The Trump Presidency Timeline

Donald Trump has finally found his dream Federal Reserve chair: Kevin Warsh, a Milton Friedman–trained, Wall Street–married, $100m net-worth inflation hawk who has now discovered a deep spiritual belief in lower interest rates the moment Trump needs them. Once famous for warning that the Fed shouldn’t be the "ultimate rescuer" or wander into political territory, Warsh is now auditioning to be the president’s personal rate-cut butler, promising to fix the "broken leadership" that had the audacity to not juice Trump’s second-term economy on command.

The real plot twist is not even subtle. Trump has spent years publicly berating Jerome Powell — the Fed chair he himself picked — calling him a "jerk" and "MORON" while repeatedly threatening to fire him. Now, as Powell’s term ends and a conveniently timed criminal investigation into Fed HQ renovations hangs over his head, Trump’s allies are turning the central bank into a hostage situation. Republican senator Thom Tillis says he’ll block Warsh’s nomination until Trump’s Justice Department drops the investigation into Powell, effectively telling the Fed: nice independence you’ve got there, shame if something happened to it.

Democrats, for their part, are focused on Warsh’s murky financial disclosures and the small matter of his nine-figure fortune, which would make him one of the richest Fed chairs in recent history — because nothing signals concern for ordinary workers like putting another mega-wealthy Wall Street alum in charge of monetary policy. Meanwhile, Trump is on Fox Business promising that "when Kevin gets in" rates will go lower, bragging that Warsh is "central casting" and "will never let you down" — which is exactly what you say when the job description is less "independent central banker" and more "loyal concierge to a wannabe strongman’s stock portfolio."

NPR brings on Richard Haass to perform the increasingly common Washington ritual: calmly explaining that the president of the United States treats long-standing democratic allies like Canada the way a bored landlord treats tenants right before a condo conversion. Allies who bled with us in wars and underwrote decades of global stability now get public humiliation, tariff threats, and policy made via all-caps posts that read like they were drafted between golf swings and cable hits.

The fun twist is that this isn’t some impulsive quirk; it’s the strategy. Cozy up to authoritarians, kick democratic partners in the shins, then act shocked when alliances fray and everyone starts hedging against the U.S. like we’re the world’s least stable cryptocurrency. Haass politely describes the damage and how countries like Canada are adapting; translation: they’re quietly building workarounds so the free world doesn’t collapse every time Trump wakes up angry at Trudeau’s eyebrows. Global leadership, brought to you by a guy who thinks NATO is a gym brand.

Trump’s deportation machine has decided that the real threat to America isn’t, say, violent crime or foreign adversaries, but the wives of U.S. soldiers. Sgt First Class Jose Serrano, who’s given 27 years to the Army and deployed to Afghanistan, watched ICE snatch his Salvadoran wife, Deisy Rivera Ortega, during an immigration office appointment in El Paso – despite a 2019 legal protection that was supposed to bar her deportation. She had an active work permit, has been here since 2016, and followed every rule laid out for her. Naturally, the Department of Homeland Security responded by labeling her a “criminal illegal alien” because she once committed the federal menace of illegal entry, a misdemeanor.

This isn’t a one-off bureaucratic oopsie; it’s a pattern. Another soldier’s wife, Annie Ramos, was detained on base in Louisiana just days after her wedding, right as her husband prepared to deploy. Her great crime? A deportation order from a hearing her family missed in 2005, when she was a baby. She got released only after the media shined a light on the case, which is how you know "rule of law" in Trump’s America really means "rule of PR." Add in the deportation of Jermaine Thomas, born on a U.S. Army base in Germany and now essentially stateless, and you’ve got an immigration policy that treats military families like expendable props until they become inconvenient.

Serrano, who’s dealing with TBI and PTSD, now gets about two hours of sleep a night while ICE debates whether to ship his wife to a country she has no ties to, like Mexico, because geography is apparently just a suggestion. His verdict on all this: "ICE is out of control right now, sir, taking away rights, as soldiers, that we have." The Army’s response was to punt questions to DHS, because nothing says "support the troops" like handing their families over to an unaccountable enforcement agency that’s busy speedrunning how-fast-can-we-shred-due-process. This is what "law and order" looks like when cruelty is the actual policy goal.

