Donald Trump’s unprecedented presidency, from inauguration to insurrection

Donald Trump’s inauguration on a wintry 20 January 2017 kicked off his extraordinary reign, completing his rise from New York luxury property tycoon to reality TV star to unlikely president. His administration started out as it intended to go on: by sparring with the press and disputing factual reality, initially over the size of the crowd who witnessed his swearing-in.

The president’s so-called Muslim travel ban was his first major policy controvesy and was followed by his first firing. Trump reluctantly removed national security adviser Michael Flynn from office after just 24 days for lying to the vice president and FBI over meetings with Russia’s ambassador to the US. His dismissal would intensify the bureau’s interest in examining the campaign’s ties to Moscow influencers and led to attorney general Jeff Sessions recusing himself from the process and an angry president firing director James Comey, leaving their replacements with little choice but to appoint Robert Mueller as special counsel to get to the bottom of it all.

Trump continued to rely on Twitter as a tool to circumvent a critical “mainstream media” and took pleasure in resetting the national news agenda with a single post, a process that backfired badly when he typed “Covfefe” on 31 May 2017 and sent it live on social media. The period also saw his first foreign tour - to the Middle East - and his son, Donald Trump Jr, finding himself in hot water when word of a secret meeting he held at Trump Tower in Manhattan during the campaign came to light.

Beleaguered White House press secretary Sean Spicer was replaced by the tough-talking Anthony Scaramucci in July 2017 before he too was ushered towards the exit after just 11 days in the job. Trump’s efforts to overturn the legislative achievements of his hated predecessor, Barack Obama, brought him to healthcare that same summer, only for his efforts to scrap the Affordable Care Act to be thwarted - with a thumbs up gesture - by maverick Republican senator John McCain, whose feud with the president exposed his broader disdain for the country’s military servicemen and women.

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The president’s war of words with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un over his nuclear ambitions escalated in August before deadly neo-Nazi violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, brought a major political test at home that he proceeded to fail spectacularly.

By the autumn of 2017, Trump was confronted by a devastating mass shooting at a country music festival in Las Vegas, Nevada, that presented an opportunity for him to take on the country’s powerful firearms lobby, the NRA. Naturally, he didn’t take it. When Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico, his response was once again found wanting and a striking absence of compassion exposed.

At the conclusion of his first year in the Oval Office Trump was again embroiled in phallic sparring with Pyongyang, an astonishingly offensive exchange about immigrants arriving from “s***hole countries” made the headlines and Stormy Daniels and Michael Cohen took to the stage. The new year brought a crushing high school massacre in Parkland, Florida, and further staff turmoil in the West Wing, as key cabinet appointees deserted acrimoniously.

The president finally set aside his cat-calling with Chairman Kim as the pair came together for a historic summit in Singapore but new tensions flared up over Iran in the wake of Trump’s withdrawal of the US from the 2015 nuclear accord. The president’s foreign adventures next brought him to Finland for bilateral talks with Russia. Trump sided with Vladimir Putin over his own intelligence officers in denying election meddling, as the entire world looked on in disbelief.

The Senate went to war over Trump’s nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the US Supreme Court in September 2018 when the aspiring justice was accused of a historic sexual assault. Rather than challenge Saudi Arabia over the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the president attempted to deliver Republican wins at the November 2018 midterms by scaremongering over the Mexican border, demonising a ragged migrant caravan of refugees fleeing poverty in Central America with false allegations about their intent. His efforts failed, new enemies won seats in a crashing blue wave and “The Squad”, composed of young Democratic progressives, took shape.

Trump’s next drama was to force a government shutdown in a bid to pressure Congress into putting aside money for his long-promised border wall, which he had assured his supporters Mexico would be picking up the bill for, not US taxpayers. The bleak stand-off through Christmas and into the new year proved to be the longest in American history at 35 days. The president ultimately blinked first but declared a national emergency at the border to empower himself to simply lift the money from Pentagon construction coffers without lawmakers getting a say-so.

The president next turned to having another crack at Kim Jong-un at a second summit in Vietnam on the same day his estranged former fixer Michael Cohen testified to his considerable discredit before the House of Representatives. With a new attorney general, Bill Barr, in place to shield the president, Robert Mueller finally released his report into the question of the Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia. He did not exonerate the president, finding 10 possible grounds for obstruction of justice charges to be laid against him, but Trump and his cronies cheered the outcome as a win anyway.

With Mueller seemingly done and dusted, Trump fixated on illegal immigration statistics in spring 2019 and fired his homeland security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who had become the reluctant face of the administration’s “zero tolerance” policies like family separation and child imprisonment. Trump next set out for London - finding fault with city mayor Sadiq Khan and the TV reception at the US ambassador’s residence upon arrival - as he attended D-Day 75th anniversary commemorations. The Normandy Landings “worked out OK”, he reflected.

