History Chapter 30

The "surge" worked as hoped. During the summer of 2011, Obama announced that the "tide of war was receding" and that the United States had largely achieved its goals, setting in motion a withdrawal of forces that lasted until 2014. "We will not try to make Afghanistan a perfect place," Obama said. "We will not police its streets or patrol its mountains indefinitely. That is the responsibility of the Afghan government." Thereafter, however, the situation in Afghanistan deteriorated, and substantial U.S. forces remained in place for a decade. The Taliban increased the amount of territory they controlled, and the Afghan government continued to be ineffective, unstable, and often corrupt.

"Surge" in Afghanistan

The presidential election of 2000 was one of the closest and most controversial in history. The two major-party candidates, Vice President Albert Gore, Jr., the Democrat, and Texas Republican governor George W. Bush, son of the former president, differed in their views on the role of the federal government, tax cuts, environmental regulations, and the best way to preserve Social Security and Medicare. Gore, a Tennessee native and Harvard graduate whose father had been a U.S. senator, favored an active federal government that would do more to protect the environment. Bush campaigned on a theme of "compassionate conservatism." He promised to restore "honor and dignity" to the White House after the Clinton scandal. The vote count created high drama. As the results rolled in, the television networks initially reported that Gore had narrowly won Florida and its decisive twenty-five electoral votes. Later in the evening, however, they reversed themselves, saying Bush had won Florida. By the early morning hours of the next day, the networks again reversed course and claimed that it was too close to call. The final tally showed Bush with a razor-thin lead, but Florida law required a recount. The results would remain in doubt for weeks. As a painstaking by-hand recount of paper ballots proceeded, the two sides sparred in court, each accusing the other of trying to steal the election. The drama lasted five weeks, until, on December 12, a divided U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the recount be halted. Bush had been elected by 537 votes. Gore had amassed a 540,000-vote lead nationwide, but losing Florida meant he lost the Electoral College by 2 votes. Although Gore "strongly disagreed" with the Supreme Court's decision, he asked voters to rally around Bush and move forward. "Partisan rancor," he urged, "must be put aside."

2000: A Disputed Election

Wild celebrations ushered in the year 2000, and Americans led the cheering at the start of a new millennium. The Cold War was over, the United States reigned as the world's only superpower, and its high-tech economy dominated global trade. During the early twenty-first century, for example, Google came to control 90 percent of search-engine use in Europe and America. YouTube became the largest video-streaming service in the world. Amazon garnered more than half of every dollar spent online. Facebook recruited billions of followers worldwide. Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, claimed that his social media company was replacing the church as the bedrock of community life. During the early twenty-first century, international relations grew more unstable. Powerful new forces were emerging across the globe, the most dangerous of which were sophisticated global networks of Islamist terrorists eager to disrupt and destroy American values and institutions.

21 Century

The inability of U.S. intelligence agencies to track the movements and intentions of militant extremists became tragically evident in the late summer of 2001. Early on the morning of September 11, 2001, Islamist terrorists hijacked four U.S. airliners filled with passengers. They commandeered one to New York City, where at 8:44 A.M. they slammed the fuel-laden jet into the upper floors of the north tower of the World Trade Center in the heart of the nation's financial district. The twin Trade Center towers, each 110 stories tall and filled with Wall Street investment companies, had been viewed as iconic cathedrals of capitalism. Now they were being toppled. Eighteen minutes later, a second hijacked jet crashed into the south tower. The skyscrapers, filled with 50,000 workers, burned fiercely. Hundreds of trapped occupants, many of them on fire, saw no choice but to jump to their deaths. One couple held hands as they plummeted to the ground. The mammoth steel structures quickly collapsed, destroying surrounding buildings and killing nearly 3,000 people, including more than 400 firefighters, police officers, and emergency responders. The southern end of Manhattan -"ground zero"--became a hellish scene of fires, twisted steel, broken concrete, suffocating smoke, wailing sirens, blood-covered streets, victims in agony, and thousands of panicked people. While the catastrophic drama in New York City was unfolding, a third hijacked plane crashed into the Pentagon in Washington, DC. A fourth airliner, most likely aimed toward the White House, missed its mark when passengers - who had heard reports of the earlier hijackings via cell phones-assaulted the knife-wielding hijackers to prevent the plane from being used as a weapon. During the cockpit struggle, the plane plummeted to the ground near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing everyone aboard. Within hours, the nineteen dead terrorists, fifteen of them from Saudi Arabia, were identified as members of al Qaeda (Arabic for the Base), a shadowy network of Islamist extremists led by a wealthy Saudi renegade, Osama bin Laden. Years before, bin Laden had declared jihad (holy war) on the United States, Israel, and the Saudi monarchy in his effort to create a single Islamist caliphate (global empire). Using remote training bases in Sudan and Afghanistan, bin Laden found a haven among the Taliban, a coalition of ultraconservative Islamists bent on waging war against the United States and its allies.

9/11

The 2016 contest between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton was one of the most negative in political history, a campaign more memorable for its drama and insults than its issues or proposals. Trump dismissed "crooked Hillary" as a "nasty woman," calling her the "most corrupt person ever to seek the presidency," and lampooning her as a creature of the Washington and Wall Street elite who masqueraded as a friend of the people while raking in millions of ill-gotten dollars. If elected president, he promised, he would "put her in jail," leading his supporters to wear T-shirts shouting "Lock Her Up." For her part, Clinton portrayed Trump as unfit for the highest office in the land, labeling him a dangerous and unpredictable leader incapable of exercising the mature temperament demanded of the modern presidency. She hurt her cause when amid a fit of frustration she claimed that "you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the 'basket of deplorables.""Hillary Clinton confronted her own scandals. For years, people had questioned how she and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, had channeled huge donations to the Clinton Foundation from foreign and domestic corporations and individuals. In March 2015, the New York Times reported that Clinton, as secretary of state between 2009 and 2013, had used her family's email server for her official communications rather than the State Department server. Her doing so violated departmental protocols, created a security risk that confidential (classified) diplomatic emails might be hacked and monitored by foreign agents, and prevented the State Department from archiving her 62,000 messages. This revelation was like a bomb hitting the Clinton campaign. It raised new questions about her presidential fitness and revealed that the ongoing investigation into her emails would not be concluded by Election Day. Clinton would later claim that Comey's revelation ("October surprise") cost her the election. Perhaps it did, but Clinton also struggled throughout the fall to articulate a unifying vision or fashion a compelling explanation for why she should be the next president.

A Campaign like No Other

George W. Bush had promised to cut taxes for the wealthy, increase military spending, and eliminate "overly" strict environmental regulations. First, however, he had to deal with a sputtering economy, which in March 2001 languished in recession for the first time in more than a decade. Bush decided that cutting taxes was the best way to boost economic growth and generate jobs. On June 7, 2001, he signed the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Act, which slashed $1.35 trillion in taxes. Instead of paying for themselves in renewed economic growth, however, the tax cuts led to a sharp drop in federal revenue, producing a fast-growing budget deficit. The wealthiest Americans benefited most from the lower tax rates. In

A Change of Direction

Bush's mistakes excited Democrats about the possibility of regaining the White House in 2008. The early front-runner for their party's nomination was New York senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, the spouse of ex-president Bill Clinton. Like her husband, she displayed an impressive command of policy issues and mobilized a well-funded campaign team. Moreover, as the first woman with a serious chance of gaining the presidency, she had widespread support among voters eager for female leadership. As the primaries played out, however, an overconfident Clinton lost the nomination to Barack Obama of Illinois, a little-known first-term senator. Young, handsome, and intelligent, a vibrant mixture of idealism and pragmatism, coolness and passion, Obama was an inspiring speaker who promised a "politics of hope," the "energy of change," and the revival of bipartisanship. In June 2008, he gained enough delegates to secure the nomination, and he named veteran senator Joseph Biden of Delaware as his running mate.

