Trump’s first presidential term

A major theme of Trump’s presidential campaign was his view that the United States had long been treated unfairly or taken advantage of by other countries, including by some traditional U.S. allies, and that under Obama’s leadership the United States had ceased to be respected in world affairs. In numerous speeches, tweets, and interviews, he threatened to impose tariffs on countries that engaged in what he deemed unfair trade practices; harshly criticized the World Trade Organization (WTO); and promised to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which he called “the worst trade deal” the United States had ever signed. He also criticized the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), dismissing the alliance as “obsolete” but also insisting that other NATO countries devote more of their budgets to defense spending. In January 2017 he withdrew the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a regional trade agreement between 12 Pacific Rim countries that had been a major foreign policy achievement of the Obama administration; Trump’s action was largely symbolic, however, because the Senate had never ratified the treaty.

In January and March 2018 the Trump administration announced steep tariffs on imports of solar panels (worth $8.5 billion per year) and washing machines (worth $1 billion), aimed particularly at China and South Korea, and on imports of aluminum and steel (worth $48 billion) made in several countries, most of them U.S. allies (initial exemptions from the aluminum and steel duties granted to Canada, the European Union [EU], and Mexico were lifted in June). Dismissing warnings and criticisms from economists and business leaders that the tariffs could ignite a trade war, Trump insisted in a tweet that “trade wars are good, and easy to win.” In April China imposed retaliatory tariffs on a variety of U.S. goods worth $2.4 billion annually, approximately the dollar amount of Chinese aluminum and steel imports affected by the Trump tariffs. The EU followed suit in June with tariffs on U.S. imports valued at $3.2 billion, as did Canada in July with tariffs on $12.8 billion of U.S. goods. Following its official finding that the Chinese had engaged in unfair trade practices, in June the Trump administration announced plans for tariffs on an additional $50 billion of dollars worth of Chinese products, prompting China to announce comparable duties. Threats and counterthreats of additional tariffs soon followed, and by July the two countries were engaged in a full-blown trade war.

Trump’s tariffs and his antipathy to the WTO overshadowed the meeting in early June of the Group of 7 in Quebec, Canada, which was marked by tense disagreement between Trump and other G7 leaders over language regarding free trade in the meeting’s final communiqué, usually a bland formality. Following Trump’s early departure from the meeting, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau reiterated his country’s reluctant determination to respond in kind to Trump’s tariffs on aluminum and steel. Reacting to Trudeau’s remarks during a flight to Singapore aboard Air Force One, Trump withdrew his endorsement of the communiqué and called Trudeau “dishonest” and “weak.” In Singapore Trump held a historic meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un, the first face-to-face encounter between sitting leaders of the two countries. Although Trump declared after the meeting that “there is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea,” it was unclear what concrete commitments North Korea had made to nuclear disarmament. In July Trump attended the annual summit meeting of NATO in Brussels, where in a speech he called other NATO countries “delinquent” and insisted that they increase their defense spending “immediately.” The meeting ended with a joint communiqué in which member countries agreed to continue their efforts to devote 2 percent of their GDP to defense spending by 2024, a goal they had agreed to in 2014.

In May 2018 Trump announced the withdrawal of the United States from a 2015 accord between Iran and five major powers—formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—that had limited Iran’s uranium-enrichment activities and required it to submit to frequent international inspections of its nuclear facilities in return for the lifting of economic sanctions. After the United States killed Iran’s highest-ranking security and intelligence official in a drone strike ordered by Trump, Iran announced in January 2020 that it would no longer observe the JCPOA-imposed restrictions on its enrichment activities, though it stopped short of formally exiting the agreement.

Ukraine scandal

In August 2019 an anonymous whistleblower, later determined to be an official of the CIA, filed a complaint with the inspector general of the U.S. intelligence community, Michael Atkinson, alleging that in a July 25 phone call with the newly elected president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump had attempted to extort a promise from Zelensky to interfere in the 2020 U.S. presidential election on Trump’s behalf. Specifically, according to the complaint, Trump strongly implied that some $400 million in congressionally mandated security assistance to Ukraine would not be provided unless Zelensky carried out two requests, which Trump introduced by saying, “I would like you to do us a favor though….” The first request was that Zelensky search for a computer server used by the Democratic National Committee that supposedly had been hidden in Ukraine after the Internet security firm CrowdStrike determined in 2016 that it had been broken into by hackers based in Russia. According to the CrowdStrike conspiracy theory, which originated as a disinformation campaign by Russia, the missing server contained evidence that the hackers were in fact Ukrainian and that Democrats and CrowdStrike had conspired to falsely blame Russia for interfering in the 2016 presidential election.

(What is a quid pro quo and is it always bad? Read examples from history.)

The second request was that Zelensky investigate Biden’s allegedly corrupt motive for pressuring the Ukrainian government in 2015, while Biden was serving as vice president in the Obama administration, to fire the country’s prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin. According to the Burisma conspiracy theory, as it came to be known, Biden called for Shokin’s removal only in order to halt an investigation of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings, Ltd., that threatened to uncover wrongdoing by Biden’s son Hunter, who was then serving on the company’s board of directors. No serious evidence of wrongdoing by Biden or his son was ever produced, however. In his phone conversation, Trump also repeatedly suggested to Zelensky that in planning or conducting the requested investigations he deal directly with Attorney General Barr and Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani.

In September 2019, after the press began reporting that Trump’s conversation with Zelensky may have involved a “quid pro quo,” the aid to Ukraine was finally released, and the White House later issued what it called a “rough transcript” of the phone call, which nevertheless did not support Trump’s assertion that there had been no quid pro quo. Later that month Pelosi changed her stance on the impeachment question, announcing that Trump’s attempt to extort a foreign leader to interfere in a U.S. election constituted a betrayal of his oath of office and therefore warranted a formal impeachment inquiry. In testimony before the House Intelligence Committee and later the House Judiciary Committee, career civil servants in the State Department and other witnesses confirmed the outlines of the whistleblower’s account of Trump’s phone call and further indicated that Trump had been attempting to conduct what amounted to a separate “back channel” foreign policy through Giuliani, Barr, and others. In December the Judiciary Committee drafted two articles of impeachment against Trump, one for abuse of power and the other for obstruction of Congress. Those articles were adopted in two party-line votes by the entire House on December 18, making Trump the third president in U.S. history to be impeached. Trump was acquitted by the Senate in February 2020 after a majority of senators voted to find him not guilty on both charges. For additional discussion, see Ukraine scandal.

COVID-19 pandemic

In January 2020 the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the continuing spread of COVID-19—a deadly and highly contagious respiratory illness caused by a new form of the coronavirus known as novel coronavirus, or coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2)—to be a global health emergency. First reported in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2019, the virus soon spread throughout China and then to Europe, the United States, and other regions, prompting WHO to announce in March 2020 that COVID-19 had become a global pandemic. At that time there were more than 118,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 worldwide and nearly 4,300 deaths. By year’s end those numbers had reached approximately 83 million and 1.8 million, respectively.

See What was the impact of COVID-19?)

