In the weeks before the election, with divisive rhetoric escalating, a series of shocking events quickly unfolded. Beginning on October 22, pipe-bomb-bearing packages were intercepted that had been bound for more than a dozen political opponents and prominent critics of Trump, including Hillary Clinton, activist billionaire George Soros, and former president Obama. A Florida man who was a staunch Trump supporter was arrested in connection with the pipe bombs and charged with five federal crimes, including the illegal mailing of explosives. Another man who had made anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic statements on social media stormed a synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on October 27, killing 11 people who were attending services there. Earlier in the week, still another individual had shot and killed two seemingly random African American victims in a grocery store in a suburb of Louisville, Kentucky, after failing to gain entrance to a black church. These events produced a national outpouring of concern over the virulence of the political tribalism that had not only taken root but seemed to be growing quickly in American life.
The 2018 midterm elections
Against this backdrop, Americans went to the polls on November 6 to fill 35 U.S. Senate seats (26 of which were held by Democrats) and to elect a new House of Representatives and 36 governors. When the votes were counted, the Democrats had regained control of the House of Representatives, the Republicans had increased their majority in the Senate, and both parties were able to claim significant victories in the gubernatorial elections—most notably with Republicans holding on to the governorships of Florida and Ohio, while Democrats retook the state executives in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Illinois. The congressional election was originally characterized as a disappointment for Democrats, largely because of losses by some high-profile hopefuls, but, as the results of too-close-to-call contests were reported in the coming days, it became clear that there actually had been a “blue wave”: Democrats picked up 40 House seats, the largest gain by the party in that body since it added 49 seats in the 1974 post-Watergate election. A record number of women had run for office, and nearly one-fourth of the members of the new House of Representatives were women. Despite opposition from some Democrats who felt their party needed younger, fresher leadership, Nancy Pelosi once again was chosen to be speaker of the House.
The 2018–19 government shutdown
Even before the new Congress began its term, Pelosi and the Democrats locked horns with Trump over his demand that the new budget to fund the continuing operation of the federal government include $5.7 billion to pay for construction of the border wall that had been the central promise of his campaign for the presidency. With funding for the federal government due to expire on December 21, Trump held a televised meeting with Pelosi and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer on December 11 at which the president said that he would be “proud to shut down the government for border security.” Trump refused to sign a short-term budget bill passed by the Senate that did not include his desired funding, and the Senate was then unable to pass a bill sent to it by the still Republican-controlled House of Representatives that included $5.7 billion for the wall. As a result, on December 22 a partial shutdown of the federal government began that would become the longest such shutdown in the country’s history.
As Trump continued to argue that the country faced a border crisis involving an influx of illegal drugs and an invasion of “bad people,” Democrats countered that the construction of a wall would be an overly expensive ineffective solution to the immigration problem. Instead, they proposed that the budget include $1.6 billion for border fencing, cameras, and technology to aid immigration control. As some 800,000 federal employees went without paychecks, negotiations dragged on fruitlessly. Trump eventually downgraded his demand for the wall to a concrete and steel “barrier” and offered a three-year extension for individuals living in the country under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy in exchange for wall funding, but Democrats refused to discuss the wall until the government was reopened. In the meantime, Pelosi took steps to prevent Trump from delivering the State of the Union address in the Capitol, scheduled for January 29, 2019. With opinion polling indicating that more Americans blamed Trump for the shutdown than blamed the Democrats, the president relented on January 25, ending the shutdown after 35 days. On February 14 both houses of Congress adopted a budget package negotiated by a special bipartisan committee that included $1.375 billion for 55 miles (88 km) of new border fences and another $1.7 billion for additional border security. The next day Trump controversially declared a national emergency to address the “security crisis” on the country’s southern border and sought to divert $6.7 billion from military construction, counternarcotics operations, and Department of the Treasury asset forfeiture funds for wall building.
Sessions’s resignation, choosing a new attorney general, and the ongoing Mueller investigation
In the immediate aftermath of the midterm elections, Sessions resigned as attorney general at the request of Trump, who remained frustrated by Sessions’s recusal from the Russia investigation. Trump’s appointment of Matthew G. Whitaker, who had been critical of the special counsel’s investigation, as interim attorney general was widely criticized by Democrats. In February 2019 the Senate confirmed William Barr as attorney general, a position he had also held in the administration of Pres. George H.W. Bush. Barr, too, had earlier been critical of the special counsel’s investigation.
By early March 2019, 34 individuals and three companies had been criminally charged as a result of the Mueller investigation, including Manafort, who was sentenced to nearly seven years in prison after being convicted on charges that included mortgage fraud, foreign lobbying, and witness tampering. In addition to Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos, others who were indicted included Rick Gates, who worked with Manafort and was a senior aide on Trump’s inauguration committee, and Roger Stone, a longtime friend and adviser of Trump. Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal lawyer, pled guilty to lying to Congress and to charges related to his involvement in paying hush money to two women who alleged that Trump had sex with them. Having cooperated with investigators but still facing a prison term of three years, Cohen gave high-profile televised testimony to Congress in February about his involvement with Trump, painting a broadly disparaging portrait of his former boss as a liar but offering no direct evidence of collusion by Trump or his associates in the Russian effort to interfere in the 2016 election.
The Mueller report
After Mueller delivered the long-anticipated report on his investigation to the Department of Justice in March, Attorney General Barr issued a four-page summary in which he reported that Mueller had found no evidence that Trump or his associates had colluded with the Russian government. Barr also indicated that Mueller had chosen not to offer a determination on whether Trump had obstructed justice, leaving that task to Barr. According to Barr, there was insufficient evidence to establish that Trump had committed a crime. Trump pronounced that the report had completely exonerated him, but Democrats were quick to demand the release of the entire report, nearly 400 pages, in order to draw their own conclusions. Those demands intensified after The New York Times reported that some members of Mueller’s team had indicated that Barr’s summary “failed to adequately portray the findings of their inquiry” and that those findings “were more troubling for President Trump than Mr. Barr indicated.” The Department of Justice responded by defending Barr’s approach. In the meantime, several House committees, now chaired by Democrats, continued to investigate related matters, and a number of criminal cases that were outgrowths of the Mueller investigation continued to be pursued independently by public prosecutors in the New York and Virginia jurisdictions. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica