How Americans Felt About the State of the Nation Every Year This Century

President Bill Clinton’s last year in office began shortly after he signed into law a controversial banking deregulation bill removing FDR-era barriers between banks, securities traders, and insurers. In December, the U.S. Supreme Court halted the Florida recount of the 2000 presidential election and George W. Bush became the first president in over a century to win a U.S. presidential contest despite losing the popular vote. Bush collected about a half-million fewer votes than Al Gore.

The year 2001 will always be identified with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the way the country united (at least temporarily) in their aftermath, and the debate over what the Bush administration and his U.S. intelligence apparatus could have done to avoid the tragic events. Earlier that year, Vermont Sen. Jim Jeffords defected from the Republican Party over his objection to the size of the Bush-era tax cuts. The tax cuts passed anyway.

News that year was dominated by the D.C.-area sniper attacks that killed 17 people over a period of months. The year wound down with President Bush signing the Homeland Security Act, the largest reorganization of the federal government in decades, following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the subsequent mailing of anthrax spores targeting media professionals and Democratic Party senators, which killed five people.

Global anti-war protests erupted in early 2003 after the Bush administration aimed the U.S. military toward Iraq based on spurious claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was in league with the terrorist group Al-Qaeda. In December, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was captured by an elite U.S. special operations squad.

Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry won the Democratic Party presidential nomination with North Carolina Sen. John Edwards as his running mate. Kerry would go on to lose to incumbent President George W. Bush. Though Bush lost the popular vote to Al Gore in the 2000 presidential race, this time he garnered three million more votes than his Democratic challenger.

In May, “Big Short” fund manager Michael Burry executed his first tranche of U.S. subprime-mortgage deals, purchasing six credit default swaps from Deutsche Bank for $60 million. The deals were one of the first red flags raised in the coming U.S. subprime mortgage storm rooted in poor government oversight of the subprime mortgages and the derivatives traded on this toxic debt. Meanwhile, a real storm — Hurricane Katrina — struck the Gulf Coast, eliciting deep public criticisms about local, state, and federal responses to the disaster.

In May, President George Bush’s approval rating from Gallup fell to its lowest level up to that point, a decrease attributed to a series of high-profile issues, including his administration’s handling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster, the indictments of White House advisor Lewis “Scooter” Libbey and Texas Republican Tom DeLay, and the ongoing war in Iraq that many Americans felt was turning into a unwinnable and costly quagmire.

The year began with Rep. Nancy Pelosi becoming the first woman speaker of the House of Representatives, and in February, Senator Barack Obama announced his presidential candidacy. Thirty-two people were murdered in May in the Virginia Tech mass shooting by a mentally ill man who had legally purchased his firearms. The U.S. plunged into the Great Recession in December, less than two months after the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit an all-time high.

Stocks plummeted in January over the U.S. subprime mortgage meltdown. Markets plunged again in September as Lehman Brothers, the global financial services firm founded in the mid-1800s, declared bankruptcy due to its exposure in those mortgages. In October, President Bush signed the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act into law, allowing the federal government to purchase troubled bank assets. In November 2008, Barack Obama was elected as the first black U.S. president, beating rival John McCain with a popular vote lead of more than 9.5 million.

Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th U.S. president in January, 14 months into the Great Recession. The worst economic contraction since the Great Depression officially ended in June of the year, but job losses continued to mount, pushing the unemployment rate to 10% by October. It took more than four years for the U.S. to recover the 8.6 million jobs it lost during the crisis.

In March, President Barack Obama signed into law the Affordable Care Act that created a health insurance marketplace; expanded Medicaid eligibility, increasing healthcare access to low-income families in participating states; banned insurers from denying coverage based on pre-existing health conditions; and implemented an annual tax penalty on the uninsured. The Republicans took control of the House and gained six Senate seats and a dozen governorships in the U.S. midterm elections.