Soon after the first known case in the United States was identified in mid-January 2020, Trump was privately informed by officials within his administration that the pandemic could result in massive numbers of American deaths and severe damage to the U.S. economy. Those warnings were repeated to Trump for several weeks through February and early March as the numbers of positive tests for the coronavirus and confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the country continued to rise.

At the end of January, Trump imposed a partial entry ban on foreign travelers who had recently visited China. However, he initially neglected to implement the aggressive measures that had been recommended to him to slow the spread of the coronavirus and reduce the number of likely deaths. Such proposals included increasing the country’s testing capacity and developing a national strategy for testing, contact tracing, and quarantining; using his authority under the Defense Production Act (DPA) of 1950 to increase production of personal protective equipment (PPE) for medical personnel and ventilators for critically ill patients; establishing a national purchasing and distribution system to allocate PPE and ventilators to states and localities according to need; and issuing national science-based guidelines for closing businesses and schools, social distancing, mask wearing, and other safety measures. In many of his public statements, Trump downplayed the threat posed by the pandemic, the extent of its spread in the United States, and the severity of COVID-19 itself. In other statements, some made in tweets and at press briefings in April following meetings of the White House coronavirus task force (first convened in late January), he promoted supposed alternative remedies for the virus that were known to be ineffective, unproved, or even deadly, and he made other false claims that expert members of the task force were obliged to contradict.

After WHO’s global pandemic announcement, Trump declared a national emergency, suspended travel to the United States from several European countries, and recommended that Americans practice social distancing for the remainder of March (he later extended that period to April 30). At the end of March he invoked the DPA to officially direct the automobile manufacturer General Motors to produce ventilators. By then, many states had already closed businesses and schools, restricted public gatherings, issued stay-at-home orders, and mandated mask wearing in public spaces. States and individual hospitals were also redoubling their efforts to find increasingly scarce ventilators and respirators after Trump told state governors in a conference call that they should make their own arrangements to obtain such equipment.

The widespread business closings and the shift to work-from-home arrangements in some industries resulted in massive layoffs, eventually producing unemployment levels not seen since the early 1930s and a deep recession. In late March Congress passed, and Trump signed into law, a $2.2 trillion economic relief package, the CARES (Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security) Act, which included a loan program for small businesses, an increase in unemployment benefits through July, one-time direct payments to households, increased funding for food-stamp and child-nutrition programs, and financial aid to state and local governments, which had been overwhelmed by unemployment claims and unprecedented demands for emergency services. Two months later the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives adopted a more extensive ($3 trillion) relief measure, the HEROES (Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions) Act, whose provisions included a vote-by-mail option in all federal elections beginning in November and additional funding for the U.S. Postal Service, which was then handling greatly increased numbers of mail-in (or absentee) ballots cast by primary-election voters wishing to avoid exposure to the coronavirus in voting lines and polling stations. Senate Republicans, however, refused to take up the measure, in part because it failed to protect reopened businesses against potential lawsuits by workers who contracted COVID-19 on the job. In late December, after several months of inaction, Congress finally passed scaled-back relief legislation, including a modest temporary increase in unemployment benefits.

Through the spring and summer, while occasionally acknowledging the real scope and seriousness of the pandemic, Trump continued to predict the imminent disappearance of the coronavirus; to dispute or misrepresent official numbers of positive tests, confirmed cases, and deaths in the United States; to promote conspiracy theories that attributed high official numbers to a variety of patently false causes; and to criticize public health officials whose assessments or recommendations did not reflect positively on his leadership. In April and May, as the numbers of new COVID-19 cases and deaths nationwide began to plateau, Trump pushed the states to quickly rescind the public health measures that had helped to slow the spread of the coronavirus, portraying state-imposed business closings and especially mask mandates as violations of economic freedom and individual liberty. Trump’s misrepresentations inspired many of his supporters to hold anti-lockdown demonstrations and to flout state and local mask-wearing orders and limits on public gatherings. Trump’s own refusal to wear a mask in public, a pointed signal of his contempt for such regulations, led many of his supporters, including several Republican governors and lawmakers, to regard the refusal to wear a mask in public as a kind of political statement—an expression of allegiance to Trump and the Republican Party.

In May and June the governors of several states, mostly in the South, responded to Trump’s pressure by relaxing or lifting pandemic-related restrictions—in particular, mask-wearing orders. Partly as a result of those premature changes, a second surge of the pandemic—a spike in positive test rates and in numbers of COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths—occurred in those and a few other states, forcing governors to reimpose restrictions they had declared unnecessary only a few weeks before.

In early October, during the final weeks of his presidential campaign, Trump himself tested positive for the coronavirus and developed COVID-19. He was admitted to Walter Reed Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, with respiratory symptoms and was reportedly treated there with advanced experimental drugs unavailable to almost all other Americans. Released at his insistence after only three days, he eventually resumed his campaign rallies before mostly unmasked supporters in several states. As before, Trump declined to wear a mask in public. Meanwhile, a third surge of the pandemic, which experts had warned would be far more deadly than the second, had begun. By the end of December 2020, more than 350,000 Americans had died of the illness.

Campaigns and litigation

Facing no serious challengers in the Republican presidential primaries of 2020, Trump became the party’s presumptive nominee in March, having by then collected the minimum number of delegates necessary to win the nomination. He was formally nominated at the Republican National Convention in late August. In an unusual decision, the Republican National Committee declined to write a platform for the 2020 election, instead adopting the same platform it had issued in 2016 (despite its ironically dated criticisms of the “current” president) with an accompanying resolution declaring that “the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda.” Shortly before the start of the Republican convention, the Trump campaign released a list of Trump’s “core priorities” for a second term, including “Create 10 Million New Jobs in 10 Months,” “Develop a [COVID-19] Vaccine by The End of 2020,” “Return to Normal in 2021,” “Protect Social Security and Medicare,” “Bring Violent Extremist Groups Like ANTIFA to Justice,” and “Require New Immigrants to Be Able to Support Themselves Financially.” Throughout his campaign Trump also kept up a steady stream of insults and name-calling aimed at Biden, who became the Democratic Party’s presumptive presidential nominee in April and was formally nominated at his party’s national convention in mid-August. Biden promised that as president he would, among other things, bring the COVID-19 pandemic under control, reverse Trump’s policies on immigration and the environment, repair the country’s frayed relations with foreign allies, repeal the 2017 corporate tax cut, strengthen voting rights, and expand access to health insurance under Obamacare.

The COVID-19 pandemic was understandably a dominant issue in the election. Biden accused Trump of ignoring the early spread of the illness in the United States, mismanaging the nation’s pandemic response, and resisting appropriate input and leadership from government scientific and health experts. Trump, for his part, initially accused Democrats of perpetrating a “hoax” by exaggerating the extent of infection and the danger of the illness. Through the remainder of his campaign, he continued to allege that Biden and other Democrats were overstating the severity of the health crisis for political advantage. A parallel issue was the adequacy of pandemic-related economic relief for individuals, businesses, and state and local governments.

