The Trump Presidency Timeline

Donald Trump, 79, is once again boasting about acing a basic cognitive screening test designed to see if you can remember "person, woman, man, camera, TV" without a spotter. Meanwhile, during an actual war, he’s interrupting cabinet meetings to tell a possibly imaginary story about negotiating custom Sharpies with a CEO who has no idea what he’s talking about, renaming the Strait of Hormuz the "strait of Trump", and cracking a Pearl Harbor joke in front of a visibly horrified Japanese prime minister. But don’t worry, the man with his finger on the nuclear button insists his brain is the best brain.

The article walks through the cheery reality that if Trump’s judgment really is slipping while he toys with deploying nearly 10,000 troops and talks about taking Iran’s Kharg Island, the US system has almost no functional safeguards. Congress is technically supposed to approve wars, but Trump’s already revving the invasion engine without it, and the loudest brake so far isn’t the Constitution – it’s Wall Street traders trying to reverse-engineer how far markets must crash before he gets bored. The 25th Amendment exists on paper, but in practice it’s mostly used for colonoscopies, not for prying power away from a volatile president surrounded by loyalists who fear him, love him, or both.

Historical comparisons don’t make this any less bleak. From JFK on amphetamines during the Cuban missile crisis to Churchill drinking like the war was sponsored by Scotch, we’ve long trusted that the people closest to power will do the right thing. Now those people are Trump appointees whose main job description is "never tell the boss no". So the world’s most powerful military is effectively being driven by an ageing father who insists he’s fine to drive, veers toward oncoming traffic, and whose family’s big plan is to hope the car’s check-engine light scares him into pulling over. Democratic safeguards, it turns out, are only as strong as the last adult in the room – and we’re fresh out.

Donald Trump has once again looked at the criminal justice system, weighed the plight of vulnerable people, and decided the real victim is the guy who siphoned millions out of nursing homes and stiffed the IRS. New Jersey nursing home mogul Joseph Schwartz pleaded guilty to a $39 million payroll tax scheme tied to his sprawling, collapsing Skyline chain, then got a three-year sentence. After a grueling three months behind bars, Trump stepped in with a full pardon, because apparently the only thing this administration hates more than taxes is consequences.

Meanwhile, families like that of 71-year-old retired cardiac nurse Doris Coulson — who died after landing in a Skyline facility with scrambled eggs in her lungs despite an NPO order — are sitting on court judgments they can’t collect. A judge awarded Coulson’s family nearly $19 million after finding Skyline’s cost-cutting left her without the care she needed. Schwartz had already shed his Arkansas assets like a snake skin, so the family gets nothing while he pays himself millions and claims he’s just a confused, sickly businessman who somehow misplaced all that money.

Schwartz is not an outlier; he’s the business model. Trump has repeatedly used clemency to rescue nursing home and health care fraudsters — commuting the sentence of Philip Esformes (tied to a $1.3 billion Medicare/Medicaid scheme) and Judith Negron ($200 million in Medicare fraud) — and even nominating nursing home owner Benjamin Landa as ambassador to Hungary while a facility he co-owns faces a $31 million Medicare overpayment audit. If you’re accused of bilking taxpayers and endangering patients and you can afford lobbyists, this White House is basically LegalZoom with nukes.

To complete the far-right Mad Lib, Laura Loomer rode in to launder Schwartz’s reputation, declaring he’d paid back “every dime,” wasn’t responsible for the taxes, and was the real victim of antisemitism and overzealous prosecution. The White House happily echoed her talking points, claiming Schwartz relied on a third party, didn’t enrich himself, and was just an overprosecuted 65-year-old in poor health — claims directly contradicted by court records and Schwartz’s own guilty plea. The sick patients and defrauded families? They don’t have lobbyists, so they get exactly what this administration thinks they deserve: nothing.

Trump’s Cuba policy continues its speedrun of humanitarian horror. After his administration, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio playing cosplay Cold Warrior, effectively strangled Cuba’s oil supply to force regime change, the island is now living in rolling blackouts: hospitals crippled, public transport slashed, people literally sitting in the dark on the Malecón. So naturally, the White House line has been: this is how we help Cubans.

Now a sanctioned Russian tanker — yes, sanctioned by the U.S., EU, and U.K. for that little Ukraine invasion thing — is parked off Cuba with 730,000 barrels of oil, and Trump shrugs from Air Force One that he has “no problem” with it reaching port. The same guy who engineered the blockade suddenly discovers a soft spot for basic survival: “They have to survive,” he says, as though he didn’t personally tighten the noose that produced the island-wide blackouts in the first place.

He insists this doesn’t help Putin — it’s just “one boatload of oil” — while simultaneously claiming Cuba is “finished” and that whether they get the oil “is not going to matter.” So the official doctrine is: Cuba is doomed, but also we care deeply about Cuban people, which is why we cut off their fuel, wrecked their infrastructure, then magnanimously allowed a sanctioned Russian ship to toss them nine or ten days of diesel. It’s not foreign policy; it’s a hostage situation with occasional mood-based mercy.

