The Trump Presidency Timeline

Nevada Judge Mary Kay Holthus has decided that six Republican fake electors who signed and submitted a forged certificate claiming Donald Trump won the state in 2020 weren’t really trying to help steal an election — they were just doing a little political improv. The yearslong case accusing them of forgery and filing a false instrument has been tossed, because when you livestream your attempt to subvert democracy, apparently it becomes performance art instead of a crime.

The defendants, including Nevada GOP chair Michael McDonald, insisted their bogus electoral certificate was mere "political theater" to "preserve their rights" and not an effort to trick Mike Pence into counting fake votes on January 6. Prosecutors argued that yes, the point was exactly to have the fake paperwork mistaken for the real thing, but the judge said there wasn’t enough evidence of intent to deceive — and also dinged the state for failing to disclose exculpatory evidence to the grand jury. Accidentally trying to overturn an election: now with legal precedent.

This brings Nevada in line with Michigan, Georgia, and temporarily Arizona, where fake elector cases have also been dismissed or derailed, turning the multi-state conspiracy to keep Trump in power into a sort of accountability whack-a-mole the justice system keeps losing. Nevada AG Aaron Ford plans to appeal, while defense lawyers accuse him of playing politics, which is bold coming from a crew whose idea of civic engagement was signing counterfeit Electoral College certificates like it was a Mar-a-Lago merch table.

So the message for 2026 is clear: if you want to help a president cling to office after losing, just call it "theater," do it on camera, and hope a judge decides that coups don’t count if the cast remembers to smile for the livestream. Democracy: now an optional genre.

After nearly a decade of ranting about "digital" aircraft carrier catapults like they personally canceled The Apprentice, Donald Trump has finally weaponized his neurosis into policy. He signed a "national security" memo ordering Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao to rip out the electromagnetic launch system on the future USS Doris Miller and go back to steam and hydraulics, because the voices in his head (and one alleged "catapulter") told him it’s better. The ship is already two years behind schedule, but why not add a few billion more and a redesign nightmare to really honor the troops.

This saga traces back to 2017, when Trump first told Time magazine his now-legendary "What is digital?" story, where he bravely stood up to an unnamed Navy officer and physics itself. He has repeated this tale almost every year since — to sailors, to donors, to CPAC, to Tucker Carlson, to anyone within range of a hot mic. Now that he’s back in office, the bit has graduated from rambling anecdote to binding defense directive, because nothing says healthy civil-military relationship like the president personally dictating carrier launch systems based on a vibes check.

Actual experts, such as General Atomics and basically the entire Navy engineering community, are politely screaming into pillows about "significant cost, schedule, and integration risks" after Trump ordered them to tear out a half-completed, fully integrated system and replace it with 20th-century plumbing. Senator Mark Kelly — former Navy pilot, astronaut, and aeronautical engineer — summed it up by suggesting Trump stick to what he knows: "ballrooms, bankruptcy, and bullshit." Meanwhile, as Trump plays steampunk cosplay with the world’s most expensive warship, the USS Abraham Lincoln’s crew is stuck on a record-breaking deployment tied to the Iran war and facing a mental health crisis. The sailors get burnout and trauma; Trump gets a new toy to complain about on stage.

Donald Trump has discovered a bold new way to handle national security: privatize the cyber war and hope the Terms of Service cover it. A new national security memo invites US companies to carry out offensive cyber-attacks against foreign "transnational criminal organizations" – but don’t worry, it’s all under the "direction, control and authority" of the same government that once thought Sharpies could edit hurricanes.

Traditionally, hacking foreign targets was the job of, you know, actual government agencies with laws, oversight, and annoying things like accountability. Now, vetted private firms can run "cyber surveillance" and "cyber effects" operations – up to and including the destruction of information systems and infrastructure – so long as they post a $1m bond like it’s a cover charge for becoming a state-sanctioned cyber mercenary. What could possibly go wrong when profit-driven companies are encouraged to propose their own cyber ops in a global digital battlefield already primed for escalation?

The White House calls it "unleashing the private sector"; legal experts call it "are you people out of your minds". With DHS and DOJ allegedly supervising this corporate hack-a-thon, the administration is quietly building a world where foreign policy is a joint venture and cyberwar is just another line of business. If you ever wanted Blackwater, but for your routers and water treatment plants, congratulations: the future is now.

