Did that really happen? Four outrageous stories from Trump’s first year back that you may have forgotten about
Former White House Chief Strategist in 2019 Steve Bannon he told PBS Frontline President, how is the program? Donald Trump He had engaged in a deliberate strategy to overwhelm the press and his critics by making major and controversial policy changes, distracting them by trolling to prevent them from focusing on anything that might matter.
He described his tactic as “flooding the area.”
“We hit them with three things every day. They’ll bite one and we’ll do all our business, bang, bang, bang,” he said.
Almost a year into Trump’s second term, their “population strategy” is in full effect.
His administration has announced sweeping changes to how America’s government operates that have and will have dramatic impacts on how ordinary people live for years to come. But these changes happened so quickly that nearly 365 days after Trump was inaugurated on a freezing January day last year, it’s hard to even begin to remember what he did.
Here are some of the wildest stories in the White House in 2025:
Donald Trump’s return to the White House came with big changes and constant headlines. Here’s a look at some of the wildest stories. (Getty Images)
Purge of Watchdogs
Five days after Trump was sworn in He carried out the massacre on Friday night Independent inspectors general who eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse within federal agencies and departments.
The late-night purge removed inspectors general at nearly every cabinet-level agency without warning, violating a longstanding law that requires the president to notify Congress of his intention to remove any such official 30 days before actually doing so.
Only monitors at the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security were allowed to keep their jobs.
Trump, who fired some inspectors general during his first term in a bid to rein in their ability to investigate wrongdoing by their appointees, argued that the illegal move was “very common” while speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One en route to a golf trip on the first weekend of his second term.
“I don’t know them… but some people thought some people were unfair or some people weren’t doing their job. That’s a very standard thing,” he said.
Purge removed Senate-approved monitors at the departments of Defense, State, Transportation, Labor, Health and Human Services, Veterans Affairs, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Energy, Commerce, Treasury and Agriculture, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency, Small Business Administration and Social Security Administration. This move allowed Trump to fill the positions with loyalists.
Trump removed many government watchdogs from their posts days after taking office. Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz was only one of two observers who survived Trump’s purge on January 25. (Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)
US capture of Gaza never happened
Trump hosts Israeli Prime Minister at the White House in less than a month Benjamin Netanyahu for an official visit.
Netanyahu’s visit was Trump’s first appearance there in a long time as his predecessor and former president. Joe BidenIsrael had declined to invite the leader because of election-year sensitivities around Hamas’ brutal campaign to bomb civilian targets in Gaza in retaliation for terrorist attacks on Oct. 7, 2023.
Just weeks ago, the Biden and Trump teams had shared praise for what was billed at the time as a ceasefire and hostage exchange agreement between Israel and Hamas, but the agreement quickly collapsed.
But as Netanyahu stood next to him in the East Room, Trump proposed another plan for the war-torn region. Middle East experts are dizzy The president claimed that the United States would “take over” Gaza and displace the 2.1 million Palestinians living there as the region is rebuilt as the “Riviera of the Middle East.”
The president’s shocking offer to bring the Gaza Strip, which Israel has occupied since the end of the 1967 Six-Day War, under American control came at the start of a frantic marathon press conference in the East Room following a bilateral meeting with Netanyahu, the first foreign leader Trump has hosted since returning to the White House last month.
He claimed that “everyone he talked to about the plan loved the idea of the United States owning this piece of land, developing and creating thousands of jobs with something that would be amazing.”
Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu take questions at a press conference in the East Room of the White House. (AFP via Getty Images)
“I’ve studied this very closely for months and seen it from every angle, and this is a very, very dangerous place, and it’s going to get worse. And I think that’s an idea that’s been very widely praised. And if the United States can help bring stability and peace to the Middle East, we’ll do that,” Trump added.
His comments attracted attention Widespread reviews around the worldSaudi Arabia said it “absolutely rejects” the forced displacement of Palestinians in Gaza, while Hamas called the idea “ridiculous and absurd.”
The White House abandoned the idea less than a day later, and the president’s aborted plan was later replaced by a ceasefire agreement negotiated between Israel and Hamas in October with the help of Egypt, Qatar and other regional powers.
