The Trump Presidency Timeline

Donald Trump has discovered a new use for the presidency: local Kentucky HR manager. Perpetually aggrieved that Rep. Thomas Massie occasionally remembers Congress is supposed to be a separate branch of government, Trump is now throwing the weight of the Oval Office behind Massie’s primary challenger in hopes of finally firing the guy who keeps reading the Constitution at the staff meeting.

Massie, a seven-term Republican and professional pebble in Trump’s shoe, has long annoyed the Dear Leader by doing unpatriotic things like questioning executive power grabs and occasionally voting like Congress is more than a fan club. So Trump is deploying his favorite governing tool — public revenge endorsements — to send a message to the rest of the GOP: toe the line, or the president will personally show up in your district to replace you with someone who thinks Article II gives him the right to rearrange your career.

As Cuba struggles with massive blackouts and a collapsing power grid, Donald Trump reportedly mused about the U.S. possibly just 'taking' the island – because when a neighboring country is in crisis, obviously the responsible thing is to LARP as 19th-century imperialists with brain damage. Why send aid or support democratic reforms when you can daydream about annexation like you’re picking out a new resort property.

This is not foreign policy so much as a live reenactment of a drunk Monopoly game: the president sees 11 million people and a sovereign nation and thinks, "great location, needs work, we’ll take it." No mention of international law, self-determination, or, you know, the fact that you can’t just grab countries the way you grab classified documents and women. Just a casual little colonial fantasy thrown into the mix while Cuba literally sits in the dark.

So while Cubans endure blackouts and infrastructure collapse, the leader of the free world’s contribution is to publicly wonder if maybe the U.S. should just scoop the island up like it’s Atlantic City in a Chapter 11 sale. The Monroe Doctrine has officially been replaced with the Trump Doctrine: if it’s nearby and struggling, it’s probably for sale.

Donald Trump rage-posts on Truth Social about US media covering attacks on American tanker aircraft in Saudi Arabia, and FCC chair Brendan Carr sprints into the comments like a very eager hall monitor promising to yank broadcast licenses for airing what he calls "fake news." For extra groveling, Carr throws in a line about Trump’s "landslide election victory" – because nothing says independent regulator like cosplaying as the campaign’s deputy press secretary with subpoena power.

The problem, besides all of it, is that Carr knows this is legally garbage. He’s spent years trying to turn the FCC into Trump’s personal content-policing squad: going after late-night comedians, talk shows, public broadcasters, and any outlet that hurts Dear Leader’s feelings, all while literally scrubbing the word "independent" from the FCC website. Every time he screams "distortion" or "not in the public interest," it just happens to target someone who wasn’t sufficiently reverent toward the man whose face is on his lapel pin.

And yet, the emptiness of the threats is the point. Station owners don’t want to spend millions fighting the regime’s favorite bootlicker or risk merger delays, so they cave: spike stories, sand down headlines, and quietly decide that maybe they don’t need quite so much reporting on Iran, dead soldiers, or the Trump administration’s total absence of a plan. We’ve already seen this with KCBS in California, where managers killed interviews that might be "anti-Trump" after Carr launched an investigation. The message is simple: cover the war like Pete Hegseth wants, or the FCC may come for your license over a headline Trump doesn’t like.

That’s how you slide from a free press to something that looks a lot more like Iran’s state TV: obedient outlets, patriotic cheerleading, and wall-to-wall propaganda for the supreme leader and his wars. Republicans mostly shrug, Democrats mumble, and Carr keeps road-testing his dream job as programming director for Trump State Television. Freedom of the press dies not with a bang, but with a regulator whining about "treasonous" headlines on social media.

The Trump administration has apparently decided that if it can’t stop wildfires, hurricanes, and extreme weather, it can at least defund the people who study them. A new lawsuit from the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) says the White House is trying to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) — the country’s largest federal climate and weather research lab — as collateral damage in Trump’s personal feud with Colorado Gov. Jared Polis. Because nothing says serious national leadership like using hurricane modeling and wildfire forecasting as hostages in your anti-mail-voting revenge tour.

