Donald J. Trump

Trump was a billionaire, real estate developer and reality TV star who became President in 2017. Trump lost the popular vote by 3 million votes, but won through the Electoral College. According to every intelligence agency that looked into it, Russia tried to help Trump get elected in both 2016 and 2020. Trump promised to build a wall to keep immigrants out but only succeeded in building part of it. Only 52 miles of the 458 constructed under his presidency were new structures, rather than replacements. Trump's family separation policy tore thousands of immigrant families apart, causing extreme emotional pain. There was no plan for reuniting those families. Trump used fraud to cheat people out of money with Trump University and Trump Charity. He told racist lies about blacks, Muslims and Mexicans, and mocked the reporter who corrected his lies about Muslims for having a disability. He signed Republican tax cuts and oversaw the deregulation of environmental protection laws. The tax cuts especially benefitted the rich. Trump was the first president to be impeached twice. His first impeachment was for trying to extort Ukraine into interfering in our elections to benefit himself. The second impeachment happened when Trump was accused of trying to overturn the 2020 election so that he could remain president after losing the election to Joe Biden by 7 million popular votes. When the coronavirus pandemic began in early 2020 Trump said he "always wanted to play it down." He thought that playing it down would help him win the 2020 election, although he also mentioned his partial travel bans on China and Europe. Trump signed Operation Warp Speed, which funded the development and distribution of vaccines. Pfizer rejected Warp Speed money for development but used the funds for distribution. Trump also signed a No Surprises Act, which reduces the risk of high surprise hospital bills. Trump was accused of cheating on his income taxes and was the first President in decades to hide his tax returns. According to The New York Times, the tax returns were evidence of business fraud. At least 28 women have accused the president of sexual misconduct, according to Axios, and he hid his DNA. He was convicted of digitally sexually penetrating writer E. Gene Carroll with his fingers in the Bergdorf Goodman department store in New York City. Carroll accused Trump of also using his penis to rape her. Trump wanted to hide every document related to his "perfect" phone call with Zelenskyy, the leader of Ukraine and tried without success to hide every document related to the January 6, 2020 insurrection. According to Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post's fact checker, Trump made 30,000 dishonest statements during his four years in office. Trump had affairs with paid-off porn stars Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal while married to Melania Trump.

Trump berated New York Times investigative reporter Serge Kovaleski for his recent recollection of an article he had written a few days after the 9/11 attacks. Trump appeared to mock Kovaleski's physical condition; the reporter has arthrogryposis, which visibly limits flexibility in his arms. "Now, the poor guy — you've got to see this guy, 'Ah, I don't know what I said! I don't remember!' " Trump said as he jerked his arms in front of his body. "The sad part about it is, it didn’t in the slightest bit jar or surprise me that Donald Trump would do something this low-rent, given his track record," Kovaleski said.

In his speech Trump defended his recollection of the Muslim revelers by citing a 2001 article by Kovaleski, who worked for The Washington Post at the time, noting that "authorities detained and questioned a number of people who were allegedly seen celebrating the attacks and holding tailgate-style parties on rooftops while they watched the devastation on the other side of the river." Those allegations were never corroborated but have persisted in online rumors in the 14 years since the attacks. In an interview on CNN this week, Kovaleski said he did not recall "anyone saying there were thousands, or even hundreds, of people celebrating."

Before he was president Trump refused to rent his apartments to blacks. He spent a large amount of money on full-page New York newspaper ads calling for the execution of five blacks and Hispanics known as the "Central Park Five," who were falsely accused of raping and badly injuring a jogger in Central Park. Even after DNA evidence proved that the Central Park Five were innocent, Trump refused to admit he was wrong. Trump won the 2016 election as a birther, claiming that President Obama was born in Kenya, which is a debunked conspiracy theory.

Trump and Billy Bush were on a bus on their way to film an episode of Access Hollywood, a show owned by NBCUniversal. In the video, Trump described his attempt to seduce a married woman and indicated he might start kissing a woman that he and Bush were about to meet. He added, "I don't even wait. And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. ... Grab 'em by the pussy. You can do anything."

"My people are so smart — and you know what else they say about my people? The polls?" Trump asked a crowd at a Sioux Center, Iowa, rally. "I have the most loyal people — did you ever see that?" "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK?" he said. "It's, like, incredible."