Scientists dug 56 million years into the past and found that when you dump massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, forests don’t hold hands and sing hymns to Exxon. They collapse. Up to 60% of standing forest biomass vanished during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, turning a lush planet into something closer to a sepia filter. So yes, the planet did get greener – if you count charred scrub and dying trees as an aesthetic.

The timing is perfect, because Trump’s Interior secretary Doug Burgum is on Fox Business explaining that CO₂ “was never a pollutant” and that plants “thrive with more CO₂,” while the administration simultaneously moves to erase the federal government’s own power to address climate change. Energy secretary Chris Wright helpfully adds that there are “pluses” to global heating, presumably referring to the booming market in air purifiers and wildfire respirators.

This isn’t just garden-variety ignorance; it’s state-sponsored climate denial weaponized to justify regulatory arson. The administration is literally citing cartoon-level science to dismantle the EPA’s ability to regulate the gas that, according to actual evidence, helped wipe out ancient forests. They’re using fossil-fueled fairy tales to lock in fossil-fueled collapse. The trees are already dying back, burning, and being cut down – and Trump’s team is sprinting to make sure they can’t recover, but the oil companies can.

The Trump administration’s ICE has apparently discovered a bold new medical doctrine: if a detained immigrant is on the verge of dying, you can fix your statistics by releasing them. José Chajón-Raxón, a Guatemalan man held at Delaney Hall in Newark, suffered a medical emergency, was taken to a hospital, and then conveniently ceased to be ICE’s problem the moment they changed his status on paper. He’s now the third person linked to deaths at this one facility since it was triumphantly reopened in 2025 as part of Trump’s immigration crackdown.

DHS won’t say when Chajón-Raxón died, what happened at the hospital, or basically anything that might suggest they see him as a human being. Instead, they proudly cite an ICE policy that says once someone is no longer in custody, ICE has no responsibility to monitor or review their death, calling that “common sense.” That “common sense” just happens to follow a 2026 policy shift where ICE stopped reporting deaths occurring within 30 days of release, reversing a Biden-era rule. Representative Rob Menendez calls it a “loophole”; ICE calls it Tuesday.

All this is happening at Delaney Hall, a detention center already under fire for two other deaths, alleged guard abuse, spoiled food, and multiple hunger and labor strikes — including a women’s strike demanding basic medical care and the release of young women, sick women, and mothers. Rights groups say more than 50 people have died in ICE custody nationwide since Trump took office, but thanks to the new policy, that number is really more of a vibes-based estimate. ICE insists detainees receive appropriate medical care, which is technically true if you define “appropriate” as “whatever doesn’t mess up the talking points.”

Elon Musk reportedly pulled down a $158.3 billion pay package from Tesla in 2025, which works out to the median Tesla worker’s annual salary every 4.23 seconds. That’s not a compensation plan, that’s a particle accelerator for wealth. Toss Musk into the S&P 500 numbers and the average CEO-to-worker pay ratio jumps from a grotesque 312:1 to a full dystopian 5,387:1. Workers’ share of national income? Lowest since World War II. But hey, at least the stock buybacks are feeling loved.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump is running his own prosperity gospel, minus the gospel. The AFL-CIO notes Trump’s 2025 income hit $2.2 billion, mostly from crypto, a 254% jump from 2024. The median US worker would need 43,154 years to match that, assuming they don’t die first from skipping medical care, falling behind on rent, or being bankrupted by a $400 emergency — all of which are now routine for huge chunks of the country.

How did this miracle of wealth concentration happen? Trump’s "radical budget" and GOP friends hacked away at healthcare and food assistance for kids and families so they could shower corporations and the ultra-rich with tax cuts. The White House insists there are "no conflicts of interest" because Trump’s assets are in "fully discretionary" accounts managed by third parties — a phrase that does a lot of work for a guy whose policies somehow keep lining up perfectly with his balance sheet. It’s not governance, it’s a live-action experiment in how far you can rig an economy before the word oligarchy stops sounding hyperbolic.

The Trump administration marched into federal court pretending to be the great defender of Jewish and Israeli students at Harvard, and Judge Richard Stearns just responded with the legal equivalent of, "you've got to be kidding me". The lawsuit claimed Harvard was basically running an antisemitic free-for-all after the Gaza war; the judge noted the complaint was built on a handful of alleged incidents from March 2025 that were "too isolated and episodic" to show any ongoing civil-rights violation. Translation: you can't scream "systemic discrimination" with a napkin full of anecdotes and a press release.

