November 9: On This Day in World History … briefly
Trump entered the 2016 presidential race as a Republican and defeated 16 other candidates in the primaries.
2016: Donald Trump declared winner of US presidential election
The 2016 United States presidential election was the 58th quadrennial American presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 8, 2016. The Republican ticket of businessman Donald Trump and Indiana Governor Mike Pence defeated the Democratic ticket of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and US Senator from Virginia Tim Kaine, despite losing the popular vote. Trump took office as the 45th president, and Pence as the 48th vice president, on January 20, 2017.
Trump emerged as the his party’s front-runner amidst a wide field of Republican primary candidates, while Clinton defeated Senator Bernie Sanders and became the first female presidential nominee of a major American party. Trump’s populist, nationalist campaign, which promised to ‘Make America Great Again’ and opposed political correctness, illegal immigration, and many free-trade agreements, garnered extensive free media coverage. Clinton emphasized her extensive political experience, denounced Trump and many of his supporters as bigots, and advocated the expansion of President Obama’s policies; racial, LGBT, and women’s rights; and ‘inclusive capitalism’. The tone of the general election campaign was widely characterized as divisive and negative. Trump faced controversy over his views on race and immigration, incidents of violence against protestors at his rallies, and numerous sexual misconduct allegations including a controversial tape, while Clinton’s campaign was undermined by declining approval ratings due to concerns about her ethics and trustworthiness, and an FBI investigation of her improper use of a private email server, which received more media coverage than any other topic during the campaign.
Clinton led in nearly every pre-election nationwide poll and in most swing state polls, leading some commentators to compare Trump’s victory to that of Harry S Truman in 1948 as one of the greatest political upsets in modern US history. While Clinton received 2.87 million more votes than Trump did (the largest margin ever for a losing presidential candidate), Trump received the majority in the Electoral College and won upset victories in the pivotal Rust Belt region. Trump won six states that Democrat Barack Obama had won in 2012: Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Ultimately, Trump received 304 electoral votes and Clinton garnered 227, as two faithless electors defected from Trump and five defected from Clinton. Trump is the fifth person in US history to become president while losing the nationwide popular vote. He is the first president with neither prior public service nor military experience, and the oldest person to be inaugurated for a first presidential term.
The United States government’s intelligence agencies concluded on January 6, 2017, that the Russian government had interfered in the 2016 elections in order to ‘undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency’. A Special Counsel investigation of alleged collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign began in May 2017 and ended in March 2019. The investigation concluded that Russian interference to favor Trump’s candidacy occurred ‘in sweeping and systematic fashion’, but ‘did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government’.
Most notable historic snippets or facts extracted from the book ‘On This Day’ first published in 1992 by Octopus Publishing Group Ltd, London, as well as additional supplementary information extracted from Wikipedia.
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