The Trump Presidency Timeline

The White House has decided that if you can't argue with the science, you just smash the lab. Budget director and professional theocrat Russ Vought jumped on X to announce a plan to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, calling it "one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country"—because nothing says "sound public policy" like nuking the people who make your weather forecasts work.

NCAR has spent more than 60 years helping universities understand global weather, water, and climate, which is apparently now a firing offense in Trump's America. Its leadership says they got zero advance notice and that the move is "entirely political". They're right: the administration insists "vital" weather work will be shipped somewhere else, as if you can just put world-class atmospheric science in a cardboard box and mail it to Mar-a-Lago.

Colorado officials are pointing out the obvious: this looks a lot like retaliation. Gov. Jared Polis says the plan "puts public safety at risk and attacks science," while Sen. Michael Bennet and Rep. Joe Neguse note the timing—coming right after Colorado refused to spring MAGA folk hero Tina Peters, the county clerk who illegally accessed voting machines after the 2020 election and is now doing nine years for it. Trump issued her a symbolic pardon (because federalism is hard), and when that didn’t work, the White House apparently reached for Plan B: threaten to blow up one of the country's premier climate and weather centers.

In other words, the guy who once took a Sharpie to a hurricane map is now trying to take a wrecking ball to the people who make the maps in the first place—both to punish a state that locked up his election-tampering fan and to silence "alarmism" about the planet catching fire. But sure, this is all just normal governance and definitely not an administration using federal power to settle scores and blindfold the country in the middle of a climate crisis.

Trump ran on “no new wars” and is now racking up at least 26 boat strikes, nearly 100 dead, a double-tap strike under congressional scrutiny, the seizure of an oil tanker, and a "total and complete blockade" of sanctioned Venezuelan oil tankers — but don’t worry, it’s not a war, it’s just peace with explosives. The White House insists this is all about "narcoterrorism" and fulfilling campaign promises on drugs, because nothing says "America First" like turning the Caribbean into a live-fire zone to enforce an economic chokehold.

MAGA world, which supposedly hates foreign entanglements, is apparently fine with undeclared military campaigns so long as the targets are "drug boats" and the dead people aren’t American. As one friendly think tanker helpfully explains, you can run "wild and crazy foreign policies" as long as the costs stay low — meaning low for U.S. domestic politics, not for the civilians caught between sanctions, blockades, and missile strikes. The administration is dusting off the Monroe Doctrine, rebranding it as an anti-cartel crusade, and betting the base won’t notice that "ending forever wars" has quietly morphed into forever gunboat diplomacy.

The right is now having a very serious discussion about whether regime change in Venezuela would be a bridge too far, not because killing people and blockading a country might be wrong, but because it might finally pierce the illusion that Trump is some kind of anti-interventionist dove. For now, he gets to posture as both the tough Monroe Doctrine enforcer and the guy who "doesn’t want a protracted war" — a Schrödinger’s warmonger whose bombs are apparently exempt from the "no new wars" promise as long as they’re dropped in the name of fighting drugs.