Political actions, executive orders, and policy
The D.C. Circuit ordered a stop to construction of Trump's $400 million ballroom on the site of the demolished East Wing, ruling 2-1 that redesigning the White House is Congress's call — 'not a matter for Executive self-help.'
Court filings revealed Homeland Security agents' texts and sworn testimony describing the August 2025 immigration raid staged outside Gov. Gavin Newsom's Los Angeles press conference as 'purely political' — federal law enforcement openly deployed against a political opponent.
After Iran fired missiles at U.S. forces on July 28, Trump told Fox News that Iran was 'going to get a beating' and ordered a 'heavy wave' of strikes on dozens of Iranian military targets — reigniting a war he started in early 2026 and again waged with no new authorization from Congress.
A D.C. Circuit panel declined on July 28, 2026 to block Trump's executive order asserting federal control over mail-in ballots, ruling only that a challenge was premature — leaving the fate of a sweeping, likely unconstitutional attempt to police voting rolls before the midterms in the hands of the Supreme Court.
Temporary Protected Status ended on July 27, 2026 for more than 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians, exposing people who fled earthquakes and civil war to deportation back to countries the State Department still warns Americans not to visit.
A DHS interim final rule announced July 27, 2026 lets immigration officers send asylum applicants straight to court — where judges can dismiss their cases on paperwork alone — by removing the longstanding right to a non-adversarial interview with an asylum officer.
In Trump v. Barbara, a cross-ideological 6-3 Supreme Court majority struck down Executive Order 14160 and upheld birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment. Chief Justice Roberts, joined by all three liberal justices and Justice Barrett, ruled that children born in the United States are citizens regardless of their parents' immigration status — reaffirming a 128-year-old precedent Trump's team had tried to erase.
In a 6-3 ruling along ideological lines, the Supreme Court overruled Humphrey's Executor v. United States — the 1935 precedent that protected independent agency commissioners from politically motivated firings — and upheld Trump's removal of FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter. Justice Sotomayor wrote in dissent that the majority had given the president 'a power unknown even to the English Crown.'
U.S. forces struck five Iranian targets on Trump's order, Iran's Revolutionary Guard hit U.S. military sites in Kuwait and Bahrain in response, and Trump posted that 'the Islamic Republic of Iran will no longer exist' if it doesn't yield — collapsing the Islamabad memorandum he had announced weeks earlier.
A 224-page draft report from Trump's hand-picked Religious Liberty Commission — staffed almost entirely with conservative Christians — declares the separation of church and state a 'legal error,' recommends federal agencies post 'Know Your Rights' religious-liberty notices, creates new presidential medals for religious activists, and treats government promotion of religion as a constitutional mandate. Trump received the report in the Oval Office and told a Faith & Freedom Coalition crowd, 'We saved religion.'
One week into a fragile U.S.-Iran ceasefire, Trump ordered U.S. Central Command to strike Iranian missile, drone, and coastal radar sites in retaliation for an IRGC drone attack on a Singapore-flagged cargo ship in the Strait of Hormuz. Trump declared from the Rose Garden that the U.S. is now 'negotiating from a position of pure strength' — a familiar pattern in a presidency that has treated war as both leverage and spectacle.
In a 6-3 decision in Mullin v. Doe, the Supreme Court let the Trump administration terminate Temporary Protected Status for roughly 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians, holding that federal courts cannot meaningfully review the Homeland Security secretary's decision. Justice Kagan dissented that Trump's own statements about Haiti 'fairly shout, in their racial undertones and overtones,' that race drove the policy.
The White House sent Congress a supplemental spending request of $87.6 billion, the bulk of it for the Iran war Trump launched in February, just hours after he had screamed at Republican senators in a closed-door lunch over their votes on a war powers resolution. The package bundles Pentagon money for an unpopular conflict with farm bailouts and Ebola aid, daring members to vote against any of it.
Trump abruptly cancelled the Capitol Hill signing of the largest housing affordability bill in decades, telling Congress he would not sign it until lawmakers pass the SAVE America Act, his stalled bill to add proof-of-citizenship requirements to voter registration nationwide. The move ties relief for millions facing a housing crisis to passage of an unrelated measure designed to throw eligible voters off the rolls.
Postmaster General David Steiner told the Senate that under a proposed USPS rule, the Postal Service will refuse to deliver mail-in ballots in any state that declines to give the Trump administration its voter list. The policy formalizes a federal threat to disenfranchise voters in states the White House cannot otherwise force into compliance with its election-overhaul agenda.
