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I wouldn't want to launch explosives over cities and be apart of all the innocent lives that are taken from both sides.

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A photo of a handsome child in a classroom.

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Shows 1st Amendment on a shirt.

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My favorite Amendment from the Bill of Rights!

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My favorite Amendment from the Bill of Rights!

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The freedom of speech effects so many people today in our world.

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First Amendment to the United States Constitution - Wikipedia

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The First Amendment (Amendment I) to the United States Constitution prevents Congress from making laws respecting an establishment of religion; prohibiting the free exercise of religion; or abridging the freedom of speech, the freedom of the press, the freedom of assembly, or the right to petition the government for redress of grievances. It was adopted on December 15, 1791, as one of the ten amendments that constitute the Bill of Rights. In the original draft of the Bill of Rights, what is now the First Amendment occupied third place. The first two articles were not ratified by the states, so the article on disestablishment and free speech ended up being first.[1][2]

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George is the Best President of All Time

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George is the Best President of All Time

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He has established so much for this country.

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George Washington (February 22, 1732 - December 14, 1799) was an American military officer, statesman, and Founding Father who served as the first president of the United States from 1789 to 1797. Appointed by the Second Continental Congress as commander of the Continental Army in June 1775, Washington led Patriot forces to victory in the American Revolutionary War and then served as president of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, which drafted and ratified the Constitution of the United States and established the American federal government. Washington has thus been called the " Father of his Country".

Washington's first public office, from 1749 to 1750, was as surveyor of Culpeper County in the Colony of Virginia. He subsequently received military training and was assigned command of the Virginia Regiment during the French and Indian War. He was later elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses and was named a delegate to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, which appointed him Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army. Washington led American forces to a decisive victory over the British in the Revolutionary War, leading the British to sign the Treaty of Paris, which acknowledged the sovereignty and independence of the United States. He resigned his commission in 1783 after the conclusion of the Revolutionary War.

Washington played an indispensable role in adopting and ratifying the Constitution, which replaced the Articles of Confederation in 1789. He was then twice elected president by the Electoral College unanimously. As the first U.S. president, Washington implemented a strong, well-financed national government while remaining impartial in a fierce rivalry that emerged between cabinet members Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. During the French Revolution, he proclaimed a policy of neutrality while sanctioning the Jay Treaty. He set enduring precedents for the office of president, including use of the title " Mr. President" and the two-term tradition. His 1796 farewell address became a preeminent statement on republicanism in which he wrote about the importance of national unity and the dangers regionalism, partisanship, and foreign influence pose to it.

Washington has been memorialized by monuments, a federal holiday, various media depictions, geographical locations including the national capital, the State of Washington, stamps, and currency. He is ranked among the greatest U.S. presidents. In 1976, Washington was posthumously promoted to the rank of General of the Armies, the highest rank in the U.S. Army. His legacy is marred, however, by his ownership of slaves and his complicated relationship with slavery, as well as his policy to assimilate Native Americans into the Anglo-American culture and waging war against Native American nations during the Revolutionary Wars and the Northwest Indian War.

Early life (1732-1752)

Ferry Farm, the Washington family's residence on the Rappahannock River in Stafford County, Virginia, where Washington spent much of his youth

George Washington was born on February 22, 1732, at Popes Creek in Westmoreland County, Virginia. He was the first of six children of Augustine and Mary Ball Washington. His father was a justice of the peace and a prominent public figure who had four additional children from his first marriage to Jane Butler. The family moved to Little Hunting Creek in 1734 before eventually settling in Ferry Farm near Fredericksburg, Virginia. When Augustine died in 1743, Washington inherited Ferry Farm and ten slaves; his older half-brother Lawrence inherited Little Hunting Creek and renamed it Mount Vernon.

Washington did not have the formal education his elder brothers received at Appleby Grammar School in England, but he did attend the Lower Church School in Hartfield. He learned mathematics, trigonometry, and land surveying, and became a talented draftsman and mapmaker. By early adulthood, he was writing with "considerable force" and "precision". As a teenager, to practice his penmanship, Washington compiled over a hundred rules for social interaction styled Rules of Civility and Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation, copied from an English translation of a French book of manners.

Washington often visited Mount Vernon and Belvoir, the plantation of William Fairfax, Lawrence's father-in-law. Fairfax became Washington's patron and surrogate father, and Washington spent a month in 1748 with a team surveying Fairfax's Shenandoah Valley property. The following year, he received a surveyor's license from the College of William & Mary. Even though Washington had not served the customary apprenticeship, Fairfax appointed him surveyor of Culpeper County, Virginia, where he took his oath of office July 20, 1749. He subsequently familiarized himself with the frontier region, and though he resigned from the job in 1750, he continued to do surveys west of the Blue Ridge Mountains. By 1752, he had bought almost 1,500 acres (600 ha) in the Valley and owned 2,315 acres (937 ha).

Colonial military career (1752-1758)

Lawrence Washington's service as adjutant general of the Virginia militia inspired George to seek a commission. Virginia's lieutenant governor, Robert Dinwiddie, appointed Washington as a major and commander of one of the four militia districts. The British and French were competing for control of the Ohio Valley: the British were constructing forts along the Ohio River, and the French between the Ohio River and Lake Erie.

In October 1753, Dinwiddie appointed Washington as a special envoy. He had sent Washington to demand French forces to vacate land that was claimed by the British. Washington was also appointed to make peace with the Iroquois Confederacy, and to gather further intelligence about the French forces. Washington met with Half-King Tanacharison, and other Iroquois chiefs, at Logstown, and gathered information about the numbers and locations of the French forts, as well as intelligence concerning individuals taken prisoner by the French. Washington was nicknamed Conotocaurius by Tanacharison. The name, meaning "devourer of villages", had been given to his great-grandfather John Washington in the late 17th century by the Susquehannock.

French and Indian War

Lieutenant Colonel Washington holds night council during the Battle of Fort Necessity in Fayette County, Pennsylvania

In February 1754, Dinwiddie promoted Washington to lieutenant colonel and second-in-command of the 300-strong Virginia Regiment, with orders to confront French forces at the Forks of the Ohio. Washington set out with half the regiment in April and soon learned a French force of 1,000 had begun construction of Fort Duquesne there. In May, having set up a defensive position at Great Meadows, he learned that the French had made camp seven miles (11 km) away; he decided to take the offensive.

The French detachment proved to be only about 50 men, so Washington advanced on May 28 with a small force of Virginians and Indian allies to ambush them. During the ambush, French forces were killed outright with muskets and hatchets, including French commander Joseph Coulon de Jumonville, who had been carrying a diplomatic message for the British. The French later found their countrymen dead and scalped, blaming Washington, who had retreated to Fort Necessity.

The full Virginia Regiment joined Washington at Fort Necessity the following month with news that he had been promoted to command of the regiment and colonel upon the regimental commander's death. The regiment was reinforced by an independent company of a hundred South Carolinians led by Captain James Mackay; his royal commission outranked Washington's and a conflict of command ensued. On July 3, a French force attacked with 900 men, and the ensuing battle ended in Washington's surrender. He signed a surrender document in which he unwittingly took responsibility for "assassinating" Jumonville, later blaming the translator for not properly translating it.

In the aftermath, Colonel James Innes took command of intercolonial forces, the Virginia Regiment was divided, and Washington was offered a captaincy in one of the newly formed regiments. He refused, however, as it would have been a demotion and instead resigned his commission. The "Jumonville affair" became the incident which ignited the French and Indian War, later to become part of the Seven Years' War.

In 1755, Washington served voluntarily as an aide to General Edward Braddock, who led a British expedition to expel the French from Fort Duquesne and the Ohio Country. On Washington's recommendation, Braddock split the army into one main column and a lightly equipped "flying column". Suffering from severe dysentery, Washington was left behind, and when he rejoined Braddock at Monongahela the French and their Indian allies ambushed the divided army. Two-thirds of the British force became casualties, including the mortally wounded Braddock. Under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Gage, Washington, still very ill, rallied the survivors and formed a rear guard, allowing the remnants of the force to disengage and retreat.

The Virginia Regiment was reconstituted in August 1755, and Dinwiddie appointed Washington its commander, again with the rank of colonel. Washington clashed over seniority almost immediately, this time with John Dagworthy, another captain of superior royal rank, who commanded a detachment of Marylanders at the regiment's headquarters in Fort Cumberland. Washington, impatient for an offensive against Fort Duquesne, was convinced Braddock would have granted him a royal commission and pressed his case in February 1756 with Braddock's successor as Commander-in-Chief, William Shirley, and again in January 1757 with Shirley's successor, Lord Loudoun. Shirley ruled in Washington's favor only in the matter of Dagworthy; Loudoun humiliated Washington, refused him a royal commission and agreed only to relieve him of the responsibility of manning Fort Cumberland.

In 1758, the Virginia Regiment was assigned to the British Forbes Expedition to capture Fort Duquesne. Washington disagreed with General John Forbes' tactics and chosen route. Forbes nevertheless made Washington a brevet brigadier general and gave him command of one of the three brigades that would assault the fort. The French had abandoned the fort and the valley before the assault, however, and Washington only saw a friendly fire incident which left 14 dead and 26 injured. Frustrated, he resigned his commission soon afterwards and returned to Mount Vernon.

Marriage, civilian, and political life (1755-1775)

Washington's 1751 bout with smallpox is thought to have rendered him sterile, though it is equally likely that "Martha may have sustained injury during the birth of Patsy, her final child, making additional births impossible." The couple lamented not having any children together. Despite this, the two raised Martha's two children John Parke Custis (Jacky) and Martha Parke Custis (Patsy), and later Jacky's two youngest children Eleanor Parke Custis (Nelly) and George Washington Parke Custis (Washy), along with numerous nieces and nephews.

At Washington's urging, Governor Lord Botetourt fulfilled Dinwiddie's 1754 promise of land bounties to all-volunteer militia during the French and Indian War. In late 1770, Washington inspected the lands in the Ohio and Great Kanawha regions, and he engaged surveyor William Crawford to subdivide it. Crawford allotted 23,200 acres (9,400 ha) to Washington; Washington told the veterans that their land was hilly and unsuitable for farming, and he agreed to purchase 20,147 acres (8,153 ha), leaving some feeling they had been duped. He also doubled the size of Mount Vernon to 6,500 acres (2,600 ha) and, by 1775, had increased its slave population by more than a hundred.

As a respected military hero and large landowner, Washington held local offices and was elected to the Virginia provincial legislature, representing Frederick County in the House of Burgesses for seven years beginning in 1758. He first ran for the seat in 1755 but was soundly beaten by Hugh West. When he ran in 1758, Washington plied voters with beer, brandy, and other beverages. Despite being away serving on the Forbes Expedition, he won the election with roughly 40 percent of the vote, defeating three opponents with the help of local supporters.

Early in his legislative career, Washington rarely spoke or even attended legislative sessions. He would later become a prominent critic of Britain's taxation policy and mercantilist policies towards the American colonies and became more politically active starting in the 1760s.

Washington imported luxuries and other goods from England, paying for them by exporting tobacco. His profligate spending combined with low tobacco prices left him £1,800 in debt by 1764, prompting him to diversify his holdings. In 1765, because of erosion and other soil problems, he changed Mount Vernon's primary cash crop from tobacco to wheat and expanded operations to include corn flour milling and fishing.

Opposition to the British Parliament and Crown

Washington played a central role before and during the American Revolution. His distrust of the British military had begun when he was passed over for promotion into the Regular Army. Opposed to taxes imposed by the British Parliament on the Colonies without proper representation, he and other colonists were also angered by the Royal Proclamation of 1763 which banned American settlement west of the Allegheny Mountains and protected the British fur trade.

Washington believed the Stamp Act 1765 was an "Act of Oppression" and celebrated its repeal the following year. In March 1766, Parliament passed the Declaratory Act asserting that Parliamentary law superseded colonial law. In the late 1760s, the interference of the British Crown in American lucrative western land speculation spurred the American Revolution. Washington was a prosperous land speculator, and in 1767, he encouraged "adventures" to acquire backcountry western lands. Washington helped lead widespread protests against the Townshend Acts passed by Parliament in 1767, and he introduced a proposal in May 1769 which urged Virginians to boycott British goods; the Acts were mostly repealed in 1770.

Parliament sought to punish Massachusetts colonists for their role in the Boston Tea Party in 1774 by passing the Coercive Acts, which Washington saw as "an invasion of our rights and privileges". He said Americans must not submit to acts of tyranny since "custom and use shall make us as tame and abject slaves, as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway". That July, he and George Mason drafted a list of resolutions for the Fairfax County committee, including a call to end the Atlantic slave trade, which were adopted.

The American Revolutionary War broke out on April 19, 1775, with the Battles of Lexington and Concord and the Siege of Boston. Upon hearing the news, Washington was "sobered and dismayed", and he hastily departed Mount Vernon on May 4, 1775, to join the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia.

Commander in chief (1775-1783)

On June 14, 1775, Congress created the Continental Army and John Adams nominated Washington as its commander-in-chief, mainly because of his military experience and the belief that a Virginian would better unite the colonies. He was unanimously elected by Congress the next day. Washington appeared before Congress in uniform and gave an acceptance speech on June 16, declining a salary, though he was later reimbursed expenses.

Congress chose his primary staff officers, including Major General Artemas Ward, Adjutant General Horatio Gates, Major General Charles Lee, Major General Philip Schuyler, and Major General Nathanael Greene. Henry Knox, a young bookkeeper, impressed Adams and Washington with ordnance knowledge and was subsequently promoted to colonel and chief of artillery. Similarly, Washington was impressed by Alexander Hamilton's intelligence and bravery. He would later promote him to colonel and appoint him his aide-de-camp.

Washington initially banned the enlistment of blacks, both free and enslaved, into the Continental Army. The British saw an opportunity to divide the colonies, and the colonial governor of Virginia issued a proclamation, which promised freedom to slaves if they joined the British. Desperate for manpower by late 1777, Washington relented and overturned his ban. By the end of the war, around one-tenth of Washington's army were blacks. Following the British surrender, Washington sought to enforce terms of the preliminary Treaty of Paris (1783) by reclaiming slaves freed by the British and returning them to servitude. He arranged to make this request to Sir Guy Carleton on May 6, 1783. Instead, Carleton issued 3,000 freedom certificates and all former slaves in New York City were able to leave before the city was evacuated by the British in late November 1783.

Siege of Boston

Washington arriving in Boston on July 2, 1775, to take command of the Continental Army

As Washington headed for Boston, word of his march preceded him, and he was greeted everywhere; gradually, he became a symbol of the Patriot cause. Upon arrival on July 2, 1775, two weeks after the Battle of Bunker Hill, he set up headquarters in Cambridge. When he went to inspect the army, he found undisciplined militia. After consultation, he initiated Benjamin Franklin's suggested reforms: drilling the soldiers and imposing strict discipline. Washington ordered his officers to identify the skills of recruits to ensure military effectiveness, while removing incompetent officers. He petitioned Gage, his former superior, to release captured Patriot officers from prison and treat them humanely. In October 1775, King George III declared that the colonies were in open rebellion and relieved Gage of command for incompetence, replacing him with General William Howe.

The Continental Army, reduced to only 9,600 men by January 1776 due to expiring short-term enlistments, had to be supplemented with militia. Soon, they were joined by Knox with heavy artillery captured from Fort Ticonderoga. When the Charles River froze over, Washington was eager to cross and storm Boston, but General Gates and others were opposed to untrained militia striking well-garrisoned fortifications. Instead, he agreed to secure the Dorchester Heights, 100 feet above Boston, with Knox's artillery to try to force the British out.

New York and New Jersey

Battle of Long Island

Howe transported his resupplied army, with the British fleet, from Halifax to New York City. George Germain, who ran the British war effort in England, believed it could be won with one "decisive blow". The British forces, including more than a hundred ships and thousands of troops, began arriving on Staten Island on July2 to lay siege to the city. After the Declaration of Independence was unanimously adopted on July 4, Washington informed his troops on July9 that Congress had declared the united colonies to be "free and independent states".

Howe's troop strength totaled 32,000 regulars and Hessian auxiliaries, and Washington's consisted of 23,000, mostly raw recruits and militia. In August, Howe landed 20,000 troops at Gravesend, Brooklyn, and approached Washington's fortifications Opposing his generals, Washington chose to fight, based on inaccurate information that Howe's army had only 8,000-plus troops. In the Battle of Long Island, Howe assaulted Washington's flank and inflicted 1,500 Patriot casualties, the British suffering 400. Washington retreated, instructing General William Heath to acquire river craft. On August 30, General William Stirling held off the British and gave cover while the army crossed the East River under darkness to Manhattan without loss of life or materiel, although Alexander was captured. Howe was emboldened by his Long Island victory and dispatched Washington as "George Washington, Esq." in futility to negotiate peace. Washington declined, demanding to be addressed with diplomatic protocol, as general and fellow belligerent, not as a "rebel", lest his men be hanged as such if captured. The Royal Navy bombarded the unstable earthworks on lower Manhattan Island. Despite misgivings, Washington heeded the advice of Generals Greene and Putnam to defend Fort Washington. They were unable to hold it; Washington abandoned the fort and ordered his army north to the White Plains.

Howe's pursuit forced Washington to retreat across the Hudson River to Fort Lee to avoid encirclement. Howe landed his troops on Manhattan in November and captured Fort Washington, inflicting high casualties on the Americans. Washington was responsible for delaying the retreat, though he blamed Congress and General Greene. Loyalists in New York City considered Howe a liberator and spread a rumor that Washington had set fire to the city. Patriot morale reached its lowest when Lee was captured. Now reduced to 5,400 troops, Washington's army retreated through New Jersey, and Howe broke off pursuit to set up winter quarters in New York.

Crossing the Delaware, Trenton, and Princeton

Washington Crossing the Delaware, an 1851 portrait by Emanuel Leutze

The Capture of the Hessians at Trenton, December 26, 1776, a John Trumbull portrait depicting the Battle of Trenton

Washington crossed the Delaware River into Pennsylvania, where Lee's replacement General John Sullivan joined him with 2,000 more troops. The future of the Continental Army was in doubt due to lack of supplies, a harsh winter, expiring enlistments, and desertions. Washington was disappointed that many New Jersey residents were Loyalists or skeptical about independence.

Howe split up his army and posted a Hessian garrison at Trenton to hold western New Jersey and the east shore of the Delaware. Desperate for a victory, Washington and his generals devised a surprise attack on Trenton. The army was to cross the Delaware in three divisions: one led by Washington (2,400 troops), another by General James Ewing (700), and the third by Colonel John Cadwalader (1,500). The force was to then split, with Washington taking the Pennington Road and General Sullivan traveling south on the river's edge.

Washington ordered a 60-mile search for Durham boats to transport his army, and the destruction of vessels that could be used by the British. He personally risked capture while staking out the Jersey shoreline alone leading up to the crossing. Washington crossed the Delaware on Christmas night, 1776. His men followed across the ice-obstructed river from McConkey's Ferry, with 40 men per vessel. The wind churned up the waters, and they were pelted with hail, but by 3:00 a.m. on December 26, they made it across with no losses. Knox was delayed, managing frightened horses and about 18 field guns on flat-bottomed ferries. Cadwalader and Ewing failed to cross due to the ice and heavy currents. Once Knox arrived, Washington proceeded to Trenton, rather than risk being spotted returning his army to Pennsylvania.

