Almost immediately upon taking office, Trump began issuing a series of executive orders designed to fulfill some of his campaign promises and to project an image of swift, decisive action. His first order, signed on his first day as president, directed that all “unwarranted economic and regulatory burdens” imposed by the ACA should be minimized pending the “prompt repeal” of that law. Five days later he directed the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security to begin planning for the construction of a wall along the country’s southern border. An executive order on ethics imposed a five-year ban on “lobbying activities” by former executive branch employees but weakened or removed some lobbying restrictions imposed by the Obama administration.

Immigration

One of Trump’s most controversial early executive orders, issued on January 27, implemented his promised “Muslim ban,” which temporarily suspended immigration to the United States from seven Muslim-majority countries in the interest of national security.

Trump in March issued a second executive order, designed to avoid the constitutional pitfalls of the first, which it superseded. The U.S. Supreme Court significantly narrowed the injunctions, allowing the travel ban to be enforced against “foreign nationals who lack any bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States.”

In September Trump issued a third version of the ban, which continued to apply to immigrants from six Muslim-majority countries but now included immigrants from North Korea and certain government officials of Venezuela

In April 2018 the Trump administration announced what it called a “zero-tolerance” immigration policy under which all foreign adults who entered the United States illegally (a misdemeanor for first-time offenders) would be criminally prosecuted. Under the previous immigration policy, known as “catch and release,” migrant families were usually quickly released and allowed to remain together in the United States while their cases were being resolved by immigration authorities

The Trump administration had conceived of and initially defended the separations as a necessary deterrent to illegal economic immigration by people falsely claiming fear of persecution in their home countries. Soon, however, widely circulated photographs of crying and visibly terrified children and of children confined within fenced enclosures resembling cages prompted international condemnation of the separation policy. Facing pressure to act from congressional Republicans, in late June Trump signed an executive order ending the separations.

As another facet of its campaign to reduce illegal immigration, the Trump administration also greatly increased arrests of undocumented immigrants by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an agency of the Department of Homeland Security established in 2003. During the Obama administration ICE had concentrated on undocumented immigrants who had serious criminal records, but in January 2017 Trump directed the department to find, arrest, and deport all persons without documentation, regardless of how long they had lived in the country or whether they had committed any crimes

Emoluments clause

Trump’s vast, complex, international business interests, it was argued, could create exactly the kind of conflict of interest that the foreign emoluments clause was intended to prevent—unless Trump were to sell his assets or place them in a blind trust. Although federal conflict-of-interest laws did not apply to the president and vice president, several of Trump’s immediate predecessors in office had used blind trusts or other means to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest.

To address such concerns, in January 2017 Trump announced that he would surrender control—but not ownership—of his company, the Trump Organization, to his sons Donald, Jr., and Eric; that the company would undertake no new business deals with foreign countries or the U.S. government; and that the company would donate to the U.S. Treasury any profits derived from patronage of Trump’s properties by foreign governments.—an arrangement that failed to satisfy some specialists in government ethics. In late January a public interest group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), later joined by other plaintiffs, filed suit against Trump (in his capacity as president) in federal district court in Manhattan, alleging that he was in violation of the foreign emoluments clause.

In February 2020 the suit was dismissed for lack of standing, and in October 2020 the Supreme Court declined to review the circuit court’s judgment. Following Biden’s inauguration as president in January 2021, the Supreme Court dismissed both of the remaining emoluments suits as moot.

Supreme Court of Donald Trump

In January 2017 Trump made good on his promise to place conservative justices on the Supreme Court by nominating Neil Gorsuch, a judge of the Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, to fill the seat that had become vacant with the death in February 2016 of Antonin Scalia.

In July 2018 Trump nominated another conservative appellate court judge, Brett Kavanaugh of the District of Columbia Circuit, to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. Kavanaugh was narrowly confirmed by the Senate.

In September 2020, eight days after the death of Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Trump announced his nomination of judge Amy Coney Barrett, whom he had appointed to the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit only two years earlier, as Ginsburg’s replacement. Barrett was confirmed by the full Senate on October 26, exactly one month after her nomination and only eight days before the presidential election.