A divided D.C. Circuit panel — two Trump appointees over a Biden-appointee dissent — vacated a district court order and cleared the way for Trump to use 'expedited removal' anywhere in the United States, allowing federal agents to deport people without an immigration judge, a lawyer, or any meaningful hearing.
The Senate voted 50-48 to direct Trump to halt military action against Iran without congressional authorization — the first time a war powers resolution has cleared both chambers of Congress in the 53-year history of the statute. Four Republicans crossed the aisle to rebuke the president after his unauthorized strikes on Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan.
The U.S. Trade Representative proposed 10–12.5% tariffs on 60 trading partners — including the EU, China, Japan, the UK, and Canada — under a Section 301 'forced labor' rationale, the administration's new legal vehicle for restoring tariffs the Supreme Court struck down.
Trump signed an executive order formally converting roughly 8,000 senior career federal employees — including agency division heads, regulation writers, policy attorneys, and chief information officers — into at-will workers who can be fired without notice or appeal, a long-planned scheme to replace nonpartisan expertise with loyalists.
Sen. Bill Cassidy — one of seven Republicans who voted to convict Trump after January 6 — became the first GOP senator in nearly a decade to lose renomination, finishing third in the Louisiana primary behind Trump-endorsed Rep. Julia Letlow and state Treasurer John Fleming.
Trump is poised to drop his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS in exchange for the creation of a $1.7 billion 'weaponization' fund — controlled by a commission he can fire at will — that can hand taxpayer money to nearly 1,600 Jan. 6 defendants and entities tied to Trump himself, with no obligation to disclose how decisions are made.
An Office of Government Ethics filing revealed Trump executed 3,642 stock trades worth $220-750 million in the first quarter of 2026, including purchases of Nvidia, Dell, Palantir, and Axon days before his administration took actions that sent those stocks soaring.
The DOJ Civil Rights Division concluded a year-long investigation by formally accusing Yale School of Medicine of intentional racial discrimination against white and Asian applicants, the second elite medical school targeted in eight days. The action is part of a sweeping Trump administration campaign weaponizing civil-rights enforcement against universities, and follows similar threats to UCLA, Stanford, UC San Diego, and Ohio State.
Trump arrived in Beijing with Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Jensen Huang, and a dozen other CEOs in tow, asking Xi Jinping to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz Trump's own war had closed — while leaving a $14 billion arms package for Taiwan unsigned on his desk.
Vice President JD Vance announced the Trump administration is withholding $1.3 billion in Medicaid reimbursements to California over alleged hospice and home-health fraud, and warned that every state will soon be ordered to prove it is 'aggressively prosecuting' Medicaid fraud or have its money cut off.
FDA Commissioner Marty Makary resigned after Trump personally berated him for resisting pressure to approve fruit-flavored e-cigarettes. The agency, days earlier, had reversed course and authorized 45 flavored vape products — a policy reversal driven by Trump's desire to court young MAGA voters and demanded by the tobacco industry, over the objections of FDA scientists who warned of the risks to children.
Trump called Iran's latest peace proposal 'garbage' and 'totally unacceptable,' threatened a resumption of major combat operations, and declared the ceasefire 'on massive life support' — as the Strait of Hormuz remained effectively closed for the 73rd consecutive day, trapping over 600 tankers and choking 20% of the world's oil supply.
Trump killed Iran's counter-proposal to end the 10-week war he started, dismissing it in all-caps as 'TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE' — sending Brent crude over $100, the U.S. pump price to $4.52, and the Strait of Hormuz back into a deadlock with no diplomatic path forward.
A Reuters investigation by Pulitzer-winning national reporter Ned Parker, amplified this week as Parker discussed his findings on Democracy Now!, documents how the Trump administration is using the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department, and the FBI to assert federal control over election administration in at least eight states — demanding voter rolls, attempting to access voting machines, and raiding county election offices on the basis of long-debunked 2020 fraud claims.
The Justice Department filed 12 new denaturalization cases in a single day and bragged it would surpass the Biden administration's four-year total within a week, while Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told CBS that naturalized citizens 'should be worried.'