The pandemic also prompted governors and election officials in several states to postpone primary elections or to implement changes in election procedures to enable voters to cast their ballots safely. Such changes included extending voter registration deadlines and early voting periods; loosening or eliminating requirements for obtaining or casting mail-in ballots, which millions of voters were expected to use as an alternative to in-person voting; authorizing the use of drop boxes for returning mail-in ballots; and extending postelection deadlines for receipt of mail-in ballots, whose delivery was expected to be slowed by postal service delays and overwhelming demand. A smaller but still significant number of states declined to change their election procedures or did so in ways that arguably made voting more difficult or less safe than in other states. In October 2020, for example, the Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, issued a directive that limited mail-in ballot drop boxes to one per county.

Pandemic-related changes to state election procedures were intensively litigated. Some were adopted in response to orders issued by federal or state courts, whose rulings were then upheld or struck down on appeal; others were initiated by state authorities and then challenged in the courts. In general, challenges to such changes were lodged by Republican election and government officials, state Republican parties and the Republican National Committee, and the Trump campaign, usually on the grounds that the changes usurped the constitutional authority of state legislatures to establish electoral laws and procedures or that they invited voter fraud (none of the suits, however, presented any evidence of significant fraud). Democrats generally defended the changes as both constitutional and necessary to ensure the opportunity to vote amid an extraordinary public health emergency; they also alleged that Republican opposition to the changes amounted to a form of voter suppression that could unfairly turn the election in Trump’s favor in swing states. In all, more than 300 election-related lawsuits were filed by both Democrats and Republicans prior to election day. The vast majority of Republican challenges were eventually dismissed.

Underlying the strategies of both parties was the accurate perception that Democratic voters were more likely to use mail-in ballots than Republican voters. Trump’s oft-repeated but baseless claim that mail-in voting was rife with fraud and abuse only magnified Democratic concerns about alleged Republican voter suppression. So too did the appointment in May 2020 of a new postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, a major Trump donor, who immediately implemented service cuts and other operational changes in the U.S. Postal Service that slowed mail delivery throughout the country.

Trump’s attacks on mail-in voting and on the postal service itself were one element of a broader accusation that he had emphasized during the 2016 presidential campaign and continued in the 2020 campaign and beyond: that the November election would be “rigged” by Democrats, resulting in “the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history,” as he stated in a July 2020 tweet. In dozens of other tweets and at numerous campaign rallies, interviews, and press encounters, Trump claimed that thousands of mail-in ballots would be stolen or forged by foreign countries and that Democratic election officials would neglect to send mail-in ballots to Republicans and would commit election fraud by intentionally miscounting mail-in ballots. In the summer and fall of 2020 Trump notably refused to commit himself to accepting a Biden victory in November, which seemed likely, given Biden’s consistent and sizable lead over Trump in nationwide opinion polls. Trump insisted, to the contrary, that the only way the Democrats could win would be through fraud, at one point suggesting in a tweet that the election should be delayed “until people can properly, securely and safely vote???” On other occasions he asserted that he should be permitted to extend his first term to make up for the distraction of the Russia investigation.

Trump’s promotion of what amounted to a conspiracy theory of Democratic vote rigging prompted criticism and varying levels of concern among Democrats as well as Trump’s conservative critics, including a small but vocal minority of Republican pundits and journalists. Some believed that Trump was merely setting the stage for a face-saving end to his presidency; others speculated that he would use lawsuits alleging election fraud in a dubious strategy to invalidate mail-in votes in swing states or to delay certification of state elections long enough to enable Republican-controlled state legislatures to take the extreme (albeit constitutional) step of replacing slates of pro-Biden electors chosen by voters with the legislatures’ own slates of pro-Trump electors. Still others feared a scenario in which Trump would simply refuse to leave office, provoking a constitutional crisis in which (in a worst-case scenario) the U.S. military would become involved. An abiding and widely shared concern, particularly among historians and political scholars, was that Trump’s apparent conspiracy mongering would undermine Americans’ trust in democratic institutions. American democracy would be severely damaged, they argued, if a significant segment of either major party consistently refused to accept defeat in elections for president or any other high office.

The 2020 presidential election was unique and historic for the vast number of voters who cast ballots—whether in person or via mail, whether through early voting or on election day—and consequently for the vote totals of both the winning and losing candidates, Biden and Trump, respectively. Trump ultimately received more than 74 million votes and Biden more than 81 million—the latter figure being the highest for any presidential candidate in U.S. history. On the eve of the election, Trump continued to trail Biden in opinion polls in most swing states, though by thinner margins than in polls the previous summer. As voting proceeded, however, it became clear that the vote totals in some states would be far closer than polls had indicated. For a few days after election day (November 3), the outcome remained uncertain, in part because of the vast number of mail-in ballots (more than 65 million nationwide), which naturally took longer to count than in-person ballots. On November 7 the Associated Press and the major U.S. television networks called the election for Biden, who, in their analysis, had by then secured 270 electoral votes, the minimum number needed to win the presidency. The eventual vote of the Electoral College, which took place on December 14, was 306 for Biden and 232 for Trump.

Aftermath

At a press encounter in the early morning of November 4, Trump declared himself the winner of the election and denounced the counting of mail-in ballots as a “fraud on the American people.” During the next several weeks he continually accused Biden and the Democrats of having stolen the presidential election and repeated far-fetched conspiracy theories about ballot stuffing, dead voters, and malicious voting-machine software that had deleted or changed millions of votes for Trump. In addition, he personally pressured election officials and other authorities in Michigan, Georgia, and Pennsylvania to delay certifying or to overturn elections in their states and later attacked those among them who declined to cooperate.

In February 2023 a judge in Georgia ordered the partial release of the final report of a special-purpose grand jury convened in 2022 to investigate possible criminal interference in the 2020 presidential election in Georgia by Trump and his allies. In the released portions of the report, the grand jury concluded that “no widespread fraud took place in the Georgia 2020 presidential election that could result in overturning that election.” The grand jury also reported its belief that “perjury may have been committed by one or more witnesses testifying before it.”

Although nearly all preelection Republican lawsuits had been dismissed, Trump and his allies mounted scores of new challenges on similar grounds. As those efforts also failed, the Trump campaign conceived a more ambitious legal strategy. In late November a team of Trump-supporting lawyers drafted a complaint designed to be submitted directly to the Supreme Court on the basis of its original jurisdiction in cases involving disputes between the states. Eventually filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in early December, the complaint alleged that pandemic-related changes to electoral procedures in four swing states that had voted for Biden—Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin—were illegal and unconstitutional and had so increased the potential for voter fraud that Biden’s victories in those states must be overturned. On December 11 the Court tersely dismissed the suit for lack of standing.

Trump’s legal efforts were ultimately unsuccessful, but his postelection narrative of election fraud and conspiracy, thematically continuous with the false claims of vote rigging that he had been making for months, was accepted by his base of dedicated supporters. Even the less ardent among Trump voters were sympathetic to the notion that Biden had somehow cheated to win the presidential election. According to an opinion poll taken in mid-November, more than 50 percent of all Republicans believed that Trump had “rightfully” won the election; another poll, in December, found that 77 percent of Republicans believed that there had been widespread election fraud.

