Donald Trump (born June 14, 1946, New York, New York, U.S.) 45th president of the United States (2017–21). Trump was a real estate developer and businessman who owned, managed, or licensed his name to hotels, casinos, golf courses, resorts, and residential properties in the New York City area and around the world. From the 1980s Trump also lent his name to scores of retail ventures—including branded lines of clothing, cologne, food, and furniture—and to Trump University, which offered seminars in real estate education from 2005 to 2010. In the early 21st century his private conglomerate, the Trump Organization, comprised some 500 companies involved in a wide range of businesses, including hotels and resorts, residential properties, merchandise, and entertainment and television. Trump was the third president in U.S. history (after Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998) to be impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives and the only president to be impeached twice—once (in 2019) for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress in connection with the Ukraine scandal and once (in 2021) for “incitement of insurrection” in connection with the storming of the United States Capitol by a violent mob of Trump supporters as Congress met in joint session to ceremonially count electoral college votes from the 2020 presidential election. Both of Trump’s impeachments ended in his acquittal by the U.S. Senate. Trump lost the 2020 election to former vice president Joe Biden by 306 electoral votes to 232; he lost the popular vote by more than seven million votes.
In March 2023 Trump was indicted by a Manhattan grand jury on state criminal charges related to a hush-money payment made in 2016 to adult-film star Stormy Daniels, who claimed to have had an affair with Trump in 2006 (see below Postpresidential activities). The indictment marked the first time in U.S. history that a former president was charged with a crime. In June 2023 Trump was indicted by a grand jury in Miami on federal criminal charges related to his removal of classified documents from the White House upon leaving office and his retention of them at Mar-a-Lago, his resort and residence in Palm Beach, Florida. The indictment marked the first time in U.S. history that a former president was charged with a federal crime. In August 2023 Trump was indicted by a grand jury in Washington, D.C., on federal criminal charges related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. The indictment charged him with obstruction of an official proceeding and three counts of conspiracy—conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, to defraud the United States, and to impede the free exercise of the right to vote and to have one’s vote counted. Later that month, Trump and 18 of his associates were indicted by a grand jury in Fulton county, Georgia, on criminal charges related to Trump’s efforts to reverse Biden’s electoral victory in the state.
Early life and business career
Trump was the fourth of five children of Frederick (Fred) Christ Trump, a successful real estate developer, and Mary MacLeod. Donald’s eldest sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, eventually served as a U.S. district court judge (1983–99) and later as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit until her retirement in 2011. His elder brother, Frederick, Jr. (Freddy), worked briefly for his father’s business before becoming an airline pilot in the 1960s. Freddy’s alcoholism led to his early death in 1981, at the age of 43.
Beginning in the late 1920s, Fred Trump built hundreds of single-family houses and row houses in the Queens and Brooklyn boroughs of New York City, and from the late 1940s he built thousands of apartment units, mostly in Brooklyn, using federal loan guarantees designed to stimulate the construction of affordable housing. During World War II he also built federally backed housing for naval personnel and shipyard workers in Virginia and Pennsylvania. In 1954 Fred was investigated by the Senate Banking Committee for allegedly abusing the loan-guarantee program by deliberately overestimating the costs of his construction projects to secure larger loans from commercial banks, enabling him to keep the difference between the loan amounts and his actual construction costs. In testimony before the Senate committee in 1954, Fred admitted that he had built the Beach Haven apartment complex in Brooklyn for $3.7 million less than the amount of his government-insured loan. Although he was not charged with any crime, he was thereafter unable to obtain federal loan guarantees. A decade later a New York state investigation found that Fred had used his profit on a state-insured construction loan to build a shopping centre that was entirely his own property. He eventually returned $1.2 million to the state but was thereafter unable to obtain state loan guarantees for residential projects in the Coney Island area of Brooklyn.
Donald Trump attended New York Military Academy (1959–64), a private boarding school; Fordham University in the Bronx (1964–66); and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Finance and Commerce (1966–68), where he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in economics. In 1968, during the Vietnam War, he secured a diagnosis of bone spurs, which qualified him for a medical exemption from the military draft (he had earlier received four draft deferments for education). Upon his graduation Trump began working full-time for his father’s business, helping to manage its holdings of rental housing, then estimated at between 10,000 and 22,000 units. In 1974 he became president of a conglomeration of Trump-owned corporations and partnerships, which he later named the Trump Organization.
During the 1960s and early 1970s, Trump-owned housing developments in New York City, Cincinnati, Ohio, and Norfolk, Virginia, were the target of several complaints of racial discrimination against African Americans and other minority groups. In 1973 Fred and Donald Trump, along with their company, were sued by the U.S. Justice Department for allegedly violating the Fair Housing Act (1968) in the operation of 39 apartment buildings in New York City. The Trumps initially countersued the Justice Department for $100 million, alleging harm to their reputations. The suit was settled two years later under an agreement that did not require the Trumps to admit guilt.
In the late 1970s and the 1980s, Donald Trump greatly expanded his father’s business by investing in luxury hotels and residential properties and by shifting its geographic focus to Manhattan and later to Atlantic City, New Jersey. In doing so, he relied heavily on loans, gifts, and other financial assistance from his father, as well as on his father’s political connections in New York City. In 1976 he purchased the decrepit Commodore Hotel near Grand Central Station under a complex profit-sharing agreement with the city that included a 40-year property tax abatement, the first such tax break granted to a commercial property in New York City. Relying on a construction loan guaranteed by his father and the Hyatt Corporation, which became a partner in the project, Trump refurbished the building and reopened it in 1980 as the 1,400-room Grand Hyatt Hotel. In 1983 he opened Trump Tower, an office, retail, and residential complex constructed in partnership with the Equitable Life Assurance Company. The 58-story building on 56th Street and Fifth Avenue eventually contained Trump’s Manhattan residence and the headquarters of the Trump Organization. Other Manhattan properties developed by Trump during the 1980s included the Trump Plaza residential cooperative (1984), the Trump Parc luxury condominium complex (1986), and the 19-story Plaza Hotel (1988), a historic landmark for which Trump paid more than $400 million.
In the 1980s Trump invested heavily in the casino business in Atlantic City, where his properties eventually included Harrah’s at Trump Plaza (1984, later renamed Trump Plaza), Trump’s Castle Casino Resort (1985), and the Trump Taj Mahal (1990), then the largest casino in the world. During that period Trump also purchased the New Jersey Generals, a team in the short-lived U.S. Football League; Mar-a-Lago, a 118-room mansion in Palm Beach, Florida, built in the 1920s by the cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post; a 282-foot yacht, then the world’s second largest, which he named the Trump Princess; and an East Coast air-shuttle service, which he called Trump Shuttle.
In 1977 Trump married Ivana Zelníčková Winklmayr, a Czech model, with whom he had three children—Donald, Jr., Ivanka, and Eric—before the couple divorced in 1992. Their married life, as well as Trump’s business affairs, were a staple of the tabloid press in New York City during the 1980s. Trump married the American actress Marla Maples after she gave birth to Trump’s fourth child, Tiffany, in 1993. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1999. In 2005 Trump married the Slovene model Melania Knauss, and their son, Barron, was born the following year. Melania Trump became only the second foreign-born first lady of the United States upon Trump’s inauguration as president in 2017.
When the U.S. economy fell into recession in 1990, many of Trump’s businesses suffered, and he soon had trouble making payments on his approximately $5 billion debt, some $900 million of which he had personally guaranteed. Under a restructuring agreement with several banks, Trump was forced to surrender his airline, which was taken over by US Airways in 1992; to sell the Trump Princess; to take out second or third mortgages on nearly all of his properties and to reduce his ownership stakes in them; and to commit himself to living on a personal budget of $450,000 a year. Despite those measures, the Trump Taj Mahal declared bankruptcy in 1991, and two other casinos owned by Trump, as well as his Plaza Hotel in New York City, went bankrupt in 1992. Following those setbacks, most major banks refused to do any further business with him. Estimates of Trump’s net worth during this period ranged from $1.7 billion to minus $900 million.
Trump’s fortunes rebounded with the stronger economy of the later 1990s and with the decision of the Frankfurt-based Deutsche Bank AG to establish a presence in the U.S. commercial real estate market. Deutsche Bank extended hundreds of millions of dollars in credit to Trump in the late 1990s and the 2000s for projects including Trump World Tower (2001) in New York and Trump International Hotel and Tower (2009) in Chicago. In the early 1990s Trump had floated a plan to his creditors to convert his Mar-a-Lago estate into a luxury housing development consisting of several smaller mansions, but local opposition led him instead to turn it into a private club, which was opened in 1995. In 1996 Trump partnered with the NBC television network to purchase the Miss Universe Organization, which produced the Miss Universe, Miss USA, and Miss Teen USA beauty pageants. Trump’s casino businesses continued to struggle, however: in 2004 his company Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts filed for bankruptcy after several of its properties accumulated unmanageable debt, and the same company, renamed Trump Entertainment Resorts, went bankrupt again in 2009.
Beginning in the mid-2000s Trump enjoyed an enormous financial windfall from the success of The Apprentice, a reality television series in which he starred that directly earned him nearly $200 million over a 16-year period. The Emmy-nominated show, in each episode of which Trump “fired” one or more contestants competing for a lucrative one-year contract as a Trump employee, further enhanced his reputation as a shrewd businessman and self-made billionaire. In 2008 the show was revamped as The Celebrity Apprentice, which featured news makers and entertainers as contestants.
Trump marketed his name as a brand in numerous other business ventures including Trump Financial, a mortgage company, and the Trump Entrepreneur Initiative (formerly Trump University), an online education company focusing on real estate investment and entrepreneurialism. The latter firm, which ceased operating in 2011, was the target of class-action lawsuits by former students and a separate action by the attorney general of New York state, alleging fraud. After initially denying the allegations, Trump settled the lawsuits for $25 million in November 2016. In 2019, more than two years into his presidency, Trump agreed to pay $2 million in damages and to admit guilt to settle another lawsuit by the attorney general of New York that had accused him of illegally using assets from his charity, the Trump Foundation, to fund his 2016 presidential campaign. As part of the settlement, the Trump Foundation was dissolved.
In 2018 The New York Times published a lengthy investigative report that documented how Fred Trump had regularly transferred vast sums of money, ultimately amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars, to his children by means of strategies that involved tax, securities, and real estate fraud, as well as by legal means. According to the report, Donald was the main beneficiary of the transfers, having received the equivalent (in 2018 dollars) of $413 million by the early 2000s. According to a later report by the Times, based on data from tax returns filed by Trump during an 18-year period starting in 2000, Trump paid no federal taxes in 11 years and only $750 in each of two years, 2016 and 2017. Trump was able to reduce his tax obligations to levels significantly below the average for the wealthiest Americans by claiming massive losses on many of his businesses; by deducting as business expenses costs associated with his residences and his personal aircraft; and by receiving, on the basis of business losses, a tentative refund from the IRS (Internal Revenue Service) of nearly $73 million, which more than covered the federal taxes Trump had paid on income he received from The Apprentice in 2005–08. The refund became the subject of an IRS audit and a legally mandated review by the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation.
Trump was credited as coauthor of a number of books on entrepreneurship and his business career, including Trump: The Art of the Deal (1987), Trump: The Art of the Comeback (1997), Why We Want You to Be Rich (2006), Trump 101: The Way to Success (2006), and Trump Never Give Up: How I Turned My Biggest Challenges into Success (2008).
Presidential election of 2016 of Donald Trump
From the 1980s Trump periodically mused in public about running for president, but those moments were widely dismissed in the press as publicity stunts. In 1999 he switched his voter registration from Republican to the Reform Party and established a presidential exploratory committee. Though he ultimately declined to run in 2000, he published a book that year, The America We Deserve, in which he set forth his socially liberal and economically conservative political views. Trump later rejoined the Republican Party, and he maintained a high public profile during the 2012 presidential election. Although he did not run for office at that time, he gained much attention for repeatedly and falsely claiming that Democratic Pres. Barack Obama was not a natural-born U.S. citizen.
