Dec. 5, 2016
Vol. 239
by Theodore Pigott, special correspondent
Trump Wins Surprise Victory to Become the Next President of the United States For the past eight years, Barack Obama has served as the president of the United States of America. However, because of the Twenty-Second Amendment to the US Constitution, he is not able to run for a third term as president, even though he is very popular among many Americans. As a result, the two major American political parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, both have new candidates running for the US presidency in 2016. For the Democrats, Hillary Rodham Clinton is the party’s official candidate. In the primary race, however, she faced stiff competition from the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders. Clinton now has Sanders’ full support, and in her campaign, she has been emphasizing her thirty years of experience in government, including stints as a US senator and Secretary of State. She was also the First Lady of the United States in the 1990s when her husband, Bill Clinton, was president for eight years. If elected, Hilary Clinton would become the first female president in US history. Donald Trump, the Republican candidate, by contrast, is a self-proclaimed “outsider” who has never been elected to any government office. He often boasts about his experience in business, and he claims that he will “Make America Great Again.” Although many in the Republican Party never thought he would actually win the party’s nomination, Trump has been able to gather support from predominantly older, white, conservative voters. As the November 8 election drew near, Clinton and Trump met in a series of three debates. In the first debate, many thought that Trump appeared unprepared, since he often failed to answer the moderator’s questions and interrupted Clinton twenty-five times in the first half hour of the debate. In the second debate, Trump seemed to recover and he went on the offensive, sometimes moving closely behind Clinton when she was speaking. In the third and final debate, however, Trump shocked many by saying he might not accept the results of a “rigged” election. He also called Clinton a “nasty woman.” Many people were also shocked when it was revealed that Trump had made extremely rude and offensive comments about women in 2005. Though Trump has apologized and dismissed this 1