Trump targets a critic with his own executive order
During his 2024 campaign against former Biden and later former vice president Kamala Harris, Trump was fond of telling supporters that he would be their “punishment” if he was re-elected.
Since taking office, he has fulfilled that promise in ways that critics say have challenged the rule of law and undermined the Justice Department’s independence.
But Trump took the unprecedented step of his “revenge” tour in April, ordering the Justice Department to investigate one of his most prominent early critics — for anything that could be investigated.
The queue came forward Miles TaylorA veteran of several Republican administrations who had by then served as chief of staff.Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly during the president’s first term. During this time, Taylor famously wrote an anonymous letter. New York Times Column and later a book about Trump administration staff’s efforts to protect the government from Trump’s worst instincts.
White House Staff Secretary Will Scharf said at the time that the order stripped Taylor of “any active authorization he had in light of his past activities involving classified information,” although Taylor’s writings were in no way alleged to contain anything classified.
Miles Taylor, the former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security, was one of Trump’s chief critics. Trump was targeted by the White House shortly after returning to Washington. (AFP/Getty)
“He will also instruct the Department of Justice to investigate his activities to see what else might come to light in this regard, given his egregious behavior during your previous administration,” Scharf added.
That same day, Trump signed a similar order directing an investigation into security expert Chris Krebs, who headed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency during his first term. Krebs had drawn Trump’s ire immediately after the 2020 election, in which Trump lost to Joe Biden, by publicly stating that the election was the most secure in the country’s 250-year history.
He also said there was “no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, altered votes, or was in any way compromised” during the 2020 election, which directly contradicts Trump’s baseless claims of fraud.
The order also targeted Krebs’ employer, the cybersecurity firm SentinelOne, ordering the revocation of “security clearances held by individuals at organizations affiliated with Krebs, including SentinelOne, pending review of whether such clearances are consistent with the national interest.”
Eight months later, neither Taylor nor Krebs have been charged with any crime, but Trump has continued to escalate his revenge campaign against critics and foes by ordering the Justice Department to prosecute former FBI director James Comey and New York State Attorney General Letitia James, among others.
Those efforts have so far been blocked by federal judges who dismissed a pair of indictments against both Comey and James on the grounds that former White House official Lindsey Halligan, whom Trump appointed to be a prosecutor in Virginia, was unlawfully appointed.
Trump claims he’s above the law with questionable Napoleon quote
Less than a month after Trump swore to “preserve, protect and defend” the U.S. Constitution, he used social media to counter numerous challenges to executive actions and threats to federal agencies by the then-Elon Musk-run Department of Government Efficiency, citing a movie about Napoleon that legitimized his despotic regime as the will of the people of France.
Writing on X and Truth Social on February 15, Trump said: “He who saves his country breaks no law.”
Trump’s efforts to cut federal funding Fire thousands of aid workers and unilaterally redefine 14th Amendment That incident, which was quickly blocked by federal courts across the country in the opening salvos of a series of months-long legal battles, appeared to lift the line from the 1970 film Waterloo, in which actor Rod Steiger’s Napoleon “did not ‘usurp’ the crown.”
“I found him in the gutter and I lifted him up with my sword, and it was people… who put him on my head,” he says. “What saves a nation does not violate any law,” Steiger said.
Four days later, Trump went further by crowning himself the “king” of his former home, New York City, after the Department of Transportation ordered a hold on federal funds to New York unless it overturned a congestion pricing plan implemented by the Democratic-led city government.
“CONGRESS PRICING IS DEAD,” he wrote on Truth Social on February 19. “Manhattanand all new YorkSAVED. Long live the king!”
The White House’s X account then shared his statement The fake cover of Time magazine features a portrait of the president wearing a crown and the text “Long live the king.”
Then-White House Deputy Chief of Staff Taylor Budowich also shared An AI-generated image of the president wearing a crown and regal cape.
In response, New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority sued Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and federal transportation officials, arguing that the Trump administration unlawfully and “purported to ‘terminate’ the program suddenly and for obvious political reasons, as then-candidate Trump announced he would do in his first week in office.”
A federal judge later blocked the Trump administration from withholding funds in retaliation for the congestion pricing plan, and the MTA’s lawsuit to permanently bar the administration from doing so is ongoing.