About immigration, Trump said, "They're poisoning the blood of our country," "They poison mental institutions and prisons all over the world, not just in South America ... but all over the world. They're coming into our country, from Africa, from Asia, all over the world." "A lot of it is about the genes, isn't it, don't you believe?" he told the crowd about their pioneer lineage, adding: "The racehorse theory, you think we're so different? You have good genes in Minnesota." About immigrants, Trump said, "No, they're not humans, they're not humans, they're animals!" and "we've got a lot of bad genes in our country right now!" Trump said that immigrants are from prisons and insane asylums. The last time this was true was during the Mariel boat lift in 1980. Trump said, "We have a new category of crime; it's called migrant crime, and it's going to be worse than any other form of crime." According to statistics, immigrants are less violent than we are, on average. Also, both the Biden and Obama administrations prioritized criminal noncitizens for removal. Trump said he would deport immigrants and grow the economy. According to economists, immigrants raise the labor participation rate, GDP and economic growth, and restricting immigration too much would Japan the economy and slow economic growth. Trump said, "And when I said, you know, Why can't we allow people to come in from nice countries, I'm trying to be nice," Trump said at the dinner, to chuckles from the crowd. "Nice countries, you know like Denmark, Switzerland? Do we have any people coming in from Denmark? How about Switzerland? How about Norway?" Trump referred to African countries, Haiti and El Salvador as "shithole" countries. According to Trump, "When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people." During his victory speech in Las Vegas after winning the Nevada Republican caucus on February 24, 2016, Donald Trump declared, "We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated."

According to the Scientific American article Donald Trump Wants to Make Eugenics Great Again. Let's Not by Arthur Caplan & James Tabery, Trump described eugenics, a racist pseudoscience that has been debunked. "To hear these remarks said at a rally in an election campaign for the presidency is beyond reprehensible," said Rabbi Mark Diamond, the former executive vice president of the Board of Rabbis of Southern California. "This is at the heart of Nazi ideology... This has brought so much tragedy and destruction to the Jewish people and to others."

In 2025, at Mount Pocono, Trump addressed the crowd in a meeting in which he said, "Why is it we only take people from shithole countries? Right? Why can't we have some people from Norway, Sweden, just a few? Let's have a few. From Denmark, do you mind sending us a few people? Send us some nice people, do you mind? But we always take people from Somalia, places that are a disaster, right? Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime. The only thing they're good at is going after ships."

In January 2017, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a declassified "ICA" (Intelligence Community Assessment) on Russian meddling in the 2016 US election. That assessment—signed by the heads of all seventeen member agencies of the US Intelligence Community—unanimously judged that Russia interfered, including through a hack-and-leak operation of Democratic emails and a social media campaign aimed at sowing discord and swaying public opinion.

More than a thousand immigrants, many of them children, were kept in cages. Former First Lady Laura Bush compared them to the internment camps used for Japanese-Americans during World War Two. The Texas facility is known as Ursula, though immigrants are reportedly calling it La Perrera — dog kennel in Spanish — to describe the cages used to hold children and adults who have ended up there after crossing the border from Mexico illegally. More were detained in what was a Walmart superstore in Brownsville, Texas.

In August 2017 The Unite the Right rally that sparked the violence in Charlottesville featured several leading names in the white-nationalist alt-right movement, and also attracted people displaying Nazi symbols. As they walked down the street, the white-nationalist protesters chanted "blood and soil," the English translation of a Nazi slogan. One of the men seen marching with the fascist group American Vanguard, James A. Fields, is charged with deliberately ramming a car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing 32-year-old counterprotester Heather Heyer.

"What about the alt-left that came charging at, as you say, at the alt-right?" Trump said. "Do they have any semblance of guilt?" "I've condemned neo-Nazis. I've condemned many different groups. But not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me," he said. "You had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists," Trump said. "The press has treated them absolutely unfairly." "You also had some very fine people on both sides," he said.

Trump has called his political opponents "vermin" and "radical left lunatics," he has encouraged physical violence against hecklers at his rallies, and at Kirk's memorial service, he said he "hates" his opponents and doesn't "want the best for them."

