January 2017: Shortly after his inauguration as president, Trump fulfills a campaign promise by releasing his full tax returns. In a statement, the president says he’s releasing them for two reasons.
“As a real estate developer, I make no apologies for taking advantage of every loophole. As president, I will close these crazy holes for the sake of the American people. #IAloneCanFixIt. #MAGA.”
He then drives through tax reforms that close the loop poles that he takes advantage of as part of a massive tax reform package that updates the tax code to reflect the 21st century and increases government revenue to start paying down the debt from the Great Recession.
February 2017: Infuriating movement conservatives, Trump resubmits 64-year-old Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court, saying he wants to uphold the principle — denied to his predecessor — that a president has the right to nominate a candidate to fill a vacant judgeship at any point in his administration.
But he does so as part of a deal in which one of the court’s older conservative justices steps down from the bench in favor of Neil Gorsuch, 49. The subsequent retirement of Anthony Kennedy and the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg mean the court regains its conservative majority, with three younger justices, by the end of Trump’s first term.
October 2017: Following the massacre of some 60 people (and the injury of more than 800) by a lone gunman in Las Vegas, Trump delivers a prime-time address on the subject of gun control. He observes that, at the time the Second Amendment was written, a skilled marksman could fire, at most, three or four rounds a minute.
“The right to bear arms cannot become a license for American carnage,” he says, borrowing a line from his inaugural address. “We’re either going to get serious about regulating the ability of just about anyone to get access to high-powered, rapid-firing weapons, or we’re going to start requiring every gun owner to spend every other Sunday doing drills in their local ‘well-regulated militia’ — just like it says in the Constitution.”
Then he drives an assault weapon ban through Congress.
May 2018: In the face of a migration crisis on the U.S.-Mexico border, Trump proposes a grand-immigration bargain with congressional Democrats:
passage of the 2013 McCain immigration bill that passed the Senate with a bipartisan 68-32 vote but was killed in the House. Later, he expands the proposal to a $2 trillion infrastructure bill with “Buy American” provisions, in exchange for expedited environmental reviews for federal projects.
June 2018: Invoking Gerald Ford’s congressional testimony regarding his presidential pardon of Richard Nixon, Trump agrees to sit before the House Intelligence Committee on the subject of his campaign’s links to Russia. He expresses regret for hiring Paul Manafort as campaign chairman and for his praise for WikiLeaks, which he concedes interfered in the 2016 election. But he challenges the factual basis of the Steele dossier and the legal basis for the F.B.I.’s investigation of his campaign.
July 2019: In a telephone call with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump makes no mention of the Biden family.
February 2020: Warning Americans that the novel coronavirus risks becoming the greatest global health emergency of the century, Trump tells Americans that we can beat this, and keep the economy strong, by adopting common-sense social-distancing measures: avoiding crowded public transportation, sports arenas, concerts and bars. Going further than even his own health experts recommended, he talks up his well-known germophobia and insists that everyone in the White House wear a face mask. But he also warns state governors that attempts to lock down entire communities in an effort to contain the spread is a futile cure that will impose ruinous economic costs.
June 2020: After the killing of George Floyd, Trump convenes a conference of law enforcement officials and others to develop a set of national police standards. He asks the Democratic Representative Val Demings of Florida to lead the conference.
He continues to drive Obama era civil rights investigations into police departments with questionable practices and obtain consent decrees to improve policing and reduce profiling of minorities. After police organizations in Minneapolis were videoed slashing reporters car tires, he speaks nationally on the importance of public reporting in speaking truth to power and vows to hold regular press conferences where truth will come before politics.