A Historic New Presidency

President-elect Trump could claim a long list of firsts: the first president never to have served in the military or held public office, the oldest president, and the president with the lowest popularity upon taking office as measured by opinion polls. Like Andrew Jackson, whom he claimed to emulate, Trump could appear wild and ruthless at times, and, like Richard Nixon, he could display open contempt for both the media ("fake news") and career government officials, many of whom he viewed as incompetent and unnecessary. Trump, however, would preside over a deeply divided nation. While his supporters were thrilled with their victory, millions of stunned Americans viewed his victory on November 8 with unprecedented foreboding. The two Democratic leaders of the California legislature released a joint statement that reflected the feelings of most Democrats: "Today, we woke up feeling like strangers in a foreign land." Women concerned about Trump's election organized mass demonstrations in January 2017 on behalf of women's rights, immigrants and refugees, improved health care, reproductive rights, LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning) rights, racial equality, freedom of religion, and workers' rights. Although a worldwide phenomenon, the Women's March was the largest one-day demonstration in U.S. history, encompassing demonstrations in some 400 American cities. The Women's March on Washington, D.C., which included a half million protesters, was designed to "send a bold message to our new administration on their first day in office, and to the world that women's rights are human rights." One of the speakers, feminist leader Gloria Steinem, directed her comments at President Trump: "Our Constitution does not begin with 'I, the President.' It begins with, 'We, the People."" Additional worries for the Trump administration came with the news that the FBI was investigating the possibility that Trump campaign staffers had secretly collaborated with Russia to torpedo Hillary Clinton's campaign. Trump vigorously denied that he or his campaign staff ever "colluded" with Russian officials. As journalist Timothy Noah explained, however, "the Trump administration in its infancy [was] creating enough blunders, scandals, and controversies to strain the resources" of the White House press corps.

A Populist President

In Afghanistan, the Trump administration dispatched more troops and intensified the bombing campaign against the Taliban, but the military stalemate continued. In December 2017, Vice President Mike Pence made a brief visit to the war-torn Islamist nation. There, he reaffirmed America's commitment: "We're here to stay until freedom wins." Three years later, however, little had changed in what President Trump had called a "stupid" war that had cost America more than a trillion dollars and 2,500 lives. The Afghan war, by far America's longest conflict, had become a costly quagmire like the Vietnam War.

Afghanistan

In 2013, the United States and diplomats from other nations held the first high-level talks with Iran since 1979, when Iranian militants took U.S. embassy employees in Tehran hostage. Two years later, Secretary of State John Kerry announced the signing of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Under its terms, Iran agreed to dismantle much of its nuclear program and open its facilities to more extensive international inspections in exchange for the removal of stringent economic sanctions imposed on Iran by the United States and five other nations. President Obama had repeatedly warned that such use of weapons of mass destruction was a "red line" that would trigger international military intervention of "enormous consequences." In late August, he hesitantly approved a military strike against Syria, but then reversed himself, triggering sharp criticism. In the fall of 2013, Kerry defused the crisis by signing an agreement with Russia to dispose of Syria's chemical weapons. By the end of October, the chemical weapon stockpiles had supposedly been destroyed or dismantled, but the civil war raged on.

An Iranian Nuclear Deal and a Syrian Crisis

As sociologist Michael Kimmel explained in his book Angry White Men (2017), the surging popularity of gender and racial equality and immigrant rights had left many White men "feeling betrayed and bewildered," and represented a direct assault on them and their values. In response, White working-class voters mobilized to oppose policies and programs promoting diversity, from busing and affirmative" action to bilingual education and gay rights. They fumed about companies and schools giving preference to what they perceived to be less qualified minorities to achieve greater diversity. And they fought liberals who, in their view, championed multiculturalism and the contribution of minorities while denigrating the achievements of White men.

Angry White Men

Throughout the 2016 presidential campaign. Trump had lambasted Obamacare, promising to replace it "on day one" with a much better health-care program "at a tiny fraction of the cost, and it is going to be so easy." To that end, he and House Speaker Paul Ryan unveiled in early 2017 the American Health Care Act (AHCA). It would have removed many of the pillars of Obamacare, including phasing out Medicaid subsidies that had enabled millions to gain coverage for the first time. Yet surveys showed that only 17 percent of voters liked the new bill. For that reason and others, Republican congressional leaders withdrew the AHCA without a formal vote. Trump remained committed to the destruction of Obamacare, but neither he nor the Republican congressional leadership offered a concrete alternative to Obamacare. Nonetheless, during his presidential term, some 4 million Americans lost their medical coverage.

Assaulting Obamacare

One of Trump's most controversial executive orders was a temporary ban on immigrants and refugees from seven nations with large Muslim populations. The response that rose against the "Muslim ban" was immediate and widespread, with adherents of both the Center and the Left voicing their dismay at such a prejudicial policy. The acting attorney general, Sally Yates, refused to enforce the new policy. Trump fired her. Even Dick Cheney, George Bush's hard-nosed former Republican vice president, declared that the proposed travel ban "went against everything we stand for." Within days, federal judges dismissed the travel ban as an unconstitutional assault on a particular religious group. In response, on March 6, 2017, President Trump issued a revised executive order, but it too was rejected by federal judges. In mid-2018, the Supreme Court by a 5-4 vote in Trump v. Hawaii approved a third version of the executive order banning immigrants from seven Muslim nations. A similar culture-wars battle with the courts greeted Trump's reversal of Barack Obama's 2016 decision to allow transgender people to serve openly in the military. The United States "will not accept or allow" transgender people in the military "in any capacity," Trump tweeted in July 2017. He added that the military "cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail. Lawsuits filed in several federal courts delayed implementation of the ban, which affected some 15,000 people. In issuing an injunction against the ban, U.S. District Court judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly found "absolutely no support for the claim that the ongoing service of transgender people would have any negative effects on the military."

Banning Muslims or Securing Borders?

In 2013, three African American activists-Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi-created a civil rights organization called Black Lives Matter (BLM) to address mounting evidence that African Americans were being treated unfairly by law enforcement officers and the judicial system. In 2012, 31 percent of people killed by police were African American (often unarmed young men), even though Blacks made up just 13 percent of the total population. Garza, Cullors, Tometi, and others generated widespread support. Black Lives Matter, the organizers explained, "is an ideological and political intervention in a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise. It is an affirmation of Black folks' humanity, our contributions to this society, and our resilience in the face of deadly oppression." BLM gained added urgency on August 9, 2014, when Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager, was shot and killed by a White police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Police left his lifeless body broiling in the summer heat for more than four hours. The failure of a grand jury to indict the police officer prompted civil unrest and protests around the country. The phrase "Black lives matter" became a rallying cry for people who had grown indignant with police brutality against people of color.