As vote counting continued, various groups of radicalized Trump supporters quickly coalesced around the idea that forceful protests and even violent direct action were necessary and justified to stop the counting of fraudulent ballots and prevent Biden from taking office. A short-lived Facebook group calling itself “Stop the Steal” was created on November 4 and grew to some 320,000 members in less than 24 hours before the social media company shut it down because of posts containing disinformation and calls for violence. Stop the Steal enthusiasts soon migrated to other (renamed) Facebook groups and other social media venues, where they repeated and elaborated conspiracy theories about the election and organized on-the-ground demonstrations in several cities, including at polling stations where supposedly fraudulent vote counting was underway.

After the electors from each state cast their votes for president and vice president on December 14, giving Biden an Electoral College victory of 306 to 232, Trump and his allies, as well as leaders of Stop the Steal and other pro-Trump groups across the country, turned their attention to the last, formal step in the election of a U.S. president, the ceremonial opening and counting of the electoral votes of each state in a joint session of Congress presided over by the vice president, Mike Pence, on January 6. Some Trump allies reportedly advised the president—incorrectly—that the vice president’s role in the ceremony entailed that Pence would have the constitutional authority to determine which slate of electors, Democratic or Republican, to accept from any given state. A federal lawsuit seeking a judgment to that effect, filed in late December by Texas Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert, was dismissed for lack of standing.

Meanwhile, in several tweets beginning in mid-December, Trump encouraged his supporters to attend a rally—initially planned by a pro-Trump group, Women for America First—in Washington, D.C., on January 6 to protest Congress’s confirmation of Biden’s victory. In one of the tweets, Trump stated, “Be there, will be wild!” At the rally, held at a public park near the White House, a crowd of thousands, including members of white supremacist and right-wing militia groups, listened to speeches by Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani and Trump’s sons Donald, Jr., and Eric, among others. In his own address, Trump repeated well-worn falsehoods and conspiracy theories about election fraud, called on Pence to block Congress’s confirmation of the Electoral College vote—declaring that if Pence failed to act, the crowd would not let the confirmation take place (“We’re just not going to let that happen”)—encouraged the crowd to “walk down Pennsylvania Avenue” to the Capitol building, and urged his audience to “fight like hell” or “you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Although Trump did not explicitly direct those in attendance to commit illegal acts, his generally incendiary language suggested to at least some of his supporters that they would be justified in violently attacking Congress to prevent Biden’s victory.

Even before Trump finished his address, a violent mob began storming the perimeter of the Capitol building, where the House and Senate were then debating a doomed challenge by Republican lawmakers to the slate of electors from Arizona, which had voted for Biden. The mob grew larger as more people arrived from the rally at which Trump had spoken. Capitol police were quickly overwhelmed, and for the next several hours rioters vandalized and looted various parts of the complex, including the Senate chamber and the offices of Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and others. One rioter was shot and killed by police, and four others, including a Capitol police officer, later died of injuries sustained in the assault. After the complex was cleared that evening, Congress resumed the confirmation process, and Biden was certified as the winner of the presidential election of 2020 in the early morning hours of January 7. On January 8 Trump was permanently banned from Twitter for having posted tweets before, during, and after the assault that the company deemed to be in violation of its policy against glorification of violence. (Trump’s Twitter account was later reinstated by the South African-born American billionaire Elon Musk, who purchased the company in 2022.)

Less than one week later the House of Representatives, by a vote of 232 to 197, adopted a single article of impeachment against Trump for “incitement of insurrection,” making him the first president in U.S. history to be impeached twice. At his Senate trial in February, which began three weeks after he left office on January 20, there was some debate about whether the Senate could try a president who was no longer in office. Trump was ultimately acquitted after only 57 senators, 10 short of the required two-thirds majority, voted to find him guilty.

Two days after the insurrection of January 6, which had failed to prevent Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election, Trump announced that he would not attend Biden’s inauguration. He thereby defied a tradition nearly as old as the United States, one understood to symbolize the peaceful transfer of power and thus the strength and continuity of American democracy. (Trump was the first U.S. president to decline to attend his successor’s inauguration since 1869, when Pres. Andrew Johnson refused to witness the swearing in of Ulysses S. Grant.) Trump and first lady Melania Trump left the White House on the morning of January 20, a few hours before Biden’s inauguration ceremony, and returned to their residence at Mar-a-Lago.

Unlike most former presidents in the months following their departure from office, Trump did not attempt to keep a low public profile in deference to his successor. Indeed, beginning with an address at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in February 2021, Trump delivered several public speeches in which he sharply criticized the new Biden administration, denounced Republican officeholders who had criticized or opposed him (including the 10 Republican House members who had voted to impeach him for inciting the January 6 U.S. Capitol attack), repeated his well-worn narrative of voter fraud in the 2020 election, and hinted that he intended to run for president again in 2024.

Despite his real-life electoral defeat and the ignominious circumstances of his departure from office, Trump retained a sizable base of dedicated supporters, which he continued to cultivate at his own campaign-style rallies and other events. Trump took advantage of his popularity among Republicans to become an effective kingmaker within the party, a role that he exercised by granting or withholding endorsements of individual Republican candidates for federal, state, and even local offices, many of whom traveled to Mar-a-Lago to seek his approval. (Trump’s endorsed candidates tended to fare well in the primary elections of 2022 but were only partially successful overall in the November midterm elections.) Trump also amassed huge sums of money from millions of individual donors through his political action committee (PAC) Save America and Make America Great Again, Inc. and other organizations.

Executive orders

See Major Executive Orders Issued by U.S. Pres. Donald Trump During His Second Term

Trump’s declared intention to change government structure and policy was confirmed almost immediately after his inauguration, when he began issuing dozens of far-reaching executive orders and memoranda, some of which called for actions or changes that were immediately challenged in court (see Major Executive Orders Issued by U.S. Pres. Donald Trump During His Second Term of Office [2025– ]). Among the most controversial orders was one that would have ended birthright citizenship in the United States (the unconditional acquisition of U.S. citizenship by any person born in the country), as established in the Fourteenth Amendment of 1868 (“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside”). Executive Order 14160, “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” denied citizenship to persons born in the United States whose biological parents are not themselves U.S. citizens or legally permanent residents.

Trump’s birthright citizenship order was targeted in several lawsuits and soon blocked in nationwide injunctions issued by three federal district court judges, each of whom found the order to be obviously or at least probably unconstitutional. After appellate courts refused to reverse or delay the injunctions, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to intervene, arguing that the injunctions should apply only to individual plaintiffs or at most to residents of the states in which the injunctions were issued. The Court added Trump’s request to the cases of its 2024–25 term and heard oral arguments from both sides on May 15, 2025.

In its decision on June 27, the Court addressed the question of whether the federal judges involved were empowered to issue nationwide injunctions against Trump’s executive order—holding that “universal injunctions likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has granted to federal courts”—but did not decide the underlying issue of whether Trump’s order was in violation of the citizenship clause. The immediate, though temporary, effect of the ruling was to enable the Trump administration to continue denying birthright citizenship to about 4.4 million U.S.-born children with at least one undocumented parent.

