Wrapping Up American History - 2016 to the Present

What is American History B Online?

The 11th-grade level American History course podcast for BESD.

00:00 Introduction
We've made it to the present. And I want to warn you upfront — this one is going to feel different from every other episode we've done. Everything we've covered so far has had time to settle. Twenty or fifty or a hundred years have passed. Historians have argued about it, sifted through the evidence, and mostly landed on some version of what happened and why. We know how the story ended.
What we're covering today? We're still living it. These events are still unfolding. That's both exciting and uncomfortable — because we don't know yet how it ends.
As a consequence, the debates on these things are still raw. People you know — maybe people in your own family — have strong feelings about nearly everything we're about to discuss. I'm going to do my best to tell you what happened and why, and to give you the strongest version of both sides wherever they exist. My goal is that when this is over, you genuinely can't tell where I stand.
But I hope you're forming your own opinions. That's the whole point.
This also makes you something no previous class of students has ever been: the first historians of this moment. So pay attention – both to this episode, and to the world around you.
Without further ado, let's go back to 2016.
01:34 The Election of Donald Trump
By 2016, a lot of Americans were frustrated. Not just with one party — with the whole system. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq had gone on for over a decade. The economy had recovered from the Great Recession. That recovery, though, hadn’t felt equal. Wall Street was raking in record profits, but many working-class communities felt left behind. Trust in government and in media was near historic lows.
Into that frustration stepped Donald Trump, a New York real estate developer and television personality who had never held political office. He ran as a Republican, but his campaign was less about traditional Republican ideas and more about blowing up the whole political establishment (figuratively speaking). And it worked. Trump won the 2016 election — defeating Democrat Hillary Clinton — and became the 45th President of the United States.
His victory sent a clear message: a lot of Americans were done with business as usual.

02:40 Trump's First Term: Deregulation
Economically, Trump's first term looked a lot like Reagan's. His focus was on deregulation — getting the government out of the way of businesses, cutting regulations, and letting the economy run more freely. It was the same idea and was done with the same reasoning. And, like before, whether it worked is something economists will argue about for decades.
While he was deregulating, Trump was also reworking America’s foreign relations. In 2018, Trump pulled the United States out of the Iran nuclear deal — the JCPOA. Remember that deal? That was the multinational agreement where Iran agreed to limit its nuclear program in exchange for lifting economic sanctions. Trump's argument was that the deal didn't go far enough and that Iran couldn't be trusted – that Iran wasn’t really following the terms of the deal. His critics said walking away just gave Iran permission to start enriching uranium again.
Whether you agree or disagree, the result of this decision is going to have an enormous impact on life in 2026.
03:54 The First Impeachment
In 2019, Trump became only the third president in American history to be impeached.
Here's what happened. Ukraine is a country that was in serious need of military support — they were under threat from Russia. Now Congress had already approved military aid for Ukraine.
Trump, though, wanted Ukraine to investigate ties between their country and Joe Biden, who he correctly deduced would be his Democratic opponent in the 2020 election. Trump’s opponents accused him of using congressionally-approved military funds as a bargaining chip to help his own reelection.
The House of Representatives – which consisted mostly of democrats - impeached him. But remember what impeachment actually means — it's a charge, not a conviction. When the trial happened in the Senate, the Senate voted not to convict. Trump remained in office.
And if that sounds familiar — it should. Clinton was impeached. The Senate didn't convict him either. Andrew Johnson was impeached, and he was also found innocent.
Trump’s supporters argued that the House was just playing political games. Opponents argued that he was trying to unlawfully make a deal with foreign powers.
 
05:18 COVID-19
Then 2020 arrived and brought something nobody was ready for: a global pandemic.
COVID-19 swept across the world with terrifying speed. In the United States, the Trump administration launched Operation Warp Speed — a massive push to develop a vaccine in record time. Under normal circumstances, vaccines take years to develop and test. These vaccines were developed, tested, and approved in less than a year. That timeline was remarkable by any historical standard. And – like most things in this era – people interpreted it very differently.
In the meantime, there were shutdowns. Businesses closed. The economic fallout lasted for years.