Black Lives Matter - Sociopolitical movement in protest of police brutality toward Black people, with origins in Missouri and a growing global presence.

For all the political sniping, however, attitudes toward some hot-button cultural values were slowly changing. In December 2010, Congress repealed the "Don't ask, don't tell" (DADT) military policy that, since 1993, had resulted in some 9,500 gays and lesbians being discharged from the armed forces.

Bold Decisions

Furious that he was one of only four presidents ever to lose reelection, Donald Trump spent the next six weeks in an unprecedented effort to intervene in the electoral process and reverse the outcome of an election. He charged, without evidence, that there had been widespread election fraud. For weeks after the election, his lawyers promoted the "Big Lie" by filing more than fifty lawsuits in various "swing" states challenging the legitimacy of the vote count. William Barr, the U.S. attorney general and one of the president's strongest supporters, contradicted the president's claim that the election was stolen from Trump. Barr reported that Justice Department investigators had found no evidence of voting fraud widespread enough to have changed the election result.

Challenging Biden's Victory

After the intense but brief 2001 recession, America's high-tech-driven economy had begun another period of prolonged expansion. Between 1997 and 2006, home prices rose an astounding 85 percent, leading to a frenzy of irresponsible mortgage lending. Homebuyers were often freed from making down payments or even demonstrating creditworthiness. At the same time, consumers binged on a debt-financed spending spree fed by the overuse of credit cards and home equity loans. Millions of people bought houses they could not afford, refinanced their mortgages, or tapped home equity for loans to make discretionary purchases. It was irrational and reckless to believe that home prices would continue to rise, but lenders, regulatory agencies, and a willing public rode that wave of false hope together. In 2007, the easy-credit bubble burst, and home values and real-estate sales plummeted. The loss of trillions of dollars in home values set off a seismic shock across the economy, as record numbers of homeowners defaulted on their mortgage payments. Foreclosures and bankruptcies soared as banks lost billions, first on the shaky mortgages, then on other categories of overleveraged debt: credit cards, car loans, student loans, and commercial mortgage-backed securities. Lax government oversight and President Bill Clinton's deregulation of the financial sector in 1999 contributed to the meltdown. The economy fell into a recession in 2008, and some of the nation's most prestigious banks, investment firms, and insurance companies went belly up. What had begun as a sharp decline in home prices became a global economic meltdown. The speed and scale of the economic collapse were so startling that people imagined another Great Depression. In early October 2008, stock markets around the world began to crash. It was the onset of what came to be called the Great Recession and it lasted from December 2007 to January 2009 and forced 9 million people out of work. Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke called it "the worst financial crisis in modern history." prompting the Fed to inject trillions of dollars into the collapsing world economy. During Bush's last year in office, his approval rating was 25 percent, just one point higher than Richard Nixon's during the Watergate investigations. Bush's roller-coaster presidency ended in failure. By cutting taxes while increasing spending, his administration created the largest budget deficits in history. In the end, Bush's presidency weakened the Republican party, strained the military, and eroded American prestige abroad.

Economic Shock: The Great Recession Great Recession (2007-2009) - Massive, prolonged economic downturn sparked by the collapse of the housing market and the financial institutions holding unpaid mortgages; resulted in 9 million Americans losing their jobs.

Barack Obama's most pressing challenge was to keep the Great Recession from becoming a prolonged depression. Unemployment had passed 8 percent and was still rising. The financial sector remained paralyzed, and public confidence in the economy had plummeted. The Obama administration chose to bail out Wall Street. It continued the TARP program by providing massive funding for huge banks and financial corporations. Critics attacked the bailouts as deeply unfair to most Americans. Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner later explained, "We had to do whatever we could to help people feel their money was safe in the [banking] system, even if it made us unpopular." Had they not saved the big banks, Obama and Geithner argued, the economy would have crashed. Preserving the banking system did not create many jobs, however. To do so, in mid-February 2009, Congress passed, and Obama signed, an $832 billion economic-stimulus bill called the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. It included cash distributions to states for construction projects to renew the nation's infrastructure electricity grid), money for renewable-energy systems, $212 billion in tax reductions for individuals and businesses, and funds for food stamps and unemployment benefits.

Ending the Great Recession

While fighting continued in Afghanistan, officials in Washington worried that terrorists might attack the United States with biological, chemical, or even nuclear weapons. To address the threat, President Bush established the Office of Homeland Security and gave it sweeping authority to spy on Americans. Another new federal agency, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), assumed responsibility for screening airline passengers for weapons and bombs. At the same time, Bush convinced Congress to create the USA Patriot Act, which gave government agencies authority to eavesdrop on confidential conversations between prison inmates and their lawyers. It also permitted suspected terrorists to be tried in secret military courts and jailed in a military prison at the Guantánamo naval base in Cuba, where they could be held indefinitely and without access to attorneys. Civil liberties groups voiced concerns that the measures jeopardized constitutional rights and protections, but most Americans supported them. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and other so-called neoconservatives ("neocons") in the Departments of State and Defense had convinced Bush to authorize-illegally-the use of torture ("enhanced interrogation techniques") when interviewing captured terrorist suspects. Such tactics violated international law and compromised human rights.

Fighting Terror at Home USA Patriot Act (2001) - Wide-reaching congressional legislation, triggered by the war on terror, which gave government agencies the right to eavesdrop on confidential conversations between prison inmates and their lawyers and permitted suspected terrorists to be tried in secret military courts.

A survey showed that more than half of voters thought he had tried to impede the Russian investigation. The House Judiciary Committee hearings centered on one issue: did President Trump withhold Congress-approved military aid to Ukraine until its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, launched an investigation into Hunter Biden, the son of Joe Biden, the former vice president and the likely Democratic presidential candidate in 2020? The younger Biden had served on the board of a Ukrainian natural-gas company, and Trump hoped to find evidence about his relationships that would embarrass Joe Biden and undermine his candidacy. After fiery debate, the House in December passed two articles of impeachment on a party-line vote, with all Democrats voting in favor: 1. Abuse of power by "pressuring Ukraine to investigate his political rivals ahead of the 2020 election while withholding a White House meeting and $400 million in U.S. security aid from Kyiv!" 2. Obstruction of Congress by directing defiance of subpoenas issued by the House and ordering officials to refuse to testify

First Impeachment

Amid the pandemic, more highly publicized killings of African Americans by White police officers and White supremacists ignited a wave of racial justice protests nationwide. On May 25, 2020, George Floyd, a forty-six-year-old security guard suspected of passing counterfeit money, was killed when a White Minneapolis police officer handcuffed him, threw him down on the pavement, and dug his knee into the back of his neck for nine minutes, all the while ignoring his anguished gasps, "I can't breathe." The gruesome ten-minute cell phone video of Floyd's killing outraged Americans-people of color and Whites-and triggered nationwide protests with a scale and momentum that had not been seen in decades. George Floyd's killing also focused worldwide attention on America's persistent racial inequalities and discrimination. "It's either COVID-19 killing us, cops are killing us, or the economy is killing us," said Priscilla Borkor, a Black social worker participating in one of the demonstrations. Before Floyd's murder, race relations were already frayed. Hate crimes in 2018 had reached a sixteen-year high. The Department of Homeland Security reported that White supremacist groups had become the deadliest terrorist threat in the United States. Two-thirds of Americans surveyed believed that racism had increased during Donald Trump's presidency. Floyd's death crystallized a renewed commitment to address the dehumanizing effects of systemic racism. While President Trump's staunchest supporters approved of his handling of the racial justice protests, the backlash from the center and left was substantial. Amid the turmoil, journalists reminded Americans of some stubborn facts: despite the civil rights revolution of the sixties, African American income remained only 60 percent of White income, further evidence of the racism that had plagued the nation since its founding.

