It ultimately resulted in a massive defeat for Democrats in the 2010 midterm elections, when they lost 63 seats in the House of Representatives and six seats in the Senate. After 2010, however, the economy gradually began to recover and outrage over the Wall Street bailouts subsided.

Moreover, in May 2011, President Obama won a major victory for all Americans: Osama bin Laden, the leader of the terrorist group Al Qaeda responsible for the September 11 attack, was captured and killed by American forces.

Still, as the 2012 election approached, questions remained about President Obama’s chances for re-election. Pundits were bracing for a very tight race between him and Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney on the Republican side. Ultimately, however, President Obama performed better than expected and handily won re-election, with 332 electoral votes and a score of 3.9 points in the popular vote. However, down-ballot Democrats did not fare so well, so the Republican Party retained its majority in the House of Representatives.

President Obama’s second term was marred by foreign policy complications in countries such as Iraq, where the ISIS terror group came to prominence, and Libya, where long-ruling dictator Muammar Gaddafi was deposed and executed by local rebel groups, aided and armed by American intelligence services.

Domestically, a new “culture war” was beginning to emerge among the American public. Neo-Marxist ideas about the supposed institutional oppression of women and minorities entered the mainstream media and academia. Suddenly, professors and journalists were adamantly trying to sell the idea that the United States led by a black president was actually a “white supremacist patriarchy.” Apparently there was a serious reaction from ordinary people to these absurdities, and the response from the media, academia and a band of ‘woke’ activists (this is when this term entered the public vocabulary) was to to do everything to silence it. the dissenting voices. Calls to fire people because of an opinion or joke were very common at the time, and unfortunately they were often heeded by companies and other institutions. Jokes and comedians were mainly in the crosshairs of the woke ‘Inquisition’.

However, the economy did well and unemployment rates fell after the horrors of the 2008 crisis; and President Obama remained a charismatic figure with the historic distinction of being the first African-American POTUS. His approval rating was just above 50 percent when the 2016 election year arrived.

The nomination on the Democratic side wasn’t really up for debate – or at least it wasn’t supposed to be. Former First Lady and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton narrowly lost to Obama in the 2008 primaries, and she was unwilling to experience anything like that again. Besides them, no major national figures participated in the 2016 primaries. But then an independent and self-proclaimed socialist senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, gained ground as the primaries progressed. He was especially popular among young voters of the Democratic Party. However, Clinton ultimately defeated him, with the not-so-secret help of the DNC, and ultimately won the nomination.

Meanwhile, when billionaire real estate developer and reality show star Donald Trump announced his run for the Republican nomination for president, the media treated him like a fun new candidate. He was not expected to actually win the primaries. What most set him apart from other Republican candidates is that he took a strong stance against illegal immigration, which others initially shied away from to avoid offending Latino voters. However, Donald Trump made the call for building a wall on the US-Mexico border the signature issue of his campaign. His simple manner of speaking also appealed to many people who were fed up with the ridiculously high sensitivities of the newly woke PC culture.

Despite all that, the mainstream media and pollsters gave Donald Trump virtually no chance of winning the election. When a hot mic clip of him talking crudely about women to radio and TV host Billy Bush was released in October, just a few weeks before the election, his own party turned against him. Reportedly, then-RNC Chairman Reince Priebus even tried to pressure him to privately drop out of the race.

Donald Trump, however, stayed inside. Shortly thereafter, the Clinton camp faced a crisis of its own, when FBI Director James Comey announced he was reopening the investigation into Clinton’s handling of classified documents while he served as secretary of state. The investigation was “miraculously” concluded within a few days, just before the election, and Clinton was not criminally charged. So when election night arrived, the mainstream media was giddy again, ready for a big Democratic win.