Some British troops retreated after a brief stand, while others took refuge in Nassau Hall, which became the target of Colonel Alexander Hamilton's cannons. Washington's troops charged, the British surrendered in less than an hour, and 194 soldiers laid down their arms. Howe retreated to New York City where his army remained inactive until early the next year. Washington took up winter headquarters in Jacob Arnold's Tavern in Morristown, New Jersey, while he received munition from the Hibernia mines. While in Morristown, Washington's troops disrupted British supply lines and expelled them from parts of New Jersey.

The British still controlled New York, and many Patriot soldiers did not re-enlist or deserted after the harsh winter campaign. Congress instituted greater rewards for re-enlisting and punishments for desertion to effect greater troop numbers. Strategically, Washington's victories at Trenton and Princeton were pivotal; they revived Patriot morale and quashed the British strategy of showing overwhelming force followed by offering generous terms, changing the course of the war. In February 1777, word of the American victories reached London, and the British realized the Patriots were in a position to demand unconditional independence.

Philadelphia

Brandywine, Germantown, and Saratoga

In July 1777, British General John Burgoyne led the Saratoga campaign south from Quebec through Lake Champlain and recaptured Fort Ticonderoga intending to divide New England, including control of the Hudson River. However, General Howe in British-occupied New York City blundered, taking his army south to Philadelphia rather than up the Hudson River to join Burgoyne near Albany.

Washington and Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette rushed to Philadelphia to engage Howe. In the Battle of Brandywine, on September 11, 1777, Howe outmaneuvered Washington and marched unopposed into the nation's capital at Philadelphia. A Patriot attack failed against the British at Germantown in October.

In Upstate New York, the Patriots were led by General Horatio Gates. Concerned about Burgoyne's movements southward, Washington sent reinforcements north with Generals Benedict Arnold, his most aggressive field commander, and Benjamin Lincoln. On October 7, 1777, Burgoyne tried to take Bemis Heights but was isolated from support by Howe. He was forced to retreat to Saratoga and ultimately surrendered after the Battles of Saratoga. As Washington suspected, Gates' victory emboldened his critics.

Valley Forge and Monmouth

Washington and his Continental Army of 11,000 men went into winter quarters at Valley Forge north of Philadelphia in December 1777. There they lost between 2,000 and 3,000 men as a result of disease and lack of food, clothing, and shelter. The British were comfortably quartered in Philadelphia, paying for supplies in pounds sterling, while Washington struggled with a devalued American paper currency. The woodlands were soon exhausted of game. By February, Washington was facing lowered morale and increased desertions among his troops.

Washington made repeated petitions to Congress for provisions. He received a congressional delegation to check the Army's conditions and expressed the urgency of the situation, proclaiming: "Something must be done. Important alterations must be made." He recommended that Congress expedite supplies, and Congress agreed to strengthen and fund the army's supply lines by reorganizing the commissary department. By late February, supplies began arriving. Meanwhile, Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben's incessant drilling transformed Washington's recruits into a disciplined fighting force by the end of winter camp. For his services, Washington promoted Von Steuben to Major General and made him chief of staff.

West Point espionage

Washington became America's first spymaster by designing an espionage system against the British. In 1778, Major Benjamin Tallmadge formed the Culper Ring at Washington's direction to covertly collect information about the British in New York. Washington had disregarded incidents of disloyalty by Benedict Arnold, who had distinguished himself in many campaigns, including the Invasion of Quebec and the Battle of Saratoga.

In 1780, Arnold began supplying British spymaster John André with sensitive information intended to compromise Washington and capture West Point, a key American defensive position on the Hudson River. Historians Nathaniel Philbrick and Ron Chernow noted possible reasons for Arnold's defection to be his anger at losing promotions to junior officers, or repeated slights from Congress. He was also deeply in debt, profiteering from the war, and disappointed by Washington's lack of support during his eventual court-martial.

After repeated requests, Washington agreed to give Arnold command of West Point in August. On September 21, Arnold met André and gave him plans to take over the garrison. While returning to British lines, André was captured by militia who discovered the plans; upon hearing the news of André's capture on September 24, while waiting to greet and have breakfast with Washington, Arnold immediately fleed to the HMS Vulture, the ship that had brought André to West Point, and escaped to New York.

Southern theater and Yorktown

In June 1778, Iroquois warriors joined with Loyalist rangers led by Walter Butler and killed more than 200 frontiersmen, laying waste to the Wyoming Valley in Northeastern Pennsylvania. In mid-1779, in response to this and other attacks on New England towns, Washington ordered General John Sullivan to lead an expedition to force the Iroquois out of New York by effecting "the total destruction and devastation" of their villages and taking their women and children hostage. The expedition systematically destroyed Iroquois villages and food stocks, and forced at least 5,036 Iroquois to flee to British Canada. The campaign directly killed a few hundred Iroquois, but according to historian Rhiannon Koehler, the net effect was to reduce the Iroquois by half. They became unable to survive the harsh winter of 1779-1780; some historians now described the campaign as a genocide.

In January 1780, Clinton assembled 12,500 troops and attacked Charles Town, South Carolina, defeating General Benjamin Lincoln. By June, they occupied the South Carolina Piedmont. Clinton returned to New York and left 8,000 troops under the command of General Charles Cornwallis. Congress replaced Lincoln with Horatio Gates; after his defeat in the Battle of Camden, Gates was replaced by Nathanael Greene, Washington's initial choice, but the British had firm control of the South. Washington was reinvigorated, however, when Lafayette returned from France with more ships, men, and supplies, and 5,000 veteran French troops led by Marshal Rochambeau arrived at Newport, Rhode Island in July 1780. French naval forces then landed, led by Admiral de Grasse.

By late September, Patriot-French forces surrounded Yorktown, trapped the British Army, and prevented British reinforcements from Clinton in the North, while the French navy emerged victorious at the Battle of the Chesapeake. The final American offensive began with a shot fired by Washington. The siege ended with a British surrender on October 19, 1781; over 7,000 British soldiers became prisoners of war. Washington negotiated the terms of surrender for two days, and the official signing ceremony took place on October 19; Cornwallis claimed illness and was absent, sending General Charles O'Hara as his proxy. As a gesture of goodwill, Washington held a dinner for the American, French, and British generals, all of whom fraternized on friendly terms and identified with one another as members of the same professional military caste.

Demobilization and resignation

When peace negotiations began in April 1782, both the British and French began gradually evacuating their forces. With the American treasury empty, unpaid and mutinous soldiers forced the adjournment of Congress. In March 1783, Washington successfully calmed the Newburgh Conspiracy, a planned munity by American officers; Congress promised each a five-year bonus. Washington submitted an account of $450,000 in expenses which he had advanced to the army, equivalent to $9.15 million in 2022. The account was settled, though it was allegedly vague about large sums and included expenses his wife had incurred through visits to his headquarters.

The following month, a Congressional committee led by Alexander Hamilton began adapting the army for peacetime. In August 1783, Washington gave the Army's perspective to the committee in his Sentiments on a Peace Establishment, which advised Congress to keep a standing army, create a "national militia" of separate state units, and establish a navy and a national military academy.

The Treaty of Paris was signed on September 3, 1783, and Britain officially recognized American independence. Washington disbanded his army, giving a farewell address to his soldiers on November 2. During this time, Washington oversaw the evacuation of British forces in New York and was greeted by parades and celebrations. Along with Governor George Clinton, he took formal possession of the city on November 25.

In early December 1783, Washington bade farewell to his officers at Fraunces Tavern and resigned as commander-in-chief soon thereafter. In a final appearance in uniform, he gave a statement to the Congress: "I consider it an indispensable duty to close this last solemn act of my official life, by commending the interests of our dearest country to the protection of Almighty God, and those who have the superintendence of them, to his holy keeping." Washington's resignation was acclaimed at home and abroad and showed a skeptical world that the new republic would not degenerate into chaos.

Early republic (1783-1789)

Return to Mount Vernon

"I am not only retired from all public employments but I am retiring within myself, and shall be able to view the solitary walk and tread the paths of private life with heartfelt satisfaction ... I will move gently down the stream of life, until I sleep with my fathers."

- George Washington in a letter to Lafayette.
February 1, 1784.

Washington was longing to return home after spending just ten days at Mount Vernon out of years of war. He arrived on Christmas Eve, delighted to be "free of the bustle of a camp and the busy scenes of public life". He was a celebrity and was fêted during a visit to his mother at Fredericksburg in February 1784, and he received a constant stream of visitors wishing to pay their respects at Mount Vernon.

To make his estate profitable again, Washington undertook a new landscaping plan and succeeded in cultivating a range of fast-growing trees and native shrubs. He also began breeding mules after being gifted a Spanish jack by King Charles III of Spain in 1784. There were few mules in the United States at that time, and he believed that they would revolutionize agriculture and transportation.

Constitutional Convention of 1787

Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States, a 1940 portrait by Howard Chandler Christy depicting Washington as the presiding officer at the Constitutional Convention in 1787

Washington arrived in Philadelphia on May 9, 1787, though a quorum was not attained until May 25. Benjamin Franklin nominated Washington to preside over the convention, and he was unanimously elected to serve as president general. The convention's state-mandated purpose was to revise the Articles of Confederation, and the new government would be established when the resulting document was "duly confirmed by the several states". Randolph introduced Madison's Virginia Plan on May 27, the third day of the convention. It called for an entirely new constitution and a sovereign national government, which Washington highly recommended.

On July 10, Washington wrote to Alexander Hamilton: "I almost despair of seeing a favorable issue to the proceedings of our convention and do therefore repent having had any agency in the business." Nevertheless, he lent his prestige to the work of the other delegates, unsuccessfully lobbying many to support ratification of the Constitution, such as anti-federalists Edmund Randolph and George Mason. The final version was voted on and signed by 39 of 55 delegates on September 17, 1787.

Chancellor of William & Mary

First presidential election

The state electors under the Constitution voted for the president on February 4, 1789, and Washington suspected that most republicans had not voted for him. The mandated March4 date passed without a Congressional quorum to count the votes, but a quorum was reached on April 5. The votes were tallied the next day, and Washington won the majority of every state's electoral votes. He was informed of his election as president by Congressional Secretary Charles Thomson. John Adams received the next highest number of votes and was elected vice president. Despite feeling "anxious and painful sensations" about leaving Mount Vernon, he departed for New York City on April 16 to be inaugurated.

Presidency (1789-1797)

Washington was inaugurated on April 30, 1789, taking the oath of office at Federal Hall in New York City. His coach was led by militia and a marching band and followed by statesmen and foreign dignitaries in an inaugural parade, with a crowd of 10,000. Chancellor Robert R. Livingston administered the oath, using a Bible provided by the Masons, after which the militia fired a 13-gun salute. Washington read a speech in the Senate Chamber, asking "that Almighty Being ... consecrate the liberties and happiness of the people of the United States". Though he wished to serve without a salary, Congress insisted that he accept it, later providing Washington $25,000 per year to defray costs of the presidency, equivalent to $6.14 million today. Washington wrote to James Madison: "As the first of everything in our situation will serve to establish a precedent, it is devoutly wished on my part that these precedents be fixed on true principles." To that end, he preferred the title "Mr. President" over more majestic names proposed by the Senate, including "His Excellency" and "His Highness the President". His executive precedents included the inaugural address, messages to Congress, and the cabinet form of the executive branch.

Washington planned to resign after his first term, but political strife convinced him to remain in office. He was an able administrator and a judge of talent and character, and he regularly talked with department heads to get their advice. He tolerated opposing views, despite fears that a democratic system would lead to political violence, and he conducted a smooth transition of power to his successor. He remained non-partisan throughout his presidency and opposed the divisiveness of political parties, but he favored a strong central government, was sympathetic to a Federalist form of government, and leery of the Republican opposition.

Washington dealt with major problems. The old Confederation lacked the powers to handle its workload and had weak leadership, no executive, a small bureaucracy of clerks, large debt, worthless paper money, and no power to establish taxes. He had the task of assembling an executive department and relied on Tobias Lear for advice selecting its officers. Britain refused to relinquish its forts in the American West, and Barbary pirates preyed on American merchant ships in the Mediterranean before the United States even had a navy.

Cabinet and executive departments

Congress created executive departments in 1789, including the State Department in July, the War Department in August, and the Treasury Department in September. Washington appointed Edmund Randolph as Attorney General, Samuel Osgood as Postmaster General, Thomas Jefferson as Secretary of State, Henry Knox as Secretary of War, and Alexander Hamilton as Secretary of the Treasury. Washington's cabinet became a consulting and advisory body, not mandated by the Constitution.

Domestic issues

His closest advisors formed two factions, portending the First Party System. Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton formed the Federalist Party to promote national credit and a financially powerful nation. Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson opposed Hamilton's agenda and founded the Jeffersonian Republicans. Washington favored Hamilton's agenda, however, and it ultimately went into effect-resulting in bitter controversy.

African Americans

In response to two antislavery petitions that were presented to Congress in 1790, slaveholders in Georgia and South Carolina threatened to "blow the trumpet of civil war". Washington and Congress responded with a series of racist measures: naturalization was denied to black immigrants; blacks were barred from serving in state militias; the Southwest Territory (later the state of Tennessee) was permitted to maintain slavery; and two more slave states were admitted (Kentucky in 1792 and Tennessee in 1796). On February 12, 1793, Washington signed into law the Fugitive Slave Act, which overrode state laws and courts, allowing agents to cross state lines to return escaped slaves. Many free blacks in the north decried the law believing it would allow bounty hunting and kidnapping. The Fugitive Slave Act gave effect to the Constitution's Fugitive Slave Clause, and the Act was passed overwhelmingly in Congress.

At the same time, Washington signed a reenactment of the Northwest Ordinance in 1789, which had freed all slaves brought after 1787 into a vast expanse of federal territory north of the Ohio River, except for slaves escaping from slave states. The 1787 law lapsed when the new U.S. Constitution was ratified in 1789. He also signed the Slave Trade Act of 1794, which sharply limited American involvement in the Atlantic slave trade. On February 18, 1791, Congress admitted the free state of Vermont into the Union as the 14th state as of March 4, 1791.

National Bank

President's House in Philadelphia, where both Washington and then John Adams worked and resided until completion of the White House in 1800

Washington's first term was largely devoted to economic concerns. Establishment of public credit became a primary challenge for the federal government. Hamilton submitted a report to a deadlocked Congress, and he, Madison, and Jefferson reached the Compromise of 1790 in which Jefferson agreed to Hamilton's debt proposals in exchange for moving the nation's capital temporarily to Philadelphia and then south near Georgetown on the Potomac River. The terms were legislated in the Funding Act of 1790 and the Residence Act, both of which Washington signed into law. Congress authorized the assumption and payment of the nation's debts, with funding provided by customs duties and excise taxes.

Jefferson-Hamilton feud

Jefferson's political actions, his support of Freneau's National Gazette, and his attempts to undermine Hamilton nearly led Washington to dismiss him from the cabinet; he ultimately resigned his position in December 1793, and Washington forsook him.

Whiskey Rebellion

In March 1791, at Hamilton's urging, with support from Madison, Congress imposed an excise tax on distilled spirits to help curtail the national debt, which took effect in July. Grain farmers strongly protested in Pennsylvania's frontier districts; they argued that they were unrepresented and were shouldering too much of the debt, comparing their situation to British taxation pre-Revolution.

Threats and violence against tax collectors, however, escalated into defiance against federal authority in 1794 and gave rise to the Whiskey Rebellion. Washington issued a final proclamation on September 25, threatening the use of military force to no avail. The federal army was not up to the task, so Washington invoked the Militia Act of 1792 to summon state militias. Governors sent troops, initially commanded by Washington, who handed over command to Henry Lee to lead them into the rebellious districts. They took 150 prisoners, and the remaining rebels dispersed. Two of the prisoners were condemned to death, but Washington exercised his Constitutional authority for the first time and pardoned them.

Foreign affairs

In April 1792, the French Revolutionary Wars began between Britain and France, and Washington declared America's neutrality. The revolutionary government of France sent diplomat Edmond-Charles Genêt to America, and he was welcomed with great enthusiasm. He created a network of new Democratic-Republican Societies promoting France's interests, but Washington denounced them and demanded that the French recall Genêt. The National Assembly of France granted Washington honorary French citizenship on August 26, 1792, during the early stages of the French Revolution.

Hamilton formulated the Jay Treaty to normalize trade relations with Britain while removing them from western forts, and also to resolve financial debts remaining from the Revolution. Chief Justice John Jay acted as Washington's negotiator and signed the treaty on November 19, 1794; critical Jeffersonians, however, supported France. Washington deliberated, then supported the treaty because it avoided war with Britain, but was disappointed that its provisions favored Britain. He mobilized public opinion and secured ratification in the Senate but faced frequent public criticism.

The British agreed to abandon their forts around the Great Lakes, and the United States modified the boundary with Canada. The government liquidated numerous pre-Revolution debts, and the British opened the British West Indies to American trade. The treaty secured peace with Britain and a decade of prosperous trade. Jefferson claimed that it angered France and "invited rather than avoided" war. Relations with France deteriorated afterward and, two days before Washington's term ended, the French Directory declared the authority to seize American ships, leaving succeeding president John Adams with prospective war.

Native American affairs

The growth of the nation demanded the dispossession of Indian people. Washington hoped the process could be bloodless and that Indian people would give up their lands for a "fair" price and move away. But if Indians refused and resisted, as they often did, he felt he had no choice but to "extirpate" them and that the expeditions he sent to destroy Indian towns were therefore entirely justified.

During the fall of 1789, Washington had to contend with the British refusing to evacuate their forts in the Northwest frontier and their concerted efforts to incite Indian tribes to attack American settlers. The Northwest tribes under Miami chief Little Turtle allied with the British to resist American expansion, and killed 1,500 settlers between 1783 and 1790.

Washington declared that "the Government of the United States are determined that their Administration of Indian Affairs shall be directed entirely by the great principles of Justice and humanity", and provided that treaties should negotiate their land interests. The administration regarded powerful tribes as foreign nations, and Washington even smoked a peace pipe and drank wine with them at the President's House in Philadelphia. He made numerous attempts to conciliate them; he equated killing indigenous peoples with killing whites and sought to integrate them into European American culture.

In 1790, Washington sent Brigadier General Josiah Harmar to pacify the Northwest tribes, but Little Turtle routed him twice and forced him to withdraw. The Northwestern Confederacy of tribes used guerrilla tactics and were an effective force against the sparsely manned American Army. Washington sent Major General Arthur St. Clair from Fort Washington on an expedition to restore peace in the territory in 1791. On November 4, St. Clair's forces were ambushed and soundly defeated by tribal forces with few survivors.

Washington replaced the disgraced St. Clair with the Revolutionary War hero Anthony Wayne. From 1792 to 1793, Wayne instructed his troops on Native American warfare tactics and instilled discipline which was lacking under St. Clair. In August 1794, Washington sent Wayne into tribal territory with authority to drive them out by burning their villages and crops in the Maumee Valley. On August 24, the American army defeated the Northwestern Confederacy at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, and the Treaty of Greenville in August 1795 opened two-thirds of the Ohio Country for American settlement.

