Upon his inauguration in 2017, Donald Trump became the first person elected president of the United States who had no prior experience in public service. Most prior presidents had been elected to political offices earlier in their careers. Of those without electoral experience, three had been Army generals (Zachary Taylor, Ulysses S. Grant, and Dwight Eisenhower) and one, Herbert Hoover, had been Secretary of Commerce among other appointed government positions.

Donald Trump’s pre-presidential political experience, by contrast, consisted largely of gaining and nurturing political influence, rather than exercising leadership. According to his biographers, Trump learned to cultivate political relationships with New York City Democratic officeholders from his father, Fred Trump, who used friendships and campaign contributions to gain preferential treatment from the politicians who influenced the rules, regulations, permitting, and tax policies that affected his real estate interests.

As a young man, Donald Trump did not display consistent party or ideological preferences. Like his father, he supported—and was supported by—the Democratic Party in New York. In the 1980s, he supported Republican Ronald Reagan for president and identified himself as a Republican by 1987. In future years, he would also register or identify as a Democrat, an independent, and a member of the Reform Party.

Trump indicated an interest in running for president several times before his ultimately successful campaign in 2016. He briefly hinted at a run in 1987 when he took out newspaper advertisements against Reagan-era foreign policy. Rehearsing a theme that would shape his presidency, he objected to providing military assistance to “countries that can afford to defend themselves.” In 1999, he joined the Reform Party, started by Ross Perot—a businessman who ran for president as a political outsider in 1992 and 1996—and formed an exploratory committee to pursue its nomination, but dropped out. In 2012, he considered entering the Republican primary to challenge then-President Barack Obama, who was running for a second term. He announced that he preferred to stay in the private sector and continue to host his successful reality television show, The Apprentice.

Trump’s history of hinting at a presidential run led some observers to dismiss his early talk of running in 2016 as another example of self-promotion. Yet his campaign ultimately proved serious and effective. During the Obama administration, Trump used his celebrity and prolific social media presence to become a leader of the so-called “birther movement,” a conspiracy theory that claimed Barack Obama had not been born in the United States and was therefore not constitutionally eligible to be president. Although serious scholars, politicians, and journalists all knew that Obama had been born in Hawaii in 1961 (two years after Hawaii achieved statehood), the quest to challenge Obama’s legitimacy had become a major focus within certain conservative political circles. Despite documented evidence of Obama’s birth in Hawaii, Trump continued to promote the “birther” lie until September 2016, only a few weeks before the election, at which time he was trailing in many national polls.

Election of 2016

Trump’s campaign began on June 16, 2015, with a dramatic entrance down an escalator in Trump Tower, his personal residence and business headquarters on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, New York. With his third wife Melania next to him, he formally announced his campaign to a gathered group of reporters, supporters, and, according to at least one campaign aide, people paid to attend and appear to be supporters. There, he introduced what would become key themes of his campaign and presidency, garnering both media attention and accusations of racism and xenophobia. He declared his strong opposition to immigration from Central and South America and famously accused Mexico of sending drugs, criminals, and rapists to the United States. Of undocumented immigrants, he claimed: “…some, I assume, are good people.”

Echoing an argument made by Ross Perot in the 1990s, Trump blamed the struggles of working-class Americans, including the decline of industrial manufacturing and the offshoring of blue-collar jobs, on global trade and government deficits. His campaign slogan promised to “Make America Great Again,” a simultaneously nostalgic and forward-looking phrase that Trump had used for several years. The tag line itself had a long history dating back to at least the 1940s, and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s and Bill Clinton in the 1990s had invoked it. Trump, who had long specialized in branding, made the slogan and its acronym, MAGA, synonymous with his argument that the country had lost something vital and had to fight to regain it.

The field of candidates in the 2016 Republican primary campaign was unusually large, including 17 major candidates. In part, the crowded field was a result of legal changes: In 2010, the US Supreme Court had loosened restrictions on campaign contributions in the case of Citizens United v. FEC, making it easier even for lesser-known candidates to raise money and stay in the race longer. In addition, the political environment seemed favorable for Republicans: Democrat Barack Obama was leaving office after eight years, and historically the presidency tended to switch from one party to the other. Moreover, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ran for the Democratic nomination virtually uncontested. Many Republicans believed that her high disapproval numbers made her vulnerable.

Of the candidates for the Republican nomination, many were current or former governors or senators. Trump faced accusations of being a non-serious candidate, a clown, and a demagogue from the media as well as some Republican leaders, despite leading in all opinion polls of Republican voters. His campaign events, quickly dubbed “Trump rallies,” drew both large crowds and extensive media coverage, generating free publicity for his candidacy. With his experience in television, Trump knew how to get attention with outrageous, unconventional, and often untrue statements. He also used social media, especially Twitter, to communicate directly to the people (a practice he maintained while he was president).

Many political insiders presumed that Trump was too brash, inexperienced, and polarizing to win a general election. His racist rhetoric alienated even conservative voters of color, as well as many moderate voters and the business and free trade wing of the Republican Party, all while attracting explicit praise from white nationalists and the emergent “alt-right” movement. More established political candidates such as former Florida governor Jeb Bush (brother and son of former presidents), Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio of Texas and Florida, and New Jersey governor Chris Christie jockeyed for the “non-Trump” vote, but none emerged as a clear alternative.

Trump’s combative and “politically incorrect” flamboyance, on display at his often-raucous campaign events, appealed to many voters precisely because it provided a viscerally satisfying alternative to the staid Republican Party. His slogan “America First,” which had been a popular expression in the 1930s used by political activists who opposed Franklin Roosevelt’s commitment to defend Europe against Nazi Germany during World War II, combined economic populism with isolationism. Trump blamed free trade and global competition for the decline of American manufacturing, claiming vaguely that the United States struck “bad deals” with countries like China. His call to curtail immigration via a border wall with Mexico and to withdraw from foreign alliances and treaties represented a stark departure from mainstream American politics.

Although Trump came in second place to Ted Cruz in the first nominating contest, the Iowa caucuses, he gathered momentum with victories in primary elections in New Hampshire and South Carolina. By May, the last candidates hoping to consolidate the “non-Trump” vote—Cruz and moderate Ohio governor John Kasich—dropped out of the race. Trump became the nominee-apparent, despite lingering doubts from many Republican Party leaders that he could be successful in the fall election.

In an effort to shore up support from religious conservatives, Trump selected Indiana governor and former House member Mike Pence to be his vice-presidential running mate shortly before the summer nominating convention. The Republican convention reiterated the key themes of Trump’s campaign, painting a dark picture of a country that had been misled toward ruin by weak, feckless, and corrupt politicians who made “bad deals” and refused to put “America first.” Shocking some viewers, it also featured angry chants of “lock her up” directed at Democrat Hillary Clinton, whom Trump supporters argued should immediately be imprisoned on vague charges of corruption.

Going into the fall election season, Trump polled significantly behind Clinton, yet Clinton also faced key liabilities. A familiar figure in national politics since becoming First Lady in 1993, she had a very long resume in public service—including as a senator and secretary of State—and was poised to make history as the first woman to be US president. Nonetheless, many voters had negative impressions of her personally, even if they agreed with her politically. In addition, many voters in 2016 reported that they wanted a “change candidate.” Finally, Clinton faced an extended investigation into whether she had inappropriately used a private email system when she was secretary of State. She was never found to have done anything improper, but the accusations preoccupied media coverage right up to the election.

Trump faced several controversies in the final months of the campaign. Although he campaigned on his business success, he refused to divulge information about his finances or to release his tax returns—becoming the first nominee since Gerald Ford not to do so. A report by the New York Times, based on a leaked copy of Trump’s 1995 tax returns, concluded that Trump had declared a very large loss that year and, as a result, may not have paid any income tax at all for up to 18 years. In a debate with Clinton, Trump said that avoiding taxes “makes me smart.”

In the months before the election, intelligence officials announced that Russian operatives had hacked the computers of the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign. The hackers then leaked personal emails in an effort to embarrass Clinton and potentially help Trump, who had repeatedly praised Russian president Vladimir Putin. The allegations of Russian interference with the election would later be expanded to include deliberate misinformation campaigns over social media and other examples of political “dirty tricks,” raising questions about why Putin wished to help Trump.

Finally, a scandal erupted shortly before the election that appeared, at the time, to be potentially devastating to Trump’s candidacy. News outlets released a video filmed in 2005 for the television show Access Hollywood that captured Donald Trump bragging to the show’s host about committing sexual assault. Celebrities like him, Trump had asserted on tape, could grab women’s genitals without their consent or resistance because they were famous. Trump apologized for what he called “locker-room talk,” but ignored calls from some Republican leaders to drop out of the race.

As Election Day approached, Hillary Clinton enjoyed steady if not huge leads in opinion polls, and nearly all observers predicted that she would win. To the surprise of many, including Trump himself, Trump won several narrow victories in states that had traditionally voted Democratic—especially the formerly industrial states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Although Clinton received 2.8 million more popular votes than Trump did, Trump’s support among blue collar white voters in a handful of key states—as well as consistently Republican states—allowed him to win the Electoral College vote 304 to 227.

Donald Trump became the fifth president, and the second in 16 years, to lose the popular vote and nonetheless win the presidency. The others included three in the 19^th century—John Quincy Adams (who lost both the popular and electoral votes in 1824 but was selected in the House of Representatives); Rutherford Hayes (whose victory in the Electoral College only came after revelations of fraud in several states and Congress passing the Electoral Commission Act of 1877); and Benjamin Harrison in 1884 (who narrowly defeated President Grover Cleveland, who then returned four years later to defeat Harrison and regain the White House, becoming the only president to serve two non-consecutive terms). More recently, George W. Bush lost the popular vote to Vice President Al Gore in 2000 by 500,000 votes but narrowly won in the Electoral College after the US Supreme Court ruled on the contested election in Florida and settled the election in Bush’s favor.

Election of 2020

In recent history, US presidents have tended to welcome the respite from campaigning and commit themselves to the challenges of governing once assuming office. By unspoken tradition, incumbent presidents typically downplay talk of running for re-election and commit to being the “president for all Americans.” Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton—the three presidents who directly preceded Donald Trump—announced their re-election campaigns more than two years into their first terms.

Trump departed from this norm by devoting funds to a re-election campaign before even initially taking office and filing campaign documents with the Federal Election Commission on the day he was inaugurated in January 2017. He immediately adopted the slogan, “Keep America Great,” a modification of “Make America Great Again” that implied, some observers noted, that Trump’s presence as president—rather than any specific action or accomplishment—was itself the key to recovering greatness.

Trump held his first re-election campaign rally on February 1, 2017, less than two weeks after becoming president. He continued to raise money and hold campaign events throughout his presidency. He faced no opposition from his party for the 2020 nomination and won all state Republican primaries and caucuses. At the same time, a competitive primary campaign developed among Democrats hoping to challenge Trump, whose public disapproval ratings had remained higher than his approval ratings for nearly his entire term.

