The United States of America has given one of the most divisive figures in its political history another four years in office.
After his third consecutive general election campaign, Donald Trump has emerged victorious and will be sworn back into the office of the president of the United States in January.
He has promised retaliation and retribution. He has made few promises of unity.
Because division has worked for Donald Trump.
While his next term will be his last, he now has four years to continue to reshape the United States and its institutions — and this time, he has more enemies and more determination to settle the score.
What happens next will likely be an extension and an escalation of what we have seen so far in this bizarre campaign.
There were multiple assassination attempts and a post-primary change of candidate.
Pop icons and movie stars weighed in.
High-profile Republicans crossed the aisle.
The world’s richest person jumped around on a stage and proved money cannot buy cool.
But on November 5, that all fell silent and the United States of America arrived at the fork in the road.
It weighed taking a step to the left, into a new, undiscovered world where a woman ascends to the country’s highest office.
Or to the right, down a well-worn path where the oval remains the domain of men, and in particular, one who has been there before.
Candidates will often say an election is about a vote for the future of the nation, but this time that line felt less like hyperbole and more like words of warning.
How Trump will continue to reshape America
When Donald Trump took that escalator ride down into the foyer of Trump Tower in 2015 and announced he was running for president, he was considered a long-shot.
Nearly a decade later, Trump has not only changed American politics, but he has altered the country itself.
In three election cycles, America has been forced to reckon with the strength of its democracy.
Election inspectors were examining ballots as they were counted into the early morning hours in Detroit, Michigan in 2020. (AP: David Goldman)
This year’s election centred on immigration, the economy, access to abortion and, increasingly in the final stages of the campaign, the future of America’s institutions, the rule of law and the integrity of the vote.
As his ramblings ratcheted up and Trump made promises of revenge, both a former chief of staff and Vice-President Harris changed their language too — they began to label Donald Trump a fascist.
“Certainly the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators,” former Trump chief of staff John Kelly said said just weeks ago.
“So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.”
Trump promised to use the Department of Justice to pursue his personal adversaries, including President Joe Biden and his family.
He promised to increase presidential power.
His immigration policies have been described as “violating the basic civil rights of millions of immigrants and native-born Americans alike” by a prominent immigration and criminal justice advocate.
Trump has repeatedly said that given a second term, he will enforce the “largest domestic deportation operation in American history”.
The former president even suggested using the American military on home soil.
As counting in the 2024 election is finalised, it is now clear tens of million people were willing to endorse those ideas and give him the power to action them.
In the Donald Trump era, the United States of America has seen an insurrection, two attempts on a presidential candidate’s life, two impeachments, and unprecedented criminal and civil cases mounted against a former president.
Trump is the first former president to be convicted of a felony crime. He was found guilty on more than 30 counts.
Trump was guilty of falsifying business records earlier this year. (Reuters: Jabin Botsford/Pool )
He ran this campaign while awaiting sentencing for that New York hush money case, and with multiple other serious criminal legal matters hanging over him, including for election subversion and the removal of classified documents from the White House.
He also went into the campaign having been found to have sexually assaulted Jean E Carroll by a jury in a civil trial, also in New York.
Still, a majority of Americans voted for him.
Donald Trump changed America because he changed what so many Americans were willing and able to accept.
Trump the 45th
On the evening of November 8, 2016, the United States, the world and perhaps Donald Trump himself were shocked as he stepped up to make his acceptance speech.
Trump had become the first person with no political or military experience to win a race for the presidency.
Trump’s persona has been embraced by his supporters during each of his presidential runs. (AP: Alex Brandon)
As the 45th president of the United States, Trump did many of the things he had promised in his first campaign.
He built a wall along the porous United States-Mexico border. He eliminated scores of environmental protection laws.
He withdrew the United States from multilateral agreements, including the Paris Agreement.
In January 2017, just days after his inauguration, Trump signed orders banning people from several Muslim countries from entering the United States.
It impacted people who had boarded flights from listed countries with protection status only for them to land into a political firestorm and without a way to enter the country.
Immigrations lawyers rushed to American airports to help.
Later, the United States was crippled by COVID-19 under Trump.
States were locked in wars of words over vaccines, mask requirements and isolation rules. From the White House briefing room, he told the public he believed injecting bleach product Clorox could help.
Scientists would later say that in all the disaster planning America had done for a possible pandemic, they never ran a scenario where the president was the problem.
COVID-19 killed more than 1 million Americans.
One of the most lasting changes Trump made to American institutions, however, was delivering conservatives the Supreme Court of the United States.
In just four years, Trump got the opportunity to appoint three justices to the court in lifetime appointments.
The last appointment hurt liberals the most.
In a twist of fate, on September 18, 2020, well into the presidential campaign, the wind was sucked out of progressive America when the news broke that Ruth Bader Ginsburg (RBG) had died.
RBG had ascended to popular culture icon status for her pioneering legal work and decades-long fight for gender equality.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg was the second woman appointed to the Supreme Court. (ABC News: Jonathan Ernst)
She was a liberal voice on the court and it would be Donald Trump who got the chance to replace her. The knife twist for many was that he exercised his presidential power to do it after he had lost the 2020 election.
Just more than two years later, SCOTUS voted to overturn Roe v Wade, the 1973 legal decision that underpinned the nation-wide protection for abortion access in the United States.
In June 2022, as Roe fell, the regulation of abortion shifted back to the states, many of which were ready with trigger laws, banning abortion and endangering the lives of women.