Second term

Portrait of the USS Constitution, commissioned and named by President Washington in 1794

Many, however, urged him to run for a second term. Madison told him that his absence would only allow the dangerous political rift in his cabinet and the House to worsen. Jefferson also pleaded with him not to retire, agreeing to drop his attacks on Hamilton, and stating that he would also retire if Washington did. Hamilton maintained that Washington's absence would be "deplored as the greatest evil" to the country. With the election of 1792 nearing, Washington relented and agreed to run.

On February 13, 1793, the Electoral College unanimously re-elected Washington president, and John Adams as vice president by a vote of 77 to 50. He was sworn into office by Associate Justice William Cushing on March 4, 1793, in the Senate Chamber of Congress Hall in Philadelphia. Afterwards, Washington gave a brief address before immediately retiring to the President's House.

On April 22, 1793, when the French Revolutionary Wars broke out, Washington issued a proclamation which declared American neutrality. He was resolved to pursue "a conduct friendly and impartial toward the belligerent Powers" while also warning Americans not to intervene in the conflict. Although Washington recognized France's revolutionary government, he would eventually ask French minister to the United States Edmond-Charles Genêt be recalled over the Citizen Genêt affair. Genêt was a diplomatic troublemaker who was openly hostile toward Washington's neutrality policy. He procured four American ships as privateers to strike at Spanish forces (British allies) in Florida while organizing militias to strike at other British possessions. However, his efforts failed to draw the United States into the conflict.

On July 31, 1793, Jefferson submitted his resignation from cabinet. Hamilton, desiring more income for his family, resigned from office in January 1795 and was replaced by Oliver Wolcott Jr.. While his relationship with Washington would remain friendly, Washington's relationship with his Secretary of War Henry Knox deteriorated after rumors that Knox had profited from contracts for the construction of U.S. frigates which had been commissioned under the Naval Act of 1794 in order to combat Barbary pirates, forcing Knox to resign.

Farewell Address

Washington's Farewell Address, published by the American Daily Advertiser on September 19, 1796

In 1796, Washington declined to run for a third term of office. In May 1792, in anticipation of his retirement, Washington instructed James Madison to prepare a " valedictory address", an initial draft of which was entitled the "Farewell Address". In May 1796, Washington sent the manuscript to Alexander Hamilton who did an extensive rewrite, while Washington provided final edits. On September 19, 1796, David Claypoole's American Daily Advertiser published the final version.

Washington stressed that national identity was paramount, as a united America would safeguard freedom and prosperity. He warned the nation of three eminent dangers: regionalism, partisanship, and foreign entanglements, and said the "name of AMERICAN, which belongs to you, in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of patriotism". Washington called for men to move beyond partisanship for the common good, stressing that the United States must concentrate on its own interests. He warned against foreign alliances and their influence in domestic affairs, and bitter partisanship and the dangers of political parties. He counseled friendship and commerce with all nations, but advised against involvement in European wars. He stressed the importance of religion, asserting that "religion and morality are indispensable supports" in a republic. Washington's address favored Hamilton's Federalist ideology and economic policies.

He closed the address by reflecting on his legacy:

Though in reviewing the incidents of my Administration I am unconscious of intentional error, I am nevertheless too sensible of my defects not to think it probable that I may have committed many errors. Whatever they may be, I fervently beseech the Almighty to avert or mitigate the evils to which they may tend. I shall also carry with me the hope that my country will never cease to view them with indulgence, and that, after forty-five years of my life dedicated to its service with an upright zeal, the faults of incompetent abilities will be consigned to oblivion, as myself must soon be to the mansions of rest.

After initial publication, many Republicans, including Madison, criticized the Address and described it as an anti-French campaign document, with Madison believing that Washington was strongly pro-British.

In 1839, Washington biographer Jared Sparks maintained that Washington's "Farewell Address was printed and published with the laws, by order of the legislatures, as an evidence of the value they attached to its political precepts, and of their affection for its author." In 1972, Washington scholar James Flexner referred to the Farewell Address as receiving as much acclaim as Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence and Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. In 2010, historian Ron Chernow called the Farewell Address one of the most influential statements on republicanism.

Post-presidency (1797-1799)

Retirement

Washington retired to Mount Vernon in March 1797 and devoted time to his plantations and other business interests. His plantation operations were only minimally profitable, and his lands in the west ( Piedmont) were under Indian attacks and yielded little income, with squatters there refusing to pay rent. He attempted to sell these but without success. He became an even more committed Federalist. He vocally supported the Alien and Sedition Acts and convinced Federalist John Marshall to run for Congress to weaken the Jeffersonian hold on Virginia.

Washington grew restless in retirement, prompted by tensions with France; in a continuation of the French Revolutionary Wars, French privateers began seizing American ships in 1798, and relations deteriorated with France and led to the " Quasi-War". Washington wrote to Secretary of War James McHenry offering to organize President Adams' army. Adams nominated him for a lieutenant general commission on July 4, 1798, and the position of commander-in-chief of the armies. Washington served as the commanding general from July 13, 1798, until his death 17 months later. He participated in planning for a provisional army, but avoided involvement in details. In advising McHenry of potential officers for the army, he appeared to make a complete break with Jefferson's Democratic-Republicans: "you could as soon scrub the blackamoor white, as to change the principles of a profest Democrat; and that he will leave nothing unattempted to overturn the government of this country." Washington delegated the active leadership of the army to Hamilton, a major general. No army invaded the United States during this period, and Washington did not assume a field command.

Washington was known to be rich because of the well-known "glorified façade of wealth and grandeur" at Mount Vernon, but nearly all his wealth was in the form of land and slaves rather than ready cash. To supplement his income, he erected a distillery for substantial whiskey production. He bought land parcels to spur development around the new Federal City named in his honor, and he sold individual lots to middle-income investors rather than multiple lots to large investors, believing they would more likely commit to making improvements.

Final days and death

On December 12, 1799, Washington inspected his farms on horseback. He returned home late and had guests for dinner. He had a sore throat the next day but was well enough to mark trees for cutting. That evening, Washington complained of chest congestion. The next morning, however, he awoke to an inflamed throat and difficulty breathing. He ordered estate overseer George Rawlins to remove nearly a pint of his blood; bloodletting was a common practice of the time. His family summoned doctors James Craik, Gustavus Richard Brown, and Elisha C. Dick. A fourth doctor, William Thornton, arrived some hours after Washington died.

Washington's death came more swiftly than expected. On his deathbed, out of fear of being entombed alive, he instructed his private secretary Tobias Lear to wait three days before his burial. According to Lear, Washington died between 10 p.m. and 11 p.m. on December 14, 1799, with Martha seated at the foot of his bed. His last words were "'Tis well", from his conversation with Lear about his burial. He was 67.

Congress immediately adjourned for the day upon news of Washington's death, and the Speaker's chair was shroud in black the next morning. The funeral was held four days after his death on December 18, 1799, at Mount Vernon, where his body was interred. Cavalry and foot soldiers led the procession, and six colonels served as the pallbearers. The Mount Vernon funeral service was restricted mostly to family and friends. Reverend Thomas Davis read the funeral service by the vault with a brief address, followed by a ceremony performed by members of Washington's Masonic lodge in Alexandria, Virginia. Word of his death traveled slowly; church bells rang in the cities, and many businesses closed. Memorial processions were held in major cities of the United States. Martha wore a black mourning cape for one year, and she burned their correspondence to protect their privacy. Only five letters between the couple are known to have survived: two from Martha to George and three from him to her.

The diagnosis of Washington's illness and the immediate cause of his death have been subjects of debate since his death. The published account of doctors Craik and Brown stated that his symptoms were consistent with cynanche trachealis, a term then used to describe severe inflammation of the upper windpipe, including quinsy. Accusations have persisted since Washington's death concerning medical malpractice. Modern medical authors have concluded that he likely died from severe epiglottitis complicated by the treatments, including multiple doses of calomel, a purgative, and extensive bloodletting which almost certainly caused hypovolemic shock.

Burial, net worth, and aftermath

Personal life

The Washington Family, a late 18th century portrait by Edward Savage depicting George and Martha Washington with her grandchildren and an unnamed enslaved man

Washington was somewhat reserved in personality, but was known for having a strong presence. He made speeches and announcements when required, but he was not a noted orator or debater. He was taller than most of his contemporaries; accounts of his height vary from 6 ft (1.83 m) to 6 ft 3.5 in (1.92 m) tall, he weighed between 210-220 pounds (95-100 kg) as an adult, and was known for his great strength.

Washington was a talented equestrian, with Thomas Jefferson describing him as "the best horseman of his age". He collected thoroughbreds at Mount Vernon, his two favorite horses being Blueskin and Nelson. He enjoyed hunting foxes, deer, ducks, and other game. He was an excellent dancer and frequently attended the theater. He drank alcohol in moderation but was morally opposed to excessive drinking, smoking tobacco, gambling, and profanity.

Religion and Freemasonry

Washington as Master of his Lodge, an 1870 rendering of the 1793 event

Washington was descended from Anglican minister Lawrence Washington, whose troubles with the Church of England may have prompted his heirs to emigrate to America. He was baptized as an infant in April 1732 and became a devoted member of the Anglican Church. He served more than 20 years as a vestryman and churchwarden at Fairfax Parish and Truco Parish in Virginia. He privately prayed and read the Bible daily, and publicly encouraged people and the nation to pray. He may have taken communion on a regular basis prior to the Revolution, but he did not do so following the war.

Washington believed in a "wise, inscrutable, and irresistible" Creator God who was active in the Universe, contrary to deistic thought. He referred to God in Enlightenment terms, including Providence, the Creator, or the Almighty, and the Divine Author or Supreme Being. He believed in a divine power who watched over battlefields, was involved in the outcome of war, protected his life, and was involved in American politics and specifically the creation of the United States. Historian Ron Chernow has argued that Washington avoided evangelistic Christianity or hellfire-and-brimstone speech along with communion or anything inclined to "flaunt his religiosity", saying that he "never used his religion as a device for partisan purposes or in official undertakings". No mention of Jesus Christ appears in his private correspondence, and such references are rare in his public writings. At the same time, Washington frequently quoted from the Bible or paraphrased it, and often referred to the Anglican Book of Common Prayer.

Washington emphasized religious toleration in a nation with numerous denominations and religions. He publicly attended services of different Christian denominations and prohibited anti-Catholic celebrations in the Army. He engaged workers at Mount Vernon without regard for religious belief or affiliation. While president, he acknowledged major religious sects and gave speeches on religious toleration. He was distinctly rooted in the ideas, values, and modes of thinking of the Enlightenment, but he harbored no contempt of organized Christianity and its clergy, "being no bigot myself to any mode of worship". In 1793, speaking to members of the New Church in Baltimore, Washington said, "We have abundant reason to rejoice that in this Land the light of truth and reason has triumphed over the power of bigotry and superstition."

A Masonic lodge was established in Fredericksburg, Virginia in September 1752, and Washington was initiated two months later at the age of 20 as one of its first Entered Apprentices. Within a year, he progressed through its ranks to become a Master Mason. Washington had high regard for the Masonic Order, but his lodge attendance was sporadic. In 1777, a convention of Virginia lodges asked him to be the Grand Master of the newly established Grand Lodge of Virginia, but he declined due to his commitments leading the Continental Army. After 1782, he frequently corresponded with Masonic lodges and members, and he was listed as Master in the Virginia charter of Alexandria Lodge No. 22 in 1788.

In Washington's lifetime, slavery was deeply ingrained in the economic and social fabric of the Colony of Virginia, which continued after the Revolution and the establishment of Virginia as a state. Slavery was legal in all of the Thirteen Colonies prior to the American Revolution.

Washington's slaves

Washington owned and rented enslaved African Americans, and during his lifetime over 577 slaves lived and worked at Mount Vernon. He acquired them through inheritance, gaining control of 84 dower slaves upon his marriage to Martha, and purchased at least 71 slaves between 1752 and 1773. From 1786, he rented slaves; at the time of his death he was renting 41.

Prior to the Revolutionary War, Washington's view on slavery was the same as most Virginia planters of the time. Beginning in the 1760s, however, Washington gradually grew to oppose it. His first doubts were prompted by his transition from tobacco to grain crops, which left him with a costly surplus of slaves, causing him to question the system's economic efficiency. His growing disillusionment with the institution was spurred by the principles of the Revolution and revolutionary friends such as Lafayette and Hamilton. Most historians agree the Revolution was central to the evolution of Washington's attitudes on slavery; "After 1783," Kenneth Morgan writes, "... [Washington] began to express inner tensions about the problem of slavery more frequently, though always in private". Regardless, Washington would remain dependent on slave labor to work his farms.

Washington faced growing debts involved with the costs of supporting slaves. He held an "engrained sense of racial superiority" towards African Americans but harbored no ill feelings toward them. Some enslaved families worked at different locations on the plantation but were allowed to visit one another on their days off. Washington's slaves received two hours off for meals during the workday and were given time off on Sundays and religious holidays.

Runaway advertisement for Ona Judge, enslaved servant in Washington's presidential household

In February 1786, Washington took a census of Mount Vernon and recorded 224 slaves. By 1799, the slave population at Mount Vernon totaled 317, including 143 children. Washington owned 124 slaves, leased 40, and held 153 for his wife's dower interest. Washington supported many slaves who were too young or too old to work, greatly increasing Mount Vernon's slave population and causing the plantation to operate at a loss.

Abolition and manumission

Based on his private papers and on accounts from his contemporaries, Washington slowly developed a cautious sympathy toward abolitionism that eventually ended with his will freeing his long-time valet Billy Lee, and then subsequently freeing the rest of his personally owned slaves outright upon Martha's death. As president, he remained publicly silent on the topic of slavery, believing it was a nationally divisive issue that could undermine the union.

During the Revolutionary War, Washington's views on slavery began to change. In a 1778 letter to Lund Washington, he made clear his desire "to get quit of Negroes" when discussing the exchange of slaves for the land he wanted to buy. The next year, Washington stated his intention not to separate enslaved families as a result of "a change of masters". During the 1780s, Washington privately expressed his support for gradual emancipation. In the 1780s, he gave moral support to a plan proposed by Lafayette to purchase land and free slaves to work on it, but declined to participate in the experiment.

Washington privately expressed support for emancipation to prominent Methodists Thomas Coke and Francis Asbury in 1785 but declined to sign their petition. In personal correspondence the next year, he made clear his desire to see the institution of slavery ended by a gradual legislative process, a view that correlated with the mainstream antislavery literature published in the 1780s that Washington possessed. He significantly reduced his purchases of slaves after the war but continued to acquire them in small numbers.

In 1794, Washington privately told Tobias Lear, his personal secretary, that he found slavery repugnant

Historical reputation and legacy

Washington's legacy endures as one of the most influential in American history since he served as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, a hero of the Revolution, and the first president of the United States. Various historians maintain that he also was a dominant factor in America's founding. Revolutionary War comrade Henry Lee eulogized him as "First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen". Lee's words became the hallmark by which Washington's reputation was impressed upon the American memory, with some biographers regarding him as the great exemplar of republicanism. He set many precedents for the national government and the presidency in particular, and he was called the "Father of His Country" as early as 1778.

Washington became an international symbol for liberation and nationalism as the leader of the first successful revolution against a colonial empire. The Federalists made him the symbol of their party, but the Jeffersonians continued to distrust his influence for years and delayed building the Washington Monument. Washington was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences on January 31, 1781.

In 1879, Congress proclaimed Washington's Birthday to be a federal holiday. Through a congressional joint resolution Public Law 94-479, passed on January 19, 1976, with an effective appointment date of July 4, 1976, he was posthumously appointed to the grade of General of the Armies of the United States during the American Bicentennial. President Gerald Ford stated that Washington would "rank first among all officers of the Army, past and present". On March 13, 1978, Washington was militarily promoted to the rank of General of the Armies.

In 1809, Mason Locke Weems wrote a hagiographic biography to honor Washington. Historian Ron Chernow maintains that Weems attempted to humanize Washington, making him look less stern, and to inspire "patriotism and morality" and to foster "enduring myths", such as Washington's refusal to lie about damaging his father's cherry tree. Weems' accounts have never been proven or disproven. Historian John Ferling, however, maintains that Washington remains the only founder and president ever to be referred to as "godlike", and points out that his character has been the most scrutinized by historians. Biographer Douglas Southall Freeman concluded, "The great big thing stamped across that man is character." Expanding on Freeman's assessment, historian David Hackett Fischer defined Washington's character as "integrity, self-discipline, courage, absolute honesty, resolve, and decision, but also forbearance, decency, and respect for others".

Places, namesakes, and monuments

Washington appears as one of four U.S. presidents on the Shrine of Democracy, a colossal statue by Gutzon Borglum on Mount Rushmore in South Dakota.

A number of secondary schools and universities are named in honor of Washington, including George Washington University and Washington University in St. Louis.

Currency and postage

Washington appears on contemporary U.S. currency, including the one-dollar bill, the Presidential one-dollar coin and the quarter-dollar coin (the Washington quarter). Washington and Benjamin Franklin appeared on the nation's first postage stamps in 1847. Washington has since appeared on many postage issues, more than any other person.

References

^ Bish, Jim (Spring 2010). "Hugh West and the West Family's Momentous Role in Founding and Developing Alexandria and Fairfax and Loudoun Counties, Virginia" (PDF). The Alexandria Chronicle. Alexandria Historical Society. pp. 13-14. Archived (PDF) from the original on April 23, 2021. In 1755 Hugh West Jr. gave up his seat in Fairfax County and won a House of Burgess election in Frederick County defeating Colonel George Washington. This defeat was Washington's only electoral loss. Hugh West Jr. served as a Frederick County burgess until 1758 when he was defeated by Washington.

^ "To George Washington from Adam Stephen, 23 December 1755". National Historical Publications and Records Commission (The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration). 1755. GW kept a copy of the Frederick County poll sheet (c. 10 Dec., DLC:GW) in his papers with the names of the 40 men who voted for him and the names of the 271 men who voted for Hugh West and 270 who voted for Thomas Swearingen.

^ Roberts, Andrew (2021). The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III. Penguin Random House. p. 446. ISBN 978-0241413333.

^ Heydt, Bruce (2005). "'Vexatious Evils': George Washington and the Conway Cabal". American History. 40 (5): 50-73.

^ Koehler, Rhiannon (Fall 2018). "Hostile Nations: Quantifying the Destruction of the Sullivan-Clinton Genocide of 1779". American Indian Quarterly. 42 (4): 427-453. doi:10.5250/amerindiquar.42.4.0427. S2CID 165519714.

^ Riley, Edward M. (July 1948). "St. George Tucker's Journal of the Siege of Yorktown, 1781". The William and Mary Quarterly. Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. 5 (3): 375-395. doi:10.2307/1923466. JSTOR 1923466.

^ Washington, George (April 30, 1788). "George Washington to Samuel Griffin, April 30, 1788". Library of Congress.

^ "The Northwest Ordinance". visitthecapitol.gov. U.S. Capitol. Congress reenacted the ordinance in 1789 and subsequently extended most of its provisions to other western territories, as the United States became a transcontinental nation.

