The Trump Presidency Timeline

Republican senators have discovered a shocking new concept: if President Trump wants tens of billions more dollars for his Iran adventure, he might actually have to ask Congress to, you know, authorize the war. The conflict is now at day 75 of what Trump promised would be a four-to-five week joyride, Iran is choking the Strait of Hormuz, fuel prices are spiking, and the White House’s grand strategy appears to be: insist hostilities are over while U.S. forces keep getting shot at.

Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, and Rand Paul briefly emerged from the Senate’s Witness Protection Program to vote with Democrats on a War Powers resolution telling Trump to stop playing Commander-in-God and get authorization or get out. Murkowski even pointed out the awkward detail that the administration claims hostilities have ended, which would neatly erase any excuse for keeping troops in danger without Congress signing off. Meanwhile, House Republicans keep barely blocking similar efforts, proving that nothing unites the party like refusing to do its constitutional job.

Out in the real world, the Navy is warning it’ll have to start cutting training, operations, and personnel by July because the Iran war, charmingly branded Operation Epic Fury, wasn’t even budgeted for. At the same time, Central Command quietly took its civilian-harm reduction office from ten people to one just months after a U.S. strike on an Iranian school. So yes, the administration is burning through cash it doesn’t have on a war it hasn’t authorized, while dismantling the tiny bit of infrastructure meant to stop it from killing kids. But don’t worry, Trump says Xi Jinping promised not to ship weapons to Iran, and if there’s one thing you can bank on in this administration, it’s totally unverifiable promises from authoritarian pals.

The Supreme Court, having spent the last few years lighting reproductive rights on fire, has now graciously agreed to pour a thimble of water on the blaze. In a 7-2 shadow-docket special, the justices said mifepristone can keep being mailed nationwide, at least until they find a more procedurally convenient way to torture pregnant people. Louisiana’s big legal theory was essentially: "We banned abortion here, so obviously we get to control the mail for the entire country." Even this court had to squint and say, yeah, that’s not how standing works.

Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito, naturally, dissented from reality. Thomas declared that mailing abortion pills is a "criminal enterprise" and tried to resurrect the 1873 Comstock Act, because nothing screams "modern constitutional jurisprudence" like dusting off Victorian anti-smut laws to control your uterus. Alito whined that keeping mifepristone available by mail "undermines" Dobbs, as if the real constitutional injury is that women haven’t suffered quite enough yet under his magnum opus.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration chose the bold strategy of… not responding to a lawsuit against its own FDA, leaving drug manufacturers and former FDA officials to do the grown-up work. The same Christian nationalist law shop, Alliance Defending Freedom, is once again trying to let a single red state override federal drug regulation for everyone, because why stop at abortion when you can blow up the entire pharmaceutical approval system? The Court punted the case back to the Fifth Circuit clown car, so everyone can look forward to Round Two: Now With Even More Theocracy, in a future term.

For now, medication abortion — which accounts for about two-thirds of abortions and has been safely used for decades — survives another trip through the Republican pain machine. Providers are already planning backup regimens in case the justices change their minds later, because when your healthcare depends on a court that misses its own deadlines while quoting 19th-century obscenity laws, "temporary" is the best you’re allowed to hope for.

The Department of Justice, that plucky little agency formerly known for prosecuting crime, has reportedly decided to drop fraud charges against Gautam Adani – Asia’s richest man – right after he hired Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Robert Giuffra Jr. At a secret April meeting inside DOJ, Giuffra rolled in with a 100-slide presentation explaining why prosecutors supposedly had no case, and, as a helpful bonus, mentioned that Adani would invest $10bn in the US and create 15,000 jobs if the charges just happened to go away. Because when you’re totally innocent, you always sweeten your legal arguments with a multi-billion-dollar economic development package.

Prosecutors insisted the investment offer wouldn’t affect the outcome, but one senior DOJ official reportedly reacted warmly to the idea that justice might come bundled with a jobs program. This is the same case where Adani was accused of orchestrating $250m in bribes to Indian officials, lying to investors and banks to raise billions, and obstructing justice – conduct DOJ once described as major corruption at the expense of US investors. Now, post-Trump comeback and post-hiring-of-Trump’s-lawyer, that towering pile of alleged fraud appears to be melting away faster than ethics rules at Mar-a-Lago.

