US President Donald Trump’s return to the White House in 2025 shattered multiple precedents, marking his second non-consecutive term as uniquely disruptive. Elected after two impeachments and a felony conviction, sworn in indoors amid brutal cold, and unleashing an unprecedented executive-order barrage in his first 100 days, Trump also entered office as the oldest president ever at inauguration.
A Musk-backed “DOGE” initiative further blurred lines between government and private tech. These milestones redefined modern presidencies.
First president who is also a felon
Trump became the first US president to win election after a felony conviction. In 2024 May a New York jury found him guilty on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records tied to a $130,000 hush-money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 election, as detailed in court records and Associated Press.
Sentenced on January 10, 2025, to an unconditional discharge (no jail time, fines, or probation due to his incoming presidency), the conviction didn’t disqualify him under the Constitution’s eligibility clauses.
Congress certified his electoral-vote victory over Kamala Harris on January 6, 2025, paving the way for his inauguration.
First to be elected after two impeachments
Trump is the only US president elected after two impeachments by the US House. The House impeached him first on December 18, 2019, for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress over Ukraine aid withholding (acquitted by Senate February 5, 2020).
The second came on January 13, 2021, for incitement of insurrection post-January 6 Capitol riot (acquitted February 13, 2021). No prior president faced even one impeachment pre- or post-election, per Congressional Research Service records.
Oldest President at Inauguration
At 78 years and 7 months on January 20, 2025, Trump broke Joe Biden’s record as the oldest president sworn in, surpassing Biden’s 78 years and 2 months from 2021.
This milestone fuelled scrutiny over presidential fitness, prompting Republican-led pushes for a 25th Amendment review clause (though none materialised) and ongoing health disclosures under the Americans with Disabilities Act precedents.
The first indoor inauguration in modern memory
Severe cold in the Washington DC forecast prompted the White House to move much of the January 20 ceremonies indoors, a step Trump himself announced, making the 2025 ceremony notable as an indoor inauguration (with related parade elements relocated to nearby arenas). Media coverage and inauguration-day dispatches documented the exceptional logistics and security arrangements that accompanied the move, Reuters reported.
Executive orders at a breakneck pace
Perhaps the most consequential “first” was the pace of executive action. During his first 100 days back in office Trump signed well over 140 executive orders, a number that, by multiple counts, exceeded the prior modern record for orders in that 100-day benchmark and dwarfed most recent predecessors.
DOGE: From meme coin to Department of Government Efficiency
One of the stranger storylines of 2025 was the rise of a Musk-linked tech effort inside the federal government known as “DOGE”, a name borrowed from the Dogecoin meme that began as a joke in online crypto culture. Short for the Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE showed up repeatedly in press coverage and was even mentioned by Trump, including ideas about returning some of its claimed “savings” to Americans. Later reports claimed that DOGE personnel were working inside federal agencies and using AI and data-analysis tools, sometimes in ways that sparked controversy. Depending on who you asked, DOGE was seen as a serious attempt to speed up the government, a flashy PR experiment, or a troubling expansion of surveillance inside the state.
He broke down White House’s structure
Trump dismantled traditional White House hierarchies, installing family scions like son-in-law Jared Kushner as senior advisor and creating ad-hoc “war rooms” for policy blitzes, bypassing Chief of Staff structures. By March 2025, he fired interim Chief Susie Wiles and restructured into flat “task forces” led by loyalists like Stephen Miller, as per Axios, contrasting siloed directorates under Bush or Obama.
Why these firsts mattered
Taken together, these firsts changed the tenor of US governance in 2025. A president taking office despite a felony conviction raised novel legal and political questions about accountability, pardon power, and public trust. An indoor inauguration underscored both the administration’s messaging priorities and the practical constraints of weather and security.
And the executive-order blitz fundamentally shifted how policy was made, privileging speed and unilateral action while prompting a wave of litigation and state-federal pushback. Meanwhile, integrating private-sector tech teams like DOGE into government operations raised fresh debates about oversight, civil-service norms and surveillance.
Overall, 2025 will be remembered as a year in which precedent was repeatedly tested. The core takeaway is simple: these “firsts” didn’t just make headlines, they reconfigured how power was exercised and scrutinised in modern America under Trump.