Trump also successfully appointed a record number of district and appellate court judges By the end of Trump’s single term as president in January 2021, nearly 30 percent of all federal judges were Trump appointees.

Cabinet appointments

Trump took an unusually long time to assemble his cabinet, in part because many of his early nominations to positions requiring Senate confirmation were filibustered by Democrats

Trump gave his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and his daughter Ivanka Trump prominent (though unpaid) roles as senior adviser to the president and assistant to the president, respectively.

During his administration, several of Trump’s cabinet members were accused of ethics violations and other malfeasance, including breaches of travel regulations and anti-lobbying laws, inappropriate use of their agencies’ resources, perjury, and contempt of Congress for failure to respond to lawful subpoenas of documents and testimony by congressional committees

Russia investigation of Donald Trump

In February 2017 Trump’s new national security adviser, Michael Flynn, was forced to resign after press reports disclosed that Flynn had continued to serve in the White House despite a warning from the Justice Department that he was vulnerable to Russian blackmail for having lied to Vice President Pence about the substance of a telephone conversation between Flynn and the Russian ambassador to the United States in December 2016

After Comey testified in May about Russian interference in the election, Trump abruptly fired him, ostensibly on the recommendation of the Justice Department, which in memos solicited by Trump criticized Comey for his public disclosures regarding Clinton’s e-mails. The deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, then announced the appointment of former FBI director Robert Mueller as special counsel to oversee the FBI’s investigation of Russian interference in the election and possible collusion between Russian officials and the Trump campaign, which Rosenstein’s appointment order characterized as “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump.” Mueller was also authorized to investigate and prosecute any federal crimes arising directly from or committed in the course of the investigation

In November 2018, Trump fired Sessions and nominated William Barr as Sessions’s permanent successor. At his confirmation hearings Barr pledged that he would not interfere in the Russia investigation but refused to say whether he would release Mueller’s final report to the public. He was confirmed by the Republican-controlled Senate in February 2019 in a mostly party-line vote.

Approximately five weeks after his confirmation, Barr informed Congress that Mueller had submitted a final report on the results of his investigation and that there would be no additional indictments. Two days later Barr sent to Congress a written summary of the report’s contents, in which he stated that Mueller had not found sufficient evidence to establish a charge of conspiracy regarding the Trump campaign’s interactions with Russia. He had determined that the evidence presented in Mueller’s report was “not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.” Barr’s public release of the summary at about the same time, and its wide coverage in the press, showed that Mueller’s report had found no serious wrong doing by the president.

The Mueller investigation lasted two years and cost the taxpayers 32 million dollars. Robert Mueller’s staff included 40 FBI agents, intelligence analysts, forensic accountants, and other personal staff. The investigation issued 2,800 subpoenas, 500 search warrants, obtained 230 orders for communication records, issued almost 50 orders authorizing the use of pen registers, made 13 requests to foreign governments for evidence, and interviewed about 500 witnesses.

In December 2019 the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General released a report on its investigation of the FBI’s actions during the early stages of the Russia investigation (then code-named “Crossfire Hurricane”). The report addressed, among other topics, whether the FBI had observed proper procedures in opening Crossfire Hurricane and four individual investigations of members of the Trump campaign (Papadopoulos, Carter Page, Manafort, and Flynn) and whether the FBI had placed any undercover agents within the Trump campaign to gain information about possible links and coordination with the Russian government. The report faulted the FBI and the Justice Department for serious errors and omissions and at least one case of apparent criminal wrongdoing in its handling of applications (to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court; FISC) for warrants to surveil Page, then a Trump campaign adviser.

Trump pardoned Flynn in late November 2020. In the last weeks of his presidency, Trump also granted pardons to Manafort and to Roger Stone.