George Floyd Racial Justice Protests - Largest collection of multiracial and intergenerational protests across the United States in opposition to racism toward Black people, prompted by the documented murder of George Floyd, a Black man, by a Minneapolis police officer.

From his first day in office, Barack Obama stressed that his foremost goal was to reform a health-care system that was "bankrupting families, bankrupting businesses, and bankrupting our government at the state and federal level." The United States was (and still is) the only developed nation without a national health-care program. Since 1970, the number of uninsured people had been steadily rising, as had health-care costs. In 2010, roughly 50 million Americans, most of them poor, young, or people of color, had no health insurance. The president's goal in creating the Affordable Care Act (ACA), commonly called "Obamacare," was to make health insurance more affordable and health care more accessible. The $940 billion law, proposed in 2009 and hotly debated for a year, centered on the "individual mandate," which required uninsured adults to buy a private insurance policy through state-run exchanges (websites where people could shop for insurance), or pay a tax penalty. Low-income Americans would receive federal subsidies to help pay for their coverage, and insurance companies could no longer deny coverage to people with preexisting illnesses. Everyone would pay higher Medicare payroll taxes. Requiring people to buy health insurance was controversial. Critics questioned not only the individual mandate but the administration's projections that the program would eventually reduce federal expenditures. The ACA passed without a single Republican vote, and Obama signed it on March 23, 2010.

Health-Care Reform Affordable Care Act (ACA) (2010) - Vast health-care-reform initiative championed by President Obama and widely criticized by Republicans that aimed to make health insurance more affordable and make health care accessible to everyone, regardless of income or prior medical conditions.

In late August 2005, President Bush's eroding public support suffered another blow after killer-hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf coast, devastating large areas of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Hardest hit was New Orleans, where floodwaters drowned the city. Katrina left more than 1,500 dead, wiped out whole towns, and destroyed 160,000 homes and apartments. Hundreds of thousands were left homeless and hopeless. In New Orleans, where local officials and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) were caught unprepared, confusion and incompetence abounded as dead bodies floated in the flooded streets. President Bush, who was vacationing when the hurricane hit, made no public statement for four days and initially appeared indifferent to the storm's toll. In the face of blistering criticism, he came out of seclusion and took responsibility for the balky federal response.

Hurricane Katrina Hurricane

The COVID-19 pandemic did not have the same physical impact as those epidemics because medical knowledge, technology, and communications are far superior today. Still, the 2019-2021 pandemic had a colossal effect on daily life throughout the world. As the head of the International F Cross warned, "We run the risk of an unprecedented humanitarian crisis." To slow the spread of infection, nations went into quarantine mode as early as February 2020. Governments urged or ordered people to stay at home. Spectator sports banned in-person attendance, and airlines and subways shut down. Businesses, schools and colleges closed, and many white-collar employees were forced to work from home using computers-if they still had a job. But many "essential workers"-physicians and nurses, delivery drivers, garbage haulers, postal and construction workers, grocery-store employees, farm laborers-could not work from home and therefore were more susceptible to the viral infection.

Impact COVID-19 pandemic - Global pandemic resulting from the airborne and contagious coronavirus disease which took millions of lives, debilitated governments and institutions, and necessitated new cultural norms of distancing and face masking.

Just weeks later, on May 8, 2018, President Trump again angered America's western European allies. He announced that the United States would withdraw from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) agreement with Iran limiting its ability to create nuclear weapons and reinstitute economic sanctions against the Islamist nation. It was Trump's most consequential foreign policy action. The withdrawal was enthusiastically welcomed in Israel and by its strong supporters. Yet, worldwide it left many confused and unsettled about the destabilizing ramifications it could produce in the Middle East.

Iran

ISIS represented the culmination of decades of Arab Islamist rage against Europe and the United States. Within months, the terrorist organization undermined governments and security in Syria and Iraq.

Islamists on the Move

In March 2018, President Trump abruptly announced punitive tariffs on imported steel and aluminum. This policy change caught his aides and fellow Republicans off guard, hurt American companies that had to buy imported steel and aluminum at higher prices, and infuriated America's most reliable global trading partners. Hardest hit was China, who predicted a retaliatory trade war. By 2020, American tariffs on imports were the highest they had been since 1993, and, as always, higher tariffs meant higher prices for consumers. The trade war with China involved more than high tariffs. President Trump complained about American companies having unequal access to China's markets and China's long history of stealing the intellectual property of U.S. companies. The president claimed that "trade wars are good, and easy to win," which stunned economists-and Republicans. The president's chief economic adviser resigned in protest. More than a hundred congressional Republicans urged the president to reconsider launching a trade war, claiming that no nation wins such vengeful efforts. In the end, while the trade war showed his willingness to stand up to China, it appears to have achieved much less than promised in the short run. The tariffs hurt U.S. manufacturers, disrupted supply chains, and raised the cost of producing factory goods.

Launching a Trade War

In May 2017, President Trump stunned the nation by firing James Comey, the FBI director, who was leading that agency's investigation into contacts between Trump campaign officials and Russian groups assisting them. White House aides initially claimed that Trump had acted on the advice of the deputy attorney general. The next day, however, President Trump contradicted them. He acknowledged firing Comey because he wanted the Russian investigation ended. Only days later, the media reported that Comey had kept detailed summaries of his meetings with the president. One of the entries revealed that Trump on February 14 had urged Comey to drop an investigation into Michael Flynn, the director of national security, who had engaged in illegal contacts with Russian officials. On May 18, 2017, Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, appointed a special counsel, Robert Mueller III, a decorated Vietnam War marine veteran, former FBI director, and longtime Republican. Mueller's assignment was to lead a criminal investigation into Russian involvement in the 2016 Trump campaign. President Trump now faced the prospect of a prolonged criminal investigation that would impede his efforts to fulfill campaign promises.

Legal Issues

Unlike the other sixteen Republican primary candidates in 2016, however, Trump (similar to Patrick Buchanan in the 1990s) had national name recognition and a unique personality suited to his raucous rallies. He nursed the grievances and anger in his large crowds, and made it clear and easy for supporters to see what he was thinking. while assuring listeners that he would get things done. Trump fed upon and reinforced the anger felt by so many Americans who had been left out of the economic recovery. He was one of the few candidates to discuss the terrible problems confronting those buffeted by the opioid drug epidemic, declining manufacturing jobs, and the rising cost of health care.

Make America Great Again

In May 2012, President Obama became the first sitting president to support the right of gay and lesbian couples to marry. While asserting that it was the "right" thing to do, Obama knew that endorsing marriage equality had powerful political implications. The LGBTQ community would come to play an energetic role in the 2012 presidential election, and the youth vote--the under-thirty electorate who most supported marriage equality-would be crucial. No sooner had Obama made his announcement than polls showed that voters were evenly split on the issue, with Democrats and independent voters providing the bulk of support.

