Barack Obama was the first African American president, serving from January 20th, 2009, to January 20th, 2017. During his first two years alone, he signed many landslide bills into office, including the Affordable Care Act (the ACA), the don’t ask, don’t tell, repeal of 2010 and the hate crimes prevention act. He had previously served as a civil rights lawyer and as an Illinois state senator. He is the 44th president of the United states, succeeding George W Bush and being succeeded by Donald J Trump.
During his first few minutes in office, his chief of staff Rahm Emanuel issued an order suspending all his predecessors last minute regulations and executive orders signed by George W. Bush, and the first actions of his presidency were all about rescinding and reforming the measures Bush took, especially in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks.
Obama signed both executive order 13492 and 13493 which ordered the immediate closure of the Guantanamo bay detention camp in Cuba and ordered the alternative identification of alternative venues for prisoners held there.
Obama also rescinded the Mexican city policy, which blocked federal grants for Non-governmental organizations that provide services such as abortions and he also lifted restrictions on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research.
The most important action of Obamas first 100 days was the passage of the American Recovery and Reinstatement Act (ARRA) which was passed to address the great recession. The bill combined tax breaks with spending on infrastructure projects, extension of welfare benefits and education.
When Obama passed the ACA bill in 2010, it faced significant difficulties as the republicans tried desperately to repeal it. The 2013 launch of the healthcare.gov website was widely criticized, even though many of its problems were fixed by the end of the year. The number of uninsured Americans dropped from 20.2% of the population in 2010 to 13.3% of the population in 2015 (the largest drop in four decades), although Obamacare still faced criticism as an unwelcome expansion of government.
Government data showed that from summer of 2013-2014, there was a net increase of 8.7 million people enrolled in both Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program.
During his presidency, Obama, congress and the supreme court all contributed to the advancement of LGBTQ+ rights in the US, with Obama signing the Hate crimes prevention act in 2009, which expanded hate crime laws to include crimes committed because of the victim’s gender identity or sexual identity/perceived sexual identity. His repeal of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, which ended the military’s discrimination of LGBQ+ personnel and allowed them to serve openly. In 2015 Secretary of Defense Ash Carter ended the ban on women in combat, and in 2016 he also ended the ban on transgender people in the military.
from the beginning of his presidency Obama supported comprehensive immigration reform, including pathway to citizenship for many illegal immigrants hiding in the US. However, congress failed to pass a comprehensive act about immigration, and so Obama turned to executive actions. He tried to pass the DREAM act, although it failed to make it through the senate. Obama passed the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) bill in 2012, which protected over 70,000 immigrants from deportation.
Donald Trump began as president on the 20th of January 2017 and finished on the 20th of January 2021.Trump is a Republican from New York city and took office after winning the election over Hilary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. He did not win by plurality of popular vote. He was the first president to not have a political or military background, instead he was a businessman and the host of a TV show, The Apprentice.
Despite many attempts, Trump was unsuccessful in his efforts to repeal the ACA, but he took several measures to hinder its functioning and he rescinded the individual mandate, which required most individuals and their families to have a certain amount of health insurance.
Trump also reinstated the Mexico city policy, prohibiting funding to non-governmental organizations that perform abortions for people who need them as a method of family planning/birth control in other countries. Throughout his term in office, trump pushed for a ban on late stage abortion
In 2018, the trump administration reorganized the global health security and biodefense unit and the NSC by merging it with other related units, and national security adviser John Bolton dissolved the global health security team, who would oversee the U.S response if a global pandemic broke out. They were not replaced, and then two years later COVID-19 broke out and Trump was calling it a hoax.
Two months prior to the outbreak in Wuhan China, the trump administration had cut nearly 200 million dollars in funding from the Chinese scientists studying animal coronaviruses, and throughout his presidency he was proposing budget cuts to global health amid two global health crises
From January-March 2020 Trump consistently downplayed, ignored and mocked the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic, accusing the media of over exaggerating and making up the pandemic. By march however, he had come to face the fact that COVID was real, but he still didn’t think it was serious, as he ignored mask regulations and social distancing rules and encouraged his followers to do the same, in addition to praising republican governors who violated the white house’s own COVID-19 guidelines.
By the end of March, the US had become the country with the highest infection rates, and the HHS inspector general who published a report about the conditions of the hospitals needing supplies was fired by the administration after Trump claimed he was ‘just wrong’
Five months into the pandemic and trump decided to withdraw the US from the WHO (world health organization) fortunately Joe Biden reversed that decision on his first day in office.
In the last quarter of 2020, the Trump administration officials lobbied congress not to provide any more vaccine funding under the premise of 'they hadn't spent this funding yet' which in turn hindered the vaccine rollout for the US.
Trump is most famously known for his stance on immigrants and immigration, with him claiming that all immigrants (especially immigrants of colour) are 'criminals' even though studies show they have lesser crime rates then those of natural born Americans. Trumps arguably most famous campaign promise was that he was going to deport all of the estimated 11 million immigrants living in the US and then he was going to build a wall on the US/Mexican border and make Mexico pay for it. During his presidency, he did substantial damage to the numbers of legal immigrants in the US, but the number of illegal immigrants almost stayed the same. A federal judge blocked the administrations attempts at deporting TPS citizens, citing trumps bias against 'anyone who isn't a European white male'
The administration's key legislative proposal on immigration was the 2017 RAISE Act, which is a proposal to reduce legal immigration levels to the U.S. by fifty percent by halving the number of green cards issued instead, capping refugee admissions at 50,000 a year and ending the visa diversity lottery. In 2020, the Trump administration set the lowest cap for refugees in the modern history of the United States for the subsequent year: 15,000 refugees. The administration increased fees for citizen applications, as well as causing delays in the processing of citizen applications. The RAISE act also sought to reduce family-based immigration pathways.
By February of 2018, the arrests of undocumented immigrants went up by 40% by ICE under Trump, and arrests of noncriminal undocumented immigrants were twice as high as during Obamas final year in office.
The administration rolled back numerous pro-LGBTQ+ bills in particular those passed during the Obama administration covering issues such as discrimination, health care in addition to adoption and education.