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CHAPTER 28 A Divided Nation
This chapter concentrates on the second term of George W. Bush’s presidency, Barack Obama’s two terms in office,
and the first two years of the Donald Trump presidency. The chapter opens by calling attention to the unique and
surprising elections of both Senator Barack Obama and his successor, the real estate mogul Donald Trump. The
chapter then examines Bush’s domestic policies, and his response to Hurricane Katrina, immigration debates, and
the economic crisis of 2008. The chapter then examines the presidency of Barack Obama. The first black man
elected as president in U.S. history, Obama faced a conservative backlash as he attempted to progressively reform
wake of the murder of nine black parishioners by a white supremacist. Who Is an American? (Primary Source
document feature) provides part of the “Speech at the Democratic National Convention” (2016) by Khizr Khan, who
criticizes Trump’s nativist pronouncements.
CHAPTER OUTLINE
I. Introduction: Barack Obama and Donald Trump
II. The Winds of Change
A. The 2004 Election
1. Democrats sensed a golden opportunity.
a. John Kerry, Vietnam veteran, surprises as an inefficient candidate, and the electoral map changes
little.
B. Bush’s Second Term
1. Bush wished to “end tyranny in the world.”
2. The continuing chaos in Iraq, Republican corruption scandals in Congress, and indictments among
the vice president’s staff eroded Bush’s popularity to an all-time low.
C. Hurricane Katrina
D. The New Orleans Disaster
1. Poor residents of the city were left abandoned amid floodwaters.
2. Where the government failed, individuals stepped in and shone.
E. Battle over the Border
1. The borderland embracing parts of the United States and Mexico has been a source of ongoing tension
for Americans.
5. Economists disagree on the impact of undocumented workers.
6. The response to stiffer-penalty legislation was met with a series of massive demonstrations by both
legal and illegal immigrants across the country.
F. Islam, America, and the “Clash of Civilizations”
1. September 11 raised fears of a “clash” between the West and Islamic “civilizations.”
G. The Constitution and Liberty
1. Key Supreme Court decisions of the early twenty-first century indicated conservative justices had come
to accept that the social revolution begun in the 1960s could not be undone.
2. A 2003 Supreme Court decision on affirmative action reaffirmed the right of colleges and universities to
take race into account in admissions decisions.
H. The Midterm Elections of 2006
1. Democrats expected gains due to Bush’s plummeting popularity.
2. Democrats gained control of both houses of Congress.
a. Nancy Pelosi of California became the first female Speaker of the House in history.
III. The Great Recession
A. The Housing Bubble
1. In 2008, the American banking system found itself on the brink of collapse.
2. The roots of the crisis lay in a combination of public and private policies that favored economic
speculation.
B. The Bubble Bursts
1. In 2006 and 2007, home prices began to fall. Many homeowners owed more money than their homes
were worth and could not pay monthly mortgage payments.
2. The value of the mortgage-based securities fell precipitously, and banks were left with billions of
dollars of worthless investments.
5. In April 2009, the recession that began in December 2007 became the longest since the Great
Depression.
a. In an era of globalization, economic crises are inevitably worldwide.
b. The mortgage crisis disproportionately affected minorities.
C. “A Conspiracy against the Public”
1. Leading bankers and investment houses helped to bring down the American economy.
2. The reputation of stockbrokers and bankers fell to lows last seen during the Great Depression.
a. Goldman Sachs fined for selling mortgage securities and betting against them
D. The Collapse of Market Fundamentalism
1. The crisis exposed the flaws in market fundamentalism and deregulation.
3. In 2008, Greenspan admitted to Congress that there had been a “flaw” in his long-held beliefs about the
free market.
E. Bush and the Crisis
1. The Bush administration allowed Lehman Brothers to fail, and Lehman Brothers’s failure created a
domino effect.
3. The crisis also revealed the limits of the American “safety net.”
F. The Emergence of Barack Obama
1. Young, interracial, and the child of an immigrant, Obama was an Illinois senator and Harvard Law
race galvanized the support of black voters, and his promise of change appealed to young voters.
G. The 2008 Campaign
1. Obama faced Senator John McCain, the Republican nominee, in the general election.
2. McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate. The selection of Palin raised questions among many
Americans about McCain’s judgment.