Marriage Equality - Legal right for gay and lesbian couples to marry, the most divisive issue in the culture wars of the early 2010s as increasing numbers of court rulings affirmed this right across the United States.

Overall, Obama adopted a posture of restraint in world affairs. He was determined to "avoid stupid errors," wind down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and reduce the use of U.S. military power abroad. Yet he and others were naive to think that the United States could avoid the burdens of being the only superpower in a post-Cold War world of growing anarchy and violence. Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein of California wondered in September 2014 if Obama had become "too cautious" about the use of force in world affairs.

New Global Challenges in an Age of Insecurity

Soon after, Trump again surprised the world when he announced that he and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un would hold a summit meeting to discuss the future of nuclear weapons in the Communist nation. On June 12, 2018, the two met in Singapore and announced that discussions would continue "to work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula." Ten days later, President Trump claimed that North Korea had begun to dismantle its nuclear test sites, only to be contradicted by his secretary of defense, James Mattis, who said there was no evidence of North Korea taking any concrete steps to denuclearize.

North Korea

In his 2009 inaugural address, President Obama acknowledged that America was in a crisis. His administration had inherited two unpopular wars, rising unemployment, a staggering national debt, and the weakest economy in eighty years. He vowed to change the culture of "greed and irresponsibility" and pledged to create a foreign policy based on diplomacy rather than military intervention. He promised to bring home all U.S. troops from Iraq and to end the use of torture in the war against terrorism. To do so, he proposed "a new politics for a new time-without explaining what that meant or how he planned to implement it. In the end, despite several notable achievements, Obama would prove to be more inspirational than effective as the nation's chief executive.

Obama's Administration

President Obama's proudest achievement, the Affordable Care Act (ACA), provided 20 million people, especially African Americans, Asians, and Latinos, with health insurance. Yet the program was so massive and complicated that the scheduled rollout took four years. In the fall of 2013, the federal online health insurance "exchange," where people without insurance could sign up, opened with great fanfare. Obama assured people that using the online system would be "real simple." It was not. On October 1, millions tried to sign up; only six succeeded. The website was hobbled with technical glitches. It also became evident that Obama had misled the nation when he told voters that if they liked their current health-insurance plan, they could, under Obamacare, "keep that insurance. Period. End of story." As it turned out, many saw their policies canceled by insurers. Eventually, the ACA website was fixed, and by August 2014, more than 9 million people, well above the original target number, had signed up for health insurance. Eventually, the ACA website was fixed, and by August 2014, more than 9 million people, well above the original target number, had signed up for health insurance. "The Affordable Care Act is here to stay," Obama said. But public skepticism about the government's ability to manage the program continued. Over the next ten years, congressional Republicans would try seventy times to dismantle, defund, or change the ACA, but the essential programs remained intact, in part because data showed that the ACA had improved the overall health of the nation.

Obamacare on the Defensive

ISIS seized huge tracts of territory while enslaving, terrorizing, raping, or massacring thousands of men, women, and children. Intense partisanship dominated the 2014 congressional elections, when Republicans gained control of the Senate for the first time since 2006. They also strengthened their hold on the House, added governorships, and tightened their control of state legislatures. The GOP had campaigned on the dual themes of the "failure" of President Obama and the "disaster" of Obamacare. Political moderates became a dying breed.

Political Gridlock

By 2020, America's population had surpassed 331 million, with more than 80 percent living in cities or suburbs. Overall, the slowing of immigration, especially from Mexico, and a declining national birth rate between 2010 and 2020 brought the second slowest population growth rate since the government began counting in 1790. Western and southern states such as Texas, Colorado, Montana, Oregon, Florida, and North Carolina continued to experience the fastest growth rates. In 1970, western and southern states combined to host just under half the national population; in 2020 those Sun Belt regions made up 62 percent of the population. One in five Americans lived in two states, California and Texas. More importantly, the nation's racial and ethnic composition was rapidly changing. In 2005, Hispanics (the term used by the Census Bureau) surpassed African Americans as the nation's largest minority group. Yet Asian Americans were the fastest-growing racial or ethnic group in the United States. Between 2000 and 2020, the Asian population grew 81 percent, compared to a 70 percent growth among Hispanic Americans, a 61 percent growth among Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders, and a 20 percent growth among Black Americans. For the first time ever, the White population decreased in size, dropping 2.6 percent. Another fast-growing cohort was the 10 million people who described themselves as "multiracial" and who represented more than 3 percent of the population. These dramatic changes in the nation's ethnic mix resulted from an immigration surge during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In 1996, U.S. immigration reached its highest level since before the First World War. By 2020, the United States had more foreign-born residents than ever-over 46 million, 11 million of whom were undocumented immigrants (formerly classified as "illegal aliens"). For the first time, most immigrants came not from Europe, but from Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Mexicans composed the largest share of Hispanics, followed by Puerto Ricans and Cubans. Most Americans born during and after the Second World War considered the surge in diversity a "cause for concern." They worried that Hispanics, now most frequently referred to as Latinos/Latinas, would never assimilate into mainstream culture but would remain a permanent underclass of people tied closely to their ancestral homelands.

Population growth among Latinos, Asian Americans, and multiracial people.

It proved far easier to win the brief war against Iraq than to reconstruct the Islamist nation in America's image. As Secretary of State Colin Powell had warned Bush, conquering Iraq would make him "the proud owner of 25 million people. You will own all their hopes, aspirations, and problems. You'll own it all." Unprepared US. officials faced the daunting task of installing a democratic government in a nation fractured by religious feuds and ethnic tensions made worse by the allied invasion. Large parts of the country quickly fell into civil war as sectarian tribalism replaced the dictatorship. Looting was widespread and chaos reigned. Rather than reducing the number of Islamist terrorists, the U.S. intervention in Iraq served to increase them. Soon, Iraq became a quagmire for American forces. Vengeful Islamist radicals streamed into Iraq to wage a campaign of terror, sabotage, and suicide bombings against American troops and bases. By the fall of 2003, Bush admitted that substantial numbers of American troops (around 150,000) would have to remain in Iraq much longer than anticipated, and many of them would end up serving multiple tours there. He also acknowledged that rebuilding Iraq would take years and cost almost a trillion dollars. Americans grew dismayed as the number of casualties and the expense of the military occupation soared. The nation became more alienated when journalists revealed graphic pictures of U.S. soldiers abusing and torturing Arab detainees in the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. By 2004, a Republican journalist dismissed Bush's Middle East strategy as "shiftless, reactive, irrelevantly grandiose; our war aims undefined; our preparations insufficient; our civil defense neglected." By the beginning of 2004, some 1,000 Americans had died, and more than 10,000 had been wounded, many of them having lost limbs in explosions. Many other veterans suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The ethnic and religious tensions only worsened as Sunni jihadists allied with al Qaeda to undermine the Iraqi government and assault U.S. forces.

