Comprehensive Impacts of Trump’s First Year: FINAL ARTICLE: Some Good News
General Introduction
2017 was a surreal year. Just when we think things can’t get any worse, lo and behold, a new tweet comes out. Or a new policy is introduced. Or a new world leader is so offended that we get closer to doomsday. Trump’s election has normalized and publicized the proverbial anonymous yahoo comments, and it’s hard to imagine that he still has a small but loud base of support and that people chose this narcissistic, sexist, racist sociopath consciously. He has exemplified our slow, subtle transformation from intelligent citizens to mindless consumers to salivating spectators who have a constant need for entertainment and outrage.
I always said that when voting for president, what we’re really voting for was the Supreme Court. I am going on record to say that I was wrong. Dead wrong. Trump has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that there are so many ways a president can be harmful other than by Supreme Court appointments. To be sure, judicial appointments are one major way that Trump is detrimental to the country, and it will take at least a generation to recover from those appointments alone. But this document shows that a president can do deep and lasting damage in many ways.
Although I vacillate between disgust and defeat and anger, I am trying very hard to channel all of those feelings into fighting against our spiral toward Idiocracy. The only way to do this is for everyone who is eligible to actually get out and vote in every single election. This November’s midterm elections will tell us if Americans are really ready for progress or if they’re apathetic enough to continue our moral, ethical, and constitutional decline.
There have been several year-end round-ups about Trump’s first year. Many of them are laughably revisionist. But there were some informative ones. Axios created a great chart of search trends for some of the biggest news events of the first year, showing how we’ve all jumped from one four-alarm news fire to another. Rolling Stone summarized the damage of Trump’s first year. And Roger Cohen with the New York Times editorialized our frightening reality in If This is America.
This piece is meant to be a comprehensive assessment of the impacts of Trump’s first year as President of the United States of America (let that sink in). There are many things that happened during the campaign that are not included. Included are impacts from January 20, 2017, to January 31, 2018 (in some cases, February 1). There are sure to be things missing, but I have done my best to record these impacts. The impacts are listed under 19 different categories:
3. Women & Families;
4. LBGT;
6. Ethics;
7. Targeting free press/free speech/Privacy;
8. Health & Safety;
10. Education;
11. Transportation/Infrastructure/Housing;
12. Immigration;
13. Social Contract;
15. General Governance;
16. Character;
18. World; and
19. Some good news. Because there is always some good news.
Of course, some of the impacts may fit under multiple categories. For example, does Trump’s encouragement of police to treat suspects violently fall under Health and Safety or Law Enforcement? Or maybe Ethics or Character? There are many such conundrums, and I have tried to categorize each example appropriately. Some may disagree on the categorization. And that’s OK. As a researcher, I’m still pondering good ways to visualize all of this data, but in the meantime, it’s listed here. Fair warning: This is long. The items may not necessarily be in chronological order.
This is the final article in this series and covers some good news despite the Trump administration. The series covering Trump’s second year will be available soon.
I want to acknowledge Amy Siskind’s weekly list of subtle changes that experts in authoritarianism say to watch out for. Amy’s in-depth listings were invaluable, and a must-read itself.
Buckle your seatbelts.
Some Good News
This series can be overwhelming. After it became clear that you can be the most qualified woman and still lose to the least qualified man, there was a collective gasp across the globe. As with all authoritarians, we cannot be distracted by the inevitable snippets of good news among the overall horrors of the administration. However, I did want to end this series with some good news because, after all, there is always good news. It seems that the courts, at least for now, are still acting somewhat as a check on this regime.
· Although Trump and his administration have tried to dismantle public education and protections for public school students, Trump’s early executive orders on education don’t actually do much.
· Although Trump has fast tracked judicial appointments, stacking the entire federal judiciary with right-wing extremists at an alarming rate, at least two of those appointments — of Jeff Mateer and Brett Talley — were able to be blocked after the nominees made discriminatory statements.
· Carl Higbie was forced to resign as chief of external affairs for the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS) after reports of his past use of racist, sexist, anti-Muslim language on the radio.
· After a 60 Minutes exposé, Trump’s nominee for “drug czar,” Tom Marino, withdrew from consideration for the job. The investigation revealed how Marino helped steer legislation through Congress that weakened the Drug Enforcement Administration’s ability to go after drug distributers, which enabled opioid-related deaths to rise.
· The deputy drug czar, a 24-year-old former campaign worker with no qualifications or professional history, was also then forced to resign when his lack of work history and qualifications became public.
· Five months into the presidency, Trump finally made one competent, qualified appointment. Surgeon General pick Jerome Adams had a history of fighting HIV and the opiate epidemic, among other things.