Adani, a close ally of Narendra Modi and the poster child for industrial-scale crony capitalism, has long faced accusations of favoritism, monopoly-building, and legal harassment of journalists who investigate his empire. Naturally, this makes him an ideal character in the Trump-era justice system, where powerful friends and well-connected attorneys can apparently turn a federal fraud indictment into a negotiation over how many jobs your get-out-of-jail-free card will create. Rule of law has now been rebranded as: how much can you invest, and do you have Trump’s guy on retainer?

Once upon a time, Republicans swore the government had no business messing with what broadcasters put on the air. Ronald Reagan’s FCC chair Mark Fowler said there was “no room” for the agency to play national hall monitor for TV content. Fast-forward to 2026 and Brendan Carr, Trump’s FCC chair, proudly announces, “This isn’t Ronald Reagan’s F.C.C. — and that’s a good thing,” which is a fun way of saying: we’ve moved from deregulation to state-approved comedy.

Trump’s FCC has now warned late-night hosts that if they keep mocking the president and then dare to book political candidates, they’d better cough up “equal time” for the opponents or face retaliation. They’re even investigating The View on the same theory, so apparently the full might of the federal government is now deployed against Joy Behar. The legal hook is a dusty “equal opportunities” statute that was supposed to prevent broadcasters from rigging access to candidates, not to force Jimmy Kimmel to hand out participation trophies to whichever Republican just got roasted in his monologue.

Conservatives spent decades insisting the Fairness Doctrine was Soviet tyranny; Trumpworld has essentially rebuilt a pettier, dumber version of it, targeted not at fairness but at hurt presidential feelings. The old line was “government shouldn’t pick winners and losers in the marketplace of ideas.” The new line is: mock Trump on TV, and the FCC shows up with a ruler and a copy of the U.S. Code. It’s less a communications policy than a federally subsidized safe space for the most powerful man in the country.

Trump’s Department of Justice, having apparently run out of actual crime, decided to go full surveillance state on trans kids’ medical records. They sent sweeping subpoenas to Rhode Island’s largest hospital for gender-affirming care, demanding birthdates, Social Security numbers, home addresses, intake forms, guardian authorizations – basically everything short of a GPS tracker for every trans child treated in the last five years. All under the noble banner of investigating ‘misbranding’ and ‘fraud,’ because nothing says careful law enforcement like using Texas prosecutors to hunt down patients in Rhode Island.

US district judge Mary McElroy took one look at this fishing expedition and hit the brakes, noting that while DOJ has “immense prosecutorial authority,” it has “proven unworthy of this trust at every point in this case.” That is a federal judge saying, as politely as possible, that the Trump administration’s law enforcers cannot be trusted not to abuse their power. She also pointed out the obvious: the administration has publicly smeared gender-affirming care for minors as “abuse,” ordered DOJ to wipe it out, and then “celebrated” when hospitals curtailed care under subpoena pressure. Totally normal behavior for a government that swears this is all just about pharma compliance, and not about building a handy list of trans kids and their parents to harass.

Meanwhile, at least seven other courts have already swatted down or narrowed similar subpoenas hurled at more than 20 doctors and hospitals, 11 families have launched a class-action suit to stop DOJ from grabbing their kids’ records, and NYU Langone just revealed it got its own grand jury subpoena from Texas for info on trans youth care. Major medical groups keep saying gender-affirming care is essential, evidence-based treatment; the Trump administration keeps responding by treating it like contraband and deploying federal prosecutors like morality police with subpoena printers. Call it what it is: not healthcare policy, but a federalized harassment campaign against trans kids dressed up as law enforcement.

