The Trump Presidency Timeline

The Trump administration’s dream of an official “anti-weaponization fund” for MAGA martyrs hit a bipartisan wall, so naturally they’ve moved on to Plan B: quietly running January 6 rioters through the Federal Tort Claims Act like it’s a rewards program for assaulting cops. The same people who shoved, sprayed, and beat police officers at the Capitol — and then got pardoned by Trump — are now filing FTCA claims for millions because they say they were "unfairly" prosecuted. The Justice Department, conveniently under Trump’s control, has essentially unchecked discretion to settle these claims out of a perpetual pot of taxpayer cash known as the Judgment Fund. You know, the exact same bucket his $1.8 billion slush fund was going to drain.

We’ve already watched this movie with Michael Flynn and Carter Page, who each walked away with $1.25 million after the Trump DOJ decided, with shocking generosity, that they deserved it. Now a Trump pal, Florida lawyer Peter Ticktin, has fired off around 400 FTCA claims for January 6 defendants, while Mark McCloskey — the rifle-on-the-lawn guy from Missouri, naturally — is helpfully explaining that FTCA is better than the scrapped weaponization fund because there are fewer pesky competitors for the money. Among the aspiring beneficiaries: men convicted of assaulting police with their bodies, bear spray, and a whip-like weapon, all insisting they were victims of malicious prosecution despite grand jury indictments, guilty pleas, and judge-signed sentences.

Former DOJ officials are politely screaming that this risks turning the Judgment Fund into exactly the kind of political payoff pool Congress tried to stop, warning that as long as someone files a bogus claim and Treasury looks the other way, there’s no real limit on what Trump’s people can do. Meanwhile, the same crowd that chants "back the blue" is now arguing that the real injustice is what happened to the guys who maced and tackled the blue on Trump’s behalf. The administration is technically moving to dismiss at least one of these lawsuits on procedural grounds, but the bigger story is clear: under Trump, the federal government isn’t just forgiving insurrectionists — it’s workshopping ways to cut them checks for their trouble.

Trump has decided that the best person to run America’s national security apparatus is Jay Clayton — yes, the corporate lawyer / former SEC chair whose main experience with "threats" involves hostile takeovers and securities fraud. The Senate Intelligence Committee now gets to pretend this is a normal nomination and not an attempt to turn national security into yet another Trump-branded legal defense team with security clearances.

Instead of a career intelligence professional, the White House is pushing a guy whose primary qualification appears to be knowing which oligarchs have which shell companies. In a functioning democracy, that might raise questions about conflicts of interest, capture of the security state by corporate power, and whether the director of national security should maybe know something about, say, national security. In Trump’s America, it’s just Tuesday.

The hearing will feature solemn speeches about "bipartisanship" and "the gravity of the role" from the same senators who rubber-stamped turning DHS into a campaign prop and CIA into a revenge fantasy factory. If history is any guide, they’ll clutch some pearls, ask a few sternly worded questions for B-roll, then hand the keys to the intel community to a man whose career goal has been keeping powerful people out of jail, not protecting the country from them.

Alabama Republicans have chosen Rep. Barry Moore as their next likely senator, because why just have Tommy Tuberville embarrassing the state from the governor’s mansion when you can send a Trump-endorsed knockoff to the Senate? Moore beat former Navy SEAL Jared Hudson in a runoff that mostly served to answer the timeless question: if both candidates swear undying loyalty to Donald Trump, which one does the Dear Leader pick?

Moore made sure everyone knew his big qualification: Donald Trump takes his calls. Not policy, not competence, not legislative skill—just that he can get through on the Mar-a-Lago help line. In return, Trump blessed him as an “America First Patriot,” which in this context means a guy who spends his time railing against transgender girls in sports and “lawless Democrat sanctuary cities” while polishing his pro-gun credentials like they’re the nuclear codes.