Rebuilding Iraq

The near collapse of the nation's financial system beginning in 2008 had prompted calls for overhauling the financial regulatory system. On July 21, 2010, Obama signed the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, also called the Dodd-Frank Bill after its two congressional sponsors, Democratic senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut and Democratic representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts. The 2,319-page law required government agencies to exercise greater oversight over complex new financial transactions and protected consumers from unfair practices in loans and credit cards by establishing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Regulating Wall Street

In July 2018, President Trump traveled to Helsinki, Finland, to meet with Vladimir Putin, the authoritarian Russian leader. There he did not address the U.S. government's displeasure with any of the issues pushing the two countries farther and farther apart. Topics to be discussed included the Russians" annexation of Crimea and their shootdown of a Malaysian passenger jet over eastern Ukraine in 2014, and the hot-button issue of Russian interference in the 2016 US. election on behalf of Trump. At the postsummit press conference, with the whole world watching, President Trump did just the opposite and took Putin's side on most of the matters dividing the two nations. A reporter asked who he believed--Putin or America's intelligence agencies-about Russian interference in the 2016 US. election. The president was widely criticized back home for his handling of the summit. Newt Gingrich, a strong Trump supporter, labeled the Russian summit "the most serious mistake of his presidency." The editors of the pro-Trump newspaper the Arizona Republic said the summit with Putin revealed that the US. president "hasn't got a clue what it means to be president."

Russia

For nearly twenty years, Vladimir Putin of Russia had viewed the disintegration of the Soviet Union as the "greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century." On February 27, 2013, now-President Putin sent troops into Crimea, part of the former Soviet republic of Ukraine. A week later, the Crimean parliament voted to become part of the Russian Federation. Putin, claiming that Crimea had "always been an inseparable part of Russia," made the illegal annexation official by positioning Russian troops there, even though he denied their presence. The speed and ruthlessness with which Putin seized control of Crimea ended hopes that Russia would become a cordial partner of the United States and its European allies. In response to the actions, the United States and the European Union refused to recognize the annexation of Crimea and announced economic sanctions against Russia while pledging financial assistance to Ukraine.

Russia's Annexation of Crimea

With the economy on the upswing, the Trump administration decided to deliver on another big campaign pledge, which was to close the U.S. border with Mexico and pass immigration reform. Initially, his administration shut down the asylum program offering refuge to victims of authoritarian regimes and deported more than 600,000 people. In the spring of 2018, the federal government announced a zero-tolerance policy regarding undocumented Mexican immigrants. The Department of Homeland Security and the US. Border Patrol took the controversial step of separating several thousand children from their detained parents. When videos surfaced of children being held in metal cages, having to sleep on concrete floors, and crying for their parents, nationwide protests erupted against the new policy, Evangelist Franklin Graham, an ardent Trump booster, called the new policy "disgraceful," and even First Lady Melania Trump issued an unusual statement deploring the situation.

Shutting Off Immigration

Many nonessential businesses closed down in March 2020, sending employees home in an effort to stem the spread of the virus. Some were able to continue working from home, but many were not, and unemployment soared. At the end of March, President Trump finally heeded the advice of medical advisers to order a national shutdown of all nonessential functions. Life ground to a halt by early April 2020 as most Americans closeted themselves in their homes or apartments. The basic human need for social interaction was frustrated by the greater need for social distancing. Americans struggled with loneliness and boredom amid the "new normal" of self-isolation. Uncertainty and anxiety abounded, as no one knew how long the pandemic and the lockdown it triggered would last. In response to the economic shock, Congress and President Trump passed the Cares Act at the end of March 2020. It distributed more than half a trillion dollars in direct aid to more than 150 million Americans. The infusion of cash helped some struggling households but was not sufficient to generate an economic recovery. For a period in the spring of 2020, America made progress against the virus. The number of cases in hard-hit states like New York and New Jersey dropped, thanks largely to a statewide shutdown of nonessential businesses such as restaurants, movie theaters, and hair salons, and new requirements that everyone wear masks in public areas and practice "social distancing"-staying at least six feet apart.

Social Disruptions

On January 6, 2021, a joint session of Congress prepared to certify the election victory of Joe Biden. President Trump called his famously loyal vice president, Michael Pence, to pressure Pence as the presiding officer of the joint session to invalidate the results of the presidential election. The vice president, however, explained that he had no constitutional authority to overturn Biden's victory. Just hours after his tense exchange with Vice President Pence, President Trump addressed thousands of ardent followers whom he had summoned to Washington, DC. He again claimed without evidence that the election was stolen from him.

Storming the Capitol

There is no upside and tremendous downside." Similarly, during his presidential campaign, he had told the Reuters news service that "we should not be focusing on Syria. You're going to end up in World War III over Syria if we listen to Hillary Clinton." As president, however, he adopted a strategy of meeting America's needs first, treating allies like secondary partners that needed constant reminders of the nature of the alliance, while engaging more openly with America's traditional enemies. His America First policy pleased his supporters, but it remained to be seen whether it truly benefited national interests.

Syria

President Trump had promised on the campaign trail to generate the greatest economic growth in US. history. To do so, he created the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which Congress passed without a single Democratic vote at the end of 2017. It was his first major legislative victory nearly one year into office. It cut the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to a permanent 21 percent, lowered income tax rates overall (not permanent), doubled the standard deduction, and eliminated personal exemptions.

Tax Reform Victory

In late 2010 and early 2011, a chaotic series of spontaneous uprisings erupted throughout much of the Arab world as long-oppressed peoples rose up against repressive regimes. Young idealists inspired by the hope of democracy and connected by social media transformed passionate street protests into political revolutions that forced corrupt tyrants from power. The essentially leaderless uprisings seemed to herald a new era in the Middle East. Yet building new democratic governments proved harder than expected. The Middle East had no models of open societies to follow, and the essential elements of democratic governance had to be established from scratch.

The "Arab Awakening"

George W. Bush received the blame for the costs and casualties of the unending war in Iraq, where violence increased throughout the fall of 2006. Bush eventually responded by creating the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan task force that surprised the president by issuing a report recommending the withdrawal of combat forces by the spring of 2008. Bush disagreed. On January 10, 2007, he announced that he was sending a "surge" of an additional 20,000 (eventually 30,000) troops to Iraq, bringing the total to almost 170,000. From a military perspective, the surge succeeded. By the fall of 2008, violence in Iraq had declined dramatically, and the Iraqi government had grown in stature and confidence.

The "Surge" in Iraq

The 9/11 assault, like the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, transformed modern life. After an initial period of grief, confusion, and fear, many Americans were consumed by blinding anger and a desire for retaliation and revenge. George W. Bush found his presidential voice and purpose as he skillfully forged a coalition of allied nations committed "to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil....We will not waver, we will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail." In a speech to Congress and the world, he warned other nations: "Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists." The war on terror, Bush stressed, would begin with al Qaeda but would "not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated." Congress readily authorized military force against anyone or any group that helped plan, aid, or commit the acts of violence against the United States. A wave of patriotic fervor swept the nation as Americans embraced Bush's war on terror. Finding the al Qaeda terrorists required ousting the Taliban movement in Afghanistan, which gave shelter to al Qaeda. Bush demanded that the Taliban government surrender the terrorists or risk military attack. When the Taliban leadership refused, the United States, supported by some sixty allied nations, launched on October 7, 2001, an invasion of Afghanistan dubbed Operation Enduring Freedom. Bush pledged that U.S. forces would stay until they finished the job of ousting the Taliban and establishing a stable democratically elected government in Afghanistan. Afghanistan was a desperately poor country hobbled by a dysfunctional and corrupt government and inhabited by a largely rural population whose life expectancy was forty-seven years; the literacy rate was only 38 percent, in large part because the Taliban prohibited girls over 8 years old from attending school. On December 9, the Taliban regime collapsed in the face of the U.S. military onslaught, and the American-led coalition was suddenly faced with rebuilding a government infrastructure. Yet rarely has a great power taken control of another nation with such a flawed understanding of the challenges it faced. As U.S. Army General Douglas Lute admitted, "We didn't have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking." The United States proved unable to improve the Islamic nation's quality of life. As a result, the war in Afghanistan transitioned into a high-stakes manhunt for the elusive Osama bin Laden.

