Not everything here is pandemic related, but most of it is. It was a critical time for the coronavirus pandemic, and the evidence is clear...Trump not only did nothing to stem the outbreak, he encouraged it...he reveled in it, because he "thought" it would affect Democrats the most...now, because of his incompetence, which was evident from the beginning, we have lost over 3/4 of a million people to the virus.
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– January 2, 2020 – Without notifying Congress ahead of time, Trump ordered an airstrike that killed Iranian General Qassim Suleimani, prompting worry about war with Iran. Trump said that he believed that Suleimani had plans for “imminent and sinister attacks on American diplomats and American personnel,” but Defense Secretary Mark Esper said that Trump “didn’t cite a specific piece of evidence.”
– January 4, 2020 – In a thread of tweets, Trump said that if Iran retaliated for the airstrike that killed Suleimani, the U.S. would target 52 sites “important to Iran & the Iranian culture” and “HIT [them] VERY FAST AND VERY HARD.” Targeting sites of cultural significance is in direct opposition to the 1954 Hague Convention and the Department of Defense’s Law of War manual.
– January 9, 2020 – In another attempt to loosen environmental regulations, Trump proposed major changes to the National Environmental Policy Act. The new rules would allow federal agencies to bypass consideration of the environmental impact of proposed infrastructure projects.
– January 9, 2020 – An appeals court allowed Trump to divert $3.6 billion from Defense spending to the construction of his border wall. Declaring a national emergency along the southern border in February 2019 allowed Trump to have the money reallocated.
– January 21, 2020 – In an address to the World Economic Forum, Trump ridiculed climate change activists as “prophets of doom.” He added, “We will never let radical socialists destroy our economy.”
– January 22, 2020 – As cases of a new viral pneumonia were breaking out in China and beyond, Trump was asked by a reporter if he was worried about a pandemic. “No. Not at all,” he said. “And — we’re — we have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s — going to be just fine.” On the same day, however, the World Health Organization convened an emergency meeting to discuss the virus. The following day, China imposed a lockdown for millions of people in Wuhan and other cities.
– January 23, 2020 – The Environmental Protection Agency finalized its revised Navigable Waters Protection Rule. Under Trump, protections for many rivers, streams, and wetlands were now officially removed.
– January 24, 2020 – Hours after the Office of Civil Rights issued California a formal notification that “it cannot impose universal abortion coverage mandates on health insurance plans and issuers,” Trump addressed the crowd at the March for Life in person. He was the first president to do so since the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision in 1973.
– January 24, 2020 – Trump’s State Department imposed a new rule that allowed consular officers to deny a woman who is pregnant or may become pregnant a tourist visa in order to deter “birth tourism.” The rule targeted countries, largely outside the West, that Trump has belittled.
– January 31, 2020 – Breaking from more than 160 countries that agreed to the Mine Ban Treaty, Trump canceled a policy that prohibited the use of anti-personnel landmines outside of the Korean peninsula. Most landmine casualties have been civilians.
– January 31, 2020 – The Trump administration placed immigration restrictions on Nigeria, Sudan, Tanzania, Eritrea, Myanmar, and Kyrgyzstan. In 2018, Trump referred to African nations as “shithole countries.”
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FEBRUARY 2020
– February 6, 2020 – In retaliation for passing New York state’s “Green Light” law, which allows immigrants to apply for driver’s licenses and blocks New York’s DMV from giving information to immigration authorities, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security announced that New York residents would no longer be able to enroll in Trusted Traveler programs that expedite security screenings at ports of entry.
– February 7, 2020 – Within 48 hours of the Senate acquitting the president, Trump fired European Union Ambassador Gordon Sondland and Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman after they testified in the president’s impeachment trial.
– February 10, 2020 – Trump’s proposed fiscal year 2021 budget included significant cuts to foreign aid and Medicare. Among the departments facing the biggest losses was the Environmental Protection Agency, which has issued numerous deregulatory policies since Trump took office.
