The Trump Presidency Timeline

The Trump justice department has reportedly decided that the real threat to America is not the guy found liable for sexual abuse and defamation, but the 82-year-old advice columnist who sued him and won. Federal prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation into E Jean Carroll for supposed perjury in a 2022 deposition — a claim a three-judge federal appeals panel already threw in the trash in 2024. When you lose two civil cases, owe your accuser $88m, and get branded a sexual abuser by a jury, naturally the next step is to send the full weight of the federal government after her.

The alleged crime? Carroll originally said she wasn’t getting outside funding for her lawsuit, then her lawyers later disclosed that a nonprofit backed by LinkedIn billionaire Reid Hoffman had helped cover some legal expenses. A judge let Alina Habba re-depose Carroll, an appeals court later ruled the perjury theory was bogus, and that should have been the end of this extremely boring non-scandal. Instead, Trump’s DOJ is now trying to resurrect it as a criminal case — a sort of legal Weekend at Bernie’s, but for authoritarian revenge fantasies.

Acting attorney general Todd Blanche has heroically recused himself, given that he used to represent Trump against Carroll. Don’t worry, though: the rest of DOJ is apparently free to keep functioning as Trump’s personal revenge concierge service. Carroll now joins a growing list of Trump enemies mysteriously attracting federal investigations: James Comey, Letitia James, Adam Schiff, Ilhan Omar — a veritable roll call of people whose main crime is not being sufficiently deferential to Dear Leader. No convictions so far, but that’s not really the point; the message is that if you cross Trump, the justice department might just come knocking.

This is what a captured justice system looks like: juries say Trump is liable for sexual abuse and defamation, and the governmental response is to criminally investigate the woman who told the truth. It’s less "law and order" and more "law as an order" — from one man, aimed squarely at anyone who dares to hold him accountable.

Trump’s end-of-term get-out-of-felony-free card for scandal magnet Elliott Broidy is really paying off. Broidy, who pleaded guilty in 2020 to secretly lobbying Trump’s own White House on behalf of Chinese and Malaysian interests, is now the proud CEO of LEO Technologies, the company that just landed a $106m Department of Justice contract to use AI to translate, transcribe, and monitor federal prison phone calls. From foreign influence peddler to taxpayer-funded surveillance czar — the American dream is alive and extremely compromised.

This is the same Elliott Broidy who previously admitted to paying nearly $1m in bribes to New York officials to snag pension fund business, got that felony later downgraded, became an RNC deputy finance chair, arranged a $1.6m payoff to a Playboy model (with a cameo from Michael Cohen), and then took $9m from a foreign national to lobby Trump and his Justice Department. Trump’s DOJ literally wrote that he agreed to lobby “the President of the United States, the Attorney General, and other high level officials” — and then Trump just pardoned him on his way out the door.

Now Broidy’s firm — whose website charmingly describes prison phone calls as “the world’s largest concentration of criminally-minded activity – all on recorded lines, all legally accessible” — gets to hoover up and algorithmically sift through incarcerated people’s conversations, courtesy of the same Justice Department his foreign clients once tried to manipulate. LEO insists Broidy had nothing to do with the bidding process, and the Bureau of Prisons says there’s no evidence his Trump ties helped. Sure. Just a total coincidence that the pardoned, twice-convicted influence peddler who thinks “life is sales” is now selling surveillance back to the government he once tried to secretly purchase.

Trump has finally achieved the dream of every mid-tier mobster and overleveraged landlord: he sued the federal government for $10bn, then "settled" by giving himself a $1.776bn taxpayer-funded slush fund and a get-out-of-taxes-free card. His own acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, helpfully produced a memo waiving Trump’s current and future IRS liabilities and trying to wall off every other agency from touching him. Roy Cohn would be proud; the rest of us get to pay for it.

Meanwhile, the East Wing is gone, replaced by a billion-dollar bunker-ballroom hybrid that Trump tried to label "critical national security infrastructure" after yet another assassination attempt. Republicans only found a spine long enough to strip the public funding when they got spooked about the midterms, but the private donors lining up for contracts and regulatory favors are doing just fine. The Trump family’s billions in crypto profits and a $400m Qatari jumbo jet for a handy $5.5bn resort deal are just background noise in this full-time kleptocracy.

