissed Epps’s defamation lawsuit against Fox for the second time, ruling that he didn’t show the network acted with “actual malice” — the legal standard that basically requires you to prove a cable host looked straight into camera and said, “I am knowingly lying to you right now.” Despite years of Fox texts, emails, and on-air brain-melting that suggest a professional-level disregard for reality, the court said Epps hadn’t plausibly shown Carlson or his show knew the conspiracy theory was false or recklessly ignored the truth. Legally speaking, Fox’s brand of weaponized paranoia apparently still counts as protected speech.

Fox issued a victory lap statement about how this ruling “preserves press freedoms,” which is a poetic way of saying: we can call a random Trump fan a government psy-op who engineered a coup to frame other Trump fans, and as long as we do it in the service of the broader project of rewriting January 6 for the base, it’s just journalism now. Meanwhile, federal prosecutors have been clear Epps was never an FBI asset, he pled to a misdemeanor, did a year of probation, and then got swept up in Trump’s mass January 6 pardon spree — a kind of bulk discount absolution for the mob that tried to keep him in power.

The moral here is not that Fox will someday feel bad. It’s that the right-wing propaganda machine can help incite an attack on democracy, invent a scapegoat to deflect blame from Trump and the GOP, sic its audience on one of its own viewers, and still get to wrap itself in the First Amendment like a flag it definitely hasn’t been dragging through the mud. Epps asked the court to hold the network accountable; the system replied: you signed up for this ecosystem, and the ecosystem bites.

Trump Media & Technology Group has heroically proven that you can run a social media platform like a meme stock subreddit. In Q1 2026, the parent company of Truth Social managed to lose almost $406 million while generating a bit over $870,000 in revenue – a business model best described as "set money on fire and call it free speech".

The magic trick comes from $3.5 billion in Bitcoin buys in 2025 for a so-called "bitcoin treasury," which is what you call it when a political cult decides to roleplay as a hedge fund. Now that crypto has dropped by about a third, the company is reporting huge "non-cash" losses on digital assets and securities. Translation: the money’s not technically gone, it’s just living on a sadder spreadsheet now.

Interim CEO Kevin McGurn insists the company has a "strong balance sheet" and "positive operating cashflow" while the actual numbers look like a financial Chernobyl. He also claims Truth Social "remains a bastion of free speech" with "innovative enhancements coming soon" – presumably more ways to monetize rage-posts from the guy who got banned from Twitter after his fans attacked the Capitol.

As a bonus subplot, the company is still trying to merge with nuclear fusion firm TAE Technologies in a $6 billion deal to "power AI datacenters," which is fitting: fusion, like Truth Social profitability, has famously never produced more energy than it consumes. But sure, keep talking about "shareholder value" while the balance sheet cosplays as a controlled demolition.

Sebastian Gorka, the cosplay general who somehow keeps failing upward, has produced a 16-page counterterrorism "strategy" that reads like a Telegram rant with a letterhead. On a press call, Trump’s counterterrorism czar helpfully clarified the intellectual rigor behind the document by calling critics of the Iran war "testicularly challenged", because nothing says serious national security planning like middle school locker-room taunts.

The memo itself is, as one analyst put it, "largely slop": it declares three big bads—"narcoterrorists and transnational gangs", "legacy Islamist terrorists", and "violent left-wing extremists"—then somehow forgets that far-right and white supremacist groups are the ones actually killing people at home. Instead, it demands the "neutralization" of "radically pro-transgender" and "anti-American" ideologies, insists immigration has turned Europe into an "incubator of terror", and promises to "map" and cripple left-wing groups using every "constitutionally available" tool. The fact that the Constitution does not, in fact, authorize turning your political enemies into a domestic al-Qaeda seems to have been redacted for vibes.

To really sell the gag, the memo accuses past administrations of "weaponizing" intelligence against innocent Americans while laying out a plan to do exactly that: expanded surveillance, renditions, illegal strikes, and deploying the military and immigration cops as a roving repression squad. Civil liberties advocates point out that this is not a bug but the feature: the strategy openly embraces state violence, dehumanizes Muslims, migrants, and trans people, and recasts dissent from the right’s agenda as an "existential terror threat" to be stamped out. It’s a blueprint for using the war-on-terror machinery to crush democracy, wrapped in patriotic clip art and Gorka’s thesaurus abuse.

The bleak punchline is that Trump and Gorka didn’t invent this toolbox; they’re just the first to wave it around while bragging about how fun it’ll be to use. As rights groups note, decades of bipartisan counterterrorism overreach built the surveillance, detention, and militarized policing infrastructure now being openly repurposed to target the left. Trump’s contribution is the honesty: no more pretending this is about "security" when it’s obviously about power, punishment, and a presidency that views the law as something to step over on the way to the next press conference.

