Donald Trump (born June 14, 1946, New York, New York, U.S.) is the 45th president of the United States (2017–21) and the winner of the United States presidential election of 2024. Upon his 2024 victory over Vice Pres. Kamala Harris, Trump became the first president to be elected to nonconsecutive terms since Grover Cleveland, the 22nd and 24th president of the United States (1885–89 and 1893–97). In May 2024, Trump also became the first former president to be convicted of a felony crime. After being sentenced without punishment in early January 2025, Trump officially became the first convicted felon to be elected president. At age 78, Trump is the oldest person to win the office.

On May 30, 2024, a New York state jury found Trump guilty on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in connection with a hush-money payment in 2016 to the adult-film star Stephanie Clifford, known as Stormy Daniels, who claimed to have had an affair with Trump in 2006. He was later indicted on dozens of other federal and state charges in cases relating to his efforts to overturn his defeat in the presidential election of 2020 and his removal of numerous classified documents from the White House upon leaving office. Following Trump’s election to a second term, special counsel Jack Smith, who led both federal criminal cases against Trump, requested that the election-related charges against Trump be dropped and that Trump be removed from the group of codefendants in the classified documents case. Smith’s decisions reflected a Justice Department policy that prohibits the criminal prosecution of a sitting president.

Presidential election of 2016
From the 1980s Trump periodically mused publicly 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. Although 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. He did not run for office at that time, but he gained much attention for popularizing “birtherism,” a conservative conspiracy theory based on the false claim that Democratic Pres. Barack Obama is 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 signified by the acronym “MAGA”—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 (later called X), a social media platform 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 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.

Donald Trump campaigning in 2016 Donald Trump at a rally in Akron, Ohio, August 2016.
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 emails by using a private email server. Earlier in July the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) announced that an investigation of Clinton’s use of email 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 emails of the Democratic National Committee were publicly released by the website WikiLeaks in an apparent effort to damage the Clinton campaign. Reacting to widespread suspicion that the emails had been stolen by Russian hackers, Trump publicly encouraged the Russians to hack Clinton’s private email server to find thousands of emails 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 attempted to break into the personal email servers of Clinton campaign officials only hours after Trump issued his invitation.

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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 a hot-mic video from 2005, which surfaced in October 2016, Trump 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 during or after Trump’s presidency—see below Postpresidential activities.) 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 emails 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 emails 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 emails 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 emails 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 emails 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 defeated Clinton in a chain of critical Rust Belt states. 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. After the election, Trump repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that 3–5 million people had voted for Clinton illegally. Trump was inaugurated 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.

Trump’s first presidential term
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 Affordable Care Act 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; the injunctions 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 all “foreign nationals who lack any bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States.”

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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 Trump’s many public statements indicating otherwise to lower courts.

From at least the early 2010s most 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, which were 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 (their 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 centers 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 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 other 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 with 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 the Trump Organization to his sons Donald, Jr., and Eric; that no new business deals with foreign countries or the U.S. government would be undertaken; and that any profits derived from patronage of Trump’s properties by foreign governments would be donated to the U.S. Treasury—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 required “Consent.” After the CREW suit was dismissed 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) 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. 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 favorably 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 forced to pay Trump for services and accommodations (e.g., for U.S. Secret Service protection) at his golf courses and at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida during his frequent visits to those venues.

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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, Christine Blasey Ford, an academic psychologist, testified that Kavanaugh had sexually molested her when the two 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. 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 chair 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 Me Too 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 Me Too 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 fact that 2020 was an election year, 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 center 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 long-standing 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 presidential term 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 Democrats filibustered many of his early nominations to positions requiring Senate confirmation. His cabinet was also unusual in that its members were the least diverse in decades and the richest by far 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 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) 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.

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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 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 email addresses for official 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. Code §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
Donald TrumpDonald Trump speaking at a rally in Hershey, Pennsylvania, a month after winning the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
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 Pres. Mike 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 emails 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 emails in October 2016 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 emails. 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 chair, 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 emails predating the meeting in which the British publicist Rob Goldstone (who had helped Trump 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 false account of the meeting (claiming that it had concerned adoptions), thus 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. For the first time, he also 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.

Have Any U.S. Presidents Decided Not to Run For a Second Term?
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 emails 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.

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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 hush-money payments in 2016 to Stormy Daniels and the model Karen McDougal 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 make or arrange payments to Daniels and McDougal. (Following the end of his first presidential term in 2021, Trump himself was indicted on state criminal charges of falsifying business records to conceal the Trump Organization’s reimbursement of Cohen for the hush-money payment to Daniels.)

In July 2018 Mueller indicted 12 Russian military intelligence officers for conspiring to interfere in the 2016 election by stealing thousands of emails 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 favor 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.

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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 behavior 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 Daniels and 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 lawbreaking 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.

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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 centerpiece 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 and increase the number of uninsured people 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.

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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 Presidents Obama and 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 acknowledged its reality but questioned the human origins of global warming.

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