Donald Trump

Immigration

One of Trump’s most controversial early executive orders, issued on January 27, implemented his promised “Muslim ban,” which temporarily suspended immigration to the United States from seven Muslim-majority countries in the interest of national security. The travel ban, as it came to be known, was immediately challenged in court on due-process and establishment-of-religion grounds and provoked spontaneous demonstrations at major airports in the United States in support of persons with valid visas who were prevented from boarding flights to the U.S. or who were detained upon arrival and forced to return to their originating countries. In February a district court in Washington state issued a nationwide temporary restraining order enjoining enforcement of the travel ban, which the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals declined to stay. Foreseeing eventual defeat in the courts, Trump in March issued a second executive order, designed to avoid the constitutional pitfalls of the first, which it superseded. The second order also dropped Iraq from the list of targeted countries and narrowed the categories of persons whose travel would be affected. Nevertheless, district courts in Hawaii and Maryland issued injunctions blocking enforcement of the revised travel ban, which were largely upheld in May and June by the Fourth and Ninth Circuit Courts of Appeal, respectively. After agreeing in June to hear the consolidated cases during its October 2017 term, the U.S. Supreme Court lifted the injunctions for “foreign nationals who lack any bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States.”

Emoluments clause

During the presidential election campaign, some of Trump’s critics had warned that his presidency could create a unique and immediate constitutional crisis because of his possible violation of the foreign emoluments clause of the U.S. Constitution, which generally prohibits federal officeholders from accepting gifts, payments, or other items of value from foreign states or rulers without congressional permission. (A related constitutional provision, known as the domestic emoluments clause, specifically prohibits the president from receiving any emolument from the federal government or the states beyond his official compensation.) Trump’s vast, complex, and largely secret international business interests, it was argued, could create exactly the kind of conflict of interest that the foreign emoluments clause was intended to prevent—unless Trump were to sell his assets or place them in a blind trust. Although federal conflict-of-interest laws do not apply to the president and vice president, several of Trump’s immediate predecessors in office had used blind trusts or other means to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest.

To address such concerns, in January Trump announced that he would surrender control—but not ownership—of his company, the Trump Organization, to two of his sons; that the company would undertake no new business deals with foreign states or the U.S. government; and that the company would donate to the U.S. Treasury any profits derived from patronage of Trump properties by foreign governments—an arrangement that failed to satisfy some specialists in government ethics. In late January a public interest group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, later joined by other plaintiffs, filed suit in federal district court in Manhattan, alleging that Trump was in violation of the foreign emoluments clause. In June the attorneys general of Maryland and the District of Columbia sued Trump for allegedly having violated both the foreign and domestic emoluments clauses, and soon afterward nearly 200 Democratic members of Congress filed a separate suit alleging that, by continuing to accept emoluments from foreign states without consulting Congress, Trump had denied them the opportunity to give or withhold their “Consent” as required under the foreign emoluments clause.

Supreme Court

Also in January, Trump made good on his promise to place conservative justices on the Supreme Court by nominating Neil Gorsuch to fill the seat that had become vacant with the death in February 2016 of Antonin Scalia. Although Obama had put forward Merrick Garland, a judicial moderate, as Scalia’s replacement, the Republican-controlled Senate refused to schedule a vote or even to hold hearings on Garland’s nomination, preferring to gamble that a Republican would win the election and nominate a more conservative justice. Gorsuch was confirmed by the Senate in April after Senate Republicans overcame a Democratic filibuster by removing the traditional 60-vote minimum needed to end debate and proceed to a vote.