By late winter, the Democratic primary race had largely coalesced into a choice between two candidates who, despite both being white men in their 70s, represented very different visions for the party. Senator Bernie Sanders, an Independent from Vermont who self-described as a democratic socialist and had challenged Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination in 2016, ran again, campaigning for the left-leaning and progressive wing of the party. Former Vice President Joe Biden ran as a moderate liberal in the tradition of Barack Obama. By April 2020, Sanders had suspended his campaign and endorsed Biden for the Democratic nomination. In August, Biden fulfilled a campaign promise to select an African American woman as his vice-presidential running mate when he selected Senator Kamala Harris of California.

During the general election campaign, Trump defended the domestic and foreign policies of his first term and prioritized the same themes he had campaigned on as an outsider four years before. He routinely stressed the importance of “law and order,” a political slogan with roots in the Richard Nixon administration that drew attention to the alleged lawlessness of public protest. During the summer of 2020, nationwide protests against police violence and racism unfolded, spurred in particular after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd. President Trump defended law enforcement and blamed civil unrest on activists in the Black Lives Matter movement. He especially criticized members of “antifa,” a loose collection of leftist and anti-fascist activists without a central organization.

By far the most important factor to shape the 2020 presidential election was the Covid-19 pandemic. In March 2020, the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic, and President Trump declared a national emergency. Major public events were cancelled as millions of Americans sheltered in their homes, and both Trump and Biden postponed in-person campaigning. Many states delayed their primary elections—even though the presidential primaries had already been determined, candidates for other offices remained in competitive races in many states. Congress’s first legislative response to the pandemic, the CARES Act (Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act) included funding for vote-by-mail, although the Trump administration soon argued against it on the baseless grounds that it could lead to voter fraud.

Trump attempted to downplay the severity of the pandemic, worrying publicly of the risk of letting “the cure be worse than the problem itself.” In June, he resumed in-person campaigning with an event in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Although attendance was lower than expected, the event appeared to lead to a significant increase in Covid cases in the area.

In the fall, Trump and Biden engaged in two in-person debates. The first, on September 29, featured unprecedented levels of chaotic cross-talk as Trump repeatedly interrupted Biden and the debate moderator. Notably, Trump declined to explicitly denounce the Proud Boys, a pro-Trump white supremacist organization that explicitly promoted political violence; when asked to address the group, Trump said they should “stand back and stand by.”

Shortly after the first debate, Trump contracted Covid-19 and was hospitalized. After he had recovered but was still considered contagious, debate organizers announced a virtual second debate. Trump refused to participate online, and the event was cancelled. A final in-person debate was held on October 22, and changes to the debate format made it more civil than the first one. Although most observers agreed that Biden fared better in the debates than Trump, few concluded that the debates were likely to have any real effect on voting behavior.

The Covid-19 pandemic also shaped election day itself in unprecedented ways. In an effort to avoid prolonged contact and due to shortages in election staff, many states lengthened early voting programs, and some expanded vote-by-mail programs. Ultimately, 69 percent of voters voted in an untraditional way—either by mail or before election day. The ease of voting may also have accounted for the dramatic increase in voter turnout: 67 percent of eligible voters voted in 2020, compared with less than 59 percent in 2016 and 62.5 percent in 2008.

More Democrats voted early or by mail than Republicans, creating a challenge for media outlets that reported on real-time results. In several competitive states, early results initially appeared to favor Trump because vote counters started with election-day ballots, only moving to early-voting or mail-in ballots later. Although election experts had predicted exactly this issue and warned the media not to make predictions based on early counts, the Trump campaign identified this discrepancy and cried foul. For months before the election, Trump had insisted without evidence that early voting would lead to fraud. Those claims would sow chaos as results came in.

By midnight on election day, pundits were unable to predict the winner because too many states had too many outstanding ballots to count. Biden called for patience but said he believed he was “on track” to win. Trump addressed his supporters at 2:30 in the morning, inaugurating what would become known as the “Big Lie”—that he had clearly won the election but that underhanded forces were at work to steal it from him. The Trump campaign began filing lawsuits to stop vote-counting and to challenge various vote counts, or otherwise allege fraud. On Saturday, November 7, news outlets officially called Pennsylvania for Biden, assuring him of a victory in the Electoral College. Trump nonetheless continued with lawsuits for several more weeks, although only in 1 of approximately 60 did a court side with Trump.

Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump by more than 7 million votes, or 4.4 percent of more than 155 million votes cast. In the Electoral College, he won by 306 to 232. Trump, however, never conceded to Biden, refused to participate in the standard presidential transition process, and continued to insist that the election was “stolen” from him.

After his lawsuits failed to change state-level counts, Trump orchestrated a prolonged effort to overturn the election results in other ways. In addition to publicly claiming fraud, he privately pressured state officials to send alternate slates of electors to the Electoral College, and he persuaded supporters in Congress to object to the certification of the Electoral College vote, a procedural formality that took place on January 6, 2021. Trump personally tried to convince Vice President Mike Pence, who as president of the Senate would preside over the official certification of the Electoral College results, that he had the power to declare the process illegitimate, and in effect keep Trump in office.

On January 6, thousands of Trump supporters, including those affiliated with the Proud Boys and other paramilitary and white supremacist groups, assembled in Washington, DC, for a Trump event known as the “Stop the Steal” rally. Speaking to a crowd of supporters, Trump repeated his false claim that he had won the election and told them, “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Trump promised to march with the crowd to the Capitol to stop the certification of the election results, although the Secret Service subsequently drove him to the White House, against his wishes.

For several hours that afternoon, a mob of Trump supporters violently invaded the US Capitol building, threatening to kill members of Congress and their staff, who hid inside. More than a hundred police officers were injured, and several rioters died—one shot by police and several from natural causes. Despite frantic pleas from members of Congress and some of his staff members, Trump refused to condemn or call off the riot, which he watched on television from the White House.

Once the Capitol police finally regained control of the building later that night, members of Congress came out of their secure locations. They formally voted to affirm the results of the Electoral College, making Joe Biden officially the president-elect and ending the 2020 presidential election.

Donald Trump’s domestic priorities largely reflected the themes he campaigned on: restricting immigration, strengthening public infrastructure, reducing taxes, and repealing the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare). His success in implementing that agenda was mixed.

Trump’s selections for cabinet posts and senior-level advisors reflected a combination of traditional Republican political leaders and unconventional and inexperienced people who were personally loyal to Trump himself. Among modern presidents, he experienced an especially high degree of turnover in top positions, and many positions remained vacant for long periods of time. Early in his presidency, critics noted that, despite having deployed populist and anti-Wall Street rhetoric on the campaign trail, Trump appointed a cabinet heavy with billionaires, multi-millionaires, and representatives of the financial services industry. These included three cabinet leaders who remained in their positions for the entire Trump presidency—Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

A number of top officials left their posts amid scandal or after losing the president’s confidence. Three weeks into his term, Trump fired National Security Advisor Michael Flynn after revelations that Flynn had lied about engaging in unlawful conversations with Russian diplomats during the Obama administration. Retired Marine General John F. Kelly, who served as Trump’s second chief of staff, resigned after a falling out with Trump. Trump fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, former CEO at ExxonMobil, after he reportedly called the president a “moron.” Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis resigned over disagreements with Trump’s decision to withdraw US troops from Syria.

Russia Investigation

In May 2017, Trump fired James Comey, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) who had been appointed to a ten-year term by Barack Obama in 2013. The ten-year term was a tradition designed to create a greater sense of independence for the FBI director from the president. Under Comey, the FBI had been investigating the role of Russian interference in the 2016 election, including the role played by Michael Flynn and the release of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee in the summer before the election.

In a private meeting, President Trump urged Comey to drop charges against Flynn and to stop suggesting publicly that agents of the Russian government had helped Trump win the election. Trump also requested Comey’s personal loyalty and that Comey publicly announce that Trump was not under personal investigation. Comey replied that his loyalty was to the US Constitution, not to any given president. Moreover, the FBI did not make a practice of publicly saying someone was not under investigation, since it would then have to retract that statement publicly if the situation changed.

Democratic leaders in Congress accused Trump of obstructing justice by firing Comey and called for an independent investigation of Comey’s firing and the allegations of Russian interference in the election. Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from all matters pertaining to the Russia investigation after revelations that he had met with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak while he was part of the Trump campaign in 2016, although he denied any knowledge of any Russian interference in the election. In his absence, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed former FBI Director Robert Mueller, a Republican, as special counsel to supervise the investigation. Sessions’s recusal and Mueller’s appointment caused a rift between Sessions and Trump, and Sessions resigned at the president’s request in November 2018. Trump replaced Sessions with William Barr, to whom Mueller submitted his final report on the Russia investigation in March 2019.

Ultimately, Mueller’s report concluded that agents of Russia’s Internet Research Agency attacked Hillary Clinton’s campaign to help Trump and that members of Russian intelligence were responsible for hacking emails from the Democratic National Committee. Although Mueller noted “numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign,” the report did not uncover clear evidence that the Trump campaign had conspired with Russia in those activities. On the question of whether Trump obstructed justice by firing James Comey, the Mueller report failed to make a determination one way or the other. The investigation, Mueller wrote, “does not conclude that the president committed a crime,” but it “also does not exonerate” Trump.

Affordable Care Act

In his first few hours in office, Trump signed a vague and non-binding order that indicated his top domestic policy priority was to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act, the legislation—also known as Obamacare—that expanded health care coverage and that the Republican Party had overwhelmingly opposed since President Obama signed it into law in 2010. Trump repeatedly promised an alternative to the bill that retained its most popular provisions, including protecting people with pre-existing conditions from discrimination by insurance companies.

In the spring of 2017, congressional Republicans proposed two bills to repeal the ACA. The first failed in the House; a modified version passed the House but failed in the Senate in July. In December 2017, however, congressional Republicans succeeded in weakening the ACA by revising the tax code to eliminate the “individual mandate penalty”—the provision of the ACA that required people to have health insurance or else pay higher taxes. Nonetheless, some states retained an individual mandate.

Taxes and Regulations

In keeping with longstanding Republican priorities, the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress wanted to cut taxes. They worked together to pass the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which President Trump signed in December 2017. That bill amended the federal tax code and reduced tax rates for corporations and individuals, easing the tax burden disproportionately on high-income and wealthy Americans while delivering only moderate tax cuts to most Americans. It also included the removal of the individual mandate penalty for the ACA.

Trump blamed the regulatory system and the federal bureaucracy for hampering the economy. Early in his presidency, Trump suspended or revoked nearly 100 federal regulations. Conflating the number of regulations with their effect, he also ordered federal agencies to eliminate two existing regulations for every new one they enacted.