Since then, a woman’s right to make choices about her own body has dominated political discussion in the United States and became a key issue of the 2024 election.
The end of Trump the 45th president happened gradually.
In 2020, it took four days for counting to confirm that Joe Biden had carried Pennsylvania, would win its 19 electoral college votes and remove Trump from the White House.
But in that time, Trump’s supporters swallowed the line that the election had been stolen.
That moment was tense as counting stations saw armed citizens assemble outside. There was a sense that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris had won, of course, but inauguration was still months away.
Trump has been sewing the seeds of doubt in America’s election system and by the time he lost, his supporters were convinced it was “a big lie”.
By January 6, on the day the election results were certified by congress, Donald Trump told his supporters to “stop the steal”.
They marched towards the Capitol, breached the building and tried to take over the house.
Trump’s attorneys argued the events of January 6 did not amount to an insurrection. (Reuters: Leah Millis)
Five police officers who were there that day died in the weeks following January 6, while 150 officers were injured, and hundreds traumatised.
For four years, Trump perpetuated the lie that the 2020 election was stolen. It is a message he has repeated, and ramped up this election cycle too.
He told his supporters if he wins, he wins. If he loses, it’s rigged.
The 2024 campaign
After that fateful first debate of the 2024 campaign in June, Donald Trump walked off stage and disappeared from view in a matter of seconds.
Joe Biden, however, hung around and he looked a little lost.
It was how he sounded throughout the debate, and as the CNN cameras moved to wide shots of the studio, Jill Biden stepped in, grabbed his hand and once again, steadied her husband.
With Trump out of sight, anyone still watching the broadcast had full view of the president of the United States as he navigated a single step down from the stage to the studio floor.
The president’s debate performance was shaky from the start to its careful-footed end.
Trump’s campaign had been making a deal of Biden’s age and during the debate, Trump broke with his stream of consciousness tradition to find a few moments to capitalise on Biden’s obvious confusion.
Joe Biden’s performance during his debate with Donald Trump eventually prompted him to withdraw from the presidential race. (Reuters: Brian Snyder)
Trump was only three years younger than Biden when he made age an issue.
He told America you needed to be a little younger to lead, you needed to be agile.
It wasn’t long until he was the older candidate, and his opponent was a ‘brat’.
Kamala Harris entering the presidential race was the ultimate election campaign vibe shift.
On July 13, a bullet grazed Trump’s ear in Butler, Pennsylvania.
He reminded everyone of that by wearing an oversized bandage on his ear throughout the convention later that week.
The image of the former president with blood streaming down his face, fist in the air telling him supporters “fight, fight, fight” was potent.
But within days, it was not leading the political news cycle.
On July 21, Harris launched her bid for the presidency and the Trump campaign was on the back foot.
Once it was Harris v Trump, the race had changed.
Money was pouring into the Democratic National Committee campaign coffers, while Trump was relying on outside spending, and outsourcing so much of the ground game in key swing states.
Harris, Trump, their vice presidential candidates and high-profile surrogates pushed this campaign to the very end.
In the final days, Trump’s rally rhetoric escalated, while Harris stopped mentioning her opponent’s name.
For Trump, his closing argument was this: ‘Are you better off today than you were four years ago?’
Many of Donald Trump’s supporters believe his claim that the 2020 election was stolen, despite there being no evidence to support this. (Reuters: Jeenah Moon)
It’s a powerful question because 2019 was the before times, when COVID-19 hadn’t ravaged populations and economies.
But also when interest rates were lower and food didn’t cost quite as much.
For some Trump watchers though, his most dangerous ideas pertain to how he intends to wield institutions of the United States for his own personal payback.
These aren’t empty threats. He has form.
After his 2016 win, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and several others, were investigated but never charged.
We now know, that despite the sedition charges, the sexual assault finding, the promises of revenge and retribution, Trump will become the 47th president of the United States.
The MAGA legacy
When Donald Trump won in 2016, nearly 63 million people voted for him.
When he lost in 2020, 74.2 million people voted for him.
This time, across the United States, millions got out and again voted for their man.
Donald Trump has appealed to millions of Americans who feel they have been left behind. (AP: Chris Szagola)
In three elections, Donald’s Trump’s popularity seems only to have increased.
After he took that escalator ride in Trump Tower, the Democrats responded with sarcasm, not taking Trump’s run seriously, certainly not considering it a threat.
But when he borrowed “make America great again” from Ronald Reagan, Trump hit a nerve.
The line was deeply meaningful to tens of millions of people. It was a rallying cry to those Americans who felt forgotten and arguably, who had been.
Four words, 16 letters, and Donald Trump had himself an army.
Before Election Day, Donald Trump signalled that regardless of the outcome, this would be his last run at the presidency.
But standing in an auditorium among a sea of red and white MAGA devotees, it’s obvious that this movement won’t simply go away because he does.
Donald Trump has another four years to continue reshaping the US. (Reuters: Jonathan Drake)
His legacy is not just the existence of his MAGA army, but the chokehold it has on the Republican Party.
Former GOP strategist now Lincoln Project member Stuart Stevens said in a scathing interview in Vanity Fair that eventually a need would emerge for a new centre-right political party.
He said that could no longer be the GOP and offered illuminating analysis as to why Trump was allowed to happen.
“Donald Trump is the most popular figure in the Republican Party because he is what the Republican Party wants to be,” Stevens said.
“He didn’t steal the Republican Party — he revealed it.
“They had plenty of choices … No, Trump is what they want. This is why they like Russia so much. They look at Russia, they got all white men in power.”
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