Donald Trump

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). It 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Trump in March issued a second executive order, designed to avoid the constitutional pitfalls of the first, which it superseded.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.

In April 2018 the Trump administration adopted what it called a “zero-tolerance” immigration policy that entailed forcibly and indefinitely separating minor children from their parents in families that had illegally crossed the U.S.-Mexico border together. From at least the early 2010s, most illegal crossings from 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 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 practice, the policy involved removing minor children of all ages, including infants and toddlers, from their parents’ custody and sending them to improvised shelters throughout the country run by the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), while their parents were held in jails or detention centres to await prosecution for illegal entry. Parents were often not informed of their children’s whereabouts (which in many cases were unknown to authorities because little preparation had been made to keep track of them), nor were they usually told when they would see their children again. By mid-June more than 2,500 children had been separated from as many parents, and some 500 parents had been deported without their children.

The Trump administration had conceived of and initially defended the policy as a necessary deterrent to illegal economic immigration by people falsely claiming fear of persecution. Trump himself asserted incorrectly that the separations were required by existing immigration law and blamed Democrats for not changing it, notwithstanding his own party’s control of both houses of Congress. Soon, however, widely circulated photographs of visibly terrified children being taken from their parents, and of others confined within fenced enclosures resembling cages, prompted international condemnation of the separation policy, as did news reports of the abuse of some children in shelters. Facing pressure to act from Congressional Republicans, in late June Trump signed an executive order ending the separations. One week later a federal judge in California ordered the Trump administration to reunite all minor children with their parents within 30 days.

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 do 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 two of his sons; that the company would undertake no new business deals with foreign states or the U.S. government; and that the company would donate to the U.S. Treasury any profits derived from patronage of Trump 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 in federal district court in Manhattan, alleging that Trump 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 states without consulting Congress, Trump had denied them the opportunity to give or withhold their “Consent” as required under the foreign emoluments clause. After the CREW suit was dismissed (for lack of standing) in December, the plaintiffs appealed the case to the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in February 2018. In March and July 2018 a federal court denied motions by the Trump administration to dismiss the suit by Maryland and the District of Columbia, allowing the case to proceed to trial.

Supreme Court

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, the Republican-controlled Senate refused to schedule a vote or even to hold hearings on Garland’s nomination, preferring to gamble that a Republican would win the election and nominate a more conservative justice. Gorsuch was confirmed by the Senate in April after Senate Republicans overcame a Democratic filibuster by removing the traditional 60-vote minimum needed to end debate and proceed to a vote.

In July 2018 Trump nominated another 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 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 offers of corroborating evidence by numerous other persons were not acted upon. After the Republican chairman 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.

Trump also successfully appointed a record number of appellate court judges, filling several seats that had been left vacant by the refusal of Senate Republicans to confirm almost all of Obama’s appellate court nominees during the last two years of Obama’s presidency. By July 2018 about one-seventh of the country’s appellate court seats were occupied by Trump appointees.

Cabinet appointments

Trump took an unusually long time to assemble his cabinet, in part because many of his 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. Some 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. Particularly controversial were Trump’s choice for head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Scott Pruitt, who as Oklahoma attorney general had spent much of his career suing the EPA on behalf of the oil and gas industry, and Trump’s choice for 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, an alt-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 the first 18 months of his administration, several of Trump’s cabinet members were accused of ethics violations, including breaches of travel regulations or anti-lobbying laws and inappropriate use of their agencies’ resources. 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 in 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. In early 2018 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. Later that year, Pruitt was forced to resign as EPA administrator 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.

Russia investigation

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 provided to the FBI by Australian authorities, who reported in May that George Papadopoulos, a foreign-policy adviser in the Trump campaign, had informed 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 Congress in March, 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. One day later Trump told Russian officials in a meeting at the White House that his firing of Comey had relieved “great pressure” on him and that Comey was “a real nut job.” 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 may have constituted obstruction of justice. The Justice Department 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. 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 and perjury.

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 who would 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. Anticipating publication of the e-mails, Donald, Jr., released his correspondence with Goldstone on Twitter but maintained that no incriminating information on Clinton had been provided. During subsequent months, conflicting accounts of the meeting were issued by Trump administration officials, by Trump’s attorneys, and by Trump and his son as additional details periodically came to light in the press. In September 2017 Donald, Jr., asserted in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee that he “did not collude with any foreign government.”

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, 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. Repeating accusations, threats, and personal insults that he had made frequently on Twitter and in speeches since the start of the Russia investigation, he again insisted that there had been no collusion between his campaign and Russia, that the Mueller investigation was a politically biased “witch hunt,” and that FBI and Justice Department officials who had been involved in the investigation were corrupt and dishonest. He also, for the first time, publicly (on Twitter) called upon Attorney General Jeff Sessions to put an end to the 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 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. In November Michael Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, and 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 second trial on additional 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, created 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. Trump responded to the indictment on Twitter, acknowledging Russian interference in the election but falsely asserting that the indictment had established that there was no collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign and that the outcome of the election had not been affected, a claim repeated by his legal team and by White House officials.

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 Stephanie Clifford, an adult-film actress, and 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 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. 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.

The announcement of the indictment preceded by only three days a summit meeting in Helsinki between Trump and Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin, whom U.S. intelligence agencies had previously identified as having ordered the Russian operation to interfere in the 2016 election. Following their meeting, Trump was asked at their joint press conference whether he believed the assessment of U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia had interfered in the election or instead accepted Putin’s denial of Russian involvement. In his response, Trump criticized the FBI for failing to find Clinton’s allegedly illegally deleted e-mails, stated that he knew of no reason why Russia “would be” responsible for the interference, and credited Putin with an “extremely strong and powerful” denial. In those and other remarks, Trump was widely perceived, even by many Republicans, as having capitulated to Putin and acquiesced in an attack on the United States by a hostile foreign power. Reacting to the storm of criticism, Trump stated to the press the next day that he had meant to say that he knew of no reason why Russia “wouldn’t be” responsible.

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

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 “deliquent” 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.

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 he believed had betrayed him or had 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 100x 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 Democrats, his Republican rivals and critics, the news media, job-exporting corporations, and anyone else who had provoked his ire in comments that were widely perceived as aggressive, boastful, petty, and vulgar. Trump similarly declined to filter himself in speeches, once even mocking the disability of a reporter he disliked. Another unique feature of Trump’s rhetoric was the large number of his public statements that were shown to be false or misleading by the press or by independent fact-checking organizations. Although critics, including some in the Republican Party, occasionally admonished him for what they considered undignified behaviour, their condemnation only provoked him to 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 through the first year of his presidency, and indeed the targets of his attacks only expanded—notably to include his perceived enemies in the FBI and the Justice Department and professional football (NFL) players who had protested police brutality by kneeling during the playing of the national anthem. 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 semi-official presidential statements.

Beyond its novelty and perceived unseemliness, Trump’s rhetoric also raised serious concerns among members of both parties about its potential damage to Americans’ respect for democratic institutions, particularly freedom of the press and the rule of law. From early in his presidential campaign, Trump attacked 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 among his supporters a distrust of and hostility 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 finding out 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 attacks on individual judges who had issued rulings he disliked and on FBI and Justice Department officials who had participated in the Russia investigation. Such rhetoric, it was alleged, encouraged a distorted perception of the judiciary and law-enforcement agencies as inherently biased. Some independent observers, however, regarded those criticisms as overblown, while Trump and his supporters dismissed them as motivated by political bias or by the resentment of Democrats at having lost the presidential election.