The EU has finally noticed that Benjamin Netanyahu treats their sternly worded letters like spam emails from a fake prince, and that maybe, just maybe, a government waging a "spectacularly reckless and illegal" war with U.S. help isn’t going to be shamed into decency over coffee and photo ops. Ursula von der Leyen has already called Gaza’s situation a "man-made famine," Brussels has denounced illegal settlements and settler violence, and Kaja Kallas has said Israel’s right to self-defense doesn’t cover leveling Lebanon. Netanyahu’s response? The diplomatic equivalent of muting the group chat.

The twist is that Europe actually holds the money hose: the EU is Israel’s biggest trading partner, and Horizon research ties are worth more than all the hasbara talking points in the world. But internal EU disunity and a touching faith in the power of polite disappointment have meant zero consequences while Trump and Netanyahu run a maximalist regional project that treats the two-state solution like a bad joke from the 1990s.

Now the ground is shifting, mostly because reality finally kicked down the door. Orbán’s election humiliation removes Netanyahu’s favorite far-right human veto from the EU table, reopening the prospect of sanctions on violent West Bank settlers. Spain is openly pushing to suspend the EU-Israel association agreement over human rights violations, and even Giorgia Meloni — former fan-club president for illiberal strongmen — has paused a defense pact with Israel after Lebanon’s civilian death toll. When Meloni’s backing away from you, you’re not just off the rails, you’ve left the train, track, and continent.

As the US-Israel Iran adventure blows back into Europe’s economy, Brussels is being forced to consider something radical: using its enormous economic and academic leverage for more than symbolic wrist-slaps. After years of being treated as a doormat by Netanyahu, with Trump cheering from the White House, the EU may finally be inching toward consequences instead of condolences. If so, it’s about a decade late — but still marginally better than letting Washington and Jerusalem drive the region (and international law) straight off a cliff without even honking.

Elaine Luria, one of the former January 6 committee members Trump has on his eternal enemies list, is trying to claw her way back into Congress while the country enjoys Trump’s second-term combo pack: war with Iran, brutal federal cuts, and gas prices that look like your rent. She’s running in Virginia’s second district, a swing seat that now doubles as a referendum on whether voters still prefer democracy, or are sticking with the guy who started his comeback tour by pardoning 1,500 Capitol rioters like they were contest winners.

Luria’s old Republican replacement, Jennifer Kiggans, is described as a reliable rubber stamp for Trump, which is convenient, because this White House doesn’t really do “separate branches of government” anymore. While Trump’s approval sinks to 37%, his administration is busy weaponizing the justice department against people who annoyed him – like Letitia James and James Comey – and Biden had to hand out pre-emptive pardons to Jan 6 committee members on his way out the door just to keep them from being prosecuted for the crime of investigating an attempted coup.

So Luria’s campaign isn’t just about flipping a House seat; it’s about whether there will be enough Democrats in the chamber to act as any kind of brake on a president who has already turned insurrectionists into folk heroes, gutted the federal government, and turned DOJ into his personal grievance concierge. The wind may be at Democrats’ backs, but so is an administration that’s openly rewriting the rules to make sure accountability never happens again.

Having already fired watchdogs, gutted agencies, and declared emergencies like they’re promo codes, Trump’s Justice Department has now decided that the Presidential Records Act – the law that says presidential records belong to the public, not the dude in the Oval Office – is actually unconstitutional. The Office of Legal Counsel, led by T. Elliot Gaiser, helpfully announced that Congress forcing a president to preserve records is a “burdensome regime” with no valid purpose, because who could possibly imagine a reason voters might want to know what their government did.

Historians, archivists, and anyone who reads above a fifth-grade level point out that this is basically an effort to make the presidency answerable to no one, not even the court of history. That’s not a bug, it’s the feature: Gene Hamilton, now at America First Legal, calls the idea that Congress can tell the president what to do with his paperwork “insane,” which is bold talk from a movement that thinks executive power is unlimited unless a Democrat is using it. This isn’t record-keeping, it’s regime maintenance – an attempt to turn presidential documents into private property so Trump can hoard, destroy, or monetize them as he pleases, while the rest of us are told to enjoy the strong-man vibes and stop asking questions.

