The American Yawp — Chapter Twenty-Eight: American Carnage
Abridged for Intermediate-High Learners

On January 6, 2021, thousands of protesters stormed the U.S. Capitol to disrupt the vote to certify Joe Biden’s election victory. Urged on by President Donald Trump — “Fight like hell,” he told them — the mob battled police, occupied the Senate chamber, and injured about 150 officers. The attack grew from decades of division: endless wars, rising inequality, and collapsing trust in institutions.

The twenty-first century’s wars began on September 11, 2001, when an al-Qaeda hijacker team of nineteen crashed four planes, killing nearly 3,000 people. President George W. Bush declared a global War on Terror. The U.S. invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, toppling the Taliban government that had sheltered al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Then, claiming Iraq’s Saddam Hussein held weapons of mass destruction, Bush invaded Iraq in March 2003. Baghdad fell quickly, but no such weapons were ever found, and a bloody insurgency followed. Hussein was captured, tried, and hanged.

The wars dragged on. In 2007, Bush sent 27,000 more troops to Iraq in “the surge”; the last combat troops left in 2011. Afghanistan fared worse: after twenty years of war, American forces began to withdraw in chaos in August 2021, and the Taliban immediately retook the country. At home, Hurricane Katrina’s 2005 flooding of New Orleans — where poor Black residents were left stranded — exposed deep racial and economic divides.

In 2008, a housing bubble burst into the Great Recession. Banks had bundled risky mortgages into complex investments; when homeowners defaulted, giants like Lehman Brothers collapsed. The government’s bank bailout fueled anger that helped elect Barack Obama, America’s first Black president. Obama passed the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”), which stopped insurers from denying coverage for preexisting conditions, but a conservative Tea Party movement pushed Republicans sharply right.

Recovery was slow and unequal: corporate profits soared while wages began to stagnate. In 2010, the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision let unlimited money flood into politics. Meanwhile, smartphones and social media transformed public life. Videos of police killing Black Americans — in Ferguson, Missouri, and elsewhere — sparked the Black Lives Matter movement, and the #MeToo movement challenged sexual abuse by powerful men.

In 2016, voters rejected the political establishment. Republican Donald Trump, promising to “Make America Great Again” and build a border wall, defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton despite losing the popular vote by nearly three million. As president, Trump passed a tax cut favoring the wealthy, separated migrant families at the border, and, according to one count, made over 30,000 false or misleading claims. In 2020, Joe Biden defeated him, but Trump refused to concede — a lie that led directly to January 6.

Then came the Covid-19 pandemic. The virus emerged in Wuhan, China, in late 2019 and devastated New York City in spring 2020. A lockdown closed schools and businesses; ten million Americans lost jobs in April alone. By May 2022, one million Americans had died. A vaccine arrived in 2021, but many refused it, and the virus became a permanent, seasonal threat.

American culture kept shifting. In 2015, the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage nationwide; in 2022, it overturned Roe v. Wade, ending the constitutional right to abortion. Younger generations embraced diversity while fighting over immigration and transgender rights. In 2024, after a disastrous debate performance, Biden withdrew and Kamala Harris lost to Trump, who returned to office pardoning the January 6 rioters on his first day. Polls showed deep despair: in late 2024, only 19 percent of Americans were satisfied with the country’s direction.

From the September 11 attacks through recession, pandemic, and insurrection, the United States endured staggering change. Yet history never stands still: new generations, with new ideas, will shape whatever comes next.