– February 10, 2020 – A week after the United States declared a public health emergency due to the coronavirus outbreak, Trump said, “Now, the virus that we’re talking about having to do — you know, a lot of people think that goes away in April with the heat — as the heat comes in. Typically, that will go away in April.” He added, “We’re in great shape, though. We have 12 cases — 11 cases, and many of them are in good shape now.” At a rally in New Hampshire that night, Trump said, “And by the way, the virus.…It looks like by April, you know in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away.” There was no evidence, then or ever, that the virus weakened in warm weather.
– February 18, 2020 – Trump commuted the sentence of former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, who was convicted on corruption charges in 2010 — the same year he appeared on Trump’s TV show, The Celebrity Apprentice.
– February 24, 2020 – “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA,” Trump tweeted as the virus spread at an alarming rate. “We are in contact with everyone and all relevant countries. CDC & World Health have been working hard and very smart. Stock Market starting to look very good to me!” Within a few days, the stock market suffered its worst week since the 2008 financial crisis.
– February 24, 2020 – In rare remarks from a president, Trump lashed out at two Supreme Court justices, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor, who had been critical of him in the past. While visiting India, he asserted in a news conference that they should “recuse themselves for anything Trump or Trump related.”
– February 25, 2020 – At a news conference in New Delhi, Trump downplayed the threat posed by the coronavirus, saying that the virus was “under control” in the United States and that it was a “problem that’s going to go away.” He added, “We have very few people with it,” and patients who did have it “are getting better, they’re all getting better.” His remarks came on the same day that the CDC warned that the coronavirus was headed toward pandemic status.
– February 26, 2020 – Even though Mike Pence had come under fire for health policy that worsened Indiana’s HIV outbreak during his time as the state’s governor, Trump appointed Pence to lead the United States’ response to the coronavirus outbreak. Pence has no medical background. Trump added that the United States had “a total of 15 cases” of the coronavirus. “And the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.” Despite Trump’s assertion, there was no evidence to suggest that the number would drop, as Italy and Iran overtook China as the new epicenters of the disease.
– February 27, 2020 – Trump said that the coronavirus is “going to disappear.” One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear. And from our shores, we — you know, it could get worse before it gets better. It could maybe go away. We’ll see what happens. Nobody really knows.” The CDC, however, issued a warning saying that it was inevitable that the virus would spread throughout the United States.
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MARCH 2020
– March 4, 2020 – Despite dire warnings from the World Health Organization, Trump disputed the deadliness of Covid-19 on a “hunch.” In an upbeat tone, he added: “So, if we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that get better just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work—some of them go to work, but they get better.” The following day, Trump tweeted, “I NEVER said people that are feeling sick should go to work. This is just more Fake News and disinformation put out by the Democrats.”
– March 5, 2020 – Disregarding advice from the World Health Organization to avoid contact with people, Trump said in a town hall that he would continue to shake hands. “You can’t be a politician and not shake hands,” he said. “People come out—when I leave, I’ll be shaking hands with people. They want to shake your hand. They want to say hello. They want to hug you. They want to kiss you. I don’t care.”
– March 6, 2020 – Speaking at a news conference about the coronavirus, Trump said, “I don’t think people are panicking.” I said last night — we did an interview on Fox last night, a town hall. I think it was very good. And I said, ‘Calm. You have to be calm.’ It’ll go away.” Markets continued to fall, though, and the number of infected people around the world surpassed 100,000.
– March 9, 2020 – The Trump administration finalized a new rule that would allow law enforcement authorities to collect DNA from immigration detainees in federal custody. The information would be stored in the FBI’s CODIS database, which is used to search for matches to traces of DNA found at crime scenes. Under the rule, the privacy rights of migrants would no longer be protected.
– March 10, 2020 – Trump repeated his claim that the U.S. was “doing a great job” with the coronavirus. “Just stay calm,” he told reporters. “It will go away… And a lot of good things are going to happen.” Crude oil prices plunged 25 percent, however, as thousands around the world died of the virus.
– March 13, 2020 – Trump said an Obama-era rule was to blame for the Trump administration not being able to provide coronavirus tests more expediently. However, no such rule exists.
