The longest government shutdown in U.S history has just come to an end after a long 35 days. The dispute started when President Donald Trump stated that he wanted more than $5 billion from American taxpayers to fund for his U.S/Mexico border wall.

Illegal immigration is a progressive issue and stopping it is President Trump’s top priority. However, building a 30 foot tall concrete wall that stretches for over 2000 miles is certainly not cheap. In order for the wall to be successfully built, American taxpayers will need to fund it. As it turns out, more Americans voted against this than for it. Trump, enraged after hearing this, decided that the ideal move would be to shutdown the government as a whole.

For 35 days, federal workers were unpaid and the IRS was shut down which stopped tax refunds from occurring, resulting in the economy starting to suffer. This caused a lot of anger as more than 800,000 federal employees were not getting paychecks for their hard earned work.

The shutdown finally came to an end on January 25th, 2019. Soon after, Trump delivered a speech to the United States Congress. This was called the State Of The Union address, which is a speech that all presidents deliver at some point or another, where they discuss budget issues/requests, general reports and the overall health of the economy.

This speech was surprisingly bipartisan and appealed to both of the main political parties, Democratic and Republican. President Trump addressed a vast number of unanswered questions and spoke about topics that are genuinely important in our country, not just his plans for the wall, which is what a lot of people were expecting. He also apologized to farmers across the country because of the shutdown interfering with their crop payments, and he congratulated women on finally being able to work in Congress. The speech lasted well over two hours and changed a lot of people’s minds about our notoriously controversial president. Some even said it was the best address they heard by any president, but others disagreed. On the bright side of it all, from what the speech entails, things are looking up for America.