The Trump Presidency Timeline

The Trump EPA has discovered a bold new climate strategy: don’t reduce pollution, just redefine it as too annoying for donors. The agency is moving to gut methane rules on so-called "stripper wells"—rundown, low-producing oil and gas wells that barely cough up 6% of U.S. output but spew about half the sector’s methane. That’s the greenhouse gas that traps 80 times more heat than CO₂, but also, crucially, threatens the profit margins of one very important billionaire: Hilcorp owner and recent Trump mega-donor Jeffery Hildebrand.

Hildebrand, whose company is already ranked among the industry’s top methane polluters, suddenly discovered his inner political animal right after the Biden administration passed strict methane rules that would cost him real money. He then shoveled millions into Trump’s campaign, his wife got an ambassadorship, he got a front-row White House seat and a chance to promise billions for Venezuela he doesn’t actually operate in, and now—what do you know—a former Hilcorp lobbyist is in charge of rewriting the EPA’s methane rules. That ex-lobbyist is helpfully workshopping policy with industry groups bankrolled by Hildebrand, producing a rollback tailor-made to rescue 700,000 leaky stripper wells from the horror of basic oversight.

The result: Hildebrand’s profits go up, his planes keep landing at Dulles before dawn, and the rest of us get to enjoy the accelerated heat waves, droughts, and wildfires that come from letting ancient, leaky wells burp methane into the atmosphere. Climate advocates point out that shutting these wells would cut emissions roughly in half while sacrificing just 6% of production—an obvious win for the planet. But the Trump-era EPA has done the math and reached a different conclusion: the only emissions that matter are the ones coming from a billionaire’s checkbook.

Donald Trump has finally "ended" his catastrophic Iran adventure, a war he and Benjamin Netanyahu kicked off while US and Iranian negotiators were literally at the table in Geneva. Because nothing says "good faith diplomacy" like secretly programming missile targets while your envoys talk about nuclear safeguards. The opening salvo: Israel assassinates Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the US flattens a school in Minab, killing more than 150 civilians — at least 120 of them girls under 12 — and Trump calls it strength. Multiple investigations later, it turns out the only thing they decisively destroyed was whatever was left of America's moral standing.

Instead of the quick, triumphant regime change fantasy Trump and Netanyahu bragged about in their video speeches, Iran's government did that inconvenient thing where it survives. Khamenei is replaced by his son Mojtaba and a new generation of IRGC hardliners who are just as ideological and less cautious — so, stellar work all around. Tehran shuts the Strait of Hormuz, hits US bases and Arab neighbours, and suddenly the "short, sharp" war becomes a long, humiliating tutorial on the limits of US power. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth blusters that American might has crippled Iran, while Iran methodically chokes 20% of the world’s oil and gas, fertilizer supply chains, and with them food security for millions, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. Totally normal foreign policy: launch a war, spike global hunger.

Now, after burning through "hard-to-replace" weapons stocks and torching US credibility with Gulf monarchies who are quietly shopping for new patrons, Trump is selling a two-page, 14-point memorandum of understanding as some grand statesmanlike achievement. The deal reopens Hormuz, lifts the US naval blockade of Iranian ports, and extends the ceasefire — i.e., it returns the world to exactly where it was 24 hours before Trump and Netanyahu decided to play regime-change roulette. All the real issues — Iran’s nuclear programme, sanctions relief, long-term security — are punted to future talks that could have just… continued on 27 February without the dead children, wrecked homes, and shattered alliances.

Israel, full partner in the war, is now sidelined from the deal and furious, while Iran’s regime is more entrenched than before. The US looks weaker, more reckless, and less reliable to its allies, and China has spent months watching Washington bleed credibility and munitions in real time. Trump’s big strategic masterstroke managed to kill a lot of civilians, empower hardliners in Tehran, destabilize the global economy, and end in a humiliating climbdown back to the status quo ante. But sure, tell us again how "peace through strength" is going.

The Supreme Court has quietly told former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page to take his Comey fanfic lawsuit and file it directly in the circular bin. Page was trying to revive a case against James Comey and seven other former FBI officials over the spectacularly sloppy FISA warrants used to spy on him during the Russia investigation. Yes, those warrants were a mess — the DOJ’s own watchdog said so — but the courts pointed out a minor issue: Page waited so long to sue that the statute of limitations basically turned to dust.

The federal government already cut Page a check in a separate settlement, which the Trump administration’s DOJ used as a chance to issue a statement thundering that the whole thing was a “political sham from the get-go” against a man “never charged with a single crime.” Bold words from the same political universe that loved warrantless surveillance right up until it singed one of their own. Once again, FISA — the beloved toy of the national security state — is treated as perfectly fine for mass surveillance of random Americans, but a civil rights tragedy when it lands on a guy who used to sit near the Trump campaign’s craft services table.