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of International Trade ruled 2-1 on May 8 that Trump's 10 percent across-the-board global tariff, imposed in February under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, was unlawful. The ruling — won by a small spice retailer, a toy company, and the state of Washington — is the latest in a string of federal court losses for Trump's signature tariff agenda, and it forces the administration to scramble for new statutory authority to keep the duties in place.
On May 8, 2026, the Trump State Department announced it will proactively revoke the passports of Americans who owe back child support, beginning with roughly 2,700 people who owe $100,000 or more and ultimately reaching anyone who owes $2,500 or more — millions of parents. The 1996 statute being invoked has existed for 30 years; what is new is the administration's decision to use it, for the first time, as an automatic mass-revocation program rather than a renewal-time check.
Three U.S. Navy destroyers came under sustained Iranian missile, drone and small-boat attack while transiting the Strait of Hormuz. The U.S. retaliated with strikes on Iranian military sites, then Trump publicly dismissed the exchange as 'just a love tap' while threatening to hit Iran 'a lot harder, and a lot more violently' if it does not sign a deal.
The Justice Department deployed the Westfall Act to ask the Supreme Court to substitute the federal government for Trump as defendant in E. Jean Carroll's defamation case — a maneuver that would make the $83.3 million judgment disappear, since the U.S. government cannot be sued for defamation.
The White House released its 2026 National Counterterrorism Strategy, the first of Trump's second term. The 16-page document elevates drug cartels and 'violent left-wing extremists' — including groups it describes as 'radically pro-transgender' and 'anarchist' — to the center of U.S. counterterrorism priorities, while stripping out the Biden-era focus on white supremacist and far-right violence.
Back-to-back U.S. military strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific killed five more people across May 4 and May 5, bringing the confirmed death toll from Operation Southern Spear past 190 since September. The Pentagon has still produced no evidence the targeted vessels were carrying drugs.
Trump-backed challengers unseated five Republican Indiana state senators who had voted against his demand to redraw the state's congressional maps, in a $13.4 million primary spending blitz that demonstrated the cost of crossing the president.
After launching a military operation in the Strait of Hormuz on Monday, Trump paused it within 24 hours and threatened on Truth Social that 'the bombing starts' at 'a much higher level' if Iran doesn't accept his peace terms.
A new executive order builds an Iran-style secondary sanctions regime targeting Cuba, exposing any foreign company or financial institution that does business with the Cuban economy to U.S. blocking sanctions. The order layers on top of an embargo that has failed to topple the Cuban government for more than six decades.
Trump joined Israel in nearly 900 strikes on Iran in 12 hours, killing Supreme Leader Khamenei, opening an undeclared war that he later told Congress he didn't need their authorization to wage.
Public Law 119-21, signed at a White House ceremony with B-2 flyovers on July 4, makes Trump's 2017 tax cuts permanent, raises the debt ceiling by $5 trillion, and pays for it with the largest Medicaid cut in the program's 60-year history. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the law will add $3.4 trillion to the deficit and strip health insurance from at least 10 million Americans by 2034.
On June 22, 2025, Trump ordered Operation Midnight Hammer — the first operational use of GBU-57 bunker-busters and the largest B-2 strike in US history — to attack Iran's Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan nuclear facilities. He did not seek congressional authorization. He notified Republican leadership before the strikes and Democratic leadership only after. He then claimed on Truth Social that Iran's nuclear program had been 'completely and totally obliterated.' His own Defense Intelligence Agency concluded within days that the strikes had set the program back only a few months.
After ICE raids in downtown LA triggered street protests, Trump invoked 10 U.S.C. § 12406 to federalize 4,000 California National Guard troops without Governor Newsom's consent — the first such federalization over a governor's objection since Lyndon Johnson sent troops to Alabama in 1965 to protect civil-rights marchers — and ordered 700 active-duty Marines into the city. A federal judge later ruled the federalization illegal.
The Trump administration formally accepted a $400 million Boeing 747-8 luxury jet from the Qatari royal family to be retrofitted as Air Force One and, after Trump leaves office, transferred to his presidential library foundation. Reporting later showed the Pentagon — not Qatar — initiated the request; Attorney General Pam Bondi (a former registered Qatar lobbyist) signed off on the legal memo blessing the deal; and the retrofit cost has been hidden inside a nuclear-missile modernization program, with internal Air Force estimates running as high as $1.5 billion.
