Donald Trump has defeated Kamala Harris to become the 47th president of the United States, capping an improbable comeback for the resilient Republican whose first term ended with his supporters attacking the U.S. Capitol — and who then faced a litany of criminal charges and two assassination attempts on his way back to the White House.
The Associated Press called the race for Trump Wednesday morning after declaring victory for him in Wisconsin.
“This is the greatest political movement of all time,” Trump said in his victory speech. “We have a country that needs help, and it needs it very badly.”
Trump is just the second U.S. president ever to return to the Oval Office after losing reelection four years earlier. (The first was Grover Cleveland in 1893.) To pull it off, Trump overcame a series of obstacles that might have derailed other candidates, including the bullet that bloodied his ear at a July 13 rally in Pennsylvania.
The fact that Trump won anyway is a testament to his iron grip on the Republican Party — and to his enduring appeal to voters who prefer his polarizing style to Vice President Harris’s more conventional approach.
In choosing Trump on Tuesday, tens of millions of Americans also chose to fortify the populist, isolationist shift in GOP politics that he has ushered in. The president-elect is still promising, like his Republican predecessors, to ease regulations on energy, shrink the federal bureaucracy and pass massive tax cuts — including no tax on tips, overtime or Social Security benefits for seniors.
But much of the rest of Trump’s “America First” agenda would seem unfamiliar to country-club conservatives reared on Ronald Reagan.
Vowing that he will protect U.S. workers and raise hundreds of billions in revenue, Trump wants to force companies who manufacture their products overseas to pay an across-the-board 10% tariff on all foreign imports and a 60% tariff for products from China — a move that most experts say will increase prices, inflation and the deficit. He has pledged not to cut Medicare or Social Security benefits or to raise the age of eligibility. He has said he would end automatic citizenship for children born to immigrants on American soil and revive his “travel ban” aimed at Muslim-majority countries. He has suggested that Ukraine might have to cede territory to Russia to end the war there. He has vowed to “fundamentally reevaluat[e] NATO’s purpose and NATO’s mission.” And if elected, he could have the opportunity to appoint several new Supreme Court justices, ensuring a clear conservative majority for decades to come.
Trump launched his third consecutive presidential campaign just days after the Republican Party’s unusually poor performance in the 2022 midterms. It was a political low point for the former president. His first term had ended ignobly, with a second impeachment for allegedly inciting his supporters’ Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol; the American people — and the American economy — were still reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic as well. Trump then spent 2022 boosting fringe candidates, hosting avowed antisemites at Mar-a-Lago and calling for the “termination” of the Constitution.
As the GOP’s midterm losses mounted, many conservatives blamed the former president for squandering an otherwise winnable election. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was soon leading Trump by 11 points among GOP primary voters, according to a December 2022 Yahoo News/YouGov poll.
And so Trump entered the 2024 Republican primary at risk of becoming the very thing he has always despised the most: a loser. Within months, federal and state prosecutors had filed four separate indictments charging the former president with 91 felonies: for conspiring to overturn his 2020 election loss; for risking national security secrets; for falsifying business records to conceal a hush money payment to a porn actress. In the latter case, a New York jury ultimately found Trump guilty on all 34 counts. Trump was also found liable for sexually abusing and defaming advice columnist E. Jean Carroll and ordered to pay nearly $90 million in damages.
Yet Republicans rallied around their once and future nominee — and on Election Day, more than enough key voters sided with Trump to make him the first convicted felon ever to win the U.S. presidency.
According to the preliminary exit polls, Trump won 63% of the rural vote, up from 57% four years ago. In contrast, Harris failed to expand Biden’s support among urban voters — and narrowly lost suburban voters, a group Biden won.
The same polls also suggest that Trump may have secured a bigger share of the Latino vote than any Republican since George W. Bush: 45%, up from 32% four years ago. In 2020, Latino men voted for Biden (59%) over Trump (36%). This year, they voted for Trump (54%) over Biden (44%).
Partly as a result, Trump defeated Harris by 13 percentage points in Florida, quadrupling his 2020 margin. He lost in Virginia — but by five points this time instead of 10. And in the deep blue states of New York and New Jersey, he performed better (on the presidential level) than any Republican in decades.
Yet taxes and tariffs aside, Trump spent much of the 2024 campaign promising a second-term agenda that would target other Americans for “retribution” — and, in doing so, conflict with the norms of U.S. democracy.
Trump has repeatedly threatened to investigate, prosecute, jail or otherwise punish people he regards as enemies — including President Biden and Harris. He has characterized Americans who disagree with him politically as “the enemy within,” saying they should be “handled” by the “National Guard” — “or if really necessary, by the military.” He has promised “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history” — a plan that would likely require mobilizing the National Guard to round up millions of undocumented residents and detain them in militarized camps while they wait to be expelled. He has floated “one real rough, nasty” and “violent day” of police retaliation to curb crime in American cities. And he has suggested withholding disaster aid from blue states that don’t comply with his policy demands.
It remains to be seen how far Trump might go. But for roughly half of his former Cabinet members — and his former vice president, Mike Pence — Trump’s past actions were concerning enough, and his plans credible enough, that they refused to endorse their old boss this time around. A few weeks before the election, John Kelly, Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, told the New York Times that Trump “falls into the general definition of fascist” and would govern like a dictator if allowed.
Democrats did what they could to prevent a second Trump term. When Biden’s support began to collapse in the wake of his disastrous June 27 debate performance, the party effectively forced their aging standard-bearer to drop out — making him the first president since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968 not to seek reelection and the only president to surrender his party’s nomination after winning its primary.
Harris quickly took Biden’s place — and within a few short weeks, she had vastly improved her favorability numbers, besting both Biden and Trump (who remain underwater today). After a well-received convention in Chicago — and an even stronger debate in September, of which she was widely judged the winner — voters started to see Harris as having a “better chance” of winning the election than Trump. Between July and September, she amassed more than $1 billion in donations — the biggest fundraising quarter ever.
But no incumbent party has ever held the White House at a time when so few voters were saying the country was on the “right track” — or when the president’s approval rating was so low.
The race between Harris and Trump tightened as summer turned to fall; the final polls predicted the closest contest in modern U.S. history. During a Trump rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden on Oct. 27, a comedian trashed Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage”; another speaker likened Harris to a prostitute with “pimp handlers.” The moment seemed as if it might boost Harris, who took to the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., to deliver her closing argument before an estimated 75,000 supporters.
Yet one week later, more Americans sided with Trump than Harris. “Every single day, I will be fighting for you with every breath in my body,” Trump said in his victory speech. “This will truly be the golden age of America.”
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