The campaign for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination

Against this backdrop the campaign for the 2016 election unfolded with the primary battles of both parties largely shaped by unlikely insurgent populist candidates—businessman and reality TV star turned Republican Donald Trump and democratic socialist U.S. senator turned Democrat Bernie Sanders. Trump rose to the top of an extremely crowded Republican field, winning primary after primary by employing unfiltered—often outlandish—personal attacks on his rivals in debate, in media interviews, and especially on Twitter. Former Florida governor Jeb Bush and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio were particular targets of Trump’s vitriol before he turned it on the last two candidates blocking his path to the nomination, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich. Because Trump’s critique was also aimed at the Republican establishment, not only was there an effort by elements of that establishment to stifle his candidacy, but he also had trouble gaining the support of a number of key Republican leaders once he had secured the party’s nomination.

Nonetheless, Trump won fervid popular support, especially among blue-collar white men, with his promise to return America to greatness by combating illegal immigration, negotiating beneficial trade deals, taking a tough economic stance against China, beefing up the military, obliterating ISIL, and eschewing political correctness. In the process, Trump also stirred hostile reaction by proposing highly controversial policies and regularly making inflammatory remarks. Among those policies most derided by his critics were his promises to build a wall between Mexico and the United States and to ban Muslims from entering the country. In addition, he was taken to task by opponents for his disparaging comments about Mexicans, remarks to and regarding women that were widely perceived as offensive, and his impugning of the character of the Muslim American parents of a U.S. soldier killed in combat after the soldier’s father was critical of Trump in a speech during the Democratic National Convention.

The campaign for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination

On the road to that convention, front-runner Hillary Clinton was pushed to the limit by the challenge of Vermont Senator Sanders, whose “political revolution” was funded by some seven million mostly small-dollar donations (the average donation was long said to have been $27). Sanders supporters, including a legion of young people, were inspired by his firebrand determination to redress economic inequality, rein in Wall Street, provide single-payer universal health care, introduce tuition-free college education, and reform the political system.

Having served as first lady, as a U.S. senator for New York, and as secretary of state, Clinton brought a wealth of experience to her candidacy, but for many voters she represented the status quo, even if she offered the potential of breaking the Oval Office’s glass ceiling as the first woman president. She was also dogged by the perception among many in the electorate that she was not trustworthy, partly because of her use of a private server for some of her e-mail during her tenure as secretary of state, an action that earned disapprobation from the FBI after investigation but that was not determined to be illegal.

Clinton entered the convention with over 2,800 delegates—more than the 2,383 needed to nominate—but her big advantage over Sanders, who had nearly 1,900 delegates, came from some 600 superdelegates in her column. Sanders could count on only about 50 superdelegates, who were not chosen through the primary and caucus process but instead were made up of prominent party members, members of the Democratic National Committee, and major elected officeholders. As the party’s nominee, Clinton sought to reach out to supporters of Sanders, who had left an indelible mark on the party’s platform and pushed Clinton to present herself prominently as a progressive and to shift many of her policies leftward.

Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail server, Donald Trump’s Access Hollywood tape, and the 2016 general election campaign

The presidential general election campaign was among the most rancorous in recent history, with Clinton accusing Trump of being devoid of the temperament and judgment required to serve as president, while Trump argued that Clinton lacked the “stamina” necessary for the office and that she should be jailed for what he claimed was criminal use of her private e-mail server while secretary of state. Together they were among the most unpopular final major-party presidential candidates in U.S. history.

Trump’s comments and attitudes toward women and Clinton’s use of that private e-mail server came back to haunt them as the election campaign wound to a close in October. Early in the month a hot-mic video from an infotainment television program (Access Hollywood) in 2005 surfaced in which Trump boasted to a reporter about sexual exploits that were grounded in predatory behavior. Trump sought to defuse the onslaught of outrage that followed by characterizing his remarks as “locker-room talk” and denied subsequent allegations by a series of women who claimed that he had sexually assaulted them, but his already low support among women voters continued to wane, and some Republicans began to withdraw their endorsements. Only weeks before the election, FBI Director James Comey announced that the bureau was reviewing additional e-mails related to the Clinton investigation that had been recently discovered, intensifying concerns about her trustworthiness that already plagued her candidacy. Only on the Sunday before the election did Comey announce that no criminal activity by Clinton had been found by this additional investigation.