In a Rose Garden ceremony on April 2, 2025, Trump declared a national emergency and imposed the highest US tariff regime since 1909 — a 10% baseline on every trading partner plus 'reciprocal' rates of up to 50% — under a formula his own economists could not defend. The S&P 500 lost 12.4% in two trading sessions. Seven days later, after the bond market revolted, Trump paused most of the tariffs for 90 days. Stocks jumped 9.52% in a single afternoon — the biggest one-day rally since 2008.
National Security Adviser Mike Waltz accidentally added The Atlantic's editor to a Signal group where Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was sharing the targets, weapons, and timing of imminent U.S. strikes on Yemen — and Trump's first instinct was to defend everyone involved.
Plainclothes ICE agents arrested Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil — a lawful permanent resident married to a U.S. citizen — at his apartment in Morningside Heights and shipped him to a Louisiana detention center for participating in last year's Gaza protests. Secretary of State Marco Rubio personally signed a memo invoking a McCarthy-era provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act that lets him deport non-citizens whose presence is deemed to have 'serious adverse foreign policy consequences,' opening the first major test case of Trump's deport-the-protesters program.
In a single Friday-night announcement, Trump fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — Gen. Charles Q. 'C.Q.' Brown Jr., only the second Black chairman in U.S. history — along with the first female Chief of Naval Operations, the Air Force vice chief, and the top uniformed lawyers of the Army, Navy, and Air Force. To replace Brown he picked a retired three-star, Dan 'Razin' Caine, who had to be recalled to active duty and granted a statutory waiver to take the job.
Trump fired USAID Inspector General Paul Martin one day after his office reported nearly $500 million in food aid was at risk of spoiling due to the administration's gutting of the agency.
Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) launched aggressive efforts to slash federal spending and reduce the government workforce, generating controversy over its access to sensitive government systems and the legality of its actions.
The Trump administration launched an unprecedented effort to drastically reduce the federal workforce, firing probationary employees en masse, offering buyout packages, and reclassifying civil servants to strip employment protections.
Trump imposed or threatened sweeping tariffs on imports from Canada, Mexico, and China, roiling global markets and sparking fears of a trade war, before pausing some tariffs after last-minute negotiations with neighboring countries.
As devastating wildfires raged across the Los Angeles area, Trump threatened to withhold federal disaster aid from California unless the state complied with his demands on water policy and immigration, drawing sharp criticism from local officials and disaster experts.
Four days into his second term, Trump dismissed 17 of the federal government's independent inspectors general by mass email late on a Friday night, citing 'changing priorities' and ignoring the 1978 Inspector General Act's 30-day notice requirement to Congress. A federal judge later ruled the firings unlawful but declined to reinstate the watchdogs, leaving cabinet departments responsible for trillions of dollars in spending without independent oversight at the start of the most aggressive remaking of the federal government since the New Deal.
Hours after his second inauguration, Trump signed Executive Order 14160 directing federal agencies to stop recognizing the U.S. citizenship of children born on American soil to undocumented parents or to parents on temporary visas — a direct attack on the 14th Amendment that was blocked by every court that reviewed it.
Within hours of taking office, Trump signed dozens of executive orders targeting immigration, withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement, ending federal DEI programs, and declaring a national emergency at the southern border.
On his first day in office, Trump issued sweeping pardons and commutations for approximately 1,500 people charged in connection with the January 6, 2021, Capitol attack, including individuals convicted of violent assaults on police officers.
Donald Trump was sworn in as the 47th president of the United States in a ceremony moved indoors due to extreme cold, returning to power with promises of sweeping policy changes and retribution against political opponents.
On the Friday before his second inauguration, Trump launched $TRUMP — a personal cryptocurrency whose 800 million tokens were retained by his own companies and whose buyers, anywhere in the world, could anonymously deposit value into accounts the president-elect controlled.
Donald Trump defeated Vice President Kamala Harris to win the 2024 presidential election, becoming only the second president in American history to win non-consecutive terms and the first convicted felon elected to the presidency.
Nine days before the election, Trump held a closing-message rally at Madison Square Garden featuring a procession of surrogates and a warm-up comedian who called Puerto Rico 'a floating island of garbage' and made racist jokes about Black people, Latinos, and Jews. Trump did not disavow it. He won anyway.
Vice President Kamala Harris and Donald Trump faced off in their only general election debate on ABC, in a contentious exchange where Harris put Trump on the defensive and Trump repeated debunked claims about immigrants eating pets.
