The Trump Presidency Timeline

The Trump administration has discovered a bold new way to own the libs: make your electricity more expensive and your air less breathable. Four federal judges – including a Trump appointee who apparently read the law at least once – have had to slap temporary injunctions on Interior’s attempts to kneecap five offshore wind projects in Virginia, New York, and New England that are already billions of dollars in and nearly ready to go online. At the same time, Trump’s energy team is issuing "emergency" orders to keep five decrepit coal plants on life support, forcing costly repairs so Americans can pay extra for the privilege of inhaling 20th-century pollution in 2026.

While the administration smashes the brakes on cheap wind and solar, it’s flooring the gas pedal on liquefied natural gas exports. Result: a 22% jump in LNG exports and US households shelling out an extra $12 billion for natural gas in just the first nine months of 2025, according to Public Citizen. Energy secretary Chris Wright – a former oil and gas CEO, because of course he is – has been flying to Europe to lobby for weaker methane rules so his buddies can ship more LNG. Those buddies include fracking billionaire Harold Hamm, who helped host a Mar-a-Lago fundraiser where Trump pitched fossil fuel CEOs on a $1 billion campaign donation in exchange for a "sweeping" pro-fossil fuel agenda. They ponied up about $75 million and, what do you know, policy now looks like it was written by a refinery lobbyist with a Sharpie.

Experts keep pointing out the obvious: if you want lower electricity prices, you don’t stall wind and solar projects that are already under construction and revive coal plants regulators decided were too expensive and unnecessary. But Trump, still swooning over "beautiful clean coal" and calling wind the "scam of the century", slashed solar tax credits in his One Big Beautiful Bill Act and is using the Energy Department to overrule utility regulators whose actual job is to consider cost and reliability. The result is a donor-driven energy agenda that raises power prices, worsens the climate crisis, and shovels hundreds of millions in extra costs onto consumers – all so a handful of fossil fuel billionaires can squeeze a few more quarters out of a dying business model.

Trump has unveiled TrumpRx, a government-branded prescription drug site he’s bragging up as “the largest reduction in prescription drug prices in history” – a bold claim for a portal that lists just 43 drugs, many of which are old, off-patent, and already cheaper pretty much everywhere else. One example: Protonix is a cool $200.10 on TrumpRx, while the generic version is $6.07 on Mark Cuban’s Cost Plus Drugs. That’s not a savings, that’s performance art.

Experts point out that patients could usually do better by just asking their pharmacist, using existing sites like GoodRx or Cost Plus, or – wild idea – relying on insurance. TrumpRx is even reportedly powered by GoodRx, which makes this whole thing the healthcare equivalent of screenshotting someone else’s website and calling it innovation. In some narrow cases, like a few fertility drugs or a specific weight loss med, the deals are decent – but they’re often identical to the manufacturer’s own offers, and the GLP-1 discounts for Wegovy and Ozempic expire in a month or two and only apply to the lowest dose.

Meanwhile, Republicans are pushing nearly $1bn in Medicaid cuts and letting ACA tax credits expire, making healthcare more expensive while Trump stands in front of a podium yelling about imaginary 578% savings on Novo Nordisk drugs. The actual site quietly admits the discounts are more like 74–85% off list price, which is still not as good as many people already get through insurance. As one advocate put it, the administration is pretending it just saved America, when in reality many people who use TrumpRx will pay more than they needed to. It doesn’t fix drug pricing, it doesn’t increase transparency – it just adds one more confusing, misleading layer to a broken system and calls it victory.

The Trump administration’s deportation machine has now graduated from caging children to psychologically and physically tormenting a 42-year-old Irish plasterer with a valid work permit whose biggest crime is buying supplies at a hardware store. Seamus Culleton, who overstayed a visa years ago but is now married to a U.S. citizen and on the path to a green card, has been locked in an El Paso ICE facility for five months, jammed into a filthy room with 71 other detainees, barely fed, and given almost no access to fresh air or exercise. He describes the conditions as “torture” and says he fears the staff, not the other detainees. America First apparently means Geneva Conventions Last.

In a particularly on-brand twist, ICE snatched him before his final green card interview—the one that would have confirmed his legal status. His lawyer calls his detention “inexplicable,” which is generous; it’s perfectly explicable if the goal is to demonstrate that in Trump’s America, the process is the punishment and paperwork is just a prop. While Culleton begs the Irish government and taoiseach Micheál Martin to get him out before he’s deported by the “least immigrant-friendly” appeals court in the country, Dublin is busy trying not to upset the guy in the White House who already rants about Ireland’s taxes, trade, and immigration.

Meanwhile, data quietly shows that fewer than 14% of the nearly 400,000 immigrants ICE arrested in year one of Trump’s second term had violent charges or convictions, which somewhat undermines the whole “we’re only going after the worst of the worst” bedtime story. Even Trump’s own “border czar” Tom Homan reportedly warned that this kind of dragnet enforcement would erode public support. The administration heard that and seems to have responded: challenge accepted. Why limit yourself to demonizing brown migrants when you can terrorize a white Irish small business owner too and prove that no one is safe from the rage of a government that treats due process like an optional add-on?

The Trump administration decided that the real threat to national security wasn’t, say, violent extremists or foreign hackers, but a Tufts PhD student who wrote a campus op-ed criticizing her university’s response to Israel’s war on Gaza. So DHS yanked Rümeysa Öztürk’s student visa, grabbed her off a Massachusetts street, and tried to deport her for the crime of having an opinion. Very bold experiment in turning the student newspaper into a deportation trigger.

Unfortunately for the White House thought-police project, an immigration judge in Boston looked at this First-Amendment-speedrun-to-fascism and concluded DHS had failed to prove she was even removable, terminating the case. This follows a federal judge already finding that her 45-day detention in Louisiana likely amounted to unlawful retaliation for her speech. So yes, the government held a child development researcher in a Southern detention facility because she wrote words on a college campus, and the courts had to explain that "criticizing a war" is not a deportable offense. The administration can still appeal, because nothing says "respect for free speech" like the Department of Justice doubling down on punishing a student editorial.

Steve Bannon, the human cigar ash that gained sentience, just got a love letter from Donald Trump’s Department of Justice. Despite Bannon’s 2022 conviction on two counts of contempt of Congress for blowing off the January 6 committee, the Trump-run DOJ has now decided that tossing his criminal case is somehow "in the interests of justice". Apparently "justice" now means: if you help incite an insurrection and stonewall investigators, you get retroactive VIP treatment.

The motion to dismiss was signed by none other than US attorney Jeanine Pirro, because this timeline is written by drunk fan fiction authors. Pirro is asking a Trump-appointed judge, Carl Nichols, to dismiss the case with prejudice, which would permanently shield Bannon from being re-prosecuted for telling Congress to go pound sand after going on air and promising that "all hell is going to break loose" on January 6. In a functioning democracy, that gets you more scrutiny; in Trump’s America, it gets you a get-out-of-contempt-free card.

This is all part of the administration’s ongoing project to launder January 6 into a kind of patriotic cosplay. Trump has already pardoned over 1,000 rioters, and now his DOJ is busy erasing what little accountability was left for the people who helped plan, cheerlead, and then obstruct the investigation. The message is crystal clear: if you’re loyal to Trump, the law is optional; if you’re loyal to the Constitution, you’re the sucker.

Ghislaine Maxwell beamed into the House Oversight Committee, said absolutely nothing, and then had her lawyer announce she’s ready to “speak fully and honestly” — just as soon as Donald Trump hands her a get-out-of-prison-(more)-free card. The message couldn’t be clearer: presidential clemency is now being treated like a premium subscription tier for access to the truth about Jeffrey Epstein.

Her attorney helpfully pre-cleared both Trump and Bill Clinton as innocent of any wrongdoing, promising that only Maxwell can explain why, once she’s been liberated by the very guy who “hasn’t thought about” pardoning her, except for when he publicly refuses to rule it out. Meanwhile, she keeps her mouth shut under the Fifth, sits in a cushier Texas prison camp, and dangles potential testimony over Congress like a paywalled confession.

Republicans like James Comer are suddenly against clemency, Democrats like Ro Khanna are flirting with retaliatory harsher confinement, and Maxwell’s lawyer is accusing Congress of authoritarianism for wanting consequences. So the authoritarian card is now being played by the legal team of a convicted sex trafficker trying to bargain for a Trump pardon. American justice has entered the DLC phase, and the price of the expansion pack is presidential corruption.