Trump’s victory and Russian interference in the presidential election

In the weeks before the election, Clinton held a small but steady lead in opinion polling both on the national level and in the battleground states. In the event, however, Trump confounded both pollsters and political pundits by not only winning several crucial battleground states (Ohio, Florida, and North Carolina among them) but also by bettering Clinton in states such as Pennsylvania and Wisconsin that had been longtime Democratic strongholds in presidential elections. In the process, Trump found a path to the more than 270 Electoral College votes necessary to be elected as the 45th president, although Clinton won the popular vote by more 2.8 million votes. In the meantime, Republicans held on to their majorities in the Senate and the House of Representatives.

Some Democrats blamed what they saw as the undemocratic nature of the Electoral College for Clinton’s defeat. Others pointed to Comey’s actions, “fake news” that had been generated by questionable Internet sites and subsequently shared as true news on social media sites like Facebook, and intervention in the election by Russia, including computer hacking of the e-mail of members of the Democratic National Committee and its release through WikiLeaks. During the transition period between the Obama administration and the incoming Trump administration, 17 U.S. intelligence agencies collectively indicated their belief that the Russian government had engaged in a systematic effort to influence the election in Trump’s favor. The president-elect forcefully questioned this conclusion, and Republicans largely dismissed the Democrats’ broader accusations as efforts to undermine the legitimacy of Trump’s impending presidency.

“America First,” the Women’s Marches, Trump on Twitter, and “fake news”

In his inaugural address on January 20, 2017, Trump echoed the populist criticism of the Washington establishment that had been a hallmark of his campaign and struck a strongly nationalist “America First” tone, promising that “America will start winning again, winning like never before.” The day after Trump’s inauguration, “Women’s Marches” and supporting events were held in cities across the United States and abroad in support of (among other issues) gender and racial equality and in defiance of the legislative and cultural challenges to them that the marchers expected from President Trump and a Republican congressional majority. Estimates varied, but many observers suggested that between 3.3 million and 4.6 million people had turned out to march in U.S. cities, making the collective action one of the largest mass protests in U.S. history.

Trump’s first months in office were steeped in controversy. From the outset, his approach to the presidency departed from many of the expectations associated with the conduct of the chief executive. Most notably, he continued to use Twitter regularly, arguably employing it as his principal platform for expressing presidential prerogative. Having appropriated the term “fake news” to denigrate mainstream media coverage of events that were unfavorable to his administration, he sought to circumvent the press and shape the country’s political narrative directly. Critics characterized the sometimes personal assaults contained in his tweets as beneath the dignity of the presidency; supporters saw the unfiltered (seemingly impulsive) immediacy of these terse statements as the embodiment of his anti-Washington establishment stance.

Scuttling U.S. participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, reconsidering the Keystone XL pipeline, and withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement

Among Trump’s first steps as president were executive actions aimed at fulfilling a number of his most prominent campaign promises. In addition to directives paving the way for the unraveling of Obamacare and guaranteeing nonparticipation by the United States in the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, a trade deal championed by Obama, Trump was quick to reverse Obama’s policies directed at protecting the environment. The new president signed memoranda that set the stage for reconsidering the Keystone XL pipeline—a 1,179-mile (1,897-km) oil pipeline project that had been rejected by his predecessor in 2015—as well as the Dakota Access Pipeline, the completion of which entailed construction of a section cutting across part of the Missouri River that would potentially endanger the water supply of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and which had been halted by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers pending the completion of an environmental impact statement. Trump’s actions were aimed at delivering on his campaign promise to expand U.S. energy exploration and production. The new president’s most controversial policy decision in the first six months of his presidency regarding the environment came in June 2017, when he announced the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate change, a broad range of measures (agreed to by 195 countries) aimed at limiting increases in worldwide temperatures and mitigating the economic consequences of global warming. Trump, who doubted that climate change was real, argued that the agreement was unfair to the United States and that its mandate for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions would damage the U.S. economy.

ICE enforcement and removal operations

Within his first week in office, Trump had fulfilled another of his signature campaign promises by issuing an executive order mandating the construction of a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico aimed at controlling illegal immigration. An additional executive order authorized the withholding of federal funds from “sanctuary” cities that had chosen to provide refuge for illegal immigrants. That order was answered with defiant statements by a number of big-city mayors. Nevertheless, at the administration’s behest, in February the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency began an aggressive effort to apprehend and deport undocumented immigrants. The operation targeted individuals with serious criminal records, but opponents of the policy argued that it was being used less specifically to simply round up undocumented immigrants. Many observers were surprised in June, however, when the Trump administration announced that it would allow the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program to stand, thus continuing to bar the deportation of undocumented immigrants who had come to the United States as children. At the same time, though, the administration eliminated a parallel program that would have similarly prohibited the deportation of undocumented parents of children who are U.S. citizens or legal residents.