May 19, 2017 – Four months after his inauguration, almost 700 positions still remained empty at the Center for Disease Control. The vacancies appeared at every level—from administrative roles to scientific advisers to director-level positions.
May 18, 2017 – Reuters reported the Trump campaign had at least 18 undisclosed contacts with Russian state officials or individuals with Kremlin ties during the final months of the 2016 election. Six of these 18 unreported contacts were direct calls to Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the United States.
May 17, 2017 – Before Donald Trump hired Michael Flynn as national security adviser, Flynn had told President Trump that he was under investigation for remunerated lobbying on behalf of the Turkish government. Trump appointed him anyway.
May 14, 2020 – Perchlorate, a toxic chemical compound used in rocket fuel, has been found to contaminate water, causing fetal and infant brain damage. The Obama administration planned to regulate the chemical, but the Environmental Protection Agency, led by Trump’s appointee Andrew Wheeler, went against the decision, saying that the regulation was “not in the public interest.”
May 12, 2020 – During a pandemic that had killed tens of thousands of Americans, Trump took the time to promote a conspiracy theory that suggested that Joe Scarborough of MSNBC committed murder. “When will they open a Cold Case on the Psycho Joe Scarborough matter in Florida,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “Did he get away with murder? Some people think so.”
May 12, 2017 – The Environmental Protection Agency announced it would withdraw mining restrictions on Alaska’s headwaters, opening the door to a major mining facility in the area. This reversal came after an EPA study concluded the mine could decimate salmon populations in the area, and thereby harm native Alaskans whose culture depended heavily on salmon.
May 12, 2017 – Donald Trump shared highly classified information with the Russian foreign minister and Russian ambassador at a WH meeting. The disclosure jeopardized the identity of a source that had infiltrated the Islamic State—an extremely sensitive piece of information. Trump had, “revealed more information to the Russian Ambassador than we’ve shared with our own allies,” said a US official in The Washington Post.
May 12, 2017 – Morgan Lewis Tax Partners reviewed ten years of Donald Trump’s tax returns and reported that, with “a few exceptions,” he had no financial ties with Russia. After investigation of Morgan Lewis, the Guardian found the tax firm had been named Russia Law Firm of the Year by an industry publication which ranks law firms by region.
May 6, 2017 – Nicole Kushner Meyer, the sister of White House adviser and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, solicited investments from Chinese business owners by promising American visas in return. An ad for her event in China read, “Invest $500,000 and immigrate to the United States.”
May 3, 2020 – COVID death toll could reach 100,000, Trump said during a Fox broadcast from the Lincoln Memorial--twice what he predicted two weeks earlier. He said the country should still reopen its economy, called predecessors “foolish” and “stupid,” and boasted he had “done more than any other president in history.”
Pointing to Lincoln: “They always said nobody got treated worse than Lincoln. I believe I am treated worse.”
May 2, 2017 – Donald Trump referred to the system of checks and balances between the legislative and executive branches as an “archaic” system. He followed this statement by claiming, “Maybe at some point we’ll have to take those rules on, because, for the good of the nation, things are going to have to be different.”
May 1, 2017 – In a Sirius Radio interview, Donald Trump praised Andrew Jackson as having “a big heart.” Andrew Jackson infamously enacted the Trail of Tears, which forced 17,000 Cherokees to walk across the country and resulted in thousands of deaths. Trump also claimed, “had Andrew Jackson been a little later, you wouldn’t have had the Civil War.” He continued, “But why was there a Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?”
April 30, 2020 – Trump administration officials put pressure on U.S. spy agencies to dig up evidence that the coronavirus originated in a lab in Wuhan, China — a theory that was widely discredited. The strategy was part of Trump’s attempt to blame China for what he continued to call the “Chinese virus.”
April 30, 2017 – Donald Trump invited Philippines authoritarian Rodrigo Duterte to visit the White House. Duterte’s regime had carried out extrajudicial killings of drug users and drug dealers, garnering global condemnation. As of January 2018, Human Rights Watch had counted over 12,000 such murders’. The two leaders met in November, during which time Trump reported the pair had a “great relationship.”
April 27, 2020 – Trump ignored at least a dozen classified briefings in January and February which called the coronavirus an imminent threat. Officials said, on the condition of anonymity, that Trump seldom reads or listens to an oral summary of the President’s Daily Brief.
April 24, 2017 – Donald Trump ordered White House aides to draft a tax plan that slashed the corporate tax rate to 15 percent. Trump told his aides cutting taxes for businesses should take priority over decreasing the federal deficit.
April 22, 2020 – Dr. Rick Bright, who headed the agency to develop a coronavirus vaccine, cast doubts on whether hydroxychloroquine could prevent Covid-19. Questioning the drug touted by Trump cost him his position: Bright was ousted as director of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority.
April 20, 2017 – After his inauguration, Donald Trump announced that within 90 days of his election he would appoint a team to investigate election interference and protect against future hacking. At 90 days from his oath to take office, no such team existed, nor was a plan in place to build one.
April 20, 2017 – A full month after dismissing 93 U.S. attorneys, Attorney General Jeff Sessions had not hired ANY to replace them. The vacancies in the federal prosecutors’ office came as a surprise, given that Sessions has prioritized a crack-down on crime.
April 18, 2020 – Trump faulted Democratic governors for not doing enough to test people for COVID-19. “They don’t want to use all of the capacity that we’ve created,” he said in a briefing. “We have tremendous capacity.”
Just nine days earlier he was faulting everyone for TESTING TOO MUCH. "Slow the testing down!"
April 17, 2017 – Donald Trump called and congratulated Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan following the Turkish leader’s victory in a public referendum that majorly expanded his executive powers. Contradicting Trump, the U.S. State Department released a statement questioning the democratic legitimacy of the referendum, pointing out irregularities in the election results and bias in media coverage.
April 13, 2020 – At the lengthy daily White House coronavirus briefing, Trump has something of a meltdown when he says he has "total" authority to order states to open up when he wants and the press tells him he does not.
April 13, 2020 – Treasury ordered that Trump’s name appear on the $1,200 stimulus checks that millions of Americans were to receive. Part of the government’s $2T coronavirus rescue package, the checks were proposed by Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Mitt Romney (R-Utah). No IRS disbursement had ever carried a president’s name. It was Trump’s idea to have his name printed on the checks.
“Time to #FireFauci” read a message that Trump retweeted after the nation’s top infectious disease expert said fewer Americans would have died had the country gone under lockdown earlier.
Trump didn’t only go after Fauci; in a series of tweets, he condemned, China, the World Health Organization, and President Obama.