Trump’s rollercoaster
After four years, two impeachments, 220 executive orders, and 26,193 tweets, Donald Trump’s presidency is over. Henry Cooke looks back at the big moments of the 45th US president’s term.
It’s over. At some point soon you will conceivably be able to read a newspaper, watch TV, or spend time online without seeing anything about a 74-year-old man from Queens. You will be able to go a whole 24 hours without thinking about Donald Trump once.
US presidents always dominate the global news, but Trump did it like nobody else. Through his adroit use of television and social media, and an ever-growing list of scandals, he has dominated the public sphere for half a decade now.
But about 6am NZ time yesterday, he ceased to be president of the United States, refusing to attend the inauguration of a successor who has made boringness a virtue.
These are some of the biggest moments of the Trump presidency.
January 20-21, 2017: His inauguration decries ‘American carnage’
Trump began his presidency with an extraordinarily dark inauguration speech.
He complained of a scourge of crime – or ‘‘American carnage’’ – despite a long-term trend of declining crime rates. He attacked foreign interventions and free trade. And he attacked the ‘‘establishment’’ in Washington, saying power was being handed back to the people.
Attacking Washington has a long pedigree – a young Delaware senatorial candidate called Joe Biden made his mark doing just this in the early 1970s.
Trump’s speech itself fell from the news as the media and new administration experienced their first proper clash – over the crowd size at the inauguration. Photos made it obvious that there were fewer people at Trump’s than Barack Obama’s in 2008. But press secretary Sean Spicer became famous for insisting there were actually more people than ever – ‘‘both in person and around the globe’’.
The relationship with the press would never really heal: Trump and his team saw them as fanatically opposed to the president; the mainstream media saw Trump as implacably opposed to them – and to truth itself. Despite this, shifting factions within the White House leaked almost constantly to reporters, allowing for a fouryear melodrama of palace intrigue.
January 27, 2017: Travel ban aimed at Muslim-majority countries
During his campaign, Trump had promised to ban Muslims from entering the United States.
In office this was formalised into a travel ban that barred foreign nationals from seven predominantly Muslim countries. This sparked protests and multiple court challenges, many successful. Two executive orders and many court challenges later, a version of the ban was finalised in 2018. Biden has just undone it.
May 2017: James Comey fired; Robert Mueller appointed
During the 2016 election, two things happened that many Democrats blamed for their loss. (Nominating a candidate with a 41 per cent disapproval rating was not one of them.)
Those were the release of a huge cache of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee, and a letter from FBI director James Comey about an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, released just before the election.
These both came to the fore in May. There had been talk since before the election that the emails had been hacked by Russia. This sparked an FBI investigation which continued into the Trump presidency and took in National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. Trump fired Flynn and then, according to Comey, asked Comey to ‘‘let go’’ of the matter, asked for loyalty, and asked what Comey could do to ‘‘lift the cloud’’ of the Russia investigation.
Soon after, Trump fired Comey. He first said this was because of the letter about Clinton, but later linked it to the Russia investigation in a talk to the Russian ambassador.
Angry Democrats demanded a special counsel investigation – basically an independent inquiry. Deputy attorneygeneral Rod Rosenstein appointed former FBI director Robert Mueller to head the investigation, both into the Russia matter and into whether Trump had obstructed justice.
The Mueller investigation would take two years of frenzied speculation and eventually find that, while Russia was behind the hacked emails, there was not significant evidence of collusion with the Trump campaign. It left the obstruction of justice question somewhat more open – but did not directly find Trump guilty.
June 1, 2017: US leaves the Paris climate agreement
Trump announced in the Rose Garden that the US would withdraw from the 2016 Paris climate agreement that his predecessor had done so much to broker.
August 15, 2017: Trump commends ‘both sides’ after Charlottesville protest
After an overtly racist rally in Virginia, a counter-protester was murdered by an avowed neoNazi, who drove his car into a crowd of protesters.
Trump had some trouble condemning the rally, saying there were fine people ‘‘on both sides’’ – leading to opprobrium across the political spectrum.
December 22, 2017: Sweeping tax cuts
In what was probably his biggest legislative agreement, Trump signed into law a massive tax cut worth about US$$1.5 trillion. While the biggest cuts went to the richest, almost everyone got something – and it’s likely that the cuts helped keep the economy running hot all the way into 2020 and the Covid-19 crash.
The tax cut law also removed a much-hated plank of Obamacare – the individual mandate, which forced people to buy health insurance or face a fine. But despite much effort by Trump and congressional Republicans over four years to properly scrap Obamacare, the system remains mostly in place, and the attacks contributed greatly to the Democrats’ big wins in the 2018 midterms.