This was never about protecting students; it was about turning the Civil Rights Act into a stage prop for Trump’s campus-culture crusade. Instead of doing the hard, boring work of actually enforcing civil-rights law consistently, the administration tried to cosplay as champions of equality while using the federal government as a blunt object against a disfavored university. The courts, annoyingly for the White House, still require things like facts and plausible claims, so the whole performance ended where most Trump legal stunts do: in the trash can, next to Rudy Giuliani’s hair dye.

Karoline Leavitt is stepping down as White House press secretary, citing the radical new parenting philosophy of "not spending every waking hour lying for Donald Trump on live television." Don’t worry, though – Trump says she’ll now be one of his “top outside advisers,” which is Washington-speak for same propaganda, fewer ethics rules. Her legacy: being 27, pregnant, and extremely mad at reporters for the crime of asking why democracy was being held together with duct tape and nondisclosure agreements.

While Leavitt heads off to spend more time not answering questions, 5,000 sailors and marines on the USS Abraham Lincoln are stuck in month nine of Trump’s Iran adventure cruise, with only two days on land and conditions so bad some have reportedly tried to jump overboard. Food is rationed, showers are moldy, water is scarce, and the laundry doesn’t work – so naturally Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has declared all this “fake news,” presumably from the comfort of a studio green room and a fresh-pressed suit.

Back in the Arctic, Greenland has had the audacity to tell a Trump-linked oil company, Greenland Energy, to delay drilling. Local authorities are not super thrilled about becoming the test site for the president’s long-time dream of turning the melting tundra into a MAGA-branded strip mine. After Trump’s imperialist threats about what the US could do there, tensions are rising along Greenland’s coast, where drilling equipment is already onshore and just itching to help finish off the climate. The good news: Trump’s approval is at a historic low. The bad news: he’s still got an oil company, a war, and a Navy carrier to play with.

The Trump White House has finally cut out the middleman and gone straight to the core promise of the administration: if you want access to your government, bring a checkbook. Two press groups are suing Trump over "Truth API," a Truth Social service that charges up to $100,000 a month for a few milliseconds' head start on his market-moving tantrums, which are somehow also considered official presidential statements. Think of it as a subscription service where the president sells inside-the-government latency to hedge funds, then signs executive orders between posts about vaccines.

The Intercept and Freedom of the Press Foundation are politely calling this "extraordinary, corrupt, and unconstitutional," which is one way to describe a president using the bully pulpit as a high-frequency trading signal generator. Their lawsuit argues that selling preferential access to presidential communications violates the First Amendment’s guarantee of equal public access and the Fifth Amendment by creating a paywalled tier of governance for "unreasonable sums." Also named: loyal courtiers Natalie Harp and Dan Scavino, because the royal social media scribes have the keys to the kingdom’s cash register.

Trump’s media company, currently lighting $238 million on fire thanks to its crypto genius, insists this is all normal because tech companies monetize data all the time. Sure, Google sells ad impressions; Trump sells the U.S. presidency by the millisecond. Totally the same. The platform still brands itself an "uncancellable haven for free speech"—as long as your speech comes with a six-figure monthly subscription and a Bloomberg terminal. If you ever wondered what it would look like to literally auction off the public’s right to know, congratulations, you’re living in the beta test.

Karoline Leavitt, 28-year-old chief stenographer for Dear Leader, is bailing out of the James Brady Briefing Room at the end of the month, after spending Trump’s second term explaining why things you saw with your own eyes didn’t technically happen. Official reason: spend more time with her beautiful young children and family, the classic Washington phrase meaning “I’ll still be doing the same politics, just with fewer ethics rules.”

Trump proudly announced she’ll now be one of his “top outside advisors” and a major GOP voice as they attempt to “defy History” in the midterms — which is a poetic way of saying she’s moving from government payroll to full-time campaign and party propaganda, where the Hatch Act goes to take a long nap. Why merely mislead from the podium when you can help coordinate the whole party’s message machine with even fewer constraints?

Leavitt framed the job as “the honor and adventure of a lifetime,” which is one way to describe standing at a lectern fielding questions about corruption, retribution fantasies, and whatever Trump posted on Truth Social at 3 a.m. She’s now the latest in a long line of Trump press secretaries who discover that defending authoritarian impulses and daily nonsense on live TV is not, in fact, compatible with a functional personal life — though it’s apparently perfect training for a permanent role in the GOP’s disinformation ecosystem.