The Trump Presidency Timeline

Trump’s America is going so tremendously well that the president of the Center for Victims of Torture – a group that literally helps people recover from secret police and dictators – is packing up his American-born kids and fleeing back to Australia because the U.S. now feels too authoritarian and dangerous. Within days of Trump’s second inauguration, the administration froze US$20m in funding for CVT by email, forcing the furlough of 430 staff and the shutdown of torture-rehab programs in refugee camps across the Middle East and Africa. Apparently the real torture was giving traumatized people therapy instead of sending more money to the Pentagon.

Once the funding was gutted, the government moved on to the fun part: kidnapping legal immigrants. ICE flooded Minneapolis, grabbed six CVT clients who were in the U.S. legally – including two who were abducted right out of their immigration check-ins – and flew them 1,800km away to a Texas detention center. While Trump publicly jokes about being “dictator for one day” and gushes over Kim Jong-un’s instant obedience, his loyalists are busy trying to criminally charge critics like James Comey, flirting with rolling back same-sex marriage protections, and turning migrants’ lives into a choice between “Alligator Alcatraz” and a Salvadoran prison. Freedom™ now comes with a side of state terror and a 40% Pentagon budget increase.

The punchline: this time Americans voted for it. Trump won the popular vote in 2024, and his followers are already rocking “Trump 2028” hats despite that awkward Constitution thing. Steve Bannon calls him an “instrument of divine will” who must stay in power “at least one more term,” which is definitely the kind of normal, chill thing you say in a functioning democracy. So Simon Adams does the unthinkable patriotic act: he leaves. He’d rather live in a country that still believes in democracy, human rights, and science than stick around in a place where performative cruelty is national policy and the crocodile of authoritarianism is already picking out its next snack.

Sen. Bill Cassidy went on national television to bravely confess that his vote to convict Donald Trump for inciting an insurrection “might be” a liability in a Republican primary — as if the problem here is his campaign prospects, not the whole "violent attempt to overturn an election" part. When the party line is that backing the Constitution is a risky brand decision, you’re not a political movement anymore, you’re a loyalty cult with better stationary.

This is the modern GOP job interview: "Did you support Trump’s effort to cling to power after losing?" Answer "yes" and you’re a patriot. Answer "no" and, as Cassidy helpfully explains, you’ve created a messaging challenge for yourself with the base that now treats not supporting a coup as a character flaw. American democracy remains technically alive, but only because its would‑be executioners are still busy polling the focus groups.

NASA sends four astronauts around the far side of the moon to inspire humanity, deepen our sense of planetary fragility, and advance science. Donald Trump responds by yanking the US out of the Paris climate agreement for the second time and trying to kneecap NASA’s budget, because nothing says “visionary leadership” like betting against both Earth and science in the same fiscal year.

The Guardian notes that Artemis II only survived thanks to a rare moment of bipartisan clarity in Congress, which briefly remembered that space exploration is more useful than yet another tax break for whichever oligarch texted Trump last. While Christina Koch is up there talking about Earth’s miraculous generosity, Trump is down here radiating what the editorial politely calls “murderous bellicosity” and less politely resembles a man who saw the overview effect and chose the eviction notice instead.

The piece worries that a £100bn moon program can become a shiny distraction from not torching the one planet we already have, especially when it’s framed as a billionaire space race and a US–China resource grab, complete with plans to drop a nuclear reactor on the moon by 2030. Still, the editorial gives credit where it’s due: to the scientists and astronauts, not the White House currently trying to turn climate policy into a bonfire and foreign policy into a threat reel.

The Trump administration spent last week workshopping new ways to make sure no one can ever prove what they did. First, the Justice Department coughed up a 52-page fever dream from election-denying Alito clerk T. Elliot Gaiser declaring the Presidential Records Act unconstitutional – because apparently Congress has no "legislative purpose" in asking presidents not to shred history like a mob accountant. Conveniently, this would let Trump decide which evidence of wrongdoing lives, dies, or gets fed to the Mar-a-Lago pool filter.

As a visual aid, Trump also dropped an AI-rendered promo for his "presidential library" – a Miami waterfront skyscraper that looks less like an archive and more like a timeshare for oligarchs. He helpfully clarified, "I don’t believe in building libraries or museums," which is at least the most honest thing he’s said about education. Instead of documents, the plan is a golden statue of himself and a 747 in the atrium, because when your legacy is pardoning January 6 rioters, purging DOJ and FBI officials who investigated them, and making entire databases of insurrection charges vanish, there’s not much left to shelve besides the merch.