In June 2015 Trump announced that he would be a candidate in the U.S. presidential election of 2016. Pledging to “make America great again,” a slogan advertised widely on the red hats that he and his supporters wore at his rallies—although hated by Trump’s detractors, the red hats were one of the most successful examples of colour branding in marketing history—he promised to create millions of new jobs; to punish American companies that exported jobs overseas; to repeal Obama’s signature legislative achievement, the Affordable Care Act (ACA); to revive the U.S. coal industry; to drastically reduce the influence of lobbyists in Washington, D.C. (“drain the swamp”); to withdraw the United States from the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change; to impose tariffs on countries that allegedly engaged in trade practices that were unfair to the United States; to construct a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border to prevent illegal immigration from Latin America; and to ban immigration by Muslims. Trump mused about those and other issues in Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again (2015).
On the campaign trail, Trump quickly established himself as a political outsider, a common strategy among nonincumbent candidates at all levels. In Trump’s case the stance proved popular with conservative voters—especially those in the Tea Party movement—and he frequently topped opinion polls, besting established Republican politicians. However, his campaign was often mired in controversy, much of it of his own making. In speeches and especially via Twitter, a social medium he had used frequently since 2009, Trump regularly made inflammatory remarks, including racist and sexist slurs and insults. Other public comments by Trump, especially those directed at his rivals or detractors in the Republican establishment, were widely criticized for their belligerence, their bullying tone, and their indulgence in juvenile name-calling. Trump’s initial refusal to condemn the Ku Klux Klan after a former Klansman endorsed him also drew sharp criticism, as did his failure to repudiate racist elements among his supporters, including white supremacists and neo-Nazis. While Trump’s comments worried the Republican establishment, his supporters were pleased by his combativeness and his apparent willingness to say whatever came into his mind, a sign of honesty and courage in their estimation.
After a loss in the Iowa caucuses to open up the primary season in February 2016, Trump rebounded by winning the next three contests, and he extended his lead with a strong showing on Super Tuesday—when primaries and caucuses were held in 11 states—in early March. After a landslide victory in the Indiana primary in May, Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee as his last two opponents, Ted Cruz and John Kasich, dropped out of the race.
In July 2016 Trump announced that Indiana Gov. Mike Pence would be his vice presidential running mate. At the Republican National Convention the following week, Trump was officially named the party’s nominee. There he and other speakers harshly criticized the presumptive Democratic nominee, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, blaming her for the 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, and for allegedly having mishandled classified State Department e-mails by using a private e-mail server. Earlier in July the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) announced that an investigation of Clinton’s use of e-mail as secretary of state had determined that her actions had been “extremely careless” but not criminal. (A 2019 report by the U.S. State Department, concluding a yearslong investigation, found “no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information” by Clinton.) Trump continued his criticisms of Clinton in the ensuing weeks, routinely referring to her as “Crooked Hillary” and repeatedly vowing to put her in jail if he were elected. Trump’s threat to jail his political opponent was unprecedented in modern U.S. political history and was not founded in any constitutional power that a U.S. president would have.
Despite having pledged in 2015 that he would release his tax returns, as every presidential nominee of a major party had done since the 1970s, Trump later refused to do so, explaining that he was under routine audit by the IRS—though there was no legal bar to releasing his returns under audit, as Pres. Richard Nixon had done in 1973. In January 2017, soon after Trump’s inauguration as president, a senior White House official announced that Trump had no intention of releasing his returns. Trump’s tax returns and other financial information later became a focus of investigations by the House of Representatives, the district attorney for Manhattan, and the attorney general of New York into alleged criminal activity by Trump and his associates (see below Russia investigation).
In late July, on the eve of the Democratic National Convention, thousands of internal e-mails of the Democratic National Committee were publicly released by the Web site WikiLeaks in an apparent effort to damage the Clinton campaign. Reacting to widespread suspicion that the e-mails had been stolen by Russian hackers, Trump publicly encouraged the Russians to hack Clinton’s private e-mail server to find thousands of e-mails that he claimed had been illegally deleted. A later investigation by the office of Robert Mueller, the special counsel appointed in 2017 to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election (see below Russia investigation), determined that Russian hackers first attempted to break into the personal e-mail servers of Clinton campaign officials on the same day, only hours after Trump issued his invitation.
Following the Democratic convention, Trump continued to make controversial and apparently impromptu comments via Twitter and in other forums that embarrassed the Republican establishment and seriously disrupted his campaign. In October 2016 a hot-mic video from 2005 surfaced in which he told an entertainment reporter in vulgar language that he had tried to seduce a married woman and that “when you’re a star…you can do anything,” including grabbing women by the genitals. Although Trump dismissed the conversation as “locker room talk,” eventually more than two dozen women claimed that they had been sexually harassed or assaulted by Trump in the past (some of the allegations were made after Trump became president). During the campaign Trump and his legal representatives generally denied the allegations and asserted that all the women were lying; they also noted that Bill Clinton had previously been accused of sexual harassment and assault. In part because of the video, Trump’s support among women voters—already low—continued to wane, and some Republicans began to withdraw their endorsements.
Approximately one hour after the release of the Trump video, WikiLeaks published a trove of e-mails that later investigations determined had been stolen by Russian hackers from the account of John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign manager. On the same day, the U.S. intelligence community publicly announced its assessment that the Russian government had directed efforts by hackers to steal and release sensitive Democratic Party e-mails and other information in order to bolster the Trump campaign and to weaken public confidence in U.S. democratic institutions, including the news media. In response, Trump attacked the competence and motives of U.S. intelligence agencies and insisted that no one really knew who might have been behind the hacking. A secret CIA report to Congress in December and a separate report ordered by Obama and released in January 2017 also concluded that the Russians had interfered in the election, including through the theft and publication of Democratic Party e-mails and through a vast public influence campaign that had used fake social media accounts to spread disinformation and create discord among Americans.
Despite his ongoing efforts to portray Clinton as “crooked” and an “insider,” Trump trailed her in almost all polls. As election day neared, he repeatedly claimed that the election was “rigged” and that the press was treating him unfairly by reporting “fake news,” a term he used frequently to disparage news reports containing negative information about him. He received no endorsements from major newspapers. During the third and final presidential debate, in October, he made headlines when he refused to say that he would accept the election results.
Eight days after that debate, the Trump campaign received a boost when FBI director James Comey notified Congress that the bureau was reviewing a trove of e-mails from an unrelated case that appeared to be relevant to its earlier investigation of Clinton. Trump seized on the announcement as vindication of his charge that Clinton was crooked. Six days later Comey announced that the new e-mails contained no evidence of criminal activity. Notwithstanding the damage that Comey’s revelation had done to her campaign, Clinton retained a slim lead over Trump in polls of swing states (those considered to be winnable by either candidate) on the eve of election day, and most pundits and political analysts remained confident that she would win. When voting proceeded on November 8, 2016, however, Trump bested Clinton in a chain of critical Rust Belt states, and he was elected president. Although Trump won the electoral college vote by 304 to 227, and thereby the presidency, he lost the nationwide popular vote by more than 2.8 million votes. After the election, Trump repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that three to five million people had voted for Clinton illegally. Trump took the oath of office on January 20, 2017.
Trump’s unexpected victory prompted much discussion in the press regarding the reliability of polls and the strategic mistakes of the Clinton campaign. Most analysts agreed that Clinton had taken for granted some of her core constituencies (including women and minorities) and that Trump had effectively capitalized upon the economic anxieties and racial prejudices of some working-class whites, particularly men.
Presidency of Donald Trump
Almost immediately upon taking office, Trump began issuing a series of executive orders designed to fulfill some of his campaign promises and to project an image of swift, decisive action. His first order, signed on his first day as president, directed that all “unwarranted economic and regulatory burdens” imposed by the ACA should be minimized pending the “prompt repeal” of that law. Five days later he directed the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security to begin planning for the construction of a wall along the country’s southern border. An executive order on ethics imposed a five-year ban on “lobbying activities” by former executive branch employees but weakened or removed some lobbying restrictions imposed by the Obama administration.
Immigration
One of Trump’s most controversial early executive orders, issued on January 27, implemented his promised “Muslim ban,” which temporarily suspended immigration to the United States from seven Muslim-majority countries in the interest of national security. The travel ban, as it came to be known, was immediately challenged in court on statutory and constitutional grounds (i.e., for allegedly violating anti-discrimination and other provisions of the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act and for being inconsistent with the due-process and establishment-of-religion clauses of the Constitution). The ban also provoked spontaneous demonstrations at major airports in the United States in support of persons with valid visas who were prevented from boarding flights to the U.S. or who were detained upon arrival and forced to return to their originating countries. In February a district court in Washington state issued a nationwide temporary restraining order enjoining enforcement of the travel ban, which the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit declined to stay.
Foreseeing eventual defeat in the courts, Trump in March issued a second executive order, designed to avoid the constitutional pitfalls of the first, which it superseded. The second order also dropped Iraq from the list of targeted countries and narrowed the categories of persons whose travel would be affected. Nevertheless, district courts in Hawaii and Maryland issued preliminary injunctions blocking enforcement of the revised travel ban, which were largely upheld in May and June by the Fourth and Ninth Circuit Courts of Appeal, respectively. After agreeing in June to hear the consolidated cases during its October 2017 term, the U.S. Supreme Court significantly narrowed the injunctions, allowing the travel ban to be enforced against “foreign nationals who lack any bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States.”
In September Trump issued a third version of the ban, which continued to apply to immigrants from six Muslim-majority countries but now included immigrants from North Korea and certain government officials of Venezuela. The Supreme Court then vacated as moot the cases it had been scheduled to hear regarding the second travel ban. The third ban, like the previous two, was immediately challenged and enjoined, but the Supreme Court stayed the injunctions in December pending review by the Fourth and Ninth Circuits (which upheld them). The Ninth Circuit’s decision in Trump v. Hawaii was eventually reversed by the Supreme Court in June 2018. In its ruling, the Court held, among other things, that the ban was not obviously motivated by unconstitutional religious bias, notwithstanding many public statements by Trump that had indicated otherwise to lower courts.
From at least the early 2010s the majority of illegal immigration across the U.S. southern border with Mexico had been undertaken by people seeking asylum from violence and persecution in their home countries, especially in Central America and Africa. Under U.S. immigration law, foreign persons who are physically present in the United States, including those who entered the country illegally, are entitled to asylum as refugees provided that they can establish a credible fear of persecution in their home countries based on their race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in certain social groups.
In April 2018 the Trump administration announced what it called a “zero-tolerance” immigration policy under which all foreign adults who entered the United States illegally (a misdemeanor for first-time offenders) would be criminally prosecuted. The policy entailed that children in families who had illegally crossed the U.S. border together would be taken from their parents (or legal guardians) and placed within a system of hundreds of shelters across the country operated or contracted by the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), a division of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Eventually, according to HHS policy, separated children would be released to sponsors (parents, close relatives, or other suitable persons) or to foster families in the United States. After surrendering their children, parents would be held in detention centres or jails to await prosecution for illegal entry. Under the previous immigration policy, known as “catch and release,” migrant families were usually quickly released and allowed to remain together in the United States while their cases were being resolved by immigration authorities. In practice, family separations conducted under the zero-tolerance policy were traumatic for both children and parents.
The Trump administration had conceived of and initially defended the separations as a necessary deterrent to illegal economic immigration by people falsely claiming fear of persecution in their home countries. Trump himself falsely asserted that the separations were required by existing immigration law and blamed Democrats for not changing it—though his own party controlled both houses of Congress at the time. Soon, however, widely circulated photographs of crying and visibly terrified children and of children confined within fenced enclosures resembling cages prompted international condemnation of the separation policy, as did eventual news reports of the physical and sexual abuse of some children in shelters and the deaths of others from lack of adequate medical care. Facing pressure to act from congressional Republicans, in late June Trump signed an executive order ending the separations. One week later, pursuant to a class action lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a federal judge in California issued an injunction against further separations and ordered the Trump administration to return to their parents all of the more than 2,700 children who had been seized under the zero-tolerance policy. The judge’s 30-day deadline was not met, however, largely because the administration had not established any procedures for tracking the whereabouts of separated children or for reuniting children with their parents or guardians after separation—a situation noted critically in the judge’s order and confirmed by an October 2018 report on the family separation policy by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). Even after the zero-tolerance policy was rescinded, border authorities continued to seize hundreds of children on the basis of clauses in the injunction and the executive order that permitted taking children from parents who were “unfit” or who posed a “danger” to their children. Broadly interpreting those exceptions, border officials reportedly applied them to parents who had committed minor offenses or who appeared not to be taking proper care of their children. Other family separations were undertaken on the basis of the federal government’s narrow definition of “family,” which allowed children who arrived with older relatives (e.g., aunts, grandparents, or older siblings) to be treated as “unaccompanied.”
