Donald Trump in an upset in 2016 snatched victory from Hillary Clinton. 8 November 2016. The night Donald Trump proved all political pundits, and pollsters wrong and spread much shock, and a lot of despair, across the planet.
However, If Hillary had won, we would not have known what a terrible President and Person Trump is
November 13, 2016 – Ivanka Trump accompanied her father on his presidential interview with 60 Minutes. Ivanka’s upscale jewelry brand used her father’s political appearance to promote a $10,800 bracelet she had worn during the broadcast.
November 18, 2016 – One week after Trump’s election, 100 foreign diplomats gathered at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. to drink champagne and tour the building. One diplomat told the Washington Post, “Why wouldn’t I stay at his hotel blocks from the White House, so I can tell the new president, ‘I love your new hotel!’ Isn’t it rude to come to his city and say, ‘I am staying at your competitor?’” This indicated a conflict of interest that could have violated the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, which forbids government officials from accepting “any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”
November 18, 2016 – Even though he said he would not settle the case, Donald Trump agreed to pay $25 million to settle his Trump University fraud lawsuits. The real estate seminar program was not an accredited university and used misleading marketing tactics to recruit students.
November 27, 2016 – Without citing evidence to support his claim, Donald Trump tweeted, “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally”. This claim has been repeatedly debunked.
End of December 2016 – In December of 2016, Donald Trump’s senior adviser Jared Kushner, incoming national security adviser Michael Flynn, and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak met at Trump Tower to establish a “line of connection.” The meeting occurred around the time that the Obama administration was placing sanctions on the Russian government for interfering in the 2016 election.
January 10, 2017 Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Donald Trump approached him about leading an investigation into “Vaccine Safety.” The prospect that vaccination can lead to autism has been repeatedly debunked by long-running, peer-reviewed studies. Trump had supported the anti-vaccination theory on stage at the 2015 presidential debates. In September 2015 he publicly stated, “We had so many instances, people that work for me, just the other day, two years old, a beautiful child, went to have the vaccine and came back and a week later got a tremendous fever, got very, very sick, now is autistic.”
Presidency
January 20, 2017 – Within hours of his inauguration, Donald Trump took aim at the Affordable Care Act in his first executive order as president. Following up on his campaign’s recurring promise to dismantle Obamacare, the order weakened the program by allowing states to “waive, defer, grant exemptions from or delay implementation of any provision or requirement” that would place a “fiscal burden” on the state.
January 22, 2017 – Donald Trump refused to release his tax returns to the public, both during the campaign and after his election. He is the first president in over 40 years to withhold his financial information from the American public. Upon Trump’s election, senior counselor Kellyanne Conway explained his refusal, saying, “The White House response is that he’s not going to release his tax returns… we litigated this all through the election. People didn’t care. They voted for him.” Donald Trump and his administration have justified his decision to break with historic precedent and keep his financial information from public scrutiny by saying that Trump is under a “routine audit” from the Internal Revenue Service. Officials from the IRS have clarified that an audit does not restrict a citizen from revealing their tax information.
January 25, 2017 – Following up on his campaign promise to crack down on immigration, Donald Trump signed an executive order to both bolster the United States deportation force and direct construction of a wall along the Mexican border. The executive order also expanded the definition of “priority for deportation” to include anyone charged with a criminal offense. Rather than requiring a conviction by a court, “priority for deportation” would henceforth apply to any “acts that constitute a chargeable offense”—including minor offenses such as traffic violations and shoplifting.
January 27, 2017 – At a private dinner, Donald Trump allegedly demanded loyalty from FBI Director James Comey. Comey claimed Trump said to him, “I need loyalty, I expect loyalty.” Comey had replied that he would always be honest with [Trump], but that he was not ‘reliable’ in the conventional political sense. Comey went on to explain why the Department of Justice and FBI should remain independent of each other. Director Comey was dismissed from office four months later.