In a separate petition filed in September 2025, Trump asked the Supreme Court to review two lower court decisions finding that the order was unconstitutional under the citizenship clause. In December the Court agreed to hear the case, Trump v. Barbara, in its 2025–26 term. (Trump attended the government’s oral argument—the first sitting president in U.S. history to do so—and left soon afterward.) On the final day of its term—June 30, 2026—the Court ruled that the order was in violation of both the citizenship clause and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952.

Trump sharply criticized the Court’s ruling and declared his intention to file a petition asking that the Court reconsider its decision—though no such request was submitted by the Court’s due date of July 27. In early August Trump signed two new executive orders in a second attempt to restrict birthright citizenship. One order, “Continuing to Protect the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” denied automatic citizenship to children born to foreign adults working in the United States for foreign governments or officially regarded as terrorists or “alien enemies.” The other order, “Ending Birth Tourism,” prevented entry into the United States of foreign women attempting to give birth on American soil; the order also denied U.S. citizenship to children born in the United States whose foreign mothers had entered the country for just that purpose. In early September 2026, the district court of Maryland issued a preliminary injunction of Trump’s order “Continuing to Protect the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship” on the ground that it is inconsistent with the Supreme Court’s earlier rejection of Trump’s original birthright citizenship order and therefore likely to be found unconstitutional.

Another very controversial executive order issued by Trump, “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections,” effectively required states to ensure that people registering to vote in federal congressional elections present particular documentary proof of their U.S. citizenship. The order also called upon the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to “review each State’s publicly available voter registration list…alongside Federal immigration databases” and to send to each state a list of persons who are or will be qualified to vote. Other elements of the order called for financial penalties on states that recognize mail-in ballots received after federal “Election Day” and prohibited the United States Postal Service (USPS) from delivering ballots to people who are not on its own list of qualified voters. Trump’s order was immediately criticized for its apparent consequence that married persons who adopt the last names of their partners would not be able to prove their citizenship with birth certificates, which list only their original last names. And other persons, according to critics, might have difficulty proving their citizenship simply because they lack ready access to the required documents. Although Trump’s order cited federal election law in its support, many Democrats argued that Trump’s order is illegitimate given that states are empowered to set the “Times, Places and Manner” of elections under Article 4, Section I of the U.S. Constitution. In a shadow docket ruling issued on August 24, 2026, the Supreme Court stayed a district decision that prohibited enforcement of Trump’s order prior to the midterm elections in November. Two days later, the district court issued a two-week stay of relevant provisions of Trump’s order on the ground that the USPS had completed its final rule the week before the shadow docket ruling and that its enforcement activities would undermine the upcoming midterm elections. One week later, Trump asked the Supreme Court to freeze the district court’s stay; on the following day, the district court issued an injunction indefinitely blocking enforcement of Trump’s order; and two days later Trump asked the Court to stay the district court’s latest injunction. On September 14, 2026, the Court denied Trump’s request in its own unsigned order, noting that “the Government is unlikely to succeed on the merits of its challenge to the District Court’s preliminary injunction.”

Trump’s order had also been enjoined in another district court decision citing its provision that DHS voter lists provided to states “shall be derived from Federal citizenship and naturalization records,” including data compiled by the Social Security Administration (SSA), the DHS’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlement (SAVE) program, and “other relevant Federal databases.” On that basis the government expanded accessible SAVE data to include various records of U.S.-born citizens, including individual Social Security numbers. The court found that the government’s compilation of data was in violation of the Social Security Act and federal privacy laws. On September 25, 2026, the Supreme Court stayed the lower court’s ruling, holding that it was unlikely that the data collection would be found illegal.

…

See Major Supreme Court Cases of the 2025–26 Term

Through other early executive orders, Trump

• imposed 25 percent tariffs on goods from Canada and Mexico and 10 percent tariffs on goods from China (in later executive orders and memoranda, Trump expanded tariffs to nearly all U.S. trading partners and repeatedly modified—i.e., reduced, increased, stayed, or made product-related exceptions to—existing tariffs on Canada, Mexico, China, and many other countries);
• attempted to prevent gender transition care for persons under 19 years of age, in part by forbidding government insurance programs from financing such treatment;
• mandated that government agencies recognize only two “biological” sexes, male and female;
• denied federal funding to schools that allow transgender student athletes to compete as members of girls’ or women’s sports teams;
• ordered a plan to prevent teachers and administrators in K–12 schools from informing students of the existence of racial and ethnic discrimination and bias or accepting a student’s transgender or nonbinary identity;
• terminated diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs in all federal agencies and the U.S. military;
• withdrew the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement (2015);
• declared a “national energy emergency” to facilitate oil and gas drilling (in fulfillment of his campaign pledge to “drill baby drill!”) and to overrule Biden-era restrictions on drilling and mining in Alaska;
• declared another national emergency at the southern border of the United States, calling for the “efficient and expedited removal of [undocumented] aliens” and the defunding or prosecution of “sanctuary jurisdictions”;
• mandated the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America” and the restoration of “Mount McKinley” as the name of Denali;
• effectively reinstated Schedule F, an executive order from the end of Trump’s first term that reclassified career federal civil servants as “political appointees” who could be removed without cause (i.e., for reasons unrelated to their performance or behavior);
• declared English to be the official language of the United States;
• directed the secretary of education to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education,” including the transfer of its major functions to other departments or agencies or to state governments;
• called for the elimination of sanctuary jurisdictions, which limit the state or local enforcement of federal immigration laws in order to protect undocumented immigrants; and
• ordered the rescinding of federal funding for two nationwide sources of public media, National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS).

The tariffs imposed through Trump’s executive orders were challenged in a consolidated case, Learning Resources v. Trump, argued before the Supreme Court on November 5, 2025. On February 20, 2026, the Court ruled (6–3) that the federal law that Trump had cited as the legitimate basis of his tariff orders, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) of 1977, did not authorize presidents to impose tariffs. On the same day, Trump criticized the Court’s decision and vowed to impose a worldwide tariff of 10 percent under an existing trade law, Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. Unlike the IEEPA, however, Section 122 limits the size and duration of presidential tariffs to 15 percent and 150 days, respectively. One day later, on February 21, Trump increased the new tariff to 15 percent.

DOGE

In another highly controversial and legally disputed executive order, Trump created a new advisory organization, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), whose official purpose was to “moderniz[e] Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.” Headed by Trump’s outspoken supporter Elon Musk—the owner of X (formerly Twitter), the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, and the world’s richest person—DOGE was almost immediately sued by a public-interest group for violating a 1970s law governing the membership and transparency of federal advisory committees. In conversations with Trump from the summer of 2024, Musk promoted the idea of a new federal department that would make the government more efficient by identifying what Musk considered “wasteful” spending. After Trump’s election in November 2024, Musk publicly announced his goal of reducing government spending by $2 trillion. In keeping with Musk’s rather expansive vision of “modernizing Federal technology and software,” his staff members demanded and were eventually granted access to sensitive government databases, including those used by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), as well as to the payment system of the U.S. Treasury Department. Some critics thus viewed DOGE as a surreptitious means by which Musk, on Trump’s behalf, could take direct financial control of all executive departments and agencies. DOGE eventually directed the firing of thousands of career civil servants and drastic budget cuts for several federal departments and agencies. Musk’s reign at DOGE was short-lived, however. He stepped down from DOGE after just a few months in May 2025, declaring in an interview that he was “disappointed” with Trump’s signature budget bill—the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (OBBBA)—for potentially increasing the budget deficit and undermining the cost-cutting measures that DOGE had implemented.

