Some Democrats blamed what they saw as the undemocratic nature of the electoral college for Clinton’s defeat. Others pointed to Comey’s actions, “fake news” that had been generated by questionable Internet sites and subsequently shared as true news on social media sites like Facebook, and intervention in the election by Russia, including computer hacking of the e-mail of members of the Democratic National Committee and its release through WikiLeaks. During the transition period between the Obama administration and the incoming Trump administration, 17 U.S. intelligence agencies collectively indicated their belief that the Russian government had engaged in a systematic effort to influence the election in Trump’s favour. The president-elect forcefully questioned this conclusion, and Republicans largely dismissed the Democrats’ broader accusations as efforts to undermine the legitimacy of Trump’s impending presidency.
United States presidential election of 2016Results of the U.S. presidential election, 2016.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
“America First,” the Women’s Marches, Trump on Twitter, and “fake news”
In his inaugural address on January 20, 2017, Trump echoed the populist criticism of the Washington establishment that had been a hallmark of his campaign and struck a strongly nationalist “America First” tone, promising that “America will start winning again, winning like never before.” The day after Trump’s inauguration, “Women’s Marches” and supporting events were held in cities across the United States and abroad in support of (among other issues) gender and racial equality and in defiance of the legislative and cultural challenges to them that the marchers expected from President Trump and a Republican congressional majority. Estimates varied, but many observers suggested that between 3.3 million and 4.6 million people had turned out to march in U.S. cities, making the collective action one of the largest mass protests in U.S. history.
Women's March, Washington, D.C.A crowd filling Independence Avenue during the Women's March in Washington, D.C., January 21, 2017.Alex Brandon/AP Images
Trump’s first months in office were steeped in controversy. From the outset, his approach to the presidency departed from many of the expectations associated with the conduct of the chief executive. Most notably, he continued to use Twitter regularly, arguably employing it as his principal platform for expressing presidential prerogative. Having appropriated the term “fake news” to denigrate mainstream media coverage of events that were unfavourable to his administration, he sought to circumvent the press and shape the country’s political narrative directly. Critics characterized the sometimes personal assaults contained in his tweets as beneath the dignity of the presidency; supporters saw the unfiltered (seemingly impulsive) immediacy of these terse statements as the embodiment of his anti-Washington establishment stance.
Scuttling U.S. participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, reconsidering the Keystone XL pipeline, and withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement
Among Trump’s first steps as president were executive actions aimed at fulfilling a number of his most prominent campaign promises. In addition to directives paving the way for the unraveling of Obamacare and guaranteeing nonparticipation by the United States in the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, a trade deal championed by Obama, Trump was quick to reverse Obama’s policies directed at protecting the environment. The new president signed memoranda that set the stage for reconsidering the Keystone XL pipeline—a 1,179-mile (1,897-km) oil pipeline project that had been rejected by his predecessor in 2015—as well as the Dakota Access Pipeline, the completion of which entailed construction of a section cutting across part of the Missouri River that would potentially endanger the water supply of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and which had been halted by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers pending the completion of an environmental impact statement. Trump’s actions were aimed at delivering on his campaign promise to expand U.S. energy exploration and production. The new president’s most controversial policy decision in the first six months of his presidency regarding the environment came in June 2017, when he announced the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate change, a broad range of measures (agreed to by 195 countries) aimed at limiting increases in worldwide temperatures and mitigating the economic consequences of global warming. Trump, who doubted that climate change was real, argued that the agreement was unfair to the United States and that its mandate for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions would damage the U.S. economy.
ICE enforcement and removal operations
Within his first week in office, Trump had fulfilled another of his signature campaign promises by issuing an executive order mandating the construction of a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico aimed at controlling illegal immigration. An additional executive order authorized the withholding of federal funds from “sanctuary” cities that had chosen to provide refuge for illegal immigrants. That order was answered with defiant statements by a number of big-city mayors. Nevertheless, at the administration’s behest, in February the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency began an aggressive effort to apprehend and deport undocumented immigrants. The operation targeted individuals with serious criminal records, but opponents of the policy argued that it was being used less specifically to simply round up undocumented immigrants. Many observers were surprised in June, however, when the Trump administration announced that it would allow the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program to stand, thus continuing to bar the deportation of undocumented immigrants who had come to the United States as children. At the same time, though, the administration eliminated a parallel program that would have similarly prohibited the deportation of undocumented parents of children who are U.S. citizens or legal residents.
The travel ban
Immigration was also the focus of another controversial executive order early in Trump’s term. Issued in late January, the order suspended immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries and, in the eyes of many, effectively fulfilled Trump’s campaign promise to institute a “Muslim ban.” This so-called travel ban was immediately greeted with widespread protests at U.S. airports. By early February, enforcement of the ban had been enjoined nationwide by order of a district court in Washington state. After the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals declined to stay the order, in March the Trump administration superseded the first executive order with a second that was crafted to get around the constitutional challenges to the first that were grounded in the assertion that it violated both the due process clause and the establishment-of-religion clause. Enforcement of the new ban—which removed Iraq from the list of countries involved and narrowed the categories of affected persons—was blocked by injunctions issued by district courts in Hawaii and Maryland that were largely upheld in May and June by the Fourth and Ninth Circuit Courts of Appeals, respectively. In June the U.S. Supreme Court put these cases on the docket for its October 2017 term and in the interim removed the injunctions for “foreign nationals who lack any bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States.”
Pursuing “repeal and replacement” of Obamacare
The “repeal and replacement” of Obamacare—another of Trump’s central campaign pledges and a fundamental objective for the Republican Party during the Obama era—moved forward slowly, in fits and starts. In the absence of a detailed plan from the Trump administration, House Republicans, led by Speaker Paul Ryan, took the lead in advancing the American Health Care Act (AHCA), which was intended to reduce the federal government’s involvement in health care without eliminating the care provided for millions of Americans by the PPACA, long characterized by Republicans as a costly catastrophe. Introduced in March, the AHCA met with lockstep opposition from Democrats and proved contentious with Republicans. The bill did away with the PPACA’s requirement that most Americans obtain health insurance or pay a penalty, rolled back federal funding of Medicaid, and, as part of nearly $1 trillion in proposed tax cuts over 10 years, promised $274 billion in tax cuts for Americans earning at least $200,000 per year. According to estimates by the Congressional Budget Office, the AHCA would trim the federal deficit by some $337 billion over 10 years, but it would also leave an additional 24 million Americans without health insurance. The most conservative House Republicans argued that the bill did not go far enough in undoing Obamacare, while moderate Republicans feared that it would leave too many people unable to pay for health care. In response to this lack of consensus, Ryan pulled the legislation in March, before it was put to a vote, but at the beginning of May a revised version of the act was adopted by a 217–213 vote in which 20 Republicans joined the Democrats in opposition.