Welcome to Our Look Back at Trump's Chaotic First Year

This Saturday marks the first anniversary of Donald Trump's inauguration and the beginning of the strangest presidency in living memory. Trump campaigned as a rule-breaker, a right-wing populist who would rebuild America while at the same time kicking out undocumented immigrants and making it harder for foreigners and refugees to legally enter the country. He came into office—after an electoral win that shocked everyone—as the head of a Republican Party that controlled both chambers of Congress and with the opportunity to fill a Supreme Court vacancy (kept open by obstructionist Republican senators after Antonin Scalia's sudden death in February 2016). As Trump and his cabinet of billionaires and generals prepared to take charge of the country, wide-ranging, transformative change was anticipated.

A year later, the same people who feared and hated the prospect of a President Trump are still worried and angry. They point to Trump's mercurial, spur-of-the-moment public statements made over Twitter, his apparent lack of interest in policy, accusations that he sexually harassed women, his reluctance to denounce white supremacists who praise him, his history of racist comments, and allegations he collaborated with Russian intelligence to smear Hillary Clinton and then fired FBI Director James Comey to block an investigation into his campaign. At the same time, many conservatives, though they may dislike Trump personality, have come at least partly around to the way he's operating—after all, he's pursuing an agenda that largely lines up with their priorities, from cutting taxes to striking down as many regulations as possible.

But any assessment of Trump's presidency runs into a problem: There is so much going on all the time. Trump's penchant for stirring up outrage—and the media's eagerness to stoke that outrage—has led to a dynamic where it's difficult to see the forest for the trees. The first week of his administration came with a bizarre controversy over the size of Trump's inauguration crowd, and each week seems to bring a fresh source of conflict between the White House, the media, and Congress. The question is, which of these conflicts truly matter?

In the next week sites across the VICE network will be publishing a series of stories looking back at the last year to take stock and see which controversial moves were the most important. The aim is to cut through the noise and single out several of Trump's most significant, lasting actions.

This package isn't meant to be comprehensive, and the future may prove it wrong on certain fronts. Assessing a presidency after its first year is always an act of guesswork—who knows how we'll look back on Trump in ten, 20, or 100 years? What will his most important legacy wind up being?

Hopefully, these stories will highlight some aspects of Trump's presidency that have been buried in the stream of controversy that was 2017. To that end, we'll steer clear of the much-covered tax bill recently signed into law, for instance. And we'll try to identify things Trump is responsible for rather than long-standing trends that he has fallen in line with, like the wars he inherited or the 240,000 troops stationed across the planet.

Instead, we'll look at things like his appointment of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. We'll explore the Justice Department's new look under Jeff Sessions and Trump's response—or lack thereof—to the opioid criss, as well as his full-scale assault on regulations. We'll talk about his handling of North Korea, his toxic rhetoric about immigration, and how he's inspired people to look at the racist attitudes of their friends and relatives. We'll also single out the best piece of legislation he's signed—and yes, we will mention his tweets.

When Trump took office, he had no track record in government to point to, nothing that could help us predict where he would take the country. In the past year we've been finding out what Trumpism means week by week and sometimes hour by hour. Consider these stories a rough sketch of what Trump has already done to America, and what he might still do to it before he's finished.

Take a look at the stories we've published so far here.