ICE raids and deportations

Trump’s order regarding sanctuary jurisdictions was in keeping with his campaign promise of mass deportations. In a revival of his efforts during his first term, the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency and newly appointed “border czar” Tom Homan, who had served as the head of ICE during Trump’s first term, worked at rounding up, detaining, and deporting as many undocumented immigrants as possible. ICE agents and other federal officers conducted numerous raids on communities and workplaces; they also targeted schools, hospitals, churches, and even immigrant courthouses, where undocumented immigrants were normally permitted to request temporary or permanent residence. Such raids were actively opposed by residents and leaders of sanctuary jurisdictions. In July 2025 Trump signed the OBBBA into law, thereby providing $75 billion in extra funding for ICE over a four year period.

In response to ICE raids conducted in downtown Los Angeles (in the sanctuary state of California) in early June 2025, local residents began demonstrations against immigrant arrests, and some early protesters committed violent acts against local police officers, who then broke up large crowds. Without consulting California’s Democratic governor Gavin Newsom, Trump ordered the deployment of 4,000 National Guard troops in the city to assist local police. Trump later deployed ICE agents, National Guard troops, and federal officers in several other cities and rural areas across the country.

In the summer of 2025, a federal district court in Los Angeles issued a temporary restraining order to ensure that ICE agents stopped and detained people solely on the basis of a reasonable suspicion of their undocumented status rather than their race or ethnicity, their spoken language, their accent, or their jobs or workplaces. After a federal appeals court refused to reverse the lower court’s order, Trump’s solicitor general asked for emergency relief from the Supreme Court. In a controversial “shadow docket” ruling, the Court temporarily lifted the district court’s order.

As ICE operations expanded, dozens of videos surfaced of masked agents smashing car windows, dragging people out of vehicles, and using other means of force to apprehend supposedly undocumented immigrants or to combat American protesters. The Trump administration’s immigration crackdown became one of several issues addressed in historically large demonstrations in some 2,000 cities and towns throughout the country. The so-called “No Kings” rallies of 2025 took place on June 14—the date of an unusual military parade that Trump had scheduled in honor of the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army (June 14 was also Trump’s 79th birthday)—and October 18, and a third rally occurred on March 28, 2026. The three rallies were among the ten largest single-day demonstrations in the history of the United States.

In January 2026 an ICE agent shot and killed an American citizen, Renee Nicole Good, at an ICE protest in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Only a few days later, her death—and the shooting of two Venezuelan immigrants in Portland, Oregon—prompted more than 1,000 additional demonstrations against ICE and Trump’s immigration policies. Later in January, Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse and American citizen, was shot and killed by federal officers at a Minneapolis protest. In July 2026 ICE officers shot and killed two more people: Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican-born business owner in Houston, Texas who had lived in the United States for 35 years, and Joan Sebastian Guerrero, a Colombian native working in Biddeford, Maine. Their killings followed a significant but unannounced increase in ICE arrests and detentions throughout the country starting in the month of June.

Trump’s direction of traditionally independent departments and agencies

While issuing his plethora of executive orders, Trump took steps toward fulfilling other campaign promises, including his vow to remove Justice Department officials and FBI officers involved in the prosecution of January 6 rioters and the investigation and indictment of Trump himself—for attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election and for removing classified documents from the White House (the last two cases were dropped before Trump’s inauguration).

In one of the first executive orders of his second term, Trump directed the U.S. attorney general to review investigations and prosecutions by law-enforcement or intelligence agencies under the Biden administration. The order cited as an example the Justice Department’s prosecution of nearly 1,600 participants in the January 6 attack. On the day he signed the order, Trump also pardoned nearly all of the rioters and commuted the sentences or dismissed the pending indictments of others. The Justice Department and other federal agencies then removed officials directly or indirectly involved in the earlier cases against Trump. The department also filed charges against former FBI director James Comey, who had overseen the FBI’s investigation of Russia’s influence over Trump’s 2016 campaign; Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff, who as a member of the House of Representatives (2001–24) had played a prominent role in various investigations of Trump; and New York attorney general Letitia James, who had successfully prosecuted Trump for civil and criminal business fraud. The charges in all three cases were later dismissed.

Trump filed or threatened numerous criminal and civil charges against his political opponents, against law firms or individual lawyers involved in his indictments or prosecutions, against news media, against networks that aired popular programs in which he was criticized or satirized, and against businesses, state and local governments, and schools with diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs. He also filed civil suits and cut federal funding for colleges and universities. Faced with such punishment, some schools agreed to modify their hiring practices and revise their academic programs to include clearly conservative faculty and ideas. In the view of many scholars, however, the Trump administration weakened the American tradition of academic freedom.

In January 2026 Trump sued the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the U.S. Department of the Treasury for $10 billion, citing the disclosure of information showing that he had paid little or nothing in federal income taxes in the years prior to his first presidential term( see above Early life and business career). The IRS contractor who had leaked Trump’s returns to news outlets between 2018 and 2020 was convicted of stealing the information and sentenced to five years in prison in 2025. Trump’s suit was quite controversial, in part because the targeted departments were led by Trump loyalists who were unlikely to oppose him in court. In May 2026, while a district court judge conducted an initial examination to determine whether the suit should be heard or dismissed, the Trump administration announced its own settlement, which established a $1.8 billion fund to compensate Trump supporters who claimed to have been unfairly investigated or prosecuted and prohibited further audits of earlier tax returns by Trump, his sons, and the Trump Organization. Later that month, the judge who had initially assessed Trump’s suit decided to reopen the case to determine whether it amounted to an act of fraud. In addition, another judge issued an order prohibiting the fund’s creation until a direct legal challenge could be heard in June.

Partisan redistricting in preparation for the midterm elections of 2026

Following the decennial census of 2020, the dominant political parties in many states took advantage of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), which declared that disputes regarding political gerrymandering (the redrawing of electoral districts in a way that gives one party a clear advantage over another) were not decidable by federal courts. Some state governments controlled by a single party then openly gerrymandered congressional districts to increase the party’s representation in Congress.

In the summer of 2025, Trump urged the state of Texas to hold a special redistricting session five years before the next decennial census. As he publicly acknowledged, the purpose of the gerrymandering would be to add five more Republican congressional representatives in the midterm elections of 2026, thus preventing Democrats from overcoming the Republicans’ narrow majority in the House of Representatives. Trump also urged other Republican-controlled states to conduct similar gerrymanders.