– March 15, 2020 – Officials from Germany’s Health Ministry said that Trump “offered large sums of money” to CureVac, a German company working on a coronavirus vaccine, in order to give the U.S. exclusive access to its information. U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell claimed that the story was wrong, but CureVac’s CEO confirmed the meeting with the White House.
– March 18, 2020 – Trump announced that the U.S.-Mexico border would be sealed off to combat the spread of the coronavirus. But as NPR reported, there were roughly 100 confirmed cases of Covid-19 in Mexico—far less than the 8,000 cases in the United States. The measure, though, allowed the administration to deport migrants without due process.
– March 18, 2020 – Even though the World Health Organization advised him not to, as his words could give rise to racial profiling, Trump defended his use of the term “Chinese virus” to refer to COVID-19.
– March 20, 2020 – Republican Senators Richard Burr and Kelly Loeffler were urged to resign following reports that they sold millions of dollars in stocks between late January and early February — ahead of the stock market’s decline due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Burr, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, warned a small group of constituents to prepare for economic turmoil while publicly upholding Trump’s assertions that the virus was being blown out of proportion.
– March 21, 2020 – Trump endorsed the combination of two drugs, hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, to treat coronavirus—despite a lack of testing or backing by the FDA. In fact, respected medical professionals warned that taking the drugs together could be dangerous.
– March 23, 2020 – Trump vowed that “America will again and soon be open for business — very soon.” At his daily press conference on the crisis, Trump equated the alarming increase in coronavirus deaths to automobile fatalities. “You look at automobile accidents, which are far greater than any numbers we’re talking about,” he said. “That doesn’t mean we’re going to tell everybody no more driving of cars.”
– March 24, 2020 – Trump told Fox News that he “would love to have the country opened up and just raring to go by Easter.” On Twitter, he wrote, “THE CURE CANNOT BE WORSE (by far) THAN THE PROBLEM!” In February, Trump said the number of coronavirus cases would soon be “down to close to zero.” By Easter, the number exceeded half a million.
– March 26, 2020 – Although health experts around the world have been warning about a pandemic for years, Trump claimed that the coronavirus crisis caught the U.S. by surprise. “This was something that nobody has ever thought could happen to this country,” he said. “Nobody would have ever thought a thing like this could have happened.”
– March 27, 2020 – Trump singled out the governors of Michigan and Washington for not being sufficiently grateful for federal government aid during the pandemic. “I want them to be appreciative,” he said. “If they don’t treat you right, I don’t call.”
– March 27, 2020 – Trump boasted that “We’ve now established great testing. … We’ve tested now more than anybody.” The U.S. did test more people for the coronavirus than South Korea, but South Koreans were tested much earlier, conducted five times as many tests per capita than the U.S., and had a per capita death toll twenty-five times lower than the United States death toll per capita.
– March 29, 2020 – Trump said that as many as 2.2 million Americans could have died “if we didn’t do what we’re doing.” He added that if the U.S. was able to limit COVID-19 deaths to between 100,000 and 200,000 people, “we altogether have done a very good job.”
– March 30, 2020 – The New York Times noted that “President Trump is a ratings hit.” Since reviving the daily White House briefing, Mr. Trump and his coronavirus updates have attracted an average audience of 8.5 million on cable news, roughly the viewership of the season finale of The Bachelor.” Trump quoted this in a tweet adding, “The numbers are continuing to rise…”
– March 30, 2020 – When questioned by a reporter about why he downplayed the coronavirus, Trump said, "We are doing a great job… Stay calm. It will go away. You know it — you know it is going away, and it will go away. And we’re going to have a great victory.” More than 17,000 cases of the virus were reported in the United States; only a handful had been reported at the beginning of the month.
– March 31, 2020 – Trump said his impeachment “probably” diverted his attention from dealing with the crisis more swiftly, a claim first made by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. “Did it divert my attention?” Trump said. “I think I’m getting A-pluses for the way I handled myself during a phony impeachment. Okay? It was a hoax. But certainly, I guess, I thought of it.”
