A Short Summary of Trump’s First Presidential Term

Timeline of President Trump’s comments about COVID-19. [Graph by Rebecca LiVingni]

During his first year of presidency, President Trump repealed several Affordable Care Act (ACA) provisions, such as ACA Enrollment Advertising, which reduced outreach efforts and declared the opioid epidemic a public health emergency but not a national emergency, therefore limited funding. In 2018, his administration fired all remaining members of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS, the FDA began targeting Juul to stop youth vaping, and the USDA also scaled back school lunch nutrition guidelines under Obama’s Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act while imposing a “Zero Tolerance”: immigration policy that led to separations of the family at the U.S. and Mexico Border where reports of significant health risks. In 2019, partly due to growing vaccine hesitancy, which was the largest U.S. measles outbreak in the past decades, the new Title X rule led to Planned Parenthood withdrawing from its federal family planning because it did not want to compete with Trump’s administration on abortion counseling. His administration disbanded the Pandemic Response Unit in 2018 scrambled to handle the COVID-19. In 2020, President Trump downplayed the risk of sending mixed signals on lockdown, protocol, and masks. The U.S. then withdrew from the World Health Organization, and then President Trump issued Operation Warp Speed to deliver the COVID-19 Vaccines; however, there was a slow initial rollout. In summary, President Trump and his Administration made major changes and faced several public health issues.