Cabinet appointments

Trump took an unusually long time to assemble his cabinet, in part because many of his nominations to positions requiring Senate confirmation were filibustered by Democrats. His cabinet was also unusual in that it was the least diverse in decades and by far the richest in U.S. history. Some of Trump’s cabinet-level appointments were closely associated with the firms or industries that their agencies were charged with overseeing or were well known for having opposed their agencies’ basic missions in the past. Particularly controversial were Trump’s choice for head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Scott Pruitt, who as Oklahoma attorney general had spent much of his career suing the EPA on behalf of the oil and gas industry, and Trump’s choice for secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, who had frequently expressed contempt for public education while promoting and financially supporting school voucher legislation and charter and private schools. He also appointed Steve Bannon, the former head of Breitbart News, an alt-right publishing platform, as chief strategist. Trump gave his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and his daughter Ivanka Trump prominent (though unpaid) roles as senior adviser to the president and assistant to the president, respectively.

Russia investigation

In February Trump’s new national security adviser, Michael Flynn, was forced to resign after press reports disclosed that Flynn had continued to serve in the White House despite a warning from the Justice Department that he was vulnerable to Russian blackmail for having lied to Vice President Pence about the substance of a telephone conversation between Flynn and the Russian ambassador to the United States in December 2016. Flynn’s contacts with the ambassador, both before and after the election, had been monitored by the FBI as part of its routine surveillance of the ambassador’s communications and in connection with a then-secret investigation since July 2016 of possible collusion between Russian officials and prominent members of the Trump campaign. Speculation in the press regarding the existence of such an investigation had been repeatedly dismissed by Trump as “fake news” but was confirmed by Comey in testimony before Congress in March, during which he also contradicted Trump’s claim that Obama had spied on the Trump campaign by tapping Trump’s telephones. Democratic members of Congress, meanwhile, expressed dismay that Comey had chosen to report the discovery of additional Clinton e-mails in October but had waited until after the election to reveal the Russia investigation.

After Comey testified again in May about Russian interference in the election, Trump abruptly fired him, ostensibly on the recommendation of the Justice Department, which in memos solicited by Trump criticized Comey for his public disclosures regarding Clinton’s e-mails. One day later Trump told Russian officials in a meeting at the White House that his firing of Comey had relieved “great pressure” on him and that Comey was “a real nut job.” Trump soon acknowledged that he had intended to fire Comey regardless of the Justice Department’s recommendation and that “this Russia thing” was a factor in his decision. Later that month the press obtained a copy of a memo written by Comey that summarized a conversation between Comey and Trump at a dinner at the White House in January. The memo stated that Trump had asked Comey to pledge “loyalty” to him and that Trump had indirectly requested that Comey drop the FBI’s investigation of Flynn. The memo immediately raised concerns, even among some Republicans, that Trump’s actions may have constituted obstruction of justice. The Justice Department then announced the appointment of former FBI director Robert Mueller as special counsel to oversee the FBI’s investigation of Russian interference in the election and possible collusion between Russian officials and the Trump campaign.

Comey’s testimony in June before the Senate Intelligence Committee, which, like the House Intelligence Committee, was conducting its own investigation of Russia, was broadcast live on television, radio, and the Internet. Many Americans watched from bars and restaurants, which opened early in some parts of the country to provide venues for viewing the much-anticipated event. Comey accused Trump and other administration officials of lying about Comey’s effectiveness as director of the FBI, and he attributed his being fired to Trump’s alleged desire to shut down the Russia investigation. Comey also revealed that, after being fired, he indirectly leaked the memo that recounted his dinner conversation with Trump in the hope of triggering the appointment of a special counsel who would continue the Russia investigation.

Health care

An early goal of the Trump administration, as reflected in Trump’s first executive order, was the repeal of Obamacare, which Trump had long derided—even before announcing his presidential bid—as an expensive failure. Trump pledged during his campaign that he would replace the ACA with a bill that would provide better coverage at lower premiums, and he promised that no one would lose health insurance under his plan. However, the details of the bill, called in the House of Representatives the American Health Care Act (AHCA), proved contentious, even within his own party. Because Trump had not worked out a specific plan of his own, he was forced to rely on Republicans in the House to draft a substantive bill that would reduce government involvement in the health insurance market without depriving millions of Americans of the coverage they had acquired under the ACA. The Republicans did not have a detailed alternative in hand, however, resulting in a delay in Trump’s promised repeal of the law.