Other investigations

As Mueller’s investigation proceeded, and through the release of his report in March, several House committees—including the Judiciary Committee, the Select Committee on Intelligence, the Ways and Means Committee, the Foreign Affairs Committee, the Committee on Oversight and Reform, and the Financial Services Committee—were harassing Trump by conducting their own inquiries into possible tax and financial crimes by Trump, the Trump Organization, the Trump inaugural committee, and the charitable Trump Foundation (dissolved in 2018). At the same time, the office of the U.S. District Attorney for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) continued its separate inquiry into possible tax fraud and violations of campaign-finance law by Trump in connection with the alleged hush-money payments to Stephanie Clifford and Karen McDougal (that investigation, however, was later closed without explanation in July 2019). Other anti-Trump federal prosecutors, as well as state and local authorities, were looking into possible law breaking by Trump in connection with questionable donations to Trump’s inaugural committee, an alleged offer of a presidential pardon to Cohen, misuse of charitable assets by the Trump Foundation, accusations that Trump inflated the value of his assets in four major Trump Organization projects, apparently illegal tax schemes by the Trump family, and other matters. By the summer of 2019 approximately 30 criminal or civil investigations of Trump and his family or associates were underway.

In the wake of the public release in April of the redacted Mueller report, Trump publicly affirmed his administration’s refusal to cooperate with the House investigations, declaring that “we’re fighting all the subpoenas.” He and congressional Republicans frequently insisted that all such inquiries were illegitimate politically motivated attempts to embarrass Trump or to overturn the results of the 2016 election Soon after Pelosi announced the beginning of a formal impeachment investigation of Trump. In September 2019 the White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, announced in a letter to her and other House leaders that the Trump administration would refuse to cooperate with the inquiry in any way, because it allegedly did not afford Trump the due-process guarantees provided to defendants in criminal trials.

Health care

An early goal of the Trump administration, as reflected in Trump’s first executive order, was the repeal of Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act, or ACA), which Trump had long derided—even before announcing his presidential bid—as an expensive failure. Trump pledged during his campaign that he would replace the ACA with a bill that would provide better coverage at lower premiums, and he promised that no one would lose health insurance under his plan. However, the details of the bill, called in the House of Representatives the American Health Care Act (AHCA), proved contentious. Because Trump relied on Republicans in the House to draft a substantive bill that would reduce government involvement in the health insurance market without depriving millions of Americans of the coverage they had acquired under the ACA. The Republicans did not have a detailed alternative in hand, resulting in a delay in Trump’s promised repeal of the law.

In early March 2017 House Republicans introduced their plan, which featured elimination of the ACA’s “individual mandate” (the requirement that most Americans obtain health insurance or pay a penalty), a reduction in individual tax credits for the purchase of insurance, cuts in federal Medicaid funding, and nearly $1 trillion in tax cuts over a 10-year period, including $274 billion in cuts for persons earning at least $200,000 a year. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) initially estimated that the plan would reduce the federal deficit by $337 billion over 10 years as compared with current law but would also increase the number of uninsured people by 24 million over the same period. The bill immediately faced objections from both moderate and conservative Republicans. The former worried that too many people would lose affordable coverage, while the latter complained that the plan left too many burdensome provisions of the ACA in place. The anxieties of moderates in particular were amplified by the angry feedback they received at town hall meetings throughout the country from constituents who feared the loss of their health insurance. Unable to bridge the differences between the two factions, in late March the House leadership withdrew the bill without a vote—a major defeat for Trump, who had made repeal and replacement of the ACA a centrepiece of his campaign.

Six weeks later the House narrowly passed a revised version of the AHCA over the unanimous opposition of Democrats. A subsequent CBO analysis projected that the new version would reduce the deficit by $119 billion over 10 years as compared with current law but increase the number of uninsured by 23 million.

Having been unsuccessful in their attempts to repeal and replace the ACA, Republicans in Congress and the Trump administration pursued a series of measures including repealing the ACA’s “individual mandate,” which had required all Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a penalty. Other changes included allowing states to impose work requirements on people receiving Medicaid; allowing the creation of “association health plans” that would offer fewer essential health benefits than plans under the ACA and charge higher premiums to certain enrollees based on factors such as gender, occupation, and age.