As another facet of its campaign to reduce illegal immigration, the Trump administration also greatly increased arrests of undocumented immigrants by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an agency of the Department of Homeland Security established in 2003. During the Obama administration ICE had concentrated on undocumented immigrants who had serious criminal records, but in January 2017 Trump directed the department to find, arrest, and deport all persons without documentation, regardless of how long they had lived in the country or whether they had committed any crimes. ICE officers thereafter regularly conducted raids—at private homes, churches, schools, courthouses, and job sites—in select locations throughout the country. Both criminal and noncriminal arrests increased nationwide as compared with 2016, but noncriminal arrests constituted a much greater percentage of the total. The raids were condemned by prominent Democrats and civil rights organizations as draconian and wasteful, while some progressive groups proclaimed an “abolish ICE” movement. At the same time, dozens of cities and towns declared themselves “sanctuaries,” vowing not to cooperate with ICE and other federal authorities seeking to remove undocumented immigrants from their jurisdictions.
Emoluments clause
During the presidential election campaign, some of Trump’s critics had warned that his presidency could create a unique and immediate constitutional crisis because of his possible violation of the foreign emoluments clause of the U.S. Constitution, which generally prohibits federal officeholders from accepting gifts, payments, or other items of value from foreign states or rulers without congressional permission. A related constitutional provision, known as the domestic emoluments clause, specifically prohibits the president from receiving any emolument from the federal government or the states beyond his official compensation. Trump’s vast, complex, and largely secret international business interests, it was argued, could create exactly the kind of conflict of interest that the foreign emoluments clause was intended to prevent—unless Trump were to sell his assets or place them in a blind trust. Although federal conflict-of-interest laws did not apply to the president and vice president, several of Trump’s immediate predecessors in office had used blind trusts or other means to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest.
To address such concerns, in January 2017 Trump announced that he would surrender control—but not ownership—of his company, the Trump Organization, to his sons Donald, Jr., and Eric; that the company would undertake no new business deals with foreign countries or the U.S. government; and that the company would donate to the U.S. Treasury any profits derived from patronage of Trump’s properties by foreign governments—an arrangement that failed to satisfy some specialists in government ethics. In late January a public interest group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), later joined by other plaintiffs, filed suit against Trump (in his capacity as president) in federal district court in Manhattan, alleging that he was in violation of the foreign emoluments clause. In June the attorneys general of Maryland and the District of Columbia sued Trump for allegedly having violated both the foreign and domestic emoluments clauses, and soon afterward nearly 200 Democratic members of Congress filed a separate suit alleging that, by continuing to accept emoluments from foreign countries without consulting Congress, Trump had denied Congress the opportunity to give or withhold its “Consent” as required under the foreign emoluments clause. After the CREW suit was dismissed (for lack of standing) in district court in December, the plaintiffs appealed the case to a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which vacated the lower court’s judgment in September 2019, allowing the suit to proceed to trial. Trump unsuccessfully petitioned the Second Circuit for an en banc hearing (before all judges of the court) and then filed a writ of certiorari (petition for review) with the Supreme Court in September 2020.
In March and July 2018 a federal district court denied motions by Trump to dismiss the suit by Maryland and the District of Columbia, allowing that case to move forward with regard to the operation of the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. After issuing a stay of the district court’s proceedings, a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit reversed the district court’s rulings and ordered a dismissal of the suit for lack of standing (the possession of a sufficient interest in the outcome of a judicial proceeding, usually on the basis of an existing or anticipated legal injury). That judgment in turn was set aside in October 2019, when the Fourth Circuit agreed to an en banc hearing in December. In May 2020 the Fourth Circuit upheld the district court’s original rulings, leading Trump to file a writ of certiorari with the Supreme Court in September. Meanwhile, in the suit brought by Democratic members of Congress, a district court rejected (in September 2018 and April 2019) the Trump administration’s motion to dismiss but agreed in August 2019 to stay discovery and to allow an immediate appeal of the court’s orders after a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit remanded the case in July. That panel later agreed to hear oral arguments in December on the question of whether the district court had erred in allowing the suit to proceed. In February 2020 it dismissed the suit for lack of standing, and in October 2020 the Supreme Court declined to review the circuit court’s judgment. Following Biden’s inauguration as president in January 2021, the Supreme Court dismissed both of the remaining emoluments suits as moot.
Although those cases were not resolved, there was no doubt that Trump had profited from patronage of his hotels, golf resorts, and other properties by officials of foreign governments, foreign and domestic lobbyists, Republican politicians, representatives of conservative interest groups, and members of his own administration. It was also apparent that much, if not most, of the business he received from foreign governments and from foreign and domestic lobbyists was undertaken on the assumption (justified or not) that Trump would look more favourably upon those who spent money at his properties than upon those who did not. During his presidency, it became a matter of routine that persons or groups who wished to influence the Trump administration at high levels, whether in the United States or abroad, would patronize a Trump-owned property whenever feasible. Trump’s properties also received much business from the U.S. government itself, which was obliged to pay Trump for services and accommodations (e.g., for U.S. Secret Service protection) at his golf courses and his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida during his frequent visits to those venues.
Supreme Court of Donald Trump
In January 2017 Trump made good on his promise to place conservative justices on the Supreme Court by nominating Neil Gorsuch, a judge of the Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, to fill the seat that had become vacant with the death in February 2016 of Antonin Scalia. Although Obama had put forward Merrick Garland, a judicial moderate, as Scalia’s replacement in March 2016, the majority leader of the Senate, Republican Mitch McConnell, refused to schedule a vote or even to hold hearings on Garland’s nomination, declaring that the Senate should not consider any Supreme Court nominee during an election year. McConnell’s gamble that a Republican would win the presidency and nominate a more conservative justice proved successful. Gorsuch was confirmed by the Senate in April after Senate Republicans overcame a Democratic filibuster by removing the traditional 60-vote minimum needed for cloture (ending debate and proceeding to a vote).
In July 2018 Trump nominated another conservative appellate court judge, Brett Kavanaugh of the District of Columbia Circuit, to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. In hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee in September, a childhood acquaintance of Kavanaugh’s, Christine Blasey Ford, testified that he had sexually molested her when they were underage teens in Maryland and that he was “stumbling drunk” during the assault. Kavanaugh was also accused of a separate act of sexual assault by a former classmate at Yale University, Deborah Ramirez, and a third accuser, Julie Swetnick, declared in a sworn statement that Kavanaugh had attended parties at which gang rapes took place. In his own testimony, Kavanaugh angrily denied the allegations, insisting that they were the product of a conspiracy by Democrats to exact revenge on behalf of “the Clintons” for Kavanaugh’s role as a member of the legal team of independent counsel Kenneth Starr during the latter’s investigation in the 1990s of U.S. Pres. Bill Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. A subsequent supplemental investigation by the FBI, ordered by Trump, was severely limited in duration and scope: Kavanaugh, Ford, and Swetnick were not interviewed; dozens of witnesses recommended to the FBI by Ford and Ramirez were not contacted; and repeated offers of corroborating evidence by numerous other persons were not acted upon. After the Republican chairperson of the Judiciary Committee declared that the FBI’s confidential report had found “no corroboration” of the allegations, Kavanaugh was narrowly confirmed by the Senate in October. Ford’s emotionally compelling testimony—and the belief among many women of both political parties that she had been treated unfairly—galvanized the #MeToo movement of survivors of sexual assault and reinforced perceptions of the Republican Party and the Trump administration as being insensitive to women’s concerns. Meanwhile, Trump defended Kavanaugh as a victim of persecution and contended that the #MeToo movement had created a dangerous climate for men.
In September 2020, eight days after the death of Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Trump announced his nomination of judge Amy Coney Barrett, whom he had appointed to the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit only two years earlier, as Ginsburg’s replacement. Notwithstanding the justification they had offered for refusing to consider Garland’s nomination four years earlier, Senate Republicans declared their intention to confirm Barrett quickly. After Judiciary Committee hearings and Senate debate that Democrats criticized as improperly rushed, Barrett was confirmed by the full Senate on October 26, exactly one month after her nomination and only eight days before the presidential election. An extremely conservative judge, Barrett was expected to move the ideological centre of the Supreme Court even farther to the right than it had been under the Court’s previous 5–4 conservative majorities and to make conservative rulings from the Court more likely for many years to come.
Trump also successfully appointed a record number of district and appellate court judges, having inherited more than 100 federal bench vacancies resulting from the refusal of Senate Republicans to confirm most of Obama’s judicial nominees during the last two years of his presidency. Trump’s judicial appointments, almost all of whom were drawn from recommendations by the conservative Federalist Society, were mostly white and male; they were also generally young (less than 50 years old), ensuring that they would serve for several years or even decades. Their usually quick confirmations on party-line votes helped to further the Republican Party’s longstanding project of transforming the federal judiciary, particularly at the appellate level, into a conservative bulwark against liberal legal initiatives and policy making. By the end of Trump’s single term as president in January 2021, nearly 30 percent of all federal judges were Trump appointees.
Cabinet appointments
Trump took an unusually long time to assemble his cabinet, in part because many of his early nominations to positions requiring Senate confirmation were filibustered by Democrats. His cabinet was also unusual in that it was the least diverse in decades and by far the richest in U.S. history. Several of Trump’s cabinet-level appointments were closely associated with the firms or industries that their agencies were charged with overseeing or were well known for having opposed their agencies’ basic missions in the past. Trump’s cabinet and high-level executive staff were also distinguished by their relatively high rate of turnover and eventually by the fact that several cabinet-level officials served at various times only in acting capacities, not having been confirmed by the Senate.
Particularly controversial among the original members of Trump’s cabinet were EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) administrator Scott Pruitt, who as Oklahoma attorney general had spent much of his career suing the agency on behalf of the oil and gas industry; and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who had frequently expressed contempt for public education while promoting and financially supporting school voucher legislation and charter and private schools. Steve Bannon, the former head of Breitbart News, a far-right publishing platform, was appointed chief strategist but left the administration after seven months in August 2017. Trump also gave his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and his daughter Ivanka Trump prominent (though unpaid) roles as senior adviser to the president and assistant to the president, respectively.
During his administration, several of Trump’s cabinet members were accused of ethics violations and other malfeasance, including breaches of travel regulations and anti-lobbying laws, inappropriate use of their agencies’ resources, perjury, and contempt of Congress for failure to respond to lawful subpoenas of documents and testimony by congressional committees (see below Russia investigation and Ukraine scandal). In September 2017 Tom Price resigned as secretary of health and human services after news reports revealed that he had spent some $400,000 on luxury chartered aircraft for trips to Europe and within the United States. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, and Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin were also criticized for inappropriate use of chartered or military aircraft, leading to Shulkin’s firing in March 2018. Zinke, who faced several federal investigations of his conduct as interior secretary, including one that was referred to the Justice Department, resigned under pressure in December 2018. Earlier that year Ben Carson, the secretary of housing and urban development, was investigated by a House oversight committee for having spent an inordinate sum on furniture for his government office. In July Pruitt was forced to resign after a long series of scandals concerning questionable spending, the use of EPA employees as personal assistants, inappropriate gifts from lobbyists, and the use of undisclosed e-mail addresses for EPA business. Although he did not resign as a result, Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross was heavily criticized (but faced no criminal charges) for apparently lying to Congress when he told the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Appropriations Committee in March 2018 that his decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 decennial census was made at the request of the Justice Department to help it better enforce the 1965 Voting Rights Act—a rationale that the Supreme Court later found to be “contrived.” (See Department of Commerce v. New York.) In April–May 2019 Mnuchin declined to act on a request by the House Ways and Means Committee for six years of Trump’s business and personal tax returns (see below Other investigations); in so doing, he appeared to flout a 1924 federal law (26 U.S.C. §6103) that requires the secretary of the Treasury to provide individual tax returns and related tax information upon request to select committees of Congress.