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APRIL 2020
– April 1, 2020 – In an interview on CNN, Mike Pence said Trump had never “belittled” the coronavirus threat. Trump made the same argument at his daily briefing. “I knew how bad it was,” he said. Both statements contradicted what Trump had said in the past, as when he claimed on Jan. 22 that “we’re not at all” worried about the virus. “And we have it totally under control.”
– April 2, 2020 – Jared Kushner, a White House adviser and Trump’s son-in-law, asserted that the Strategic National Stockpile of ventilators and medical supplies was “supposed to be our stockpile — it’s not supposed to be states’ stockpiles that they then use.” Journalists at the Kushner news conference pointed out that what he said went against the program’s description on its website. The following day, the program website’s wording was altered to match what Kushner had said.
– April 4, 2020 – After Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, confirmed there was no evidence that hydroxychloroquine could fight the coronavirus — or that it was safe — Trump said he was considering it for himself. “I may take it, OK? I may take it," he said. “And I’ll have to ask my doctors about that, but I may take it.”
– April 5, 2020 – The U.S. stockpiled 29 million hydroxychloroquine pills, even though health experts doubted its efficacy and warned about its dangerous side effects. Trump pushed for hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19. “What do I know?” he said at a news briefing. “I’m not a doctor. But I have common sense.”
– April 6, 2020 – Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro warned the White House as early as January that the coronavirus posed a great threat to the United States. Navarro said, “the lives of millions of Americans” could be imperiled by the pandemic. Trump continued to downplay the threat, saying a month later, “Now, this is just my hunch, and — but based on a lot of conversations with a lot of people that do this, because a lot of people will have this, and it’s very mild. They will get better very rapidly.”
– April 7, 2020 – Trump blamed the World Health Organization for what he called its slow response to the pandemic. The WHO, however, warned of a “public health emergency of international concern” weeks before Trump declared a national emergency. “They called it wrong,” he said. “They really, they missed the call.”
– April 7, 2020 – Trump ousted the chairman of a watchdog panel that oversaw how the Trump administration managed $2 trillion in coronavirus relief. Glenn Fine, the acting Pentagon inspector general, was chosen in March to head the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee. Fine was the second inspector general in a week to be fired by the president, after the April 3 firing of whistle-blower Michael Atkinson.
– April 9, 2020 – Defying health experts, Trump rejected the notion that more people needed to be tested for the coronavirus before the U.S. economy could be restarted. “Do you need it?” he asked about testing. “No. Is it a nice thing to do? Yes.” He added, “We’re talking about 325 million people. And that’s not going to happen, as you can imagine.”
– April 11, 2020 – Trump refused to help the U.S. Postal Service, arguing that it needed to raise its rates for Amazon and other private shippers. If the $2 trillion coronavirus relief bill contained any money to help the USPS, Trump said that he would veto the act, according to an administration official. The pandemic, meanwhile, took a heavy toll on postal workers: Roughly 500 of them tested positive for Covid-19, and 19 died of the disease.
– April 12, 2020 – “Time to #FireFauci” read a message that Trump retweeted after the nation’s top infectious disease expert said fewer Americans would have died had the country gone under lockdown earlier. Trump didn’t only go after Fauci; in a series of tweets, he condemned, China, the World Health Organization, and President Obama.
– April 13, 2020 – Trump held a 2½-hour news conference in which he attacked the press. “You know you’re a fake,” he told one reporter. “Everything we did was right,” he said. He also incorrectly said that the power to reopen the country rested solely with him, not governors. “When somebody is the president of the United States,” he said, “the authority is total, and that’s the way it’s got to be.”
– April 13, 2020 – The Treasury Department ordered that Trump’s name appear on the $1,200 stimulus checks that millions of Americans were to receive. Part of the government’s $2 trillion coronavirus rescue package, the checks were proposed by Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Mitt Romney (R-Utah). No IRS disbursement had ever carried a president’s name. According to administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity, it was Trump’s idea to have his name printed on the checks.
– April 14, 2020 – Trump said that he would cut off U.S. payments to the World Health Organization, claiming that the WHO engaged in a coverup of the outbreak in its early days in China. “We have not been treated properly,” he said of the organization.