Trump, naturally, folded this into his ever-expanding Russia “hoax” mythology, casting Page as the wronged hero of Deep State fanfic. But when it came time for the big legal showdown, the justices didn’t bite: no hearing, no dramatic showdown, just a one-line rejection. Page’s claims against the individual officials are dead, Comey’s lawyer isn’t even bothering to comment, and the only real legacy here is a bipartisan reminder that the government’s surveillance powers are both overbroad and incompetently managed — right up until someone important gets mad, and then it’s grievance merch for the base.

The Trump administration has finally found a way to cut unemployment: kick Daca recipients out of their jobs by not processing their paperwork. For 14 years, renewals took a few weeks; now people like Claudia and Cesar wait six months and counting, lose work authorization, and watch the careers they built since age four evaporate because some White House ghoul decided a backlog is a great deportation tool.

While Trump world loudly insists they’re only going after “criminals,” the numbers quietly rat them out: 77% of people shoved into deportation proceedings in 2025 had no criminal conviction. Hundreds of Daca holders have been arrested, some deported, all while USCIS spokesbot Zach Kahler serenely explains that Daca “does not confer any form of legal status” and that they’re just “safeguarding the American people” by more thoroughly vetting a group that already had to pass background checks and maintain spotless records.

Not content with weaponized delay, the administration is also trying to choke off any remaining livelihoods: proposed rules would block Dreamers from working unless their employers use E‑Verify and ban them from getting commercial driver’s licenses — because nothing says “strong economy” like sidelining half a million educated, fully integrated workers. Advocates call it a “mass delegalization effort”; the administration calls it Tuesday.

Meanwhile, Congress could pass the bipartisan Dream Act and end this bureaucratic hostage-taking, but why provide stability when you can let Trump methodically unravel temporary protections and push families back into the shadows? Dreamers did everything this country asked of them — study, work, stay out of trouble — and the reward is an “emotional rollercoaster” where the American Dream disappears the moment a renewal lands on the wrong desk at USCIS.

European judge Beti Hohler woke up one day to discover that the Trump administration had basically Thanos-snapped her digital life out of existence: Apple, Amazon, Visa, Mastercard, PayPal – all gone, not because she committed a crime, but because she had the audacity to serve as a judge at the International Criminal Court. Turns out in Trump’s America, your access to basic digital infrastructure is contingent on whether Washington likes your job description. Rule of law, but make it Terms of Service.

This is the same administration that cheers Elon Musk using X and Starlink as his personal foreign policy cosplay, leans on Anthropic to wall off advanced AI from foreigners, and openly talks about "cultivating resistance" inside Europe while sitting on the continent’s cloud, chips, and platforms. Europe’s big response? A "sovereignty package" that bravely declares it will sometimes, in very specific circumstances, consider the possibility of maybe not handing the most sensitive public data directly to Amazon and Microsoft – unless, of course, individual member states decide they’d rather not upset the White House or spook the investment fairy.

Brussels then completes the magic trick by adopting Washington’s own AI gospel: more, faster, bigger, screw the consequences. The Commission is racing to triple data centre capacity, bulldozing environmental and planning safeguards to create "datacentre acceleration zones" that just happen to be perfectly designed for the same US hyperscalers they claim to be weaning themselves off. Digital "sovereignty" apparently means asking Silicon Valley to colonise your grid and water supply slightly more quickly, but with European branding.

The result is a continent that talks about independence while still reading off the Silicon Valley cue cards that Trump’s people are happily weaponising. The administration gets to treat tech infrastructure like a sanctions joystick and a surveillance playground, while Europe debates what colour its handcuffs should be. Geopolitical vassalage, now available in cloud-native format.

Vice-president JD Vance has announced that he’ll decide whether to run for president in 2028 after the 2026 midterms, following a serious family conversation with his wife Usha and a less-serious reality show conversation with Donald Trump. He insists he doesn’t sit around plotting a White House run, which is adorable coming from a guy doing a book tour about his religious awakening while floating his presidential ambitions on national TV.

Vance says Trump will be "very supportive" of whatever he decides, which is a polite way of saying that the future of the Republican party will once again be determined by whatever mood the octogenarian strongman is in when Fox & Friends ends. He claims he never brings up 2028 with Trump, but says the president talks about it "a lot"—publicly and privately—because of course the man who tried to overturn an election is "very fascinated" by who gets to sit in his old chair next.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports Vance may delay deciding because his fourth child is due in July, reminding everyone that the would-be heir to Trumpism is busy expanding both his family and his political brand. On the shortlist of other 2028 hopefuls: Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Donald Trump Jr, because nothing says "healthy democracy" like a dynastic primary between the son, the courtier, and the guy who converted to Catholicism and to Trumpism with the same fervor.