The Trump administration has discovered a bold new frontier in "public lands management": turning national parks and refuges into mixed-use shooting galleries. Interior secretary Doug Burgum quietly ordered agencies to rip out "unnecessary" barriers to hunting and fishing, which apparently include such radical ideas as not shooting along trails, not damaging trees with stands, and not turning park bathrooms into DIY slaughterhouses. Visitor safety and wildlife protection, once considered core National Park Service values, are now treated like fussy suggestions from the deep state.

Under the new regime, hunting seasons get stretched into spring and summer at Cape Cod National Seashore, hunters at Lake Meredith in Texas can clean carcasses in the restrooms, and Jean Lafitte National Historical Park in Louisiana becomes an alligator shooting gallery. Former park officials note that current rules were forged through years of stakeholder input and science-based management; the Trump team responds with its usual governing philosophy: don’t ask, don’t study, just deregulate and issue a press release about "commonsense" freedom.

All of this is happening to rescue a pastime practiced by about 4.2% of Americans over 16, but somehow sold as a sacred national tradition that must override everyone else’s ability to visit a park without dodging bullets or entrails. Conservation groups aligned with hunters dutifully applaud the "streamlining" of regulations and "vital role" of duck hunters, while people who thought national parks were for, say, hiking with their grandkids are told to enjoy the view—just ignore the gutted elk being dragged across the visitor center parking lot. Under Trump, even a quiet walk in the woods has to become a culture war front.

President Trump has apparently decided that if you can’t beat corruption, you should just legalize it. He’s handing out pardons to officials convicted of public corruption while simultaneously taking a sledgehammer to the federal office that investigates and prosecutes, you know, public corruption. Why bother laundering money or hiding the bribes when you can just get a commemorative get-out-of-jail-free card from the guy in the Oval Office?

This is less a justice system and more a loyalty rewards program. Steal from the public, abuse your office, betray the voters — and if you stayed on Team Trump, congratulations, you’ve earned enough points for a presidential pardon. Meanwhile, the office tasked with catching the next batch of crooks is being quietly dismantled, because nothing says "clean government" like firing the referees while you pardon the players who already got caught.

So the new standard is clear: corruption isn’t a crime, it’s a career path, and the only real mistake is getting prosecuted before Trump has time to erase your record. The message to every grifter in government is loud and clear: help yourself now, the accountability department has left the building.

The Department of Justice, now apparently rebranded as the Department of Just Trust Us Bro, is facing the wild accusation that maybe, just maybe, the people who were at the scene of a shooting and are potential victims or witnesses shouldn’t also be running the prosecution. The man accused of attacking the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Cole Tomas Allen, is asking a judge to kick acting attorney general Todd Blanche and U.S. attorney Jeanine Pirro off the case because they were there when he allegedly fired a shotgun at a Secret Service officer.

The defense has pointed out the tiny, barely noticeable issue that Blanche was Trump’s personal lawyer until last year, and Pirro is a longtime Trump pal who has spent years treating her Fox set like a shrine to his ego. They’re now overseeing a prosecution that includes charges of attempting to assassinate Donald Trump himself. So the people who are Trump’s friend and former attorney, who were in the room when the shots were fired, are in charge of deciding how to prosecute the guy accused of trying to kill Trump. Totally normal justice system stuff, nothing to see here.

Public defenders Eugene Ohm and Tezira Abe suggested a special prosecutor, because apparently someone in Washington still remembers what the phrase “appearance of a conflict of interest” means. Meanwhile, Pirro is out here thundering about not tolerating “antidemocratic acts of political violence” while presiding over a case where her boss and her buddy are at the center of the story. When the victim, the witness, the former client, and the prosecuting authority all start to overlap, you don’t have a justice system; you have a loyalty test with subpoenas.

Virginia’s Supreme Court just discovered a powerful new tool for protecting democracy: retroactive paperwork audits. A 52–48 voter-approved constitutional amendment that would have let Democrats redraw the state’s congressional map was tossed out because the legislature supposedly messed up the “multi-step process” and didn’t obey a 1902 notice rule that might as well have required posting it on MySpace and carving it into a stone tablet at the courthouse.

The court solemnly declared that these procedural sins “irreparably undermine” the referendum and therefore the will of actual living voters is null and void, but the existing GOP-friendly map is just fine and pure as the driven snow. The result: Virginia keeps the Trump-era districts that help Republicans cling to the House, while Trump’s mid-decade redistricting arms race in Florida, Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana, and friends keeps racking up seats like it’s a rigged carnival game.

Normally, states redistrict once a decade after the census. Under Trump, we’re doing rolling emergency map surgery every time Republicans get nervous about losing power. A bipartisan commission written into the Virginia constitution was supposed to prevent this kind of partisan map-rigging, but voters briefly handed redistricting power to the legislature to push back against Trump’s gerrymander spree. The court’s response: nice democracy you tried to have there, shame about that scheduling error from last year.