The Trump Presidency Timeline

Michigan Democrats are holding a quaint little election to decide whether they want universal healthcare or a candidate rich donors can trust not to upset their stock portfolios. Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive public health guy who thinks people shouldn’t go bankrupt for getting sick, is leading in the polls. In response, more than $40m in outside money has poured in to boost Haley Stevens or kneecap El-Sayed, including from AIPAC-aligned groups that apparently believe the true threat to America is… a doctor with Medicare-for-All vibes.

This isn’t just one race, it’s a bulk purchase of the Democratic ballot. Bernie Sanders is out here backing progressives in multiple Michigan districts, while the party’s establishment and its favorite Super PAC sugar daddies frantically shovel cash at more reliable vote-yes-on-the-next-war moderates. Meanwhile, Republicans are deciding whether Trump-endorsed John James or businessman Perry Johnson gets the honor of trying to replace Gretchen Whitmer with someone who won’t make the former president feel so inadequate by comparison.

So the “battle for the soul of the Democratic Party” is once again being fought with TV ads bought by billionaires and lobbyists, while voters are allowed the thrilling freedom to pick which pre-screened candidate of the donor class they’d like to send into a 53–47 Republican Senate. The future of American democracy may hang in the balance, but don’t worry: the check has already cleared.

American civil rights lawyers have reached the "I’d like to speak to your supervisor" stage with U.S. democracy, and the supervisor is now the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. After decades of using U.S. courts to hold cops, presidents, and other assorted government thugs accountable, these attorneys are watching Trump kneecap the judiciary, weaponize the DOJ, and target the very lawyers who sue him. When your own legal system starts acting like a hostile witness, you pack your briefs and head to the international human rights system.

The IACHR, a body usually busy dealing with Latin American dictatorships, is now holding a special hearing on the United States’ violent crackdown on protests against Trump’s immigration pogroms. On the docket: the killing of Renee Good, shot in her car by an ICE agent during a Minneapolis demonstration and then posthumously smeared as a "domestic terrorist" by DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, and Rev David Black, shot in the head with a pepper ball by a federal agent while protesting in Chicago—an incident that Customs and Border Protection’s "commander-at-large" Gregory Bovino proudly declared was "absolutely in line with policy". When shooting clergy in the head is considered good policy, the policy might be the problem.

This is all part of Trump’s Day One fantasy of "Protecting the American People Against Invasion," which translated into federal agents running paramilitary raids across U.S. cities, tearing families apart, and abducting, beating, and shooting unarmed migrants. ICE has racked up multiple recent killings, while the U.N. human rights chief says he’s "astounded" by the routine abuse and racial profiling, and a U.N. anti-racism committee is openly calling out "racist hate speech" from political leaders, including the President. So yes, we’ve now reached the part of the American experiment where the international bodies we used to lecture are sending us strongly worded letters about acting like a police state.

The lawyers warn that today’s targets are anti-ICE protesters, but tomorrow it could be climate activists, gun rights people, abortion-rights marchers, or labor organizers. Once you normalize federal goons brutalizing dissenters and calling it "policy," the First Amendment becomes more of a suggestion than a right. The symbolism is almost too on the nose: a human rights commission that spent decades confronting juntas and strongmen is now holding a hearing two blocks from the White House about whether the United States is sliding into authoritarianism. America First, indeed—first to show the hemisphere how fast a democracy can backslide when you put a wannabe strongman in charge of the riot police.

The Democratic National Committee, steward of Our Sacred Democracy™ and frequent victim of its own PowerPoints, apparently produced a report on Donald Trump’s 2024 win that is missing a key chapter. You know, the part where they might explain how they managed to lose to a twice-impeached, multi-indicted coup enthusiast who tried to speedrun authoritarianism the first time. That chapter seems to have gone the way of Roe v. Wade and basic voting rights: mysteriously absent when you need it most.

Instead, we get NPR’s Steve Inskeep politely asking the New York Times’ Shane Goldmacher why the party that brands itself as the last line of defense against fascism can’t even keep track of its own homework. While Trump and his friends are busy testing how much of the Constitution you can shred before the Supreme Court notices, the DNC is out here misplacing the section titled, essentially, "How We Blew It While Democracy Was on Fire." Outstanding work all around.