Following a pattern Ronald Reagan deployed in the 1980s, Trump staffed several cabinet positions with leaders who were ideologically and/or materially hostile to the mission of the agency. For example, Trump appointed former Texas governor Rick Perry as secretary of Energy, a department Perry had called for eliminating during his own presidential campaign in 2012. The president also appointed climate-change denier Scott Pruitt as head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Immigration

Trump’s “Make America Great Again” and “America First” campaign slogans translated into harsh restrictions on immigration during his presidency. Immediately after taking office, he issued an executive order blocking entry visas for citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries (Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen), as well as temporarily suspending all refugees from entering the United States for four months. Trump’s travel ban sparked large protests and legal challenges. As a result of legal challenges, the Trump administration revised the executive order.

In addition, the administration targeted the issue of illegal migration over the country’s southern border with Mexico. As a candidate, Trump promised to build a wall along the border, paid for by Mexico, although the government of Mexico never expressed any intention of doing so. Trump’s battle with Congress over funding the southern border wall resulted in a government shutdown in December 2018. The shutdown became the longest government shutdown at that time, 35 days, before President Trump and Congress announced a deal. Although Congress agreed to provide $1.375 billion for a border wall, it was far short of the more than $5 billion that President Trump wanted.

Between 2017 and 2021, the United States constructed new barriers along more than 450 miles on the nearly 2,000-mile Mexican border, including nearly 50 miles that previously had no barrier. Although no singular “wall” was ever built, 30-foot steel bollard wall segments replaced fencing along much of this area.

In 2018, the Trump administration introduced a “family separation” policy at the southern border in an effort to dissuade migrants and asylum-seeking refugees from entering the United States. Under this “zero tolerance” policy, parents and children apprehended at the border were separated from each other. Critics immediately protested that no protocol existed to track the separated families or reunite children with their parents. Within six weeks, at least 2,300 migrant children had been separated from their parents. Many were housed in detention centers in chain-link cells that resembled cages. After fierce condemnation from public protestors, American politicians, and world leaders, Trump signed an executive order in June 2018 reversing the policy. By the time of the 2020 election, hundreds of children had still not been reunited with their parents.

Covid-19 Pandemic

Domestic politics in the final year of Trump’s presidency were profoundly shaped by the Covid-19 pandemic. First detected in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, the novel coronavirus known as SARS-CoV-2 spread to the United States in January, and the first reported American death from the disease occurred in February. From the beginning, Trump downplayed the risks of the disease and discounted the science around it even as he blamed China, long a focal point of his critique of America’s declining global trade position, for the pandemic. Critics accused Trump of xenophobia and racism when he used racial epithets like “Kung Flu” to associate Covid-19 with China and Chinese people.

In March 2020, the pandemic overtook American life as public events were cancelled, schools and universities shifted to remote learning, millions of Americans stayed in their homes, and in-person work was reserved largely for “essential employees,” including health and public safety workers. Trump acknowledged the scope of the pandemic in March, when he declared a national state of emergency and signed the first relief bill, known as the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act of 2020, which allocated $2.2 trillion in economic stimulus. He also appointed a White House Coronavirus Task Force.

At the same time, Trump actively denigrated scientists and health policy experts, including member of his task force such as Dr. Anthony Fauci, who recommended continued “social distancing” and stay-at-home orders, as well as the wearing of masks. Trump mostly refused to wear a mask, even after he contracted a serious case of Covid-19 and was hospitalized in October 2020.

The pandemic caused a sharp economic contraction, a historic decline in the stock market, and a severe spike in unemployment, particularly as hospitality and service-sector companies laid off workers when they were forced to shutter. The ensuing recession was very brief by historical standards, at two months, but it likely hurt Trump’s political popularity.

By April 2020, more people had died of Covid-19 in the United States than in any other country, a position that persisted until the end of the global pandemic. Public health experts gave the Trump administration credit for expediting the development of vaccines, which became available at the end of 2020. Many critics nonetheless faulted Trump for not taking the virus seriously, sowing doubt about scientific expertise and public health measures such as social distancing and masking. Many argued that more aggressive policies and a closer fidelity to scientific expertise may have reduced the death toll, both during and after the Trump administration.

White Supremacy and Civil Unrest

Both before and during the Covid-19 pandemic, the Trump administration’s domestic politics had to contend with issues related to racism and civil rights. As a candidate and as president, Trump counted white nationalists, white supremacists, and other violent racist, xenophobic, and antisemitic organizations among his supporters. In August 2017, hundreds of white nationalists assembled in Charlottesville, Virginia, for what was known as the “Unite the Right” rally. Violence ensued, and one white supremacist murdered a counter-protestor by driving his car into a crowd.

Trump drew criticism for condemning bad behavior on “both sides” but declined at first to explicitly denounce racist ideology, white supremacy, and right-wing domestic terrorism. Instead, he regularly amplified the conservative view that members of “antifa”—a loosely organized community of left-leaning and anti-fascist activists with no official organization—represented a threat to domestic security.

He also routinely condemned the Black Lives Matter movement, which first mobilized in 2013 in response to the 2012 death of a Black teenager named Trayvon Martin and protested police violence against Black people as well as other instances of racism, discrimination, and injustice. In the summer of 2020, during both the Covid-19 pandemic and the presidential election campaign, a vast series of protests erupted across the country, triggered in particular after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered Minnesotan George Floyd, an African American man. Trump derided the mostly peaceful protest movement, which he saw as contrary to his promise of “law and order.”

Supreme Court Appointments

President Donald Trump appointed three members to the US Supreme Court, the highest number for any president since Ronald Reagan, who appointed four justices over two terms. Typifying the increased partisan polarization of national politics and the intense animosity among political leaders, all of Trump’s nominations sparked protest and outrage for different reasons, and all were confirmed largely on party-line votes.

In January 2017, Trump appointed Neil Gorsuch to fill a vacancy caused by Justice Antonin Scalia’s death nearly one year earlier, during Barack Obama’s presidency. Obama had nominated jurist Merrick Garland to replace Scalia, but Republicans in the Senate refused to conduct confirmation hearings, arguing without historical evidence that a new justice should not be confirmed in an election year. Liberals and Democrats objected to Gorsuch not only for his conservative judicial philosophy but because they believed the seat had been “stolen.” Gorsuch was confirmed 54 to 45. Three Democrats from conservative states voted in favor.

In July 2018, the president nominated Brett Kavanaugh after Justice Anthony Kennedy announced he would retire. Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings were marked by public accusations that, as a high school student, he had attempted to rape a fellow student. During emotional and highly partisan Senate hearings, Kavanaugh denied the allegations. The Senate confirmed Kavanaugh with a vote of 50 to 48.

Finally, Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett in September 2020 following the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Despite the Republican leadership’s claim four years earlier that Supreme Court nominations should not be made during an election year, the Republican-controlled Senate quickly called hearings and confirmed Barrett just one week and one day before the 2020 election. All three of Trump’s appointees represented historically conservative judicial philosophies on a range of issues and moved the Supreme Court decidedly to the political right.

Impeachments

Donald Trump is the only US president to be impeached twice. His first impeachment resulted from efforts to persuade a foreign leader, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, to interfere with the upcoming 2020 US presidential election on Trump’s behalf. According to an inquiry by the House of Representatives, Trump corruptly linked military assistance, which Ukraine needed to defend itself from Russia (which had already annexed Crimea from Ukraine and would invade the country in February 2022), to political favors: announcing an investigation into Trump’s likely opponent, Joe Biden, and affirming a false conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, had hacked the Democratic National Committee in 2016. Testimony from witnesses, especially Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, as well as a summarized transcript of a call between Trump and Zelensky, provided the case against the president. The House committee further charged that Trump had instructed government officials not to comply with legal subpoenas.

On December 18, 2019, the House voted to impeach Trump on two articles—abuse of power (for pressuring Zelensky) and obstruction of Congress—making Trump the third US president to be impeached, following Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998. The Senate convened to try the president in January 2020, even as most observers predicted that partisan politics would dictate the results. On February 5, the Senate acquitted Trump on both counts, and he remained in office. Only one Republican, Senator Mitt Romney of Utah—who had run for president unsuccessfully against Barack Obama in 2012 and was publicly critical of Trump—voted against Trump on the charge of obstruction of Congress.

Trump’s second impeachment followed the insurrectionist attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, by Trump supporters who falsely believed the 2020 election had been “stolen” from Trump. On January 13, one week after the insurrection and one week before his term constitutionally expired, the House of Representatives passed a single article of impeachment against Trump, accusing him of “incitement to insurrection” for his role in encouraging his supporters to violently and illegally breach the Capitol building in hopes of disrupting the certification of electoral votes. All 222 Democratic and 10 Republican members of the House voted for impeachment; this represented the most members of a president’s party to ever vote for impeachment.

Republican Senate leaders relied on a parliamentary rule to prevent the Senate from formally receiving the House’s article of impeachment until after Joe Biden was inaugurated on January 20, 2021. Democrats thus agreed to delay the trial for several weeks so it did not overshadow the beginning of Biden’s presidency. The Senate trial began on February 9, 2021. An effort by Senate Republicans to dismiss the charges on the grounds that Trump was no longer president failed 55 to 45; five Republicans joined Democrats and independents in agreeing to hold the trial, arguing that holding the trial signaled that no person was above the law. Four days later, on February 13, however, the Senate acquitted Trump for a second time. Although 57 senators voted guilty, that figure fell short of the constitutionally required two-thirds (67 votes) necessary to convict.

On the campaign trail and in his Inaugural Address, Donald Trump declared his commitment to what he called an “America First” approach to foreign policy. The slogan itself had been especially prominent in the 1930s, when right-wing political activists sympathetic to Nazi Germany and fascism rallied against American intervention in World War II. More generally, Trump’s foreign policy reflected an isolationist strand that had largely been marginalized in national affairs since World War II. Although mainstream politics and the foreign policy establishment had remained committed to the exercise of US global leadership for decades, Trump capitalized on a sense of discontent that had been building since the end of the Cold War in the 1990s and was galvanized by the so-called “forever wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan that followed the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In addition to capturing a growing weariness of foreign military involvement, Trump also linked foreign policy to his populist campaign rhetoric about the “forgotten men and women” whom the global economy had left behind.

Both Trump’s rhetoric and his policy positions contained contradictions, as Trump simultaneously called for isolationism and a more robust military. Despite his promise to reduce American military deployments around the world, he also called for more robust military activity. In April 2017, he authorized cruise missile strikes against a Syrian military airfield and warned that the United States might continue to intercede in Syria’s civil war against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, despite his administration’s prior statement acknowledging that al-Assad would most likely prevail in the war. In December 2018, in opposition to his military advisors, he announced the withdrawal of the 2,000 US troops still deployed in Syria (since 2015). That surprise decision prompted the resignation of Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis.