In 2017, the US House of Representatives introduced a proposed bill called the American Healthcare Act of 2017, or AHCA. This bill, also known as Trumpcare, would serve to amend and even partially repeal part of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The AHCA did not become law as it did not pass in the Senate. Republican Senator John McCain cast the deciding vote against it. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the legislation would eventually cost 53 million Americans their health insurance, including 14 million in the first year. A Quinnipiac poll showed that only 17 percent of Americans supported the bill, while 56 percent opposed it. However, Republicans did succeed in ending the "individual mandate" requiring that everyone buy health insurance. Smaller health insurance risk pools led to higher health insurance premiums. At first Congress allowed subsidies, which were ended in 2026. As a result, Affordable Health insurance plans became difficult to afford.

Federal investigators charged Trump with keeping classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago home after leaving the White House, resulting in a 40-felony count indictment against the president in 2023. Jack Smith told UCL Law host Andrew Weissmann that the evidence was piling up when Trump won the election in 2024 and both the stolen documents case and the January 6 case were dropped. Trump, he said, made it easy to determine willfulness in the documents case. "The government even tried to get [the documents] back before there was a criminal investigation, and then after the investigation started, [Trump] still [refused] to give them back, and then [tried] to obstruct the investigation," Smith said. Additionally, Smith slammed Trump's attempt to frame his prosecution as political. Smith revealed that he had collected a lot of damning evidence that Donald Trump willfully hoarded classified documents as president the first time. The report that Smith did on this, however, remains confidential, and Trump's Justice Department will keep it completely covered up.

On January 2, 2021, during an hour-long conference call, then-US president Donald Trump pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to "find 11,780 votes" and overturn the state's election results from the 2020 presidential election. Before the call to Raffensperger, Trump and his campaign spoke repeatedly to state and local officials in at least three states in which he had lost, urging them to recount votes, throw out some ballots, or replace the Democratic slate of electors with a Republican slate.

Trump demanded that Bill Barr, the head of the Justice Department, investigate the 2020 election. Barr did an investigation in which around a hundred people were interviewed and told Trump that there was no evidence of enough vote fraud to change the result of the election. Trump flew into a rage. Republican Chris Krebs, who was in charge of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), said that the 2020 election was the most secure election ever according to 59 cybersecurity experts. Trump immediately fired Krebs. Eastman, a lawyer, said that imaginary dueling slates of electors could be used as a reason for Vice President Michael Pence to block Biden's electors so that Trump could continue as President. Republicans Mike Lee, Lindsey Graham, J. Michael Luttig and Daniel Quayle told Pence that he didn't have the authority to do that. Lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Christina Bobb of OAN organized Republicans in seven states to forge documents and falsely state that they were electors, as part of Eastman's plan. Trump asked Giuliani, Barr and state Republican officials to seize election equipment. They refused to do so. Michael Flynn, who was pardoned by Trump, told Trump to invoke martial law. The January 6 committee said that Trump's acting defense secretary at the time, Christopher Miller, defied Trump's specific orders to intervene on January 6.

Steve Bannon said a January 6, 2021 rally would kill the Biden administration in the crib. Giuliani said that it would be "trial by combat." On January 5 Trump said that it would be "wild," and on January 6 he told his fans to "fight like hell." Thousands of Trump fans attacked police with firearms, stun guns, flagpoles, fire extinguishers, bike racks, batons, a metal whip, office furniture, pepper spray, bear spray, a tomahawk ax, a hatchet, a hockey stick, knuckle gloves, a baseball bat, a massive "Trump" billboard, "Trump" flags, a pitchfork, pieces of lumber, crutches and even an explosive device. Several people died, and four capitol policemen later committed suicide. About 174 policemen were injured, including a brain injury, an eye gouged out, broken bones and acid burns. Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Brian Kilmeade, Trump Jr, Ivanka Trump and Kevin McCarthy asked Trump to stop the violence. For three hours Trump refused to do so, watching the violence unfold on television. Insurrectionists were chanting "hang Michael Pence" and "kill her." After three hours Trump told his fans to go home.

In 2025 Trump deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller said that the US would never tolerate "unlawful riotous assemblies" at federal buildings.