3. With his promise of change, Obama won the election.
c. Obama also won in states that had been reliably Republican for years.
i. Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida
H. Obama’s First Inauguration
2. In his inaugural address, Obama offered a stark rebuke to eight years of Bush policies and, instead of
“freedom,” spoke of community and responsibility.
IV. Obama in Office
1. In many ways, Obama’s first policy initiatives lived up to the promise of change.
a. Sonia Sotomayor
3. The explosion of a BP oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico highlighted the downsides of globalization and
deregulation.
A. Health Care Debate
1. Obama’s first year was dominated by a congressional battle over the restructuring of the nation’s health
care system to insure the millions of uninsured and end insurance companies’ abusive practices.
2. Following bitter partisan debate, in 2010 Congress passed a bill that required all Americans to purchase
repeal it when possible.
a. The government shutdown
5. By 2015, the health care reform law, or “Obamacare,” had proved a successful policy with 16 million
more Americans obtaining medical coverage (most with some sort of subsidy assistance).
6. Twenty-three Republican-controlled state governments refused the expansion of Medicaid coverage.
B. Financial Reform
1. Financial regulatory reform also occurred in 2010, but the power of big banks and Wall Street remained
largely unchallenged, and homeowners received little assistance.
2. The most dramatic domestic reform legislation since the Great Society did not go far enough for many
C. The Problem of Inequality
1. In 2014, the economic recovery gathered momentum, but most of the benefit went to the top 1 percent
of earners, while the middle class continued to shrink and the number of people in poverty grew.
2. At the bottom of the social scale, many workers employed by America’s largest corporations earned
very low wages and had difficulty coping in their living situations.
D. The Occupy Movement
1. Economic inequality took center stage in 2011 when protestors camped out in parks and held rallies
2. The Occupy movement spread through the use of social media and recalled civil disobedience efforts of
3. Low-wage workers (particularly those in fast food) were inspired to demand a higher minimum wage
4. Obama’s announced focus on “middle-class economics” stood little chance of making any headway in
light of congressional hostility.
5. Rising inequality had profound social consequences in the United States, which (according to statistics)
by 2015 was the most unequal developed nation in the world.
V. The Obama Presidency
A. The Continuing Economic Crisis
2. Racial minorities suffered most severely in the recession.
B. Postracial America?
1. Despite the reality, Obama’s election sparked a public discussion of a new “postracial” America.
3. A series of controversial incidents involving the deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of police and
other authorities suggested that racial inequality had not ended.
5. Unrest erupted in Ferguson, Missouri, after a white police officer shot and killed unarmed black
6. Investigations revealed black residents of Ferguson suffered routine racial discrimination in a system
dominated by white authorities.
7. Voices of Freedom (Primary Source document feature) comes from Barack Obama’s Eulogy at Emanuel
African Methodist Episcopal Church, delivered in 2015 in the wake of the murder of nine black
parishioners by a white supremacist in Charleston, South Carolina.
C. Obama and the World
2. Obama extended the USA Patriot Act, and failed to close Guantanamo military prison.
3. U.S. involvement overseas ranged from the killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan to aid for the
5. In his second term, Obama restored diplomatic relations with Cold War enemy Cuba and helped broker
a deal with Iran to confine its nuclear development program to energy purposes.
D. The Rise of ISIS
1. Obama also faced the new crisis of the self-proclaimed Islamic State (or ISIS), a brutal occupying
2. By 2018, facing counterattacks by the United States and its allies, ISIS was on the defensive throughout
the Middle East, having surrendered most of the territory it occupied.
3. In a continuation of Bush’s policies in the war on terror, the Obama administration perpetuated secret
domestic and international government surveillance programs.
a. Edward Snowden revelations
b. National security versus civil liberties debate rekindled
E. The Republican Resurgence
2. On the state level, conservative Republicans moved to curtail abortion rights and eliminate the
3. Conservative state legislatures also took aim at undocumented immigrants.
a. Alabama enacted the strictest measures.
4. Undocumented immigration became a topic of debate in the 2012 presidential campaign.
F. The 2012 Campaign
1. Although a somewhat controversial choice, Republicans nominated Mitt Romney as their presidential
candidate (the first Mormon in the role) and Tea Party favorite Paul D. Ryan as his running mate.
3. Obama was reelected in a heated campaign.
5. As a result of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United, the 2012 presidential election was
consumed by unprecedented funding through “political action committees.”
