UNPRESIDENTED
Four years of chaos, ending in crisis. A presidency founded on lies that led to carnage. Trump will leave the White House this morning after 1,461 days that shook America.
Amid the torrent of tweets and headlines, 21 moments would come to define this presidency
WASHINGTON—“There’s never been anything like it,” U.S. President Donald Trump said Tuesday in his farewell message from the White House. It may be the least disputed thing he’s ever said.
Over 20 sometimes dishonest minutes, he surveyed his term in office. “We did what we came here to do,” Trump said.
At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell conveyed a different farewell message at the Capitol building: “The mob was fed lies,” McConnell said of the Jan. 6 insurrectionist riot that Trump inspired. “They were provoked by the president and other powerful people.”
It was because of Trump’s mob, and the fear that it might return, that the area of Washington where the two Republican leaders spoke looked like a war zone: five square miles locked down in a multi-layered maze of fences and military and Secret Service checkpoints patrolled by 25,000 soldiers toting guns.
The streets deserted, buildings boarded up, bridges into the city blockaded.
It’s fitting that Trump’s presidency ended with a massive military deployment in a walled-off U.S. capital to defend it against the political forces he’d unleashed. His farewell message notwithstanding, his time in office was all about erecting walls, attacking opponents, stirring up extremists and cartoonish displays of power.
Trump’s was a presidency of chaos and controversy, in which each new day brought fresh outrage in tweets, dishonest comments and policy announcements. As he leaves, from among likely thousands of memorable moments, here are 21 that defined his presidency:
1. “Russia, if you’re listening.” Then candidate Trump’s July 2016 plea to a foreign power to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails summed up much that was to come — in part because it turned out someone in Russia was listening. It led to the Russia investigation, while showcasing Trump’s fixation on digging up (or manufacturing) dirt on opponents and his shameless public catering to foreign authoritarian regimes.
2. Biggest. Crowd. Ever. In January 2017, the Trump administration’s insistence on claiming — despite obvious evidence — that his inauguration had drawn a larger crowd than Barack Obama’s set the tone for his obsession with crowd sizes, but more importantly for his commitment to frequent and obvious lying.
3. James Comey’s firing. Trump trampled norms by firing the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in May 2017 because Comey wouldn’t shut down an investigation into the president’s campaign. The obvious abuse of power would become a theme of his presi- dency, and this one wound up launching the Mueller investigation.
4. “Covfefe.” When Trump tweeted in May 2017, “Despite the negative press covfefe,” he caused an absurd media sensation. It was a simple typo, yet the millions of memes launched in response and the acres of newspaper space devoted to debating its meaning clearly articulated the era of the Twitter presidency, in which the impulsive thoughts of the president were immediately shared with the general public and drove both pop culture and government policy.
5. John McCain’s thumbsdown. No policy enraged Obama-haters more than his health insurance plan. No moment defined the split between the old Republican establishment and Trump’s administration like the July 2017 hand gesture with which Arizona senator John McCain killed Trump’s attempt to repeal Obamacare.
6. “Very fine people on both sides.” Trump’s team has emphasized that in addition to appearing to call a murderous white supremacist mob in Charlottesville, Va., “very fine people,” he also condemned them in August 2017. But the message, even in context, encapsulated his impulse to condemn his opponents when his supporters act out violently, and to muddy his message enough that white supremacists and extremists could interpret it as support. Joe Biden claimed it made him run for president.
7. “America First” at the United Nations. In his first speech to the UN in September 2017, Trump defined a transactional approach to foreign policy. “I will always put America first, just like you, as the leaders of your countries will always, and should always, put your countries first.”
8. “Shithole countries.” After his Muslim ban, the beginning of construction of his border wall, and a rush of other anti-immigration policies, Trump reportedly quizzed his advisers about Haiti in January 2018, asking, “Why do we want all these people from shithole
countries coming here?”
9. “I REALLY DON’T CARE, DO U?” Amid the shock of Trump’s immigration policies, particularly the punitive measure of separating refugee children from their families in detention centres, first lady Melania Trump went to visit the children in June 2018. The back of her jacket bore a message that seemed to sum up the Trump administration’s response to humanitarian concerns: “I REALLY DON’T CARE, DO U?”
