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In 2019, former White House Chief Strategist steve bannon Told PBS’ borderline program how president donald trump Engaged in a deliberate strategy of overwhelming the press and his critics by making large-scale and controversial policy changes, while distracting them through trolling and preventing them from focusing on the one thing that might matter.
He described this strategy as “flooding the area”.
“Every day, we hit them with three things. They’ll bite one, and we’ll be done with all our work, bang, bang, bang,” he said.
Nearly a year into Trump’s second term, his “strategy of flooding the region” has been in full effect.
His administration has unveiled sweeping changes to the way America’s government operates that will have a dramatic impact on the lives of everyday people for years to come. But those changes have come so fast that nearly 365 days after Trump was sworn in on a cold January day last year, it’s hard to even remember what they’ve done.
Here are some of the wildest White House stories in 2025:
purging of vigilantes
Trump five days after his swearing-in Friday night massacre Independent inspectors general who root out waste, fraud, and abuse within federal agencies and departments.
The late-night purge removed the inspectors general of nearly every Cabinet-level agency without warning and is in violation of a long-standing law that requires the President to notify Congress of his intention to fire any such official 30 days before doing so.
Only Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security watchdogs were allowed to keep their jobs.
Trump, who fired several inspectors general during his first term in an effort to curtail the ability to investigate wrongdoing by his appointees, described the illegal move as “very normal” while speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One during a weekend golf trip before his second term.
He said, “I don’t know them… but some people thought some people were inappropriate or some people weren’t doing their job. That’s a pretty standard thing.”
The purge removed Senate-confirmed overseers 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 Social Security Administration. The move allowed Trump to fill the position with loyalists.
The American occupation of Gaza that never happened
Trump hosts Israeli PM at White House in less than a month benjamin netanyahu For official visit.
As Trump’s predecessor, a former president, Netanyahu’s visit was his first appearance in quite some time Joe BidenThe Israeli leader had declined to be invited due to election year sensitivities surrounding Israel’s brutal campaign of bombing civilian targets in Gaza in retaliation for terror attacks carried out by Hamas on October 7, 2023.
Just a few weeks earlier, the Biden and Trump teams shared credit for what was then billed as a ceasefire and hostage exchange agreement between Israel and Hamas, though the agreement quickly collapsed.
But as Netanyahu stood next to him in the East Room, Trump offered another plan for the war-torn region. Middle East experts’ heads are spinning As the president claimed, the US would “occupy” Gaza, displacing the 2.1 million Palestinians living there, while remaking the territory as the “Riviera of the Middle East”.
The president’s surprise proposal to place the Gaza Strip – territory Israel has occupied since the end of the 1967 Six-Day War – under US control came at the start of a mad marathon press conference in the East Room after a bilateral meeting with Netanyahu, the first held by Trump since returning to the White House last month.
He claimed that “everybody” he talked to about the plan “liked the idea of the United States of America owning that piece of land, developing something and creating thousands of jobs that would be fantastic.”
Trump said, “I’ve studied this very closely for many months, and I’ve looked at it from every different angle, and it’s a very dangerous place, and it’s going to get worse. And I think it’s an idea that has received tremendous praise. And if the United States can help bring stability and peace to the Middle East, we will do that.”
His comments attracted Widespread criticism around the worldSaudi Arabia said it “categorically rejects” the forced displacement of Palestinians in Gaza, and Hamas dismissed the idea as “ridiculous and absurd”.
The White House withdrew the idea less than a day later, and the president’s aborted plan was later removed from a ceasefire agreement struck between Israel and Hamas in October with the assistance of Egypt, Qatar and other regional powers.
Trump takes aim at a critic with his 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 “avenge” if re-elected.
Since taking office, he has followed through on that promise in a way that critics say has strained the rule of law and diminished the independence of the Justice Department.
But Trump took an unprecedented step on his “retaliation” tour in April and ordered the Justice Department to investigate one of his most prominent first-term critics — for anything that can be investigated.
order became single miles tellerA veteran of several Republican administrations, he served as Chief of Staff to then-Homeland Security Secretary of State John Kelly during President’s first term. During that time, Taylor infamously wrote an anonymous work new York Times The op-ed – and later a book – described efforts by Trump administration personnel to protect the government from Trump’s worst tendencies.
White House Staff Secretary Will Scharf said at the time that the order “stripped Taylor of any active clearance in light of his past activities involving classified information” even though Taylor’s writings were not alleged to contain any classified information.
“It’s also going to order the Department of Justice to investigate his activities to see what else can come to light in that context given his egregious behavior during your previous administration,” Scharf said.
The same day, Trump signed a similar order directing an investigation into Chris Krebs, the security expert who led the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency during his first term. Krebs sparked Trump’s ire shortly after the 2020 election — which Trump lost to Joe Biden — by publicly saying the election was the most secure in the country’s 250-year history.
He also said that during the 2020 election “there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, altered votes, or was compromised in any way”, directly contradicting Trump’s false claims of fraud.
That order further targeted Krebs’s employer, cybersecurity firm SentinelOne, “ordered to strip 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 have been charged with a crime, but Trump continues to pursue his campaign of revenge against critics and opponents by ordering the Justice Department to prosecute others, including former FBI Director James Comey and New York State Attorney General Letitia James.
Those efforts have so far been stymied by federal judges, who dismissed a pair of indictments against both Comey and James on the grounds that Lindsey Halligan, the former White House official whom Trump appointed as a prosecutor in Virginia, was unlawfully appointed.
Trump suggests he’s above the law with questionable Napoleon quote
Less than a month after taking an oath to “preserve, protect, and defend” the U.S. Constitution, Trump took to social media to cite a quote from a movie about Napoleon to challenge his onslaught of executive actions and threats made to federal agencies by the then-Elon Musk-ed Department of Government Efficiency.
Writing on X and Truth Social on February 15, Trump said: “He who saves his country breaks no laws.”
Trump, whose efforts to eliminate federal funding, Fire thousands of aid workers and redefine unilaterally 14th amendment The ban was swiftly blocked by federal courts across the country, setting off a series of months-long legal battles that appeared to lift a line from the 1970 film Waterloo, in which actor Rod Steiger’s Napoleon says he “did not ‘usurp’ the crown.”
He says, “I found it in the gutter, and I picked it up with my sword, and it was these people… who put it on my head.” Steiger said, “He who saves a nation violates no law.”
Four days later, Trump went even further by declaring himself “king” of his former home, New York City, after the Department of Transportation reportedly ordered the withholding of federal funds to New York unless it ended a congestion pricing plan implemented by the Democratic-led city government.
“Congestion pricing is over,” he wrote on Truth Social on Feb. 19. ,manhattanand all new yorkHas been saved. Long live the king!”
then white house x account shared his statement With a mock cover of Time magazine featuring a portrait of the President wearing a crown and the caption “Long live the King.”
Then White House Deputy Chief of Staff Taylor Budovich also shared AI-generated image of the President wearing a crown and princely hat.
In response, New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority sued Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and federal transportation officials, arguing that the Trump administration acted unlawfully and “rapidly – and clearly for political reasons – ‘ended’ the program, as then-candidate Trump had announced 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 plan, and the MTA’s lawsuit seeking to permanently enjoin the administration from doing so is still ongoing.