More than 60 courts were asked to decide lawsuits over vote fraud in the 2020 election. Nearly all the suits were dismissed or dropped for lack of evidence or lack of standing, including 30 lawsuits that were dismissed by the judge after a hearing on the merits. They include US Supreme Court judges, conservative judges and judges appointed by Trump. The AP did an investigation into alleged attempted vote fraud in six states contested by Trump and found fewer than 475 cases of suspected attempted vote fraud, not enough to change the result. Most of these were ballots that were blocked and never counted.

Joe Biden

Joe Biden became President in 2021. Biden continued Trump's plan for ending the war in Afghanistan, although he added four extra months to get pro-US personnel and equipment out. In response to criticism, he also raised the quota for refugees. Still, the withdrawal was shambolic. Some Afghans clung to planes because they were so desperate to escape. Americans responded to a terrorist attack on an air base and killed civilians by mistake. Biden presided over 48 straight months of job growth.

In February 2022 Russia invaded Ukraine without provocation. Ukraine fought back much better than expected, and the West, led by Biden, imposed severe sanctions on Russia and led an international effort to send weapons, humanitarian aid and other assistance to Ukraine. Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian leader, was offered a safe haven in the US He replied, "I don't need a ride, I need ammunition." He showed courage and spoke out against Russian crimes against humanity, including mass murder, torture and rape.

After vaccines were available the economic harm from the pandemic was reduced. The economy grew and unemployment went down. However, inflation increased to nine percent for a variety of reasons. International supply chain problems caused by COVID-19 increased inflation around the globe. Also, both Trump and Biden spent money to keep the economy afloat during the recession caused by the pandemic. While sanctions against Russia harmed Russia the most, they also increased inflation in the US. Bird Flu increased the price of eggs. American Rescue legislation allowed many to stay home until the pandemic was over. Inflation caused by rising demand and broken supply chains decreased to less than 3 percent because the Federal Reserve, headed by Jerome Powell, raised interest rates. As inflation went down interest rates also went down. Unemployment and inflation were both low because of this, and the US economy grew faster than other first-world economies.

In 2022 the pandemic was worst in red states, according to statistics. Many opposed any attempt to deal with the pandemic. Vaccines worked extremely well against the delta variant, and less well against other variants. Still, the risk of infection from variants is less among those who are vaxxed and boostered.

In addition to military research the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) helped to develop mRNA vaccines, including covid vaccines. It also helped develop the internet and GPS.

In June 2022 the Supreme Court issued its Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health decision overturning Roe v. Wade. As a result, whether abortion is legal is decided at the state level.

The FBI raided Mar a Lago to get government documents Trump took there in August 2022. Trump didn't follow official procedures for declassifying the documents, and some of the documents were related to nuclear weapons. While a president can declassify other documents, he can't declassify nuclear-related documents by himself, and all presidential documents are supposed to be sent to the National Archives, not Mar a Lago. When Trump was President he sometimes tore up documents, even though presidential documents are supposed to be preserved. He flushed documents down the toilet. Olivia Troye, who worked for then Vice President Michael Pence said she found classified documents in the White House ladies' room. In 2024 Judge Cannon, a Trump appointee, dismissed charges against Trump because she believed that Jack Smith, the Justice Department prosecutor, was not legitimately appointed, a belief with which legal experts disagree. Former SDNY prosecutor Kristy Greenberg reported that District Court for the Southern District of Florida Judge Aileen Cannon "has defied 150 years of precedent in saying that the special counsel was improperly appointed."

Under the Presidential Records Act, the penalty for taking presidential documents anywhere but the National Archives is three years in prison. The penalty for violating the Espionage Act by removing documents related to national security is ten years in prison. A person connected with Trump told the government that there were no classified documents at Mar a Lago, which wasn't true. The penalty for obstructing a Department of Justice investigation is 20 years in prison.

In 2023 Fox News agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems $787.5 million to avert a trial in the voting machine company's lawsuit that would have exposed how the network promoted lies about the 2020 presidential election. Fox promoted a vote-flipping story invented by serial liar and fraudster Dennis Montgomery.