– April 15, 2020 – As a result of waiting for months to obtain N95 respirator masks, the Trump administration paid companies $5 per mask — almost eight times what the price was earlier in the year.
– April 17, 2020 – Trump used Twitter to call on protesters to challenge governors’ stay-at-home orders. “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” and “LIBERATE MINNESOTA!” he wrote about two states that mandated social-distancing restrictions. He also urged Virginians to resist stricter gun-control measures in that state, writing, “LIBERATE VIRGINIA, and save your great 2nd Amendment. It is under siege!”
– April 18, 2020 – Trump faulted Democratic governors for not doing enough to test people for COVID-19. “They don’t want to use all of the capacity that we’ve created,” he said in a briefing. “We have tremendous capacity.”
– April 20, 2020 – Trump announced that he planned to temporarily suspend immigration into the country. The extreme measure, revealed in a late-night tweet, could allow the president to close borders in a way he couldn’t before the pandemic. Trump said he wanted to block what he called an “attack from the Invisible Enemy.” The U.S. confirmed in March that it had more coronavirus cases than any other country in the world.
– April 21 – Suffering from a sharp decline in business, like all hotels across the nation, Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., asked for a break on its lease payments — from the Trump administration. Trump’s business also asked Florida’s Palm Beach County if it was required to continue making $88,000 monthly lease payments for the Trump International Golf Club.
– April 21, 2020 – Congress approved $6 billion to help college students affected by the pandemic pay for food, childcare and housing. The Trump administration worked in a restriction to prevent undocumented students from getting any of the aid.
– April 22, 2020 – Dr. Rick Bright, who headed the agency to develop a coronavirus vaccine, cast doubts on whether hydroxychloroquine could prevent Covid-19. Questioning the drug touted by Trump cost him his position: Bright was ousted as director of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority.
– April 23, 2020 – Prompting widespread alarm, Trump speculated about ingesting or injecting disinfectants to fight the coronavirus. “Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that,” he said at his daily briefing. He also mused about the use of ultraviolet light. “Supposing we hit the body with a tremendous—whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light,” he said. “And I think you said that hasn’t been checked, but we’re going to test it?” Health officials and manufacturers of household cleaners urged Americans not to follow Trump’s proposed remedies. The next day, New York City’s poison control center reported more than twice the calls related to household disinfectants than it received for a comparable timeframe in 2019.
– April 25, 2020 – “I never said the pandemic was a Hoax!” Trump tweeted. “Who would say such a thing?” Two months earlier, at a South Carolina rally he said, “Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus,” he told the crowd on February 28. “And this is their new hoax.”
– April 26, 2020 – In a series of tweets which misspelled both “Nobel Prize” and “hamburger,” Trump assailed reporters who “have received Noble Prizes for their work on Russia, Russia, Russia, only to have been proven totally wrong” and complained about a New York Times story on his work ethic. “Then I read a phony story in the failing @nytimes about my work schedule and eating habits, written by a third rate reporter who knows nothing about me. I will often be in the Oval Office late into the night & read & see that I am angrily eating a hamberger & Diet Coke in my bedroom. People with me are always stunned.”
– April 27, 2020 – If Americans were ingesting or injecting disinfectants to fight the coronavirus, it wasn’t his fault, Trump said. States reported numerous cases of people drinking cleaning products after Trump’s comments. At his daily briefing, the president was asked if he accepted any responsibility for people improperly using cleaning products. “No, I don’t,” he said.
– April 27, 2020 – Trump ignored at least a dozen classified briefings in January and February which called the coronavirus an imminent threat. Officials said, on the condition of anonymity, that Trump seldom reads or listens to an oral summary of the President’s Daily Brief.
– April 29, 2020 – Trump berated his political advisers after they told him that his polling numbers were declining in key states due to his handling of the pandemic. According to officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity, Trump repeatedly said, “I am not fucking losing to Joe Biden.”
– April 29, 2020 – Although many states were still under lockdown, and despite increasing COVID-19 cases, Jared Kushner predicted that “a lot of the country should be back to normal” by June. “The hope is that by July the country’s really rocking again," said Trump’s son-in-law.
