By Marc Stoufer III
A town hall in Washington on March 10 was interrupted by a group of angry citizens protesting President Donald Trump’s recent executive orders. At a Mississippi protest on February 17 regarding the administration, a crowd chanted, “Stop the coup! Stop the coup!” 49% of Americans say the country is going in the wrong direction, according to a Reuters survey.
Tensions between the government and its people are nothing new, having existed since the beginning of American democracy. The national temperature, however, seems to be changing.
Many believe a major turning point was when Trump was first elected president in 2016. Trump’s aggressive persona, white-nationalist-endorsed policies and lack of political experience made him an incredibly divisive leader for many outside the Republican party and even some within.
Trump’s presidency was marked with a number of initiatives that garnered praise from his supporters and shock from those who opposed him – but perhaps none more so than his handling of the 2020 pandemic.
The impacts of COVID-19 quickly infected nearly every facet of existence, on a global scale never quite seen before.
“When we heard things were shutting down, I thought it wasn’t real,” Grand Rapids Community College nursing major Olivia Pontarelli told The Collegiate.
Psychiatry major Sumayah Hanson said she saw a culture shift toward fear – fear of illness, fear of others, fear in general – as the disease gripped the world.
“There’s a lot of fear mongering, things being pushed that aren’t realistic. And people believe anything with fear,” she said.
On a larger scale, the pandemic was uniquely devastating. Over one million people have died as a direct result of COVID-19 in the U.S. alone, according to the CDC.
The Trump administration’s response to this was divisive. Trump publicly compared the virus to the standard flu while privately saying it was “deadly stuff” to journalist Bob Woodward, though he later admitted he downplayed its seriousness.
The CDC’s recommendations to wear a face covering and stay at home to mitigate the spread of coronavirus each became the subject of intense political debate and protest, likely fueled by Trump’s description of masks as a voluntary practice he wouldn’t be participating in and his publicly stated desire to reopen the nation’s economy as quickly as possible.
While the world has mostly gotten “back to normal” in the five years since the outbreak, with 44% of polled Americans telling the Pew Research Center they had “mostly recovered” from the pandemic, the same study found that 72% of Americans believe that it drove the country apart.
Eight months after COVID-19’s outbreak, the U.S. held its presidential election. Given the strife that occurred during the lockdown, roughly 75% of Americans saw this election as critical to the future of democracy. Analysts at the time predicted a close race.
On Nov. 7, the election was called for Joe Biden.
Hours later, Trump tweeted, in all caps, “I WON THE ELECTION… BAD THINGS HAPPENED WHICH OUR OBSERVERS WERE NOT ALLOWED TO SEE.”
In an unprecedented situation, over a third of the nation believed the election had been rigged and that Biden’s win was illegitimate. This political fracture culminated on Jan. 6, 2021. As Congress was certifying Biden’s win, Trump delivered remarks to a crowd elsewhere in Washington, D.C.
“We will never concede… you don’t concede when there’s theft involved,” he said. “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen… Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness… We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated.”
About one hour later, a large group of pro-Trump protesters broke through barriers around the Capitol building, overtook Capitol Police and gained access to the building by shattering windows and opening doors from the inside for further protesters, according to timelines from NPR and The Washington Post.
The protesters were eventually removed from the Capitol, and Biden’s win was certified on Jan. 7 at 3:44 a.m.
The Biden administration focused its efforts on economic recovery, climate initiatives, and the transition out of the pandemic.
A major part of that transition included the phased reopening of schools. In July of 2020, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed Executive Order 2020-142, which instituted options for a return to school and standards for maintaining safety in doing so.
“We aren’t out of the woods yet. But if we get vaccinated, and if we keep using science-based prevention strategies, we can be,” Miguel Cardon, Education Secretary at the time, said of the national push. “We cannot let mask fatigue, pride or politics get in the way of doing what is right for our students.”
Despite Cardon’s enthusiasm, some took issue with the mask mandates in reopened schools and many states introduced legislation to ban them, citing personal freedoms and parental rights.
Democrats, for their part, praised Biden’s efforts for schools and in general, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi saying he’d done “a spectacular job.” His public approval rating, however, had dropped from 67% in 2021 to 37% in 2024.
In response, Biden announced in July 2024 – less than five months before the election – that he was taking himself out of the running for reelection and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris as his replacement. She campaigned against Trump, who was aiming for a second term.
At 12:15 a.m. on Nov. 9, the Associated Press called the election for Trump, who had won 49.9% of the popular vote.
On his first day in office, Trump signed 26 executive orders – more than any president in history – that he calls “common sense” initiatives.
These have ended affirmative action, declared that the U.S. recognizes only two genders, ended federal remote work, reversed “every one of Joe Biden’s… anti-American energy regulations,” withdrawn the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement, directed the Pentagon to deploy troops to the southern border, renamed the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, opened offshore drilling in Alaska and pardoned everyone involved in the Jan. 6 breach of the Capitol.
He also changed which outlets would be allowed in the White House Press Room, created a national stockpile of Bitcoin and introduced DOGE under Elon Musk’s leadership.
This department has removed government web pages that refer to gender identity or the LGBTQ+ community, ended nearly 29 federal DEI programs – and threatened to pull funding from schools that didn’t end their DEI programs, reduced the federal workforce by offering employees a financial buyout to leave, taken control of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, cut $900 million from the Department of Education’s budget, fired multiple officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, cut more than $4 billion from the National Institutes of Health’s research budget and fired multiple employees and made a move to shutter the U.S. Agency for International Development and any humanitarian work they were doing.
Additionally, the department has been in contact with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Department of Defense, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Federal Aviation Administration and the Internal Revenue Service.
Political scientist Jeffrey A. Winters has called this era of politics “‘in-your-face oligarchy.”
After years of working to get his students to accept that America has had historical oligarchs, he now finds he has “a very hard time getting students to accept the idea that there’s democracy.”
Others, however, believe that Trump’s initiatives are democracy working exactly as it should.
“The way that they’ve been able to move and upset (the norms)… I think portends a great four years,” said Paul Dans, lawyer and former director of Project 2025, the controversial presidential roadmap that Trump repeatedly denied involvement in.
The national- and global, as the Trump administration publicly comments on the war in Ukraine and the relationship between the US and Israel– temperature seems to be rising.
“For many people, politics is a form of chronic stress that is getting harder and harder to deal with,” University of Toronto psychology professor Brett Ford said.
Though, like political tension, this form of anxiety is not entirely new.
In the 1950s, psychiatrist Orville Walters described that era as the “age of anxiety.”
Similar sentiments have been echoed in the 1920s, the 1930s and the 1940s.
In 1963, at the height of tensions between West Germany and West Berlin, President John F. Kennedy gave a commencement speech at American University. In it, he expressed his belief that America had “no more urgent task” than the “pursuit of peace.”
“Too many of us think (peace) is impossible. Too many think it unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief… Our problems are manmade–therefore, they can be solved by man,” Kennedy said. “Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”