Russia investigation of Donald Trump
In February 2017 Trump’s new national security adviser, Michael Flynn, was forced to resign after press reports disclosed that Flynn had continued to serve in the White House despite a warning from the Justice Department that he was vulnerable to Russian blackmail for having lied to Vice President Pence about the substance of a telephone conversation between Flynn and the Russian ambassador to the United States in December 2016. Flynn’s contacts with the ambassador, both before and after the election, had been monitored by the FBI as part of its routine surveillance of the ambassador’s communications and in connection with a then secret investigation since July 2016 of possible collusion between Russian officials and prominent members of the Trump campaign. That investigation had been triggered by information obtained by Australian authorities, who reported to the FBI in May that George Papadopoulos, a foreign-policy adviser in the Trump campaign, had told an Australian diplomat in London that Russia had “dirt” on Clinton, an apparent reference to the stolen e-mails that were eventually released by WikiLeaks in July. Speculation in the press regarding the existence of the investigation had been repeatedly dismissed by Trump as “fake news” but was confirmed by Comey in testimony before the House Intelligence Committee in March 2017, during which he also contradicted Trump’s claim that Obama had spied on the Trump campaign by tapping Trump’s telephones. Democratic members of Congress, meanwhile, expressed dismay that Comey had chosen to report the discovery of additional Clinton e-mails in October but had waited until after the election to reveal the Russia investigation.
After Comey testified again in May about Russian interference in the election, Trump abruptly fired him, ostensibly on the recommendation of the Justice Department, which in memos solicited by Trump criticized Comey for his public disclosures regarding Clinton’s e-mails. Trump soon acknowledged that he had intended to fire Comey regardless of the Justice Department’s recommendation and that “this Russia thing” was a factor in his decision. Later that month the press obtained a copy of a memo written by Comey that summarized a conversation between Comey and Trump at a dinner at the White House in January. The memo stated that Trump had asked Comey to pledge “loyalty” to him and that Trump had indirectly requested that Comey drop the FBI’s investigation of Flynn. The memo immediately raised concerns, even among some Republicans, that Trump’s actions might have constituted obstruction of justice. The deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, then announced the appointment of former FBI director Robert Mueller as special counsel to oversee the FBI’s investigation of Russian interference in the election and possible collusion between Russian officials and the Trump campaign, which Rosenstein’s appointment order characterized as “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump.” Mueller was also authorized to investigate and prosecute any federal crimes arising directly from or committed in the course of the investigation, including obstruction of justice, perjury, destruction of evidence, and witness intimidation.
Comey’s testimony in June before the Senate Intelligence Committee, which, like the House Intelligence Committee, was conducting its own investigation, was broadcast live on television, radio, and the Internet. Many Americans watched from bars and restaurants, which opened early in some parts of the country to provide venues for viewing the much-anticipated event. Comey accused Trump and other administration officials of lying about Comey’s effectiveness as director of the FBI, and he attributed his being fired to Trump’s alleged desire to shut down the Russia investigation. Comey also revealed that, after being fired, he indirectly leaked the memo that recounted his dinner conversation with Trump in the hope of triggering the appointment of a special counsel to continue the Russia investigation.
Early in July 2017 the press reported that in June 2016 senior members of the Trump campaign, including its chairperson, Paul Manafort, as well as Jared Kushner and Trump’s son Donald, Jr., had met secretly in Trump Tower with a lawyer associated with the Russian government. In response, Donald, Jr., issued a statement in which he claimed that the meeting had primarily concerned adoptions of Russian children by Americans and that he had not known in advance who on the Russian side would be attending. Three days later the press reported the existence of e-mails predating the meeting in which the British publicist Rob Goldstone (who had helped Donald Trump, Sr., stage the 2013 Miss Universe contest in Moscow) notified Donald, Jr., that the Russian government possessed incriminating “documents and information” on Clinton and offered to set up a meeting to convey them through a “Russian government attorney.” Attendance at such a meeting was potentially a crime under U.S. campaign finance law, which generally prohibits accepting or soliciting foreign assistance in connection with a U.S. election.
In January 2018 President Trump’s legal team acknowledged in a memo to the Mueller investigation that Trump himself had dictated the initial false account of the meeting (claiming that it had concerned adoptions), contradicting earlier statements by his attorneys and by White House press secretaries. In August 2018 Trump admitted via Twitter that the purpose of the meeting was “to get information on an opponent” but insisted that the encounter was perfectly legal, that no information was forthcoming, and that he did not know about the meeting in advance. He also, for the first time, publicly (on Twitter) called upon Attorney General Jeff Sessions to put an end to the Russia investigation by firing Mueller—a power, however, that Sessions did not possess, having recused himself in March 2017 after revelations of his previously undisclosed contacts with the Russian ambassador as a member of the Trump campaign in September 2016.
In October 2017 the Mueller investigation announced a plea agreement with Papadopoulos in which he admitted to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian nationals regarding the theft of e-mails from the Clinton campaign and pledged to cooperate with the investigation in exchange for its promise not to prosecute him on more serious charges. Later that month the Mueller team also unveiled a 12-count indictment against Manafort and his associate Rick Gates (who himself had been an adviser to the Trump campaign), charging them with money laundering, tax evasion, and bank fraud in connection with Manafort’s consulting and lobbying efforts on behalf of Ukrainian political parties and leaders between 2006 and 2015. As part of a plea agreement with prosecutors, Flynn twice pleaded guilty in federal district court to lying to the FBI—once in December 2017 and again in December 2018. (Flynn’s sentencing was postponed by the district court on several occasions, initially to permit Flynn to cooperate with government investigators, which he did until mid-2019.) In February 2018 additional charges were filed against Manafort and Gates in a superseding indictment, leading Gates to reach a plea agreement; Gates’s testimony at Manafort’s trial in July–August was instrumental in securing the latter’s conviction on eight criminal counts. Facing a separate trial on other felony charges in September, Manafort reached his own plea agreement with the Mueller investigation that month.
Also in February 2018 the Mueller investigation indicted 13 Russian nationals and three Russian organizations on charges of conspiring to defraud the United States by interfering in its political and electoral processes, including the 2016 election. The indictment charged that the individual defendants, working in part through facilities provided by the Internet Research Agency (IRA) in St. Petersburg, used hundreds of fictitious and stolen social media identities to spread “derogatory information” about Clinton and to support Trump. According to the indictment, they also engaged in efforts to discourage minorities from voting, promoted allegations of voter fraud by the Democratic Party, purchased political advertisements on social media, and used false U.S. identities to organize on-the-ground political rallies in several states.
Acting on a referral by the Mueller investigation, in April the FBI raided the home and office of Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal attorney, seizing business records and recordings of telephone conversations between Cohen and his clients, including Trump. According to press reports, Cohen was being investigated on charges of tax evasion, bank fraud, and violations of campaign finance law in connection with his role in making or arranging payments in 2016 to adult-film actor Stephanie Clifford, known as Stormy Daniels, and to Karen McDougal, a model, in fulfillment of nondisclosure agreements concerning their alleged affairs with Trump in 2006–07. In March both women filed lawsuits seeking to have their agreements declared invalid. Cohen eventually pleaded guilty to eight criminal counts in August 2018 in a hearing at which he stated under oath that Trump had directed him to arrange payments to Clifford and McDougal.
In July 2018 Mueller indicted 12 Russian military intelligence officers for conspiring to interfere in the 2016 election by stealing thousands of e-mails and other documents from computer servers of the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign and publicly releasing them through fictitious social media identities and WikiLeaks. The indictment also charged the officers with breaking into the computer network of at least one state board of elections and stealing data on approximately 500,000 voters. (In a secret May 2017 report, later leaked to the press, the National Security Agency [NSA] determined that a total of 39 state boards of election had been targeted.) The announcement of the indictment prompted Trump to again express doubt that Russia was responsible for the interference, as he had done on several occasions since the beginning of the Russia investigation, and to again assert that the FBI was corrupt and dishonest for not pursuing a criminal investigation of Clinton.
In September 2018 Papadopoulos was sentenced to serve 14 days in a minimum-security federal prison for lying to the FBI, becoming the first Trump campaign official to be jailed in connection with the Russia investigation. Two months later, in November, Mueller informed a trial judge that Manafort had violated his plea agreement by again lying in interviews with investigators and by making false statements before a grand jury. Manafort was eventually sentenced to a combined 7.5 years in prison by two federal courts in March 2019. Later that month he was charged with an additional 16 state felonies by the district attorney for Manhattan. Meanwhile, in November 2018, Cohen pleaded guilty to separate charges of lying to Congress for having told the House and Senate intelligence committees that Trump’s efforts to build a hotel in Moscow had ended in January 2016, when, in fact, they had continued until at least June of that year, by which time Trump had become the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison in December 2018.
Also in November 2018, Trump fired Sessions and appointed as acting attorney general Matthew Whitaker, Sessions’s former chief of staff, who had been an outspoken critic of the Russia investigation before joining the Justice Department. Controversy over whether Whitaker should recuse himself from the investigation was soon overshadowed, however, by Trump’s nomination in December of William Barr as Sessions’s permanent successor. Barr, who had served (1991–93) as attorney general in the George H.W. Bush administration, was known for his extreme view of executive power—one that entailed, among other things, that presidents cannot commit obstruction of justice through the exercise of the discretionary powers granted to them by the Constitution. Notably, Barr relied upon that theory to question the legitimacy of the Mueller investigation in an unsolicited memo that he submitted to the Justice Department in June 2018. The memo, which came to light soon after Barr’s nomination, immediately drew criticism from Democrats, who viewed it as an attempt to curry favour with the Trump administration and as a signal of Barr’s apparent willingness to shut down the Mueller inquiry if Trump so ordered. At his confirmation hearings Barr pledged that he would not interfere in the Russia investigation but refused to say whether he would release Mueller’s final report to the public. He was confirmed by the Republican-controlled Senate in February 2019 in a mostly party-line vote.
Approximately five weeks after his confirmation, Barr informed Congress that Mueller had submitted a final report on the results of his investigation and that there would be no additional indictments. (By that time, Mueller’s team had indicted 34 individuals and three businesses on nearly 200 criminal charges and obtained seven guilty pleas.) Two days later Barr sent to Congress an unusual written summary of the report’s contents, in which he stated that Mueller had not found sufficient evidence to establish a charge of conspiracy regarding the Trump campaign’s interactions with Russia and that Mueller had not made a traditional recommendation about whether Trump should be prosecuted for obstruction of justice. Absent that recommendation, he continued, he and Rosenstein had themselves determined that the evidence presented in Mueller’s report was “not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.” Barr’s public release of the summary at about the same time, and its wide coverage in the press, encouraged many Americans to assume that Mueller’s report had found no serious wrongdoing by the president, though others remained skeptical. According to press reports in late April, Mueller had privately written to Barr soon after the summary became public to complain that Barr’s characterization of the report to Congress “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this Office’s work and conclusions” and had created “public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation.”
On April 18, nearly one month after his letter to Congress, Barr released a redacted version of the Mueller report. House Democrats welcomed the release but insisted that Barr make available to them all confidential grand jury materials and the redacted passages related to them. After Barr refused, the House Judiciary Committee sued the Justice Department and obtained a court order in October requiring the release of the grand jury materials. That order was later upheld by a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, a decision that the Justice Department appealed to the Supreme Court in July. In late November, after Biden’s victory over Trump in the 2020 presidential election, the Court removed the case from its argument calendar at the request of the Judiciary Committee.
The two volumes of Mueller’s report reflected the dual mandates of his appointment as special counsel: the first detailed the goals and methods of the Russian attack on the 2016 presidential election, and the second outlined several potentially obstructive actions taken by Trump in connection with the FBI’s investigation of Russian interference (begun in July 2016) and the subsequent investigation led by Mueller (begun in May 2017).