^ Maulden, Kristopher (Winter 2016). "A Show of Force: The Northwest Indian War and the Early American State". Ohio Valley History. 16 (4): 20-40.

^ Peabody, Bruce G. (September 1, 2001). "George Washington, Presidential Term Limits, and the Problem of Reluctant Political Leadership". Presidential Studies Quarterly. 31 (3): 439-453. doi:10.1111/j.0360-4918.2001.00180.x. JSTOR 27552322.

^ Breen, Eleanor E.; White, Esther C. (2006). "A Pretty Considerable Distillery: Excavating George Washington's Whiskey Distillery" (PDF). Quarterly Bulletin of the Archeological Society of Virginia. 61 (4): 209-20. Archived from the original (PDF) on December 24, 2011.

^ "A Brief History". The George Washington Masonic National Memorial Association (GWMNMA).

Maloy, Mark (April 6, 2021). "The Founding Fathers Views of Slavery". Archived from the original on April 6, 2021.

"The Growth of Mount Vernon's Enslaved Community". George Washington's Mount Vernon. Mount Vernon Ladies' Association. Over the course of George Washington's life, at least 577 enslaved people lived and worked at Mount Vernon.

^ Willard, Joseph (February 28, 1781). "To George Washington from Joseph Willard, 28 February 1781". National Archives and Records Administration. Archived from the original on February 21, 2017.

^ Kleber, Brooks E. (June 1978). "Washington is Now No. 1: The Story Behind a Promotion". Army. pp. 14-15.

^ "George Washington". Britannica.com. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. July 4, 2023. His fellow citizens memorialized him forever by naming the newly created capital city of the young nation for him while he was still alive. Later, one of the states of union would bear his name-the only state named for an individual American. Moreover, counties in 32 states were given his name, and in time it also could be found in 121 postal addresses.

Bibliography

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George Washington (February 22, 1732 - December 14, 1799) was an American military officer, statesman, and Founding Father who served as the first president of the United States from 1789 to 1797.

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America's most influential American Figure!

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America's most influential American Figure!

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Trump has a lot of power and say, and many would support what he does.

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Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is an American politician, media personality, and businessman who served as the 45th president of the United States from 2017 to 2021. He won the 2024 presidential election as the nominee of the Republican Party and is scheduled to be inaugurated as the 47th president on January 20, 2025.

Trump graduated with a bachelor's degree in economics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1968. After becoming president of the family real estate business in 1971, he renamed it the Trump Organization. After a series of bankruptcies in the 1990s, he launched side ventures, mostly licensing the Trump name. From 2004 to 2015, he produced and hosted the reality television series The Apprentice. In 2015 he launched a presidential campaign.

Trump won the 2016 presidential election. His election and policies sparked numerous protests. In his first term, he ordered a travel ban targeting Muslims and refugees, funded the Trump wall expanding the U.S.-Mexico border wall, and implemented a family separation policy at the border. He rolled back more than 100 environmental policies and regulations, signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, and appointed three justices to the Supreme Court. He initiated a trade war with China, withdrew the U.S. from several international agreements, and met with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un but failed to make progress on denuclearization. He downplayed the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic. He was impeached in 2019 for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, and in 2021 for incitement of insurrection. The Senate acquitted him in both cases.

Trump's politics and rhetoric led to the creation of Trumpism. Many of his comments and actions have been characterized as racially charged, racist, and misogynistic. He promoted conspiracy theories and made many false and misleading statements during his campaigns and presidency, to a degree unprecedented in American politics. After his first term, scholars and historians ranked him as one of the worst presidents in American history. He lost the 2020 presidential election but refused to concede, falsely claiming widespread electoral fraud and attempting to overturn the results, including facilitating the January 6 Capitol attack. In 2024, he was found guilty of falsifying business records, making him the first U.S. president to be convicted of a felony. He faced more felony indictments related to interference in the 2020 election, dismissed without prejudice after the 2024 election due to the Department of Justice policy prohibiting the prosecution of a sitting president, and his mishandling of classified documents.

Early life, education, family

Trump was born on June 14, 1946, at Jamaica Hospital in Queens, New York City, the fourth child of Fred Trump and Mary Anne MacLeod Trump. He is of German and Scottish descent. He grew up with older siblings Maryanne, Fred Jr., and Elizabeth and younger brother Robert in the wealthy Jamaica Estates neighborhood of Queens. He attended the private Kew-Forest School through seventh grade and New York Military Academy, a private boarding school, from eighth through twelfth grade.

In 1964, Trump enrolled at Fordham University. Two years later, he transferred to the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in May 1968 with a Bachelor of Science in economics. In 2015, he threatened his high school, colleges, and the College Board with legal action if they released his academic records.

In 1977, Trump married Czech model Ivana Zelníčková. They had three children: Donald Jr. (born 1977), Ivanka (1981), and Eric (1984). The couple divorced in 1990, following his affair with actress Marla Maples. He and Maples married in 1993 and divorced in 1999. They have one daughter, Tiffany (born 1993), who Maples raised in California. In 2005, he married Slovenian model Melania Knauss. They have one son, Barron (born 2006).

Personal life

Health habits

Trump says he has never drunk alcohol, smoked cigarettes, or used drugs. He sleeps about four or five hours a night. He has called golfing his "primary form of exercise", but usually does not walk the course. He considers exercise a waste of energy because he believes the body is "like a battery, with a finite amount of energy", which is depleted by exercise. In 2015, his campaign released a letter from his longtime personal physician, Harold Bornstein, stating that he would "be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency". In 2018, Bornstein said Trump had dictated the contents of the letter and that three of Trump's agents had seized his medical records in a February 2017 raid on the doctor's office.

Trump (rightmost) and wife Ivana in the receiving line of a state dinner for King Fahd of Saudi Arabia in 1985, with U.S. president Ronald Reagan and First Lady Nancy Reagan

In 1982, Trump made the initial list of wealthy people for holding a share of his family's estimated $200 million net worth (equivalent to $631 million in 2023). His losses in the 1980s dropped him from the list between 1990 and 1995. After filing the mandatory financial disclosure report with the FEC in July 2015, he announced a net worth of about $10 billion. Records released by the FEC showed at least $1.4 billion in assets and $265 million in liabilities. Forbes estimated his net worth dropped by $1.4 billion between 2015 and 2018. In their 2024 billionaires ranking, his net worth was estimated to be $2.3 billion (1,438th in the world).

In 2018, journalist Jonathan Greenberg reported that Trump had called him in 1984 pretending to be a fictional Trump Organization official named " John Barron". Greenberg said that, to get a higher ranking on the Forbes 400 list of wealthy Americans, Trump, speaking as "Barron", falsely asserted that Donald Trump owned more than 90 percent of his father's business. Greenberg also wrote that Forbes had vastly overestimated Trump's wealth and wrongly included him on the 1982, 1983, and 1984 rankings.

Trump has often said he began his career with "a small loan of a million dollars" from his father and that he had to pay it back with interest. He was a millionaire by age eight, borrowed at least $60 million from his father, largely failed to repay those loans, and received another $413 million (2018 dollars adjusted for inflation) from his father's company. In 2018, he and his family were reported to have committed tax fraud, and the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance started an investigation. His investments underperformed the stock and New York property markets. Forbes estimated in October 2018 that his net worth declined from $4.5 billion in 2015 to $3.1 billion in 2017 and his product-licensing income from $23 million to $3 million.

In 2020, The New York Times obtained Trump's tax information extending over two decades. Its reporters found that he reported losses of hundreds of millions of dollars. Since 2010 he had also failed to pay back $287 million in loans. During the 15 years prior to 2020, using tax credits for business losses, he paid no income taxes in 10 of those years and $750 each in 2016 and 2017. He balanced his businesses' losses by selling and borrowing against assets, including a $100 million mortgage on Trump Tower (refinanced in 2022) and the liquidation of over $200 million in stocks and bonds. He personally guaranteed $421 million in debt, most of which is due by 2024.

As of October 2021, Trump had over $1.3 billion in debts, much of which was secured by his assets. In 2020, he owed $640 million to banks and trust organizations, including Bank of China, Deutsche Bank, and UBS, and approximately $450 million to unknown creditors. The value of his assets exceeds his debt.

Racial views

Many of Trump's comments and actions have been described as racist. In national polling, about half of respondents said that he is racist; a greater proportion believed that he emboldened racists. Several studies and surveys found that racist attitudes fueled his political ascent and were more important than economic factors in determining the allegiance of Trump voters. Racist and Islamophobic attitudes are a powerful indicator of support for Trump.

In 1975, Trump settled a 1973 Department of Justice lawsuit that alleged housing discrimination against black renters. He has also been accused of racism for insisting a group of black and Latino teenagers were guilty of raping a white woman in the 1989 Central Park jogger case, even after they were exonerated by DNA evidence in 2002. As of 2019, he maintained this position.

According to an analysis in Political Science Quarterly, Trump made "explicitly racist appeals to whites" during his 2016 presidential campaign. In particular, his campaign launch speech drew criticism for claiming Mexican immigrants were "bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, they're rapists"; in response, NBC fired him from Celebrity Apprentice. His later comments about a Mexican-American judge presiding over a civil suit regarding Trump University were also criticized as racist.

Answering questions about the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville

Trump's comments on the 2017 Unite the Right rally, condemning "this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides" and stating that there were "very fine people on both sides", were criticized as implying a moral equivalence between the white supremacist demonstrators and the counter-protesters.

Misogyny and allegations of sexual misconduct

In October 2016, two days before the second presidential debate, a 2005 " hot mic" recording surfaced in which Trump bragged on Access Hollywood about groping women and kissing them without their consent, saying that "when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. ... Grab 'em by the pussy". The incident's widespread media exposure led to his first public apology during the campaign and caused outrage across the political spectrum.

Business career

Real estate

Trump in 1985 with a model of one of his aborted Manhattan development projects[68]

Starting in 1968, Trump was employed at his father's real estate company, Trump Management, which owned racially segregated middle-class rental housing in New York City's outer boroughs. In 1971, his father made him president of the company and he began using the Trump Organization as an umbrella brand. Between 1991 and 2009, he filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection for six of his businesses: the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan, the casinos in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and the Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts company.

Manhattan and Chicago developments

Trump attracted public attention in 1978 with the launch of his family's first Manhattan venture, the renovation of the derelict Commodore Hotel, adjacent to Grand Central Terminal. The financing was facilitated by a $400 million city property tax abatement arranged for him by his father who also, jointly with Hyatt, guaranteed a $70 million bank construction loan. The hotel reopened in 1980 as the Grand Hyatt Hotel, and that same year, he obtained rights to develop Trump Tower, a mixed-use skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan. The building houses the headquarters of the Trump Corporation and Trump's PAC and was his primary residence until 2019.

In 1996, Trump acquired and renovated the mostly vacant 71-story skyscraper at 40 Wall Street, later rebranded as the Trump Building. In the early 1990s, he won the right to develop a 70-acre (28 ha) tract in the Lincoln Square neighborhood near the Hudson River. Struggling with debt from other ventures in 1994, he sold most of his interest in the project to Asian investors, who financed the project's completion, Riverside South.

Atlantic City casinos

In 1984, Trump opened Harrah's at Trump Plaza, a hotel and casino, with financing and management help from the Holiday Corporation. It was unprofitable, and he paid Holiday $70 million in May 1986 to take sole control. In 1985, he bought the unopened Atlantic City Hilton Hotel and renamed it Trump Castle. Both casinos filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 1992.

In 1985, Trump acquired the Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida. In 1995, he converted the estate into a private club with an initiation fee and annual dues. He continued to use a wing of the house as a private residence. He declared the club his primary residence in 2019. The Trump Organization began building and buying golf courses in 1999. It owns fourteen and manages another three Trump-branded courses worldwide.

Side ventures

The Trump Organization has licensed the Trump name for consumer products and services, including foodstuffs, apparel, learning courses, and home furnishings. According to The Washington Post, there are more than 50 licensing or management deals involving his name, and they have generated at least $59 million in revenue for his companies. By 2018, only two consumer goods companies continued to license his name.

In September 1983, Trump purchased the New Jersey Generals, a team in the United States Football League. After the 1985 season, the league folded, largely due to his attempt to move to a fall schedule (when it would have competed with the NFL for audience) and trying to force a merger with the NFL by bringing an antitrust suit.

Trump and his Plaza Hotel hosted several boxing matches at the Atlantic City Convention Hall. In 1989 and 1990, he lent his name to the Tour de Trump cycling stage race, an attempt to create an American equivalent of European races such as the Tour de France or the Giro d'Italia.

From 1986 to 1988, Trump purchased significant blocks of shares in various public companies while suggesting that he intended to take over the company and then sold his shares for a profit, leading some observers to think he was engaged in greenmail. The New York Times found that he initially made millions of dollars in such stock transactions, but "lost most, if not all, of those gains after investors stopped taking his takeover talk seriously".

In 1988, Trump purchased the Eastern Air Lines Shuttle, financing the purchase with $380 million (equivalent to $979 million in 2023) in loans from a syndicate of 22 banks. He renamed the airline Trump Shuttle and operated it until 1992. He defaulted on his loans in 1991, and ownership passed to the banks.

Trump University

In 2004, Trump co-founded Trump University, a company that sold real estate seminars for up to $35,000. After New York State authorities notified the company that its use of "university" violated state law (as it was not an academic institution), its name was changed to the Trump Entrepreneur Initiative in 2010.

Foundation

The Donald J. Trump Foundation was a private foundation established in 1988. From 1987 to 2006, Trump gave his foundation $5.4 million which had been spent by the end of 2006. After donating a total of $65,000 in 2007-2008, he stopped donating any personal funds to the charity, which received millions from other donors, including $5 million from Vince McMahon. The foundation gave to health- and sports-related charities, conservative groups, and charities that held events at Trump properties.

In 2016, The Washington Post reported that the charity committed several potential legal and ethical violations, including alleged self-dealing and possible tax evasion. Also in 2016, the New York attorney general determined the foundation to be in violation of state law, for soliciting donations without submitting to required annual external audits, and ordered it to cease its fundraising activities in New York immediately. Trump's team announced in December 2016 that the foundation would be dissolved.

Legal affairs and bankruptcies

According to a review of state and federal court files conducted by in 2018, Trump and his businesses had been involved in more than 4,000 state and federal legal actions. While he has not filed for personal bankruptcy, his over-leveraged hotel and casino businesses in Atlantic City and New York filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection six times between 1991 and 2009. They continued to operate while the banks restructured debt and reduced his shares in the properties.

During the 1980s, more than 70 banks had lent Trump $4 billion. After his corporate bankruptcies of the early 1990s, most major banks, with the exception of Deutsche Bank, declined to lend to him. After the January 6 Capitol attack, the bank decided not to do business with him or his company in the future.

Trump has produced 19 books under his name. At least some of them have been written or co-written by ghostwriters. His first book, The Art of the Deal (1987), was a New York Times Best Seller. While he was credited as co-author, the entire book was written by Tony Schwartz. According to The New Yorker, the book made Trump famous as an "emblem of the successful tycoon".

Trump had cameos in many films and television shows from 1985 to 2001.

Starting in the 1990s, Trump was a guest about 24 times on the nationally syndicated Howard Stern Show. He had his own short-form talk radio program called from 2004 to 2008. From 2011 until 2015, he was a guest commentator on Fox & Friends.

From 2004 to 2015, Trump was co-producer and host of reality shows The Apprentice and The Celebrity Apprentice. On the shows, he was a superrich and successful chief executive who eliminated contestants with the catchphrase "you're fired". The New York Times called his portrayal a "highly flattering, highly fictionalized version of Mr. Trump". The shows remade his image for millions of viewers nationwide. With the related licensing agreements, they earned him more than $400 million.

In February 2021, Trump, who had been a member of SAG-AFTRA since 1989, resigned to avoid a disciplinary hearing regarding the January 6 attack. Two days later, the union permanently barred him.

Early political aspirations (1987-2014)

Trump registered as a Republican in 1987; a member of the Independence Party, the New York state affiliate of the Reform Party, in 1999; a Democrat in 2001; a Republican in 2009; unaffiliated in 2011; and a Republican in 2012.

In 1987, Trump placed full-page advertisements in three major newspapers, expressing his views on foreign policy and how to eliminate the federal budget deficit. In 1988, he approached Lee Atwater, asking to be put into consideration to be Republican nominee George H. W. Bush's running mate. Bush found the request "strange and unbelievable".

2016 presidential election

Trump announced his candidacy in June 2015. His campaign was initially not taken seriously by political analysts, but he quickly rose to the top of opinion polls. He became the front-runner in March 2016 and was declared the presumptive Republican nominee in May.

Trump's fame and provocative statements earned him an unprecedented amount of free media coverage, elevating his standing in the Republican primaries. He adopted the phrase "truthful hyperbole", coined by his ghostwriter Tony Schwartz, to describe his public speaking style. His campaign statements were often opaque and suggestive, and a record number were false. He said he disdained political correctness and frequently made claims of media bias.

Hillary Clinton led Trump in national polling averages throughout the campaign, but, in early July, her lead narrowed. In mid-July he selected Indiana governor Mike Pence as his running mate, and the two were officially nominated at the 2016 Republican National Convention. Trump and Clinton faced off in three presidential debates in September and October 2016. He twice refused to say whether he would accept the result of the election.

Trump described NATO as "obsolete" and espoused views that were described as noninterventionist and protectionist. His campaign platform emphasized renegotiating U.S.-China relations and free trade agreements such as NAFTA, strongly enforcing immigration laws, and building a new wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. Other campaign positions included pursuing energy independence while opposing climate change regulations, modernizing services for veterans, repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act, abolishing Common Core education standards, investing in infrastructure, simplifying the tax code while reducing taxes, and imposing tariffs on imports by companies that offshore jobs. He advocated increasing military spending and extreme vetting or banning of immigrants from Muslim-majority countries.

Financial disclosures

Trump's FEC-required reports listed assets above $1.4 billion and outstanding debts of at least $315 million. He did not release his tax returns, contrary to the practice of every major candidate since 1976 and his promises in 2014 and 2015 to do so if he ran for office. He said his tax returns were being audited, and that his lawyers had advised him against releasing them. After a lengthy court battle to block release of his tax returns and other records to the Manhattan district attorney for a criminal investigation, including two appeals by Trump to the U.S. Supreme Court, in February 2021 the high court allowed the records to be released to the prosecutor for review by a grand jury.

In October 2016, portions of Trump's state filings for 1995 were leaked to a reporter from The New York Times. They show that he had declared a loss of $916 million that year, which could have let him avoid taxes for up to 18 years.

On November 8, 2016, Trump received 306 pledged electoral votes versus 232 for Clinton, although, after elector defections on both sides, the official count was ultimately 304 to 227. The fifth person to be elected president while losing the popular vote, he received nearly 2.9 million fewer votes than Clinton. He was the only president who neither served in the military nor held any government office prior to becoming president.

In late 2016, named Trump its Person of the Year.

First presidency (2017-2021)

Early actions

Trump takes the oath of office administered by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. at the Capitol, January 20, 2017.