The "War on Terror" - Global crusade to root out anti-Western and anti-American Islamist terrorist cells launched by President George W. Bush as a response to the 9/11 attacks.

By winning Ohio, Bush captured 286 electoral votes to Kerry's 251. Yet in some respects, the election was not so close. Bush received 3.5 million more votes nationwide than Kerry, and Republicans increased their majorities in both houses of Congress. Bush pledged to bring democracy and stability to Iraq, trim the federal deficit, pass a major energy bill, create more jobs, and "privatize" Social Security funds by investing them in the stock market. George Bush's second term featured thorny political problems, a sluggish economy, and continuing turmoil in Iraq. In 2005, he pushed through Congress an energy bill and a Central American Free Trade Act (CAFTA). But his effort to privatize Social Security retirement accounts only provoked fear and distrust among retired Americans. At the same time, soaring budget deficits dismayed many fiscal conservatives.

The 2004 Election

Mitt Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts (2003-2007), emerged as the Republican nominee. Two factors hurt his candidacy. The first was his decision to cater to right-wing voters by opposing immigration reforms that might allow undocumented immigrants a pathway to citizenship. The second was a startling statement made to wealthy Republican donors. He was caught on tape saying that he "did not care" about the 47 percent of Americans who "will vote for the president no matter what" because they are "dependent upon government... believe that they are victims... [who] believe the government has a responsibility to care for them... these are people who pay no income tax." Nearly 60 percent of White voters chose Romney. But the nation's fastest-growing groups-Latinos, Asian Americans, and African Americans-voted overwhelmingly for Obama, as did college- educated women. David Frum, a Republican speechwriter and columnist, confessed that his party was becoming "increasingly isolated and estranged from modern America."

The 2012 Election

Ferocious political polarization shaped the 2016 presidential campaign. Surveys showed that voters were more intensely divided about the opposing political party than they were about race, class, gender, and age. The growing partisanship was evident in a single data point: in 1960, some 5 percent of Republicans and 4 percent of Democrats said they objected to their child marrying someone with the opposing party affiliation.

The 2016 Presidential Primaries

In 2020, voters faced a presidential campaign like no other. Twenty-nine Democrats initially sought the nomination, the largest number of candidates ever. In the end, the Democrats chose Joe Biden, a former U.S. senator from Delaware and Barack Obama's two-term vice president. Biden selected Senator Kamala Harris from California as his running mate. The daughter of immigrants from Jamaica and India, she was the first woman to serve as California's attorney general, and the first African American and Indian American to be nominated as vice president by one of the two major parties. traditional values such as trust, compassion, and inclusion. Trump repeatedly used his Twitter account to charge that the Democrats were "rigging" the election against him and that he might not accept the election results should he lose. In September 2020, he declined to commit to a peaceful transfer of power should he lose the election. The death of Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg just weeks before the election added an incendiary issue to the presidential campaign. Only the second woman to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, and the first Jewish woman justice, Ginsberg had been a liberal stalwart on the Court for twenty-seven years. When President Trump and Senate Republicans rushed to appoint conservative Amy Coney Barrett as a successor for Ginsberg before the November election, Democrats cried foul, for these were the same Senate Republicans who had blocked Barack Obama's efforts to fill a vacancy on the Court before the 2016 election. The blockbuster news of President Trump's illness hurt his efforts to win a second term. "It's hard to imagine that this doesn't end his hopes for reelection," said Rob Stutzman, a Republican campaign consultant. The news of his own infection also became the president's greatest political liability. topping By late October, just days before the election, another surge in coronavirus cases threatened Trump's reelection hopes. October 23 witnessed the highest number of new cases in the United States since the pandemic started. By late November, the daily totals set all-time records, 200,000. After more than a week of tedious vote counting and recounting. Joe Biden won by retaking three long-held Democratic states that Trump had won in 2016, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, while flipping two traditionally Republican states, Arizona and Georgia. He beat President Trump 52 to 47 percent in the popular vote, with a winning margin of more than 7 million votes nationwide. The 2020 electoral pain continued for Republicans as they lost control of the Senate in January 2021 when Democratic candidates won both Georgia Senate runoff races, thanks to a huge turnout by Black voters. This meant that president-elect Joe Biden, who at seventy-seven would be the oldest president ever, would be able to get major legislation through Congress and appoint cabinet members and federal judges of his choosing.

The 2020 General Election

In the fall of 2002, George Bush unveiled a new national security policy. The Bush Doctrine said that the growing menace posed by "shadowy networks" of terrorist groups and unstable rogue nations with weapons of mass destruction (WMD) required the United States at times to use preemptive military action and to act unilaterally if necessary to eliminate the threats of nations like Iraq using WMDs. "If we wait for threats to fully materialize," or wait for allies to join America, Bush explained, "we will have waited too long. In the world we have entered, the only path to safety is the path of action. And this nation will act."

The Bush Doctrine - National security policy launched in 2002 by which the Bush administration claimed the right to launch preemptive military attacks against perceived enemies, particularly outlaw nations or terrorist organizations believed to possess WMDs. Weapons of mass destruction (WMD) - Lethal nuclear, radiological, chemical, or biological devices aimed at harming people, institutions, and a nation's sense of security.

The powerful anti-Communist Cuban community in South Florida fiercely criticized Obama's decision, and congressional Republicans threatened to block the appointment of a U.S. ambassador to Cuba because of its Communist government. But Obama insisted that isolating Cuba had not worked. "Americans and Cubans alike are ready to move forward," he said. "I believe it's time for Congress to do the same."

The Cuban Thaw

Barack Obama was the first African American presidential nominee of either party. Born in Hawaii in 1961, he was the son of a White mother from Kansas and a Black father from Kenya who left the household and returned to Africa when Barack was a toddler. Raised in Indonesia, where his mother was an anthropologist, and Hawaii, where his maternal grandparents lived, Obama attended Occidental College in Los Angeles and graduated from Columbia University in New York City before earning a law degree from Harvard. The forty-seven-year-old senator presented himself as a leader who could inspire, unite, and forge collaborations across the partisan divide. He vowed to end the "forever" wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, stop the use of torture, reduce nuclear weapons, tighten regulation of the banking industry, secure the border with Mexico, provide a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, and offer medical coverage to millions of uninsured Americans. Obama and his strategists mastered the use of social media to organize rock-concert-like campaign rallies. His vitality created a movement that reinvigorated political activism at a time when voter disgust with politics was widespread. On November 4, 2008, Obama made history by becoming the first person of color to be elected president. He won the popular vote by 53 percent to 46 percent, won the Electoral College 365 to 173, and penetrated the solidly Republican South by winning Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia. He also helped the Democrats win majorities in both houses of Congress. Voter turnout, especially among African Americans and young adults, was the highest since 1968.