Schools went online. Some states — not Utah, but many others — kept those school shutdowns going for a long time. Studies have shown that the disruption to education was severe, and some students never fully caught up.
The response to Covid-19 was another illustration of both federalism and executive orders. President Biden (who we’ll get to in a minute) attempted to mandate face masks, which was shot down for issues of both federalism and executive overreach. States, on the other hand, were allowed to adopt their own policies in light of the Tenth Amendment.
06:41 January 6, 2021
And then came January 6th.
Democrat Joe Biden won the 2020 election against Donald Trump. Trump disputed the results, claiming widespread fraud. Courts across the country reviewed those claims and threw them out. The Justice Department, led by Trump's own attorney general, found no evidence of widespread fraud that would have changed the outcome.
But a large group of Trump's supporters believed otherwise. On January 6, 2021, Congress was meeting to officially certify the Electoral College results. This is a routine and largely symbolic process, as neither the Constitution nor the law give Congress permission to alter the outcome. A massive rally was taking place nearby. A group of people from that rally, believing they had Trump’s blessing, stormed the United States Capitol building.
They broke windows. They overwhelmed Capitol Police. Members of Congress hid and fled. The certification was interrupted for hours.
Many Americans from both sides of the political aisle found this deeply disturbing. The symbolic weight of an angry mob bursting into the Capitol bothered them immensely. Some called for action.

Trump's Second Impeachment
After Biden took office, the House impeached Trump a second time — this time for his role in the events of January 6th.
And here's where things got constitutionally interesting, even for the people who blamed Donald Trump for what happened on January 6th: The impeachment happened after Trump had already left office. Can you impeach a former president? The Constitution is not entirely clear on this. Most Republicans in the Senate argued you can't — that impeachment exists to remove someone from office, and if they're already gone, the whole point is moot. Most Democrats disagreed. Note, though, that for both groups I used the word “most.” Even inside their own parties, people disagreed on the Constitutionality of the impeachment.
The Senate voted, and again, Trump was not convicted. But the debate over whether that impeachment was even constitutional? That's still an unsettled legal issue.
09:06 Biden's Presidency
Joe Biden took office inheriting a country that was exhausted, divided, and still climbing out of a pandemic. Many independent voters and swing voters – voters willing to vote for either party – supported Biden, believing that he would be a middle-of-the-road president. They hoped he would have the vision and the political skill to pull the country back together.
Biden, however, governed more along party lines than many had hoped. The highly divided political climate was nowhere near ending.
09:42 The Afghanistan Withdrawal
One of the biggest early crises of Biden's presidency was the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
You'll remember that the United States had been in Afghanistan for twenty years — the longest war in American history. Trump had actually negotiated a withdrawal agreement in 2020, setting a timeline for American troops to leave. Biden inherited both that commitment and a Taliban that had been quietly growing stronger in anticipation.
Biden went through with the withdrawal, choosing to do it as quickly as possible.
And it went badly.
The Afghan government — the one the U.S. had spent twenty years and trillions of dollars trying to build — collapsed in days. Not weeks. Days. The Taliban swept back into power almost immediately.
The images coming out of Afghanistan were heartbreaking. Refugees flooded the airport trying to escape. Women and girls who had grown up with the right to go to school watched it disappear overnight — the Taliban banned girls from school past 6th grade. Women couldn't appear in public without a male escort.
America's allies around the world noticed. When a superpower makes a commitment and then withdraws so suddenly that the government collapses in 72 hours, people ask: How much can we trust them? That's a hard question to recover from.
11:12 Student Loans and the Limits of Executive Power
One of Biden's signature domestic goals was student loan forgiveness. Millions of Americans had taken out federal student loans — often to attend colleges that, frankly, oversold what they could deliver. Biden wanted to forgive a significant portion of that debt.
Here's the problem. Remember executive orders? Biden tried to forgive student loans by executive order — without Congress. Would the elastic clause (a.k.a. the necessary and proper clause) stretch far enough to let President Biden forgive the loans?
The issue went all the way to the Supreme Court, and the court said: No. The president doesn't have the authority to do that unilaterally. Congress would have to act.