Mueller’s office concluded in the first volume that there was insufficient evidence to establish that “members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government” despite “numerous links” between the two as detailed in the report. In the second volume, Mueller explained that his office had decided not to recommend charges of obstruction of justice against Trump because Justice Department regulations prohibited the indictment or criminal prosecution of a sitting president and because the office deemed it unfair to accuse Trump of a crime outside the context of a formal trial, where he would have the opportunity to answer the charges against him. Nevertheless, Mueller emphasized in the conclusion of the second volume that
if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.
Although the Mueller report appeared to document numerous instances of impeachable behaviour by Trump, Democrats in the House were initially divided over whether a formal impeachment inquiry should be opened. Despite demands for immediate action from several liberal Democrats, the House leadership and most other Democratic members preferred a more cautious approach, arguing that most Americans were opposed to impeachment and that Trump could not be removed from office anyway, because he was certain to be acquitted in the Republican-controlled Senate. The latter view, which House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had advocated even before the release of the Mueller report, remained the prevailing position within the Democratic Party until the late summer of 2019 (see below Ukraine scandal).
In December 2019 the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General released a report on its investigation of the FBI’s actions during the early stages of the Russia investigation (then code-named “Crossfire Hurricane”). The report addressed, among other topics, whether the FBI had observed proper procedures in opening Crossfire Hurricane and four individual investigations of members of the Trump campaign (Papadopoulos, Carter Page, Manafort, and Flynn) and whether the FBI had placed any undercover agents within the Trump campaign to gain information about possible links and coordination with the Russian government. Although the report concluded that the investigation had been legitimately opened and that there was no evidence of political bias or of FBI “spying” on the Trump campaign, it also faulted the FBI and the Justice Department for serious errors and omissions and at least one case of apparent criminal wrongdoing in its handling of applications (to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court; FISC) for warrants to surveil Page, then a Trump campaign adviser.
In an extraordinary decision in May 2020, the Justice Department moved to drop its case against Flynn on the grounds that his statements to the FBI were not “materially” relevant to the bureau’s investigation and that, in any event, the investigation of Flynn itself lacked any legitimate counterintelligence or criminal purpose. Although the district court’s refusal to drop the case was eventually upheld by the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the case became moot after Trump pardoned Flynn in late November 2020. In the last weeks of his presidency, Trump also granted pardons to Manafort and to Roger Stone, a friend and adviser who had been convicted of lying to Congress, obstruction, and witness tampering in connection with the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Other investigations
As Mueller’s investigation proceeded, and through the release of his report in March, several House committees—including the Judiciary Committee, the Select Committee on Intelligence, the Ways and Means Committee, the Foreign Affairs Committee, the Committee on Oversight and Reform, and the Financial Services Committee—were conducting their own inquiries into possible tax and financial crimes by Trump, the Trump Organization, the Trump inaugural committee, and the charitable Trump Foundation (dissolved in 2018), evidence of which had arisen from Mueller’s investigation and from congressional testimony by Cohen and other Trump associates. At the same time, the office of the U.S. District Attorney for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) continued its separate inquiry into possible tax fraud and violations of campaign-finance law by Trump in connection with the alleged hush-money payments to Stephanie Clifford and Karen McDougal (that investigation, however, was abruptly closed without explanation in July 2019). Other federal prosecutors, as well as state and local authorities, were looking into possible law breaking by Trump in connection with questionable donations to Trump’s inaugural committee, an alleged offer of a presidential pardon to Cohen, misuse of charitable assets by the Trump Foundation, accusations that Trump inflated the value of his assets in four major Trump Organization projects, apparently illegal tax schemes by the Trump family (see above Early life and business career), and other matters. By the summer of 2019 approximately 30 criminal or civil investigations of Trump and his family or associates were underway.
Since the early months of that year, however, the Trump administration had regularly refused to provide documents or witness testimony requested or subpoenaed by Democratic-led House committees investigating alleged corruption, abuse of power, and obstruction of justice by Trump or the Trump administration. In the wake of the public release in April of the redacted Mueller report, Trump publicly affirmed his administration’s refusal to cooperate with the House investigations, declaring that “we’re fighting all the subpoenas.” He and congressional Republicans frequently insisted that all such inquiries were illegitimate politically motivated attempts to embarrass Trump or to overturn the results of the 2016 election. Although past administrations, including the Richard Nixon administration, had also regularly defied congressional oversight, particularly with claims of executive privilege, none had so broadly rejected, on explicitly partisan grounds, any congressional oversight whatsoever. Some constitutional scholars warned that Trump’s refusal to recognize any legitimate purpose to Congress’s investigations of his administration threatened to undermine the constitutionally established separation of powers between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government. Soon after Pelosi announced the beginning of a formal impeachment investigation of Trump in September 2019 (see below Ukraine scandal), the White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, announced in a letter to her and other House leaders that the Trump administration would refuse to cooperate with the inquiry in any way, primarily because it allegedly did not afford Trump the due-process guarantees provided to defendants in criminal trials (the House investigation, however, was not a trial).
After Michael Cohen’s testimony to Congress in February 2019 that Trump had regularly inflated or deflated the value of his assets in order to obtain bank loans or to reduce his real estate taxes, respectively, the House Oversight Committee in March requested 10 years of Trump’s financial records from Trump’s accounting firm, Mazars, which responded that it could not legally provide the desired records. The committee’s subsequent subpoena was challenged by Trump in a lawsuit against Mazars and the Oversight Committee but ultimately upheld by a U.S. district court and the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Responding to an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court by Trump’s attorneys, Chief Justice John Roberts, Jr., indefinitely stayed the subpoena while the Court considered whether to review the judge’s decision. Meanwhile, two other House committees, on Financial Services and Intelligence, issued subpoenas to Deutsche Bank, Trump’s primary lender since the late 1990s, seeking nearly 10 years of tax returns and other financial documents; the Financial Services Committee also subpoenaed the U.S. bank Capital One for similar information. Trump’s lawsuit to prevent the two banks from releasing his financial information was rejected by a district court and, on appeal, by the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. In a third case, Trump sued New York state officials (and preemptively the House Ways and Means Committee) to block enforcement of a grand jury subpoena to Mazars for eight years of his state tax returns, arguing that a sitting president is immune from state criminal subpoenas. After a district court dismissed that doctrine as “repugnant to the nation’s governmental structure and constitutional values” and the Second Circuit affirmed, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed in December 2019 to hear all three cases, consolidating the first two as Trump v. Mazars. The Court ultimately declined to invalidate the subpoenas in Mazars but remanded the cases to the lower courts for further consideration of their implications for the separation of powers between Congress and the president. In Trump v. Vance, the Court rejected Trump’s assertion of immunity but again remanded the case to permit him to challenge the subpoena on other grounds.
Health care
An early goal of the Trump administration, as reflected in Trump’s first executive order, was the repeal of Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act, or ACA), which Trump had long derided—even before announcing his presidential bid—as an expensive failure. Trump pledged during his campaign that he would replace the ACA with a bill that would provide better coverage at lower premiums, and he promised that no one would lose health insurance under his plan. However, the details of the bill, called in the House of Representatives the American Health Care Act (AHCA), proved contentious even within his own party. Because Trump had not worked out a specific plan of his own, he was forced to rely on Republicans in the House to draft a substantive bill that would reduce government involvement in the health insurance market without depriving millions of Americans of the coverage they had acquired under the ACA. The Republicans did not have a detailed alternative in hand, however, resulting in a delay in Trump’s promised repeal of the law.
In early March 2017 House Republicans introduced their plan, which featured elimination of the ACA’s “individual mandate” (the requirement that most Americans obtain health insurance or pay a penalty), a reduction in individual tax credits for the purchase of insurance, cuts in federal Medicaid funding, and nearly $1 trillion in tax cuts over a 10-year period, including $274 billion in cuts for persons earning at least $200,000 a year. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) initially estimated that the plan would reduce the federal deficit by $337 billion over 10 years as compared with current law but would also increase the number of uninsured people by 24 million over the same period. The bill immediately faced objections from both moderate and conservative Republicans. The former worried that too many people would lose affordable coverage, while the latter complained that the plan left too many burdensome provisions of the ACA in place. The anxieties of moderates in particular were amplified by the angry feedback they received at town hall meetings throughout the country from constituents who feared the loss of their health insurance. Unable to bridge the differences between the two factions, in late March the House leadership withdrew the bill without a vote—a major defeat for Trump, who had made repeal and replacement of the ACA a centrepiece of his campaign.
Six weeks later the House narrowly passed a revised version of the AHCA over the unanimous opposition of Democrats. A subsequent CBO analysis projected that the new version would reduce the deficit by $119 billion over 10 years as compared with current law but increase the number of uninsured by 23 million.
Soon after the AHCA was passed, Republicans in the Senate, working largely in secret and without input from Democrats, began crafting their own replacement for the ACA, initially called the Better Care Reconciliation Act (BCRA). Like the AHCA, the BCRA, in numerous versions under various names, would have decreased the deficit but significantly increased the number of uninsured, and it would have increased insurance premiums in the first year after its passage, according to analyses released by the CBO in late June. The BCRA thus faced the same criticisms that had beset the House measure, revealing deep divisions between Senate Republicans who wished to limit the loss of health insurance in their states and those who aimed to dismantle as much of the current law as possible. Eventually, within a single week in late July, the Senate voted on three bills: a repeal of major provisions of the ACA without immediate replacement; a relatively comprehensive repeal and replacement of the ACA; and a more modest “skinny” repeal and replacement. Despite considerable political pressure on Senate Republicans from the Trump administration, all three measures failed.
Having been unsuccessful in their attempts to repeal and replace the ACA, Republicans in Congress and the Trump administration pursued a series of measures intended to cumulatively undermine the law by making the health insurance it provided less accessible, less affordable, and less effective (through reductions in coverage and other measures), a strategy that Trump described as allowing Obamacare to “explode.” Those changes, some of which predated the failure of Republican alternatives to the ACA in the Senate, included cutting funding for advertising and for assistance with enrollment in Obamacare; drastically reducing open enrollment periods; ending cost-sharing subsidies that enabled insurance companies to reduce out-of-pocket expenses for low- and middle-income Americans; and repealing (effective in 2019) the ACA’s “individual mandate,” which had required all Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a penalty. (The last measure was part of Republican tax legislation drafted in secret and passed without Democratic support in December 2017; Trump signed the measure later that month. A subsequent analysis by the CBO determined that the legislation, which among other things reduced the corporate tax rate from 35 to 21 percent, would increase the federal deficit by approximately $1.8 trillion over a 10-year period.) In November 2017 a study by the CBO had estimated that repealing the individual mandate and making no other changes to the ACA would increase the number of uninsured people by 13 million after 10 years and raise premiums by 10 percent in most years through 2027. Other changes included allowing states to impose work requirements on people receiving Medicaid; allowing the creation of “association health plans” that would offer fewer essential health benefits than plans under the ACA and charge higher premiums to certain enrollees based on factors such as gender, occupation, and age; and permitting the sale of short-term plans that would provide minimal benefits and would not cover medical services for preexisting conditions.
Environmental policy
One of the areas in which the Trump administration was able to move quickly to implement its policies was the environment, in part because many of the changes it sought could be accomplished through executive action by Trump or his appointees. Other changes were undertaken through legislation adopted by Congress, whose Republican majority generally shared Trump’s environmental views. In January, for example, Trump signed memoranda to hasten approval and completion of the Dakota Access and Keystone XL oil pipelines, both of which had been blocked by the Obama administration on environmental grounds. In February Trump signed legislation to block an Interior Department rule that would have restricted the dumping of toxic mining waste into streams and other waterways. In March Trump signed an executive order that rescinded various Obama-era policies and programs related to climate change, including a 2016 freeze on new coal leases on federal lands. In the same month, EPA administrator Pruitt withdrew an EPA request that oil and natural gas companies report methane emissions from their facilities and rejected a total ban on the pesticide chlorpyrifos, against the advice of the EPA’s own scientists. Other significant decisions included drastically reducing the size of national monuments created by Obama and Pres. Bill Clinton; rescinding the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, a set of EPA regulations that had mandated a 32 percent reduction in carbon emissions by the U.S. power sector between 2005 and 2030; revoking fuel-efficiency standards for cars and light trucks developed by the EPA during the Obama administration; and proposing numerous changes to the Endangered Species Act (ESA) that would weaken legal protections for endangered and threatened animals and make listing species as threatened more difficult.