Early 2018: Trump gets very involved in east Asia
In January Trump launched a tariff war with China that continues to this day, ending a long-running consensus on free trade in US politics.
The year also saw Trump become increasingly involved with North Korea, meeting for summits with leader Kim Jongun in an attempt to denuclearise the country. There were signs of progress but, as of early 2021, North Korea is showing off new missiles.
April 2018: Zero-tolerance policy sees children separated at border
Trump announced a ‘‘zero tolerance’’ policy for the USMexico border in April 2018 that officially sanctioned the separation of migrant children from their parents. This had been happening already, but the policy shot into the headlines. As of the election, many children and parents remain separated.
July 9, 2018: Trump makes his most controversial Supreme Court nomination
Trump nominated three separate Supreme Court justices – Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett, and, most controversially, Brett Kavanaugh, who was appointed despite several accusations of sexual assault against him.
November 6, 2018: Democrats retake House in midterm elections
Trump was elected in 2016 while the Republicans retained control of both the House and Senate.
This meant that, barring filibusters, he was able to pass laws and appoint people without needing any Democratic senators or representatives. His party was also able to shut down or curtail investigations from within Senate or House committees as it would always have the majority.
This ‘‘trifecta’’ of control was upset in the 2018 midterm
elections when Republicans lost 41 House seats and their House majority. Democrats had a good election, running mostly on the fear that Trump was going to dismantle Obamacare.
But it was not the full ‘‘blue wave’’ many Democrats had hoped for. The Republicans gained two seats in the Senate, and kept control of that chamber. This contributed to the second government ‘‘shutdown’’ of his presidency in early 2019.
Late 2019: First impeachment
In July 2019 it emerged that Trump had asked Ukraine’s leader to investigate Biden, whom he assumed correctly would be his 2020 rival.
The Democrat-controlled House voted to impeach Trump for this in December, making him the third president to be impeached. But Republicans’ control of the Senate meant he was acquitted in early 2020.
2020: Covid-19 craters economy and kills 350,000
Covid-19 appears to have arrived in the US in January 2019. A 35-year-old man in Washington state who had recently visited Wuhan is the first definitively known case, but others who got sick earlier now have the antibodies, and it’s clear the virus arrived in many places early in the year.
The virus would go on to kill more people in the US than in any other country, and will define Trump’s presidency. About a quarter of all known cases and a fifth of total world deaths have been in the US.
Trump would eventually catch the virus, after downplaying the need for masks. His actions on the virus have been controversial from the get-go. In February, he described it publicly as less dangerous than the flu, despite telling Bob Woodward at the time that it was more deadly. In March, he said he wanted to play it down to avoid panic.
Bizarre scenes played out throughout the year, including Trump suggesting that the ingestion of bleach might help cure the disease. Lockdowns were enforced on a state and local level, and by the middle of the year Trump started to actively push back on them, as the Covid-19 recession worsened.
Infection rates got higher and higher, and the virus would eventually kill 350,000 people in 2020 – including a member of Trump’s Cabinet.
November 3, 2020: Refuse to concede election loss
With Covid-19 raging and the economy weakened, Biden narrowly won the crucial states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, and Arizona – all of which had gone to Trump in 2016.
Because Democrats were more likely to vote by mail than Republicans, these wins were not immediately apparent, and Trump seized on this to claim the election had been stolen – a claim that has been rejected by the Supreme Court and by most high-ranking Republicans.
January 6, 2021: Invasion of the Capitol
On January 6, Congress met to certify the results of the election in the Capitol Building in Washington DC.
Trump asked Vice-President Mike Pence to use his role as president of the Senate to stop the certification. Pence refused, explaining that was not within his constitutional power.
Trump held a rally at the White House saying he would ‘‘never concede’’, and suggested his supporters ‘‘walk down to the Capitol’’ to cheer on Republicans objecting to the certification.
‘‘You have to show strength and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated.’’
Hundreds of these supporters marched to the Capitol building, and broke in. The voting on the certification was paused as legislators were evacuated. As the mob went looking for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Pence, five people died, including a Capitol police officer.
Order was eventually restored and the certification of Biden’s victory completed. Days later Democrats would vote to impeach Trump again, making him the first president to be impeached twice. His Senate trial will take place soon.
Even with control of the Senate, the Democrats would need to win over 17 Senate Republicans to convict Trump – which could bar him from running for president again.
Trump still controls much of the Republican base, making it a tough vote for wavering Republican senators. But stranger things have happened.