One Relentless Year
So much has happened since President Trump took office again that it can be hard to keep track of it all.
At home and abroad, he has driven change at warp speed, upending policy and challenging democratic norms. Along the way, he’s provided an often unfiltered narration of his own presidency, almost in real time.
Here, out of the blur of events, are some of the most consequential, illuminating or just plain remarkable moments from his first year back in the White House.
On the afternoon of Sept. 2, Mr. Trump was in the Oval Office delivering remarks about the U.S. Space Command’s headquarters when he casually mentioned that “we just, over the last few minutes, literally shot out a boat, a drug-carrying boat.”
I had been chronicling all the ways Mr. Trump was expanding executive power, but this immediately stood apart.
The military is not allowed to deliberately target civilians or criminals. Even in an armed conflict, targeting a civilian is a war crime. But in this moment, Mr. Trump claimed he had the power to “determine” that the United States was in an armed conflict with drug cartels and to deem crews suspected of smuggling boats “combatants.”
In asserting he could do this, Mr. Trump defined a new level of presidential power for himself.
Later that day, he posted a video of the strike, bragging that it killed 11 “terrorists.” In the months since, the military has continued to kill scores of people in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific.
Photographs by Doug Mills and Gabriela Bhaskar. Videos by Brent McDonald, Alex Kent and U.S. Department of Defense.
When Mr. Trump signed an executive order in March that promised to restore the Smithsonian Museum “to its rightful place as a symbol of inspiration and American greatness,” historians and other observers were anxious about what he meant.
Months later, the president confirmed their worst fears.
“The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been,” he wrote in a social media post in August.
The post, which came a week after the White House ordered a review of the museum’s exhibitions, offered the most candid look to date at what many of Mr. Trump’s executive actions on diversity have targeted: the history and experience of Black people in the United States.
High-profile Black leaders have been fired as the president builds an overwhelmingly white administration. Federal websites have been scrubbed to sanitize the country’s history of slavery and discrimination. And other government agencies, like the National Park Service, have also removed exhibits on slavery. At the same time, Mr. Trump has reinstalled statues that glorify Confederate soldiers.
In his first year, Mr. Trump has set out to rewrite the nation’s history by erasing the scars of its original sin.
Photographs by Al Drago, Doug Mills, Maansi Srivastava and Bettmann Archive, via Getty Images.
After midnight on March 16, three U.S. planes carrying migrants landed on an airport tarmac in El Salvador.
Among those aboard were more than 200 Venezuelans. The Trump administration claimed they were violent criminals and members of the Tren de Aragua gang, even though few had documented links to the gang.
Their arrival signaled a drastic escalation of Mr. Trump’s deportation campaign.
The president had secretly signed an executive order invoking a rarely used wartime law so he could deport the Venezuelans without due process. And he had struck a deal with El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, to lock them up in a maximum-security prison.
That was the moment when I realized how aggressive the White House was willing to be. A federal court judge had tried to stop the deportation flights after the first two flights were already in the air. But despite his order, the administration did not turn the planes around. U.S. officials later argued that the courts do not have jurisdiction over what the officials said was a foreign policy decision.
“Oopsie… Too late 😂” Mr. Bukele wrote on social media once all the flights had arrived. The migrants were pushed into vans and taken to a prison built for terrorists. Many said later they were tortured.
Photographs by Adriana Zehbrauskas, Federico Rios, Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images and the Office of the President of El Salvador. Video by AFPTV and Reed Showalter, via Storyful.
If there is a single moment that captures the extent to which Mr. Trump is willing to reposition America on the world stage, it was his Oval Office meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in February.
Mr. Zelensky arrived in his signature military outfit, with no tie but plenty of anger. He was there to sign an agreement that gave the United States rights to seek rare earth minerals as repayment for its support over the past three years. No security guarantees against further Russian aggression had been agreed upon.
With cameras running, the encounter quickly turned sour. Vice President JD Vance accused Mr. Zelensky of being ungrateful and demanded that he thank Mr. Trump for his efforts to broker a peace deal with Russia. When Mr. Zelensky rose to the bait and demanded “guarantees” for Ukraine’s security, Mr. Trump began yelling.
“You’re either going to make a deal or we are out,” he said, adding, “You don’t have the cards!”
After four decades of covering American foreign policy, I already sensed Mr. Trump’s second term marked the end of the post-World War II order, a system designed by the United States to defend democracy and protect smaller allies who shared common values. But the Zelensky encounter crystallized for me the new era, one where profits come first, alliances mean little and raw power rules.
Photographs by Ivor Prickett, Eric Lee and Doug Mills. Video by Reuters and Saher Alghorra.
No person had fashioned himself more as the leader of the legal resistance against Mr. Trump than Brad Karp, the head of the powerful law firm Paul, Weiss.
But in March, Mr. Trump signed a crippling executive order that made it impossible for the firm to represent its clients. The order left Mr. Karp with a choice: fight or bend the knee.
Mr. Karp initially considered fighting the suit. But powerful partners at his firm feared a public battle with the administration, worried clients would flee and the firm would collapse.