Undoubtedly the most momentous environmental decision of the new Trump administration was Trump’s announcement in June that the United States would withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate change, under which the United States and 194 other countries had agreed to a broad range of measures intended to limit potentially catastrophic increases in global average temperatures during the 21st century and to mitigate the economic consequences of global warming. Trump contended that the agreement would harm the American economy (through government-mandated reductions in the country’s greenhouse gas emissions) and was in other respects unfair and even demeaning to the United States—historically the largest emitter of greenhouse gases and in the early 21st century the second largest emitter after China. Trump’s decision was condemned by government and political leaders, scientists, business executives, and activists throughout the world but praised by Republicans in Congress, who viewed it as a reassertion of American independence in world affairs and a repudiation of the environmental policies of the Obama administration. Like Trump, many Republican lawmakers doubted that climate change was real, while others questioned the human origins of global warming.
Foreign relations of Donald Trump
A major theme of Trump’s presidential campaign was his view that the United States had long been treated unfairly or taken advantage of by other countries, including by some traditional U.S. allies, and that under Obama’s leadership the United States had ceased to be respected in world affairs. In numerous speeches, tweets, and interviews, he threatened to impose tariffs on countries that engaged in what he deemed unfair trade practices; harshly criticized the World Trade Organization (WTO); and promised to renegotiate NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement), which he called “the worst trade deal” the United States had ever signed. He also criticized NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization), dismissing the alliance as “obsolete” but also insisting that other NATO countries devote more of their budgets to defense spending. In January 2017 he withdrew the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a regional trade agreement between 12 Pacific Rim countries that had been a major foreign policy achievement of the Obama administration. (Trump’s action was largely symbolic, however, because Congress had never ratified the treaty.)
In January and March 2018 the Trump administration announced steep tariffs on imports of solar panels (worth $8.5 billion per year) and washing machines (worth $1 billion), aimed particularly at China and South Korea, and on imports of aluminum and steel (worth $48 billion) made in several countries, most of them U.S. allies (initial exemptions from the aluminum and steel duties granted to Canada, the European Union [EU], and Mexico were lifted in June). Dismissing warnings and criticisms from economists and business leaders that the tariffs could ignite a trade war, Trump insisted in a tweet that “trade wars are good, and easy to win.” In April China imposed retaliatory tariffs on a variety of U.S. goods worth $2.4 billion annually, approximately the dollar amount of Chinese aluminum and steel imports affected by the Trump tariffs. The EU followed suit in June with tariffs on U.S. imports valued at $3.2 billion, as did Canada in July with tariffs on $12.8 billion of U.S. goods. Following its official finding that the Chinese had engaged in unfair trade practices, in June the Trump administration announced plans for tariffs on an additional $50 billion of dollars worth of Chinese products, prompting China to announce comparable duties. Threats and counterthreats of additional tariffs soon followed, and by July the two countries were engaged in a full-blown trade war.
Trump’s tariffs and his antipathy to the WTO overshadowed the meeting in early June of the Group of 7 in Quebec, Canada, which was marked by tense disagreement between Trump and other G7 leaders over language regarding free trade in the meeting’s final communiqué, usually a bland formality. Following Trump’s early departure from the meeting, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau reiterated his country’s reluctant determination to respond in kind to Trump’s tariffs on aluminum and steel. Reacting to Trudeau’s remarks from a flight to Singapore aboard Air Force One, Trump withdrew his endorsement of the communiqué and called Trudeau “dishonest & weak.” In Singapore Trump held a historic meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un, the first face-to-face encounter between sitting leaders of the two countries. Although Trump declared after the meeting that “there is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea,” it was unclear what concrete commitments North Korea had made to nuclear disarmament. In July Trump attended the annual summit meeting of NATO in Brussels, where in a speech he called other NATO countries “delinquent” and insisted that they increase their defense spending “immediately.” The meeting ended with a joint communiqué in which member countries agreed to continue their efforts to devote 2 percent of their GDP to defense spending by 2024, a goal they had agreed to in 2014.
In May 2018 Trump announced the withdrawal of the United States from a 2015 agreement between Iran and five major powers that had limited Iran’s uranium-enrichment activities and required it to submit to frequent international inspections of its nuclear facilities in return for the lifting of economic sanctions. After the United States killed Iran’s highest-ranking security and intelligence official in a drone strike ordered by Trump, Iran announced in January 2020 that it would no longer observe the treaty-imposed restrictions on its enrichment activities, though it stopped short of formally exiting the agreement.
Ukraine scandal
In August 2019 an anonymous whistleblower, later determined to be an official of the CIA, filed a complaint with the inspector general of the U.S. intelligence community, Michael Atkinson, alleging that in a July 25 phone call with the newly elected president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump had attempted to extort a promise from Zelensky to interfere in the 2020 U.S. presidential election on Trump’s behalf. Specifically, according to the complaint, Trump strongly implied that some $400 million in congressionally mandated security assistance to Ukraine would not be provided unless Zelensky carried out two requests, which Trump introduced by saying, “I would like you to do us a favor though….” The first request was that Zelensky search for a computer server used by the Democratic National Committee that supposedly had been hidden in Ukraine after the Internet security firm CrowdStrike determined in 2016 that it had been broken into by hackers based in Russia. According to the CrowdStrike conspiracy theory, which originated as a disinformation campaign by Russia, the missing server contained evidence that the hackers were in fact Ukrainian and that Democrats and CrowdStrike had conspired to falsely blame Russia for interfering in the 2016 presidential election.
The second request was that Zelensky investigate Biden’s allegedly corrupt motive for pressuring the Ukrainian government in 2015, while Biden was serving as vice president in the Obama administration, to fire the country’s prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin. According to the Burisma conspiracy theory, as it came to be known, Biden called for Shokin’s removal only in order to halt an investigation of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings, Ltd., that threatened to uncover wrongdoing by Biden’s son Hunter, who was then serving on the company’s board of directors. No serious evidence of wrongdoing by Biden or his son was ever produced, however. In his phone conversation, Trump also repeatedly suggested to Zelensky that in planning or conducting the requested investigations he deal directly with Attorney General Barr and Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani.
In September 2019, after the press began reporting that Trump’s conversation with Zelensky may have involved a “quid pro quo,” the aid to Ukraine was finally released, and the White House later issued what it called a “rough transcript” of the phone call, which nevertheless did not support Trump’s assertion that there had been no quid pro quo. Later that month Pelosi changed her stance on the impeachment question, announcing that Trump’s attempt to extort a foreign leader to interfere in a U.S. election constituted a betrayal of his oath of office and therefore warranted a formal impeachment inquiry. In testimony before the House Intelligence Committee and later the House Judiciary Committee, career civil servants in the State Department and other witnesses confirmed the outlines of the whistleblower’s account of Trump’s phone call and further indicated that Trump had been attempting to conduct what amounted to a separate “back channel” foreign policy through Giuliani, Barr, and others. In December the Judiciary Committee drafted two articles of impeachment against Trump, one for abuse of power and the other for obstruction of Congress. Those articles were adopted in two party-line votes by the entire House on December 18, making Trump the third president in U.S. history to be impeached. Trump was acquitted by the Senate in February 2020 after a majority of senators voted to find him not guilty on both charges. For additional discussion, see Ukraine scandal.
COVID-19 pandemic
In January 2020 the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the continuing spread of COVID-19—a deadly and highly contagious respiratory illness caused by a new form of the coronavirus known as novel coronavirus, or coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2)—to be a global health emergency. First reported in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2019, the virus soon spread throughout China and then to Europe, the United States, and other regions, prompting WHO to announce in March 2020 that COVID-19 had become a global pandemic. At that time there were more than 118,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 worldwide and nearly 4,300 deaths. By year’s end those numbers had reached approximately 83 million and 1.8 million, respectively.
Soon after the first known case in the United States was identified in mid-January 2020, Trump was privately informed by officials within his administration that the pandemic could result in massive numbers of American deaths and severe damage to the U.S. economy. Those warnings were repeated to Trump for several weeks through February and early March as the numbers of positive tests for the coronavirus and confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the country continued to rise.
At the end of January Trump imposed a partial entry ban on foreign travelers who had recently visited China. However, he initially neglected to implement the aggressive measures that had been recommended to him to slow the spread of the coronavirus and reduce the number of likely deaths. Such proposals included increasing the country’s testing capacity and developing a national strategy for testing, contact tracing, and quarantining; using his authority under the Defense Production Act (DPA) of 1950 to increase production of personal protective equipment (PPE) for medical personnel and ventilators for critically ill patients; establishing a national purchasing and distribution system to allocate PPE and ventilators to states and localities according to need; and issuing national science-based guidelines for closing businesses and schools, social distancing, mask wearing, and other safety measures. In many of his public statements, Trump downplayed the threat posed by the pandemic, the extent of its spread in the United States, and the severity of COVID-19 itself. In other statements, some made in tweets and at press briefings in April following meetings of the White House coronavirus task force (first convened in late January), he promoted supposed alternative remedies for the virus that were known to be ineffective, unproved, or even deadly, and he made other false claims that expert members of the task force were obliged to contradict.
After WHO’s global pandemic announcement, Trump declared a national emergency, suspended travel to the United States from several European countries, and recommended that Americans practice social distancing for the remainder of March (he later extended that period to April 30). At the end of March he invoked the DPA to officially direct the automobile manufacturer General Motors to produce ventilators. By then, many states had already closed businesses and schools, restricted public gatherings, issued stay-at-home orders, and mandated mask wearing in public spaces. States and individual hospitals were also redoubling their efforts to find increasingly scarce ventilators and respirators after Trump told state governors in a conference call that they should make their own arrangements to obtain such equipment.
The widespread business closings and the shift to work-from-home arrangements in some industries resulted in massive layoffs, eventually producing unemployment levels not seen since the early 1930s and a deep recession. In late March Congress passed, and Trump signed into law, a $2.2 trillion economic relief package, the CARES (Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security) Act, that included a loan program for small businesses, an increase in unemployment benefits through July, one-time direct payments to households, increased funding for food-stamp and child-nutrition programs, and financial aid to state and local governments, which had been overwhelmed by unemployment claims and unprecedented demands for emergency services. Two months later the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives adopted a more extensive ($3 trillion) relief measure, the HEROES (Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions) Act, whose provisions included a vote-by-mail option in all federal elections beginning in November and additional funding for the U.S. Postal Service, which was then handling greatly increased numbers of mail-in (or absentee) ballots cast by primary-election voters wishing to avoid exposure to the coronavirus in voting lines and polling stations. Senate Republicans, however, refused to take up the measure, in part because it failed to protect reopened businesses against potential lawsuits by workers who contracted COVID-19 on the job. In late December, after several months of inaction, Congress finally passed scaled-back relief legislation, including a modest temporary increase in unemployment benefits.
Through the spring and summer, while occasionally acknowledging the real scope and seriousness of the pandemic, Trump continued to predict the imminent disappearance of the coronavirus; to dispute or misrepresent official numbers of positive tests, confirmed cases, and deaths in the United States; to promote conspiracy theories that attributed high official numbers to a variety of patently false causes; and to criticize public health officials whose assessments or recommendations did not reflect positively on his leadership. In April and May, as the numbers of new COVID-19 cases and deaths nationwide began to plateau, Trump pushed the states to quickly rescind the public health measures that had helped to slow the spread of the coronavirus, portraying state-imposed business closings and especially mask mandates as violations of economic freedom and individual liberty. Trump’s misrepresentations inspired many of his supporters to hold anti-lockdown demonstrations and to flout state and local mask-wearing orders and limits on public gatherings. Trump’s own refusal to wear a mask in public, a pointed signal of his contempt for such regulations, led many of his supporters, including several Republican governors and lawmakers, to regard the refusal to wear a mask in public as a kind of political statement—an expression of allegiance to Trump and the Republican Party.
