Did that really happen? Four outrageous stories from Trump’s first year back that you may have forgotten about

Did that really happen? Four outrageous stories from Trump’s first year back that you may have forgotten about

Andrew Feinberg

Fri, December 26, 2025 at 6:06 PM UTC

10 min read

Did that really happen? Four outrageous stories from Trump’s first year back that you may have forgotten about

In 2019, former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon told PBS’ Frontline program how President Donald Trump was engaged in a deliberate strategy to overwhelm the press and his critics by rolling out massive and controversial policy changes while distracting them with trolling to keep them from ever focusing on any one thing that could matter.

He described the tactic as “flooding the zone.”

“Every day, we hit them with three things. They'll bite on one, and we'll get all of our stuff done, bang, bang, bang,” he said.

Nearly a year into Trump’s second term, their “flood the zone strategy” has been in full effect.

His administration has unveiled sweeping changes to how America’s government operates in ways that have had and will have dramatic effects on how everyday people live for years to come. But those changes have come in such rapid-fire succession that nearly 365 days after Trump was sworn in on a freezing January day last year, it’s hard to even begin to remember what he’s done.

Here are some of the wildest stories from the White House in 2025:

Donald Trump’s return to the White House has come with big changes and constant headlines. Here is a look back at some of the wildest stories. (Getty Images)

The Purge of the Watchdogs

Five days after his swearing-in, Trump committed a Friday-night massacre of the independent inspectors general who root out waste, fraud and abuse within federal agencies and departments.

The late-night purge removed the inspectors general at nearly every Cabinet-level agency without warning and in violation of a longstanding law requiring the president to notify Congress of his intent to fire any such official 30 days before actually doing so.

Only the watchdogs at the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security were permitted to remain in their jobs.

Trump, who fired a number of inspectors general during his first term in an effort to kneecap their ability to investigate wrongdoing by his appointees, defended the illegal move as “very common” while speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One en route to the first weekend golf outing of his second term.

“I don’t know them … but some people thought that some were unfair or some were not doing their job. It’s a very standard thing to do,” he said.

The purge took out Senate-confirmed watchdogs 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 the Social Security Administration. The move allowed Trump fill the positions with loyalists.

Days after taking office, Trump removed several government watchdogs from their post. Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz was just one of two watchdogs spared by Trump’s January 25 purge (Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)

The U.S. Takeover of Gaza that never happened

Less than a month in the White House, Trump hosted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for an official visit.

Netanyahu’s trip was his first appearance there in quite some time, as Trump’s predecessor, former president Joe Biden, had declined to invite the Israeli leader due to election-year sensitivities around Israel’s brutal campaign of bombing civilian targets in Gaza to retaliate for the October 7, 2023, terror attacks by Hamas.

Just weeks earlier, the Biden and Trump teams had shared credit for what was billed at the time as a ceasefire and hostage exchange deal between Israel and Hamas, though the agreement quickly collapsed.

But as Netanyahu stood beside him in the East Room, Trump offered up another plan for the war-torn territory that sent Middle East experts’ heads spinning as the president claimed the U.S. would “take over” Gaza, displacing the 2.1 million Palestinians living there while the territory is rebuilt as “the Riviera of the Middle East.”

The president’s shocking proposal to put the Gaza Strip — territory that Israel has occupied since the end of the 1967 Six-Day War — under American control came at the start of a madcap 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 “everybody” he had spoken to about the plan “loves the idea of the United States owning that piece of land, developing and creating thousands of jobs with something that will be magnificent.”

Trump and Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu take questions during a press conference in the East Room of the White House. (AFP via Getty Images)

“I've studied this very closely over a lot of months, and I've seen it from every different angle, and it's a very, very dangerous place to be, and it's only going to get worse. And I think this is an idea that's gotten tremendous ... praise. And if the United States can help to bring stability and peace in the Middle East, we'll do that,” Trump added.