January 27, 2017 – Donald Trump signed what would become known as the” travel ban,” an executive order which imposed a 90-day ban on citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States, while also indefinitely halting incoming refugees from Syria. Trump’s travel bans still allowed travelers from other Muslim-majority countries where he held extensive business interests, such as Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
January 30, 2017 – Donald Trump fired acting Attorney General Sally Yates for refusing to defend the travel ban. In a repudiation of the president, Yates had instructed Justice Department lawyers not to defend the executive order from any legal challenges.
February 4, 2017 – Donald Trump questioned the legitimacy of the federal judge who had blocked his travel ban, calling Judge James Robart a “so-called judge” whose dissenting opinion had taken “law-enforcement away from our country.” Justice Robart had received a unanimous endorsement of “well-qualified” from the American Bar Association before his appointment to the bench by George W. Bush.
February 11, 2017 – Donald Trump claimed without evidence that 3 million illegal votes went to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. PolitiFact and Snopes have both debunked the claim—with Snopes saying “the ‘3 million non-citizens’ may just as well have been plucked out of thin air.” The number appeared to originate from an Infowars article which sought to explain why Donald Trump lost the popular vote by 2.9 million votes.
May 9, 2017 – Donald Trump fired FBI Director James Comey in the midst of the FBI’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Before his dismissal, Comey had been leading the federal investigation into Trump’s potential collusion with Russia during the 2016 election. Comey was speaking to a crowd of Bureau agents when he heard the news and initially thought the announcement was a prank.
May 25, 2017 – During the NATO Summit in Brussels, Belgium, Donald Trump visibly pushed Montenegro’s Prime Minister out of the way so he could to stand in front for a picture with other world leaders.
June 1, 2017 – Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement, saying the global climate accord would “undermine our economy.” Signatories of the global pact promised to lower greenhouse gas emissions, in an international effort to keep global temperature below two degrees Celsius over the planet’s pre-industrial levels. Besides Nicaragua, which eventually signed, the United States and Syria were the only countries to reject the agreement.
June 2017 – Two anonymous White House officials told the New York Times that Donald Trump said Haitians “all have AIDS” and Nigerian immigrants wouldn’t ever “go back to their huts.” Newly released immigration statistics, which reported 15,000 Haitian immigrants had entered the U.S. since he took office, reportedly ignited President Trump’s tirade. While the White House subsequently denied Trump had used the words “AIDS” and “huts,” it did not deny the “overall description of the meeting.”
September 5, 2017 – Donald Trump ordered an end to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, inviting Congress to take the necessary actions to offer its replacement. One of Barack Obama’s signature pieces of legislation, DACA protects against the deportation of nearly 800,000 young people who arrived in the United States as children. Trump gave Congress six months to act on his order before he would begin phasing out the DACA protections. Among Trump’s most oft-repeated arguments against the program is that DACA beneficiaries would take jobs from natural-born American citizens. Many economists vehemently disagree with Trump on this point, citing the fact that a) immigrants are more likely than natural-born Americans to start companies (employing new workers in the process), and b) the number of individuals retiring from the workforce will outpace the number of young people entering it by 55 million in 2020.
January 11, 2018 – According to an account of an immigration meeting with members of Congress, Donald Trump allegedly referred to Haiti, El Salvador, and nations in Africa as “shithole countries.” In regard to the 60,000 Haitian immigrants sheltered in America following the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, Trump purportedly said, “Why do we want people from Haiti here?” Trump followed this saying that the U.S. should admit more people from places like Norway, and that he would accept more Asian immigrants because he believed them to be beneficial to the economy.
President Trump is accused of pressuring Ukraine to dig up damaging information on one of his main Democratic challengers for the presidency in 2020, Joe Biden, and his son Hunter.
Hunter worked for a Ukrainian company when Joe Biden was US vice-president.
The president is accused of dangling two things as bargaining chips to Ukraine – withholding $400m of military aid to Ukraine that had already been allocated by Congress, and a White House meeting for Ukraine’s president.
This, Democrats say, amounts to an abuse of presidential power, using the office for personal political gain and to the detriment of national security. Ukraine was using that money in its ongoing conflict with Russia.
