1 Jan 2017 Jahr - President Donald Trump signs enormous tax court

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From one political vantage point, President Obama and the Democratic Party looked like the beneficiaries of an electoral shift in a liberal direction. Between 1992 and 2012, Democrats won the popular vote in five of the six presidential elections, and in 2008 Obama won a greater share of the popular vote (53 percent) than any Democratic nominee since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. He won the support of 93 percent of African Americans, 71 percent of Hispanics, 73 percent of Asian Americans, 55 percent of women, and 60 percent of Americans under the age of thirty. His coalition was multiracial, heavily female, and young.

That coalition appears strong enough to win popular majorities for Democratic presidential nominees into the foreseeable future. Yet the nation’s peculiar constitutional method of awarding the presidency through the electoral college allows for the possibility, as in 2000 and again in 2016, that a candidate with the lower national vote total can win. Moreover, the Constitution’s awarding of two senators to each state regardless of population means that a fiercely conservative state with a small population, like North Dakota, has as much influence in the U.S. Senate as a fiercely liberal state with a massive population, like California. In that context, the Democratic coalition has struggled to sustain Senate majorities. Furthermore, changes in House districts after the 2010 Census have further disadvantaged Democrats (Table 30.1). In 2012, Democratic candidates for the House of Representatives won more votes nationally than Republican candidates did (59.6 million to 58.2 million), but Republicans still won a majority of seats. Thus, heading into the 2016 election, the long-term fate of the liberal Obama coalition remained unclear.

In the 2016 presidential election, that coalition, true to form, produced a 2.8 million-vote margin of victory for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. But Clinton’s popular vote success could not stop the remarkable ascent of Donald Trump, the Manhattan real estate developer and one-time reality television show star, to the presidency. Despite losing the national vote by more than two percentage points (about 2.8 million votes), the Republican nominee Trump narrowly won the key states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin and secured 306 electoral college votes to Clinton’s 232, making him president (Map 30.6). As the first woman to lead a major-party ticket for U.S. president, Clinton boasted a resume with decades of high-level political service, including eight years as First Lady, eight years as a U.S. senator, and four years as secretary of state. In the general election campaign against Trump, Clinton proposed detailed plans of action on a wide range of issues, including climate change, criminal justice reform, workers’ rights, early childhood education, tax reform, the nation’s deteriorating infrastructure, and many more. For his part, Trump campaigned on building a vast wall to block immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border, temporarily banning Muslim immigration to the United States, and imposing tariffs on a variety of goods imported from other countries. Trump remained a viable presidential candidate despite revelations that many observers believed were disqualifying: that he likely avoided paying federal income taxes for decades, for instance, and his bragging in a 2005 video about sexually assaulting women.

In an unexpected election result, the real estate mogul and television celebrity Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, defeated the former senator and U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee. Clinton won the popular vote by 2.9 million, but Trump won the electoral college vote by capturing states that Obama had won in 2008 and 2016 — especially Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan. This was the second election in sixteen years in which the winner of the popular vote (Al Gore in 2000 and Clinton in 2016) did not win the electoral college vote.

A supporter of President Donald Trump tries to block the signs of a pair of protesters during Trump’s speech at a political rally in Ohio in July 2017. Trump’s 2016 election to the presidency deepened political divisions in the United States, and the president’s political rallies, like this one, became symbols of those divisions.

Trump’s victory surprised — even shocked — many Americans, from ordinary citizens to prominent media figures. This surprise came from the fact that Trump openly campaigned on a nationalist platform of racial animosity and economic protectionism, which most political experts predicted would doom his candidacy. He made inaccurate claims about the threat of immigration and urban crime, blaming Mexican Americans and African Americans for rising violent crime rates when in fact such rates had been declining for two decades. In the speech announcing his candidacy for the Republican nomination in 2015, Trump said of Mexican immigrants, “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” In his first two years in office, Trump issued a ban on immigration from seven predominantly Muslim countries (an order which was adjusted following a Supreme Court ruling) and increased deportations at the U.S.-Mexico border. Trump’s conservative nationalism also took the form of economic protectionism: he withdrew the United States from major trading partnerships in North America (the North American Free Trade Agreement) and East Asia (the Trans-Pacific Partnership), which had been painstakingly built over many decades, and imposed tariffs (on Mexico, Canada, China, and the EU, among other nations) instead.

President Trump speaking with reporters in 2018 in front of prototypes of the wall he is seeking to build along the border with Mexico. During his campaign for the presidency Trump promised if elected he would construct such a wall across the entire length of the Mexican border.


President Trump has carried out most of his initiatives through the powers of the executive branch: appointing three Supreme Court justices and more than three hundred other federal judges; repealing Obama’s Clean Power Plan; and imposing a series of controversial tariffs on imported goods, for example. Some of these initiatives, particularly the protectionist tariffs, have placed him at odds with political conservatism as it has evolved in the United States since the era of Ronald Reagan. But Trump’s major legislative accomplishment — an enormous tax cut passed in 2017 — lies squarely within that tradition. Between 2001, when President George W. Bush and Congress launched a major tax-cutting initiative, and 2018, when the Trump cuts went into effect, federal revenues have been reduced by more than $5 trillion, which has contributed to a swelling national debt. Two-thirds of that savings went directly to the richest 20 percent of Americans, which has helped to accelerate income and wealth inequality in the United States. The 2001–2018 reductions went further than even the Reagan-era cuts and have had two major consequences: placing government programs such as Social Security and Medicare on fragile financial footing and making the shoring up of those programs, or adding new social programs, more politically difficult because doing so would require raising taxes. Viewed historically, these tax reductions represent a political victory of twenty-first-century conservatism over twentieth-century liberalism’s signature accomplishments (in the New Deal and Great Society eras).

With the 2020 presidential election less than a year away—and as the Democratic Party held state primaries to determine its candidate to challenge President Trump—an utterly unexpected event transformed everyday life in the United States. A new form of coronavirus (a large family of viruses that causes many illness worldwide, including the common cold) began infecting people in China in late December 2019 and within months spread around the world. This virus is easily transmitted and causes severe respiratory disease known as COVID-19, which proved fatal in vulnerable populations. Like other global disease outbreaks (pandemics) before it, COVID-19 began to overwhelm health care systems in country after country, including the United States. By the early spring of 2020, ordinary social life in the United States—from going to schools and restaurants to attending sporting events and church gatherings — had ground to a halt as cities and states took increasingly radical steps to limit the spread of the virus, treat the sick, and avoid catastrophic loss of life.

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