The race also featured a delightful subplot about whether Moore did a little creative writing on his military record. A coalition letter listed him as a “staff sergeant,” but records show he was discharged as a cadet. His campaign’s explanation? The organizers just gave him the rank, and he never “affirmed” it. Very normal thing that happens, totally not the political equivalent of letting someone else write your résumé and then pretending you never saw it. When pressed about a 2020 ad bragging he’s “been in those combat boots,” his team helpfully posted a link to the literal shoe to prove that, yes, National Guard members wear boots too. Inspiring stuff.

Meanwhile, Hudson ran as a “warrior for President Trump’s America First Agenda” who would “deploy to the Senate” to defend Trump, as if the upper chamber is just another forward operating base in the ongoing war against reality. Voters went with the guy whose main selling point is that he can dial up Trump like a late-night infomercial, potentially sending yet another loyalist with a flexible relationship to truth and basic governance to the world’s most overrated deliberative body. Democracy: still speed-running the “personality cult” level.

Republican voters in Georgia have bravely stood up to Donald Trump’s influence by rejecting his endorsed fake elector Burt Jones and instead rallying behind Rick Jackson, a billionaire who spent over $100 million to convince them he’s the Trumpiest non-Trump on the ballot. Democracy is alive and well, provided you can light nine figures on fire to prove you’re an America First outsider who also happens to be rich enough to buy every ad slot between SEC football games.

Jackson plastered the airwaves with spots calling himself a “straight-talking, Trump-supporting self-made outsider,” while Jones ran on the more traditional platform of having literally tried to help overturn the 2020 election as part of the alternate elector scheme. Trump blessed Jones as a “fanatic” for election fraud claims, Brian Kemp showed up late with an endorsement like a dad at a recital, and still the base chose the guy who acts like Trump over the guy who helped him undermine the vote.

Helping move this inspiring tale of grassroots billionairedom along: Ted Cruz and Rick Scott, who vouched that Jackson is so rich he doesn’t even have to do this, which has somehow become a moral credential in Republican politics instead of a blazing red oligarchy siren. Don Jr. chimed in online to declare that either way it was a win for MAGA, which is true in the sense that whether Georgia ends up with a democracy-skeptical fake elector or a mega-rich Trump cosplayer as governor, the GOP has firmly established that the choices are now: authoritarian, or authoritarian with better ad buys.

On his last night hosting The Late Show, Stephen Colbert had the band play the Peanuts classic Linus and Lucy while mock-worrying it might cost CBS some money — a line that aged about five minutes before becoming documentary evidence. The network has now quietly cut a check to Lee Mendelson Film Productions for using the song without a license, because even in the late stages of American democracy, copyright law still shows up on time.

The Peanuts rights-holders, who have been busily suing everyone from apparel companies to the actual US Department of the Interior for unlicensed use, say they’ll donate the undisclosed payout to World Central Kitchen, the disaster-relief nonprofit that’s somehow become a catch‑all response team for everything from hurricanes to presidents. Colbert himself already dropped $2.5m on WCK during his penultimate episode, meaning the comic who spent years shredding Trump and his enablers is now literally funding disaster relief while the corporate suits and government agencies get lectured on basic IP law by the people who own Snoopy.

The company’s chairman helpfully explained that their crusade is meant to “educate individuals, businesses, and government entities” about getting written licenses — a polite way of saying that in an era of authoritarian vibes, climate collapse, and democratic backsliding, at least one institution is still absolutely ruthless about enforcing rules: the people who control a cartoon jazz soundtrack from the 1960s.

Florida’s beloved “Alligator Alcatraz” – the Everglades pop-up torture camp Donald Trump personally praised for being extra cruel – is being emptied out, ICE says. Not closed, mind you, just mysteriously “relocated” detainees, with zero information on how many people or where they were sent, because transparency is for governments that aren’t running a low-budget authoritarian theme park.