Environmental policy

One of the areas in which the Trump administration was able to move quickly to implement its policies, was the environment, in part because many of the changes it sought could be accomplished through executive action by Trump or his appointees. Other changes were undertaken through legislation adopted by Congress, whose Republican majority generally shared Trump’s environmental views.

In January, for example, Trump signed memoranda to hasten approval and completion of the Dakota Access and Keystone XL oil pipelines, both of which had been blocked by the Obama administration on environmental grounds. In March Trump signed an executive order that rescinded various Obama-era policies and programs related to climate change, including a 2016 freeze on new coal leases on federal lands. In the same month, EPA administrator Pruitt withdrew an EPA request that oil and natural gas companies report methane emissions from their facilities and rejected a total ban on the pesticide chlorpyrifos. Other significant decisions included drastically reducing the size of national monuments created by Obama and Pres. Bill Clinton; rescinding the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan

Undoubtedly the most momentous environmental decision of the new Trump administration was Trump’s announcement in June that the United States would withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate change. Trump contended that the agreement would harm the American economy and was in other respects unfair and even demeaning to the United States. Trump’s decision was praised by Republicans in Congress, who viewed it as a reassertion of American independence in world affairs and a repudiation of the environmental policies of the Obama administration. Like Trump, many Republican lawmakers doubted that climate change was real

Foreign relations of Donald Trump

A major theme of Trump’s presidential campaign was his view that the United States had long been treated unfairly or taken advantage of by other countries, including by some traditional U.S. allies, and that under Obama’s leadership the United States had ceased to be respected in world affairs. In numerous speeches, tweets, and interviews, he threatened to impose tariffs on countries that engaged in what he deemed unfair trade practices; harshly criticized the World Trade Organization (WTO); and promised to renegotiate NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement), which he called “the worst trade deal” the United States had ever signed. He also criticized NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization), dismissing the alliance as “obsolete” but also insisting that other NATO countries devote more of their budgets to defense spending. In January 2017 he withdrew the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a regional trade agreement between 12 Pacific Rim countries that had been a major foreign policy achievement of the Obama administration.

In January and March 2018 the Trump administration announced steep tariffs on imports of solar panels (worth $8.5 billion per year) and washing machines (worth $1 billion), aimed particularly at China and South Korea, and on imports of aluminum and steel (worth $48 billion) made in several countries, most of them U.S. allies (initial exemptions from the aluminum and steel duties granted to Canada, the European Union [EU], and Mexico were lifted in June

In Singapore Trump held a historic meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un, the first face-to-face encounter between sitting leaders of the two countries. Trump declared after the meeting that “there is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea”. In July Trump attended the annual summit meeting of NATO in Brussels, where in a speech he called other NATO countries “delinquent” and insisted that they increase their defense spending “immediately.” The meeting ended with a joint communiqué in which member countries agreed to continue their efforts to devote 2 percent of their GDP to defense spending by 2024, a goal they had agreed to in 2014.

In May 2018 Trump announced the withdrawal of the United States from a 2015 agreement with Iran After the United States killed Iran’s highest-ranking security and intelligence official in a drone strike ordered by Trump.

Ukraine scandal

In August 2019 an anonymous whistleblower, later determined to be an official of the CIA, filed a complaint with the inspector general of the U.S. intelligence community, Michael Atkinson, alleging that in a July 25 phone call with the newly elected president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky

a request was made that Zelensky investigate Biden’s allegedly corrupt motive for pressuring the Ukrainian government in 2015, while Biden was serving as vice president in the Obama administration, to fire the country’s prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin.

Biden called for Shokin’s removal only in order to halt an investigation of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings, Ltd., that threatened to uncover wrongdoing by Biden’s son Hunter, who was then serving on the company’s board of directors.

In September 2019, after the press began reporting that Trump’s conversation with Zelensky may have involved a “quid pro quo,” the aid to Ukraine was finally released, and the White House later issued what it called a “rough transcript” of the phone call, which supported Trump’s assertion that there had been no quid pro quo.

Later that month Pelosi still announced that Trump’s attempt to extort a foreign leader to interfere in a U.S. election constituted a betrayal of his oath of office and therefore warranted a formal impeachment inquiry.