In 2023 writer E. Jean Carroll filed two lawsuits against Trump for defamation and sexual abuse. The United States District Court for the Southern District of New York awarded her a total of $88.3 million. Judge Lewis Kaplan said that Trump was guilty of the common definition of rape.

Trump had his lawyer Cohen pay $130,000 in hush money payments to adult porn star Stormy Daniels to hide a sexual encounter Trump had with Daniels while he was married to Melania Trump. Trump was prosecuted in New York for falsifying his business records to hide any one of three other crimes: Cohen's illegal campaign contribution, tax law violations, and/or Trump's participation in the alleged conspiracy to influence the 2016 presidential election through unlawful means, in the first criminal trial of a former US president. In 2024 Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts for interfering with the 2020 election. Trump was later officially sentenced as guilty with no jail time or fines after he won the 2024 election.

On June 2024 the Supreme Court issued its Loper Bright decision overturning the Chevron precedent. As a result, the Court ruled that science experts are not competent to make science-based cost-benefit analyses to set regulations for government agencies, including the EPA and the FDA, to resolve ambiguously written legislation. The US Supreme Court held that only courts are competent to make such decisions. One Supreme Court justice who agreed with this decision, Neil Gorsuch, didn't know that nitrous oxide is laughing gas. Critics claim that members of Congress and courts lack the technical expertise to make the specific laws required by the Supreme Court decision. The ruling weakens government agencies.

In July 2024 the Supreme Court issued its Trump v. United States decision ruling that presidential immunity extends to all official acts.

Biden signed bills to improve infrastructure, extend health care subsidies to the middle class for three years, allow Medicare to bargain over prescription drug prices, improve gun safety, deal with climate change and forgive student loan debt for many. The CHIPS Act funds the creation of microprocessors in the US, reducing our dependence on China for microprocessors. Microprocessors are used in everything from laptops to cars to missiles.

The head economist for Moody's, Mark Zandi, said "this is among the best performing economies in my 35-plus years as an economist."

• Economic growth is rip-roaring, with real GDP up 3 percent over the past year. Unemployment is low, at near 4 percent, consistent with full employment.
• Inflation is fast closing in on the Fed's 2 percent target.
• Grocery prices, rents and gas prices are flat to down over the past more than a year. Households' financial obligations are light, and set to get lighter with the Fed cutting rates.
• House prices have never been higher, and most homeowners have more equity in their homes than ever.
• Corporate profits are robust, and the stock market is hitting a record high on a seemingly daily basis.

Researchers at the University of Chicago told us: "Under the Biden administration, real GDP rose 12.6 percent, rightly cheered ... as 'a historically robust expansion' that repeatedly defied forecasts. Since the pandemic, economic growth in the US has far outpaced that of our peer nations. Business investment is up; unemployment is low."

Inflation since 2020

According to The New York Times:

"For the first time since that transition 24 years ago, there will be no American troops at war overseas on Inauguration Day. New data reported in the past few days indicate that murders are way down, illegal immigration at the Southern border has fallen even below where it was when Mr. Trump left office and roaring stock markets finished their best two years in a quarter-century."

According to Steve Rattner, an American investor, media commentator and former journalist:

"The economy had a strong 2024: robust growth, low unemployment and inflation descending to 3%" ... "All told, Biden has added 693,000 factory jobs while Trump added just 425,000 before Covid hit ... The rate of grocery inflation - particularly troubling for everyday Americans ­- has subsided to less than 1.6%."

However, the Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman said that America had a "vibesession" in that many felt bad about the economy even though it was recovering. Trump promised to make prices "go down fast with tariffs." Many felt that not enough had been done to reduce inflation, which began because broken supply chains couldn't keep up with rising demand when the pandemic ended. Biden had a disastrous debate performance against Trump, and vice president Kamala Harris replaced Biden as the Democratic candidate and lost.

Trump cited a debunked conspiracy theory when he said of Haitians, "they're eating the dogs ... they're eating the cats ... they're eating the pets of the people." Trump also said that Haitians "Probably have AIDS," that Haiti is "filthy, dirty and disgusting" and that Haitian immigration is "Like a death wish for our country." Springfield, Ohio, which is the home of Haitian immigrants, got 33 bomb threats and several death threats aimed at those who defended the immigrants.