Trump’s dramatic last minute U-turn on bombing Iran on 20 June 2019 came in retaliation for the downing of a US Navy surveillance drone, with the president claiming the human tragedy incurred would have been too great. While Trump attended the G20 in Japan, the drowning of a migrant father and his infant daughter in the Rio Grande brought worldwide condemnation before he caused a distraction by stepping across the demilitarized zone into North Korea in a historic appeal to Kim Jong-un that yielded nothing. July began with a quasi-fascistic “Salute to America” celebration on Independence Day beset by organisational problems, rain and some laughable historical inaccuracies in his speechmaking.

August followed with a horrific 24 hours that saw twin mass shootings erupt in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, the former carried out by a gunman who posted a manifesto online explicitly citing Trump’s racist rhetoric against Hispanic Americans. The president’s blundering attempt to heal these grieving communities only made matters worse. The silly season then kicked off in earnest, with Trump angry at being rebuffed in his attempt to buy Greenland from Denmark, pronouncing himself “the Chosen One” and making an utter fool of himself by refusing to admit his mistake about the path of Hurricane Dorian and doctoring a weather map to cover his tracks before picking an embarrassing fight with sitcom actress Debra Messing.

September 2019 opened a fresh chapter: the House impeachment inquiry and hearings and Senate trial of Donald J Trump for attempting to extort a political favour from Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in exchange for the release of $400m in congressionally-approved military aid. The drama unfolded over several months and presented a memorable cast of characters, from witnesses Alexander Vindman, Fiona Hill and Gordon Sondland to Rudy Giuliani henchmen Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman. Trump was ultimately acquitted in the Senate when only Mitt Romney broke Republican ranks to condemn him.

While the impeachment saga dominated the news, a number of absurd developments took place in the autumn and winter of 2019 that were unjustly sidelined. Events including the revelation that Trump demanded a moat filled with ravenous snakes and alligators along the length of his border wall and Twitter tomfoolery taking in Nickelback, Rocky Balboa and Greta Thunberg all played a part. The new year began with the sudden assassination of top Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, a move Trump had plotted over Christmas at Mar-a-Lago, despite advice to the contrary.

By February 2020, a freshly acquitted Trump was touring India and given a lavish welcome at a cricket stadium, at which he repaid his hosts’ generosity by mangling the names of several local heroes in his speech. The president and first lady also posed for pictures at the Taj Mahal, which provided an unfortunate reminder of one of his failed Atlantic City casino ventures. Upon returning home, he was forced to confront the dawning coronavirus pandemic, insisting all would be well as Asia and Europe entered lockdowns and New York City bore the brunt.

Then came the explosive events of last summer. With the world in the grip of Covid-19, the police killing of two African Americans, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, led to Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the streets of every major US city and angry clashes with law enforcement officers and right-wing agitators. Trump, attempting to adopt a Nixonian “law and order” stance, again upped the tension by having protesters tear-gassed outside the White House to clear a path for a photo opportunity. Further insensitivities followed when he risked lives by returning to the campaign trail in Tulsa, Oklahoma, an event that ended in humiliation thanks to TikTok teens and the death of an ally.

As election campaigning against Joe Biden heated up, Trump continued to exploit “culture war” divisions before ignoring precedent to nominate conservative judge Amy Coney Barrett to the US Supreme Court in place of the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg. His pick was ultimately elevated to the bench but her unveiling ceremony in the White House Rose Garden proved to be a Covid superspreader event, with Trump inadvertently carrying the symptoms with him to his first TV debate against the Democratic presidential challenger. After that chaotic encounter, the president and first lady were taken ill with a disease they had done their utmost to downplay.

Trump received life-saving and costly treatment at Walter Reed military hospital and returned to campaigning before decisively losing the race to Biden, who claimed the popular vote by a 7m ballot margin and the Electoral College 306-232 in a landslide. Unable to accept the reality of life as a loser, the outgoing president whipped up his supporters by claiming the result was “stolen” from him, raising huge amounts in donations and mounting a legal challenge to swing state defeats led by Giuliani. The former New York City mayor resoundingly humiliated himself at every possible turn and lost more than 60 court cases without finding a trace of evidence of the “mass voter fraud” his employer alleged.

The storming of the US Capitol Building by supporters of the president on 6 January 2021 brought his tenure to a sorry end, those responsible riled up by their idol and intent on stopping Congress certifying the election results after all but his most loyal Republican followers had deserted the cause. Five people were killed, a second impeachment wa passed and security concerns lingered in the runup to Biden’s inauguration on 20 January, even after Trump had finally been deplatformed by Twitter in disgrace.