Makaya Hall

Former President of the United States, Donald Trump, ran for president in 2016 as a Republican nominee for president of the United States after beating sixteen other candidates during a controversial campaign that drew praise and support from foreign dictatorships, domestic white nationalists, and the global far right. 

According to Vox news, Donald Trump is the first president to lack both military and political service. The only other president to get elected with the least amount of military or political experience was Woodrow Wilson in 1913, with only two years in the public office. 

Donald Trump’s presidency had some accomplishments and failures. A few of Donald Trump’s accomplishments are being able to defeat ISIS’s caliphate and killing Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Baghdadi was the world’s most wanted terrorist up to that point and his death represented a major blow to the terrorist group according to Businessinsider. In 2014, when ISIS took over a large swath of territory across Iraq and Syria and declared a caliphate it shocked the world.

According to Businessinsider.com, one of Donald Trump’s most lasting and yet impactful accomplishments was reshaping the Federal judiciary. Trump installed three Supreme Court justices and 226 judges overall to the Federal bench. In just four years, Trump appointed 54 judges on the 13 US circuit courts. To put this in perspective, former President Barack Obama appointed 55 circuit judges in his two terms in the White House.

By December 2019, Trump nominees made up roughly 25% of all US circuit court judges, according to an analysis by The Washington Post.

Donald Trump also had some impactful failures. In 2016 Trump campaigned on reducing undocumented immigrants. In his campaign he emphasized that he would reduce the undocumented immigrants but his administration’s “zero tolerance” policy on illegal border crossings led to the separations of at least 5,500 families and saw children placed in cages. Trump falsely blamed his predecessor, former President Barack Obama, for the policy that saw thousands of children separated from their parents.

In May 2018, chaos throughout the Middle East was caused by Donald Trump’s decision to unilaterally withdraw the US from the 2015 nuclear deal. It remains one of Trump’s most unpopular decisions in the global arena.

When Trump term came to an end on January 20, 2021 we thought that was the last time we would hear about his shenanigans, but Donald Trump is currently fighting a case against the United States after showing efforts to slow down a criminal investigation into classified documents that the FBI seized from Mar-a-Lago, his Florida residence in August.

One of the biggest issues in this case, for example, is whether Trump could require the FBI to return more than 100 documents seized from his residence, all of which are marked as classified, because they may be his property.

The Justice Department sought limited relief from the 11th Circuit.The Department of Justice has not yet challenged Judge Cannon’s order appointing the special master, or instructing him to comb through the non-classified documents seized from Trump. But it did seek the appeals court’s permission to continue its criminal and national security investigations into the classified materials.

It is possible for Trump to ask the Supreme Court to reinstate Judge Cannon’s original order for his attorneys to read over the non-classified documents seized from Trump . But he just lost before a conservative panel dominated by judges that he appointed. It is unlikely that even this Supreme Court will side with him.

In other words, Trump’s challenge with the case is still ongoing but the DOJ will be allowed to continue its criminal investigation into Trump without significant further interference from Judge Cannon.