The Trump Presidency Timeline

The CIA has announced it will retract or heavily edit 19 intelligence reports after a review by the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board — a body now stacked with Trump loyalists like Devin Nunes, Reince Priebus, Brad Wenstrup, and Katie Miller (yes, the Stephen Miller one). CIA Director and Trump appointee John Ratcliffe swears this is all about protecting the agency from bias, which is a bold claim from a crew that treats objective reality like a hostile foreign power.

The offending reports? Analyses on white supremacist women being radicalized, global contraceptive shortages harming economic development, and LGBT activists under pressure in the Middle East and North Africa. So the Trump-era standard for "tradecraft" appears to be: if it makes right-wing culture warriors uncomfortable, it clearly fails the analytic rigor test. The agency insists this purge is just about meeting "the President’s expectations" that the workforce remain independent of any agenda — by obeying his agenda.

Sen. Mark Warner politely called this what it is: politicization of intelligence. Sen. Tom Cotton, meanwhile, applauded the move, accusing Obama and Biden of mixing politics and intelligence, while cheering on a board of hyperpartisan Trump picks literally rewriting the historical record. The intelligence community is supposedly being rescued from bias by the same people who think climate change is a hoax and that the deep state lives under their bed. What could possibly go wrong when national security analysis is run through a MAGA vibes-check?

The US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, went on Tucker Carlson’s podcast and casually suggested it would be “fine if they took it all” — "it" being land stretching from Egypt to the Euphrates, i.e. most of the modern Middle East. Not content with normal diplomacy, Huckabee has upgraded US foreign policy to Old Testament cosplay, declaring Israel a land that God personally deeded over, with the ambassador apparently serving as the world's least subtle real estate agent for Yahweh.

Tucker, who now brands himself as a persecuted victim of routine airport security, helpfully clarified that this biblical promise covers Israel, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and big chunks of Saudi Arabia and Iraq. Huckabee quibbled only on the exact size of the fantasy empire, then doubled down that it’d be perfectly acceptable if Israel just went ahead and took the lot. So America’s official representative in Jerusalem is out here endorsing a theologically mandated regional annexation project on a podcast, while Washington pretends it’s still promoting “stability” and “rules-based order.” Imperialism by scripture citation is a bold new chapter in Trump-era diplomacy.

The Department of Homeland Security has apparently decided that if you’re going to run a mass deportation machine, you might as well do it from a flying country club. DHS is eyeing a $70m Boeing 737-8 Max with a queen bed, showers, a kitchen, four big flat-screens, and a bar – officially for ICE deportation flights, but also, very coincidentally, for ferrying Trump administration VIPs to their Very Important Photo Ops in maximum comfort.

The problem? Normal ICE deportation flights move over 100 shackled detainees plus guards and medical staff. This jet maxes out at 18 passengers and sleeps 14, which is great if your mission is “flying cabinet slumber party,” less great if you’re pretending this is about operational efficiency. Even DHS officials are reportedly calling the dual-use fantasy “far-fetched,” which is bureaucrat-speak for “this is obviously a grift.”

A DHS spokesperson gamely insists they’re converting at least one bedroom into seating to meet the “deportation mission set” and that the plane is 40% cheaper than using military aircraft, which is a bold claim given that it currently has a bar. This airborne Ritz-Carlton is also being sold as part of secretary Kristi Noem’s crusade to “save taxpayer dollars,” a fascinating rebrand for the same Kristi Noem who was just censured by House Democrats for blowing $200m on a pair of Gulfstream jets for herself and her deputy during a government shutdown.

So yes, the administration is tightening its belt on waste and abuse – by consolidating deportations and luxury travel into one convenient forever-grifting package. Shackled migrants in the back, Trump officials up front with cocktails and flat-screens. Truly, a model of fiscal responsibility.

The Trump EPA has decided that mercury — a neurotoxin that harms babies’ brain development — is just another pesky regulation standing between America and the God-given right to run 40-year-old coal plants so AI servers can keep hallucinating cat photos. At an event in Kentucky (of course), the administration announced it will roll back Biden-era Mercury and Air Toxics Standards that were set to slash mercury pollution by 70% and toxic metals like nickel, arsenic, and lead by two-thirds. Health benefits through 2037 were estimated at $420m, but the EPA now claims the old 2012 rule is good enough and anything more is just too expensive for the poor, struggling utility companies.