Trump wraps it all up by saying he’d “prefer letting it in… because the people need heat and cooling and all of the other things.” The people needed those things last month, when the blockade was grinding them down, and they’ll need them next month when the diesel runs out again. But sure, one reluctantly permitted tanker from a sanctioned Russian vessel totally balances out an entire U.S. strategy built on making 11 million civilians suffer until their government collapses. Freedom, Trump-Rubio style.

The Trump White House has discovered a bold new fiscal innovation: pay people with money that doesn’t exist in any actual appropriation. After shutting down DHS for six weeks because Congress won’t fund his plans, Trump simply signed a memo ordering TSA workers to be paid from "existing funds" that no one can quite identify, least of all DHS, which is currently ghosting NPR’s questions like a teenager dodging their report card.

Meanwhile, Tom Homan, now apparently the nation’s official "border czar" and unofficial ICE hype man, says the ICE officers parachuted into airports to cover for unpaid, quitting TSA staff might just stick around even after paychecks resume. Asked if they’ll leave, he offered the reassuringly authoritarian "we’ll see," because nothing says "normal functioning democracy" like immigration police turning up at domestic airport checkpoints and then maybe never going away.

As 50,000 TSA workers have been forced to work without pay and at least 480 have quit, absences have hit 40% at some airports, producing hours-long security lines. The administration’s solution? Not ending the shutdown, not respecting Congress’s power of the purse, but drafting ICE into airport security to "check identification" and "plug other security holes"—a phrase that definitely doesn’t sound like mission creep toward a national internal checkpoint system at all. But hey, the lines in Houston are shorter, so who’s counting the constitutional problems?

US health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr has discovered a bold new frontier in public health: letting wellness hucksters and Silicon Valley bio-bros run the show while the FDA sits quietly in the corner and thinks about what it’s done. Under his Make America Healthy Again (because of course that’s the name) agenda, boring things like proven vaccines and safety standards are treated as tyrannical oppression, while chugging raw milk and injecting barely-studied peptides you bought off a sketchy website are rebranded as heroic “personal choice”.

His latest brainstorm: opening up the sale of “about 14” injectable peptide drugs that the FDA restricted in 2023 for “potential significant safety risks” and zero demonstrated benefit. Some peptides are medicines, some are basically snake venom that melts your cells, but RFK Jr’s plan is to blur that line and call it freedom. Who needs rigorous clinical trials when you’ve got anecdotes, biohacking podcasts, and a booming market for vials labeled “for research use only” being mainlined in Silicon Valley bathrooms?

The Maha project doesn’t just tolerate the peptide grey market; it wants to make the grey market the market. The goal isn’t to prove these drugs safe or effective, it’s to dismantle the FDA’s ability to say no so pharmacies, enhancement-obsessed sports outfits, and assorted wellness profiteers can cash in. Generations of public health policy built on the precautionary principle are being swapped out for a national experiment in crowd-sourced medicine where the control group is ‘other countries that don’t let their health minister legislate off Reddit threads’.

So while normal governments are still insisting on things like evidence and regulation, RFK Jr is happily turning federal health policy into a libertarian theme park where every American can be their own underfunded clinical trial. The administration calls it autonomy. The peptide sellers call it a business opportunity. The rest of us can call it what it is: public health by huckster, with the Health and Human Services seal slapped on the bottle for decoration.

Texas just beta-tested the Trump administration’s dream scenario: take a messy, violent protest outside an ICE detention center, strip out the legal nuance, and sell it as the grand triumph of the war on Antifa™. Nine activists were convicted on a mix of terrorism, riot, explosives, and firearms charges after a protest where one participant shot and wounded a police officer, while others vandalized cars and government property. The shooter, Benjamin Song, was hit with attempted murder; someone who wasn’t even at the protest was convicted for moving a box of zines afterward, because nothing says “domestic terror” like stapled pamphlets.

The Justice Department, led by Pam Bondi, responded with a press release that said "antifa" 16 times, like Beetlejuice for authoritarians, triumphantly declaring the verdict proof that their crusade against this "domestic terror group" is working. Tiny problem: the actual terrorism statute used in court didn’t require proving the existence of any organization or ideology at all. The judge openly wondered why "antifa" should be mentioned, comparing it to the Methodist Women’s Auxiliary — which, to be clear, has yet to be designated a terror cell by Pam Bondi. Jurors acquitted seven defendants on attempted murder, suggesting they didn’t buy the government’s "ambush on law enforcement" fan fiction, but that didn’t stop DOJ from treating the case like Nuremberg for kids in black hoodies.