Trump also significantly drew down the US troop presence in Afghanistan, which the US military had maintained since invading the country in 2001. In February 2020, Trump officials signed a deal with the Taliban, which had been engaged in an insurrection against the US-backed government, leading to the full withdrawal of all US troops the next year. The Taliban retook control of Afghanistan in September 2021.

International Agreements

A cornerstone of Trump’s America First policy agenda was the abrogation of bilateral and multilateral agreements and treaties in favor of unilateral arrangements, conducted country to country. Trump was openly hostile to the European Union, which he regarded as a competitor. He frequently threatened to withdraw the United States from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), an organization formed after World War II to create a mutual defense alliance against the Soviet Union (and, after 1991, Russia), arguing that providing military defense for Western Europe was too expensive. In June 2017, Trump announced that the United States would withdraw from the Paris Agreement to combat climate change; Joe Biden reversed that decision early in his presidency. In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, Trump announced that the United States would withdraw from the World Health Organization, which he accused of absolving China from responsibility for the pandemic. As with the Paris Accords, the Biden administration immediately rejoined the World Health Organization in January 2021.

In May 2018, the Trump administration announced that the United States would withdraw from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or the Iran nuclear deal, a 2015 agreement among the United States, Iran, five other countries, and the European Union. The deal allowed Iran to pursue nuclear technology for non-military purposes, under strict foreign supervision, in exchange for relaxed economic sanctions. Trump, along with many Republicans, had long disapproved of the agreement, which many conservatives believed made excessive and unwise concessions to Iran and risked the security of Israel in the event Iran broke the agreement and developed nuclear weapons. In November 2018, the United States reimposed all economic sanctions that had previously been in effect on Iran. Upon taking office, Joe Biden indicated his desire to rejoin the deal.

Trump also applied his unilateral approach to foreign affairs through his actions related to the Israel/Palestine conflict. In December 2017, in a move hailed by the conservative government of Israel but opposed by most world leaders, Trump announced that the United States would recognize Jerusalem as that Israel’s capital city. In May 2018, the United States officially opened a new embassy in Jerusalem. While the decision regarding Jerusalem was interpreted as inflammatory and hostile to the Palestinian cause, Trump also pursued a peace plan with the intent of solving the decades-old conflict. In August and September 2020, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner brokered deals—known collectively as the Abraham Accords—whereby the governments of the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain would normalize diplomatic relations with Israel.

Trade

President Trump’s approach to trade likewise departed from recent practice. Within days of becoming president, Trump withdrew the United States from the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership, designed to reduce barriers to trade between countries along the Pacific rim. Making good on his campaign promise to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement of 1994, which liberalized the movement of goods between Mexico, Canada, and the United States, Trump reached an agreement in 2018 to replace the treaty with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA). Although the new agreement largely retained the framework of the original treaty, it updated a number of specific terms to take account the advances of digital technology and online sales. It also created new incentives for automobile production in the United States.

Trump also fulfilled his campaign promise to address trade competition with China, whom he accused of unfair competition and theft of intellectual property that resulted in the decline of American industrial manufacturing. Beginning in January 2018, Trump imposed new tariffs, or import taxes, on a range of products from China, including especially steel and aluminum, driving up the cost of those imports for American consumers in the hope of boosting sales of American-made products. In response, China imposed tariffs on products it imported from the United States, hurting the sales of American exporters. The trade war escalated through 2019 before the Trump administration and the government of China reached an agreement that eased tensions. Trump received praise from some politicians for sticking up for American manufacturers, but criticism from others, from within his own party as well as from Democrats, for hurting global trade and driving up costs for American consumers.

North Korea

Critics of President Trump observed that, in pursuit of his America First policies, he frequently praised foreign autocrats and dictators while seeming to disparage traditional allies and democratically elected foreign leaders as weak and ineffective. Trump’s complicated relationship with Kim Jong-un, the supreme leader of the globally isolated country of North Korea, typified this tension. During the first year of his presidency, Trump took a bellicose posture toward North Korea’s test of long-range missiles that had the potential to reach targets in the United States. Ratcheting up international tensions, Trump promised to deliver “fire and fury” in response to any nuclear aggression from North Korea.

In 2018, however, Trump changed his approach. Believing in the power of personal relationships and his own deal-making prowess, Trump endeavored to resolve a decades-long standoff between the United States and North Korea through personal engagement with Kim. The two leaders met in Singapore in June 2018, the first time leaders of the two countries had ever met. The two met twice more, and in 2019 Trump became the first sitting US president to enter North Korea when, accompanied by Kim, he crossed the De-Militarized Zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea. Despite this personal diplomacy, however, Kim refused to surrender his nuclear program due to his belief that North Korea’s security from annexation by South Korea depended on possessing nuclear weapons.

Russia

The Trump administration took a very different approach to its relationship with Russia than any administration since the Cold War began after World War II. Since its brief experiment with democratic governance in the 1990s, following the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russia’s relationship with Western Europe and North American nations had grown increasingly fraught. President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB intelligence officer who first took power in Russia late in 1999, had steadily solidified his grip on political power in the ensuing decades. His annexation of Crimea and support for separatists in Ukraine, his repression of dissent in Russia (including allegations that he ordered assassinations of journalists and other opponents), and his support for Syrian president Bashar al-Assad had isolated Russia from the world community.

Trump, however, praised Putin as a strong leader during the presidential campaign. Revelations that Russian intelligence agents had orchestrated a hack of the Democratic National Committee and engaged in other propaganda efforts to help Trump in the 2016 election raised suspicions about Trump’s relationship with the Russian leader. Trump’s insistence on keeping private the details of his personal conversations with Putin only furthered suspicion.

Special counsel Robert Mueller indicted six members of Trump’s campaign and staff for various offenses related to Russia’s interference with the 2016 election. Mueller also indicted twelve Russians on charges of conspiracy to interfere in the election by hacking servers and emails. At a meeting with Putin in 2018, Trump announced that he accepted Putin’s denial of any involvement in the US election. After Mueller’s final report identified clear links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign, Trump ordered the intelligence community to investigate the investigation itself, giving his attorney general, William Barr, authority to declassify relevant information. Barr appointed federal prosecutor John Durham as special counsel to investigate; Durham continued in that office after Trump left office and, as of 2022, he had not brought evidence of wrongdoing.

Donald Trump lost the presidential election of 2020 by approximately 7 million popular votes (46.9 percent to 51.3 percent) and 232 to 306 votes in the Electoral College. He joined a relatively small group of recent US presidents to have served one term and then lost re-election. Trump’s life after the presidency was shaped both by the fact that he remained constitutionally eligible to run again and by his unwillingness to accept the legitimacy of his loss.

During the time between the election in November and the inauguration of Joe Biden on January 20, 2021, Trump continued to perpetuate the falsehood that the election had been “stolen” and that he was the rightful winner, despite the fact that many of his advisors repeatedly told him that he was wrong. He insisted to his supporters that the election was fraudulent and that he could remain in office by undoing the results.

On January 6, 2021, many Trump supporters gathered near the White House to hear the president speak at an event known as the “Stop the Steal” rally. Trump continued to push the false claims that the election was “rigged” and that he won it. He stated that he would "never concede.” He also suggested that Vice President Pence could halt the certification of the Electoral College vote, a procedural formality that was scheduled to take place in the US Capitol building on that day.

For several hours that afternoon, a mob of Trump supporters violently invaded the US Capitol building, threatening to kill members of Congress and their staff, who hid inside. More than a hundred police officers were injured, and several rioters died—one shot by police and several from natural causes. Despite frantic pleas from members of Congress and some of his staff members, Trump refused to condemn or call off the riot, which he watched on television from the White House. Once the Capitol police finally regained control of the building later that night, members of Congress came out of their secure locations and formally voted to affirm the results of the Electoral College, making Joe Biden officially the president-elect.

In the aftermath of that attack, major social media companies blocked Trump’s accounts, and the House of Representatives impeached him for a second time. Even after Trump left office, fallout from the attack continued. The House of Representatives convened a Select Committee to investigate the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. Throughout 2022, Americans watched the January 6 hearings to learn more about what transpired.

In a departure from recent tradition, Trump did not attend the inauguration of his successor, Joe Biden. He thus became only the fifth outgoing president (apart from those who died in office) to conduct such a boycott, and the first since Richard Nixon, who resigned the presidency in 1974 and did not witness the oath of office of his successor Gerald Ford. The other three were one-term presidents in the 19^th century (John Adams, John Quincy Adams, and Andrew Johnson). In addition to violating a standard norm of presidential politics, Trump’s refusal to attend Biden’s inauguration or acknowledge the legitimacy of his electoral victory marked a strike against the long-held tradition of the peaceful transfer of power that is vital to democratic governance.

Trump relocated to Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, when his presidential term expired. The beginning of his post-presidency witnessed his second impeachment trial in the United States Senate. One week after January 6, the House of Representatives impeached Trump for incitement of insurrection. The Senate trial began on February 9. Republican senator Rand Paul motioned to dismiss the trial at the outset on the grounds that Trump was out of office. Supporters of the trial noted that a guilty vote in the Senate would bar him from running for president again, and the Senate voted 55 to 45 to conduct the trial. 

Trump’s legal defense argued that Trump’s speech to the protestors on January 6 had been standard political rhetoric and accused Trump’s opponents of seeking “political vengeance.” Later the House Committee investigations revealed that Trump knew both that the election results were legitimate and that rioters on January 6 were armed and intended to commit violence, and that he personally wished to join the assault on the Capitol. That information was not presented at the Senate trial. The Senate ultimately voted 57 to 43 to convict Trump of inciting insurrection, ten votes fewer than needed for the conviction to stand. He therefore remained eligible to seek the presidency again. All Democrats (and Democratic-leaning independents) as well as seven Republican senators voted against Trump.

Without access to social media accounts like Twitter, Trump experimented with a range of start-up social media platforms and frequently issued commentary on political affairs via standard press release. He remained politically active, raising donations from supporters, campaigning for various office seekers in advance of the 2022 midterm elections, and actively criticizing President Biden, the Democratic Party, and Republicans whom he determined were insufficiently loyal to him or the “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) agenda. In November 2022, Trump announced that he was running for the GOP nomination in the 2024 presidential election. As the 2024 Republican primary got underway, almost a dozen candidates threw their hats in the ring, including Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, former governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley, and former governor or New Jersey, Chris Christie. Despite all the competition, Trump won almost all of the GOP primaries and became the presumptive Republican nominee in March 2024.

Yet, Trump remained beset by legal troubles. By September 2023, he had been indicted in four separate cases: one in New York related to hush money payments, one in Florida related to mishandling classified documents, one in Washington, DC, and one in Georgia, both related to efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. The indictments in DC and Florida were federal, brought by the US Department of Justice; those in New York and Georgia were brought under state laws.