– April 30, 2020 – Trump administration officials put pressure on U.S. spy agencies to dig up evidence that the coronavirus originated in a lab in Wuhan, China — a theory that was widely discredited. The strategy was part of Trump’s attempt to blame China for what he continued to call the “Chinese virus.”
– April 30, 2020 – Trump said of the coronavirus, “Nobody’s thinking about it more. Nobody has spent more time, late in the evening, thinking about what’s happened to this country in a short period of time.” The Washington Post noted at least 44 times in March, April and early May in which Trump downplayed the threat of the virus calling it “very well under control” again and again.
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MAY 2020
– May 3, 2020 – The coronavirus death toll could reach 100,000, Trump said during a Fox News town hall broadcast from the Lincoln Memorial. The figure was double the estimate he predicted only two weeks earlier. Nevertheless, he said the country should still reopen its economy. He called his predecessors “foolish” and “stupid” and boasted that he had “done more than any other president in the history of our country.” Pointing to the statue of the 16th president, who was assassinated, Trump said, “They always said nobody got treated worse than Lincoln. I believe I am treated worse.”
– May 4, 2020 – The White House issued new guidance that banned members of its pandemic task force from testifying before Congress. The decision was made shortly after infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci, whose views often diverged from Trump’s, was prohibited from testifying before a House committee.
– May 5, 2020 – Rick Bright, the scientist who lost his job as head of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, filed a whistleblower complaint with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel. In the complaint, Bright said his warnings about the coronavirus were dismissed by the Trump administration and that he was punished by being moved to another post.
– May 6, 2020 – The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put together a 17-page report advising Americans on when they could reopen the economy. According to a CDC official who spoke on the condition of anonymity, the Trump administration prevented the release of the report, telling the CDC that it “would never see the light of day.”
– May 7, 2020 – The criminal case against Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser, was dropped by the Justice Department — even though Flynn had pleaded guilty twice to lying to the FBI in an investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Trump called those who opposed him “dishonest, crooked people… They’re scum — and I say it a lot, they’re scum, they’re human scum.”
– May 8, 2020 – Trump met with seven World War II veterans, all in their 90s, to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Allied victory in Europe. Even though he was close enough to speak with the men, he didn’t wear a mask in their presence. “The wind was blowing so hard and such a direction that if the plague ever reached them, I’d be very surprised,” Trump told reporters. “It could have reached me, too. You didn’t worry about me, you only worried about them, but that’s OK.”
– May 11, 2020 – The Trump administration unveiled two large banners at a Rose Garden briefing that read, “AMERICA LEADS THE WORLD IN TESTING.” The event ended suddenly, however, after a testy exchange between Trump and journalists Weijia Jiang and Kaitlan Collins. “You’ve said many times that the U.S. is doing far better than any other country when it comes to testing,” Jiang said. Trump told Jiang, who is Chinese American, “Don’t ask me, ask China that question, OK?” He then tried to have Collins ask him a question, but she deferred back to Jiang. Frustrated, Trump abruptly turned around and left the briefing.
– May 12, 2020 – Though U.S. law dictates that the election occurs on the Tuesday after the first Monday in November, White House adviser Jared Kushner suggested that the presidential election might have to be delayed because of the pandemic. “I’m not sure I can commit one way or the other,” he said, though neither Kushner nor Trump has the authority to postpone an election.
– May 12, 2020 – During a pandemic that had killed tens of thousands of Americans, Trump took the time to promote a conspiracy theory that suggested that Joe Scarborough of MSNBC committed murder. “When will they open a Cold Case on the Psycho Joe Scarborough matter in Florida,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “Did he get away with murder? Some people think so.”
– May 13, 2020 – At a time when the coronavirus was spreading throughout American prisons, infecting thousands of inmates, Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort was released from prison at his attorneys’ urging. Manafort, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud the U.S. and obstruct justice, was allowed to complete his seven-year sentence under home confinement.
– May 14, 2020 – Trump spoke of coronavirus testing in contradictory terms while visiting a medical equipment distribution center in Pennsylvania. “We have the best testing in the world,” he boasted, then added, “Could be that testing’s, frankly, overrated. Maybe it is overrated.”