The real innovation isn’t the corruption; it’s the impunity. With the Supreme Court’s "presumptive immunity" ruling as a backdrop, this IRS deal flirts with blanket immunity for everything else, forever. Legal experts are openly wondering how, or if, it can even be stopped before the money is gone and the recipients disappear into redacted PDFs. Trump has figured out he doesn’t need votes, a party, or public approval—just power and a direct line to the Treasury. As his approval numbers crater, his demands for public cash to fund vanity arches, bunkers, and monuments only grow. The message is clear: he breaks the law in broad daylight so often that you’ll eventually stop believing law exists at all.

That creeping cynicism—moving off the grid to read novels while the president loots the country—isn’t a side effect, it’s the strategy. Autocracy doesn’t always arrive with tanks; sometimes it shows up as a president "suing himself" and then quietly turning your tax dollars into hush money and loyalty payoffs while everyone shrugs and changes the channel.

The Trump administration’s favorite new pastime—extrajudicially vaporizing boats in Latin American waters—has claimed another life. US Southern Command released a hype video of a "suspected" drug boat speeding along before it’s turned into a floating fireball, then patted itself on the back for calling the Coast Guard after the explosion to see who might still be alive. One man is dead, two survived, and we still have zero public evidence that the boat was carrying anything more illegal than a bad life plan.

This is part of Trump’s ongoing oceanic snuff-film campaign that’s been running since early September, killing at least 194 people on the theory that the US is "at war" with Latin American drug cartels. Conveniently for the White House, "war" here means you can skip trials, skip proof, and go straight to remote-controlled execution in international waters. The Pentagon inspector general has bravely stepped up to announce a "self-initiated" review—not of whether it’s legal to blow up untried suspects at sea—but of whether the paperwork and six-phase targeting cycle were filled out correctly before the missiles flew. America: where the real crime is improper form routing, not turning the Pacific into a jurisdiction-free kill zone.

Republicans in Texas drew themselves such a friendly little congressional map that they managed to do what multiple Trump impeachments could not: knock out Al Green. After the GOP legislature helpfully "reimagined" Houston’s lines to flip seats for the party – at Trump's urging to protect the House majority – Green’s deep-blue TX-09 was basically disappeared, shoving him into a brutal primary runoff in a different district.

Christian Menefee, a freshman Democrat who just arrived via special election, beat the 20-year incumbent in that engineered cage match. Green tried to warn that Menefee was a little too cozy with "Trump crypto cronies" and big-money politics, but when the map is rigged before voters even show up, nuance tends to lose. The GOP got what it wanted: fewer safe seats for Trump critics, more structural advantage for the party that keeps failing upward.

The irony is almost too on-the-nose. Green became nationally known for protesting Trump, including getting booted from the State of the Union after holding a sign that read "Black people aren’t apes!" in response to Trump sharing a racist AI video depicting the Obamas as simians. For his trouble, the system didn’t just try to silence him – it redrew him out of existence. American democracy remains fully committed to free speech, as long as you understand that the mapmakers and their favorite authoritarian get the last word.

The Trump administration has apparently decided that the best way to handle Americans exposed to Ebola is to ship them to Kenya like defective merchandise, rather than bring them back to the country that allegedly issued their passports. Past administrations used state-of-the-art biocontainment units in the U.S.; this one is experimenting with a bold new model of medical deportation. Unless you’re lucky enough to be one of the chosen few who got flown to Germany or the Czech Republic, in which case congratulations, you’ve unlocked the NATO Tier of American citizenship.

This is all happening against the backdrop of an Ebola outbreak in Congo that exploded to over 1,000 cases and 200+ deaths in eleven days, helped along nicely by Trump’s earlier aid cuts that dismantled disease surveillance networks and medical supply chains that might have contained it. First they break the global health system, then they use the mess they made to justify slamming the door with Title 42—blocking not just immigrants but even legal permanent residents who’d been in Congo, Uganda, or South Sudan. Now they’re extending that logic to their own citizens: if you might be sick, you’re someone else’s problem.

A few dozen Public Health Service officers are being trained to deploy to Kenya to tend to the exiled Americans, who will be monitored there and then, if they actually get sick, potentially shipped on again to Europe. It’s like a frequent flyer program, except the reward is being treated anywhere but your own country. This is not a public health strategy; it’s a vibes-based quarantine policy where the only consistent principle is that Trump’s America will do anything—gut aid, outsource care, bend public health law—rather than accept responsibility for the consequences of its own decisions.