In response, California’s Democratic governor Gavin Newsom announced that his state would conduct its own redistricting to prevent Republicans from unjustly retaining their House majority. A few other Democratic governors, accusing Republicans of undermining American democracy, also indicated their willingness to facilitate political gerrymandering in their states. After a federal district court in Texas issued a preliminary injunction preventing the state from using its 2025 map in the midterm elections—on the ground that the new map was based on racial gerrymandering—Texas filed an emergency appeal with the Supreme Court, asking that it stay the lower court’s order. On December 4, 2025, the Court granted the state’s request. Exactly two months later, on February 4, 2026, the Court denied a request by California Republicans to stay a lower court’s order permitting California to use its new congressional map (adopted in November 2025) in the midterm elections.

In a later monumental decision, Louisiana v. Callais (2026), the Supreme Court declared that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which had been designed to end racially discriminatory voting practices, does not justify racial gerrymandering in the states for the purpose of increasing or maintaining the voting power of minority populations (e.g., by creating minority-majority voting districts), because doing so would amount to discrimination against the states’ racial majorities. Nor does Section 2 prevent redistricting that happens to reduce the voting power of minorities, according to the Court, as long as it is officially undertaken for a different purpose, as in political gerrymandering. Following the Callais ruling, additional states performed or at least considered gerrymandering on political grounds.

In addition to redistricting, Trump aimed at preserving Republican control of Congress by preventing noncitizens from voting. His executive order, “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections,” issued in March 2026, required the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to send to each state a list of persons who are or will be qualified to vote. The order also sought to limit mail-in or absentee voting, a practice then more popular among Democrats than Republicans, by establishing a specific design for ballot envelopes and disallowing the postal delivery of ballots from individuals are not on a list of qualified voters put together by the United States Postal Service (USPS). The Supreme Court then denied Trump’s emergency request to stay a lower court’s injunction of his executive order.

The unexpected results of the midterm elections of 2026

A series of polls taken across the country prior to the November midterms indicated that Democrats had a reasonable chance of taking control of the House of Representatives by eliminating Republicans’ slight majority (218 to 214). And, as election day (November 3) became closer, some polls showed that Democratic control of the House was not only possible but likely. Nevertheless, control of the Senate, in which Republicans held a larger majority (53 to 45), remained unlikely for Democrats.

Given standing Republican majorities in Congress and Trump’s efforts to oversee the distribution and counting of ballots in some states, it was quite surprising—even among optimistic Democrats—that their party took control of both chambers by large majorities. As of November 11, amid continued vote counting in some states, the Democrats gained 41 seats in the House and 8 seats in the Senate, thereby holding new majorities of 255 to 167 and 53 to 44, respectively.

The unexpected midterm victories enjoyed by Democrats have been attributed to the country’s widespread opposition to or frustration with the economic, political, and military initiatives undertaken during the first half of Trump’s second term. In particular, many voters did not expect and were understandably displeased with increased inflation resulting from worldwide tariffs and the war with Iran (which greatly raised oil prices), as well as the nationwide arrest and deportation of undocumented immigrants (which increased the prices of farm products and disturbed some local communities).

Trump initially accepted the results of the midterm elections, attributing Republican losses to the fact that his own name was not on the ballots. Soon afterward, however, he reasserted his earlier accusations of voter fraud by Democrats. He vowed to fight any criminal investigations or even impeachments conducted by the new Democratic Congress.

Trump’s elimination of climate change regulation by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

In keeping with Trump’s campaign promises to revive oil and gas drilling in the United States and his executive order declaring a “national energy emergency” (see above, Trump’s second presidential term: Executive orders), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), now directed by Trump loyalists, officially revoked its historic “endangerment finding” of 2009, which justified the regulation of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act (1970). The finding declared that such pollution poses a serious threat to human health and welfare by causing significant climate change. Trump’s agency thus eliminated the power of any future EPA to regulate harmful emissions from the operation of oil and gas industries and the burning of fossil fuels.

Trump’s emergency petitions to the Supreme Court

Trump’s campaign for a second presidential term is notable for his promises of wide-ranging and significant changes to the country’s domestic and foreign policies and to the size, structure, and power of the executive branch itself. Many of the changes he initiated, however, were immediately challenged in state and federal courts on the ground that the corresponding orders were illegal or unconstitutional. In several cases, the court issued an injunction that temporarily prohibited enforcement of the order; an appeals court then declined to lift the injunction; and Trump or his administration then filed an emergency petition with Supreme Court, asking that it lift the injunction itself as soon as possible.

During the first year of his second term (2025– ), Trump and his administration filed more than 30 emergency petitions, a record number as compared to other presidents and far more than predecessors Biden, Obama, or Bush. By early January of 2026, the Supreme Court had granted, at least in part, 29 emergency petitions filed by Trump or his administration.

Epstein files

The Epstein Files: A Timeline

During his 2024 campaign Trump agreed in various interviews to release information obtained in criminal investigations of Jeffrey Epstein, a financier, convicted sex offender, and former friend of Trump. After being arrested on federal sex-trafficking charges in 2019, Epstein killed himself in a Manhattan jail cell, where he had been awaiting trial. Trump’s campaign promise greatly excited his supporters, who hoped the files would reveal more about Epstein’s activities and ties to numerous high-powered politicians and businesspeople, including former President Bill Clinton. 

For several months into Trump’s second term (2025– ), the administration failed to release the Epstein files it had promised, though it did supply information that had already been made public during and after investigations by state and federal agencies. Many MAGA members were greatly angered, suspecting that Trump was attempting to conceal his real relation and activities with Epstein. In July Trump further angered MAGA members in a post on Truth Social, his own social media site, in which he criticized his supporters for demanding the release of “Epstein files” that, he claimed, had actually been created by his Democratic enemies. In November 2025, after Congress reconvened following the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, Democratic members of the House Oversight Committee released three e-mails by Epstein indicating that his friendship with Trump might have been closer and lasted longer than Trump had claimed. On the same day, Republican members released some 20,000 Epstein files, many of which contained mentions of Trump.

Soon afterward, facing public pressure, Trump reversed his opposition to the passage of a bill called the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which required the release of all of the Justice Department’s Epstein files, with exceptions only for ongoing investigations, national security, and the protection of survivors’ identities. The bill, requiring the release all documents by December 19, was passed by the House and Senate on November 18 and signed into law by Trump the next day.

Although hundreds of thousands of document pages were released on December 19, they included some previously released material, and hundreds of pages were completely black, having been redacted. Almost immediately, some lawmakers and Epstein survivors decried the release as incomplete. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche then acknowledged that the Justice Department had not completed its review of the files, saying he expected that the review would take several more weeks. At the end of January 2026 Blanche announced the Justice Department’s new release of more than 3 million document pages, as well as about 2,000 videos and 180,000 images.

Venezuela, Greenland, and Iran

In early September 2025 the U.S. military began a series of strikes against Venezuelan vessels suspected of smuggling illegal drugs into the United States. During the next four months an estimated 30 bombings of civilian boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific resulted in the deaths of more than 100 people. Although Trump claimed to be preventing the dangerous accumulation of fentanyl and cocaine in the country, he provided no evidence that the boats destroyed in the bombings had been carrying illegal drugs.