– May 14, 2020 – Perchlorate, a toxic chemical compound used in rocket fuel, has been found to contaminate water, causing fetal and infant brain damage. The Obama administration planned to regulate the chemical, but the Environmental Protection Agency, led by Trump’s appointee Andrew Wheeler, went against the decision, saying that the regulation was “not in the public interest.”
– May 15, 2020 – The coronavirus stabilization law that Congress passed included money for public education institutions hurt by the pandemic, but Trump’s Education Secretary Betsy DeVos directed $180 million of it to private and religious schools.
– May 16, 2020 – Trump fired State Department Inspector General Steve Linick. Appointed by President Obama, Linick was another government watchdog ousted late on a Friday night. He was replaced by an ambassador who is close to Mike Pence.
– May 17, 2020 – After President Obama, addressing high school seniors, alluded to Trump’s lack of leadership during the pandemic, Trump attacked his predecessor as “grossly incompetent.”
– May 18, 2020 – Trump confirmed that he was taking hydroxychloroquine, a drug he had long praised even though medical experts warned that it could be dangerous and was not shown to combat Covid-19. “I started taking it, because I think it’s good,” he said. “I’ve heard a lot of good stories.”
– May 21, 2020 – Unlike everyone around him who followed company policy and state law, Trump did not wear a mask when touring a Ford Motor Company factory in Michigan. “I had one on before,” he told reporters. “I wore one in this back area, but I didn’t want to give the press the pleasure of seeing it.” Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel called him a “petulant child who refuses to follow the rules.” Trump responded in a tweet: “Do nothing A.G. of the Great State of Michigan, Dana Nessel, should not be taking her anger and stupidity out on Ford Motor.”
– May 21, 2020 – Michael Cohen, Trump’s former attorney, was released from prison, a week after Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, was released. Concerns about the coronavirus cut short Cohen’s three-year term for financial and political crimes. He was ordered to serve the remainder of his sentence in his multimillion-dollar Manhattan apartment.
– May 22, 2020 – Calling houses of worship “essential,” Trump told governors to reopen them, despite the pandemic. It was not certain if Trump had that power. Nevertheless, he said of the governors, “If there’s any question, they’re going to have to call me, but they are not going to be successful in that call.”
– May 22, 2020 – Trump, whose approval ratings dropped during the pandemic, expressed doubt that the nation’s coronavirus death toll was as high as health departments said it was. The official total was almost 95,000, but Trump said it could be “lower than” that. Experts averred that it was certainly higher than the confirmed count.
– May 24, 2020 – As the nation marked a somber benchmark — 100,000 were killed by Covid-19 — Trump instead used the Memorial Day weekend to insult numerous people on Twitter. The president called Stacey Abrams “Shamu,” saying she “visited every buffet restaurant in the State.” He accused Nancy Pelosi of drinking “booze on the job.” And he referred to Hillary Clinton as a “skank.”
– May 26, 2020 – Trump continued to spread a conspiracy theory that MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough had committed murder, this time addressing the allegation at a press conference in the Rose Garden. Police in Florida had ruled that there was no sign of foul play in the 2001 death of Lori Klausutis, who died when hitting her head in a fall after a heart attack. That didn’t stop Trump from saying, “It’s certainly a very suspicious situation. Very sad, very sad and very suspicious.”
– May 27, 2020 – Twitter added a fact-check label to two of Trump’s tweets that claimed that mail-in ballots were fraudulent. In response, he threatened to shut down his favored social media platform on which he’d issued more than 50,000 tweets. “Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices,” he wrote on the very site that he said was silencing him.
– May 28, 2020 – Following up on his threat to punish Twitter for tagging warning labels to two of his tweets, Trump signed an executive order to “defend free speech from one of the gravest dangers it has faced in American history.”
– May 29, 2020 – Trump said he would end the country’s relationship with the World Health Organization. He had warned of the action since the early days of the pandemic. “Countless lives have been taken and profound economic hardship has been inflicted all around the globe,” he said.
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