His comments drew widespread criticism around the world, with Saudi Arabia saying it “unequivocally rejected” the forced displacement of Palestinians in Gaza, and Hamas branding the idea “ridiculous and absurd.”

The White House walked back the idea less than a day later, and the president’s aborted plan was later superseded by the ceasefire agreement negotiated between Israel and Hamas with the aid of Egypt, Qatar and other regional powers in October.

Trump targets a critic with his very 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 “retribution” if he was elected again.

Since taking office, he’s made good on that promise in ways that critics say have strained the rule of law and undermined the independence of the Department of Justice.

But Trump took an unprecedented step on his “retribution” tour in April by ordering the Department of Justice to investigate one of his most prominent first-term critics — for anything that can be found to investigate.

The order singled out Miles Taylor, a veteran of multiple Republican administrations who served as chief of staff to then-Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly during the president’s first term. During that time, Taylor infamously penned an anonymous New York Times op-ed — and later a book — describing efforts by Trump administration personnel to shield 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 clearance that he has in light of his past activities involving classified information” even though Taylor’s writings weren’t alleged to have included anything classified at all.

Miles Taylor, a former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security, was as a major critic of Trump. He was targeted by the White House soon after Trump returned to Washington. (AFP/Getty)

“It's also going to order the Department of Justice to investigate his activities, to see what else might come up in that context, given his egregious behavior during your previous administration,” Scharf added.

The same day, Trump signed a similar order directing a probe of Chris Krebs, the security expert who headed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency during his first term. Krebs had incurred Trump’s ire in the immediate wake of the 2020 election — which Trump lost to Joe Biden — by stating publicly 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, changed votes, or was in any way compromised” during the 2020 election, directly contradicting Trump’s false claims of fraud.

That order further targeted Krebs’ employer, the cybersecurity firm SentinelOne, by ordering the stripping of security clearances “held by individuals at entities associated with Krebs, including SentinelOne, pending a review of whether such clearances are consistent with the national interest.”

Eight months later, neither Taylor nor Krebs has been accused of any crime, but Trump has continued to escalate his campaign of revenge against critics and adversaries by ordering the Justice Department to prosecute ex-FBI director James Comey and New York State Attorney General Letitia James, among others.

Those efforts have thus far been stymied by federal judges who dismissed a pair of indictments against both Comey and James on the grounds that the ex-White House official who Trump installed as a prosecutor in Virginia, Lindsey Halligan, had been unlawfully appointed.

Trump suggests he’s above the law with dubious Napoleon quote

Less than a month after he swore to “preserve, protect and defend” the U.S. Constitution, Trump took to social media to push back against the myriad challenges to his blitzkrieg of executive actions and threats to federal agencies from the then-Elon Musk-ed Department of Government Efficiency by invoking a movie quote from a film about Napoleon, who justified 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 does not violate any Law.”

Trump, whose efforts to gut federal funding, fire thousands of aid workers and unilaterally redefine the 14th Amendment had been swiftly blocked by federal courts across the country in the opening salvos of what has become a series of months-long legal battles, appeared to be lifting a line 1970 film Waterloo, in which actor Rod Steiger’s Napoleon states that he “did not ‘usurp’ the crown.”

“I found it in the gutter, and I picked it up with my sword, and it was the people … who put it on my head,” he says. “He who saves a nation violates no law,” Steiger said.

Four days later, Trump went even further by crowning himself “king” of his former home, New York City, after the Department of Transportation purported to order the withholding of federal funds to New York unless it nixed the congestion pricing plan that the Democratic-led city government implemented.

“CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD,” he wrote February 19 on Truth Social. “Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!”

The White House’s X account then shared his statement with a mock cover of Time magazine featuring a portrait of the president wearing a crown with the caption “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 the Trump administration unlawfully and “precipitously — and for blatantly political reasons— purported to ‘terminate’ the program, as then-candidate Trump proclaimed 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 scheme, and the MTA’s lawsuit seeking to permanently enjoin the administration from doing so remains ongoing.

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