In December the Judiciary Committee drafted two articles of impeachment against Trump, one for abuse of power and the other for obstruction of Congress. Those articles were adopted in two party-line votes by the entire House on December 18, making Trump the third president in U.S. history to be impeached. Trump was acquitted by the Senate in February 2020 after a majority of senators voted to find him not guilty on both charges.

COVID-19 pandemic

In January 2020 the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the continuing spread of COVID-19—a deadly and highly contagious respiratory illness caused by a new form of the coronavirus known as novel coronavirus, or coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2)—to be a global health emergency. First reported in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2019, the virus soon spread throughout China and then to Europe, the United States, and other regions, prompting WHO to announce in March 2020 that COVID-19 had become a global pandemic. At that time there were more than 118,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 worldwide and nearly 4,300 deaths. By year’s end those numbers had reached approximately 83 million and 1.8 million, respectively.

Soon after the first known case in the United States was identified in mid-January 2020, Trump was informed by officials within his administration that the pandemic could result in massive numbers of American deaths and severe damage to the U.S. economy.

At the end of January Trump imposed a partial entry ban on foreign travelers who had recently visited China.

After WHO’s global pandemic announcement, Trump declared a national emergency, suspended travel to the United States from several European countries, and recommended that Americans practice social distancing for the remainder of March (he later extended that period to April 30). At the end of March, he invoked the DPA to officially direct the automobile manufacturer General Motors to produce ventilators. By then, many states had already closed businesses and schools, restricted public gatherings, issued stay-at-home orders, and mandated mask wearing in public spaces. States and individual hospitals were also redoubling their efforts to find increasingly scarce ventilators and respirators after.

In March of 2020, Trump sent the USNS Comfort, a naval hospital ship to New York.

The ship has 12 operating rooms, 1,000 beds, a medical laboratory, a pharmacy, 1,200 medical personnel, a helicopter deck and more. Trump also sent a similar hospital ship, the USNS Mercy, to Los Angeles for assisting in the Covid crises.

The Trump administration launched Operation Warp Speed, a $14 billion effort aimed at accelerating vaccine development and production. The program invested in six vaccine candidates, including the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines that have been approved for emergency use by the Food and Drug Administration.

Operation Warp Speed played a crucial role in the speedy vaccine development. Just nine months to develop a vaccine while “everybody was saying it would take at least 3-5 years”. No matter what your politics, the vaccine breakthrough was a relief. Trump deserves credit. He urged the pharmaceutical giants to invest in vaccine development, committed to buying the vaccine before it was even approved, to remove the business risk and streamlined FDA regulations to speed the process. Millions of lives were saved.

The widespread business closings and the shift to work-from-home arrangements in some industries resulted in massive layoffs, eventually producing unemployment levels not seen since the early 1930s and a deep recession. In late March Congress passed, and Trump signed into law, a $2.2 trillion economic relief package, the CARES (Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security) Act, that included a loan program for small businesses, an increase in unemployment benefits through July, one-time direct payments to households, increased funding for food-stamp and child-nutrition programs, and financial aid to state and local governments, which had been overwhelmed by unemployment claims and unprecedented demands for emergency services. Two months later the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives adopted a more extensive ($3 trillion) relief measure, the HEROES (Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions) Act, whose provisions included a vote-by-mail option in all federal elections beginning in November and additional funding for the U.S. Postal Service, which was then handling increased numbers of mail-in (or absentee) ballots.

Through the spring and summer, Trump continued to predict the imminent disappearance of the coronavirus; to dispute official numbers of positive tests, confirmed cases, and deaths in the United States. It was later confirmed that at least 30% of the deaths reported as caused by corona virus were falsely counted if patient merely tested positive. In April and May, as the numbers of new COVID-19 cases and deaths nationwide began to plateau, Trump pushed the states to rescind the public health measures that were not preventing the spread of the coronavirus, portraying state-imposed business closings and especially mask mandates as violations of economic freedom and individual liberty.