The first case to move forward was the hush money case in New York City. Beginning in April 2024, the prosecution argued that Trump used fraudulent business practices for the purpose of interfering with the outcome of the 2016 presidential election by misleading voters. The case alleged that in October 2016, Trump had one of his lawyers, Michael Cohen, pay a porn star, Stormy Daniels, to not go public about a sexual liaison she claimed to have had with Trump in 2006. 

The case lasted about six weeks, and on May 30, 2024, the jury returned a verdict of guilty on all 34 felony counts against President Trump for falsifying business records, making him the first US president to ever be convicted of a felony. He vowed to appeal the ruling, and speculation abounded about what effects his felony conviction might have on his quest to reclaim the presidency.

Donald Trump has stated throughout his life that family has always been central to him, from his childhood through his presidency. By his own account, he has few close friends outside of his family relations. “I have a lot of good relationships,” he once said. “I have good enemies, too, which is okay. But I think more of my family than others.”

Trump has been married three times and divorced twice, the only US president with that marital history. Republican president Ronald Reagan, first elected in 1980, became the first US president to have been divorced and re-married, while a number of presidents married for a second time (three did so while in the White House!) following the death of a first spouse.

In 1977, Trump married his first spouse, Ivana Zelnickova, who was originally from Czechoslovakia and became a US citizen in 1988. The couple had three children: Donald, Jr. (born in 1977), Ivanka (born in 1981), and Eric (born in 1984). Donald and Ivana Trump divorced in 1992 in the wake of revelations, widely covered in New York City tabloid newspapers, that Trump had been engaging in an extra-marital affair with American actor Marla Maples. Trump and Maples were married in 1993, two months after their daughter Tiffany was born. They were separated in 1997 and divorced in 1999; Maples raised Tiffany in California while Trump maintained his primary residence in New York City. While his divorce to Maples was pending, Trump began dating Slovenian model Melania Knauss. They married in Palm Beach, Florida, in January 2005. Their son Barron was born the following year. Ivana Trump died in July 2022.

Until the final months of his presidency, Donald Trump maintained his primary residency at Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, New York City. As head of the Trump Organization, he “commuted” to work by taking the elevator from his opulent penthouse apartment to his office on the 26^th floor of the building. Once Trump took office, he formally moved to the White House, while First Lady Melania Trump remained in New York for the spring of 2017 so Barron could complete the school year. Melania and Barron moved to the Washington, DC, thereafter.

During his presidency, Trump also spent considerable time at his estate known as Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, which he purchased in 1985. Originally a retreat for heiress and General Foods owner Marjorie Merriweather Post, Mar-a-Lago was Trump’s warm-weather home and private club, which he often referred to as the “Winter White House.” As president, he frequently hosted foreign heads of state and conducted other official business at Mar-a-Lago. In October 2019, he formally changed his legal domicile to Mar-a-Lago, and thus ran for re-election in 2020 as a resident of Florida.

As adults, Trump’s three oldest children became executives in the Trump Organization. When Trump became president, he announced that he was transferring operational control of the company to his sons, Donald Jr. and Eric. Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner, a real estate developer, joined Trump in Washington as White House advisors. A 1967 law, passed in response to President John F. Kennedy’s selection of his brother Robert as Attorney General, raised concerns about their appointments. When Trump became president, however, the legal counsel for the Department of Justice issued an opinion that the 1967 “Robert Kennedy Law” did not apply to White House advisors, only to the heads of agencies and Cabinet secretaries. Both Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner became advisors, with Ivanka also taking the title of “First Daughter.” Trump’s other daughter, Tiffany, campaigned for her father in both 2016 and 2020 but did not play an active role in either the administration or the Trump Organization. When he left office, Trump had ten grandchildren.

Donald Trump was the fourth of five children born to Mary Anne MacLeod Trump and Fred Trump. His oldest sibling, Fred Trump, Jr., died of alcoholism in 1981 at the age of 43. After first entering the family business, Fred Trump, Jr., clashed with his father and left the company to become an airline pilot. Donald Trump has cited his brother’s struggle with addiction and premature death as the reason he avoids alcohol and tobacco use. His younger brother, Robert, also entered the family business and became an executive. He maintained a close relationship with Donald Trump throughout his life and died in the summer of 2020.

Trump’s sisters, Elizabeth Trump Grau and Maryanne Trump Barry, were discouraged from entering the family business by their father. Maryanne Trump Barry, the eldest of the Trump children, became an attorney, Assistant United States Attorney, and a federal judge on the US District Court for New Jersey and later the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. She assumed senior status in 2011, taking a reduced caseload, and took inactive senior status shortly after her brother was inaugurated president in 2017. She retired fully in 2019 in the face of investigations into tax fraud.

In 2020, Fred Trump Jr.’s daughter, Mary L. Trump, emerged as a sharp opponent of Donald Trump. She published a highly critical book about her family, Too Much and Never Enough (2020), relying both on her training as a psychiatrist and on transcripts and reports of personal conversations. She also sued her father’s siblings—her uncle Donald, her aunt Maryanne, and the estate of her late uncle Robert—claiming that they defrauded her of her inheritance from her grandfather, Fred Trump.

As a one-term president who remains constitutionally eligible to be elected to a second term and who became the presumptive Republican nominee for president in March 2024, Trump has an evolving legacy. Assessments of the range of his impacts will surely change in the years to come. Nonetheless, his effect and legacy on the institution of the presidency, the Republican Party, and key aspects of democratic governance in the United States are already evident.

Through his campaigns, presidency, and post-presidency, including his lies about the 2020 election results, Trump exercised particular influence over the shape and operation of the Republican Party. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the Republican Party expanded its state and federal gains in elections and broadened its appeal. As it did so, important ideological rifts emerged within the party. One wing of the party focused more on big business and global trade, and favored an aggressive, often belligerent, foreign policy. The other focused on cultural and social issues, often with a populist bent that criticized powerful elites, whether in the government, media, or corporate sectors. Previous Republican presidents and party leaders tried, with varying degrees of success, to cater to both camps.

Trump’s aggressive and racist approach to immigration, his disengagement from foreign alliances, his tendency to praise autocrats and dismiss liberal democratic foreign leaders, and his refusal to disavow white supremacist groups marked a profound break from the past. Although he favored certain “traditional” Republican Party positions—including the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017—and appointed socially conservative justices from the same list that any Republican president would have used, his rhetoric and priorities shifted the Republican Party decidedly.

His upset win against Hillary Clinton in 2016, despite losing the popular vote, convinced many Republicans that the only path to electoral success lay in appealing to Trump’s base of voters. As a result, many commentators observed that, even in the years after Trump left office, the Republican Party had become “the Party of Trump”: candidates sought his endorsement and approval, believing that they would be more successful if they embraced his positions, from a hardline on immigration to denying the results of the 2020 election. Moderate Republicans, particularly those who criticized Trump, lost influence within the party, and many lost elections.

Trump’s presidency also shined a light on an aspect of the American presidency and the operations of democratic governance that had frequently been overlooked in public life: the importance of political and social norms and the degree to which the system depended on a mutual respect for them. Although many laws govern the behavior of elected officials, many of the practices Americans had come to expect from their leaders were not codified in law but rather in tradition—what social scientists call norms. Trump, who prided himself on his independence and unique approach to politics, routinely violated political norms.

He refused, for example, to divulge personal financial information about himself or his company. Although every president since Gerald Ford had released prior years’ tax returns, Trump claimed that he could not do so because his taxes were under audit. (The IRS denied that Trump was barred from releasing his tax returns.) Similarly, past presidents with significant financial or business interests had put their assets in blind trusts to avoid any appearance that their presidential decisions would be influenced by their personal interests. Although Trump named his adult sons as the heads of the Trump Organization, he created no legal separation between himself and the operations of his business.

In addition, past presidents recognized the importance of demonstrating transparency when questions about presidential conduct arose and agreed to appoint investigators and special prosecutors, even when they themselves were the subject of the investigation. Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, which was his legal right to do, but he did so to impede an investigation of the 2016 election. During Robert Mueller’s investigation, Trump refused to cooperate, discredited the process, and asked his counsel to fire Mueller (he refused). And throughout his presidency, Trump routinely attacked his former campaign rival Hillary Clinton, even asking law enforcement to investigate her, breaking the long-established norm of winning graciously and affirming the patriotism and good will of one’s political opponents. In so doing, he furthered the country’s partisan polarization and the tendency for people on one side to see those on the other as alien, evil, and un-American.

By far the most significant norm that Trump violated was respect for the peaceful transition of power. By refusing to publicly accept what he knew, and was told repeatedly, about his loss to Joe Biden in 2020, Trump perpetuated a lie that enflamed passions and resulted in a violent insurrection on January 6, 2021. He not only encouraged crowds of armed people to break into the US Capitol to interrupt the certification of election results but also, despite pleas from lawmakers and his advisors, refused to intervene for several hours while the violence unfolded. In refusing to attend Joe Biden’s inauguration and continuing to insist that the election results had been manipulated and the presidency “stolen” from him, he weakened public faith in elections and the democratic process more broadly.

As an ex-President, Trump has been unusually active in political life, even as an increasing number of investigations create legal and financial peril for him. He routinely holds rallies, both for fellow Republican politicians and for himself, and collects campaign contributions from supporters. Prior former presidents, by contrast, typically maintained a low profile, allowing their successors to establish themselves as leaders (even when they were from different parties and had different policy views). Other former presidents also typically spend time in their first few years out of office planning presidential libraries, working on memoirs, and establishing non-profit organizations. 

Trump, by contrast, remains a prominent force in public life and a candidate for president. In 2023, Trump was indicted in four separate legal cases on charges related to the January 6 insurrection, the effort to pressure officials to overturn the results of the 2020 election, the illegal handling of classified documents, and the payment of hush money during his first campaign. Despite his legal troubles, Trump won almost all the Republican primaries and became the presumptive GOP nominee for president by March 2024. 

The first case to move forward was the hush money case in New York City. Beginning in April 2024, the prosecution argued that Trump used fraudulent business practices for the purpose of interfering with the outcome of the 2016 presidential election by misleading voters. The case alleged that in October 2016, Trump had one of his lawyers, Michael Cohen, pay a porn star, Stormy Daniels, to not go public with her account of a sexual liaison she claimed to have had with Trump in 2006. 

The case lasted about six weeks, and on May 30, 2024, the jury returned a verdict of guilty on all 34 felony counts against President Trump for falsifying business records, making him the first US president to ever be convicted of a felony. He vowed to appeal the ruling, and many speculated about what effects his felony conviction might have on his quest to reclaim the presidency.

Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. was elected the 46^th president of the United States after thirty-six years in the Senate and eight years as vice president. On January 20, 2021, at age 78, Biden became the oldest president in history to take oath of office. He confronted a divided nation wracked by the worst health crisis in a century with the coronavirus pandemic, a staggered economy, protests for racial justice, and internal threats to American democracy.  