This isn’t a one-off dumb idea; it’s a coordinated campaign of policy arson. Trump previously declared an “energy emergency” so he could keep decrepit coal plants open and exempt them from key air rules, then literally invited coal plants to email the government for two-year get-out-of-MATS-free cards — 68 plants happily signed up to keep spewing neurotoxins. Last week, the EPA helpfully repealed the “endangerment finding” that gave it authority to regulate greenhouse gases at all, and the White House ordered the Pentagon to buy coal power like it’s war bonds for black lung. All this to prop up an industry that now supplies less than 20% of U.S. electricity, but 100% of the administration’s nostalgia for when men were men and air was chunky.

So yes, coal plants remain among the largest sources of mercury, lead, arsenic, acid gases, benzene, formaldehyde, and dioxins — but on the bright side, some aging coal executives might squeeze out a few more quarters of profit before the planet finishes baking. The message from Trump’s EPA is clear: if you’re a fetus, a kid, or someone living downwind of a plant, your health is a rounding error in the great crusade to keep obsolete coal burners on life support for the glory of AI and campaign donors.

The Supreme Court has finally looked at Trump’s "everything is an emergency if I say so" tariff regime and decided: actually, no, the president does not get to run the global economy like a casino he’s already bankrupted. In a 6-3 opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Court ruled that Trump’s use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to slap massive, wildly fluctuating tariffs on imports is unconstitutional. That’s Trump’s signature economic policy, vaporized — and not even on the shadow docket this time.

Trump had jacked tariffs to at least 10% on most imports, up to 145% for China, and 25–35% on supposed "allies" like Canada and Mexico, because nothing says strategic genius like declaring trade war on maple syrup. Businesses, somehow unthrilled by having their supply chains tied to the president’s mood ring, sued, arguing he’d blown past his legal authority. After years of rubber-stamping Trump’s power grabs on the emergency docket, the justices finally took a real case, did full briefing, and told him no. Roberts plus five others sided with the Constitution; Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh dissented, presumably from an alternate universe where "emergency powers" means "whatever the guy with the loudest rally crowd wants."

The upshot: Trump’s trade policy — a chaotic protectionist cosplay justified by perpetual "emergency" — just hit a constitutional wall. The Court, which has spent years enabling his authoritarian cosplay, has now drawn at least one line: you don’t get to rewrite global trade law by executive order and call it Tuesday. Whether this slows the broader project of turning emergency powers into a permanent presidential cheat code is unclear, but for today, the imperial presidency took a rare loss.

The Trump administration’s war on international students has found a very eager foot soldier in Indiana, where Purdue University is reportedly pioneering a new admissions standard: citizenship-based auto-reject. After getting a sternly worded letter from the House’s Select Committee on the CCP — which basically accused Chinese students of being walking national security breaches — Purdue departments started admitting Chinese grad students, offering them funding, watching them turn down other schools and sign leases, and then having the university swoop in weeks later to quietly yank the offers with all the transparency of a CIA black site.

Faculty, students, and alumni say there’s now an unwritten policy to block applicants from China and other officially designated "adversary nations" — Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea — because nothing says "meritocracy" like a secret list of forbidden passports. Purdue, for its part, insists there is "no ban", it’s just coincidentally rescinding offers to Chinese students after departments admit them, and also refusing to explain why. Totally normal behavior for a public university that allegedly believes in academic freedom.

This isn’t happening in a vacuum. Trump already canceled thousands of student visas (a lot of them Chinese), froze billions in research funding, and helped drive international enrollments off a cliff, while overseas universities cheerfully scoop up the talent we’re busy deporting or ghosting. Other schools like UIUC are at least doing their xenophobic compliance cosplay in writing by "winding down" partnerships with Chinese institutions. Purdue, though, seems to be test-driving the next phase: a soft ban that’s invisible on paper, brutal in practice, and perfectly aligned with an administration that treats foreign students as spies until proven otherwise — and then still denies them housing.