The First African American President

On March 22, 2019, after twenty-two months of investigation, special counsel Robert Mueller submitted to Attorney General William Barr his much-anticipated report. The Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election detailed the "systematic" Russian government-sponsored efforts to ensure a Trump victory in the 2016 presidential election. Mueller and his team of nineteen attorneys and forty FBI agents had interviewed more than 500 people and perused thousands of documents. The Mueller report revealed that the Russian Internet Research Company weaponized social media, especially Facebook, to manipulate U.S. voters in 2016. Trump campaign officials had secretly welcomed Russian help, but the evidence was insufficient to warrant charges that Donald Trump the candidate "conspired or coordinated" with Russians.

The Mueller Report

The loosely defined Obama Doctrine grew out of efforts to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In essence, the president wanted to replace confrontation and military intervention with cooperation and negotiation. On February 27, 2009, President Obama announced that all 142,000 US. troops would be withdrawn from Iraq by the end of 2011, as the Iraqi government and the Bush administration had agreed in 2008. He was true to his word, and the last US. combat troops left Iraq in December 2011. The war was an expensive mistake. As it turned out, there were no weapons of mass destruction, despite what officials in the Bush administration had claimed, nor was there a direct link between the al Qaeda terrorists and Saddam Hussein. Al Qaeda, in fact, did not arrive in Iraq until after the invasion. American efforts at nation building had failed, and Obama and Bush's hopes that the United States could avoid fighting in the Middle East and that the Iraqis could sustain a stable government proved fruitless,

The Obama Doctrine

The first case of the virus in the United States emerged on January 19, 2020, when a thirty-five-year-old man in the state of Washington went to a clinic complaining of a stubborn cough, fever, and vomiting. He had recently returned from China. Tests confirmed that he had the COVID-19 virus. Two previous presidents, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, had established detailed protocols and maintained a federal office to deal with epidemics, but the Trump administration had closed the office. On February 29, 2020 officials reported the first American death from the coronavirus. While public health officials urged people to self-quarantine and to cancel social events and large gatherings, the Trump administration continued to downplay the threat.

The Pandemic in America

During 2002 and 2003, Iraq emerged as the focus of the Bush administration's policy of preemptive military action. Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz repeatedly urged the president to use U.S. power to reshape the Islamist world in America's image. This included sponsoring "regime change" in authoritarian nations lacking "political and economic freedom." The goal was to create a new democratic world order "friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles." Yet neither Bush nor his "hawkish" advisers found any tangible evidence of such weapons. In addition, none of Bush's advisers understood the bewildering complexities of religion, culture, politics, and rivalries between traditionalists and modernists within Islamist nations. The administration placed too little faith in diplomacy and too much faith in intelligence agencies and military intervention. On March 17, 2003, Bush issued Saddam Hussein an ultimatum: leave Iraq within forty-eight hours or face an invasion. Hussein refused. Two days later, on March 19, American and British forces attacked Iraq. None of the other major American allies, nor the United Nations, agreed to participate; thus the two-nation force that entered Iraq was referred to as the "coalition of the willing." The war was legitimate, Bush claimed, because Hussein "promotes international terror" and "seeks nuclear weapons." The second Iraq War began with a massive bombing campaign, followed by a fast-moving ground assault. On April 9, after three weeks of intense fighting. U.S. forces captured Baghdad, the capital of Iraq. Hussein's regime and his demoralized army collapsed a week later. But the president, as he later admitted, had spoken too soon; the initial military triumph carried with it the seeds of deception and disaster, as no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq. Bush said that the absence of WMD left him with a "sickening feeling," for he knew that his primary justification for the war had evaporated. As former presidential candidate and conservative commentator Pat Buchanan said, America had "invaded a country that did not attack us, and did not want war with us, to disarm it of weapons we have since discovered it did not have."

The Second Iraq War

Soon, the revolt became a national Tea Party movement, with chapters in all fifty states. The Tea Party was not so much a cohesive political organization as it was an attitude and an ideology, a collection of self-described "disaffected," "angry," and "very conservative" activists.

The Tea Party - Right-wing populist movement, largely made up of middle-class, White male conservatives, that emerged as a response to the expansion of the federal government under the Obama administration.

The emergence of these "angry White men" proved crucial to the unprecedented presidential campaign of Donald Trump, a celebrity real estate developer and reality-television star who had never held elected office. Born in 1946 in Queens, a borough of New York City, he attended a military high school where he was known as a "ladies' man." He then enrolled at Fordham University for two years before transferring to the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a degree in economics in 1968. After college, Trump parlayed a large loan from his wealthy father into a sprawling real estate development business called the Trump Organization. Trump expanded his business empire into the casino gambling industry and later acquired numerous golf resorts around the world. All the while, he focused on building the Trump brand, despite numerous business failures and bankruptcies. Trump's visibility earned him a starring role in a popular NBC television reality series called The Apprentice, in which contestants competed for a job within the Trump Organization. Trump had been a Republican until 2000 when he switched to the Democratic party because Republicans, he said, were "crazy" right-wingers. During Barack Obama's presidency, however, Trump switched back to the Republican party, convinced that the future belonged to "nonpoliticians" like himself. Yet he was a new type of Republican. He showed little interest in reducing government spending, balancing the federal budget, or reducing government entitlement programs-the centerpiece of "Reagan Republicanism." Instead, he focused on economic growth, job creation, and stopping free trade, immigration, and U.S. military interventions abroad.

Trump the Outsider

Rolling back environmental regulations On June 1, 2017, President Trump announced that the United States, which ranked as the world's second-highest emitter of greenhouse gases, would withdraw from the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement addressing climate change. He claimed that the accord, signed by 195 nations, penalized American businesses and workers, while other major countries simply ignored the terms and benchmarks of the agreement to reduce carbon emissions.

Vetoing Efforts to Slow Climate Change

The pandemic deepened political divisions. Following President Trump's lead, Republicans were much less willing than Democrats to respect CDC guidelines for social distancing and wearing masks, insisting that it was their constitutional right to do whatever they wanted, wherever they pleased, even if doing so endangered others. As American behavior during the Second World War had demonstrated, however, the necessity of collective sacrifice in pursuit of the greater good during a national crisis should not be confused as an assault on individual liberty. To address the slumping economy, Trump authorized Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin to distribute a staggering $1.6 trillion in stimulus grants and loans to individuals, companies, and nonprofit organizations. The aid package calmed markets, prevented many businesses Stimulus efforts from collapsing, slowed layoffs, and stabilized household income. Those killed by the virus were disproportionately old, poor, African American, Native American, and Latino. Because people were twenty times more likely to become infected indoors than outdoors, congested spaces-prisons, nursing homes, and meat processing plants-became "hot spot" incubators for the virus. Wherever the coronavirus emerged, area hospitals were overwhelmed. President Trump's approval ratings began to drop noticeably throughout the summer of 2020, as the number of cases and deaths steadily rose and the economy limped along.

Viral Politics