VI. President Trump
A. The Candidates in 2016
1. The Democrats favored former first lady and New York senator Hillary Clinton.
2. Clinton faced a challenge for the nomination from Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a self-
4. Donald Trump, a New York real estate developer and television celebrity, shocked the world by
winning the Republican nomination and defeating Clinton in the general election.
B. The Election of Trump
1. Trump’s campaign played on nativist, racial, and gender resentments spawned by the growing diversity
of American society and the decline of manufacturing.
a. Who Is an American? (Primary Source document feature) provides part of the “Speech at the
2. Trump rejected the idea that the United States should seek to remake other countries in its own image,
or pay attention to their behavior concerning human rights.
4. Trump’s policies marked a significant change in the national sense of purpose, a shift partially created
by weariness with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
6. He was a major spokesman for the “birther” movement, which claimed that Obama had been born in
Africa and was ineligible to serve as president.
8. Trump ran an unusual campaign. He did not have a conventional campaign organization, spent little on
television ads, and did not seek newspaper endorsements. He spread his views via social media.
9. Trump won key “swing” states such as Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, where
working-class voters felt resentment against NAFTA.
C. Trump in Office
2. Trump’s main legislative achievement during his first two years in office was a massive tax cut.
4. His efforts launched a trade war with China whose results are left to be seen.
6. In 2016, evidence surfaced that Trump had potentially colluded with the Russians in his election.
8. Persons close to the president, including Paul Manafort, his campaign manager; his personal lawyer
Michael Cohen; and Michael Flynn, his national security adviser, pleaded guilty to crimes.
9. The contents of the redacted Mueller report, issued in April 2019, remain a major issue in national
politics.
D. Trump and Immigration
1. One of Trump’s first acts was to ban travel to the United States from several Muslim-majority countries.
3. Despite low immigration and crime in the United States, Trump blamed immigrants for national
problems.
E. Trump and the Environment
1. Trump argued that global warming does not exist despite unanimous scientific conclusions.
3. In 2017, Trump withdrew from the Paris Agreement on climate change, making the United States the
only country not to commit itself to reducing emissions that cause climate change.
5. Trump appointed Scott Pruitt of Oklahoma, a close ally of the oil industry, to head the Environmental
Protection Agency.
F. A Polarized Nation
1. The critical tone set by Trump’s tweets resulted in a coarsening of public discourse.
3. On the day after his inauguration, a Women’s March on Washington brought hundreds of thousands of
people to the nation’s capital to express their support for women’s rights and immigration reform.
G. The Elections of 2018
1. During the campaign, Trump traveled the country holding rallies and whipping up fear of immigrants.
a. These appeals consolidated his political base but alienated more moderate voters.
3. Republicans increased their majority in the Senate.
5. More than 100 women were elected to the House, the most in American history.
a. Congress now included its first two Native American women and first two Muslim women.
VII. Freedom in the Twenty-First Century
A. Exceptional America
1. In the United States, people lived longer and healthier compared to previous generations, and enjoyed
unprecedented material comforts.
3. Ideas of American freedom seemed more attuned to individual advancement than to the kind of broad
social welfare seen in other developed nations.
5. American exceptionalism had a darker side that included the world’s highest gun-murder rates and
increasing incidents of horrific shooting massacres.
6. Over forty percent of the world’s privately owned guns are in the United States.
a. In 2012 there were 9,146 murders with guns in the United States, as opposed to 158 in Germany, 173
7. In 2018, hundreds of thousands of young people demonstrated across the country for gun control.
B. Varieties of Freedom
1. America’s tolerance for diversity and the rise of antigovernment conservatives reshaped the idea of
American freedom into individual fulfillment of potential.
a. Traditional definitions of freedom waned.
b. Americans enjoyed more personal freedom, but less “industrial freedom.”
C. Battles Over History
1. In a politically polarized nation, history itself has become a battleground.
5. President Trump refused to apportion blame, insisting that there were “very fine people” on both sides.
D. Learning from History
1. At the end of 2018, the world seemed far more unstable than anyone could have predicted after the Cold
War ended.
SUGGESTED DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
• What were the most important issues that arose during President George W. Bush’s second term in office?
• Discuss undocumented immigration. Is it fair to allow the undocumented immigrants amnesty? How do the
immigrants impact the American economy?
