The Trump Presidency Timeline

Donald Trump is hosting Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva at the White House to talk about the economy, tariffs, and organized crime, which is bold from a guy who just tried to run foreign policy like a Change.org petition for Jair Bolsonaro. The U.S. slapped a 40% tariff on Brazilian goods — on top of another 10% — and Trump later helpfully explained that his annoyance over Bolsonaro’s criminal charges was one reason for the economic punishment. Foreign policy, but make it personal legal grievance cosplay.

The two leaders have supposedly had a strained relationship, which tends to happen when the American president writes a letter demanding you go easy on your own country’s former far-right leader and then hikes tariffs when you don’t roll over. Now they’re meeting again so Trump can pretend this is about “shared economic and security interests” instead of his ongoing habit of turning U.S. trade tools into a loyalty test for fellow authoritarians and indicted buddies.

Trump claims he and Lula had “excellent chemistry” and that Lula “seemed like a very nice man,” which, given Trump’s track record, is somewhere between a curse and a threat. Lula shows up trying to talk about a pact against organized crime; Trump shows up having already used the U.S. economy as a pressure tactic to meddle in Brazil’s justice system. One of these is actual statecraft. The other is a guy running the White House like it’s a VIP lounge for embattled strongmen.

Donald Trump’s commerce secretary Howard Lutnick is heading to a closed-door interview with the House oversight committee to explain why his "I cut off Epstein in 2005" story somehow includes a family trip to Epstein’s private island in 2012 and business ties as late as 2014. Turns out when the Department of Justice briefly deleted, then quietly restored, an island photo of Lutnick and Epstein, it raised a few more questions than "who wore the white shorts better".

After weeks of pretending he was far too important to answer questions about his years of friendship and business with a serial sex offender, Lutnick finally agreed to talk only when Democrats threatened to subpoena him and, hilariously, Republicans on the committee didn’t immediately throw their bodies in front of the investigation. James Comer is now praising Lutnick’s "commitment to transparency" for agreeing to a transcribed, closed-door chat that couldn’t be less transparent if they held it in a SCIF at Mar-a-Lago.

Meanwhile, GOP member Nancy Mace is annoyed that these Epstein witness interviews keep getting scheduled when members are out of town, which is an interesting way of admitting Congress can’t even investigate elite sex-trafficking networks without tripping over its own vacation calendar. But sure, let’s all pretend this is a serious, functioning government and not a protection racket where Trump’s cabinet officials with Epstein island itineraries get gently "grilled" in private while everyone issues somber press releases about accountability.

The Trump administration has apparently unlocked a new level of sabotage: fund the NIH on paper, starve it in practice. After Congress — in a rare moment of bipartisanship and basic human decency — restored billions in research money for 2026, the administration responded by just... not really giving it out. Former NIH officials say the agency is now handing out fewer grants, stretched over more years with bigger dollar amounts, so everything looks fine in a pie chart while entire fields of research quietly flatline.

Instead of openly attacking the "crown jewel" of the federal government, they're running a passive-aggressive demolition. NIH "forecasts" for future research funding are being left up like ghost listings on a dead real estate site — 205 of 336 are past their promised posting dates, never turned into real grant calls. To scientists, it looks like opportunity; to the administration, it's just a screensaver.

On the ground, this means cancer labs like Rachael Sirianni’s are laying people off, closing down promising pediatric brain cancer projects, and leaving once-busy benches as little memorials to the research that could have been. Years of taxpayer-funded progress toward saving kids with metastatic tumors are now politely driven into a brick wall, while HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon shrugs and insists everything is just back to "typical funding patterns" — if by typical you mean weaponizing bureaucracy so children’s cancer therapies lose a race against the calendar.

The Secret Service arrested an FAA contractor who allegedly used his work computer to Google "I am going to kill Donald John Trump" and how to sneak a gun into a federal facility, then politely asked IT to delete his search history like this was a bad day on Pornhub, not a federal crime. He also allegedly emailed the White House from his personal computer to announce his intent to "neutralize/kill" Trump, because subtlety is dead and so are competent plots.

On its own this is just one unhinged guy with three guns and zero operational security. The bigger picture: the DOJ says there have been three other prosecutions for Trump threats this week, including former FBI director James Comey being charged over an Instagram photo of seashells that prosecutors claim was a threat. So yes, we’ve hit the part of the authoritarian arc where the president’s Justice Department is hunting for coded messages in beach decor while bragging about "zero tolerance" and "maximum punishments" for speech, even as actual violent extremists marinate happily in the background.

Meanwhile, a South Carolina man was arrested after literally writing "Headed to Wsh to kill the pres" on his car like a rolling confession, and a Florida man pleaded guilty to threatening Trump and other officials. All this comes less than two weeks after a gunman stormed the White House Correspondents’ Dinner allegedly trying to kill Trump and other government officials. The country is spiraling, the temperature is off the charts, and the administration’s answer is to turn threat prosecutions into a loyalty spectacle where an ex-FBI director’s seashell post gets treated like the Zapruder film.

The Trump education department has decided that the real crisis in American schools isn’t guns, crumbling buildings, or student debt – it’s Smith College letting trans women exist. The Office for Civil Rights proudly announced it is investigating the women’s college for the crime of admitting, quote, “biological males into women’s intimate spaces,” because nothing says “limited government” like Washington micromanaging who can pee in a Northampton dorm bathroom.

Assistant secretary for civil rights Kimberly Richey helpfully clarified that Title IX’s single-sex exemption only applies to "biological sex difference, not subjective gender identity" – a legally creative way of saying: we will rewrite civil-rights law on the fly to match the vibes of the Christian right. Smith, which has admitted trans women since 2015 after, you know, actually talking to students and alumnae, is now being told that educating women of all kinds means it might not count as a women’s college anymore. Schrödinger’s woman: female enough for discrimination, not female enough for protection.

This latest stunt slots neatly into the administration’s ongoing project of driving trans people out of every public space: bans on trans military service, lawsuits against states that let trans kids play sports, attempts to kill gender‑affirming care, and passport rules that must match birth sex. Now, with an assist from rightwing group “Defending Education” – whose entire business model is screaming “indoctrination” at any school that acknowledges marginalized people exist – the federal government is using Title IX, a law meant to fight sex discrimination, as a weapon to enforce it instead. Truly a bold new era of civil rights: everyone is equal, as long as they’re the right kind of woman.