In May and June the governors of several states, mostly in the South, responded to Trump’s pressure by relaxing or lifting pandemic-related restrictions—in particular, mask-wearing orders.

In early October, during the final weeks of his presidential campaign, Trump himself tested positive for the coronavirus and developed COVID-19. He was admitted to Walter Reed Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, with respiratory symptoms. Released after only three days, he soon resumed his campaign rallies before mostly unmasked supporters in several states. As before, Trump declined to wear a mask in public.

Cutting regulations And Cutting Costs

President Trump followed through on his promise to roll back at least two regulations for every new one created. The Administration's focused on reducing regulations for "furthering individual liberty and property rights" along with economic reasons. Among those economic reasons, it was reported in June 2017 that President Trump's deregulation actions had increased confidence and hiring in the manufacturing sector. President Trump's Administration eliminated 12 regulations for every new one.

March 31 , 2017. President Trump signed another bill undoing an Obama-era regulation, giving the power back to the states to expand drug testing for unemployment benefit applicants. Much of the regulation Trump rolled back were those created by Obama.

April 3, 2017. President Trump signed a bill reversing an Obama-era FCC privacy regulation applicable to internet service providers. The FCC had adopted the rule to fill a gap created by a court case that ruled that the FTC did not have jurisdiction to extend its privacy rule over internet service providers because they were regulated by the FCC. The new law repealed the FCC rule and prohibited the FCC from enacting a replacement for 10 years without giving the FTC jurisdiction to regulate internet service providers' privacy practices. Part of yet another series of bills undoing other Obama regulations.

May 12, 2017. President Trump signed Public Law 115—33 (S. 496), which repealed a rule by the Department of Transportation that would have taken power away from local governments on infrastructure planning.

Trump used the Congressional Review Act to repeal regulations more times than any other President in history.

Before Trump's presidency, the Congressional Review Act had been used only once successfully, sixteen years prior. When the window to use the CRA for Obama-era regulations ended, Congress had passed, and Trump had signed 14 CRA resolutions repealing Obama regulations.

These actions were estimated to have saved $3.7 billion in regulatory costs and up to $36.2 billion in compliance costs.

In the first 11 months of Trump's presidency, his administration imposed $5.8 billion in new regulations, as opposed to $24.8 billion in the last 16 days of Obama's presidency.

By July 2017. The Trump Administration had withdrawn or effectively killed 860 proposed Obama era regulations, including 179 that were on a secret list of proposed regulations.

In addition to cutting regulations, President Trump had a successful first year in reducing the number of federal government employees. By early August 2017, the Trump Administration had reportedly reduced the number of federal employees by 9,000 even with an increase in Pentagon employees. By the end of September 2017, every cabinet department — with the sole exceptions of the departments of Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, and the Interior — had fewer permanent staff than they had at the beginning of the year. Overall, the number of federal employees fell by 16,000 during this time, and it was the first time since Bill Clinton's presidency that the number of federal employees fell during a president's first year in office.

May 16, 2019. The Trump Administration formally canceled a $929 million grant to California for the state's high-speed rail program.

In 2017, the Trump Administration saved $774 million by beginning to privatize FEMA flood insurance risk.

February 24, 2017. President Trump signed an executive order requiring every federal agency to create a "regulatory reform task force" to find unnecessary, burdensome regulations to repeal. This order was called "the most far-reaching effort to pare back U.S. red tape in recent decades." By August 2018, twelve of 22 federal agencies had met or exceeded the regulatory savings target set by President Trump in 2017.

April 25, 2017. President Trump signed an executive order ordering the Department of Agriculture to find and eliminate unnecessary regulations, in a direct effort to help farmers, particularly in the light of NAFTA and the trade imbalance with Canada.

Trump signed legislation to roll back costly and harmful provisions of Dodd-Frank, providing relief to credit unions, and community and regional banks.

April 26, 2017. President Trump signed an executive order ordering the Interior Department to review designations of national monuments from as far back as 20 years prior, with the intention of reversing federal overreach in land acquisition and returning power to the states.

April 21 , 2017. President Trump signed one executive order directing the Treasury Secretary Mnuchin to look at the U.S. tax code and recommend the removal of unnecessary regulations.