Donald Trump looked at a nursing home owner who diverted $39 million in employee payroll taxes while residents were neglected, injured, and dying, and thought: now there’s a guy who deserves mercy. Joseph Schwartz, whose empire allegedly left families like Doris Coulson’s with dead relatives and unpaid judgments, got a Trump pardon after admitting to the federal tax crime. The White House helpfully explained that Schwartz was the victim of “over prosecution” and that prison would be hard for a rich older man, which is apparently now a constitutional defense.

The families who sued Schwartz? They got a nearly $19 million wrongful death judgment that he never bothered to pay while he allegedly kept tens of millions in assets tucked safely out of his own name. Workers at his collapsing homes bought food for residents with their own money and discovered their health insurance premiums were taken but never funded, while Schwartz quietly spent over $1 million on lobbyists to secure his golden ticket from Trump — who, the White House assures us, definitely does not issue pardons at the request of lobbyists. Totally unrelated coincidence that the guy with seven figures for influence-peddling got “grace” and the people with dead parents got paperwork.

Even after the federal pardon, Arkansas squeezed out a nine-month sentence for Schwartz over Medicaid fraud, which turned out to be less of a punishment and more of a brief layover. A reporter tried to reach him in prison; the Coulson family’s lawyer tried to serve a subpoena to finally track his assets. Then, like clockwork, another lobbyist appeared, the parole board sprang him in under three weeks, and the reporter’s letter bounced back as undeliverable. The system moved with cheetah speed to shorten his punishment, but when it came to helping the people he allegedly damaged, the machinery suddenly remembered how to be very, very tired.

Nesrine Malik basically writes the field guide for understanding Trump’s second-term evil: it’s not the cinematic, uniformed, balcony-speech kind of fascism; it’s the stupid kind. The kind where a man can threaten “entire civilisations” while standing next to a gigantic Easter bunny, post himself as Jesus, and still unleash real wars, mass expulsions, and school bombings as background noise to his hurt feelings. The bodies pile up in Gaza, Iran, and Lebanon while the president of the United States governs like a YouTube comments section with nuclear codes.

The essay shreds the comforting myth that Trump can’t be fascist or truly dangerous because he’s too inept, too silly, too online. Malik points out that history’s monsters were often ridiculous in real time – Mussolini was a clown before he was a corpse in a gas station. Evil doesn’t always show up in Hugo Boss; sometimes it arrives as a thin-skinned boomer live-streaming his grievances, forever terrified of humiliation and determined to bomb his way out of feeling small.

Malik zeroes in on the performance aspect: cruelty as pageant. It’s not enough for ICE to destroy families – it has to be merchandised, complete with Trump grinning next to alligators in ICE caps under the slogan “Alligator Alcatraz” like a summer blockbuster about state terror. The pleasure isn’t just in the violence, but in flaunting the license to commit it, like The Purge with more golf and fewer ethics briefings. The message: this isn’t some manageable, ideology-free tantrum phase; it’s jubilant, escalating brutality.

The column closes on the obvious but still somehow controversial point: you don’t negotiate with this, you don’t downplay it as apolitical chaos that will burn itself out. You either fight it – urgently – or you let an emotionally broken man with a sociopath’s appetite for escalation and a toddler’s impulse control keep "reigning in Hell" from the Oval Office. The vibes may be clownish, but the body count is not.

The Trump administration’s idea of "peace talks" continues to be: send negotiators to Pakistan while the president liveblogs war crimes on Truth Social. As U.S. forces enforce a sweeping blockade of Iranian ports and help shut down the Strait of Hormuz — through which about 20% of the world’s oil normally moves — Trump bragged that Iran is losing "$500 Million Dollars a day" while the U.S. "loses nothing." Aside from, you know, global stability, maritime safety, and the concept of international law.

Not content with the blockade and a "precarious ceasefire" that expires Wednesday, Trump threatened that if Iran doesn’t accept his "very fair and reasonable DEAL," the United States will "knock out every single Power Plant, and every single Bridge, in Iran. NO MORE MR. NICE GUY!" Because nothing says responsible statesman like openly promising to target civilian infrastructure — on your own social network. Meanwhile, Indian-flagged ships are being shot at, tens of thousands of seafarers are trapped on vessels in the Gulf, and Iran vows to keep the Strait closed until the war ends. The administration calls this a path to peace; everyone stuck in the world’s most important oil chokepoint might describe it more as hostage diplomacy with cruise missiles.