• What did Hurricane Katrina say about the ability of the Bush administration to lead through adversity?
• Should there be another Great Society–type program launched?
• Assess and analyze the economic crisis of 2008. What caused the crisis? To what extent did Americans begin to
question market fundamentalism?
• Assess and analyze the election of 2008. Why did Barack Obama win the election? Why was his election
significant?
• Compare and contrast the political ideals and domestic policies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
• Trace Obama’s foreign policy decisions during his first term in office.
• How did Donald Trump win the 2016 race for president?
SUPPLEMENTAL WEB AND VISUAL RESOURCES
Charlottesville
www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/documenting-hate-charlottesville/
This site provides access to the documentary Documenting Hate: Charlottesville (Frontline and ProPublica, 2018, 3 episodes). It
also includes articles and clips from other documentaries.
www.pbs.org/video/trumps-showdown-jqp2qd/
A PBS Frontline series production, Trump’s Showdown (2018, 4 hrs., 2 parts) chronicles the Mueller investigation into
corruption in the election and presidency of Donald Trump.
Hurricane Katrina
www.youtube.com/watch?vVjFCv6JvZnU
The site provides the first episode of the documentary When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (Spike Lee, 2006–
2007, 4 hrs.).
Immigration
https://www.democracynow.org/topics/immigration
This Democracy Now! site includes interviews and articles on a wide range of modern topics including immigration, white
supremacy, and climate change.
Islam in America
http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/twenty/tkeyinfo/islam.htm
This site provides access to the PBS documentary Obama’s Deal (2010), an examination of the health care debate. A teacher’s
guide and links are provided.
USA Patriot Act
www.epic.org/privacy/terrorism/hr3162.html
This site contains the full USA Patriot Act document as well as archives of material pertaining to the act.
SUPPLEMENTAL PRINT RESOURCES
Appiah, Anthony. The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity. New York: Liveright, 2018.
Begala, Paul. It’s Still the Economy, Stupid: George W. Bush, The GOP’s CEO. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002.
Berenger, Ralph, ed. Global Media Go to War: Role of News and Entertainment Media during the 2003 Iraq War. Spokane, WA:
Marquette Books, 2004.
Friedman, Thomas. Longitudes and Attitudes: The World in the Age of Terrorism. New York: Anchor Books, 2003.
Gardner, Lloyd. The Long Road to Baghdad: A History of U.S. Foreign Policy from the 1970s to the Present. New York: New
Press, 2008.
Hersh, Seymour. Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib. New York: Harper Perennial, 2005.
2006.
Shorris, Earl. The Politics of Heaven: America in Fearful Times. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007.
Soros, George. “The Bubble of American Supremacy.” Public Affairs, 2004.
Stone, Geoffrey. War and Liberty: An American Dilemma: 1790 to the Present. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007.
Tooze, Adam. Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World. New York: Viking Press, 2018.
Turk, Katherine. Equality on Trial: Gender and Rights in the Modern American Workplace. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2015.
Weisser, Michael. From My Cold Dead Hands: Why Americans Won’t Give Up Their Guns. New York: Nova, 2018.
INTERACTIVE INSTRUCTOR ACTIVITIES
1. The Attacks of 9/11—National History, Personal Memory
The resource for this activity comes from a website that gathers personal memories, videos, and photographs of the September
1. Ask students to browse through the written stories in the complete archive of this website, choose one, and present it to the
class. Ask them to explain why they consider this personal memory relevant and important for our historical understanding
or for our national memory of the event.
2. Ask students to browse through the photographs collected on this website and have them choose one. (It should not be
1. Divide the class in groups of five to eight and ask them to draft the text of not more than fifty words for a memorial
plaque. Have the class reconvene and choose their favorite plaque. Have them discuss the merit of the plaque they
chose.
2. Divide the class into groups and ask them to prepare arguments for and against rebuilding the World Trade Center at
Ground Zero. Let them discuss in which way the nation can do the most justice to the victims in commemoration and to
history.
3. a. Divide the class into groups of five to eight and ask them to discuss how online multimedia, the way it is used on this
website, changes our memory and historical understanding of an important event. Do we understand the historical
significance of 9/11 better because of it? Are we better able to commemorate the victims?
2. Group Debate: The Impeachment of Donald Trump
Organize the class into a debate over the impeachment of Donald Trump for crimes in office. Allow the students to form two