Donald Trump has discovered the moral horror of forced labour – specifically, the kind allegedly happening in other countries that he wants to hit with tariffs, not the kind happening in U.S. prisons that props up American supply chains. After the Supreme Court struck down his last round of tariffs, the administration did what any responsible government would do: slapped on clearly illegal 150-day “temporary” tariffs, let them expire, and then rebranded the same trade war cosplay as a noble crusade against slavery. Regulatory laundering, but make it authoritarian.

The new tariffs conveniently track Trump’s old deficit-based tariffs, because apparently bilateral trade balances and forced labour rates are now spiritually aligned. China – a long-time forced labour concern – just happens to skate by, since it controls rare earths and could body-slam Trump’s little tariff tantrum. So the tough-on-slavery president bravely goes after … the EU, which already has a 2024 law banning imports made with forced labour, while his commerce secretary Howard Lutnick recently complained that this exact EU law was an “unnecessary burden” on American companies. Now it’s the moral standard. Sure, why not.

Meanwhile, the U.S. runs a massive system of captive prison labour protected by the 13th Amendment loophole, with over a million prisoners working – hundreds of thousands in manufacturing – while Trump howls about forced labour in Europe and Canada. If anyone actually took his rhetoric seriously, the EU would be slapping tariffs on products from U.S. states that lean hardest on prison labour and on companies like Walmart, Burger King, and Cargill that happily dip into that pool. Instead, European leaders mostly sigh in relief they weren’t hit harder, which is exactly how bullies and wannabe strongmen keep winning.

All of this economic cosplay has produced no manufacturing renaissance, no smaller trade deficit, and no coherent policy – just record-high deficits, higher costs for American consumers, and another round of Trump using state power as a personal cudgel while pretending it’s about human rights. Call it what it is: a lawless, hypocritical protection racket dressed up as moral leadership, with the world still too timid to call his bluff.

UN countries are inching toward the radical, dangerous, totally unacceptable idea that corporations should pay tax where they actually do business, not where a mailbox in the Cayman Islands allegedly "innovates" at a P.O. box. A new Tax Justice Network report says unitary taxation could claw back $500 billion a year from the global tax-dodge Olympics without even raising rates. Naturally, Donald Trump’s America responded by storming out of the UN tax talks and begging others to join the tantrum. Shockingly, nobody else wanted to cosplay as a legal department for Apple and Google.

While the rest of the world tries to build a UN framework to tax profits where real economic activity happens, Trump is busy threatening tariffs at Europe like a mobster shaking down a parking garage. The proposed system would let countries tax digital and cross-border services without waiting for Big Tech to open a token office staffed by a ficus, and even move secretive investor-state arbitration into something resembling public accountability. That’s terrible news for the corporate-lawyer-industrial complex and the offshore finance crowd that U.S. Republicans treat like an endangered species in need of constant protection.

Countries like India and Nigeria are already writing laws to ensure that companies profiting off their economies can’t just disappear into a spreadsheet in Dublin. Ireland is quietly admitting the party’s almost over by stashing away its "windfall" corporate tax receipts before the music stops. Meanwhile, an African-led coalition, backed by India and Brazil, has engineered UN rules that block the U.S. or any rich-country clique from wielding an automatic veto. So Trump can sit outside the room and yell "America First" all he wants; he just can’t stop everyone else from finally sending his favorite tax-dodging multinationals a bill.

Capital One has politely informed a federal court that, no, it did not close more than 300 Trump Organization accounts because of "woke" persecution; it did it because its anti-money-laundering team looked at the transactions and said, in banker-speak, "absolutely not." After months of AML analysis, the bank concluded the activity looked like the kind of thing federal guidance tells you to flag, which is generally not what you want your family business associated with when Dad is also the president.

The Trump Organization and Eric Trump responded the way they always do when confronted with compliance: sue and scream culture war. Their 2025 lawsuit claims Capital One was just chasing post–January 6 vibes and engaging in "discriminatory debanking" of conservatives. Capital One's filing delicately notes that this theory is based on "cherry-picked quotations" and that the real story is transaction patterns, not pronouns.