Biden sought the presidency three times—1988, 2008, and 2020. During his long years in public service, he twice suffered enormous personal tragedy. Shortly after he was first elected to the Senate in 1972, his first wife Neilia and infant daughter, Naomi, known as Amy, were killed in a car crash; his sons Beau and Hunter were injured. In 2015, when Biden was vice president and grappling with a possible presidential run in 2016, his son Beau died of brain cancer.

Biden was born on November 20, 1942, in Scranton, Pennsylvania, into a working-class Irish Catholic family. The first child of Catherine Eugenia “Jean” Finnegan Biden and Joseph Robinette Biden Sr., Joey, as he was known, suffered from a severe stutter that he managed to overcome with rigorous practice and sheer will, though it still afflicted him from time to time throughout his life. During his undergraduate years at the University of Delaware, Biden was exposed to the inequities of racial injustice while working one summer as a lifeguard at a public swimming pool near a housing project. After graduating from Syracuse University Law School in 1968, he first took a job with a corporate law firm defending big businesses but soon realized the work was not right for him, and he became a public defender whose clients were nearly all African Americans from Wilmington’s East Side. 

In 1972, at age 29, he won an unexpected victory in his campaign for a US Senate seat from Delaware, beating 63-year-old, two-term Senator J. Caleb Boggs, a Republican. Shortly after his election, his wife and daughter were killed in a car accident. Biden at first did not have the will to take up his duties in Washington but agreed to try it for six months at the urging of powerful Senate colleagues such as Edward Kennedy and Mike Mansfield, Senate majority leader. 

In 1975, Biden met Jill Jacobs, a student at the University of Delaware almost nine years his junior, and they were married in 1977. Their daughter Ashley was born in 1981.

Over his many years in the Senate, Biden grew to love and respect the traditions and hierarchy of the institution, playing leading roles on both the Judiciary Committee and the Foreign Relations Committee. He chaired the confirmation hearings of five justices, the most contentious being the hearings over the nominations of Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas. 

Presiding over the confirmation hearings of Robert Bork, a US Appeals Court Judge and former US solicitor general, in 1987, Biden conducted a prolonged, painstaking inquiry into the record of the nominee, who was a declared opponent of civil rights and whose originalist views presupposed his adversity to Roe v. Wade. The Senate rejected Bork’s nomination by a vote of 58 to 42.

Throughout his Senate years, Biden had his sights set on higher office. After two failed presidential runs in 1988 and 2008, he won a valuable second prize: the vice presidency. In August 2008, Barack Obama selected Biden as his running mate, inspired by Biden’s foreign policy expertise, his skill working with Congress, his resilience after his profound personal setbacks, and his devotion to his family. Biden served as Obama’s chief counselor. When the president’s advisers debated critical issues, Biden was the last guy in the room, whispering in Obama’s ear.

He played influential foreign and domestic roles in the administration, establishing himself as one of the most significant vice presidents in American history. He and Obama formed an unprecedented partnership. No president and vice president had ever worked so closely together and formed such an intimate bond. Just days before the end of the Obama-Biden administration, the president surprised his vice president by awarding him the Medal of Freedom. At the ceremony, Obama extolled his relationship with Biden by reciting lines from William Butler Yeats: “Think where man’s glory most begins and ends / and say my glory was I had such friends.”   

Ever since high school, Biden had his heart set on the biggest prize in American politics. After his first two runs for the presidency flamed out early, he was emboldened to take on Donald Trump in 2020, declaring: “We are in the battle for the soul of this nation.” He cited as a motivation President Trump’s reaction to the white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, when Trump asserted there were “very fine people on both sides.” Biden also zeroed in on the Trump administration’s failed management of the coronavirus pandemic as a cornerstone of his campaign.

Biden’s 2020 presidential run looked doomed early on like his previous campaigns. It gained little traction until Biden got a last-minute rescue from powerful Representative James E. Clyburn from South Carolina. His endorsement powered Biden to victory in the South Carolina primary and marked a turnaround for the former vice president. Just before accepting the Democratic nomination at the party convention in August 2020, Biden selected Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate, proposing the possibility of the first woman, first Black, and first South Asian American as vice president.

Because of the pandemic, many Americans voted early and by mail, prompting President Trump to assert that the outcome was compromised by fraud. After all the votes were counted showing a decisive victory for Biden, Trump kept up his attacks on the integrity of the election process. But his team presented almost no evidence of fraud and repeatedly lost court challenges. On December 14, the Electoral College ratified Biden’s election with a solid majority of 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232 votes. Biden collected 81 million votes overall, 7 million more than Trump’s 74 million. Despite his clear defeat in the popular vote and the Electoral College, Trump continued to claim falsely that he had won the election and never conceded defeat. 

The consequences of Trump’s false claims became clear to the nation on January 6, 2021, when Trump supporters and white supremacists gathered to protest the results of the 2020 presidential election. A mob overwhelmed Capitol police and pushed their way into the US Capitol, where members of Congress were meeting to certify the election results. As members of Congress were rushed out of harm's way, police were unable to contain the intruders who broke windows, destroyed property, and trespassed through the building. Five people were killed during the attack, including a Capitol police officer. A week later, the US House of Representatives impeached President Trump for a second time, making him the first president to be impeached twice in US history. 

Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. was born on November 20, 1942, in Scranton, Pennsylvania, as World War II raged overseas. The first child of Catherine Eugenia “Jean” Finnegan Biden and Joseph Robinette Biden Sr., Joey, as he was known, was a scrappy kid from a working-class Irish Catholic family. Biden’s father prospered during the war when an uncle gave him a job in his lucrative manufacturing company that provided sealant for merchant marine ships. Joe Sr. left Scranton to run the Boston office; he lived the high life, driving fast cars, hunting, and haunting the polo fields. But after the war, his fortunes reversed, and Joe Sr. found himself adrift. After a couple of failed business ventures, he returned to the coal-mining town of Scranton where he took what work he could get to support the family. By now, Joe Jr. had been joined by his sister Valerie; two brothers, James and Frank, would complete the family. 

As a child, Joe Jr. suffered from a severe stutter. He endured bullies and the shame that accompanies the affliction. Kindergarten speech therapy did not work so he decided to fight his battle on his own. The effort toughened him and endowed him with prodigious confidence that sometimes veered into recklessness. In industrial Scranton, at around age ten, he accepted a $5 dare from a local kid to climb to the top of a culm mountain. The two-hundred-foot mountain—made up of waste material from coal mine shafts—was hot and dangerous; along its surface were invisible ash pockets that could collapse with a footstep, dropping a foolhardy young kid into the burning center. But Joe took the gamble and scrambled up the side of the black mountain. As author Richard Ben Cramer told the story, “By the time he got to the top, the five bucks wasn’t the point anymore. It was more like . . . immortality.” 

In 1953, Joe Sr. landed a job selling cars in Wilmington, Delaware, and moved the family into an apartment in the suburb of Claymont. Joe Jr.’s tribulations dogged him into high school at the Archmere Academy, a private Catholic school for boys. His classmates tarred him with the nickname “Dash,” for the way sounds came off his lips. “I talked like Morse code,” Biden explained in his memoir, Promises to Keep. “Dot-dot- dot-dot-dash-dash-dash-dash.” His stutter put the fighting spirit in him, and he shouted down the bullies: “You gu-gu-gu-gu-guys sh-sh-sh-sh-shut up!” He practiced hard in his bedroom, watching his lips in the mirror with a flashlight while memorizing Yeats and Emerson so he could speak flawlessly in class. “Other kids looked at me like I was stupid,” Biden recalled. “I wanted so badly to prove I was like everybody else.” At Archmere, Biden was outgoing and athletic and relied on sports to distract attention away from his stutter. He turned himself into a star halfback known for his skill at reeling in passes and earned the nickname “Hands,” which replaced the bullying epithets. By sheer will, he conquered the stutter, though it has crept back on him now and then throughout his life. 

When Biden began his freshman year at the University of Delaware in 1961, he already had law school in his sights and a dream of becoming “an esteemed public figure,” as he put it in his memoir. During college, Biden took a summer job as a lifeguard at a public swimming pool near a housing project. He was the only white lifeguard among a dozen inner-city African Americans who were students at historically Black colleges. The job opened Biden’s eyes to the stark difference in the lives of Black and white Americans: “Every day, it seemed to me, Black people got subtle and not-so-subtle reminders that they did not quite belong in America,” Biden wrote in his memoir. 

On his spring break in 1964, he met Neilia Hunter, a Syracuse University student. They married in 1966 and had three children, Beau (1969), Hunter (1970), and Naomi (1971), who was known as Amy.

After graduating from Syracuse University Law School in 1968, Joe first took a job with a corporate law firm defending big businesses but soon realized the work was not right for him, and he became a public defender whose clients were nearly all African Americans from Wilmington’s East Side. By 1970, he had his first taste of politics, winning election to the New Castle County Council, where he served until 1972, when he challenged the likeable, 63-year-old, two-term Senator J. Caleb Boggs, a Republican. It was an audacious gamble by the cocky 29-year-old unknown. Even if he won, Biden would have to wait by law until his 30th birthday to take his seat. 

Supported by his sister Valerie, who served as campaign manager, his brother Jimmy, who was his chief fundraiser, and his wife, Neilia, Biden barnstormed the state, going door to door in the suburbs and at the shore, and won by less than 3,000 votes out of a total 228,000 cast. In his victory speech, the young Senator-elect graciously called the defeated incumbent “a real gentleman.” 

But tragedy soon followed. On December 18, 1972, Neilia set out to do some Christmas shopping with the three kids when a tractor trailer plowed into her station wagon, killing Neilia and Amy. Beau and Hunter were badly injured. Biden considered giving up his Senate seat before he even arrived, but Democratic and Republican colleagues persuaded him to give the new job a try. He was sworn in as senator in the chapel at Wilmington Medical Center with Beau, Hunter, and other family members. 

As a freshman senator, Biden raised his voice in protest over President Richard Nixon’s violation of the public trust and strongly criticized President Gerald Ford for pardoning Nixon after his resignation. Even in his early years as a senator, Biden sought prominence as a national figure, though he kept his focus on the needs of his constituents in Delaware, a task made easier by his daily commutes home. He also developed an early reputation for candor, acknowledging in the second year of his term what many senators kept to themselves: that the presidency was the place to be if you wanted to have the biggest national impact. “You’re being phony to say you’re not interested in being president if you really want to change things,” he acknowledged in 1974. “But I’m certainly not qualified at this point. I don’t have the experience or background.”

In 1975, Biden met Jill Jacobs, a student at the University of Delaware eight years his junior, and they were married in 1977. Their daughter Ashley was born in 1981. 

During 36 years in the Senate, Biden served in leading roles on both the Judiciary Committee and the Foreign Relations Committee. He was chairman or ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee for 17 years. He chaired the confirmation hearings of five justices, the most contentious being the hearings over the nominations of Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas.