10. Standing against allies at the G7 Summit. At the June 2018 meeting of G7 leaders in Quebec, Trump imposed harsh tariffs on Canada, Mexico and Europe, accused allies of using the U.S. as a “piggy bank,” attacked Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as “dishonest and weak,” and lamented that Russian President Vladimir Putin wasn’t at the meeting. A photo of German Chancellor Angela Merkel staring down a defiantly seated Trump went viral for capturing the “America alone” mood among U.S. allies.
11. “We fell in love.” While alienating allies, Trump was courting North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. After earlier seeming to threaten the country with nuclear annihilation, Trump visited “Little Rocket Man” in North Korea for a summit in February 2019, making policy concessions to woo him. “We fell in love,” the president said of his relationship with the dictator.
12. “She’s not my type.” Trump was accused of sexual assault by journalist E. Jean Carroll, who in a June 2019 magazine article related an account of being raped by the future president in a department store in the 1990s. Trump, who once famously bragged about grabbing women “by the p---y” dismissed Carroll’s allegation, saying, “Number one, she’s not my type. Number two, it never happened.”
13. That Sharpie line on the hurricane map. In September 2019, Trump was accused of drawing a line on an official map to extend the area threatened by a hurricane to conform to his own previous warnings. Weeks of government resources were consumed defending the president’s claims.
14. “It was a perfect phone call.” In July 2019, Trump told the president of Ukraine that, “I want you to do us a favour,” and proceeded to ask him to launch investigations into Biden and Biden’s son, Hunter, in exchange for U.S. government aid. In September 2019, he insisted it was a “perfect phone call.” In December 2019, he was impeached by the House of Representatives for it.
15. Trudeau laughs behind his back. A viral behind-thescenes video of Trudeau sharing a laugh with other world leaders at Trump’s expense in December 2019 came to symbolize the world’s fallen esteem for the United States under Trump’s presidency. 16. “I think it’s a problem that’s going to go away.” In February 2020, early in the coronavirus crisis, Trump predicted the virus would simply disappear soon. He stuck more or less to that line of thinking for the duration of his presidency, generally refusing to wear a mask and claiming the end of the pandemic was just around the corner. As he leaves office, COVID-19 continues to spread relatively unchecked, and has killed more than 400,000 Americans.
17. The Bible photo op. As mass demonstrations over police brutality and racism spread across the country, Trump called the protesters “terrorists” on June 1, 2020, and had a peaceful crowd near the White House tear-gassed and forcefully dispersed to make way for a brief, wordless photo opportunity in front of a church. The moment summarized his ongoing approach to the largest mass protest movement in U.S. history.
18. “Stand back and stand by.” Trump again turned an opportunity to disavow violent right-wing extremists into something they interpreted as a call to arms when, in a September 2020 debate, he told members of the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.”
19. The White House COVID-19 salute to nobody. Trump got COVID-19, as did dozens of those who worked with and for him. He received elite experimental treatments at a military hospital. Still recovering in October 2020, he staged a made-for-propaganda-video return to the White House, in which he exited a helicopter, ascended to a seldomused White House balcony, tore off the mask meant to protect others from him, and dramatically saluted no one in particular.
20. Four Seasons Total Landscaping. As it became clear that Biden had won the 2020 election, Trump friend and lawyer Rudy Giuliani staged a news conference in the parking lot of a Philadelphia landscaping company — next door to a porn shop and across the street from a crematorium — during which he falsely claimed that Trump was the victim of voter fraud.
21. “We won by a lot”—the insurrectionist riot. After months of telling supporters the election had been stolen from him, Trump summoned them to a demonstration in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021 — the day Congress was meeting to certify Biden’s victory.
After a fiery speech by Trump, the crowd stormed the Capitol building in an hours-long riot that left five people dead. His “incitement of insurrection” led within days to his second impeachment by the House of Representatives, but did not prevent the vote certification. Without actually conceding legitimate defeat, Trump acknowledged soon afterwards that he would be leaving office on Jan. 20 to make way for Biden.
In one of the last tweets he posted before being banned for life from Twitter, he declared he would not attend the inauguration — the first outgoing president to do so since 1869.