In early March House Republicans introduced their plan, which featured elimination of the ACA’s “individual mandate” (the requirement that most Americans obtain health insurance or pay a penalty), a reduction in individual tax credits for the purchase of insurance, cuts in federal Medicaid funding, and nearly $1 trillion in tax cuts over a 10-year period, including $274 billion in cuts for persons earning at least $200,000 a year. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) initially estimated that the plan would reduce the federal deficit by $337 billion over 10 years but would also increase the number of uninsured people by 24 million over the same period. The bill immediately faced objections from both moderate and conservative Republicans. The former worried that too many people would lose affordable coverage, while the latter complained that the plan left too many burdensome provisions of the ACA in place. The anxieties of moderates in particular were amplified by the angry feedback they received at town hall meetings throughout the country from constituents who feared the loss of their health insurance. Unable to bridge the differences between the two factions, in late March the House leadership withdrew the bill without a vote—a major defeat for Trump, who had made repeal and replacement of the ACA a centrepiece of his campaign.

Six weeks later the House narrowly passed a revised version of the AHCA over the unanimous opposition of Democrats. A subsequent CBO analysis projected that the new version would reduce the deficit by $119 billion over 10 years but increase the number of uninsured by 23 million.

Soon after the AHCA was passed, Republicans in the Senate, working largely in secret and without input from Democrats, began crafting their own replacement for the ACA, initially called the Better Care Reconciliation Act (BCRA). Like the AHCA, the BCRA, in numerous versions under various names, would have decreased the deficit but significantly increased the number of uninsured, and it would have increased insurance premiums in the first year after its passage, according to analyses released by the CBO in late June. The BCRA thus faced the same criticisms that had beset the House measure, revealing deep divisions between Senate Republicans who wished to limit the loss of health insurance in their states and those who aimed to dismantle as much of the current law as possible. Eventually, within a single week in late July, the Senate voted on three bills: a repeal of major provisions of the ACA without immediate replacement; a relatively comprehensive repeal and replacement of the ACA; and a more modest “skinny” repeal and replacement. Despite considerable political pressure on Senate Republicans from the Trump administration, all three measures failed.

Environmental policy

One of the areas in which the Trump administration was able to move quickly to implement its policies was the environment, in part because many of the changes it sought could be accomplished through executive action by Trump or his appointees. Other changes were undertaken through legislation adopted by Congress, whose Republican majority generally shared Trump’s environmental views. In January, for example, Trump signed memoranda to hasten approval and completion of the Dakota Access and Keystone XL oil pipelines, both of which had been blocked by the Obama administration on environmental grounds. In February Trump signed legislation to block an Interior Department rule that would have restricted the dumping of toxic mining waste into streams and other waterways. In March Trump signed an executive order that rescinded various Obama-era policies and programs related to climate change, including a 2016 freeze on new coal leases on federal lands. In the same month, EPA administrator Pruitt withdrew an EPA request that oil and natural gas companies report methane emissions from their facilities and rejected a total ban on the pesticide chlorpyrifos, against the advice of the EPA’s own scientists.

Undoubtedly the most momentous environmental decision of the new Trump administration was Trump’s announcement in June that the United States would withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate change, under which the United States and 194 other countries had agreed to a broad range of measures intended to limit potentially catastrophic increases in global average temperatures during the 21st century and to mitigate the economic consequences of global warming. Trump contended that the agreement would harm the American economy (through government-mandated reductions in the country’s greenhouse gas emissions) and was in other respects unfair and even demeaning to the United States—historically the largest emitter of greenhouse gases and in the early 21st century the second largest emitter after China. Trump’s decision was condemned by government and political leaders, scientists, business executives, and activists throughout the world but praised by Republicans in Congress, who viewed it as a reassertion of American independence in world affairs and a repudiation of the environmental policies of the Obama administration. Like Trump, many Republican lawmakers doubted that climate change was real, while others questioned the human origins of global warming.