In May and June the governors of several states, mostly in the South, responded to Trump’s pressure by relaxing or lifting pandemic-related restrictions—in particular, mask-wearing orders. Partly as a result of those premature changes, a second surge of the pandemic—a spike in positive test rates and in numbers of COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths—occurred in those and a few other states, forcing governors to reimpose restrictions they had declared unnecessary only a few weeks before.
In early October, during the final weeks of his presidential campaign, Trump himself tested positive for the coronavirus and developed COVID-19. He was admitted to Walter Reed Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, with respiratory symptoms and was reportedly treated there with advanced experimental drugs unavailable to almost all other Americans. Released at his insistence after only three days, he eventually resumed his campaign rallies before mostly unmasked supporters in several states. As before, Trump declined to wear a mask in public. Meanwhile, a third surge of the pandemic, which experts had warned would be far more deadly than the second, had begun. By early November more than 9.5 million Americans had developed COVID-19 and more than 225,000 had died of the illness.
Presidential election of 2020
Campaigns and litigation
Facing no serious challengers in the Republican presidential primaries of 2020, Trump became the party’s presumptive nominee in March, having by then collected the minimum number of delegates necessary to win the nomination. He was formally nominated at the Republican Party’s national convention in late August. In an unusual decision, the Republican National Committee declined to write a platform for the 2020 election, instead adopting the same platform it had issued in 2016 (despite its dated criticisms of the “current” president) with an accompanying resolution declaring that “the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda.” Shortly before the start of the Republican convention, the Trump campaign released a list of Trump’s “core priorities” for a second term, including “Create 10 Million New Jobs in 10 Months,” “Develop a [COVID-19] Vaccine by The End of 2020,” “Return to Normal in 2021,” “Protect Social Security and Medicare,” “Bring Violent Extremist Groups Like ANTIFA to Justice,” and “Require New Immigrants to Be Able to Support Themselves Financially.” Throughout his campaign Trump also kept up a steady stream of insults and name-calling aimed at Biden, who became the Democratic Party’s presumptive presidential nominee in April and was formally nominated at his party’s national convention in mid-August. Biden promised that as president he would, among other things, bring the COVID-19 pandemic under control, reverse Trump’s policies on immigration and the environment, repair the country’s frayed relations with foreign allies, repeal the 2017 corporate tax cut, strengthen voting rights, and expand access to health insurance under Obamacare.
The COVID-19 pandemic was understandably a dominant issue in the election. Biden accused Trump of ignoring the early spread of the illness in the United States, mismanaging the nation’s pandemic response, and resisting appropriate input and leadership from government scientific and health experts. Trump, for his part, initially accused Democrats of perpetrating a “hoax” by exaggerating the extent of infection and the danger of the illness. Through the remainder of his campaign, he continued to allege that Biden and other Democrats were overstating the severity of the health crisis for political advantage. A parallel issue was the adequacy of pandemic-related economic relief for individuals, businesses, and state and local governments.
The pandemic also prompted governors and election officials in several states to postpone primary elections or to implement changes in election procedures to enable voters to cast their ballots safely. Such changes included extending voter registration deadlines and early voting periods; loosening or eliminating requirements for obtaining or casting mail-in ballots, which millions of voters were expected to use as an alternative to in-person voting; authorizing the use of drop boxes for returning mail-in ballots; and extending postelection deadlines for receipt of mail-in ballots, whose delivery was expected to be slowed by postal service delays and overwhelming demand. A smaller but still significant number of states declined to change their election procedures or did so in ways that arguably made voting more difficult or less safe than in other states. In October 2020, for example, the Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, issued a directive that limited mail-in ballot drop boxes to one per county.
Pandemic-related changes to state election procedures were intensively litigated. Some were adopted in response to orders issued by federal or state courts, whose rulings were then upheld or struck down on appeal; others were initiated by state authorities and then challenged in the courts. In general, challenges to such changes were lodged by Republican election and government officials, state Republican parties and the Republican National Committee, and the Trump campaign, usually on the grounds that the changes usurped the constitutional authority of state legislatures to establish electoral laws and procedures or that they invited voter fraud (none of the suits, however, presented any evidence of significant fraud). Democrats generally defended the changes as both constitutional and necessary to ensure the opportunity to vote amid an extraordinary public health emergency; they also alleged that Republican opposition to the changes amounted to a form of voter suppression that could unfairly turn the election in Trump’s favour in swing states. In all, more than 300 election-related lawsuits were filed by both Democrats and Republicans prior to election day. The vast majority of Republican challenges were eventually dismissed.
Underlying the strategies of both parties was the accurate perception that Democratic voters were more likely to use mail-in ballots than Republican voters. Trump’s oft-repeated but baseless claim that mail-in voting was rife with fraud and abuse only magnified Democratic concerns about alleged Republican voter suppression. So too did the appointment in May 2020 of a new postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, a major Trump donor, who immediately implemented service cuts and other operational changes in the U.S. postal system that slowed mail delivery throughout the country.
Trump’s attacks on mail-in voting and on the postal service itself were one element of a broader accusation that he had emphasized during the 2016 presidential campaign and continued in the 2020 campaign and beyond: that the November election would be “rigged” by Democrats, resulting in “the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history,” as he stated in a July 2020 tweet. In dozens of other tweets and at numerous campaign rallies, interviews, and press encounters, Trump claimed that thousands of mail-in ballots would be stolen or forged by foreign countries and that Democratic election officials would neglect to send mail-in ballots to Republicans and would commit election fraud by intentionally miscounting mail-in ballots. In the summer and fall of 2020 Trump notably refused to commit himself to accepting a Biden victory in November, which seemed likely, given Biden’s consistent and sizable lead over Trump in nationwide opinion polls. Trump insisted, to the contrary, that the only way the Democrats could win would be through fraud, at one point suggesting in a tweet that the election should be delayed “until people can properly, securely and safely vote???” On other occasions he asserted that he should be permitted to extend his first term to make up for the distraction of the Russia investigation.
Trump’s promotion of what amounted to a conspiracy theory of Democratic vote rigging prompted criticism and varying levels of concern among Democrats as well as Trump’s conservative critics, including a small but vocal minority of Republican pundits and journalists. Some believed that Trump was merely setting the stage for a face-saving end to his presidency; others speculated that he would use lawsuits alleging election fraud in a dubious strategy to invalidate mail-in votes in swing states or to delay certification of state elections long enough to enable Republican-controlled state legislatures to take the extreme (albeit constitutional) step of replacing slates of pro-Biden electors chosen by voters with the legislatures’ own slates of pro-Trump electors. Still others feared a scenario in which Trump would simply refuse to leave office, provoking a constitutional crisis in which (in a worst-case scenario) the U.S. military would become involved. An abiding and widely shared concern, particularly among historians and political scholars, was that Trump’s apparent conspiracy mongering would undermine Americans’ trust in democratic institutions. American democracy would be severely damaged, they argued, if a significant segment of either major party consistently refused to accept defeat in elections for president or any other high office.
The 2020 presidential election was unique and historic for the vast number of voters who cast ballots—whether in person or via mail, whether through early voting or on election day—and consequently for the vote totals of both the winning and losing candidates, Biden and Trump, respectively. Trump ultimately received more than 74 million votes and Biden more than 81 million—the latter figure being the highest for any presidential candidate in U.S. history. On the eve of the election, Trump continued to trail Biden in opinion polls in most swing states, though by thinner margins than in polls the previous summer. As voting proceeded, however, it became clear that the vote totals in some states would be far closer than polls had indicated. For a few days after election day (November 3), the outcome remained uncertain, in part because of the vast number of mail-in ballots (more than 65 million nationwide), which naturally took longer to count than in-person ballots. On November 7 the Associated Press and the major U.S. television networks called the election for Biden, who, in their analysis, had by then secured 270 electoral votes, the minimum number needed to win the presidency. The eventual vote of the electoral college, which took place on December 14, was 306 for Biden and 232 for Trump.
Aftermath
At a press encounter in the early morning of November 4, Trump declared himself the winner of the election and denounced the counting of mail-in ballots as a “fraud on the American people.” During the next several weeks he continually accused Biden and the Democrats of having stolen the presidential election and repeated far-fetched conspiracy theories about ballot stuffing, dead voters, and malicious voting-machine software that had deleted or changed millions of votes for Trump. In addition, he personally pressured election officials and other authorities in Michigan, Georgia, and Pennsylvania to delay certifying or to overturn elections in their states and later attacked those among them who declined to cooperate.
In February 2023 a judge in Georgia ordered the partial release of the final report of a special-purpose grand jury convened in 2022 to investigate possible criminal interference in the 2020 presidential election in Georgia by Trump and his allies. In the released portions of the report, the grand jury concluded that “no widespread fraud took place in the Georgia 2020 presidential election that could result in overturning that election.” The grand jury also reported its belief that “perjury may have been committed by one or more witnesses testifying before it.”
Although nearly all preelection Republican lawsuits had been dismissed, Trump and his allies mounted scores of new challenges on similar grounds. As those efforts also failed, the Trump campaign conceived a more ambitious legal strategy. In late November a team of Trump-supporting lawyers drafted a complaint designed to be submitted directly to the Supreme Court on the basis of its original jurisdiction in cases involving disputes between the states. Eventually filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in early December, the complaint alleged that pandemic-related changes to electoral procedures in four swing states that had voted for Biden—Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin—were illegal and unconstitutional and had so increased the potential for voter fraud that Biden’s victories in those states must be overturned. On December 11 the Court tersely dismissed the suit for lack of standing.
Trump’s legal efforts were ultimately unsuccessful, but his postelection narrative of election fraud and conspiracy, thematically continuous with the false claims of vote rigging that he had been making for months, was accepted by his base of dedicated supporters. Even the less ardent among Trump voters were sympathetic to the notion that Biden had somehow cheated to win the presidential election. According to an opinion poll taken in mid-November, more than 50 percent of all Republicans believed that Trump had “rightfully” won the election; another poll, in December, found that 77 percent of Republicans believed that there had been widespread election fraud.
As vote counting continued, various groups of radicalized Trump supporters quickly coalesced around the idea that forceful protests and even violent direct action were necessary and justified to stop the counting of fraudulent ballots and prevent Biden from taking office. A short-lived Facebook group calling itself “Stop the Steal” was created on November 4 and grew to some 320,000 members in less than 24 hours before the social media company shut it down because of posts containing disinformation and calls for violence. Stop the Steal enthusiasts soon migrated to other (renamed) Facebook groups and other social media venues, where they repeated and elaborated conspiracy theories about the election and organized on-the-ground demonstrations in several cities, including at polling stations where supposedly fraudulent vote counting was underway.
After the electors from each state cast their votes for president and vice president on December 14, giving Biden an electoral college victory of 306 to 232, Trump and his allies, as well as leaders of Stop the Steal and other pro-Trump groups across the country, turned their attention to the last, formal step in the election of a U.S. president, the ceremonial opening and counting of the electoral votes of each state in a joint session of Congress presided over by the vice president, Mike Pence, on January 6. Some Trump allies reportedly advised the president, incorrectly, that the vice president’s role in the ceremony entailed that Pence would have the constitutional authority to determine which slate of electors, Democratic or Republican, to accept from any given state. A federal lawsuit seeking a judgment to that effect, filed in late December by Texas Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert, was dismissed for lack of standing.
Meanwhile, in several tweets beginning in mid-December, Trump encouraged his supporters to attend a rally—initially planned by a pro-Trump group, Women for America First—in Washington, D.C., on January 6 to protest Congress’s confirmation of Biden’s victory. In one of the tweets, Trump stated, “Be there, will be wild!” At the rally, held at a public park near the White House, a crowd of thousands, including members of white supremacist and right-wing militia groups, listened to speeches by Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani and Trump’s sons Donald, Jr., and Eric, among others. In his own address to the crowd, Trump repeated well-worn falsehoods and conspiracy theories about election fraud, called on Pence to block Congress’s confirmation of the electoral college vote—declaring that, if Pence failed to act, the rally crowd would not let the confirmation take place (“We’re just not going to let that happen”)—encouraged the crowd to “walk down Pennsylvania Avenue” to the Capitol building, and urged his audience to “fight like hell” or “you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Although Trump did not explicitly direct those in attendance to commit illegal acts, his generally incendiary language suggested to at least some of his supporters that they would be justified in violently attacking Congress to prevent Biden’s victory.
Even before Trump finished his address, a violent mob began storming the perimeter of the Capitol building, where the House and Senate were then debating a doomed challenge by Republican lawmakers to the slate of electors from Arizona, which had voted for Biden. The mob grew larger as more people arrived from the rally at which Trump had spoken. Capitol police were quickly overwhelmed, and for the next several hours rioters vandalized and looted various parts of the complex, including the Senate chamber and the offices of Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and others. One rioter was shot and killed by police, and four others, including a Capitol police officer, later died of injuries sustained in the assault. After the complex was cleared that evening, Congress resumed the confirmation process, and Biden was certified as the winner of the presidential election of 2020 in the early morning hours of January 7. On January 8 Trump was permanently banned from Twitter for having posted tweets before, during, and after the assault that the company deemed to be in violation of its policy against glorification of violence. (Trump’s Twitter account was later reinstated by the South African-born American billionaire Elon Musk, who purchased the company in 2022.)
Less than one week later the House of Representatives, by a vote of 232 to 197, adopted a single article of impeachment against Trump for “incitement of insurrection,” making him the first president in U.S. history to be impeached twice. At his Senate trial in February, which began three weeks after he left office on January 20, there was some debate about whether the Senate could try a president who was no longer in office. Trump was ultimately acquitted after only 57 senators, 10 short of the required two-thirds majority, voted to find him guilty.
Postpresidential activities
Two days after the insurrection of January 6, which had failed to prevent Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election, Trump announced that he would not attend Biden’s inauguration. He thereby defied a tradition nearly as old as the United States, one understood to symbolize the peaceful transfer of power and thus the strength and continuity of American democracy. (Trump was the first U.S. president to decline to attend his successor’s inauguration since 1869, when Pres. Andrew Johnson refused to witness the swearing in of Ulysses S. Grant.) Trump and first lady Melania Trump left the White House on the morning of January 20, a few hours before Biden’s inauguration ceremony, and returned to their residence at Mar-a-Lago.
Unlike most former presidents in the months following their departure from office, Trump did not attempt to keep a low public profile in deference to his successor. Indeed, beginning with an address at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in February 2021, Trump delivered several public speeches in which he sharply criticized the new Biden administration, denounced Republican officeholders who had criticized or opposed him (including the 10 Republican House members who had voted to impeach him for inciting the January 6 U.S. Capitol attack), repeated his well-worn narrative of voter fraud in the 2020 election, and hinted that he intended to run for president again in 2024.
Despite his real-life electoral defeat and the ignominious circumstances of his departure from office, Trump retained a sizable base of dedicated supporters, which he continued to cultivate at his own campaign-style rallies and other events. Trump took advantage of his popularity among Republican voters to become an effective kingmaker within the party, a role that he exercised by granting or withholding endorsements of individual Republican candidates for federal, state, and even local offices, many of whom traveled to Mar-a-Lago to seek his approval. (Trump’s endorsed candidates tended to fare well in the primary elections of 2022 but were only partially successful overall in the November midterm elections.) Trump also amassed huge sums of money from millions of individual donors through his leadership PAC (see political action committee) Save America, his super PAC Make America Great Again Inc., and other organizations. Soon after the midterm elections of 2022, Trump announced his candidacy for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.
Trump’s presidential campaign faced several unique challenges in the form of ongoing criminal investigations and civil suits stemming from events before, during, and after his presidency. Among the major criminal probes were Justice Department investigations, conducted from November 2022 by a special counsel appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland, dealing with Trump’s alleged incitement of the violent assault on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and his alleged mishandling of numerous classified documents improperly removed from the White House, many of which were discovered at Mar-a-Lago during an FBI search of the property in August 2022. In June 2023 Trump was indicted by the Justice Department on multiple federal criminal charges stemming from the classified-documents investigation. In December 2022 the special counsel’s office expanded the January 6 investigation to focus on how the January 6 attack was funded and organized as well as on possible broader efforts by Trump and his aides to overturn election results in certain swing states, including by creating “fake” slates of pro-Trump electors.
Meanwhile, the district attorney of Fulton county, Georgia, conducted a parallel investigation into Trump’s efforts after the 2020 election to pressure state officials—including Georgia’s secretary of state and its governor—into reversing or invalidating Biden’s victory in the state, including by “finding” additional votes for Trump. (See above Presidential election of 2020: Aftermath.) In September 2022 the attorney general of New York state filed a $250 million civil suit accusing Trump, his children Ivanka, Donald, Jr., and Eric, and the Trump Organization of radically misrepresenting the value of their properties and other assets to secure favourable loan and insurance rates and to minimize their tax liabilities. In March 2023 a lengthy probe by the New York district attorney’s office culminated in Trump’s indictment on criminal charges in connection with a hush-money payment of $130,000 made during the 2016 presidential campaign to adult-film star Stormy Daniels, who claimed to have had an affair with Trump in 2006. At his arraignment in April, where the charges were made public, Trump pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to the reimbursement of his former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, for the latter’s payment of hush money to Daniels. In an accompanying statement of facts, prosecutors also alleged that, under an arrangement with Trump and Cohen in 2016, the CEO of American Media, Inc., the publisher of the National Enquirer and other tabloids, made a hush-money payment of $150,000 to Karen McDougal, a Playboy model who claimed to have had an affair with Trump in 2006–07, and another payment of $30,000 to a former doorman at Trump Tower who asserted that Trump had fathered a child out of wedlock (the Enquirer later concluded that the doorman’s story was false). Trump denied having had affairs with Daniels and McDougal. Trump also faced a trial that began later in April in a civil suit brought by the writer E. Jean Carroll, who alleged that Trump had raped her in a department-store dressing room in the mid-1990s. In May the jury in the trial found Trump liable for having sexually abused Carroll and for later defaming her and awarded her $5 million in damages. Trump did not attend the trial, and his lawyer brought no witnesses in his defense.
In the view of some Republican Party leaders, the formidable legal difficulties confronting Trump threatened to weaken his appeal to moderate Republican and independent voters and thus made him undesirable as the party’s presidential nominee in the 2024 election. Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, Trump’s undeclared rival for the nomination (as of March 2023), notably condemned Trump’s indictment on the hush-money charges but also referred disparagingly to Trump’s involvement with a “porn star,” thus indirectly dismissing Trump’s viability as a candidate. Other Republicans took the hopeful position that Trump would use his court battles to increase his popularity by casting himself as the victim of multiple Democratic-led “witch hunts” and “hoaxes,” as he routinely characterized the investigations and legal cases targeting him.
Style and rhetoric
Trump’s personal style was unusual, if not unique, among national political figures in modern U.S. history. In part reflecting his experiences as a prominent figure in the New York real estate industry, Trump was fiercely competitive as well as intensely concerned with demonstrating his success and accomplishments to others. Indeed, from the very beginning of his career, he cultivated and cherished his reputation as a shrewd businessman, an image that often aided him in his real estate dealings and which he eventually exploited as a brand beginning in the 1990s. That concern, however, was accompanied by an unusual sensitivity to criticism and a tendency to retaliate harshly against those who, in his view, had betrayed him or treated him unfairly. His longtime mentor, friend, and legal adviser Roy Cohn (who had assisted Joseph McCarthy’s investigations of alleged communist subversion in the U.S. government in the 1950s) had encouraged him in the latter regard, counseling him on numerous occasions never to apologize (because it is a sign of weakness) and always to hit back harder than you are hit, as Trump put the lesson in The Art of the Deal. As he declared in a tweet in 2012, “When someone attacks me, I always attack back…except 100× more. This has nothing to do with a tirade but rather, a way of life!”
In keeping with his bellicose and confrontational style, Trump in his business career characteristically used blunt language as a weapon against his rivals and adversaries, pointedly insulting or belittling them in the press in retaliation for their real or perceived slights. Perhaps surprisingly, Trump did not significantly alter his style or temper his rhetoric upon his entry into politics, notwithstanding the conventional view that success in politics is necessarily a matter of persuasion and compromise rather than “hitting back harder.” The advent of Twitter in 2006 eventually gave Trump (who joined the service in 2009) a larger platform for his unfiltered political comments, once he began regularly tweeting about politics in about 2011. During the presidential primaries and in the 2015–16 election campaign, Trump frequently used his Twitter account, which had more than 40 million followers, to angrily attack individual Democrats, his Republican rivals and critics, members of the news media, and others in comments that were widely perceived as aggressive, boastful, petty, vindictive, juvenile, and vulgar. Trump similarly declined to filter himself in speeches, once even mocking the physical disability of a reporter he disliked. Another unique feature of Trump’s rhetoric was the extremely large number of his public statements that were shown to be false or misleading by the press or by independent fact-checking organizations (The Washington Post counted more than 30,500 such claims during Trump’s presidency). Although Trump’s detractors, including some in the Republican Party, admonished him for what they considered his undignified behaviour, their criticism only provoked him to make fresh attacks. Despite some speculation after his election that the weight of the presidential office and his eventual need for tangible political and diplomatic successes would lead him to adopt a more conventional demeanour, his confrontational style and rhetoric continued unchanged during his presidency, and indeed the targets of his abuse only expanded. Trump’s frequent expressions of contempt for Democrats, along with his general unwillingness to compromise with Democratic leaders in Congress, considerably worsened partisan divisions in American politics, according to many analysts. In any event, Trump certainly distinguished himself from previous U.S. presidents by his heavy use of social media. He was the first president to rely on Twitter as a primary means of communication with his political supporters and the press, using it even as a venue for semiofficial presidential statements.
Trump’s rhetoric also raised serious concerns among members of both parties about its potential damage to Americans’ faith in democratic institutions, particularly freedom of the press and the rule of law. From early in his presidential campaign, Trump dismissed unfavourable press reports about him as “fake news,” implying that the news organizations in question knowingly published falsehoods. After his election Trump frequently condemned most major news organizations as “the enemy of the American people,” a phrase reminiscent of totalitarian societies. The effect of his accusations was to engender distrust and hostility among his supporters toward major media outlets other than Fox News, which generally supported Trump in its reporting and which he regularly watched. Many political scientists and media scholars also pointed to more general problems, claiming that Trump’s efforts to portray the press as untrustworthy had created broad confusion and uncertainty among the electorate about what was true—or even a passive and resigned attitude about the possibility of ever knowing what was true. They also worried that Trump’s rhetoric would so diminish public confidence in the press that it would cease to serve effectively as a check on governmental power, the role that the founders of the country had envisioned for it. Analogous concerns were raised about Trump’s treatment of his perceived enemies in the FBI, the Justice Department, and the judiciary. His rhetoric, critics feared, would encourage some people to view those traditionally apolitical and independent institutions as untrustworthy and incapable of carrying out their responsibilities objectively and impartially.
Another controversial feature of Trump’s rhetoric, one that drew especially heavy criticism from civil rights organizations, was his regular appeals to racist stereotypes, his frequent indulgence in racist slurs aimed at non-European minority and immigrant groups, and his refusal to consistently condemn violence aimed at minorities, including several acts of police brutality against African Americans that prompted large protests in cities across the United States in the summer of 2020 (see Black Lives Matter). Indeed, Trump repeatedly mischaracterized the mostly peaceful demonstrations against police brutality and for racial justice as mob violence by anarchist thugs. Trump’s detractors condemned him for such behaviour and warned that he was stirring up racial animosities among his supporters and other Americans and encouraging those who already harboured such prejudices to express them more freely in public or even to act on them violently. In the final months of the 2016 presidential campaign, in the period shortly after Trump’s election, and during the first three years of Trump’s presidency, there were notable increases in hate crimes throughout the country—ranging from vandalism and assaults to bomb threats and mass shootings—particularly against Jews, Muslims, African Americans, Latinos, and LGBTQ persons, as indicated in various studies, including the FBI’s annual hate crime report. Although the validity and implications of such statistics were disputed, many researchers and journalists agreed that Trump’s rhetoric had changed the country’s political culture by making the public expression of hate-based and extremist attitudes more acceptable. Trump himself, meanwhile, denied that his speeches had had any such effect, proclaiming on more than one occasion that he was “the least racist person” in the world.
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