This state-run masterpiece of Christian family values costs taxpayers about $1.2 million a day and comes with all the amenities Amnesty International says you’d expect from a modern U.S. black site: migrants shackled in a 2-foot-high outdoor metal cage with no water as punishment, guards allegedly denying drinkable water and instead offering “rotten” mosquito-larvae water to pressure people into signing English-only documents they couldn’t read. One detainee says people were thrown into “the box” for the crime of asking that he get his medication. Freedom isn’t free, but apparently it does come with a complimentary dehydration chamber.

ICE now insists the transfers are about “safety” during hurricane season, which is a poetic way of saying, “We don’t want CNN footage of a tent full of tortured migrants blowing into the Gulf.” Ron DeSantis, ever the fiscal hawk, claims they never built anything permanent because they knew the facility was temporary – just a $1.2 million-a-day, rights-optional pop-up gulag. The people are gone, the abuses are denied, and the paperwork trails are in English only. Don’t worry, though: Florida says there’s medical care and even a pharmacy on site. Nothing says humane treatment like a pharmacy next to a 2-foot punishment cage.

Hillary Clinton has emerged from the Democratic Museum of Unlearned Lessons to announce that Joe Biden’s decision to run for a second term was “a terrible mistake” that handed the presidency back to Donald Trump and torched Biden’s legacy on the way out. According to Clinton, Biden had privately suggested he’d be a one-term bridge and then decided, actually, no, he’d like to personally supervise the collapse. He clung to the nomination through a catastrophic debate where the country watched in real time while Jill Biden thought he might be having a stroke, and then finally bailed in July 2024 — just in time to give Kamala Harris the nomination and about five minutes to beat a fully armed fascist movement.

Clinton insists that if Biden had stepped aside in summer 2023 and allowed a real primary, any Democrat emerging from that process would have beaten Trump, a statement that pairs nicely with her own 2016 experience of definitely-not-beating Trump. Meanwhile, actual postmortems paint a bleaker picture: voters desperate for economic change, a right-wing media machine blasting nonstop propaganda, and a Democratic Party that’s been bleeding power at every level for nearly two decades. Left-wing movements on Gaza, racial justice, and immigration were badly out of sync with party leadership, while Republicans were perfectly aligned on one core message: give Trump the power and he’ll use it.

By the time Biden finally let go of the wheel, the car was already through the guardrail. Harris inherited a damaged brand, a fractured coalition, and an opponent whose only real platform was vengeance. The party that keeps warning about authoritarianism once again arranged itself into the most efficient formation for losing to it. Trump didn’t just win; he got invited back by a political establishment that knew exactly what he was and still couldn’t stop tripping over its own consultants, egos, and broken promises.

European leaders are apparently living in a quantum thought experiment where NATO both exists and doesn’t, depending on whether Donald Trump woke up wanting to help defend Europe or shake it down like a mob boss with nuclear weapons. The European Council on Foreign Relations politely calls this a “Schrödinger’s NATO” moment; the less polite version is: the continent’s security now hinges on the mood swings of a guy who once tried to blackmail Ukraine for dirt.

While Vladimir Putin tests how much of Ukraine he can chew off, Europe is heroically responding by… letting French and German defense contractors torpedo a £100bn joint fighter-jet program over who gets to hoard the tech and the glory. As Spain’s defense minister dryly notes, it’s not ideal when Dassault’s ego outranks Europe’s security. Meanwhile, everyone keeps buying US F-35s that only work as long as Washington feels like letting them, and the US is already leaning on Italy over its AI air defense project to make sure the gravy train of dependency keeps flowing.

Brussels is trying to duct-tape together a response with a new EU defence industrial strategy and €150bn in cheap loans, plus a patchwork of side deals like the UK–Finland–Netherlands procurement club. And yet, even as G7 leaders trek to Evian to sweet-talk Trump into maybe pressuring Putin this week, the editorial’s whole subtext is: Europe either grows up and stops relying on flattering an aspiring autocrat, or it keeps gambling its survival on the hope that the guy who loves strongmen suddenly decides to stand up to one.