· Patagonia CEO sued the Trump administration after the administration rescinded 85 percent of Bears Ears National Monument and nearly half of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, putting over a million acres of land at risk for permanent destruction.
· Paleontologists are also suing Trump for gutting Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante because the areas being gutted have thousands of archaeological sites, landscapes sacred to Native American tribes, virtually pristine wilderness, and unique geology.
· When a group of Afghan girls participating in an international robotics competition was denied visas to enter the US for the competition, Trump eventually (and reluctantly) allowed them to come to the country for the competition.
· As Republicans across the country challenged the DREAM Act in court while Trump stayed silent on the issue, two senators introduced a new bipartisan bill granting legal status and a path to citizenship to undocumented immigrants who were brought to the country as children.
· Cards Against Humanity bought a piece of land at the US border that will make it difficult for Trump to build his wall.
· Trump’s attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act continually failed, leaving 20 million Americans with health insurance. In fact, about 1.5 million people signed up for ObamaCare in the first 11 days of open enrollment in 2017, nearly half a million more than at the same time last year.
· Further, Senators created a bipartisan deal that extended payments to insurers under the Affordable Care Act that President Trump tried to end.
· The Republican governor of Maryland offered a bill to his state’s General Assembly to protect Marylanders from being “negatively affected” by Congress’s newly-passed GOP tax bill.
· After backlash, Trump’s Department of Justice dropped its request for more than one million IP addresses of people making anti-Trump comments.
· Defense Secretary Jim Mattis decided that the Pentagon will not carry out Trump’s directive to ban transgender soldiers from serving in the military. Later, a federal judge barred Trump from excluding transgender people from the military.
· After another backlash, Trump reversed his decision to allow big game “trophies” such as elephants to be imported into the US.
· American backlash also made Trump reverse a decision to cut a homeless veterans program.
· A US citizen married to a Canadian citizen and their three children held hostage in Pakistan for five years were freed by the Taliban-allied Haqqani network.
· Mueller’s investigation led to many indictments, including for Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager, and for George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy advisor, for lying to the FBI about colluding with Russians to win the election.
· After threatening the UN to agree with Trump to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, the UN defied Trump and voted for a resolution demanding that the United States rescind its declaration on Jerusalem.
· California also defied Trump; Governor Jerry Brown granted pardons to two men who were about to be deported.
· In one of the first elections after the 2016 election, a Latina Democrat won a Florida senate seat in a swing district. The losing streak for Republicans continued in Virginia and New Jersey, and then in Wisconsin. (Spoiler alert: This was a sign of things to come the following year.)
· A record number of scientists are running for office!
· Women. Rose. Up. As Jennifer Wright reported, “2017 felt like a year when women all across America transformed into the fiercest possible version of her former self.”
· A bipartisan effort in the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology decided to look into sexual harassment in science and ways to crack down on it.
· In a personal note of good news as a shark buff and advocate, shark conservation organizations saw a sharp increase in contributions after it was revealed that Trump hated sharks and wanted them all to die.
· The courts have also come through and protected us from some of Trump’s attempts at destroying the country:
§ An appeals court in Washington, D.C., blocked an attempt by the Environmental Protection Agency to delay methane regulations implemented by President Obama.
§ Before a watered-down version of the horrific travel ban was eventually approved, federal appeals courts rejected Trump’s travel bans.
§ A federal judge halted the deportation of 1400 Christian Iraqis who would have faced torture or death had they been returned to Iraq.
§ A federal judge temporarily blocked Trump’s decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
§ A federal judge ruled that Trump’s federal permits authorizing the Dakota Access pipeline to cross the Missouri River near the Standing Rock reservation violated the law.
§ A federal judge in Texas blocked most of Texas’s immigration law targeting sanctuary cities. Trump actively supported the law.
§ A federal judge required the Trump administration to allow a teenage undocumented immigrant in a detention center to have an abortion. Further, the judge said she was “astounded” that the Trump administration was trying to block the procedure.
§ Two judge issued an injunction from Trump’s attempt to allow companies to exclude contraception coverage from health insurance plans.
§ A federal judge refused to erase Joe Arpaio’s conviction after Trump pardoned him. The judge said that the pardon only freed Arpaio from possible punishment but would not wipe his criminal record clean.
§ A federal judge ruled that Trump cannot withhold grants or other funding from cities based on their sanctuary policies.
§ A federal judge ruled that Trump can’t delay an immigration rule from President Obama that lets foreign start-up founders/entrepreneurs into the U.S. without a visa.
This completes the series of Comprehensive Impacts of Trump’s First year. Stay tuned for the series covering Trump’s second year soon!
