Six Months After Trump Gets Elected

A story from six months after Trump’s inauguration.

Six months after the turmoil surrounding President Trump’s inauguration, the tension in the United States remains thick. The embattled president has seen members of his own party challenge his leadership, he has been criticized for his handling of the riots in multiple major cities and unprecedented heat has the whole capitol sweating.

Police presence has been large in America’s cities, and the border patrol has arrested over 900 people demonstrating at border wall construction sites. President Trump’s domestic surveillance efforts have been criticized by the ACLU, the Election Frontier Foundation (EFF), legal scholars and multiple federal courts. Vice President Mike Pence remains adamant about the defunding of Planned Parenthood, and his comments on gay and transgender people have caused widespread outrage. Organizations like NORML, the Marijuana Policy Project and the Drug Policy Alliance are demanding Pence apologize for his claim that medical marijuana is “a myth.”

It’s hard to think of a more turbulent beginning of a presidency since the founding of this nation. House Democrats have insisted President Trump should be impeached, and talks of invoking the 25th Amendment stalled when legislators began considering the implications of a Pence presidency. It seems neither the president or vice president are being treated as viable leaders by the Democrats.

“This is a time of great strife for America,” Former President Obama said in an interview with CNN on Saturday. “However, we’ve always been able to come together, as a nation, and look beyond our differences.” The former president refused to comment on specific decisions Trump has made.

Hillary Clinton has been largely absent from public view since President Trump took office, but her rare media appearances show she is still mourning a major political loss. One has to imagine the narrow victory Trump achieved came as a shock after the multiple controversies his campaign faced.

“My hope is that President Trump will not continue to feed the fires raging in this country, and it is extremely important that he help unite us, because we cannot survive when we are divided,” Hillary Clinton said on NBC last month.

White supremacists have been engaged in violent conflicts with minority citizens in the South, and several videos have appeared on social media in the past few months showing police officers killing unarmed Black men, which has exacerbated racial tensions. President Trump’s comment that “those people” need to “learn a thing or two about the law” were seen as insensitive and, by some, racist.

The EPA is currently on lockdown since President Trump announced he will be working to shut down several departments within the agency, and climate activists have filed multiple lawsuits against the government, claiming inaction on climate change is a threat to younger generations. President Trump’s nomination of a former ExxonMobil executive to head the EPA was seen as a major blow to the fight against climate change.

Perhaps the most controversial of President Trump’s moves, his nomination of Judge Diane Sykes for the Supreme Court, seems the most likely to fail. The Democratic majority in the Senate remains firmly against Sykes. Many were surprised President Trump nominated her in the first place, and it has been speculated that Vice President Pence was actually responsible for the selection.

The situation in Syria is continuing to deteriorate, as the U.S. has seen little international support for its war actions. Many saw German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s recent canceling of a meeting with President Trump as an intentional snub, and communication between British Prime Minister Theresa May and President Trump appears to be virtually nonexistent lately.

What will become of the Trump presidency remains to be seen, but it appears many of his former supporters are having buyer’s remorse. The president’s approval rating has sunk to 24 percent, as of Tuesday. Where his supporters once saw a strong leader of industry, they now see a panicked man. Were the election to be redone today, it’s hard to imagine the results would be the same as they were.

Photos of President Trump pacing in the Oval Office seem to appear above every headline, with headlines typically explaining the president’s latest road block or controversial move. He appears a man surrounded by enemies, locked away in his place of work. His active Vice President traverses the nation, attempting to remedy the disquiet, but he has so far failed to make a dent in the visceral fear many Americans are experiencing. The country is hungry, and it appears it’s eating itself alive.