President Joe Biden ended his reelection campaign and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, who rapidly consolidated Democratic support and became the party's presidential nominee in an unprecedented late-stage shakeup.
Donald Trump was shot and wounded during an outdoor campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, when a gunman opened fire from a nearby rooftop, killing one attendee and critically injuring two others before being neutralized by Secret Service.
In a 6-3 decision authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court ruled that former presidents enjoy absolute immunity for 'core' constitutional acts and presumptive immunity for all other official acts — a doctrine found nowhere in the Constitution and explicitly designed to delay Jack Smith's election-subversion case past the 2024 election.
The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously reversed Colorado's removal of Trump from the state's primary ballot, ruling that states cannot unilaterally disqualify federal candidates under the 14th Amendment's insurrection clause.
Donald Trump won the Iowa Republican caucuses by the largest margin in the contest's history, capturing over 50% of the vote and signaling his dominant grip on the Republican Party.
A Fulton County, Georgia grand jury indicted Trump and 18 co-defendants under state racketeering laws for a sprawling conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia, including Trump's recorded call pressuring the secretary of state to 'find' votes.
Special Counsel Jack Smith charged Trump with four federal counts related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, alleging a broad conspiracy involving fake electors, pressure on the Vice President, and the weaponization of the Justice Department.
The House Select Committee voted unanimously to refer Donald Trump to the Justice Department on four criminal charges, including insurrection and obstruction, concluding that he was the 'central cause' of the January 6 attack.
One week after Republicans' disappointing midterm results, Donald Trump announced his candidacy for the 2024 presidential election from Mar-a-Lago, becoming the first former president in decades to seek a non-consecutive second term.
On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization that the U.S. Constitution does not protect a right to abortion, overturning Roe v. Wade after nearly 50 years. The majority was supplied by Trump's three appointees — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett — each of whom had told the Senate under oath that Roe was settled precedent. Trump immediately took credit, calling Dobbs 'the biggest WIN for LIFE in a generation.'
The House Select Committee investigating the Capitol attack launched its public hearings, presenting evidence over multiple sessions that Trump orchestrated a multi-part plan to overturn the 2020 election.
The House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack issued subpoenas to members of Trump's inner circle, including former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, Steve Bannon, and other key figures, setting up major legal confrontations over executive privilege.
The Senate voted 57-43 to convict Trump for incitement of insurrection, but fell short of the two-thirds majority needed. Seven Republicans crossed party lines to vote guilty, the most bipartisan impeachment vote in history.
Donald Trump refused to attend Joe Biden's inauguration, becoming the first outgoing president to skip his successor's swearing-in since Andrew Johnson in 1869.
The House of Representatives impeached President Trump for the second time, charging him with 'incitement of insurrection' for his role in the January 6 attack on the Capitol, making him the only president in American history to be impeached twice.
Following a rally where Trump urged supporters to 'fight like hell,' thousands stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to prevent the certification of Joe Biden's electoral victory.
In an Oval Office meeting with attorney John Eastman, Trump pressed Vice President Pence to reject certified electoral votes on January 6. When Pence refused on legal grounds, Trump publicly attacked him as a 'wimp' — and tweeted that Pence lacked 'courage' minutes after being told the Capitol had been breached and the mob was chanting 'Hang Mike Pence.'
In a recorded hour-long phone call, President Trump pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to 'find 11,780 votes' to overturn Biden's victory in the state, a call that would later form the basis of criminal charges.
In the weeks following his election loss, Trump personally pressured state legislators, election officials, and governors in key battleground states to overturn certified results and declare him the winner.
After major news organizations called the presidential race for Joe Biden, Trump refused to concede and launched an unprecedented campaign to overturn the results, falsely claiming the election had been stolen through widespread fraud.
President Trump announced he had tested positive for COVID-19, was hospitalized at Walter Reed Medical Center, and received experimental treatments, raising urgent questions about presidential succession and transparency about his condition.
During the first presidential debate, when asked to condemn white supremacist groups, Trump told the far-right Proud Boys to 'stand back and stand by,' a statement the group immediately adopted as a rallying cry.
Recordings from journalist Bob Woodward's interviews revealed that President Trump privately acknowledged COVID-19 was deadly and airborne as early as February 2020, even as he publicly downplayed the virus for months.
The Trump administration deployed federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security to Portland, Oregon, where officers in unmarked vehicles detained protesters off the streets, provoking a constitutional crisis over federal overreach.