Trump was inaugurated on January 20, 2017. During his first week in office, he signed six executive orders, authorizing interim procedures in anticipation of repealing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare"), withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations, reinstatement of the Mexico City policy, advancement of the Keystone XL and Dakota Access Pipeline construction projects, reinforcement of border security, and a planning and design process to construct a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico.

Trump's daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner became his assistant and senior advisor, respectively.

Conflicts of interest

Domestic policy

Trump took office at the height of the longest economic expansion in American history, which began in 2009 and continued until February 2020, when the COVID-19 recession began.

Under Trump, the federal budget deficit increased by almost 50 percent, to nearly $1 trillion in 2019. By the end of his term, the U.S. national debt increased by 39 percent, reaching $27.75 trillion, and the U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio hit a post-World War II high. Trump also failed to deliver the $1 trillion infrastructure spending plan on which he had campaigned.

In 2017, Trump signed Executive Order 13771, which directed that, for every new regulation, federal agencies "identify" two existing regulations for elimination, although it did not require elimination. He dismantled many federal regulations on health, labor, and the environment, among others, including a bill that made it easier for severely mentally ill persons to buy guns. During his first six weeks in office, he delayed, suspended, or reversed ninety federal regulations, often "after requests by the regulated industries". The Institute for Policy Integrity found that 78 percent of his proposals were blocked by courts or did not prevail over litigation.

During his campaign, Trump vowed to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. In office, he scaled back the Act's implementation through executive orders. He expressed a desire to "let Obamacare fail"; his administration halved the enrollment period and drastically reduced funding for enrollment promotion. In June 2018, the Trump administration joined 18 Republican-led states in arguing before the Supreme Court that the elimination of the financial penalties associated with the individual mandate had rendered the Act unconstitutional. Their pleading would have eliminated health insurance coverage for up to 23 million Americans, but was unsuccessful. During the 2016 campaign, Trump promised to protect funding for Medicare and other social safety-net programs. In January 2020, he expressed willingness to consider cuts to them.

In response to the opioid epidemic, Trump signed legislation in 2018 to increase funding for drug treatments, but was widely criticized for failing to make a concrete strategy. U.S. opioid overdose deaths declined slightly in 2018, but surged to a record 50,052 in 2019.

Trump barred organizations that provide abortions or abortion referrals from receiving federal funds. He said he supported "traditional marriage", but considered the nationwide legality of same-sex marriage "settled". His administration rolled back key components of the Obama administration's workplace protections against discrimination of LGBTQ people. His attempted rollback of anti-discrimination protections for transgender patients in August 2020 was halted by a federal judge after a Supreme Court ruling extended employees' civil rights protections to gender identity and sexual orientation.

Trump has said he is opposed to gun control, although his views have shifted over time. After several mass shootings during his term, he said he would propose legislation related to guns, but he abandoned that effort in November 2019. His administration took an anti-marijuana position, revoking Obama-era policies that provided protections for states that legalized marijuana.

Trump is a long-time advocate of capital punishment. Under his administration, the federal government executed 13 prisoners, more than in the previous 56 years combined, ending a 17-year moratorium. In 2016, he said he supported the use of interrogation torture methods such as waterboarding.

In June 2020, during the George Floyd protests, federal law-enforcement officials controversially used less lethal weapons to remove a largely peaceful crowd of lawful protesters from Lafayette Square, outside the White House. Trump then posed with a Bible for a photo-op at the nearby St. John's Episcopal Church, with religious leaders condemning both the treatment of protesters and the photo opportunity itself. Many retired military leaders and defense officials condemned his proposal to use the U.S. military against anti-police-brutality protesters.

Pardons and commutations

Trump granted 237 requests for clemency, fewer than all presidents since 1900 with the exception of George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush. Only 25 of them had been vetted by the Justice Department's Office of the Pardon Attorney; the others were granted to people with personal or political connections to him, his family, and his allies, or recommended by celebrities. In his last full day in office, he granted 73 pardons and commuted 70 sentences. Several Trump allies were not eligible for pardons under Justice Department rules, and in other cases the department had opposed clemency. The pardons of three military service members convicted of or charged with violent crimes were opposed by military leaders.

Immigration

Trump's proposed immigration policies were a topic of bitter debate during the 2016 campaign. He promised to build a wall on the Mexico-U.S. border to restrict illegal movement and vowed that Mexico would pay for it. He pledged to deport millions of illegal immigrants residing in the U.S., and criticized birthright citizenship for incentivizing " anchor babies". As president, he frequently described illegal immigration as an "invasion" and conflated immigrants with the criminal gang MS-13.

From 2018 onward, Trump deployed nearly 6,000 troops to the U.S.-Mexico border to stop most Central American migrants from seeking asylum. In 2020, his administration widened the public charge rule to further restrict immigrants who might use government benefits from getting permanent residency. He reduced the number of refugees admitted to record lows. When he took office, the annual limit was 110,000; he set a limit of 18,000 in the 2020 fiscal year and 15,000 in the 2021 fiscal year. Additional restrictions implemented by the Trump administration caused significant bottlenecks in processing refugee applications, resulting in fewer refugees accepted than the allowed limits.

On January 27, 2017, Trump signed Executive Order 13769, which suspended admission of refugees for 120 days and denied entry to citizens of Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen for 90 days, citing security concerns. The order took effect immediately and without warning, causing chaos at airports. Protests began at airports the next day, and legal challenges resulted in nationwide preliminary injunctions. A March 6 revised order, which excluded Iraq and gave other exemptions, again was blocked by federal judges in three states. In a decision in June 2017, the Supreme Court ruled that the ban could be enforced on visitors who lack a "credible claim of a bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States".

Family separation at the border

The Trump administration separated more than 5,400 children of migrant families from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border, a sharp increase in the number of family separations at the border starting from the summer of 2017. In April 2018, the administration announced a " zero tolerance" policy whereby adults suspected of illegal entry were to be detained and criminally prosecuted while their children were taken away as unaccompanied alien minors. The policy was unprecedented in previous administrations and sparked public outrage. Trump falsely asserted that his administration was merely following the law, blaming Democrats, despite the separations being his administration's policy.

Although Trump originally argued that the separations could not be stopped by an executive order, he acceded to intense public objection and signed an executive order in June 2018, mandating that migrant families be detained together unless "there is a concern" of a risk to the child. On June 26, 2018, Judge Dana Sabraw concluded that the Trump administration had "no system in place to keep track of" the separated children, nor any effective measures for family communication and reunification; Sabraw ordered for the families to be reunited and family separations stopped except in limited circumstances. After the order, the administration separated more than a thousand migrant children from their families; the ACLU contended that the administration had abused its discretion and asked Sabraw to more narrowly define the circumstances warranting separation.

Trump wall and government shutdown

In 2018, Trump refused to sign any appropriations bill from Congress unless it allocated $5.6 billion for the border wall, resulting in the federal government partially shutting down for 35 days from December 2018 to January 2019, the longest U.S. government shutdown in history. Around 800,000 government employees were furloughed or worked without pay. Trump and Congress ended the shutdown by approving temporary funding that provided delayed payments to government workers, but no funds for the wall. The shutdown resulted in an estimated permanent loss of $3 billion to the economy, according to the Congressional Budget Office. About half of those polled blamed Trump for the shutdown, and his approval ratings dropped.

To prevent another imminent shutdown in February 2019, Congress passed and Trump signed a funding bill that included $1.375 billion for 55 miles (89 km) of bollard border fencing. He also declared a national emergency on the southern border, intending to divert $6.1 billion of funds Congress had allocated to other purposes. He vetoed a joint resolution to overturn the declaration, and the Senate voted against a veto override. Legal challenges to the diversion of $2.5 billion originally meant for the Department of Defense's drug interdiction efforts and $3.6 billion originally meant for military construction were unsuccessful.

Foreign policy

Trump described himself as a "nationalist" and his foreign policy as " America First". He praised and supported populist, neo-nationalist, and authoritarian governments. Hallmarks of foreign relations during his tenure included unpredictability, uncertainty, and inconsistency. Tensions between the U.S. and its European allies were strained under Trump. He criticized NATO allies and privately suggested on multiple occasions that the U.S. should withdraw from NATO.

Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations, imposed tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, and launched a trade war with China by sharply increasing tariffs on 818 categories (worth $50 billion) of Chinese goods imported into the U.S. While he said that import tariffs are paid by China into the U.S. Treasury, they are paid by American companies that import goods from China. Although he pledged during the campaign to significantly reduce the U.S.'s large trade deficits, the trade deficit skyrocketed under Trump. Following a 2017-2018 renegotiation, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) became effective in July 2020 as the successor to NAFTA.

Trump repeatedly praised and rarely criticized Russian president Vladimir Putin but opposed some actions of the Russian government. After he met Putin at the Helsinki Summit in 2018, he drew bipartisan criticism for accepting Putin's denial of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, rather than accepting the findings of U.S. intelligence agencies. He did not discuss alleged Russian bounties offered to Taliban fighters for attacking American soldiers in Afghanistan with Putin, saying both that he doubted the intelligence and that he was not briefed on it.

China, Hong Kong, Taiwan

Trump repeatedly accused China of taking unfair advantage of the U.S. He launched a trade war against China that was widely characterized as a failure, sanctioned Huawei for alleged ties to Iran, significantly increased visa restrictions on Chinese students and scholars, and classified China as a currency manipulator. He also juxtaposed verbal attacks on China with praise of Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping, which was attributed to trade war negotiations. After initially praising China for its handling of COVID-19, he began a campaign of criticism starting in March 2020.

Trump said he resisted punishing China for its human rights abuses against ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang region for fear of jeopardizing trade negotiations. In July 2020, his administration imposed sanctions and visa restrictions against senior Chinese officials, in response to expanded mass detention camps holding more than a million of the country's Uyghur minority.

North Korea

In 2017, when North Korea's nuclear weapons were increasingly seen as a serious threat, Trump escalated his rhetoric, warning that North Korean aggression would be met with "fire and fury like the world has never seen". In 2017, he declared that he wanted North Korea's "complete denuclearization", and engaged in name-calling with leader Kim Jong Un. After this period of tension, he and Kim exchanged at least 27 letters in which the two men described a warm personal friendship. In March 2019, he lifted some U.S. sanctions against North Korea against the advice of his Treasury Department.

Trump, the first sitting U.S. president to meet a North Korean leader, met Kim three times: in Singapore in 2018, in Hanoi in 2019, and in the Korean Demilitarized Zone in 2019. However, no denuclearization agreement was reached, and talks in October 2019 broke down after one day. While conducting no nuclear tests since 2017, North Korea continued to build up its arsenal of nuclear bombs and ballistic missiles.

Middle East

Afghanistan

U.S. troop numbers in Afghanistan increased from 8,500 in January 2017 to 14,000 a year later, reversing Trump's preelection position critical of further involvement in Afghanistan. In February 2020, his administration signed a peace agreement with the Taliban, which called for the withdrawal of foreign troops in 14 months "contingent on a guarantee from the Taliban that Afghan soil will not be used by terrorists with aims to attack the United States or its allies" and for the U.S. to seek the release of 5,000 Taliban imprisoned by the Afghan government. By the end of his term, 5,000 Taliban had been released, and, despite the Taliban continuing attacks on Afghan forces and integrating Al-Qaeda members into its leadership, U.S. troops had been reduced to 2,500.

Trump supported many of the policies of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Under Trump, the U.S. recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, leading to international condemnation including from the UN General Assembly, European Union, and Arab League. In 2020, the White House hosted the signing of agreements, named Abraham Accords, between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain to normalize their foreign relations.

Saudi Arabia

Trump, King Salman of Saudi Arabia, and Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi at the 2017 Riyadh summit in Saudi Arabia

Trump actively supported the Saudi Arabian-led intervention in Yemen against the Houthis and in 2017 signed a $110 billion agreement to sell arms to Saudi Arabia. In 2018, the U.S. provided limited intelligence and logistical support for the intervention. Following the 2019 attack on Saudi oil facilities, which the U.S. and Saudi Arabia blamed on Iran, he approved the deployment of 3,000 additional U.S. troops, including fighter squadrons, two Patriot batteries, and a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Trump ordered missile strikes in April 2017 and April 2018 against the Assad regime in Syria, in retaliation for the Khan Shaykhun and Douma chemical attacks, respectively. In December 2018, he declared "we have won against ISIS", contradicting Department of Defense assessments, and ordered the withdrawal of all troops from Syria. The next day, Mattis resigned in protest, calling Trump's decision an abandonment of the U.S.'s Kurdish allies who played a key role in fighting ISIS. In October 2019, after Trump spoke to Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, U.S. troops in northern Syria were withdrawn from the area and Turkey invaded northern Syria, attacking and displacing American-allied Kurds. The U.S. House of Representatives voted 354-60 to condemn Trump's withdrawal of those U.S. troops from Syria.

On January 1, 2020, Trump ordered a U.S. airstrike that killed Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, who had planned nearly every significant Iranian and Iranian-backed operation over the preceding two decades. One week later, Iran retaliated with ballistic missile strikes against two U.S. airbases in Iraq. Dozens of soldiers sustained traumatic brain injuries. He downplayed their injuries, and they were initially denied Purple Heart medals and the benefits accorded to their recipients.

The Trump administration had a high turnover of personnel, particularly among White House staff. By the end of his first year in office, 34 percent of his original staff had resigned, been fired, or been reassigned. As of early July 2018, 61 percent of his senior aides had left and 141 staffers had left in the previous year. Both figures set a record for recent presidents-more change in the first 13 months than his four immediate predecessors saw in their first two years. Notable early departures included National Security Advisor Michael Flynn (after just 25 days), and Press Secretary Sean Spicer. Close personal aides to Trump including Bannon, Hope Hicks, John McEntee, and Keith Schiller quit or were forced out. Some later returned in different posts. He publicly disparaged several of his former top officials, calling them incompetent, stupid, or crazy.

Trump had four White House chiefs of staff, marginalizing or pushing out several. Reince Priebus was replaced after seven months by retired Marine general John F. Kelly. Kelly resigned in December 2018 after a tumultuous tenure in which his influence waned, and Trump subsequently disparaged him. Kelly was succeeded by Mick Mulvaney as acting chief of staff; he was replaced in March 2020 by Mark Meadows.

Trump lost three of his 15 original cabinet members within his first year. Health and Human Services secretary Tom Price was forced to resign in September 2017 due to excessive use of private charter jets and military aircraft. Environmental Protection Agency administrator Scott Pruitt resigned in 2018 and Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke in January 2019 amid multiple investigations into their conduct.

Trump appointed 226 Article III judges, including 54 to the courts of appeals and three to the Supreme Court: Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. His Supreme Court nominees were noted as having politically shifted the Court to the right. In the 2016 campaign, he pledged that Roe v. Wade would be overturned "automatically" if he were elected and provided the opportunity to appoint two or three anti-abortion justices. He later took credit when Roe was overturned in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization; all three of his Supreme Court nominees voted with the majority.

COVID-19 pandemic

Initial response

The first confirmed case of COVID-19 in the U.S. was reported on January 20, 2020. The outbreak was officially declared a public health emergency by Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Alex Azar on January 31, 2020. Trump initially ignored persistent public health warnings and calls for action from health officials within his administration and Secretary Azar. Throughout January and February he focused on economic and political considerations of the outbreak. In February 2020 he publicly asserted that the outbreak in the U.S. was less deadly than influenza, was "very much under control", and would soon be over. On March 19, 2020, he privately told Bob Woodward that he was deliberately "playing it down, because I don't want to create a panic".

By mid-March, most global financial markets had severely contracted in response to the pandemic. On March 6, Trump signed the Coronavirus Preparedness and Response Supplemental Appropriations Act, which provided $8.3 billion in emergency funding for federal agencies. On March 11, the World Health Organization (WHO) recognized COVID-19 as a pandemic, and he announced partial travel restrictions for most of Europe, effective March 13. That same day, he gave his first serious assessment of the virus in a nationwide Oval Office address, calling the outbreak "horrible" but "a temporary moment" and saying there was no financial crisis. On March 13, he declared a national emergency, freeing up federal resources. He claimed that "anybody that wants a test can get a test", despite test availability being severely limited.

World Health Organization

Prior to the pandemic, Trump criticized the WHO and other international bodies, which he asserted were taking advantage of U.S. aid. His administration's proposed 2021 federal budget, released in February, proposed reducing WHO funding by more than half. In May and April, he accused the WHO of "severely mismanaging" COVID-19, alleged without evidence that the organization was under Chinese control and had enabled the Chinese government's concealment of the pandemic's origins, and announced that he was withdrawing funding for the organization. These were seen as attempts to distract from his own mishandling of the pandemic. In July 2020, he announced the formal withdrawal of the U.S. from the WHO, effective July 2021. The decision was widely condemned by health and government officials as "short-sighted", "senseless", and "dangerous".

Pressure to abandon pandemic mitigation measures

In April 2020, Republican-connected groups organized anti-lockdown protests against the measures state governments were taking to combat the pandemic; Trump encouraged the protests on Twitter, although the targeted states did not meet his administration's guidelines for reopening. In April 2020, he first supported, then later criticized, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp's plan to reopen some nonessential businesses. Throughout the spring he increasingly pushed for ending the restrictions to reverse the damage to the country's economy. He often refused to mask at public events, contrary to his administration's April 2020 guidance to wear masks in public and despite nearly unanimous medical consensus that masks are important to preventing spread of the virus. By June, he had said masks were a "double-edged sword"; ridiculed Biden for wearing masks; continually emphasized that mask-wearing was optional; and suggested that wearing a mask was a political statement against him personally. His contradiction of medical recommendations weakened national efforts to mitigate the pandemic.

Political pressure on health agencies

Outbreak at the White House

On October 2, 2020, Trump tweeted that he had tested positive for COVID-19, part of a White House outbreak. Later that day he was hospitalized at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, reportedly due to fever and labored breathing. He was treated with antiviral and experimental antibody drugs and a steroid. He returned to the White House on October 5, still infectious and unwell. During and after his treatment he continued to downplay the virus. In 2021, it was revealed that his condition had been far more serious; he had dangerously low blood oxygen levels, a high fever, and lung infiltrates, indicating a severe case. In January 2021, he received a COVID-19 vaccination.

Effects on the 2020 presidential campaign

By July 2020, Trump's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic had become a major issue in the presidential election. Biden sought to make the pandemic the central issue. Polls suggested voters blamed Trump for his pandemic response and disbelieved his rhetoric concerning the virus, with an Ipsos/ ABC News poll indicating 65 percent of respondents disapproved of his pandemic response. In the final months of the campaign, he repeatedly said that the U.S. was "rounding the turn" in managing the pandemic, despite increasing cases and deaths. A few days before the November 3 election, the U.S. reported more than 100,000 cases in a single day for the first time.

Investigations

In April 2019, the House Oversight Committee issued subpoenas seeking financial details from Trump's banks, Deutsche Bank and Capital One, and his accounting firm, Mazars USA. He sued the banks, Mazars, and committee chair Elijah Cummings to prevent the disclosures. In May, DC District Court judge Amit Mehta ruled that Mazars must comply with the subpoena, and judge Edgardo Ramos of the Southern District Court of New York ruled that the banks must also comply. Trump's attorneys appealed. In September 2022, the committee and Trump agreed to a settlement about Mazars, and the accounting firm began turning over documents.