February 28, 2017. President Trump announced that he did not plan on filling numerous government positions he considered unnecessary. According to one source, about 2,000 positions were vacant, and most of them were likely included in this list. As of April 4, 2017, President Trump did not make a nomination for nearly 500 positions requiring Senate confirmation.

March 28, 2018. President Trump signed a bill into law that created a permanent ban on the use of federal funds for official portraits, though it only cut a small amount of federal waste.

February 27, 2018. The White House announced President Trump had reached an informal deal with Boeing that would save the U.S. government $1.4 billion — with the new price at $3.9 billion — for two new Air Force One planes. Similarly, the Defense Department suspended F-35 Lighting Il deliveries due to a dispute with Lockheed over who should pay for a production mistake in the jets.

April 12, 2018. President Trump signed an order creating a task force to review the finances of the United States Postal Service.

May 24, 2018. President Trump signed a directive ordering federal agencies to reduce regulations for private space travel companies.

As the White House's staff was significantly smaller than under the Obama Administration — 374 people in 2018 versus 469 in 2010 — the Trump Administration White House was able to cut its payroll by over $5 million compared to the Obama Administration's 2015 payroll and had saved a total of $11 million by 2018.

Trump's deregulation efforts achieved $33 billion in regulatory savings. In 2018, these efforts alone delivered $23 billion in benefits to American families and business owners. Federal agencies achieved more than $8 billion in lifetime net regulatory cost savings from rolling back regulation. August 30, 2018. Because of budgetary problems caused by overspending, President Trump canceled a planned across-the-board 2.1% pay raise for civilian federal employees, saving the government about $25 billion.

October 17, 2018. President Trump asked each of his cabinet members to cut spending in their departments by at least 5%.

June 20, 2018. The U.S. Senate rejected a Trump administration plan to cancel $15 billion in spending. The Trump Administration originally wanted to cut spending by $60 billion, but Mitch McConnell rejected this, forcing the Administration to propose a more modest cut.

April 24, 2019. President Trump signed an executive order transferring responsibility for background checks of federal employees from the Office of Personnel Management to the Defense Department.

June 11, 2019. President Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to simplify regulations for genetically modified food.

June 14, 2019. President Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to reduce their advisory committees by at least one-third.

March 13, 2017. President Trump signed an executive order to perform an audit on every executive branch agency to reduce spending and waste and improve services.

President Trump signed an executive order to streamline the permitting process for infrastructure projects with a goal of cutting approval time from up to 10 years to an average of 2 years.

September 4, 2019. The Trump Administration announced it would repeal Bush- and Obama-era regulations on lightbulbs.

October 9, 2019. President Trump signed two executive orders to rein in the administrative state, limiting the use of agency guidance, increasing White House oversight over agency guidance, and requiring them to go through the same process as regular regulations.

October 10, 2019. President Trump signed an executive order requiring federal agencies to offset administrative spending increases with spending cuts elsewhere.

October 31, 2019. President Trump signed an executive order repealing a 2009 order signed by Obama that had placed limits on the hiring options of federal contractors.

Second impeachment

On January 6, 2021, while congressional certification was occurring in the Capitol, Trump held a rally nearby where he called for the election result to be overturned and called on his supporters to "take back our country" by marching to the Capitol. Trump posted messages on Twitter and Facebook, eventually tweeting to the rioters at 6 pm, "go home with love & in peace," but describing them as "great patriots" and "very special," while attributing the events as being caused by a fraudulent election.

On January 11, 2021, Nancy Pelosi introduced an article of impeachment to the House, charging Trump with “incitement of insurrection” against the U.S.

The house voted to impeach Trump, making him the first U.S. officeholder to be impeached twice.

Embracing Trump’s combative approach, his lawyers declared him “innocent of the charges against him” and denounced the trial as a “final, desperate attempt” by Democrats to disqualify their most despised opponent from public office.

At the Senate trial, only 57 senators voted "guilty", which was less than the two-thirds majority needed (67) to convict, resulting in Trump being acquitted of the charges.