The Trump Presidency Timeline

Donald Trump rolled out of his Truth Social bunker last night to endorse former Fox News host and David Cameron sidekick Steve Hilton for California governor, because why wouldn’t the largest state in the country be run by a guy whose main qualification is once yelling at liberals on cable news?

Trump promised that “as President, I will help him” and that “with Federal help, and a Great Governor, like Steve Hilton, California can be better than ever before!” Subtle as a brick: elect my guy and maybe the federal government will stop treating the country’s biggest economy like an enemy state. Elect anyone else and enjoy four more years of disaster tourism from Mar-a-Lago.

The GOP field is basically Hilton vs. Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, while eight Democrats politely reenact the Spider-Man pointing meme in California’s jungle primary. Polls show no clear frontrunner and a non-trivial chance of a two-Republican general, which is why the state party chair is begging low-polling Democrats to stop cosplaying as viable candidates. Meanwhile, Hilton is out here promising tax cuts, homeownership, and better test scores, as if the main structural barrier to California’s future was not enough Steve Hilton in it.

So the Trump machine is now explicitly offering a loyalty rewards program for governors: say the right things on TV, get the presidential seal of approval and a vague promise of extra federal goodies. It’s not quite handing out ambassadorships to donors, but it’s the same basic model—just with more wildfire risk and a much bigger GDP.

The Michigan Democratic party looked at its 2024 faceplant with Arab American voters and said: "What if we just do that again, but louder?" In a tight three-way Senate primary, state senator Mallory McMorrow and her friends in the professional centrist-industrial complex are trying to bludgeon Abdul El-Sayed by screaming "antisemitism" at Hasan Piker, a Muslim streamer with 3 million followers whose main crime appears to be criticizing Israel’s ongoing habit of turning Gaza and southern Lebanon into craters. Helping out: the Anti-Defamation League, Third Way, Senator Elissa Slotkin, and, for that extra dystopian flavor, the Trump administration, all happily aligned on the noble project of policing who Democrats are allowed to stand next to on a stage.

Arab American leaders, watching their ancestral villages in southern Lebanon literally wiped off the map while being told their grief is politically inconvenient, are not exactly impressed. They point out that Harris already lost Michigan by 80,000 votes after her Israel policy bled at least 100,000 votes, but party elites seem determined to prove that you really can lose the same state the same way twice. While McMorrow solemnly insists that hosting rallies with Piker "fans the flames" after a synagogue attack that Arab Americans also condemned, the actual asymmetry is crystal clear: Israel gets compassion, Arabs get lectures, and corporate-backed Democrats get to pretend this is moral clarity instead of electoral negligence.

Meanwhile, Piker is the same guy the Harris campaign once invited to stream from the 2024 DNC and who’s been praised by Bernie Sanders, but now he’s apparently too radioactive to be in a room with Democrats who take AIPAC checks. Michigan has the largest Arab American population per capita in the country, over a million Lebanese civilians have been displaced, and virtually every Lebanese American family in the state knows someone killed or driven from their home. The party establishment’s response is to treat their pain like a messaging problem to be suppressed, then act shocked when those voters decide they don’t feel like saving the same people who keep telling them to shut up and fall in line.

US federal agents have arrested Qassem Soleimani’s niece and grandniece in Los Angeles after Secretary of State Marco Rubio personally revoked their green cards, because nothing says "land of the free" like the top diplomat doing immigration status reviews on the relatives of dead enemies. The State Department announced that Hamideh Soleimani Afshar and her daughter are now in ICE custody and "pending removal" — a phrase that now apparently covers everyone from cartel bosses to women with the wrong last name and a bad attitude toward the "Great Satan".

The Trump administration helpfully explained that the family’s alleged crimes include praising Iran’s new supreme leader, celebrating strikes on US forces, and maintaining a "lavish" LA lifestyle while posting too much IRGC fan content on Instagram. So the new standard is: if the government thinks your political views and social media likes are insufficiently pro-America-during-war, your lawful permanent residence can vanish by press release. Rubio has already used the same magic wand on the daughter of former Iranian security chief Ali Larijani and her husband, who were bounced from the country and slapped with a permanent ban.

This is sold as national security, but it’s collective punishment dressed up as counterterrorism: punishing people not for acts, but for bloodlines and opinions, with the secretary of state playing judge, jury, and deportation officer. The message from Trump’s Washington is crystal clear: your rights are only as permanent as your last name, your politics, and your Instagram grid. Welcome to immigration policy by vendetta.