Russian election interference

In January 2017, American intelligence agencies-the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA, represented by the Director of National Intelligence-jointly stated with " high confidence" that the Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election to favor the election of Trump. In March 2017, FBI Director James Comey told Congress, "[T]he FBI, as part of our counterintelligence mission, is investigating the Russian government's efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. That includes investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government, and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia's efforts."

Many suspicious links between Trump associates and Russian officials and spies were discovered and the relationships between Russians and "team Trump", including Manafort, Flynn, and Stone, were widely reported by the press. Members of Trump's campaign and his White House staff, particularly Flynn, were in contact with Russian officials both before and after the election. On December 29, 2016, Flynn talked with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak about sanctions that were imposed that same day; Flynn later resigned in the midst of controversy over whether he misled Pence. Trump told Kislyak and Sergei Lavrov in May 2017 he was unconcerned about Russian interference in U.S. elections.

FBI Crossfire Hurricane and 2017 counterintelligence investigations

In July 2016, the FBI launched an investigation, codenamed Crossfire Hurricane, into possible links between Russia and the Trump campaign. After Trump fired FBI director James Comey in May 2017, the FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation into Trump's personal and business dealings with Russia. Crossfire Hurricane was transferred to the Mueller investigation, but Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein ended the investigation into Trump's direct ties to Russia while giving the bureau the false impression that the Robert Mueller's special counsel investigation would pursue the matter.

Mueller investigation

In May 2017, Rosenstein appointed former FBI director Mueller special counsel for the Department of Justice (DOJ), ordering him to "examine 'any links and/or coordination between the Russian government' and the Trump campaign". He privately told Mueller to restrict the investigation to criminal matters "in connection with Russia's 2016 election interference". The special counsel also investigated whether Trump's dismissal of James Comey as FBI director constituted obstruction of justice and the Trump campaign's possible ties to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Qatar, Israel, and China. Trump sought to fire Mueller and shut down the investigation multiple times, but backed down after his staff objected or after changing his mind.

In March 2019, Mueller gave his final report to Attorney General William Barr, which Barr purported to summarize in a letter to Congress. A federal court, and Mueller himself, said Barr mischaracterized the investigation's conclusions and, in so doing, confused the public. Trump repeatedly claimed that the investigation exonerated him; the Mueller report expressly stated that it did not.

The report also detailed multiple acts of potential obstruction of justice by Trump, but "did not draw ultimate conclusions about the President's conduct". Investigators decided they could not "apply an approach that could potentially result in a judgment that the President committed crimes" as an Office of Legal Counsel opinion stated that a sitting president could not be indicted, and investigators would not accuse him of a crime when he cannot clear his name in court. The report concluded that Congress, having the authority to take action against a president for wrongdoing, "may apply the obstruction laws". The House of Representatives subsequently launched an impeachment inquiry following the Trump-Ukraine scandal, but did not pursue an article of impeachment related to the Mueller investigation.

Several Trump associates pleaded guilty or were convicted in connection with Mueller's investigation and related cases, including Manafort and Flynn. Trump's former attorney Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about Trump's 2016 attempts to reach a deal with Russia to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. Cohen said he had made the false statements on behalf of Trump. In February 2020, Stone was sentenced to 40 months in prison for lying to Congress and witness tampering. The sentencing judge said Stone "was prosecuted for covering up for the president".

First impeachment

Members of House of Representatives vote on two (articles of impeachment H.Res. 755), December 18, 2019

In August 2019, a whistleblower filed a complaint with the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community about a July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, during which Trump had pressured Zelenskyy to investigate CrowdStrike and Democratic presidential candidate Biden and his son Hunter. The whistleblower said that the White House had attempted to cover up the incident and that the call was part of a wider campaign by the Trump administration and Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani that may have included withholding financial aid from Ukraine in July 2019 and canceling Pence's May 2019 Ukraine trip.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi initiated a formal impeachment inquiry on September 24. Trump then confirmed that he withheld military aid from Ukraine, offering contradictory reasons for the decision. On September 25, his administration released a memorandum of the phone call which confirmed that, after Zelenskyy mentioned purchasing American anti-tank missiles, Trump asked him to discuss investigating Biden and his son with Giuliani and Barr. The testimony of multiple administration officials and former officials confirmed that this was part of a broader effort to further Trump's personal interests by giving him an advantage in the upcoming presidential election. In October, William B. Taylor Jr., the chargé d'affaires for Ukraine, testified before congressional committees that soon after arriving in Ukraine in June 2019, he found that Zelenskyy was being subjected to pressure directed by Trump and led by Giuliani. According to Taylor and others, the goal was to coerce Zelenskyy into making a public commitment to investigate the company that employed Hunter Biden, as well as rumors about Ukrainian involvement in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. He said it was made clear that until Zelenskyy made such an announcement, the administration would not release scheduled military aid for Ukraine and not invite Zelenskyy to the White House.

On December 13, the House Judiciary Committee voted along party lines to pass two articles of impeachment: one for abuse of power and one for obstruction of Congress. After debate, the House of Representatives impeached Trump on both articles on December 18.

During the trial in January 2020, the House impeachment managers cited evidence to support charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress and asserted that Trump's actions were exactly what the founding fathers had in mind when they created the impeachment process.

Trump was acquitted of both charges by the Republican majority. Senator Mitt Romney was the only Republican who voted to convict him on one charge, the abuse of power. Following his acquittal, he fired impeachment witnesses and other political appointees and career officials he deemed insufficiently loyal.

Second impeachment

2020 presidential election

Defeated by Biden

Breaking with precedent, Trump filed to run for a second term within a few hours of assuming the presidency. He held his first reelection rally less than a month after taking office and officially became the Republican nominee in August 2020.

Starting in the spring of 2020, Trump began to sow doubts about the election, claiming without evidence that the election would be rigged and that the expected widespread use of mail balloting would produce massive election fraud. When, in August, the House of Representatives voted for a $25 billion grant to the U.S. Postal Service for the expected surge in mail voting, he blocked funding, saying he wanted to prevent any increase in voting by mail, creating a crisis in the Postal Service. He repeatedly refused to say whether he would accept the results if he lost and commit to a peaceful transition of power.

Biden won the election on November 3, receiving 81.3 million votes (51.3 percent) to Trump's 74.2 million (46.8 percent) and 306 Electoral College votes to Trump's 232.

Rejection of results

At 2 a.m. the morning after the election, with the results still unclear, Trump declared victory. After Biden was projected the winner days later, Trump stated that "this election is far from over" and baselessly alleged election fraud. He and his allies filed many legal challenges to the results, which were rejected by at least 86 judges in both the state and federal courts, including by federal judges appointed by Trump himself, finding no factual or legal basis. His allegations were also refuted by state election officials. After Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency director Chris Krebs contradicted Trump's fraud allegations, Trump dismissed him on November 17. On December 11, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a case from the Texas attorney general that asked the court to overturn the election results in four states won by Biden.

Trump withdrew from public activities in the weeks following the election. He initially blocked government officials from cooperating in Biden's presidential transition. After three weeks, the administrator of the General Services Administration declared Biden the "apparent winner" of the election, allowing the disbursement of transition resources to his team. Trump still did not formally concede while claiming he recommended the GSA begin transition protocols.

The Electoral College formalized Biden's victory on December 14. From November to January, Trump repeatedly sought help to overturn the results, personally pressuring Republican local and state office-holders, Republican state and federal legislators, the Justice Department, and Vice President Pence, urging various actions such as replacing presidential electors, or a request for Georgia officials to "find" votes and announce a "recalculated" result. On February 10, 2021, Georgia prosecutors opened a criminal investigation into Trump's efforts to subvert the election in Georgia.

Trump did not attend Biden's inauguration.

January 6 Capitol attack

In December 2020, reported the Pentagon was on red alert, and ranking officers had discussed what to do if Trump declared martial law. The Pentagon responded with quotes from defense leaders that the military has no role in the outcome of elections.

In March 2023, Trump collaborated with incarcerated rioters on a song to benefit the prisoners. In June, he said that, if reelected, he would pardon many of them.

First post-presidency (2021-present)

Trump's false claims concerning the 2020 election were commonly referred to as the " big lie" in the press and by his critics. In May 2021, he and his supporters attempted to co-opt the term, using it to refer to the election itself. The Republican Party used his false election narrative to justify the imposition of new voting restrictions in its favor. As late as July 2022, he was still pressuring state legislators to overturn the 2020 election.

Business activities

In February 2021, Trump registered a new company, Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), for providing "social networking services" to U.S. customers. In March 2024, TMTG merged with special-purpose acquisition company Digital World Acquisition and became a public company. In February 2022, TMTG launched Truth Social, a social media platform. As of March 2023, Trump Media, which had taken $8 million from Russia-connected entities, was being investigated by federal prosecutors for possible money laundering.

Investigations, criminal indictments and convictions, civil lawsuits

FBI investigations

On November 18, 2022, U.S. attorney general Merrick Garland appointed federal prosecutor Jack Smith as a special counsel to oversee the federal criminal investigations into Trump retaining government property at Mar-a-Lago and examining Trump's role in the events leading up to the Capitol attack.

Criminal referral by the House January 6 Committee

Federal and state criminal indictments

In June 2023, following a special counsel investigation, a federal grand jury in Miami indicted Trump on 31 counts of "willfully retaining national defense information" under the Espionage Act, one count of making false statements, and one count each of conspiracy to obstruct justice, withholding government documents, corruptly concealing records, concealing a document in a federal investigation and scheming to conceal their efforts. He pleaded not guilty. A superseding indictment the following month added three charges. The judge assigned to the case, Aileen Cannon, was appointed to the bench by Trump and had previously issued rulings favorable to him in a past civil case, some of which were overturned by an appellate court. She moved slowly on the case, indefinitely postponed the trial in May 2024, and dismissed it on July 15, ruling that the special counsel's appointment was unconstitutional. On August 26, Special Counsel Smith appealed the dismissal. On November 25, the prosecution asked the appeals court to remove Trump as a co-defendant from the appeal, citing Department of Justice policy prohibiting the prosecution of a sitting president.

Criminal conviction in the 2016 campaign fraud case

During the 2016 presidential election campaign, American Media, Inc. (AMI), publisher of the National Enquirer, and a company set up by Cohen paid model Karen McDougal and adult film actress Stormy Daniels for keeping silent about their alleged affairs with Trump between 2006 and 2007. Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to breaking campaign finance laws, saying he had arranged both payments at Trump's direction to influence the presidential election. Trump denied the affairs and said he was not aware of Cohen's payment to Daniels, but he reimbursed him in 2017. Federal prosecutors asserted that Trump had been involved in discussions regarding nondisclosure payments as early as 2014. Court documents showed that the FBI believed he was directly involved in the payment to Daniels, based on calls he had with Cohen in October 2016. Federal prosecutors closed the investigation in 2019, but in 2021, the New York State Attorney General's Office and Manhattan District Attorney's Office opened a criminal investigations into his business activities. The Manhattan DA's Office subpoenaed the Trump Organization and AMI for records related to the payments and Trump and the Trump Organization for eight years of tax returns.

Civil judgments

In September 2022, the attorney general of New York filed a civil fraud case against Trump, his three oldest children, and the Trump Organization. During the investigation leading up to the lawsuit, Trump was fined $110,000 for failing to turn over records subpoenaed by the attorney general. In an August 2022 deposition, he invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination more than 400 times. The presiding judge ruled in September 2023 that Trump, his adult sons, and the Trump Organization repeatedly committed fraud and ordered their New York business certificates canceled and their business entities sent into receivership for dissolution. In February 2024, the court found him liable, ordered him to pay a penalty of more than $350 million plus interest, for a total exceeding $450 million, and barred him from serving as an officer or director of any New York corporation or legal entity for three years. He said he would appeal the verdict. The judge also ordered the company to be overseen by the monitor appointed by the court in 2023 and an independent director of compliance, and that any "restructuring and potential dissolution" would be the decision of the monitor.

2024 presidential election

Trump's escalation of election rigging claims before the 2024 election[706]

During the campaign, Trump made increasingly violent and authoritarian statements. He also said that he would weaponize the FBI and the Justice Department against his political opponents and use the military to go after Democratic politicians and those that do not support his candidacy. He used harsher, more dehumanizing anti-immigrant rhetoric than during his presidency. His harsher rhetoric against his political enemies has been described by some historians and scholars as authoritarian, fascist, and unlike anything a political candidate has ever said in American history. Age and health concerns also arose during the campaign, with several medical experts cited by The New York Times highlighting an increase in rambling, tangential speech and behavioral disinhibition.

Trump mentioned "rigged election" and "election interference" earlier and more frequently than in the 2016 and 2020 campaigns and refused to commit to accepting the 2024 election results. Analysts for The New York Times described this as an intensification of his "heads I win; tails you cheated" rhetorical strategy; the paper said the claim of a rigged election had become the backbone of the campaign.

On July 13, 2024, Trump's ear was grazed by a bullet in an assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Butler Township, Pennsylvania. Two days later, the 2024 Republican National Convention nominated him as their presidential candidate, with Senator JD Vance as his running mate. On September 15, 2024, he was targeted in another assassination attempt in Florida.

Trump was elected the 47th president of the United States in November 2024, defeating incumbent vice president Kamala Harris, the second president in U.S. history after Grover Cleveland to be elected to a nonconsecutive second term. The Associated Press and BBC News described it as an extraordinary comeback. The first Republican to win the popular vote since 2004, Trump did so with 49.9% of the popular vote and a margin of 1.6% over his opponent, the third-smallest since 1888.

Assessments

Public image

A Gallup poll in 134 countries comparing the approval ratings of U.S. leadership between 2016 and 2017 found that Trump led Obama in job approval in only 29 countries, most of them non-democracies; approval of U.S. leadership plummeted among allies and G7 countries. By mid-2020, only 16 percent of international respondents to a 13-nation Pew Research poll expressed confidence in him, lower than China's Xi Jinping and Russia's Vladimir Putin.

In the C-SPAN "Presidential Historians Survey 2021", historians ranked Trump as the fourth-worst president. He rated lowest in the leadership characteristics categories for moral authority and administrative skills. The Siena College Research Institute's 2022 survey ranked him 43rd out of 45 presidents. He was ranked near the bottom in all categories except for luck, willingness to take risks, and party leadership, and he ranked last in several categories. In 2018 and 2024, surveys of members of the American Political Science Association ranked him the worst president.

Political practice and rhetoric

Beginning with his 2016 campaign, Trump's politics and rhetoric led to the creation of a political movement known as Trumpism. Professor Mary Stuckey identified his rhetoric as using vitriol: "demeaning language, false equivalency, and exclusion".[page needed ] Professor Gary Jacobson found he used fearmongering about immigrants and minorities[page needed ] that other researchers found were essential to his support. His political base has been compared to a cult of personality.

Trump's political positions have been described as right-wing populist. described them as "eclectic, improvisational and often contradictory". He helped bring far-right fringe ideas and organizations into the mainstream. The alt-right movement coalesced around and supported his candidacy, due in part to its opposition to multiculturalism and immigration. He has a strong appeal to evangelical Christian voters. He appeals to Christian nationalists,[page needed ] and his rallies take on the symbols, rhetoric and agenda of Christian nationalism.

Truthfulness

Fact-checkers from The Washington Post,[781] the Toronto Star,[782] and CNN[783] compiled data on "false or misleading claims" (orange background), and "false claims" (violet foreground), respectively.

As a candidate and as president, Trump frequently made false statements in public remarks to an extent unprecedented in American politics. His falsehoods are a distinctive part of his political identity and have been described as firehosing. His false and misleading statements were documented by fact-checkers, including at The Washington Post, which tallied 30,573 false or misleading statements made by him during his first presidency, increasing in frequency over time.

Some of Trump's falsehoods were inconsequential, such as his repeated claim of the " biggest inaugural crowd ever". Others had more far-reaching effects, such as his promotion of antimalarial drugs as an unproven treatment for COVID-19, causing a U.S. shortage of these drugs and panic-buying in Africa and South Asia. Other misinformation, such as misattributing a rise in crime in England and Wales to the "spread of radical Islamic terror", served his domestic political purposes. His attacks on mail-in ballots and other election practices weakened public faith in the integrity of the 2020 presidential election, while his disinformation about the pandemic delayed and weakened the national response to it. Trump habitually does not apologize for his falsehoods.

Conspiracy theories

Before and throughout his presidency, Trump promoted numerous conspiracy theories, including Obama birtherism, the Clinton body count conspiracy theory, the conspiracy theory movement QAnon, the Global warming hoax theory, Trump Tower wiretapping allegations, that Osama bin Laden was alive and Obama and Biden had members of Navy SEAL Team 6 killed, and alleged Ukrainian interference in U.S. elections. In at least two instances, Trump clarified to press that he believed the conspiracy theory in question.

After years of criticism for allowing Trump to post misinformation and falsehoods, Twitter began to tag some of his tweets with fact-checks in May 2020. In response, he tweeted that social media platforms "totally silence" conservatives and that he would "strongly regulate, or close them down". In the days after the storming of the Capitol, he was banned from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other platforms. The loss of his social media presence diminished his ability to shape events and prompted a dramatic decrease in the volume of misinformation shared on Twitter. In February 2022, he launched social media platform Truth Social where he only attracted a fraction of his Twitter following. Elon Musk, after acquiring Twitter, reinstated his Twitter account in November 2022. Meta Platforms' two-year ban lapsed in January 2023, allowing him to return to Facebook and Instagram, although in 2024, he continued to call the company an " enemy of the people".

Relationship with the press

Trump sought media attention throughout his career, sustaining a "love-hate" relationship with the press. In the 2016 campaign, he benefited from a record amount of free media coverage, elevating his standing in the Republican primaries. The New York Times writer Amy Chozick wrote in 2018 that his media dominance enthralled the public and created "must-see TV".

As a candidate and as president, Trump frequently accused the press of bias, calling it the "fake news media" and "the enemy of the people". In 2018, journalist Lesley Stahl said that he had privately told her that he intentionally discredited the media "so when you write negative stories about me no one will believe you".

Trump also deployed the legal system to intimidate the press. The Trump campaign sued The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN for defamation in opinion pieces about Russian election interference. All the suits were dismissed. By 2024, he repeatedly voiced support for outlawing political dissent and criticism he considers misleading or challenges his claims to power, and that media companies should be investigated and prosecuted for treason for displaying "bad stories" about him and possibly lose their broadcast licenses if they refuse to name confidential sources.

References

^ Ashford, Grace (February 27, 2019). "Michael Cohen Says Trump Told Him to Threaten Schools Not to Release Grades". The New York Times.

^ Ballengee, Ryan (July 14, 2018). "Donald Trump says he gets most of his exercise from golf, then uses cart at Turnberry". Golf News Net.

^ 1634-1699: McCusker, J. J. (1997). How Much Is That in Real Money? A Historical Price Index for Use as a Deflator of Money Values in the Economy of the United States: Addenda et Corrigenda (PDF). American Antiquarian Society. 1700-1799: McCusker, J. J. (1992). How Much Is That in Real Money? A Historical Price Index for Use as a Deflator of Money Values in the Economy of the United States (PDF). American Antiquarian Society. 1800-present: Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. "Consumer Price Index (estimate) 1800-".