Sebastian Gorka has finally unveiled his long-teased “life’s work” on counterterrorism, and it turns out the magnum opus is… a typo-riddled 16-page Trump valentine that treats intelligence assessments like fake news. The new U.S. counterterrorism strategy declares Latin American drug cartels the top threat, demotes Islamist militants to second place, and then pulls a full where’s Waldo on far-right extremism — the thing the FBI keeps saying is the leading domestic danger. Neo-Nazis and militias don’t even get a shout-out, but a relatively tiny slice of militant leftists is elevated to cosmic supervillain status, on par with al-Qaida.

What used to be a sober, bipartisan national security document is now a campaign brochure with classified letterhead. The strategy gushes over Trump’s greatness, recycles his conspiracy theories about a stolen election and an alleged genocide of Christians, and warns darkly about “alien cultures” threatening Western civilization. It even finds room to mention Biden seven times, just in case anyone forgot who the designated villain is. Actual data? That’s for losers and Democrats.

This is the logical sequel to Trump’s mass pardons for more than 1,500 Jan. 6 defendants, including people who assaulted police, all while Republicans pretended that focusing on far-right violence was an attack on “conservative organizing.” Now the White House has codified that delusion into national strategy, explicitly hunting for “violent leftist antifascists and anarchists” while pretending the guy who Googled Hitler and Nazis before a campus shooting is just a statistical rounding error. The message is clear: if you’re a right-wing extremist, you’re a misunderstood patriot; if you’re on the left, you’re the new ISIS.

Asked about the glaring holes and partisan tilt, the White House did what passes for accountability in Trump’s America: they sent a spokesperson to email a slogan about “crushing terrorist threats” and pointed reporters back to Gorka’s own glowing self-promo. America’s top counterterrorism document now functions less as a security roadmap and more as a loyalty test. Who needs evidence-based threat assessments when you can just criminalize your critics and call it strategy?

Trump has once again assembled his favorite species of American — the billionaire CEO — as set dressing for his latest attempt to look tough on China while desperately wanting a deal he can call "historic" on Fox & Friends. NBC notes that the invite to top executives is mostly posturing, which is a polite way of saying "stage-managed cosplay of economic statecraft" where the people whose supply chains he wrecked are dragged in to clap for the arsonist.

The White House is selling this as high-stakes strategy; in practice it's a casting call for whichever corporate leaders are willing to nod gravely while Trump alternates between threatening more tariffs and insisting the U.S. and China have a "fantastic relationship." Workers, farmers, and small businesses who got steamrolled by his trade war don't get an invite to this little oligarch salon — just the folks who can quietly pass the costs down the line and then pocket the tax cuts.

So the "deal" talk is less about fixing structural problems with China and more about producing a market-calming photo-op: Trump, Xi, and a ring of CEOs pretending this is all part of a 4D chess plan and not the diplomatic equivalent of a hostage negotiation conducted by reality TV producers. It’s the Trump doctrine in one tableau: break global trade, then ask the richest guys in the room to help you spin the rubble as a win.

The Trump administration has now reached the "spin the globe and pick a country" phase of its deportation policy. A federal judge ruled that ICE and the State Department most likely broke the law when they deported a 55-year-old Colombian woman, Adriana Maria Quiroz Zapata, to the Democratic Republic of Congo — a country that had explicitly said it would not take her. The judge has done the unthinkable in Trump’s immigration universe: ordered the U.S. to bring her back.

This fiasco is the byproduct of the White House leaning on agencies to find any country willing to accept migrants who can’t legally be sent home because they’d likely face persecution or torture there. So they cut side deals with governments, then tried to dump Ms. Zapata in Congo even after Congolese officials wrote ICE to say they couldn’t medically care for her diabetes, hyperlipidemia and hypothyroidism. When Congo is the one lecturing the United States on basic human decency and capacity, you know the moral floor has collapsed.

Rather than follow court rulings or basic asylum law, the administration’s strategy is essentially: "What if we just ignore everyone — judges, doctors, foreign governments — and see who we can shove on a plane?" It took a federal judge to point out that yes, that’s still illegal, even if Stephen Miller drew it on a whiteboard once. The cruelty isn’t a bug; it’s the operating system — and every now and then, an actual court hits Ctrl+Alt+Delete.