This is that same question we keep running into. How much power does the president have? And every time a president overreaches, the courts remind them that there are limits.
12:11 Dobbs (Abortion) and Federalism
In 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade — the 1973 decision that had established a federal right to abortion.
And this brings us to federalism — which I want you to really understand, because it keeps showing up. So I’m going to give you a quick repeat of what we already discussed.
Federalism is the idea that power in the American system is shared between the national government and the states. There are two competing forces in the Constitution: the Supremacy Clause, which says when federal law and state law conflict, federal law wins — and the Tenth Amendment, which says that any power the Constitution doesn't specifically give the federal government belongs to the states.
The Roe decision in 1973 said abortion was a federal constitutional right — meaning states couldn't ban it. This recent decision said: no it's not. Which means, under the Tenth Amendment, it goes back to the states. Some states immediately banned it. Others protected it. That's federalism in action.
Whether you think the Court was right or wrong probably depends on how you think about both abortion and about the balance of federal vs. state power. But now you understand what the legal argument was actually about.
13:39 The Rise of AI
One more thing happened during these years that's worth noting: In November 2022, a company called OpenAI released ChatGPT — a large language model AI that anyone could talk to in plain English.
You've almost certainly used it or something like it.
Here's why it's controversial. On one hand, AI can be an incredible tool — answering questions, generating content, and making information more accessible than ever. On the other hand: AI systems can confidently state things that are completely false. They can be intentionally used to generate misinformation at a scale unaided humans never could. They can shortcut student work. And so there's a real debate about whether relying on AI might actually make people worse at thinking — because if the AI does the reasoning for you, are you actually learning anything?
We don't have answers yet. You're living through the experiment. (If you’re curious, though, as of Spring 2026, the preliminary answer appears to be that using AI too much makes a person stupider. They call it “cognitive decline.”)
14:54 The 2024 Election
Now — the 2024 election. And here's what was historically unique about it. I know what you're thinking: Trump running again — hasn't that kind of thing happened before? Yes. Grover Cleveland lost, came back, and won. That's not new.
What was genuinely new was this: President Biden, the sitting president, withdrew from the race midway through the election cycle. He stepped aside and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris. Harris became the Democratic nominee without going through a primary — without voters ever getting the chance to decide if she was the one they wanted.
It had happened before — once, back in 1968, when Hubert Humphrey won the Democratic nomination without entering a single primary. Note that you’ve never heard of Hubert Humphrey. That’s because he lost. And he lost badly. In fact, it went so badly that both parties rewrote their rules afterward to make primaries the standard.
For the first time in over fifty years, the Democrats found themselves back in that same situation. They had no way to know how the public would receive Harris, because there was never a real public test. Whether that cost the Democrats the election is something people will debate for a long time.
But whether Harris was the Democrat’s best choice or not, Trump won. He became the 47th President — and only the second person in American history to serve two non-consecutive terms, after Grover Cleveland.
16:32 Trump's Second Term: A Different Focus
Here's something interesting: Trump's second term is economically almost the opposite of his first — at least in one important way. First term: deregulation. Get the government out of the economy. Let the market run. Second term: tariffs. That's still not regulation in the traditional sense — Trump isn't telling businesses how to operate. But he is using the government as an economic weapon, intervening in trade. It's a different kind of conservatism than the 1980s version — less 'get out of the way' and more 'use government power, but use it our way.’
A tariff is a tax placed on imported goods. When the U.S. puts a tariff on, say, goods from China, those goods become more expensive. The idea is to make American-made products more competitive. If the foreign version is cheaper, businesses will just buy that instead. So instead they add a tariff to make the price comparable (or more expensive than) the same thing made in America. Tariffs are supposed to protect American manufacturers and American jobs.
But here’s the other side of tariffs: when you make imported goods more expensive, consumers pay more. And other countries don't just sit quietly. They respond with their own tariffs on American goods. American farmers can't sell their soybeans in China as easily. American car manufacturers pay more for foreign parts.
That escalating cycle — my tariff, your tariff, my bigger tariff, your bigger tariff — is called a trade war. And it's exactly what happened.