Federal officers used tear gas and rubber bullets to forcibly clear peaceful protesters from Lafayette Square so President Trump could walk to St. John's Church and pose for photographs holding a Bible.
As protests over the police killing of George Floyd spread across the country, Trump tweeted 'when the looting starts, the shooting starts' — a phrase with a violent, racist history — drawing widespread condemnation and a warning label from Twitter.
During a White House coronavirus briefing, President Trump mused publicly about whether injecting disinfectant or using ultraviolet light inside the body could treat COVID-19, prompting immediate alarm from medical professionals.
As COVID-19 spread rapidly across the United States, President Trump repeatedly downplayed the severity of the virus, comparing it to the common flu and predicting it would soon disappear.
The Republican-controlled Senate voted to acquit President Trump on both articles of impeachment, with Senator Mitt Romney becoming the only Republican to vote for conviction.
Trump ordered a U.S. drone strike that killed Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani, head of the Quds Force, as he left Baghdad International Airport. The administration's claim that the strike preempted an 'imminent attack' on four embassies fell apart within days — Defense Secretary Mark Esper publicly contradicted it. Iran retaliated with a ballistic missile barrage on al-Asad Airbase, inflicting traumatic brain injuries on at least 109 U.S. service members that Trump initially dismissed as 'headaches.' Iraq's parliament voted to expel U.S. forces.
The House of Representatives impeached President Trump on two articles — abuse of power and obstruction of Congress — making him the third U.S. president to be impeached.
The U.S. House of Representatives voted to formalize the impeachment inquiry into President Trump over his efforts to pressure Ukraine into investigating political rival Joe Biden.
A whistleblower revealed that Trump had pressured Ukraine's president to investigate political rival Joe Biden during a July phone call, while withholding military aid, leading to Trump's first impeachment by the House of Representatives.
After Trump falsely tweeted that Alabama would be hit by Hurricane Dorian, displayed a NOAA forecast map crudely altered with a black Sharpie to support his claim, and refused to retract the error, the Commerce Department forced career meteorologists at NOAA to issue an unsigned statement disavowing the Birmingham National Weather Service's accurate forecast — a textbook case of political pressure overriding scientific judgment in a public-safety agency.
Trump tweeted that four Democratic congresswomen of color — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib — should 'go back' to the 'totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,' a racist trope directed at American citizens and elected officials.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller's 448-page report documented a 'sweeping and systematic' Russian interference operation that the Trump campaign 'expected to benefit from,' identified ten separate episodes in which Trump may have obstructed justice, and explicitly stated it did 'not exonerate' him. Attorney General William Barr spent the morning of its release publicly mischaracterizing it before Congress and the public could read it.
After Congress refused to fund his border wall and the longest government shutdown in U.S. history failed to force their hand, Trump declared a fabricated 'national emergency' to seize billions in military funds — a brazen end-run around the constitutional power of the purse.
Trump shut down the federal government for 35 days — the longest shutdown in U.S. history — after demanding $5.7 billion for a border wall Mexico was supposed to pay for. Roughly 800,000 federal workers went without paychecks, TSA officers visited food banks, the economy lost an estimated $3 billion, and Trump ended the standoff with nothing to show for it but a fake national-emergency declaration.
After Saudi agents murdered and dismembered journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Trump refused to hold Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman accountable, prioritizing arms deals over human rights and press freedom.
Standing beside Russian President Vladimir Putin at a joint press conference in Helsinki, Trump sided with Putin's denial of election interference over the unanimous assessment of U.S. intelligence agencies, stunning allies and drawing bipartisan condemnation.
The Trump administration's 'zero tolerance' immigration policy resulted in thousands of children being forcibly separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border, with some families never reunited, provoking widespread outrage and comparisons to internment camps.
Trump unilaterally pulled the United States out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — the multilateral agreement that had verifiably halted Iran's nuclear weapons program — over the explicit objections of his Defense Secretary, Secretary of State, National Security Adviser, and the U.S. intelligence community, all of whom had told him Iran was complying.
During a bipartisan meeting on immigration, Trump asked why the U.S. was accepting immigrants from 'shithole countries' in Africa and Haiti rather than from places like Norway, laying bare the racial animus behind his immigration agenda.
Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the largest overhaul of the U.S. tax code in three decades, which slashed the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% and delivered the majority of its benefits to corporations and the wealthiest Americans.