Trump also ordered the deployment of military vessels in the Caribbean to prevent oil tankers from leaving or entering Venezuelan ports. A blockade was necessary, according to the Trump administration, to prevent Venezuela from using oil exports to fund its drug smuggling activities.

In early January 2026, the U.S. military captured Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores, and flew them to the United States, where Maduro and others, including Flores, faced charges related to drug trafficking. Trump then proclaimed that the United States would “run” Venezuela until a “safe, judicious, and proper” transition could take place, with a particular focus on allowing American oil companies to manage the oil-rich country’s struggling nationalized industry.

Soon after the military raid in Venezuela, Trump repeated his earlier declarations regarding America’s need to “acquire” Greenland, an administrative division of the kingdom of Denmark and the largest island in the world. According to Trump, ownership of Greenland was necessary to ensure the national security of the United States, given that control of the island could be used to prevent military operations in the Arctic Ocean by Russia or China. While Trump repeatedly announced his desire to purchase Greenland from Denmark, he also threatened to take the island by force should Denmark refuse such a sale. Trump’s plans for Greenland were vigorously opposed by Denmark and other member countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

In late February 2026 the United States and Israel launched a series of coordinated attacks against Iran, aiming to destroy its nuclear facilities and to overthrow its government. The strikes followed Trump’s repeated threats to invade the country unless it agreed to dismantle its nuclear program. Trump also promised to support mass antigovernment protests throughout Iran that had begun in late December 2025, declaring at one point that “help is on its way.” The attacks on February 28 resulted in the death of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and many other Iranian officials, as well as more than 160 children and staff in a girls’ school near an Iranian naval base. Operation Epic Fury, as the United States labeled its offensive, soon became a massive military conflict, as coordinated bombings and missile attacks continued throughout the country while Iran conducted its own missile attacks against military and civilian targets in Israel and other countries. One result of the conflict was the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz, through which oil was shipped to countries around the world. Oil shortages and increased oil prices followed immediately after that.

For months after the start of the war, Trump repeatedly announced both imminent peace deals with Iran and immediate attacks on the country should it continue military operations or fail to agree to Trump’s demands. In June of 2026 the U.S. and Iran reached a “Memorandum of Understanding” that officially put an end to the war and established a 60-day period of continued negotiations regarding Iran’s nuclear capabilities.

Return of the emoluments clause controversy

Also from the start of his second term, Democrats and a few Republicans resumed their criticism of Trump over the U.S. Constitution’s emoluments clause, which generally prohibits federal officeholders from accepting gifts, payments, or other items of value from foreign states or rulers without congressional permission. Trump’s actions included acceptance of unreported foreign donations to the inaugural ceremony of his second term; his promotion of a cryptocurrency meme coin ($TRUMP) available to foreign customers through World Liberty Financial, his family’s cryptocurrency firm (First Lady Melania Trump introduced her own meme coin, $MELANIA, shortly thereafter); and his announced intention to accept a $400 million Boeing 747-8 airplane from the government of Qatar as a luxurious replacement of Air Force One. In defense of some of his activities, Trump’s allies pointed out that he was not in direct control of any firm from which he might benefit financially (there are “no conflicts of interest,” according to a presidential spokesperson, because Trump’s “assets are in a trust managed by his children”). Trump himself defended his acceptance of Qatar’s Boeing 747 by claiming that the U.S. government would otherwise have to spend a great deal of money to replace the current Air Force One, which he deemed “much less impressive” than the official planes of other countries.

A possible third assassination attempt

On April 25, 2026, at the annual White House Correspondent’s Dinner in Washington, D.C., Trump and other attendants were quickly escorted out of the ballroom where the dinner was taking place, in response to nearby gunfire between a shooter and law enforcement officers. The shooter did not enter the ballroom and was immediately detained. No one in the ballroom was injured, though an officer wearing a bullet-proof vest was shot and later briefly hospitalized.

See Assassinations and assassination attempts involving U.S. presidents and presidential candidates.

Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS

In January 2026 Trump, his sons, Donald, Jr., and Eric, and the Trump Organization filed a lawsuit alleging that the IRS and the Treasury Department failed to protect the privacy of Trump tax records when a contractor leaked them to news organizations. The suit sought $10 billion in damages. The suit was controversial: The judge in the case questioned how a plaintiff (the president) could sue agencies that he directs (the IRS and Treasury). Some questioned whether it was constitutional, citing provisions of Article III.

Just days before the judicial briefs on the question were due, a settlement of the lawsuit was announced. It included two key provisions:

• Creation of a $1.776 billion fund: This so-called “Anti-Weaponization Fund” would allow other people adversely affected by government actions to sue the government. This was broadly seen as a way for January 6 rioters to gain financial compensation from the government, something Trump did not deny.
• Tax immunity for the Trump family: A one-page addendum, signed by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, said the government was “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing” current or future tax claims against Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Jr., Eric Trump, the Trump Organization, and a wide array of other family members.

But the settlement drew a stinging rebuke from the judge hearing the case, who said that the filing of the lawsuit was simply a ruse to set up the settlement that “had no viable basis in law or fact.” It also threatened to derail Blanche’s nomination to become attorney general when two Republican senators, John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, said they would not vote to advance his nomination without written notification that the tax immunity deal was voided.

On August 2, 2026, Blanche issued two documents. One, signed by him, officially rescinded the anti-weaponization fund. The second, unsigned, clarified that only the president, his two sons, and the Trump Organization were immune from IRS scrutiny and only for previously filed returns. Future tax returns could be audited, a provision Cornyn had insisted on. In return, Cornyn and Tillis agreed to support Blanche.

Trump’s construction of a White House ballroom

In 2025 Trump planned a massive ballroom at an initial cost of $300 million. While the ballroom was to be paid for by donors and the president, the destruction of the historic East Wing of the White House, where the new ballroom was to be built, prompted much criticism. In December the National Trust for Historic Preservation filed suit to stop the ballroom construction. In February 2026 the 90,000-square-foot ballroom, the cost of which had ballooned to $400 million, received approval from a fine arts panel filled with Trump appointees. However, in March a federal district court judge ordered construction to be stopped on the ground that reconstructing the White House on such a massive scale would require Congressional approval. After a federal appeals court upheld the judge’s ruling in August, Trump filed an emergency petition with the Supreme Court, asking that it cancel the lower court’s order. In August 2026 Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., issued a stay of the order, allowing construction to continue while the Supreme Court considered the case. In a 5–4 vote on August 31, the Court stayed the district court’s injunction, finding that the government was likely to prevail in the court’s final ruling. Notably, it did not hold that Trump’s reconstruction of the White House is legal, but only that the case would ultimately be dismissed because the National Trust for Historic Preservation lacks standing to sue. Interestingly, the largely conservative Chief Justice Roberts wrote a lengthy dissenting opinion, joined by the Court’s three liberal justices, in which he argued that Trump’s reconstruction is likely illegal and that the National Trust does indeed have standing to sue.

See A Brief History of White House Construction and The White House in the 21st century.