In 1987, Biden presided over the confirmation hearings of Robert Bork, a US Appeals Court Judge and former US solicitor general, who was a declared opponent of civil rights and whose originalist views presupposed his adversity to Roe v. Wade; he also favored maximum powers for the executive branch. Biden prepared arduously and conducted prolonged, painstaking hearings that probed not only Bork’s judicial record but also his judicial philosophy. The Senate rejected Bork’s nomination by a vote of 58 to 42.

During the Thomas hearings in 1991, Biden failed to conduct a full investigation into sexual harassment allegations against the nominee. The committee called on Thomas’s accuser, Anita Hill, to testify, and she provided a vivid account of the nominee’s conduct, but Biden did not allow corroborating testimony from other witnesses. Ever since the staunchly conservative Thomas won confirmation, liberals have criticized Biden for shutting down the hearings before the harassment debate was fully aired. When his handling of the hearings became a presidential campaign issue, Biden told ABC News in 2019 that "Hill did not get treated well. I take responsibility for that." 

As Judiciary Committee chairman, Biden was a leading advocate for massive tough-on-crime legislation such as the 1994 federal crime bill that stiffened sentences, widened application of the death penalty, added police officers to the streets, and provided funding for new prisons. Crime in America had tripled between 1960 and 1990, inflamed by a crack-cocaine epidemic in the 1980s. Working with police groups, Biden wrote the Senate version of the bill, which he used to proudly call the Biden Crime Bill. When Congress passed the new law with bipartisan support, it was not considered terribly controversial. But in recent years, it has been seen as contributing to the plague of mass incarceration. The passage of time has changed the public’s perspective of the law, and the quarter-century-old legislation surfaced as a point of controversy in the 2020 Democratic primaries, forcing Biden to defend his role in shaping it.    

Ever since his stumble over the Anita Hill accusations, Biden has worked to improve his record on issues important to women. In 1990, appalled by the lack of attention given marital rape and moved by the killing of 14 women in Montreal who were targeted because the shooter believed they were feminists, Biden introduced the Violence Against Women Act that promised federal penalties for crimes against women. Stalled by Republicans, the bill went nowhere until 1994 when Congress finally passed it. Biden has called the law his “proudest legislative accomplishment.” Biden further advanced his recognition of women and their issues when he selected Senator Kamala Harris of California as his running mate. 

As the chairman or ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for 11 years, Biden influenced American foreign policy and led efforts on America’s response to terrorism and the shape of the post-Cold War world. He is prone to boast of his achievements overseas, sometimes exaggerating his role or impact, causing some critics to downplay his foreign policy acumen. Nonetheless, he had contact with a vast array of world leaders during his time in the Senate. He provided a list to The Washington Post after his selection as Barack Obama’s running mate in 2008 that showed Biden had met with 150 leaders from nearly 60 countries, territories, and international organizations such as NATO and the United Nations. 

Biden often favored humanitarian efforts overseas, and he pushed for US military intervention in the Balkans in the 1990s. In 1991, Biden voted against authorizing President George H.W. Bush to wage war against Iraq, arguing that too much of the burden of the anti-Iraq coalition fell on the United States. In the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Biden voted in favor of the Iraq War in 2002. Under his chairmanship before the vote, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee heard testimony contending Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, testimony based on unsubstantiated evidence that proved to be untrue. Biden later opposed the war and acknowledged his vote was a “mistake.” He also was strongly opposed to the US troop surge in Iraq in 2007, which many observers attributed to a subsequent decline in violence in Iraq.  

Throughout his Senate years, Biden had his sights set on higher office. After two failed presidential runs, he won a valuable second prize: the vice presidency. In August 2008, Barack Obama selected Biden as his running mate, inspired by Biden’s foreign policy expertise, his skill working with Congress, his resilience after his profound personal setbacks, and his devotion to his family. 

When approached as a potential running mate, Biden had a very clear idea of how he wanted to shape the vice presidency. He wanted to be Obama’s chief counselor, he wanted to be in attendance at every important meeting, he wanted his views considered on every crucial decision on both foreign and domestic policy, he wanted to advise and participate in legislative efforts, he wanted to be the last guy in the room whispering in Obama’s ear, and he wanted a private meeting, perhaps lunch, with the president every week. Perhaps most important, given Biden’s nature, he wanted to be able to speak with absolute candor. Obama recognized Biden’s talents, wanted the unvarnished truth, accepted his demands.

After the election, Biden played influential foreign and domestic roles in the administration, establishing himself as one of the most significant vice presidents in American history. A sign of his importance in foreign policy was a pre-inaugural trip he made to Afghanistan that set the stage for Biden’s advocacy of a more limited US military role in the country.  Obama encouraged Biden to stir debate in advisers’ meetings, so a range of voices and options were heard in arriving at decisions. While some national security advisers urged the president to increase troop levels in Afghanistan, Biden favored a drawdown of US forces, a position Obama ultimately followed when he decided to withdraw 30,000 troops by 2012. Asked to take on a key role in America’s military and diplomatic relationships with Iraq, Biden made repeated trips to meet with the nation’s leaders. Speaking on behalf of the president, Biden laid out the administration’s foreign policy ambitions when he spoke to a gathering of heads of state and ministers at the Munich Conference on Security Policy in February 2009, just weeks into the first term. 

Biden provided President Obama with crucial advice on legislative issues related to the 2009 Recovery Act, budget and tax negotiations, and the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) treaty. Working with legislators, Biden helped wrangle the votes needed to pass the Affordable Care Act. He was tasked with overseeing implementation of the Recovery Act, a job that relied on his political and governmental skills in coordinating efforts by federal agencies with the needs of state and local jurisdictions. 

President Obama and Vice President Biden forged such a close partnership that the media took to calling it a “bromance” and featured the duo in photographs eating lunch out together, putting on the White House green, and horsing around in the Oval Office. Just days before the end of the Obama-Biden administration, the president surprised his vice president by awarding him the Medal of Freedom. At the ceremony, Obama extolled his relationship with Biden by reciting lines from William Butler Yeats: “Think where man’s glory most begins and ends / and say my glory was I had such friends.”   

Although Biden considered running for president in 2016, the death of his son Beau in 2015 diminished his appetite for the contest. In addition, President Obama quietly urged Biden to stay out of the race. Biden announced that he would not run on October 21, 2015. After leaving the vice presidency, Biden, together with his wife, created the Biden Foundation and the Biden Cancer Initiative, but both organizations suspended operations after Biden announced in 2019 that he would run for president. 

As far back as his high school days at Archmere Academy, Joe Biden had his heart set on the biggest prize in American politics. When the father of a classmate named Dave Walsh asked him what he wanted to do with his life, Biden was quick with an answer: “Mr. Walsh, I want to be president of the United States.” 

It took Biden three tries to get to the White House, the first two—1988 and 2008—flaming out early and embarrassingly, and even his final winning campaign in 2020 struggled to gain traction and seemed headed for defeat until it got a last-minute rescue from a powerful South Carolina congressman.

In his first bid, for the 1988 Democratic nomination, Biden had a high-profile leadership role as the backdrop to his campaign. As Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, he was set to preside over the Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Robert Bork, starting on September 15, 1987. But a couple weeks before the hearings began, Biden plagiarized a speech by British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock during his closing remarks at a debate at the Iowa State Fair. The press swarmed, uncovering other incidents when Biden had appropriated material dating back to his school days. As a law student at Syracuse University, he cribbed from a law review article without citation for a class paper. Later as a politician, he failed to credit words he used that belonged to Robert Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey. It was also discovered that Biden had claimed to have finished in the top half of his law school class when he was 76 out of 85 classmates. Having announced his candidacy for president on June 9, 1987, he dropped out of the race on September 23.

In 1988, Biden suffered two aneurysms, which were repaired surgically. 

On January 31, 2007, Biden launched his run for the 2008 presidency. But, on the same day, the media reported that he had described another candidate, Barack Obama, as “the first sort of mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean.” Reporters dug up other instances unrelated to Obama when Biden’s casual comments had sounded racially insensitive. His campaign never recovered. Biden trudged along, attracting little attention, and after a dismal showing in the Iowa caucuses on January 3, 2008, he called it quits.

Biden’s run for the presidency in 2020 looked similarly doomed at the outset. He entered the race on April 25, 2019, declaring: “We are in the battle for the soul of this nation.” He cited as his motivation President Trump’s reaction to the white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, when Trump asserted there were “very fine people on both sides.” He presented himself as the candidate who could rid the country of the divisive Trump and work to heal political polarization. Recognizing the danger of the spreading coronavirus pandemic, Biden limited public rallies, and when he did appear at campaign events, supporters listened from their cars, honking their applause. He made Trump’s failed management of the pandemic a cornerstone of his argument while the president held his own rallies with supporters crowded together often without masks.

But Biden’s appeal at first did not resonate with Democratic voters. He was deemed too old and too conservative for the young insurgents in the party aligned with rival Bernie Sanders who wanted to push the party farther to the left. Critics zeroed in on potential health issues for the then-77-year-old candidate. In December 2019, Biden released a medical assessment that noted he was healthy and vigorous and had not had any aneurysm recurrences. In the Iowa caucuses, Biden came in fourth, and in the New Hampshire primary he dropped to fifth place. In the next contest, in Nevada, Biden came in a distant second behind Sanders who the media now labeled as the front-runner. Biden, whose chances for the nomination appeared to be fading, threw all his hopes on the South Carolina primary, the first in a series of states where African American voters played a significant role. When Biden won the endorsement of the influential South Carolina Representative, James E. Clyburn, his campaign gained new momentum. He captured 48.6 percent of the vote in South Carolina, decisively beating Sanders who tallied 19.8 percent, marking a startling turnaround for the former vice president. 

Biden gained the endorsements of former campaign rivals Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg. After he won 10 of 14 states on Super Tuesday, Kamala Harris and Cory Booker threw their support behind the surging Biden. As Biden racked up victories and delegates in subsequent primaries, Sanders bowed out on April 8, paving the way for Biden’s nomination at the Democratic National Convention. As the presumptive nominee, Biden kept to his promise to name a woman as his running mate. He chose Kamala Harris, a former attorney general of California and a senator of Black and Indian descent, a move that acknowledged the aspirations of both women and people of color. 

The Democratic National Convention, held August 17 to 20, was unlike any other due to restrictions imposed by the coronavirus pandemic. A mostly virtual event, it was structured to appeal to voters watching on television at home. There were celebrity hosts and musical performances and brief appearances by politicians, political activists, and average Americans who were filmed in a variety of geographic regions around the country. “It was simply more compelling to watch than the fusty, arena-bound version that rolls around every four years,” wrote Lorraine Ali, a television critic for the Los Angeles Times.

Biden and Harris delivered their nomination acceptance speeches in front of reporters in a largely empty arena in Wilmington, then watched a fireworks display with supporters in their cars in a parking lot outside the arena. The celebration was highlighted by supporters honking their horns and flashing their headlights. 