A mass shooting in January in Tucson by a mentally ill man who had legally purchased a firearm, killed six and injured 14, including Rep. Gabby Giffords, who survived the attack with permanent brain damage. In May, President Barack Obama announced that U.S. Navy SEALs had killed terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden. The U.S. raised its debt ceiling in August, leading Standard & Poor’s to downgrade its U.S. credit rating for the first time.

A dozen people were killed and 58 injured in a mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado, in July. Nearly five months later, a 20-year-old gunman murdered six adults and 20 young children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, before taking his own life. Gun sales and gun manufacturer stock prices surged after these and other mass shootings. In November, President Obama won a second term, beating Utah Sen. Mitt Romney with a popular-vote lead of nearly 5 million.

In anticipation of her run in the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton resigned from her role as Secretary of State in February and was replaced by John Kerry. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a section of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that required states with a history of racial discrimination in voting practices to seek federal approval to change their election procedures. The following day, the high court struck down a section of the Defense of Marriage Act that denies benefits to married same-sex couples.

President Obama announced in December that he would normalize diplomatic relations with Cuba. (Key provisions of that effort were to be undone in 2017 by President Donald Trump.) In June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a provision in the Affordable Care Act cannot compel privately held companies to offer health plans that cover birth control.

The 114th Congress convened in January after Republicans took control of the Senate and won the largest majority in the House since before the Great Depression. Voter turnout in the 2014 midterms was the lowest in 70 years. In June, businessman and media personality Donald Trump announced his run to become the Republican nominee for the 2016 presidential election.

President Obama nominated Merrick Garland to replace Antonin Scalia, who died in February, on the Supreme Court, but the move was blocked by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and fellow Republicans. In March, Obama became the first U.S. president to visit Cuba since 1928. In November, Donald Trump became the second president since the 19th century (after George W. Bush) to win an election without winning the popular vote, falling nearly 2.9 million votes shy of his challenger, Hillary Clinton.

Donald Trump’s first acts as president included executive orders to freeze hiring of non-military federal employees, stop all new research at the Environmental Protection Agency, divert Department of Homeland Security funds toward expanding the border wall with Mexico, and expedite the deportation of unauthorized immigrants. With a Republican federal trifecta, the GOP passed a massive raft of tax cuts in December, including a reduction of the corporate tax rate to 21% from 35%. Filers earning annual incomes of more than $500,000 benefitted the most from the cuts.

Stephanie Clifford, aka Stormy Daniels, alleged in March that she had had sexual relations with Donald Trump in 2006 and was paid $130,000 in return for a nondisclosure agreement. Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen later testified to Congress that he was tasked with paying hush money to Daniels ahead of the 2016 presidential election. Another of Trump’s alleged sexual partners, former Playboy model Karen McDougal, was said to have been paid off by the parent company of the National Enquirer to keep her story from the public, in order to protect the president’s reputation.

The 116th U.S. Congress convened after the Democrats regained a majority in the House of Representatives with a net gain of 41 seats, ending the Republican federal trifecta established in the 2016 elections. The GOP gained two Senate seats and held its majority. In April, former vice-president Joe Biden announced his candidacy for the 2020 presidential election.

A period of tepid economic and wage growth, enormous gains in the stock market, and historically low unemployment (a continuation of trends that had begun under the Obama administration) came to an end with the Covid-19 pandemic. Lockdowns to curb the spread of the virus temporarily spiked unemployment to an all-time high and caused a two-month springtime economic recession. In November, Joe Biden beat Donald Trump with a popular vote lead of more than seven million.

Joe Biden was sworn in as the 46th U.S. president two weeks after hundreds of Trump supporters ransacked the U.S. Capitol as lawmakers huddled behind closed doors, protected by police officers with guns drawn. Though Republicans did not contest the integrity of the 2016 election — when Hillary Clinton won nearly 2.8 million more popular votes, but lost in the Electoral College — 147 GOP lawmakers voted to overturn the 2020 presidential election based on unsubstantiated claims of electoral fraud after Joe Biden won by 7 million votes.