^ "From the Tower to the White House". The Economist. February 20, 2016. Mr Trump's performance has been mediocre compared with the stockmarket and property in New York.

^ Schaffner, Brian F.; Macwilliams, Matthew; Nteta, Tatishe (March 2018). "Understanding White Polarization in the 2016 Vote for President: The Sobering Role of Racism and Sexism". Political Science Quarterly. 133 (1): 9-34. doi:10.1002/polq.12737.

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Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is an American politician, media personality, and businessman who served as the 45th president of the United States from 2017 to 2021. He won the 2024 presidential election as the nominee of the Republican Party and is scheduled to be inaugurated as the 47th president on January 20, 2025.

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Talks about how government tries to hold back religion in some ways.

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Before I speak about the ominous trends in America to curtail freedom of speech, let me tell you about Dr. Charles H. McVety, president of Canada Christian College in Toronto, whose television program was removed from the air because he had the temerity to preach against homosexuality. Later, he was allowed back on television, but now he has to submit his program to the Canadian Broadcast Standard Council every Wednesday for review by the censors on Thursday, and then, if approved, can be broadcast on Sunday. As far as I know this panel does not rule on programs that are immoral or violent, just on those that dare to be politically incorrect, such as a minister who believes the Bible and therefore opposes same-sex marriage.

Closer to home in our great United States, hate speech laws and recent court rulings seek to restrict our right to believe, preach, and practice one's religious convictions (hate speech, someone said, is simply whatever the leftists among us hate to hear!) The supposed line of "separation between church and state" means that God must stay on His side of the line in our country's education, politics, law, science, and workplaces. Beware if you live out your religion in the so-called public square, because you just might find yourself slapped with a lawsuit.

Here is the irony: the censurers, the radicals who are all too ready to deny freedom to those who disagree with them, are perceived in our culture as "tolerant," and we, who want to express our views, are viewed as "intolerant." In other words, the philosophy of the left is preach tolerance, but practice inflexible intolerance to anyone who has the courage to express a different point of view.

Here is but one example: Angela McCaskill was suspended as an administrator from Gallaudet University for signing a petition to put Maryland's same-sex legislation on a November ballot. In other words, even an innocuous act, such as allowing the electorate to decide the question of same-sex marriage, is enough for one to be suspended. Incredibly, the university justified its decision because of its view of tolerance! What they were saying was: we exercise tolerance by censuring anyone who does not agree with our point of view!

The loss of our freedoms can take an unusual twist. The lawsuit Christian Legal Society v. Martinez arose when Hastings University insisted that The Christian Legal Society could not require its leaders to adhere to a certain set of beliefs and behaviors, but it had to be open to all students, without discrimination. This means, among other things, that an atheist could become president of The Christian Legal Society on campus. This action on the part of the university is a denial of freedom of association and the free exercise of religion. The notion that student groups at the university can have no religious, political, or moral requirements for leadership defies common sense and defeats the very purpose of such groups.

The list of cases where religious rights are being marginalized is endless. If the present trends continue, we must prepare ourselves for a dark and challenging future. Thankfully, we can face the future with confidence that God is with us. The Church in other eras has been here before.

What you need to know about today's "Religious Freedom."

In the Q&A section below, Dr. Lutzer addresses some critical issues regarding the assault on religious freedom in America.

Q: Recently, we've heard the ruling that a Christian baker must bake a cake for same-sex couples to avoid fines, and similarly, a photographer must take pictures at a same-sex wedding to avoid being charged with discrimination. How is this different from saying that homosexuals and same-sex couples should be served in restaurants, etc.?

A: The difference is this: we would all agree that homosexuals should be served in restaurants and in similar venues. But baking a cake or being the photographer for a wedding is a participatory-or even better-a celebratory act that indicates approval, and a rejoicing with the couple to be married. Whether a Christian does or does not agree to give these services to same-sex couples should remain a matter of conscience and not be decided by law.

Most distressing is the exception that is made for followers of Islam. Star Transport, a trucking company in Morton, IL, was sued for violating federal law for terminating two Muslim drivers, who on religious grounds, refused to drive a truck that transported alcohol.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission explained, "Everyone has a right to observe his or her religious beliefs and employers don't get to pick and choose which religions and which religious practices they will accommodate." So, there you have it: the religious beliefs of Muslims may be accommodated; the beliefs of Christians must not.

Q: Many evangelicals refuse to speak to their congregations about these matters, but you do. What is your philosophy regarding the involvement of the church in such matters?

A: Yes, some of my evangelical pastor friends would never speak about these matters publicly for fear that they would be setting up barriers for those that they wish to reach for Christ. And I understand that, since anyone who speaks about these concerns is immediately branded as "a right wing radical" or worse. However, there is a balance that must be maintained. I call it "redemptive involvement." We must always lead with the Cross, but must speak about these issues if we are thoroughly biblical.

Q: What else bothers you about some pastors, particularly those who have mega-churches and are known as "seeker friendly?"

A: I'm going to tread carefully here. Certainly none of us want to pastor a church that is known as "seeker un friendly." So, in one sense to be seeker friendly is fine, but the problem is that in many cases it is this philosophy that shapes the pastor's preaching and the whole stance of the congregation. Sermons are often reduced to "feel good" messages that would never biblically address the topic of homosexuality, the false teachings of Islam, or the doctrinal deceptions of other religions. Nor would it tackle the distortions of the Gospel seen on many television programs.

Preaching to felt needs is fine, but we have to help the congregation understand what its real felt needs are. For example, standing in the presence of a holy God, our greatest felt need at that moment will be for the righteousness of Christ.

Q: Returning to the matter of religious freedom. What should we do to prepare for the continuing attacks against Christianity in our culture?

A: That is both an important and huge question. For every Christian the answer will be different, but minimally what we must do is, first, give thanks to God for the opportunity to live at this hour of history and prove the faithfulness of God to His people. Secondly, we must courageously and lovingly witness to Christ among our families, neighbors, and friends, and wherever we have influence. We must also support those organizations that are fighting our legal battles, which is really where the conflict comes in our culture. And finally, let's realize that America has fallen too far for us to "turn it around." We have lost the so-called culture war. We must repent of our sins and cry out to God for mercy and for divine intervention. Whether or not God chooses to turn this country around, He will be with us as we live out our faith-even if it means death.

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Before I speak about the ominous trends in America to curtail freedom of speech, let me tell you about Dr. Charles H. McVety, president of Canada Christian College in Toronto, whose television program was removed from the air because he had the temerity to preach against homosexuality.

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Song shows the feel and passion that we all "can" have for the country.

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Alaska has many issues such as drug abuse and crime violence. Also the third problem for them is lack of jobs.

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As part of a research project undertaken in late 1994 with the Alaska Department of Public Safety, the Justice Center conducted a public opinion telephone survey concerning quality of life and public safety issues in Alaska communities. The project was funded by a federal grant from the Office of Justice Programs.

One purpose of this survey was to obtain the opinions of Alaska residents about the most serious problems in their community and the relationship of public safety agencies to the perceived problems. A secondary concern was to obtain information regarding the actions which residents believe most appropriate for dealing with the problems they identified. Among the items, interviewees were asked to identify: first, the most serious problem in their community; second, the most serious public safety concern; and third, possible solutions to the problem. Interviewers contacted a statewide sample of 603 residents.

In an effort to avoid bias, interviewers explained only that the survey was being conducted for the University of Alaska; the Department of Public Safety was not mentioned. The answers obtained were recorded and consolidated into broad categories to facilitate understanding.

Major Community Problem

Perhaps the most striking feature of the responses is the absence of a consensus on community problems. Interviewees cited a range of problems from drug abuse to cold weather. The most frequently cited serious problem (Table 1) concerns drugs, alcohol, substance abuse and associated crime; however, statewide, only one out of four respondents (24.8%) identified problems in this category as the most serious overall problem in their community.

The second category of most frequently cited serious problem_noted by 15.2 per cent of respondents statewide_involve concerns related to crime and violence. More specifically, interviewees identified increasing crime and decreasing safety, violent crimes and killings.

Economic issues affecting Alaska communities, primarily lack of jobs, unemployment and the general economy, formed the third most frequently cited serious problem area, with about 7.8 per cent of Alaskans noting such concerns as primary.

Many Alaskans identified problems associated with the behavior of juveniles, their attitudes and criminality. Still others voiced concerns with what they perceive as a breakdown in family and home life, parental authority, indifference and apathy. Concerns about the quality of education are also prominent across the state, with people commenting on the quality of schools, a lack of funding and the quality of teachers. Aside from the concerns voiced by a fairly large group of people about violence and violent crime, the only other crimes or types of crimes identified as "serious problems" were theft and burglary, and drinking and driving.

Public Safety Concerns

Following the question regarding the most serious community problem, each interviewee was asked to "narrow" his or her focus and identify the most serious public safety issue facing the community. Fewer respondents answered this question than answered the previous question, perhaps because in some instances they had already identified a public safety issue as the most serious problem. (Again, the public safety concerns voiced by respondents were coded into broad categories of like or similar responses. The statewide categorizations are displayed in Table 2.) In assessing the relative importance of some of the concerns expressed, it may be useful to keep in mind that answers to open-format questions reflect "top-of-mind" issues immediately important to the interviewee. The range of specific public safety problems identified was as broad as Alaska is diverse, including concerns about substance abuse, road conditions, teen pregnancy and winter weather. It is clear, based on the responses, that adult Alaskans are not of one mind on public safety problems. Many of the concerns expressed were unique and so closely tied to a community or a respondent they were mentioned only once. Moreover, none of the problems identified was mentioned by more than 16 per cent of the interviewees. The range of these responses seems to illustrate the importance of a community-by-community approach to public safety problems.

"Crime," not further specified, is the third most frequently mentioned public safety concern, at 9.1 per cent. The level of concern about drinking and driving vehicles was striking, as was the level of concern with law enforcement services.

Alcohol and drug use and substance abuse were, as in the previous question, the most frequently cited problem, with 15.9 per cent of the interviewees identifying this area as the most serious public safety concern. The second most commonly cited group of public safety concerns were those relating to streets and roadways, with 10.3 per cent identifying a broad range of street and highway-related deficiencies and issues as the most serious problem in their communities.

Suggested Solutions

Respondents were also asked their suggestions for solutions to the problems they identified. The solutions offered are organized in Table 3 by categories of the cited public safety concerns. For example, of the respondents who identified alcohol, drugs and substance abuse as the most pressing problem facing their communities, one-fifth (20.2%) suggested educational efforts to be the most effective solution. As a solution to alcohol and drug problems, "family ties, parental responsibility and involvement" formed the second most frequently offered suggestion. A number of people (7.2%) recommended strengthening laws and making penalties associated with drug and alcohol abuse tougher. Still others (6.5%) suggested legally restricting access to alcohol and drugs, while others (3.0%) suggested legalizing drugs. About five per cent suggested funding more law enforcement officers in an effort to solve the problems of drug and alcohol abuse in their communities.

Concerns about roadway hazards, poor maintenance, sidewalk problems and snow removal were cited as most pressing by 10.3 per cent of respondents. Subsequent suggestions for handling these types of problems included better road maintenance and repair, increased funding and taxing for roadway maintenance, and more snow removal on roadways and sidewalks.

Education was the answer most commonly suggested by respondents citing crime as the most serious public safety concern. Solutions to crime also included suggestions that laws be changed to be harsher on criminals and that government fund more police. Only three respondents specifically suggested that a solution to crime was public involvement and awareness.

Most commonly, tougher laws and longer sentences were suggested for drinking and driving problems. Other suggestions included more law enforcement related to drinking and driving and education and educational campaigns.

For problems with law enforcement services the suggested remedies included calls for more law enforcement officers, more funding for law enforcement, and more and better training for law enforcement officers.

Suggestions for how to deal with violence and violent crime, cited as the most serious public safety problem by five per cent, mirrored suggestions for other public safety concerns, with proposals for more law enforcement resources, and newer and tougher laws against violence, but respondents also believe that families and citizens need to become more involved and that education is also a solution.

Conclusion

Based on the information received from this survey, Alaskans have diverse opinions concerning both the nature of the problems facing their communities and the solutions to those problems. The data obtained seem to support community-by-community assessment and prioritizing of problems.
Future Forum articles will present additional findings from the longer study from which this article was taken.

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Community Problems in Alaska: Public Perceptions

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As part of a research project undertaken in late 1994 with the Alaska Department of Public Safety, the Justice Center conducted a public opinion telephone survey concerning quality of life and public safety issues in Alaska communities.

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Alaska has a lot of natural beauty and animals that I would like to go and see.

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Image shows eagle in front of flag which shows the "freedom and power" of America.

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Sasori is a puppet master and he is really powerful and cool.

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Sasori (サソリ, ), renowned as Sasori of the Red Sand (赤砂のサソリ, Akasuna no Sasori), was an S-rank missing-nin from Sunagakure's Puppet Brigade and a member of Akatsuki, where he was partnered with Orochimaru and later Deidara.

Background

When Sasori was young, his father and mother were killed by Sakumo Hatake in battle, leaving him in the care of his grandmother, Chiyo. When Chiyo attempted to cheer him up by teaching him puppetry, Sasori's innate aptitude for the art became apparent, and he even began to devise masterful ways of eliminating a puppet master's weaknesses in battle. His skills even allowed him to create two puppets in the image of his parents in an attempt to discard the terrible loneliness he felt. However, as the puppets were unable to give him the real parental love that he desired, Sasori lost interest in them, and they later fell into Chiyo's possession. Sasori created many other ingenious puppets, including Kuroari, Karasu, and Sanshōuo.

During the Third Shinobi World War, the effectiveness of his puppets in spilling his enemies' blood on the sand gave rise to Sasori's moniker " Sasori of the Red Sand". However, motivated by his desire to make works that last forever, Sasori began experimenting to create puppets out of people. In the anime, his only friend, Komushi, lost his right arm during his border control duty, so Sasori gave him a new puppet arm as a prosthetic limb. After Komushi perished, having accidentally ingested some of Sasori's poison, Sasori proceeded to turn him into one of his first human puppets. Twenty years before his introduction in the series, Sasori left Sunagakure. Over ten years before his own death, Sasori secretly assassinated the Third Kazekage and made him into one of his human puppets. Despite this, Sasori noted the Third Kazekage did not die without giving Sasori a struggle.

After joining the Akatsuki, he utilised his skills to create numerous spies like Yūra and Mukade from Suna as sleeper agents. Sasori was paired with Orochimaru, who shared his desire of an everlasting existence. Later, Sasori joined his group in recruiting Deidara into Akatsuki. After Orochimaru left the Akatsuki following his failed attempt to take Itachi Uchiha's body, Sasori bore a grudge towards his former partner and sent Kabuto Yakushi to be his spy in Otogakure. Nevertheless, Sasori was unaware that Kabuto was working for Orochimaru long before he posed as an Akatsuki spy, with him and the rest of the Akatsuki made to think that Kabuto joined Orochimaru's side after being dispelled of Sasori's brainwashing. In the anime, Sasori later learned of Orochimaru's whereabouts and joined Deidara to find him. Once tracking him down in the Land of Wind, Sasori unleashed his Third Kazekage puppet. Orochimaru, however, surprised Sasori by countering with a reincarnation of the actual Kazekage. The two missing-nin then pitted their respective pawns against each other, with the Third Kazekage proving stronger than the puppet. However, the Kazekage soon regained control of himself and forced a release of the technique, prompting Orochimaru to retreat. Deidara then unleashed a series of bombs on Orochimaru's hideout, hoping to kill the Konoha-nin. Sasori was left very annoyed that despite a thorough search, they couldn't find a body.

Personality

Sasori grew up in a sad and lonely environment due to the absence of parental love. When introduced to the art of puppetry by his grandmother, Chiyo, he grew a little happier. He eventually created puppets in the likeness of his parents, but when he realised that the puppets couldn't give him the actual love that he desired, he became cold, aloof and led to his general disregard for human life. Sasori even went so far as to state that he would feel nothing if Chiyo died, as he claimed that his heart had become like his puppet body: without any emotions. Neither did Sasori had any loyalty for his village, as he defected to pursue personal interests and even kidnapped the Third Kazekage, the latter act causing severe consequences for Sunagakure, and then attacking the village again twenty years after leaving. Despite his cruel and nihilistic nature, Sasori was also known to possess a very down-to-earth outlook on life, rarely getting worked up over obstacles that impeded his way. He rarely gave way to any strong emotions, and such instances that happened were often short-lived.

Sasori was also known for his impatience, as he repeatedly noted that he did not wish to wait or keep others waiting. Despite this, he took his time in battling Kankurō when they first met due to his interest in fighting his old creations, which were handed down to a puppet master of the next generation.

Sasori and his second partner in Akatsuki, Deidara, both had conflicting views on art, and they frequently argued about their differing perspectives. Deidara maintained his belief that art was something transient that departs quickly, where as Sasori believed that fine art was everlasting and remained far into the future. This reflected their individual natures; Deidara made clay sculptures which exploded, while Sasori created long-lasting puppets out of humans that never died. Nevertheless, although Deidara outwardly seemed to respect Sasori's beliefs, Sasori never respected Deidara's.

Sasori's ambition was to become an exquisite piece of art himself by turning his body into one of his own puppet works. Sasori adhered so strongly to his belief that true art was ever-lasting that he even went as far as to have his spy retrieve information on the Summoning: Impure World Reincarnation and human experiments. Sasori abandoned this ambition after Kankurō told him that it was his creations that he put his heart and soul into that would last forever. After accepting Kankurō's view on eternal art, he entrusted his Mother and Father puppets to Kankurō and told him to pass them on to the next generation after he dies. In this moment, Sasori is shown to have an emotional side as well.

Sasori was also willing to accept the views of others on certain topics in contrast to Deidara, who stubbornly stood by his beliefs until the end. Sasori spared Kankurō during their first confrontation after the latter made a last attempt to attack him, but he notes that Kankurō's envenomed state would eventually lead to his death.

Possibly stemming from his lonely childhood, Sasori was entirely loyal to Akatsuki, so much that he vowed to kill his former partner, Orochimaru, for betraying the organisation.

Appearance

Sasori had wide greyish brown eyes which he inherited from his mother, and short, mousy red hair which he inherited from his father. He was usually seen with a hazy, dreamy look to his appearance. As a child, Sasori wore dark green robes with a pale poncho around them. As a teenager, while living in Sunagakure, he wore a purplish robe with the Sunagakure forehead protector. After leaving the village he was seen wearing the Suna flak jacket with a sleeveless undershirt, bandages around both arms, brown pants with an attached colster where he held his puppet summoning scroll, and brown shinobi sandals. After joining the Akasuki and converting himself into a puppet in the likeness of his original body, Sasori's hair became slightly more messy, and wore his Akatsuki robe along with a purple Akatsuki ring on his left thumb that bears the kanji for "jewel" or "sphere" (玉, gyoku). He also wore teal nail polish on his fingernails. Even though Sasori still possessed his Sunagakure forehead protector that was slashed out in the middle, he kept it on his person instead of wearing it.

