How America Changed

By Michael Dimock And John Gramlich

Donald Trump stunned the political world in 2016 when he became the first person without government or military experience ever to be elected president of the United States. His four-year tenure in the White House revealed extraordinary fissures in American society but left little doubt that he is a figure unlike any other in the nation’s history.

Trump, the New York businessman and former reality TV show star, won the 2016 election after a campaign that defied norms and commanded public attention from the moment it began. His approach to governing was equally unconventional.

Other presidents tried to unify the nation after turning from the campaign trail to the White House. From his first days in Washington to his last, Trump seemed to revel in the political fight. He used his presidential megaphone to criticize a long list of perceived adversaries, from the news media to members of his own administration, elected officials in both political parties and foreign heads of state. The more than 26,000 tweets he sent as president provided an unvarnished, real-time account of his thinking on a broad spectrum of issues and eventually proved so provocative that Twitter permanently banned him from its platform. In his final days in office, Trump became the first president ever to be impeached twice – the second time for inciting an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol during the certification of the election he lost – and the nation’s first chief executive in more than 150 years to refuse to attend his successor’s inauguration.

Trump’s policy record included major changes at home and abroad. He achieved a string of long-sought conservative victories domestically, including the biggest corporate tax cuts on record, the elimination of scores of environmental regulations and a reshaping of the federal judiciary. In the international arena, he imposed tough new immigration restrictions, withdrew from several multilateral agreements, forged closer ties with Israel and launched a tit-for-tat trade dispute with China as part of a wider effort to address what he saw as glaring imbalances in America’s economic relationship with other countries. 

Many questions about Trump’s legacy and his role in the nation’s political future will take time to answer. But some takeaways from his presidency are already clear from Pew Research Center’s studies in recent years. In this essay, we take a closer look at a few of the key societal shifts that accelerated – or emerged for the first time – during the tenure of the 45th president.

Deeply partisan and personal divides

Trump’s status as a political outsider, his outspoken nature and his willingness to upend past customs and expectations of presidential behavior made him a constant focus of public attention, as well as a source of deep partisan divisions.

Even before he took office, Trump divided Republicans and Democrats more than any incoming chief executive in the prior three decades.1 The gap only grew more pronounced after he became president. An average of 86% of Republicans approved of Trump’s handling of the job over the course of his tenure, compared with an average of just 6% of Democrats – the widest partisan gap in approval for any president in the modern era of polling.2 Trump’s overall approval rating never exceeded 50% and fell to a low of just 29% in his final weeks in office, shortly after a mob of his supporters attacked the Capitol.

Republicans and Democrats weren’t just divided over Trump’s handling of the job. They also interpreted many aspects of his character and personality in fundamentally opposite ways. In a 2019 survey, at least three-quarters of Republicans said the president’s words sometimes or often made them feel hopeful, entertained, informed, happy and proud. Even larger shares of Democrats said his words sometimes or often made them feel concerned, exhausted, angry, insulted and confused.

The strong reactions that Trump provoked appeared in highly personal contexts, too. In a 2019 survey, 71% of Democrats who were single and looking for a relationship said they would definitely or probably not consider being in a committed relationship with someone who had voted for Trump in 2016. That far exceeded the 47% of single-and-looking Republicans who said they would not consider being in a serious relationship with a Hillary Clinton voter.

Many Americans opted not to talk about Trump or politics at all. In 2019, almost half of U.S. adults (44%) said they wouldn’t feel comfortable talking about Trump with someone they didn’t know well. A similar share (45%) said later that year that they had stopped talking politics with someone because of something that person had said.  

In addition to the intense divisions that emerged over Trump personally, his tenure saw a further widening of the gulf between Republicans and Democrats over core political values and issues, including in areas that weren’t especially partisan before his arrival. 

In 1994, when Pew Research Center began asking Americans a series of 10 “values questions” on subjects including the role of government, environmental protection and national security, the average gap between Republicans and Democrats was 15 percentage points. By 2017, the first year of Trump’s presidency, the average partisan gap on those same questions had more than doubled to 36 points, the result of a steady, decades-long increase in polarization.

On some issues, there were bigger changes in thinking among Democrats than among Republicans during Trump’s presidency. That was especially the case on topics such as race and gender, which gained new attention amid the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements. In a 2020 survey that followed months of racial justice protests in the U.S., for instance, 70% of Democrats said it is “a lot more difficult” to be a Black person than to be a White person in the U.S. today, up from 53% who said the same thing just four years earlier. Republican attitudes on the same question changed little during that span, with only a small share agreeing with the Democratic view.

On other issues, attitudes changed more among Republicans than among Democrats. One notable example related to views of higher education: Between 2015 and 2017, the share of Republicans who said colleges and universities were having a negative effect on the way things were going in the U.S. rose from 37% to 58%, even as around seven-in-ten Democrats continued to say these institutions were having a positive effect.

A dearth of shared facts and information

One of the few things that Republicans and Democrats could agree on during Trump’s tenure is that they didn’t share the same set of facts. In a 2019 survey, around three-quarters of Americans (73%) said most Republican and Democratic voters disagreed not just over political plans and policies, but over “basic facts.”

Much of the disconnect between the parties involved the news media, which Trump routinely disparaged as “fake news” and the “enemy of the people.” Republicans, in particular, expressed widespread and growing distrust of the press. In a 2019 survey, Republicans voiced more distrust than trust in 2o of the 30 specific news outlets they were asked about, even as Democrats expressed more trust than distrust in 22 of those same outlets. Republicans overwhelmingly turned to and trusted one outlet included in the study – Fox News – even as Democrats used and expressed trust in a wider range of sources. The study concluded that the two sides placed their trust in “two nearly inverse media environments.” 

Some of the media organizations Trump criticized most vocally saw the biggest increases in GOP distrust over time. The share of Republicans who said they distrusted CNN rose from 33% in a 2014 survey to 58% by 2019. The proportion of Republicans who said they distrusted The Washington Post and The New York Times rose 17 and 12 percentage points, respectively, during that span.3

In addition to their criticisms of specific news outlets, Republicans also questioned the broader motives of the media. In surveys fielded over the course of 2018 and 2019, Republicans were far less likely than Democrats to say that journalists act in the best interests of the public, have high ethical standards, prevent political leaders from doing things they shouldn’t and deal fairly with all sides. Trump’s staunchest GOP supporters often had the most negative views: Republicans who strongly approved of Trump, for example, were much more likely than those who only somewhat approved or disapproved of him to say journalists have very low ethical standards. -Pew Research