Donald Trump has been elected the 47th president of the United States in a stunning political resurrection that sent shockwaves through America and the rest of the world.
Trump becomes the first convicted criminal to win the White House. At 78 years old, he is also the oldest person ever elected to office.
The result will set off alarm bells in foreign capitals, given Trump’s chaotic leadership style and his overtures to authoritarians like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. He was branded as a threat to democracy and even a fascist by his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, and some of his own former White House officials.
Yet the American electorate appeared willing to put such concerns aside and hand over the nuclear codes to the property developer turned reality TV star for the second time.
Trump defeated Harris, a Democrat who wanted to make history herself as the first woman, the first black woman and the first South Asian American to become president in the 248-year history of the US.
As votes were counted overnight, Trump surprisingly early captured North Carolina, the first battleground state to be declared, and later won Georgia and Pennsylvania.
As early as 1:20 a.m. ET, at Trump’s election watch party in Palm Beach, Florida, there was a long, almighty roar as Fox News called Pennsylvania for the Republican nominee. “It’s over!” a man shouted. A young man wearing a black Trump hat shouted, “Fuck Joe Biden! Fuck her!”
standard
After 2 a.m., Trump emerged to speak, surrounded by his family, close aides and J.D. Vance, the far-right senator from Ohio he made his vice presidential pick.
“This is a movement like no one has ever seen before,” Trump said. “I think this is the greatest political movement of all time. There has never been anything like this in this country and now it’s going to reach a new level of importance because we’re going to help our country heal.
“We are going to establish our boundaries. We are going to fix everything in our country…I will not rest until we deliver the strong, safe and prosperous America our children deserve, this will truly be America’s Golden Age.”
At 5:37 a.m. ET, the Associated Press declared Wisconsin for Trump, with the 10 electoral college votes bringing Trump’s total to 277 — well above the 270 votes needed to win the presidency.
In Congress, Republicans also retook the U.S. Senate, but control of the House of Representatives remained unclear Wednesday morning, with many of the most competitive races still uncalled.
Harris, 60, made reproductive rights and personal freedoms a rallying cry and supported a national law codifying access to safe abortion. Her loss represents a devastating, chilling blow to supporters, reminiscent of Hillary Clinton’s crushing defeat in 2016. She was expected to speak later on Wednesday.
But for Trump, the unlikeliest of comebacks is now complete. Many analysts assumed that his 2020 defeat by Joe Biden marked the end of his political career, especially when an angry mob of his supporters – fueled by his lie that the election had been stolen – stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, which resulted in his second impeachment.
But while Trump’s grip on the Republican Party was briefly shaken, it held firm. The thrice-married New Yorker, who was found guilty of sexual abuse, remained an unlikely hero of evangelical Christians and the white working class, and polls showed him gaining small but significant popularity among African-American and Latino voters.
Four criminal cases – including a 34-felony conviction for concealing hush-money payments to pornographic film performer Stormy Daniels – would have been devastating for any other politician, but only seemed to strengthen Trump’s position with his ‘Make America Great Again’ (Maga) basic.
Trump spewed insults and swatted aside challengers to claim the Republican presidential nomination for the third time in a row. Just before the party convention in July, he survived an assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, an escape that many allies took as a sign from God (another potential killer was captured at one of Trump’s golf courses in Florida in September).
Meanwhile, after a disastrous debate performance, Joe Biden stepped aside as the presumptive Democratic nominee in July and anointed Harris as his successor. Her “politics of joy” gave Democrats a jolt of energy and seemed to change the trajectory of a race that was slipping.
The match lasted just over 100 days, the shortest in modern memory, against a backdrop of hurricanes at home and wars abroad. Trump received major support from the world’s richest man, technology entrepreneur Elon Musk, who gave away millions of dollars to voters in swing states who signed a petition linked to his political action committee.
The race seemed extremely exciting until the end. However, Trump’s significant victory suggests that his arguments – often crude and impetuous, mendacious and racist – continued to resonate among voters disillusioned with the political establishment. It was also a repudiation of Biden’s legislatively productive presidency and his dire warnings of the danger Trump poses to American institutions and global security.
The election results threaten convulsions and mass protests across the country. Trump ran on a now familiar campaign theme of nativist populism, which promised the largest-ever deportation of undocumented immigrants, whom he labeled “animals” with “bad genes” who were “poisoning the blood of the country.” He complained that the US was “like a garbage can” to the rest of the world.
The former president also cast his criminal charges as a political attack, promising “retaliation” against perceived enemies and increasingly embracing dystopian rhetoric. He made ominous remarks threatening to use the military at home against “enemies from within” and vowing to pardon supporters jailed for the January 6 uprising.
Trump will be the first president to serve non-consecutive terms since Grover Cleveland, who served from 1885 to 1889 and from 1893 to 1897.
As vice president, Harris will chair a joint session of Congress in January to certify the election results. She will be succeeded as vice president by Vance, the 40-year-old senator who, unlike former Vice President Mike Pence, has refused to acknowledge that Trump lost four years ago.
