Trump caused a stir by giving a 30 minute on the record interview to a New York Times reporter. He expressed some curious ideas, but not any one statement resulted in a scandal. Reading the transcript has inspired some in the media, mostly liberals to again question his mental state.
A good Washington Post report on how the New York Times interview happened without his staff knowing, and hoe Trump enjoys much fewer constraints in Mar-A-Lago than in the White House.
On the last day of 2017, the New York Times published a story about how the FBI investigation onto the Trump campaign began: in May 2016, Papadopoulos was drinking in a bar with an Australian diplomat and revealed that he had been told the Russians have email dirt on Clinton. Two months later the Australians notified the FBI, which sparked the investigation. This was not known until the Times reported it, and it reveals that it was not the Steele dossier that started the investigation, which Trump applies have been using as an excuse to discredit the investigation.
Here is a list of 10 news items that the Trump administration released in the “news dumps” just before Christmas and New Year’s Eve, they include rolls backs of environmental regulations and the DOJ’s request to alter the census to include questions about citizenship.
Here is Pew’s summary of trends they notice in 2017. One shows how “the average gap between the views of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents and Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents across 10 political values has increased from 15 percentage points in 1994 to 36 points today.”