Meanwhile, in a stunning coincidence, Trump’s second-term White House has been leaning on big banks over supposed anti-right-wing bias, and he even signed an executive order banning "discriminatory debanking"—right as he’s suing Capital One and JPMorgan for cutting him off. This follows his earlier attempt, back in 2019, to stop Capital One and Deutsche Bank from sharing his financial records with Congress, after Deutsche’s own AML staff reportedly flagged suspicious Trump-related transactions that higher-ups helpfully ignored. Regulatory capture meets personal finance triage: the president is now using the power of the state to yell at banks for treating him like any other high-risk client.

Max Blumenthal flew back from covering Ali Khamenei’s funeral in Iran and landed at Dulles, where US Customs and Border Protection rolled out the red carpet for journalists the Trump administration doesn’t like: a "secondary inspection," interrogation about who funded his trip, and the casual seizure of his two phones after he refused to cough up his passwords. His laptop and cameras? Untouched. Because why bother with actual reporting materials when you can go straight for contacts, sources, and private communications like a government that’s definitely not hostile to the First Amendment.

The phones were magically returned less than 24 hours after the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee filed an emergency court motion, with the government claiming, pinky swear, they couldn’t get into them so everything’s fine. Judge Leonie Brinkema was unconvinced by the "trust us, we’re the people secretly copying your devices" routine, and ordered the government to explain exactly who had the phones, when, and what they tried to do with them. That pesky Fourth Circuit ruling saying you need a warrant for an "advanced" search of a phone? Turns out it still exists, even if Trump-world treats the Constitution like an optional app.

All this followed public calls from Trump ally Laura Loomer for Blumenthal to be taken off his plane and detained, which really helps drive home that this wasn’t a random security check so much as a fan-service stunt for the administration’s anti-press base. Meanwhile, the same government that recently tried and failed to subpoena New York Times reporters is now insisting that whatever they did to Blumenthal’s phones might be "law enforcement privileged" and therefore too sensitive to disclose. When the White House is picking out journalists for special border harassment based on their politics and identities – in this case, a "Jewish anti-Zionist" reporter – you’re not running a democracy, you’re running a petty surveillance state with worse UX.

Trump looked at the entire history of insider trading and said: why let the little guys risk prison when the president can just sell the cheat codes himself? Trump Media & Technology Group is now offering a premium "Truth API" that gives hedge funds and trading firms early access to the president’s Truth Social feed — the same feed he uses to blurt out market-moving policy and foreign affairs announcements — for up to $100,000 a month. Why leak when you can invoice?

Former SEC official Renée Jones politely notes that this looks a lot like an illegal insider-trading scheme based on misusing non-public information, while one anonymous Wall Street executive says that in any other administration, this would be considered criminal. But here in Trump’s America, we’ve streamlined the process: skip the shady tipster, just wire money directly to the president’s media company and get a front-row seat to real-time market manipulation. Regulation is for suckers; access is for sale.

Gavin Newsom, the gelled avatar of West Coast moneyed liberalism, has released more than 700 pages of tax returns to inform the nation of a shocking fact: the governor of California is extremely rich and pays a lot of taxes on his extremely rich-guy income. From 2022 to 2024, the Newsoms pulled in between $1.7m and $2m a year and cut checks of about half a million annually to federal and state tax collectors, because when your brand is "responsible rich guy who might run for president," you have to show your work.

The document dump arrives as the DOJ is investigating the couple’s finances, which Newsom insists is politically motivated, so he’s responded by performing the classic pre-presidential ritual: tax return kabuki. The money mostly comes from winery and restaurant businesses parked in a so-called blind trust, which is adorable, because the returns conveniently don’t list which businesses made what. The PlumpJack empire is now run by his sister and cousin, so the trust is less "blind" and more "I just won’t ask my relatives too many follow-up questions."

On the lifestyle side, we learn the Newsoms spent up to $44,000 a year on childcare and handed out $40,000 to $65,000 annually to charity, plus thousands in donated clothes and toys. The highlight: they offloaded $45,000 worth of Armani business wear to a racial justice organization in Oakland, presumably so activists can fight systemic inequality while dressed like they’re headed to Davos. The returns show one big spike in 2021, when they made $4.2m after selling a Marin house for nearly $6m, paid over $1m in taxes, and somehow resisted the urge to call that "middle class" on cable news.