United States

Comey’s description of the encounter (which would be repeated in new testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee in June) sparked concern, even among some members of Trump’s own party, that the president’s actions may have constituted obstruction of justice. Four congressional committees—the Senate and House intelligence committees, the House oversight committee, and the Senate Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism—were actively investigating Russian interference in the election. In the wake of the Comey memo, however, protracted calls by many Democrats and even some Republicans for the appointment of an independent prosecutor or special committee were answered on May 17 by the Justice Department’s appointment of former FBI director Robert Mueller as special counsel to oversee the FBI’s investigation of Russian interference in the election and possible collusion between Russian officials and the Trump campaign.

Hurricanes Harvey and Maria and the mass shootings in Las Vegas, Parkland, and Santa Fe

In August Hurricane Harvey, the most forceful storm to make landfall in the United States in more than a decade, inundated the Houston area. The city received more than 16 inches (400 mm) of rain in a 24-hour period. Catastrophic flooding claimed several lives, more than 100,000 homes were damaged, and thousands of people remained displaced months afterward. Already challenged by the events in Houston, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) responded to another natural disaster when Puerto Rico was hammered by Hurricane Maria, a nearly category 5 cyclone, in September. That storm caused more than $90 billion in property damage and left some 400,000 of the island’s electricity customers without power for nearly five months. Puerto Rico’s Department of Public Safety’s initial official death toll from the storm was 64 lives, but some later estimates put the figure in the thousands, and in August 2018 the Puerto Rican government upped the official estimate to nearly 3,000 deaths.

Mass shootings continued to afflict the country. In October 2017 in Las Vegas, 58 people were killed and hundreds more were wounded when a man used as many as 23 guns to rain fire on the audience of a country music festival from the window of a 32nd-floor hotel room. In February 2018 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, 14 students and three staff members were killed when a former student who had been expelled for disciplinary reasons went on a rampage. Some of the students who survived the shooting became outspoken advocates for tighter gun-control laws and played prominent roles in the March for Our Lives protest that drew hundreds of thousands of demonstrators to Washington, D.C., on March 24, 2018, as well as to some 800 other gun-control rallies across the country and around the globe. Nonetheless, fewer than two months later, on May 18 in Santa Fe, Texas, another 10 people were killed in a shooting at a high school.

The #MeToov movement, the Alabama U.S. Senate special election, and the Trump tax cut

A different kind of social movement began shaking American society in October 2017, after it was revealed that film mogul Harvey Weinstein had for years with impunity sexually harassed and assaulted women in the industry. After one of his victims, actress Alyssa Milano, made her story known, a multitude of others who had been victims of sexual harassment or assault began sharing their experiences on social media. The resulting movement, which took its name from the social media hashtag used to post the stories, #MeToo, grew over the coming months to bring condemnation to dozens of powerful men in politics, business, entertainment, and the news media, including political commentator Bill O’Reilly, television newsmen Charlie Rose and Matt Lauer, actors Kevin Spacey and Sylvester Stallone, and U.S. Sen. Al Franken.

Allegations of sexual misconduct also played a pivotal role in the special election in December 2017 to fill the seat in the U.S. Senate for Alabama vacated by Jeff Sessions when he became attorney general. During the general election campaign, allegations surfaced that the Republican candidate, controversial former Alabama supreme court justice Roy Moore, had, when in his 30s, not only romantically pursued a number of teenage girls but also engaged in improper behaviour with some of them, including alleged assault. Seemingly in response to the allegations and as a reflection of growing discontent with the Trump presidency, Alabama voters elected a Democrat (Doug Jones) to the Senate for the first time in more than two decades.