In his speech, Biden underscored his themes in battling Trump during the final leg of the race, stressing that Trump had “cloaked America in darkness . . . anger . . . fear [and] division.” He pledged to bring America together. “United we can, and will, overcome this season of darkness in America,” he said. “We will choose hope over fear, facts over fiction, fairness over privilege.” He drew a sharp distinction between himself and Trump, promising to offer generosity, compassion, and character amid the coronavirus pandemic that at the time of convention had killed 170,000 people. Biden painted Trump and his response to the pandemic in simple, stark terms.  “Our current president,” he said, “has failed in his most basic duty to this nation. He failed to protect us. He failed to protect America.” 

Because of the pandemic, many Americans voted early and by mail, prompting President Trump to assert that the outcome may be compromised by fraud. On election night, November 3, early returns based on voters who showed up at the polls that day—a large majority of them Republicans—indicated a lead for Trump. At around 2:30 a.m., Trump said falsely that he had won the election and demanded that all vote counting stop. It took several days for all the votes to be counted, including the early ballots and mail-in ballots which were dominated by Democrats. On November 7, 2020, the major news networks and the Associated Press declared Biden the winner. Harris became the first woman, the first Black, and first Asian American woman to become vice president. 

A record number of voters turned out in 2020, casting nearly 160 million votes. The turnout among eligible voters was the highest in 120 years: 66.2 of eligible voters cast ballots, surpassed only by the election of 1900 when 73.7 percent voted. Trump continued to cry fraud, launched dozens of legal challenges with little effect, until finally the Electoral College met on December 14 and ratified Biden’s victory on November 3 with a solid majority of 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232 votes. Biden collected 81 million votes overall, 7 million more than Trump’s 74 million. Despite his clear defeat in the popular vote and the Electoral College, Trump continued to claim falsely that he had won the election and that the voting was fraudulent. 

The consequences of Trump’s false claims became clear to the nation on January 6, 2021, when Trump supporters and white supremacists gathered to protest the results of the 2020 presidential election. A mob overwhelmed Capitol police and pushed their way into the US Capitol, where members of Congress were meeting to certify the election results. As members of Congress were rushed out of harm's way, police were unable to contain the intruders who broke windows, destroyed property, and trespassed through the building. Five people were killed during the attack, including a Capitol police officer. A week later, the US House of Representatives impeached President Trump for a second time, making him the first president to be impeached twice in US history. 

President Joe Biden came into office with two clear priorities—getting control over the coronavirus pandemic, which had killed more than 400,000 Americans by the time he took office, and restoring the US economy. Before he took office, the new president sent a clear signal that after four years of inexperienced leadership at many levels of government, it was time to build a mature team ready to take on the massive challenges facing the country. His cabinet and staffing choices also reflected Biden’s pledge to put together the most diverse cabinet in history. Biden encountered some criticism for recycling some officials who served under Barack Obama and for putting together a team whose primary policy ambitions appear aimed at tackling the twin pandemic and economic crises confronting America at the expense of pursuing the broad change that progressives desire. 

Among Biden’s picks, the most senior is Janet Yellen, who at 74 will assume the role of Treasury secretary, the first women to lead the department. She served as chair of the Federal Reserve from 2014 to 2018. As head of Treasury, she was immersed in politics in a way she never was at the Federal Reserve as she needed to work with Congress on stimulus efforts to ease the economic hardship from the pandemic. 

The new secretary of Health and Human Services, Xavier Becerra, had the coronavirus pandemic as his chief focus. Under Biden, and Becerra, the first Latino to head HHS, the administration took a more aggressive approach than the Trump administration in combating the Covid-19 crisis. HHS encompasses a wide range of agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control, National Institutes of Health, and Food and Drug Administration, that are core to bringing the pandemic under control. Becerra also likely proved a valuable adviser to Biden in his bid to strengthen the Affordable Care Act after Trump repeatedly sought to undermine it. As attorney general of California, Becerra led a multi-state effort to preserve the ACA.

Biden said he was committed to building an administration, including his cabinet, that “is going to look like the country.” Several other cabinet members he has selected, in addition to Yellen and Becerra, broaden the diversity of Biden’s domestic policy team. Deb Haaland, named secretary of the Interior Department, was the first Native American person to serve in a cabinet position. A New Mexico representative, Haaland was a win for progressives who had lobbied for a Native American at the head of Interior. Her appointment signaled a change in the government’s long and often tragic relationship with the country’s indigenous population.    

Biden also chose Michael S. Regan, who runs the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, to be the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, and Brenda Mallory, a veteran of environmental law and regulation, to lead the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality. Both Regan and Mallory, who are Black, had personal and professional understanding of the adverse impact environmental practices and policies have on low-income and minority communities.

The Obama era resurfaces in several of Biden’s selections. Tom Vilsack, named secretary of the Department of Agriculture, served two terms in the same position under President Obama. Denis McDonough, whom Biden chose for secretary of Veteran Affairs, was Obama’s chief of staff for four years as well as serving as his principal deputy national security adviser. Biden also recruited another name from the Obama administration—Merrick Garland—although he did not actually serve in it. In 2016, President Obama nominated Judge Garland to a seat on the Supreme Court, but Mitch McConnell, Senate Majority Leader, refused to consider his nomination. Biden named Garland to be Attorney General and run the Department of Justice.  

In another nod to diversity, Biden selected Pete Buttigieg, former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and a presidential candidate in 2020, as secretary of the Department of Transportation. If confirmed, Buttigieg would be the first openly gay person in US history to have a seat at the table when President Biden’s cabinet convenes.  

President Biden faced a number of challenges in foreign affairs. After years of erratic policy decisions under President Trump, Biden aimed to bring a state of normalcy to US foreign policy, rejoin treaties and alliances the previous administration abandoned, and restore the county’s standing in the world. The Biden approach jettisoned Trump’s “America First” nationalism in favor of rebuilding relationships with US allies and bolstering international institutions that Trump denigrated such as NATO and the World Health Organization. President Biden planned for the United States to return to the Paris climate agreement, focus on repairing the damage done to the Iran nuclear deal, and try to tame China’s widening international influence.  

Biden’s foreign policy team reflected a return to stability but also, some critics contended, a return to the past rather than a strong forward-looking agenda. While he built a diverse team, Biden also drew criticism for populating it with members of the Obama administration. His choice for secretary of State, Antony Blinken, served as deputy secretary of State and deputy security adviser under Obama. He is a longtime adviser to Biden, having served the former vice president both in the Senate and as his national security adviser in the White House. Blinken is a steadfast proponent of building strong partnerships around the world. “Put simply,” Blinken said in 2016, “the world is safer for the American people when we have friends, partners, and allies.”

Other alumni of the Obama White House are Linda Thomas-Greenfield, a longtime Black diplomat nominated as US Ambassador to the United Nations, Jake Sullivan, slated to become national security adviser, and Samantha Power, chosen to run the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). 

Alejandro Mayorkas, who was deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security in Obama’s second term, was named to head that department under Biden. He also served as director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services in the Obama administration. He was the first immigrant and Latino secretary of Homeland Security.

Biden chose Avril Haines, who served as deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and deputy national security adviser under Obama, as his director of national intelligence. She was the first woman in that job. 

Biden nominated retired General Lloyd Austin as secretary of the Defense Department. Austin, a four-star general who served in the military for 41 years, ran the US Central Command from 2013 to 2016, the first African American in that position. He will also be the first African American Defense secretary. However, some objected to Biden’s choice because it placed a former military leader in a traditional civilian role. Austin also faced another possible obstacle: the law requires at least seven years of retirement from active military service for a Defense secretary to take up leadership of the Pentagon. Austin would need a waiver from Congress where some lawmakers have expressed hesitation after President Trump sought a waiver for his first Defense secretary, Jim Mattis. Biden was said to lean toward Austin for the job because of his experience with large logistics operations in his previous roles, a skill that will be needed to tackle the slower-than-hoped distribution of coronavirus vaccines. 

Joe Biden has suffered two significant family tragedies that have shaped his personal and political life. As a University of Delaware student on spring break in 1964, Biden on a whim flew from Fort Lauderdale to Nassau—it was his first plane flight—and, as he told biographer Jules Witcover, “that trip changed everything.” In Nassau, he met Neilia Hunter, a Syracuse University student, and fell in love at first sight. The next weekend, he showed up at Neilia’s dorm in Syracuse and sat in the lobby until he saw her. “You know what he said,” Neilia revealed afterward to a friend. “He told me he’s going to be a senator by the time he’s thirty. And then, he’s going to be president.” They married in 1966. Their son Beau was born in 1969, followed by Hunter in 1970, and Naomi, or Amy as the family called her, who arrived in 1971. 

On December 18, 1972, after Biden won an unexpected victory in his bid for a US Senate seat, he was in Washington making preparations for his term when Neilia took the kids shopping in Wilmington. As she pulled the station wagon into an intersection, a tractor trailer packed with corncobs smashed into the driver’s side, knocking the car 150 feet down the road and into a ditch. Neilia and baby Amy were dead on arrival at Wilmington Medical Center. Beau, who had many broken bones, was put in a full body cast. Hunter had suffered head injuries.

Biden was wasn’t sure he could take up his seat in the Senate, prompting his Senate colleagues to embrace him and ease him through his emotional crisis. Biden’s love of the institution can be traced back to the compassion both Republican and Democratic senators showered upon him: the Senate became his family. Biden agreed to a six-month trial as a new senator, but he would live at home in Delaware and return each evening by train to be with his sons, earning himself a sobriquet that has stuck to this day: “Amtrak Joe.”

In 1975, Biden met Jill Jacobs, a student at the University of Delaware eight years his junior. She embraced the Biden family, and Beau and Hunter adored her, prompting the boys to advise their father: “We think we should marry Jill.” The couple was married in 1977. Their daughter Ashley was born in 1981. Jill was instrumental in rebuilding the family, raising Beau and Hunter as her own.

Biden’s second family tragedy came in 2015 when Beau died of brain cancer in May. Biden, who had been considering a presidential bid in 2016, wavered on whether he had the strength for a campaign. In August 2015, Biden had gained his strongest position in the polls in six months. His favorability numbers were higher than those of anyone running in either party, including the likely Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. He scored high on trustworthiness, honesty, and empathy, and he thumped Clinton in voter surveys in the swing states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida. Momentum was building, and the media speculated heavily about a Biden candidacy. But as he was still in mourning and Obama favored Clinton, Biden announced on October 21, 2015, that he had decided not to run. 

Biden’s father imparted an important lesson to his son from his life of hard knocks as the family’s breadwinner. From the example of his father, Biden learned the art of resilience. Through his tragedies in life and his disappointments in politics, he fondly repeated one of his father’s favorite maxims. “Champ,” his father used to tell him, “it’s not how many times you get knocked down, it’s how quickly you get up."