The Trump Presidency Timeline

Elon Musk has officially become the world’s first trillionaire, which in our brave new timeline means he doesn’t just buy social media platforms on a whim, he buys governments. After turning Twitter into a one-man Super PAC to shove Donald Trump back into office, Musk is rewarded with his very own quasi-cabinet fiefdom: the "Department of Government Efficiency" (DOGE), because of course the future of public policy is a meme coin.

Once in charge, Musk does what every tech libertarian dreams of between ketamine microdoses: he shuts down USAID. Not trims it, not reforms it—shuts it down. Programs fighting malnutrition, HIV, and preventable diseases around the world? Gone. A Lancet study estimates these "efficiencies" could mean more than 14 million deaths by 2030, including 4.5 million children under five. But hey, the line on the spreadsheet looks cleaner, and nothing says "small government" like using state power to annihilate global health programs while one guy sits on $1 trillion.

Gabriel Zucman points out that this is not some abstract "virtual" wealth story; this is what happens when extreme wealth fuses with an authoritarian-curious presidency: one man’s net worth becomes a planetary death panel. Meanwhile, retirees get their winter fuel allowance cut in the UK to save £1.5bn, while about 1,000 ultra-rich families could cough up ten times that every year with a modest 2% wealth tax and still be obscenely rich. Instead, we’re running a global Hunger Games where the Capitol is Mar-a-Lago plus SpaceX HQ, and democracy is whatever’s left after the trillionaires finish shopping.

The Trump EPA has discovered a bold new climate strategy: don’t reduce pollution, just redefine it as too annoying for donors. The agency is moving to gut methane rules on so-called "stripper wells"—rundown, low-producing oil and gas wells that barely cough up 6% of U.S. output but spew about half the sector’s methane. That’s the greenhouse gas that traps 80 times more heat than CO₂, but also, crucially, threatens the profit margins of one very important billionaire: Hilcorp owner and recent Trump mega-donor Jeffery Hildebrand.

Hildebrand, whose company is already ranked among the industry’s top methane polluters, suddenly discovered his inner political animal right after the Biden administration passed strict methane rules that would cost him real money. He then shoveled millions into Trump’s campaign, his wife got an ambassadorship, he got a front-row White House seat and a chance to promise billions for Venezuela he doesn’t actually operate in, and now—what do you know—a former Hilcorp lobbyist is in charge of rewriting the EPA’s methane rules. That ex-lobbyist is helpfully workshopping policy with industry groups bankrolled by Hildebrand, producing a rollback tailor-made to rescue 700,000 leaky stripper wells from the horror of basic oversight.

The result: Hildebrand’s profits go up, his planes keep landing at Dulles before dawn, and the rest of us get to enjoy the accelerated heat waves, droughts, and wildfires that come from letting ancient, leaky wells burp methane into the atmosphere. Climate advocates point out that shutting these wells would cut emissions roughly in half while sacrificing just 6% of production—an obvious win for the planet. But the Trump-era EPA has done the math and reached a different conclusion: the only emissions that matter are the ones coming from a billionaire’s checkbook.

Donald Trump has finally "ended" his catastrophic Iran adventure, a war he and Benjamin Netanyahu kicked off while US and Iranian negotiators were literally at the table in Geneva. Because nothing says "good faith diplomacy" like secretly programming missile targets while your envoys talk about nuclear safeguards. The opening salvo: Israel assassinates Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the US flattens a school in Minab, killing more than 150 civilians — at least 120 of them girls under 12 — and Trump calls it strength. Multiple investigations later, it turns out the only thing they decisively destroyed was whatever was left of America's moral standing.

Instead of the quick, triumphant regime change fantasy Trump and Netanyahu bragged about in their video speeches, Iran's government did that inconvenient thing where it survives. Khamenei is replaced by his son Mojtaba and a new generation of IRGC hardliners who are just as ideological and less cautious — so, stellar work all around. Tehran shuts the Strait of Hormuz, hits US bases and Arab neighbours, and suddenly the "short, sharp" war becomes a long, humiliating tutorial on the limits of US power. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth blusters that American might has crippled Iran, while Iran methodically chokes 20% of the world’s oil and gas, fertilizer supply chains, and with them food security for millions, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. Totally normal foreign policy: launch a war, spike global hunger.

Now, after burning through "hard-to-replace" weapons stocks and torching US credibility with Gulf monarchies who are quietly shopping for new patrons, Trump is selling a two-page, 14-point memorandum of understanding as some grand statesmanlike achievement. The deal reopens Hormuz, lifts the US naval blockade of Iranian ports, and extends the ceasefire — i.e., it returns the world to exactly where it was 24 hours before Trump and Netanyahu decided to play regime-change roulette. All the real issues — Iran’s nuclear programme, sanctions relief, long-term security — are punted to future talks that could have just… continued on 27 February without the dead children, wrecked homes, and shattered alliances.

Israel, full partner in the war, is now sidelined from the deal and furious, while Iran’s regime is more entrenched than before. The US looks weaker, more reckless, and less reliable to its allies, and China has spent months watching Washington bleed credibility and munitions in real time. Trump’s big strategic masterstroke managed to kill a lot of civilians, empower hardliners in Tehran, destabilize the global economy, and end in a humiliating climbdown back to the status quo ante. But sure, tell us again how "peace through strength" is going.

The Supreme Court has quietly told former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page to take his Comey fanfic lawsuit and file it directly in the circular bin. Page was trying to revive a case against James Comey and seven other former FBI officials over the spectacularly sloppy FISA warrants used to spy on him during the Russia investigation. Yes, those warrants were a mess — the DOJ’s own watchdog said so — but the courts pointed out a minor issue: Page waited so long to sue that the statute of limitations basically turned to dust.

The federal government already cut Page a check in a separate settlement, which the Trump administration’s DOJ used as a chance to issue a statement thundering that the whole thing was a “political sham from the get-go” against a man “never charged with a single crime.” Bold words from the same political universe that loved warrantless surveillance right up until it singed one of their own. Once again, FISA — the beloved toy of the national security state — is treated as perfectly fine for mass surveillance of random Americans, but a civil rights tragedy when it lands on a guy who used to sit near the Trump campaign’s craft services table.

Trump, naturally, folded this into his ever-expanding Russia “hoax” mythology, casting Page as the wronged hero of Deep State fanfic. But when it came time for the big legal showdown, the justices didn’t bite: no hearing, no dramatic showdown, just a one-line rejection. Page’s claims against the individual officials are dead, Comey’s lawyer isn’t even bothering to comment, and the only real legacy here is a bipartisan reminder that the government’s surveillance powers are both overbroad and incompetently managed — right up until someone important gets mad, and then it’s grievance merch for the base.