During a visit to hurricane-devastated Puerto Rico, Trump tossed rolls of paper towels into a crowd of disaster survivors in a widely criticized display, while downplaying the death toll and praising his administration's response to a catastrophe that killed nearly 3,000 Americans.
After a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, turned deadly when a neo-Nazi drove his car into counter-protesters, killing Heather Heyer, Trump said there were 'very fine people on both sides' — equating white supremacists with those protesting against them.
In a Rose Garden announcement built on fabricated economic numbers, Trump pulled the United States out of the global climate accord, abandoning the only nonbinding framework the world had agreed on for limiting warming. He framed the withdrawal as standing up for 'Pittsburgh, not Paris' — a city whose mayor immediately reminded the country it had voted 80 percent against him.
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed former FBI Director Robert Mueller as Special Counsel to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election and any links to the Trump campaign, launching a two-year investigation that would dominate Trump's presidency.
At a rally in Florida, Trump referenced a nonexistent terrorist attack 'last night in Sweden,' baffling the Swedish government and drawing international ridicule. He later claimed he was referring to a Fox News segment.
Just 29 days into his presidency, Trump tweeted that major news outlets are 'the enemy of the American People' — echoing language used by Stalin and Mao to justify suppressing dissent.
Less than a month into his presidency, Trump held a combative, rambling 77-minute press conference in which he attacked reporters, coined the term 'very fake news,' falsely claimed the largest Electoral College win since Reagan, and insisted his scandal-plagued administration was running like a 'fine-tuned machine.'
Just one week into his presidency, Trump signed an executive order banning entry from seven Muslim-majority countries, triggering immediate chaos at airports and a wave of federal court challenges.
On his first full day in office, Trump sent his press secretary to falsely claim the inauguration had the 'largest audience ever,' and counselor Kellyanne Conway defended the lies as 'alternative facts.'
Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 45th President of the United States and delivered a dark, nationalist address that former President George W. Bush reportedly called 'some weird shit.'
Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton to become the 45th president of the United States, winning the Electoral College 304 to 227 despite losing the popular vote by nearly three million ballots, in one of the most stunning upsets in American political history.
After Gold Star father Khizr Khan delivered a powerful DNC speech challenging Trump's proposed Muslim ban, Trump attacked the Khan family, suggesting Khan's wife was not 'allowed' to speak and questioning their motives.
At a press conference, Trump publicly called on Russia to find Hillary Clinton's deleted emails, saying 'Russia, if you're listening,' in a moment that would become central to investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
A pattern of violence at Trump rallies culminated in the cancellation of a major Chicago event amid clashes between supporters and protesters, as Trump repeatedly encouraged aggressive behavior from the stage.
At a campaign rally in Iowa, Trump boasted that his supporters were so loyal he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue in New York City and not lose voters, a remark that became one of the most quoted lines of the 2016 campaign.
In a written statement and at a rally in South Carolina, Trump called for a 'total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,' drawing bipartisan condemnation and comparisons to some of the darkest chapters in American history.
During the first Republican primary debate, Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly confronted Trump about his history of calling women 'fat pigs' and 'slobs,' prompting a prolonged feud in which Trump appeared to suggest Kelly was menstruating.
In his presidential campaign announcement speech at Trump Tower, Donald Trump described Mexican immigrants as 'rapists' and criminals, sparking immediate backlash from Latino communities and setting the tone for his candidacy.
Donald Trump descended a golden escalator at Trump Tower in Manhattan to announce his candidacy for president, delivering a speech in which he called Mexican immigrants 'rapists' and promised to build a border wall.
President Obama used his speech at the White House Correspondents' Dinner to deliver a pointed, comedic takedown of Donald Trump, who sat stone-faced in the audience as the room laughed.
President Obama took the extraordinary step of releasing his long-form birth certificate from Hawaii, directly responding to Donald Trump's relentless promotion of the false birther conspiracy theory.
Donald Trump embraced and amplified the false conspiracy theory that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States, using it to build a political following and establish himself as a leading figure on the populist right.
Donald Trump withdrew from the Reform Party presidential race, citing the party's dysfunction, after months of exploratory campaigning that foreshadowed his eventual 2016 run.
Trump formed a presidential exploratory committee under the Reform Party banner, proposing a one-time wealth tax and universal healthcare before ultimately withdrawing, in what many viewed as an early test of his political ambitions and media strategy.