Donald Trump took to prime-time television to declare victory in Iran, which is always what you do when you definitely haven’t started a mess you can’t finish. The White House version: flawless statesmanship and peace through strength. The reality version: a president using a foreign crisis as a campaign infomercial, waving around "mission accomplished" vibes like George W. Bush’s ghostwriter, and hoping nobody notices the body count, the regional chaos, or whatever classified thing they definitely don’t want Congress to see.

While Trump was busy victory-lapping, the Supreme Court heard arguments on whether the 14th Amendment still means what it says about birthright citizenship. The administration’s long-running dream of turning citizenship into a vibes-based loyalty program is now one conservative ruling away from reality. If they can get SCOTUS to help them carve holes in the Constitution big enough to drive Stephen Miller’s white ethnostate fantasies through, that’d be swell for them, less so for, you know, American democracy.

And then there’s Attorney General Pam Bondi — now out, which is interesting for someone whose main qualification for the job was "once took money from Trump’s foundation while deciding whether to investigate Trump University." The woman who helped weaponize the Justice Department as a presidential law firm is suddenly gone, leaving behind a DOJ so battered and politicized it should probably qualify for disaster relief. The revolving door of loyalists continues, each one leaving the rule of law slightly more broken than they found it. Tremendous operation, really.

Donald Trump has apparently decided that if you’re going to violate international law, you might as well do it with the rhetorical subtlety of a Monster Energy can. He’s talking about Iran like it’s a Call of Duty DLC: promising to “keep bombing our little hearts out”, describing the US presence as a “lovely ‘stay’ in Iran”, and bragging on Truth Social that as the 47th president it’s a “great honor” to kill “deranged scumbags” — by which he means, an entire nationality. War, but make it influencer content.

Meanwhile, Pete Hegseth, now proudly titled “secretary of war” because “defense” didn’t sound murdery enough, is out here live-blogging war crimes. He gushes over “death and destruction from the sky all day long”, openly endorses targeting civilian infrastructure like desalination plants, and announces a policy of giving “no quarter” — i.e., proudly advertising a Geneva Convention violation as if it’s a gym PR. He lovingly calls the US military’s role “lethality”, likens America to a rabid attack dog that shouldn’t be “shackled”, and savors the “quiet death” of an Iranian warship’s crew like he’s reviewing a wine.

All this bloodthirsty honesty, of course, is wrapped around the usual lies. Trump still refuses to call it a war so he doesn’t have to talk about Congress, preferring “excursion” and “stay”, while the White House homepage claims a “doctrine of peace through strength” that has allegedly “ended eight wars” and brought “global stability”. At the same time, the Financial Times reports a broker for Hegseth tried to pile into US military stocks before the shooting started, and Trump helpfully clarifies his favorite part of the whole adventure: “take the oil in Iran.” Bold new doctrine: peace through plunder.

So on the surface, it’s all macho plain-speaking and taboo-busting — the MAGA base gets its fix of unfiltered ultraviolence and linguistic cruelty. Underneath, it’s the same old imperial grift: geopolitical miscalculation and war profiteering, now dressed up as an edgy podcast. Orwell said insincerity is the enemy of clear language; Trump and Hegseth have solved that problem by being both maximally insincere and maximally deranged at the same time. Truly, an epic fury of killing-democracy cosplay.

After nearly 50 days of stiffing more than 35,000 Department of Homeland Security employees, Donald Trump has magnanimously decided they can have their own paychecks back. A new presidential memo orders DHS to start paying people at FEMA, the Coast Guard, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — you know, the folks who deal with disasters, defend the coasts, and keep critical infrastructure from being hacked, all of whom Trump previously treated as interest‑free lenders to his shutdown vanity project.

Trump already carved out TSA last week once passengers started noticing that having unpaid security workers is somewhat bad for air travel. Now, with a record-long DHS shutdown still grinding on, he’s issuing one-off memos like coupons at a clearance sale, while ICE and CBP conveniently stayed funded the whole time thanks to his so‑called One Big Beautiful Bill. So the border cops get steady cash, the rest of DHS gets sporadic presidential mercy, and Congress’s actual power of the purse gets replaced by whatever Trump feels like signing between TV hits. Governing by hostage release note is the new normal.