The real innovation here isn’t public safety, it’s precedent. Prosecutors pointed to things like using Signal, wearing dark clothing, and reading leftwing books in a club as evidence of a coordinated "antifa cell" — meaning the government just basically argued that having encrypted messages, black jeans, and a reading list is suspicious terrorist behavior. Experts warn this is about scaring people out of protesting: show up at the wrong place, stand near the wrong person, or use the wrong app, and you might get swept into a terrorism conspiracy. The FBI already has investigations in at least 23 regions, and DOJ officials are telling prosecutors to "go big" and "go loud" against protesters.

So no, this verdict doesn’t legally establish antifa as an organization. What it does establish is that the Trump administration doesn’t need antifa to be real to prosecute it — it just needs your group chat, your book club, and your wardrobe. The message is clear: protest, and you might end up a test case in the government’s latest fanfic about the Antifa Menace. People should be scared; that’s the whole point.

Wisconsin Republicans are discovering that when you spend a decade building a beautiful, intricate gerrymandered fortress, it’s a real shame when a liberal Supreme Court comes along and says, "Yeah, that’s illegal." After Donald Trump managed to wheeze out a win in the state, the vibes were supposed to be permanently red. Instead, the party that turned Wisconsin into a case study in minority rule is now watching its legislative leadership sprint for the exits like someone just turned the lights on at a sketchy bar.

The conservatives’ old reliable friend — the Wisconsin Supreme Court — flipped, torched the GOP’s rigged maps, and suddenly Republicans have to do something they haven’t done in years: compete. With Speaker Robin Vos and Senate President Devin LeMahieu retiring, Democrats are openly fantasizing about a trifecta — governor, Legislature, and court — while another liberal-backed justice, Chris Taylor, is out-raising and out-advertising the conservative pick, Maria Lazar. It turns out when you spend 15 years weaponizing the courts to lock in power, people eventually notice and vote like they’re tired of living in a civics lesson on "How to Break a Swing State."

Meanwhile, Trump’s approval in Wisconsin is sinking to fresh lows during his second term, which is awkward for a party that rebuilt its entire brand around his insecurities. The GOP insists that the wave of retirements means nothing, the new maps mean nothing, and the polls mean nothing — which is technically true, if you define "nothing" as "the end of a carefully engineered system of anti-democratic control." The changing of the guard in Madison isn’t just generational; it’s what happens when your whole strategy depends on never letting voters actually choose anything.

Trump’s White House has discovered a bold new constitutional principle: states’ rights are sacred, unless they annoy David Sacks’ cap table. While Congress is in its usual coma, states across the country — including Republican-led ones — are actually passing AI laws to protect kids, demand transparency, and shield whistleblowers. Naturally, the administration’s response is to swoop in and tell them to knock it off because it might mildly inconvenience "innovation" (read: the venture capital guys who keep getting invited to Mar-a-Lago).

Utah GOP Rep. Doug Fiefia tried to require tech companies to explain how they’d protect consumers. The bill never even made it to a vote, thanks to a one-line memo from the Trump administration declaring it "unfixable" and contrary to the president’s AI agenda — no explanation, just vibes and donor priorities. Meanwhile, Trump’s AI and crypto czar David Sacks and OSTP head Michael Kratsios are demanding a single national framework to avoid a "patchwork" of state protections, which is very convenient given that Congress is so deadlocked the only thing it could pass is a kidney stone.

Republican state lawmakers like Pennsylvania’s Tracy Pennycuick are openly saying they don’t have time to wait for Washington to stop doing nothing, so they’ll keep writing their own rules. The White House, speaking anonymously (because apparently even they’re embarrassed), insists they’d never tell a state it can’t protect children — they just, coincidentally, keep kneecapping the bills that try. It’s a neat trick: federal government too broken to regulate AI, yet somehow still nimble enough to intervene when states try to protect their own citizens from the president’s tech friends.

Pete Hegseth, the guy who spent years calling the U.S. military "woke" from a Fox News couch, is now personally reaching into the promotion list to block four officers — two Black, two women — from becoming one-star generals. The move is so "highly unusual" that anonymous Pentagon officials are basically waving semaphore flags that say: this is political loyalty testing, not a personnel decision.

The pattern isn’t subtle. Hegseth has been busy "restructuring" the Pentagon by firing four-stars like he’s cleaning out a spam folder — including Gen. C.Q. Brown, only the second Black Joint Chiefs chair, and Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead the Navy. Official explanations: none. Unofficial explanation, straight from his own book The War on Warriors: too much diversity, not enough culture-war cosplay.

The Pentagon’s response, delivered by spokesman Sean Parnell, is that this is all "fake news" and that a pure, unsullied "meritocracy" now reigns. Which is a bold claim from an operation that keeps mysteriously deciding merit stops right around where the officer is Black, female, or not sufficiently eager to salute Trump’s latest truth-social brain fog. This isn’t personnel management; it’s an ideological purge in uniform.