To really cement the amnesia project, Trump fired the actual Archivist of the United States and replaced her with Marco Rubio and a senior archivist from the Richard Nixon Foundation, because if you’re going to erase presidential crimes, you might as well bring in the franchise players. Meanwhile, cronies like Corey Lewandowski reportedly strut around DHS bragging that Trump will pardon them for anything, while figures like Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi hover in the gray zone of maybe-pre-pardoned, maybe-just-blackmailable. The Supreme Court’s 2024 gift of near-total presidential immunity is the cherry on top: corrupt pardons and document destruction now come bundled with a constitutional warranty.

Democrats are left talking about truth commissions and shaming website-scrubbers, which is adorable against an administration that openly markets itself as a historical Etch A Sketch. The message from Trump World is brutally simple: loyalty gets you impunity, impunity gets you amnesia, and amnesia keeps the grift going. The American people’s right to "reconstruct and come to terms with their history" has been replaced with an AI video of a fake library and a real plan to burn the archives.

The US has launched an illegal, unprovoked war on Iran and instead of bothering with constitutional niceties like Congress or declared war, the Trump administration has decided to market it like a cross between the Winter Olympics and Call of Duty. One minute drones are giving us gorgeous slow‑mo shots of skiers, the next they’re serving up snackable war crimes content of Iranian civilians and infrastructure getting vaporized, all trimmed into neat two‑minute clips for your doomscrolling pleasure.

This isn’t just aesthetic overlap; it’s policy. The White House hasn’t even pretended to justify the war or seek authorization. Instead, it’s busy meme-ifying mass death, dropping Hollywood and gaming imagery into official videos and reframing the whole thing as sports fandom: no context, no bodies, just clean highlight reels of "targets" exploding. The Pentagon used drone racing as a recruiting pipeline and gear incubator, then quietly graduated to the big leagues: Shahed knockoffs and US-made Lucas drones as the defining weapons of a forever streamable conflict.

Trump’s own briefings are now reportedly daily hype videos of “stuff blowing up”, edited by a team of social media managers like they’re cutting a Wembanyama dunk package. The commander-in-chief is basically watching a personalized war TikTok while the rest of the country is nudged to consume the Iran campaign like March Madness: passive, remote, and stripped of any human cost. Who needs constitutional checks and public debate when you’ve got drone footage, EDM, and a president treating an undeclared war as his favorite new content vertical?

The Trump Education Department has discovered a bold new frontier in "civil rights" enforcement: stopping it. The agency just tore up settlements that Obama and Biden officials negotiated with five school districts and a college, agreements that required schools to actually follow federal civil rights law for transgender students. Cape Henlopen in Delaware, Fife in Washington, Delaware Valley in Pennsylvania, plus La Mesa-Spring Valley, Sacramento City Unified, and Taft College in California all just got a friendly reminder that Washington is done backing up trans kids.

This isn’t a one-off clerical tweak; it’s the first time the administration has openly torched existing civil-rights settlements because they protected the wrong kind of students. While some districts like Sacramento are gamely insisting they’ll keep supporting LGBTQ+ students, the federal government has essentially hung a sign on the Office for Civil Rights door that says: "Trans kids need not apply."

Assistant secretary for civil rights Kimberly Richey helpfully explained that this is all about shielding girls’ and women’s sports and locker rooms from the terrifying menace of… teenagers trying to use the bathroom and play sports with their peers. She denounced prior administrations for a "radical transgender agenda," which apparently consisted of "enforcing the law as written and interpreted by courts." The same administration that sues states for letting trans students play on teams is now proudly withdrawing from agreements that made districts comply with Title IX. Nothing says "equal protection" like ripping up civil-rights settlements to own the kids.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick — the man Trump decided should oversee American commerce, not, say, his own alibis — will sit for a voluntary interview with the House Oversight Committee on May 6 about his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. Chair James Comer is very proud that Lutnick has "proactively" agreed to talk, which is a nice, gentle way of saying, "we found the flight logs."

Lutnick previously told the New York Post that by 2005 he had decided Epstein was "disgusting" and that he wanted nothing to do with him. Bold stance. Unfortunately for that heroic origin story, Justice Department files show Lutnick and his family paid a friendly little visit to Epstein’s island in 2012 — four years after Epstein pleaded guilty to sex crimes with a minor — and that he appears to have invited Epstein to a small Hillary Clinton fundraiser in 2015. For a guy who wanted "nothing to do" with Epstein, he sure had a hard time saying no to the private island and the donor list.

Pressed in a Senate hearing, Lutnick said he can’t remember why he took the trip to the island, but assures us there was nothing "untoward" about it. Because when you fly to a convicted sex offender’s private island with your family, years after the conviction, it’s usually just for the vibes. He now says he’s eager to "set the record straight" before the committee and insists he’s done nothing wrong — a phrase that, in this administration, might as well be printed on the official Cabinet letterhead.