According to the complaint, Trump got mad that Colorado wouldn’t ban mail-in voting or spring a convicted election-tampering county clerk from prison, so the administration allegedly launched a “campaign of punishment and coercion” against the state. That includes trying to break up NCAR, slapping gag orders on scientists so they can’t talk to the public, canceling multimillion-dollar climate adaptation grants, and yanking NCAR’s supercomputing facility out of UCAR’s control. The National Science Foundation even put out a notice basically asking, "Hey, anyone want Boulder’s premier climate campus for some other use?" — as if it’s a strip mall, not critical weather infrastructure.

This is all part of a bigger tantrum, per related lawsuits: moving U.S. Space Command out of Colorado, axing $109 million in transportation funds, and slapping extra SNAP requirements on low-income residents, ostensibly over “fraud” but actually, the state argues, to punish them for not playing along with election denial cosplay. A federal judge already called BS on the SNAP stunt and blocked it. Now UCAR is asking the court to stop the administration from gutting NCAR’s funding, supercomputers, and staff — you know, the 1,400 people who do things like hurricane forecasting, wildfire monitoring, and space weather modeling that protect lives and infrastructure.

UCAR warns that this politically motivated wrecking ball “poses a direct threat to national security, public safety, and economic prosperity,” which is a very polite way of saying: Trump is so obsessed with punishing a blue state over mail ballots and an election-crimes conviction that he’s willing to kneecap America’s top climate and weather lab during an era of historic climate disasters. The message from the administration is clear: fall in line with the Big Lie, or we’ll turn your climate research center into a parking lot and sell the supercomputer for parts.

The country’s largest raw milk distributor, charmingly named Raw Farm, has been linked by the FDA to a multi-state E. coli O157:H7 outbreak that mostly hit kids three and under, because of course it did. Seven people got sick across California, Florida, and Texas, but the company’s response is to SCREAM IN ALL CAPS that they “100% DISAGREE” with the FDA’s "false possible link" — a phrase that really captures the spiritual core of this administration’s relationship with science. Voluntary recall? That’s for people who don’t believe in rugged individualism and acute kidney failure.

This is the same Raw Farm whose products California had to recall in 2024 after retail samples tested positive for bird flu. So naturally, in the Biden-Trump unity cosplay administration, this is the moment Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr — a man who treats public health like a YouTube comment section — steps in to loudly champion raw milk and pledge support for the farmers selling it. The CEO of Raw Farm, Mark McAfee, proudly notes that RFK Jr is a longtime customer, which is definitely what you want to hear about the cabinet official allegedly in charge of disease prevention, not the hype man for your local pathogen co-op.

The CDC has spent years telling Americans to avoid raw milk because it’s more likely to contain dangerous bacteria. The administration’s response? Put a raw-milk evangelist in charge of federal health policy and let him boost a company already linked to E. coli and bird flu. Regulatory capture used to be about corporations quietly writing the rules behind closed doors; now it’s just the Health Secretary yelling "DRINK UP" while the FDA whispers from the corner that maybe feeding toddlers unpasteurized plague juice is bad.

The Supreme Court has graciously agreed to hear arguments on whether the Trump administration can yank Temporary Protected Status from Haitians and Syrians, because nothing says "land of opportunity" like debating how fast to deport people back to war zones and disaster rubble. For now, the justices are allowing hundreds of thousands to keep living and working legally in the US, like a landlord who hasn’t quite gotten around to changing the locks.

The conservative majority has already greenlit ending protections for 600,000 Venezuelans, but this time the White House wants a deluxe package: a broad ruling that would basically tell lower courts to sit down and shut up whenever DHS decides a country is magically “safe” again. This, despite one court explicitly finding that “hostility to nonwhite immigrants” likely played a role in the decision to target Haitians. The administration, naturally, denies any racial animus, presumably because when you say the quiet part out loud in cabinet meetings, it doesn’t count as evidence.

At stake: protections for at least 356,000 people from Haiti and Syria and the precedent for 1.3 million TPS holders globally. The Justice Department is arguing that DHS has sole, unreviewable power to end these protections — a fun little theory of government where the executive branch gets to play immigration god and the judiciary’s job is to nod politely. Meanwhile, Homeland Security has been methodically terminating TPS for multiple countries since Trump’s encore performance in the Oval Office, turning a humanitarian safeguard into yet another loyalty test for nonwhite immigrants: how badly are you willing to risk death to prove America is still great?