Donald Trump will be America’s 47th president, CNN projected Yesteraday, after mounting the most momentous comeback in political history that will hand him massive, disruptive power at home and will send shockwaves around the world.
Four years after leaving Washington as a pariah, following his attempt to overturn the 2020 election to stay in office, Trump’s victory defied two assassination attempts, two presidential impeachments, his criminal conviction and many other criminal changes.
Trump vowed at his Mar-a-Lago resort early Wednesday to “heal” the nation, to fix its borders and to deliver a strong and prosperous economy after millions of his voters turned to him amid frustration over high prices for food and housing and embraced his plans for a crackdown on undocumented immigrants.
“I want to thank the American people for the extraordinary honor of being elected your 47th president and your 45th president,” said Trump, only the second president to win a nonconsecutive term. “This will truly be the golden age of America.”
ut Trump’s new mandate will raise fresh fears that he plans to follow through on his belief that presidents enjoy almost unlimited authority. He vowed on the campaign trail to use a new White House term to enact “retribution” and has openly talked about using America’s governing institutions, and even the military, to punish his foes. He has pledged to launch a mass deportation of undocumented, and even some legal, immigrants that could set off a showdown with the courts. CNN projected Trump’s victory after the state of Wisconsin put him over the top and he secured the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency. His win ended the Democrats’ desperate attempt to thwart his return to power, which saw Vice President Kamala Harris hurriedly elevated to the party nomination after already unpopular President joe Biden's disastrous performance at the CNN debate against Trump in June.
The former president outpaced his own performance in a losing cause four years ago, putting the states of Georgia and Pennsylvania back into the GOP column and retaining North Carolina for his party – all of which Democrats had targeted as part of the vice president’s path to the White House.
Trump campaigned on searing authoritarian-style rhetoric and false claims that the nation’s towns and cities were under “occupation” from foreign criminals and gangs. But he also tapped into a palpable thirst for change among Americans still feeling the painful aftereffects of a now-cooled run of high inflation. And he warned that only he could stop a slide to World War III as foreign crises rage.
He has promised to create the greatest economy in the world and to make life more affordable for working Americans who form the populist base of the Republican Party that he transformed. Trump’s supporters see him as a unique figure whose blunt, sometimes vulgar and often racially suggestive rhetoric reveals him as a scourge of political correctness. But the spectacle of the final days of the campaign being dominated by debate over whether Trump is a “fascist”reflects the fresh challenges he’s likely to pose to democratic guarantees and presidential decorum in the years ahead and the dread of at least half the electorate who voted for Harris that he plans to establish authoritarian-style rule.
Trump’s victory is also certain to lead to the dismissal of special counsel Jack Smith and will mean that the president-elect paid no electoral price for his attempt to overturn the result of the 2020 election, which culminated in his supporters’ mob attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
After years highlighting Biden’s age, Trump, at 78, is now the oldest man to be elected president ,and his every act and utterance as commander in chief is likely to be scrutinized for signs of age-related slowing down or cognitive issues.
Given the extreme nature of his campaign, his election may also augur a period of national and international turmoil. Trump has vowed to use his second term to seek “retribution” against his political adversaries and mused aloud about using the military against “the enemy from within.” Overseas, US allies are bracing for the return of the wild unpredictability in US foreign policy that Trump whipped up in his first term. There are also concerns about his willingness to enforce NATO’s bedrock principle of mutual defense.
But the billionaire real estate tycoon and former reality star’s win, based on a peerless grip on the GOP, also undeniably turns Trump into one of the most significant political figures in the history of the United States. It underlines that his victory in 2016 was not an aberration but heralded a major realignment in domestic politics and the US’ role in the world. It also means that Biden’s legacy will no longer be defined by his success in ejecting Trump from power in 2020 but by his hubris in seeking a second term that would have ended when he was 86, which opened the door to his rival again. And Trump’s success means that he has for the second time defied the aspirations of millions of Americans for a female president, since his vanquishing of Harris follows his 2016 defeat of Hillary Clinton, again preventing the shattering of what she called “the highest, hardest glass ceiling” in US politics.
Trump’s false claims that he was illegally ejected from power in 2020 formed the foundation of his return four years later, since millions of Americans bought into his alternative reality. The ex-president’s defiance – and his capacity to weaponize charges against him – was best illustrated by the way he seized on his mug shot, taken in a Georgia jail after he was indicted over election interference in the state. He turned the photo into a political rallying call for a primary campaign that previously lacked juice, using subsequent legal woes – including a criminal conviction in Manhattan in a hush money case to keep his base energized by claiming he was being indicted for them. His sense of indestructibility – and the almost divine purpose felt by many of his supporters – was reinforced when he narrowly escaped a would-be assassin’s bullet at a rally in Pennsylvania, and rose, with his ear bloodied and his fist in the air, and told his supporters to “fight, fight, fight.”
Trump and his supporters have made clear that they believe his most authentic instincts were thwarted in his first term by establishment figures in Washington. He and his loyalists have therefore proposed plans that could gut the government’s administrative departments and replace civil servants with political loyalists who will carry out his most draconian political desires. Trump has also vowed to sweep away the top layers of personnel at the Justice Department and in the intelligence agencies that he considers biased against him. Trump, if he completes his four-year second term, will become the oldest sitting president in history, a milestone that will be rich in irony since his relentless attacks on Biden’s age and mental faculties paved the way for his successor’s exit from the political stage.
During the campaign, Trump’s own mental lapses and unpredictable behavior raised speculation about his health and cognition – a theme that is likely to last throughout his second presidency. And the former president’s undimmed habit of inserting himself into every cultural and political debate and incessant zeal for igniting clashes with his political and personal adversaries promise another test for the national psyche.
Trump will be accompanied into the White House by Vice president-elect JD vance, an Ohio senator who emerged as a potential heir to Trumpism with his vehement defenses of his new boss on the campaign trail. Trump’s first vice president, Mike Pence, is now persona non grata in the Republican Party after he refused Trump’s demands to thwart the Constitution to overturn the result of the 2020 election during the certification process.