Sasori's puppet body consisted of a pair of spinning claws attached to his lower back, a holder for four scrolls on his back, a stinger in the empty and open stomach cavity, a compartment in his right chest, and a 'core of living flesh' (生身の核, namami no kaku) in the left which had the kanji for "scorpion" (蠍, sasori) painted on it. In his exposed state, Sasori's eyes would also be wide open in a maniacal way, as opposed to his normal calm looking eyes.

After Kabuto reincarnated him, Sasori displayed the black sclerae and darker irides seen in other reincarnated shinobi. In place of his previous clothing, Sasori, like the other reincarnated Akatsuki members, wore a maroon cloak with beige lining. Despite being 35 years old at the time of death, his reincarnated form takes that of his teenage years, how he looked before he converted himself.

Sasori was a very powerful shinobi, being able to, with effort, defeat and kill the Third Kazekage, the strongest ninja in Suna's history. His use of his puppets was greatly feared throughout the Third Shinobi World War as he turned the sand red with blood, giving him the nickname, "Sasori of the Red Sand". His legacy was such that Kankurō knew of and feared him despite being born after Sasori already left the village. Deidara himself even admitted that Sasori was the stronger of the two of them.

Puppet Mastery

Trained by his powerful grandmother, Chiyo, in the art of puppetry, Sasori was an extremely powerful puppeteer and had great skill in creating and controlling his puppets. He created a number of ingenious ones including the three main puppets that Kankurō uses, which were made in Sunagakure before he fled. At the time of his final battle with Sakura and Chiyo, Sasori had 298 human puppets in his collection. His status as a puppet master offered him a tremendous advantage against other puppeteer shinobi, especially if the puppets they were using happened to be ones that he created, as seen in his battle against Kankurō. As puppets are usually installed with long-range weapons, Sasori was an expert at fighting at long distances. He had tremendous skill with chakra threads, suppressing them to the point that they became invisible and he could control upwards to 100 puppets - a feat thought impossible for ordinary shinobi. Sasori can also control living people as puppets, even against their will, if they are weakened enough. His usage of puppets was at such a high level that he made mere techniques appear as an artistic performance, what he called his " Red Secret Technique".

Hiruko was the first puppet to be shown being used by Sasori in the series, as both a weapon and an armour, and as a means to eliminate the puppeteer's weakness of being a separate and exposed target. As Hiruko was one of his favourite puppets, Sasori adorned it in Akatsuki attire for nearly the entirety of his tenure in the organisation. Because of this, only certain members like Orochimaru, Deidara, or relatives like Chiyo knew Sasori's true face while others like Zetsu and Kabuto had no idea that Hiruko was not his actual body. While within Hiruko, Sasori speaks through his puppet in a deeper and hoarser voice.

Hiruko had a long mechanical, scorpion-like tail (an allusion to Sasori's name meaning "scorpion"), extending from the mouth of what appeared to be a demon mask on its back. Chiyo said this mask was a recent addition by Sasori to act as an extra defence to a weak point in the puppet. The tail worked as Hiruko's main offensive weapon and was laced with Sasori's speciality poison. The tail could also be used defensively by spinning around Hiruko's body at a rapid speed. Hiruko's left arm was also rigged with a projectile launcher capable of firing poisoned shrapnel and needles, and its mouth could also be used to serve a similar function of firing poisoned needles. In the anime, Sasori was also capable of performing the Sand Clone technique through Hiruko, Hiruko is said to have been a human puppet in the anime from a once famous Sunagakure shinobi that Sasori converted upon death. In the manga it was just a regular puppet.

Human Puppetry

Main article: Human Puppet Sasori's puppets were unique in that they were made from the still-living bodies of humans. These human puppets were more versatile than regular puppets, since, in addition to having many dangerous devices installed within them (as is common with regular puppets), they were also able to use chakra and perform any techniques or kekkei genkai abilities that they possessed during their life. Being the developer of this form of puppets, Sasori is also the only one who knows how to create them.

Third Kazekage

Main article: Third Kazekage (puppet)

Sasori's favourite human puppet was the Third Kazekage, which retained its Magnet Release, which in turn grants Sasori access to the Iron Sand techniques. When mixed with Sasori's poison, the Iron Sand was given a more lethal edge. The Iron Sand could also be used to fill up the joints of other puppets, thus immobilising them. Due to the Iron Sand being derived from the Third's ability to convert chakra to magnetism, this grants Sasori immunity from metallic weapons. The Third's puppet's right arm held several poisoned blades, while the left arm could open up to reveal several summoning seals that summoned thousands of similar arms to attack the target. These arms were capable of crushing an opponent, emitting poisonous gas clouds, and releasing wires that dragged the opponent into the gas cloud. If these arms were cut off, a small buzz-saw took their place.

Puppet Body

Main article: Sasori (puppet)

Although Sasori was thirty-five years old, he maintained the appearance of a teenage boy. His unnaturally young appearance was a product of the immortalisation of his design. Aside from his core, Sasori's body was actually a puppet. In place of his intestines was a thick cable coiled around a pole, allowing him to use it as a stinger and retract it if necessary. Attached to his back was a scroll holder, containing four scrolls that stored extra armament. The first scroll allowed him to expel powerful streams of fire, and the second scroll was used to store numerous puppets for the Red Secret Technique: Performance of a Hundred Puppets. The capabilities of the third and fourth scrolls were not revealed in the manga, though in the anime, the fourth scroll was used to fire jets of water with enough force to cut through rock. Sasori also has a pair of poles attached to the back of his hips, each equipped with five large blades that could spin like a propeller, granting him both an equipage for greater speed and a monstrous close combat weapon. Sasori also had pipes on each of his palms that could spew out intense fire, hot enough to melt rock, or, in the anime, powerful water jets with such pressure that they were capable of cutting through rock. Being a fully-armed puppet himself, Sasori did not suffer the weakness of being vulnerable to close-range combat that other puppeteers suffer.

Despite being loaded with weapons, Sasori kept them (and his true form) hidden within his Akatsuki robes, which were large enough to conceal them without problem. Curiously, when using "himself", Sasori's eyes were always wide open, giving him a somewhat insane look. In contrast, prior to revealing his puppet body, Sasori's eyes were always half-closed, making him appear calmer and more aloof. Sasori has claimed that he has not used "himself" since joining Akatsuki, until his last battle with his grandmother and Sakura Haruno.

Installed in the right part of Sasori's chest was a mechanism that could spin numerous chakra threads, allowing him to exceed his previous capabilities and control well over a hundred puppets. Doing so also allows him to use his Red Secret Technique: Performance of a Hundred Puppets. With it, Sasori was given a drastic advantage over other puppeteers, having once taken down a small nation with it. The left part of Sasori's chest held the lone human part of him and thus, the only necessary part of his body capable of controlling chakra: a cylinder-shaped device containing his 'core' (核, kaku).

Because Sasori's core was the only living part of his body that he still contained, his puppet body was virtually indestructible, allowing him to survive the poison mist Kankurō bombarded him with, as well as the impact from Sakura's punches. He was also able to fight for extended periods of time without hindrances that would normally affect a human's body, such as fatigue, muscle failure, loss of blood, wounds, or pain. When smashed apart, he could simply draw the pieces back together. Additionally, Sasori could transfer his core to other puppets in a split second, allowing him to abandon a body that was damaged beyond repair or incapacitated. It is suggested in the manga that Sasori created more than one puppet body in his image. The core was his only weakness, and its destruction would mean his death. After Sasori's death, Kankurō would later take the body and use it as his puppet.

Intelligence

Repeatedly, Sasori has demonstrated to be a highly analytical and cunning man, able to handle situations with various traps and misdirection. He is also shown to be a highly analytical man, quickly determining his opponent's strengths and combat methods. Like his grandmother, Sasori has a great knowledge of the human body, as shown from his brainwashing technique and his mastery over creating different types of poisons. His unique poisons, that he laced nearly every weapon in his arsenal with, took effect instantly, and one such poison could kill the target after three days of suffering; according to Sakura, this poison is refined with heavy metals, which intrude the muscles and destroy healthy cells. This poison was so complex that Sasori himself acknowledged that no one in Sunagakure could counter it and believed its complexity made it incurable altogether. However, to his surprise, Sakura came up with a successful antidote for the poison; Sasori even noted that creating the antidote requires extreme precision, with no room for failure, something difficult even for himself.

Sasuke Recovery Mission

At the end of Part I, Sasori made a cameo appearance as a silhouette during the Akatsuki gathering where they discussed Orochimaru's taking of Sasuke Uchiha, as well as the capturing of the Nine-Tails and the furthering of their plans.

The Fallen Castle

Later, in the anime, Sasori and Deidara met with Hidan and Kakuzu to discuss their new missions. It was decided that Sasori and Deidara would take the war mission. The duo then went to the Land of This, a small nation, with the intent of destroying it to spread the reputation of the Akatsuki. After Deidara handled the initial attack with a series of explosions, Sasori unleashed his army of puppets. During the attack, Sasori personally went after and killed the This Daimyō. After doing so, he was confronted by the late daimyō's hired bodyguard Tatewaki. While the samurai managed to pressure Sasori, he was ultimately poisoned by several of Sasori's poisoned senbon. By dusk, the nation was destroyed, making Sasori and Deidara's mission a success.

Kazekage Rescue Mission

At the start of Part II, Sasori, hidden in his puppet, Hiruko, returned to his former village, Sunagakure, with Deidara to capture the One-Tailed Shukaku's jinchūriki, and the Fifth Kazekage, Gaara. Both the Akatsuki members easily penetrated Suna's defences, as the village was betrayed by one of Sasori's own subordinates, Yūra. After Deidara captured Gaara, the Kazekage's elder brother, Kankurō, attempted to stop the Akatsuki duo from fleeing. But Sasori confronted him so that Deidara could go on ahead unopposed and made quick work of Kankurō, poisoning and nearly killing him, and easily destroying his puppets, as he had pre-existing knowledge of their secrets. After the Akatsuki members extracted and sealed the One-Tailed Shukaku from Gaara at the Akatsuki hideout, Sasori and Deidara were left in charge by their leader of defeating the pursuing Team 7 and Sasori's grandmother, Chiyo. As Deidara led Naruto Uzumaki and Kakashi Hatake away using Gaara's dead body as bait, Sasori was left to face Sakura Haruno and his grandmother Chiyo.

Soon after the battle began, with Chiyo controlling her as a puppet, Sakura was able to destroy Sasori's puppet, Hiruko. As Sasori emerged from Hiruko's remains and revealed his true self, Chiyo and Sakura were shocked to see his youthful face, considering that he had left Sunagakure over twenty years ago, yet looked so young. Not wasting any time, however, Sasori brought out his Third Kazekage puppet, who he revealed to be his favourite, as the Third was the hardest to kill and add to his collection. Since the Third Kazekage was a human puppet, Sasori was able use its various Iron Sand abilities to attack and overwhelm Chiyo and Sakura. To try and combat the Kazekage, Chiyo brought out the first puppets Sasori ever created Mother and Father. Although Chiyo had since equipped them with extra weapons and defences, the Kazekage's puppet's Iron Sand quickly disabled the two puppets, and Chiyo's arm as well. Acting on her own, Sakura demolished the Kazekage puppet after picking up on its movements and using herself as bait to lower Sasori's guard.

With the loss of the Kazekage puppet, Sasori revealed the reason behind his young look: his own human puppet body, which itself was fitted with numerous weapons and traps laced with poison. Sakura eventually managed to break apart his puppet body, but missed his core, allowing him to reassemble himself. Chiyo then brought out her own ten puppets in an attempt to level the playing field. Sasori used his Red Secret Technique: Performance of a Hundred Puppets, allowing him to control ten times as many puppets as Chiyo. Since Chiyo's puppets were designed to work together, a trait lacking with all of Sasori's puppets, her puppets fared far better than his, although they were eventually overwhelmed by Sasori's sheer numbers. During the battle, Chiyo attempted to seal Sasori's chakra with a special orb from one of her puppets, but missed his core - the only living part of his body and the source of his chakra - and only trapped his puppet body. As Chiyo and Sakura were distracted by his summoned puppets, Sasori was revealed to have transferred the cylindrical container housing his core, into another one of his own puppets, possessing his face's likeness, before the seal nailed his original body to a wall.

Using the seal as a distraction, Sasori, in his new puppet body, attempted a sneak attack on Chiyo. However, Sakura took the sword's attack from Sasori for Chiyo. Sasori's katana pierced Sakura's abdomen, and since the blade itself was coated in poison, Sasori stated that she would either succumb to the poison or bleed to death. As Sasori prepared to attack again, it gave Chiyo a chance to use Mother and Father to stab him through his core in the form of an embrace. As Chiyo ran to Sakura's almost lifeless body, she began to try and heal her, to which Sasori, even in his dying state, laughed in amusement at her seemingly senile attempt to save Sakura, stating that it was far too late for any form of medical ninjutsu. When Chiyo revealed the true nature of her technique, Sasori believed it impossible until Sakura awoke.

Before dying, as a reward to Sakura for defeating him, Sasori informed her of a spy that he had within his former Akatsuki partner, Orochimaru's, ranks, and told her to meet him ten days from then at noon at the Tenchi Bridge. When Sasori died, Chiyo implied that Sasori could have avoided her last attack, but for some reason he chose not to.

Main article: Power (Arc) In the anime, Sasori is summoned by Kabuto to battle Team Kakashi, who are investigating the incident which happened in the Tonika Village and at The Hole. However, after being summoned, Sasori's coffin vanished, leading Kabuto to question whether or not the Impure World Reincarnation was still incomplete.

Fourth Shinobi World War: Countdown

In an attempt to both impede Tobi and coerce him into joining forces during their initial encounter, Kabuto Yakushi demonstrated his capabilities by reincarnating many of the deceased members of Akatsuki, including Sasori, using Summoning: Impure World Reincarnation.

Fourth Shinobi World War: Confrontation

Assigned to the Surprise Attack and Diversion Platoon, Sasori was tasked with disrupting the Allied Shinobi Forces by raiding the enemy, as the Fourth Shinobi World War commenced. After discerning that Akatsuki had fallen with only Zetsu, and his replacement, Tobi remaining, their group mobilised atop Deidara's clay birds, where they pursue the three remaining members of the Infiltration and Reconnaissance Party.

Irritated by the adversaries scurrying about as they attempt to evade them, the group was eventually taken captive nonetheless. Sasori then forcefully manipulated the booby-trapped Muta Aburame, so as to attack the opposing Surprise Attack Division without their knowledge, while taking Zaji hostage. However, the enemy uncovered the trap and evaded the blast, forcing him to engage them using the controlled Tokuma Hyūga and Ranka, but Omoi soon managed to free them both. After Kankurō connected his own chakra threads to those of Sasori's, which had just been severed, the latter is pulled downwards, and Ittan raised the terrain he had just lowered, causing him to collide with Deidara. Recuperating, he complimented Kankurō's improvement and later remarked that he had obtained the immortal body he had always desired, upon seeing the former reveal his old body. Sasori then manipulated Shin in avoiding Omoi and Kankurō's attacks, before Deidara detonated the clay placed inside of Shin.

Expounding on his knowledge of Root, he stated that their ideals to become emotionless were similar to his own endeavours, whilst Shin reformed. However, struck from behind by an enraged Sai's attack, both he and Deidara are then contained by Kankurō's puppets. As Shin deconstructed, after his soul was set free, Sasori noted that he couldn't feel any response from his threads. When Kankurō explained that strength came from his soul, and not in spite of it, as he poured his heart and soul into his creations, Sasori emotionally accepted that his puppets and techniques were what immortalised him. Starting to deconstruct, he entrusted his Mother and Father puppets to Kankurō, telling him to pass them down to future generations. With his soul freed, only a pile of debris, and the corpse of the unknown individual who was used as part of the ritual remained.

At the time of his death, Sasori had not yet captured his assigned tailed beast. A short dialogue between himself and Deidara suggested that Sasori did not even know what beast he had been assigned to target. However, after his death, Tobi took his place as Deidara's new partner and his ring in Akatsuki, and, later, he captured the Three-Tails, thereby suggesting that the beast was Sasori's target.

However, due to the preservation of his body, Sasori's influence on future events was not over with his death. Prior to the events at the Five Kage Summit, Kankurō recovered Sasori's body to replace his usual puppets. It seems that some modifications have been made to his body since Sasori's death, although it is unknown if certain mechanisms were previously installed, but were not shown prior to Sasori's death. Using the Sasori puppet to fight the reincarnated Sasori, Kankurō manages to give Sasori closure by stating he achieved his immortality through all the puppets he made.

In Other Media

Road to Ninja: Naruto the Movie

An alternate version of Sasori appears in the Genjutsu World. Unlike the real version of Sasori, this version doesn't use Human Puppets but ordinary puppets instead. However, he apparently made himself into a puppet to preserve his youth, much like the real-world counterpart.

Video Games

Sasori is a playable character in the following video games:

The name "Sasori" (蠍) means "scorpion".

Sasori had the same birth date as Masashi Kishimoto.

Additionally, his birth date, November 8, makes Sasori's Western astrological sign Scorpio, the scorpion. His alias of the Red Sand may carry connotations towards the planet Mars, traditional ruler of the sign.

Studio Pierrot's Settei sheets of Sasori show that he was 147.5 cm when his friend Komushi died.

According to the databook(s):

His hobby was remodelling his puppet collection.

Sasori wished to fight Monzaemon Chikamatsu.

Sasori doesn't need food.

Sasori had completed 72 official missions in total: 5 D-rank, 12 C-rank, 16 B-rank, 29 A-rank, 10 S-rank.

Sasori's favourite phrase was "Eternal beauty" (永久の美, Eikyū no Utsukushī).

Sasori had one of the longest battle times in the anime - spanning approximately 8 episodes - giving him roughly about three hours of battle screen-time.

In the first poll he was in (the 6th overall poll), he placed 6th on the list. In the second poll, he placed 8th.

Sasori made a brief appearance in the Naruto: Shippūden episode 129 omake, walking past Sakura Haruno and Naruto Uzumaki in a festival, glancing at the latter.

Sasori and his former partners Orochimaru and Deidara all had a role in the deaths of three of the Kazekage. Sasori killed the Third, Orochimaru killed the Fourth, and Deidara was responsible for the Fifth.

(Upon seeing Kankurō using his puppet body) "My old puppet body... Suddenly it all seems so pointless. I now have the body I've always desired, one that will never rot or decay. I've truly become a puppet in every sense of the word."

(To Kankurō) "Kankurō... I want you to have my "Mother" and "Father" puppets as well... and when you die, pass them both on... to the next generation."

References

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Sasori (サソリ, Sasori), renowned as Sasori of the Red Sand (赤砂のサソリ, Akasuna no Sasori), was an S-rank missing-nin from Sunagakure's Puppet Brigade and a member of Akatsuki, where he was partnered with Orochimaru and later Deidara. When Sasori was young, his father and mother were killed by Sakumo Hatake in battle, leaving him in the care of his grandmother, Chiyo.

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A video of trump and every time he says 'CHINA.'

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Donald Trump says the word China over and over. Subscribe to HuffPost Movie Mashups: http://goo.gl/8Md2G8 HuffPost Movie Mashups are a collection videos celebrating cinematic tropes and themes, and a part of the larger Huffington Post internet news, blog, and video community.