So, Mr. Karp quickly flew to Washington and met face to face with Mr. Trump in the Oval Office, where he made a $40 million deal to take on pro bono legal work for causes Mr. Trump championed.
The deal shocked members of the legal community and even some in his firm, who contended Mr. Karp chose his firm’s profits over standing up to Mr. Trump.
It also seemed to convince Mr. Trump that he could bend other institutions to his will. In the weeks that followed, eight other law firms struck similar deals even as several successfully fought him in court. A number of universities and media companies have also cut deals when the consequences of fighting grew too large.
Photographs by Eric Lee, Sophie Park, James Estrin, Carly Zavala and Al Drago/Getty Images. Video by Associated Press.
Speculation was high when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth hauled the country’s top brass from all over the world to Marine Corps Base Quantico for a sudden conclave in September. Would there be an announcement of more firings? A declaration of war on Venezuela? Another Iran strike?
In the end, what was on Mr. Hegseth’s mind was his distaste for fat generals.
Mr. Hegseth ordered all those men and women, most who far outranked him when he was but a major in the Army National Guard, to Quantico so he could tell them to do more push-ups. And that hot yoga didn’t count.
In Mr. Hegseth, Mr. Trump has at last found a defense secretary who has no qualms about breaking the military’s long history of nonpartisanship. His talking points regularly veer into contentious cultural issues, and he has no issue with using troops against domestic enemies at home, something the founding fathers feared.
Mr. Hegseth spoke for 45 minutes, ending with instructions to “move out and draw fire, because we are the War Department. Godspeed.”
His words were met with silence.
Photographs by Haiyun Jiang, Doug Mills, David Smith/Associated Press and Ricardo Arduengo/Reuters. Video by Kenny Holston.
At first it wasn’t clear just how radically Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency would seek to slash the federal government.
But that question was quickly answered after he and his young software engineers showed up at the headquarters of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which was the world’s largest foreign aid agency.
They hastily put dozens of staff members on leave and canceled hundreds of millions of dollars in grants. Lifesaving programs that prevent disease like H.I.V. and malaria and provide emergency food assistance were gone.
The culture clash between the freewheeling DOGE coders and the button-down civil servants escalated. On a Saturday night in early February, my colleagues and I learned about a major conflict at U.S.A.I.D. headquarters. Mr. Musk’s team found themselves locked out of an administrator’s suite and accused the agency’s top security officials of trying to stymie their work.
The officials were suspended, and soon after, DOGE sent a late-night email telling the agency’s remaining employees to not come to work. Mr. Musk gleefully tweeted that U.S.A.I.D. had been fed “into the wood chipper.”
It had taken just two weeks to shutter the entire agency. And in the process, the world lost a vital flow of aid that has resulted in death, illness and hunger, as Times reporters around the globe have documented.
Photographs by Samuel Corum, Haiyun Jiang, Doug Mills, and Anna Rose Layden. Video by Alex Wong/Getty Images.
The winter wind was blowing hard as I stood outside a stylish party for some of the country’s most powerful cryptocurrency executives. They had come to celebrate Mr. Trump’s second inauguration and his promise to roll back crypto regulations.
Men in tuxedos, women in ball gowns and high heels, and an image of a giant computer chip projected on the side of the building. Those arriving included the Coinbase C.E.O. Brian Armstrong, the Winklevoss twins and Howard Lutnick, then the commerce secretary nominee.
It was an invite-only affair, but at 9 p.m. Mr. Trump took us all by surprise. He announced on social media that he was launching a memecoin, $TRUMP.
This set off a wild buying frenzy both inside the ballroom and around the world. It was also just a small hint of what was to come.
In his second term, Mr. Trump has embraced the crypto industry, while he and his family have also generated billions of dollars in new wealth, on paper at least, for themselves from their own crypto ventures.
Mr. Trump is now effectively both the crypto regulator in chief and a crypto industry profiteer, creating questions about conflicts of interest that have few precedents in American history.
Photographs by Gabriela Bhaskar, Kenny Holston, Al Drago, Jason Andrew and Doug Mills.
The hulking container ships that surrounded me as I toured the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach had taken weeks to cross the Pacific Ocean, carrying car parts and toys for American shoppers.
Unfortunately for the businesses that ordered those goods, tariffs were changing by the hour.
I flew from Washington to Los Angeles on May 28 to document the effects of a chaotic trade policy on the country’s busiest port complex, which had experienced its slowest month in over two years.
For a moment it seemed as if that might change. A court ruled that Mr. Trump’s tariffs on many countries were illegal and ordered them stopped. But then the next day, as I stood on a roof at the Port of Long Beach, surrounded by a sunny harbor, I learned that another court had paused that decision, maintaining tariffs for now.
It was a fitting encapsulation for a chaotic year in which the rules global businesses depend on have fluctuated dramatically. Mr. Trump has introduced, paused and reinstated the highest tariffs seen in a century, while businesses have done their best just to hang on.
Photographs by Haiyun Jiang and Hannah Yoon. Video by Mark Abramson.