Authorities haven’t accused Lutnick of a crime, but the Commerce Secretary being neck-deep in the Epstein orbit while running a major federal department is exactly the kind of ethical tire fire you’d expect from a government that treats background checks as a personal insult. America’s economic policy, brought to you by people who can’t remember why they went to sex predator island.

Donald Trump, now fully committed to speedrunning the authoritarian playbook, used a White House press conference to threaten that his administration will tell a media outlet: "national security, give [the source] up or go to jail" over reporting on a missing US airman in Iran. He didn’t bother naming the outlet or the reporter, because the point wasn’t precision – the point was to broadcast that the government will happily dangle jail time over journalists until they cough up their sources. The First Amendment remains technically in effect, but only because Trump hasn’t figured out how to issue executive orders against the Constitution in all caps yet.

This is not a one-off tantrum; it’s a continuation. The same administration already sent the FBI to raid Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson’s home after she used more than 1,000 anonymous sources to document Trump’s federal government clown show. Now the message to the press is clear: report on what the government doesn’t like, and the president will personally fantasize about you in an orange jumpsuit. As the Freedom of the Press Foundation gently reminded him, journalists don’t work for the government, and the First Amendment doesn’t magically disappear every time a president says "national security" like it’s a Hogwarts spell. But Trump’s second-term project is obvious: turn leaks into crimes, journalism into collaboration, and the press corps into a parole board meeting.

Donald Trump rolled out of his Truth Social bunker last night to endorse former Fox News host and David Cameron sidekick Steve Hilton for California governor, because why wouldn’t the largest state in the country be run by a guy whose main qualification is once yelling at liberals on cable news?

Trump promised that “as President, I will help him” and that “with Federal help, and a Great Governor, like Steve Hilton, California can be better than ever before!” Subtle as a brick: elect my guy and maybe the federal government will stop treating the country’s biggest economy like an enemy state. Elect anyone else and enjoy four more years of disaster tourism from Mar-a-Lago.

The GOP field is basically Hilton vs. Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, while eight Democrats politely reenact the Spider-Man pointing meme in California’s jungle primary. Polls show no clear frontrunner and a non-trivial chance of a two-Republican general, which is why the state party chair is begging low-polling Democrats to stop cosplaying as viable candidates. Meanwhile, Hilton is out here promising tax cuts, homeownership, and better test scores, as if the main structural barrier to California’s future was not enough Steve Hilton in it.

So the Trump machine is now explicitly offering a loyalty rewards program for governors: say the right things on TV, get the presidential seal of approval and a vague promise of extra federal goodies. It’s not quite handing out ambassadorships to donors, but it’s the same basic model—just with more wildfire risk and a much bigger GDP.

The Michigan Democratic party looked at its 2024 faceplant with Arab American voters and said: "What if we just do that again, but louder?" In a tight three-way Senate primary, state senator Mallory McMorrow and her friends in the professional centrist-industrial complex are trying to bludgeon Abdul El-Sayed by screaming "antisemitism" at Hasan Piker, a Muslim streamer with 3 million followers whose main crime appears to be criticizing Israel’s ongoing habit of turning Gaza and southern Lebanon into craters. Helping out: the Anti-Defamation League, Third Way, Senator Elissa Slotkin, and, for that extra dystopian flavor, the Trump administration, all happily aligned on the noble project of policing who Democrats are allowed to stand next to on a stage.

Arab American leaders, watching their ancestral villages in southern Lebanon literally wiped off the map while being told their grief is politically inconvenient, are not exactly impressed. They point out that Harris already lost Michigan by 80,000 votes after her Israel policy bled at least 100,000 votes, but party elites seem determined to prove that you really can lose the same state the same way twice. While McMorrow solemnly insists that hosting rallies with Piker "fans the flames" after a synagogue attack that Arab Americans also condemned, the actual asymmetry is crystal clear: Israel gets compassion, Arabs get lectures, and corporate-backed Democrats get to pretend this is moral clarity instead of electoral negligence.

Meanwhile, Piker is the same guy the Harris campaign once invited to stream from the 2024 DNC and who’s been praised by Bernie Sanders, but now he’s apparently too radioactive to be in a room with Democrats who take AIPAC checks. Michigan has the largest Arab American population per capita in the country, over a million Lebanese civilians have been displaced, and virtually every Lebanese American family in the state knows someone killed or driven from their home. The party establishment’s response is to treat their pain like a messaging problem to be suppressed, then act shocked when those voters decide they don’t feel like saving the same people who keep telling them to shut up and fall in line.