18:21 The Executive Authority Question — Again
Here's the constitutional wrinkle. How did Trump implement most of these tariffs?
Executive orders. Without Congress.
And again, people of both parties asked: Can the president actually do that? The Constitution expressly gives Congress the power to regulate trade. Presidents have broad authority over foreign affairs, but using sweeping executive orders to reshape the entire global trade relationship? That's being challenged in courts.
Same question. Different policy. How much power does the president have?
18:59 The Immigration Crackdown
Trump's second term also brought a significant crackdown on immigration, with ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) ramping up enforcement dramatically. Deportations increased. DACA — the Dreamers program Obama created — faced renewed challenges.
And this is one where I want to give you both sides fairly, because this is a genuine debate with real people on both sides.
Those who support stricter enforcement argue: Countries have the right to control their borders. Legal immigrants followed the rules — sometimes waiting years — and undocumented immigration undermines that system. There are real security concerns: drug trafficking, gang activity crossing the border. Laws on the books should be enforced.
Those who favor a more flexible approach argue: Most undocumented immigrants are contributing members of their communities. Many have been here for decades and have American children. Separating families causes genuine harm to real people, including American citizens. The legal path to citizenship is extraordinarily slow and difficult — sometimes impossible.
Most of those things can be true at the same time. That's why it's a debate.
20:20 The Iran War
And now we get to the thing that is most recent, most raw, and most uncertain.
To understand it, we need to thread backward through everything we've covered.
In 1979, Iran overthrew its American-backed government and became a theocracy. They took American hostages. For decades after that, they funded terrorist groups across the Middle East. In 2015, the JCPOA — the nuclear deal — tried to limit Iran's nuclear program in exchange for lifting sanctions. In 2018, Trump withdrew from the deal. Iran responded by gradually ramping its nuclear program back up.
Then, on February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched airstrikes on Iran.
The targets included Iran's nuclear program, military infrastructure, and leadership. In the strikes, Iran's Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Khamenei — the head of the theocracy since 1989 — was killed.
Iran responded. They struck U.S. allies in the region. And — this is where it hits home — they closed the Strait of Hormuz.
The Strait of Hormuz is a narrow waterway connecting the Persian Gulf to the open ocean. About 20 percent of the world's oil supply passes through it. When Iran closed it, global oil prices spiked — and you felt it at the gas pump. That's why gas prices nearly doubled in the spring of 2026.
Now. Both sides of this.
Supporters of the strikes argue: Iran was advancing a nuclear program that posed an existential threat to the region. They fund terrorism. Diplomacy had been tried repeatedly and failed. A weakened Iran represented the best — maybe the last — opportunity to prevent a nuclear-armed theocracy.
Opponents argue: The strikes happened while negotiations were reportedly still underway. Civilian casualties have been reported. And here's a lesson we've learned over and over in this unit: removing a government creates a power vacuum. What fills that vacuum? We don't know. The long-term destabilization of a country of 90 million people in one of the world's most volatile regions — nobody can predict what that looks like.
And then there's the constitutional question the Founders cared deeply about: Congress is supposed to declare war. The president is not supposed to unilaterally start one. Since Reagan, presidents have pushed further and further into that territory. Were these strikes legal under American law? Under international law? Those arguments are happening right now.
And of course they’re all exacerbated because we don't know how this ends.
23:22 Where We Leave Off
So here you are. You've gone from the earliest debates over the Constitution all the way to a war that started mere months ago. You've watched the same arguments — arguments about federal power vs. state power, about presidential authority vs. Congressional authority, about security vs. civil liberties — You’ve watched the same arguments show up again and again across 250 years of American history.
That's not a coincidence. Those tensions are baked into the system. The Founders designed it that way. This design is not because they wanted chaos, but because they were deeply suspicious of concentrated power. They'd lived under a king and didn’t want to see another one.
The question is what you do with that understanding.
You're probably old enough to vote in the next election. You're old enough to form an opinion. You're the first historians of this moment — and someday, future students are going to learn about what happened in your lifetime the way you've been learning about Vietnam and Watergate.
What they learn will depend, in part, on the choices your generation makes.
So pay attention. And participate! Our country was never designed for spectators.