WASHINGTON – Donald Trump was elected the 47th president of the United States on Wednesday, an extraordinary comeback for a former president who refused to accept defeat four years ago, sparked a violent uprising at the US Capitol, was convicted of felony charges and survived two assassination attempts.
With a victory in Wisconsin, Trump cleared the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency.
The victory confirms his naked approach to politics. He attacked his Democratic rival, Kamala Harris, in deeply personal — often misogynistic and racist — terms as he presented an apocalyptic picture of a country overrun by violent migrants. The crude rhetoric, paired with an image of hypermasculinity, resonated with angry voters — especially men — in a deeply polarized nation.
As president, he has vowed to pursue an agenda centered on dramatically reshaping the federal government and seeking retribution against his perceived enemies. In a speech to his supporters on Wednesday morning, Trump claimed he had won “an unprecedented and powerful mandate”.
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The results cap a historically tumultuous and competitive election season that included two assassination attempts targeting Trump and a shift to a new Democratic candidate just a month before the party’s convention. Trump will inherit a series of challenges when he takes office on January 20, including increased political polarization and global crises that are testing America’s influence abroad.
His win against Harris, the first woman of color to lead a major party ticket, marks the second time he has defeated a female rival in a general election. Harris, the current vice president, rose to the top of the ticket after President Joe Biden left the race amid outcry about his advanced age. Despite an initial surge of energy surrounding her campaign, she struggled under a compressed timeline to convince disillusioned voters that she represented a break from an unpopular administration.
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Donald Trump was elected the 47th president of the United States
Trump is the first former president to return to power since Grover Cleveland retook the White House in 1892. He is the first person convicted of a felony to be elected president and, at 78, is the oldest person elected to the office. His running mate, 40-year-old Ohio Senator JD Vance, will become the highest-ranking member of the millennial generation in the US government.
There will be far fewer checks on Trump when he returns to the White House. He has plans to quickly enact a sweeping agenda that would change nearly every aspect of American government. His GOP critics in Congress have largely been defeated or retired. Federal courts are now filled with judges he appointed. The US Supreme Court, which includes three Trump-appointed justices, issued a ruling earlier this year granting presidents broad immunity from prosecution.
Trump’s language and behavior during the campaign sparked growing warnings from Democrats and some Republicans about shocks to democracy that his return to power would bring. He repeatedly praised strong leaders, warned that he would deploy the military to target political opponents he called “the enemy from within”, threatened to take action against news organizations for unfavorable coverage and suggested suspending the constitution.
Some who served in his first White House, including Vice President Mike Pence and John Kelly, Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, either declined to endorse him or issued serious public warnings about his return to the presidency.
While Harris focused much of his initial message around themes of joy, Trump channeled a powerful sense of anger and resentment among voters.
He seized on frustrations over high prices and fears of crime and migrants entering the country illegally on Biden’s watch. He also highlighted wars in the Middle East and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to ensure that Democrats preside over — and encourage — a world in chaos.
It was a formula that Trump perfected in 2016, when he cast himself as the one person who could fix the country’s problems, often borrowing language from dictators.
“In 2016 I declared that I am your voice. Today I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution,” he said in March 2023.
This campaign often veered into the absurd, with Trump amplifying the bizarre and refuting rumors that migrants stole and ate pets of cats and dogs in an Ohio town. At one point, he kicked off a rally with a detailed story about the legendary golfer Arnold Palmer, praising his genitalia.
But perhaps the defining moment came in July when a gunman opened fire at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. A bullet grazed Trump’s ear and killed one of his supporters. His face streaked with blood, Trump stood with his fist in the air and shouted “Fight! Fight! Fight!” Weeks later, a second assassination attempt was thwarted after a Secret Service agent discovered a gun barrel poking through the greenery while Trump was playing golf.
Trump’s return to the White House seemed unlikely when he left Washington in early 2021 as a diminished figure whose lies about his defeat sparked a violent uprising at the US Capitol. He was so isolated at the time that few outside his family bothered to attend the send-off he organized for himself at Andrews Air Force Base, complete with a 21-gun salute.
Democrats who controlled the US House quickly impeached him for his role in the rebellion, making him the only president to be impeached twice. He was acquitted by the US Senate, where many Republicans argued that he no longer posed a threat because he had left office.
But from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, Trump worked — with the help of some elected Republicans — to maintain his political relevance. Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the California Republican who led his party in the U.S. House at the time, visited Trump shortly after he left office, essentially confirming his continued role in the party.
As the 2022 midterm elections approached, Trump used the power of his support to assert himself as the undisputed leader of the party. His preferred candidates almost always won their primaries, but some went on to defeat in elections that Republicans saw as within their reach. Those disappointing results were fueled in part by a backlash to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that revoked a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion, a decision that was aided by Trump-appointed justices. The midterm elections raised questions within the GOP about whether Trump would remain the party’s leader.
But if Trump’s future was in doubt, that changed in 2023 when he faced a wave of state and federal charges over his role in the insurgency, his handling of classified information and election meddling. He used the allegations to cast himself as the victim of government overreach, an argument that resonated with a GOP base increasingly skeptical — if not outright hostile — of institutions and established power structures.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who challenged Trump for the Republican nomination, lamented that the allegations “sucked all the oxygen” out of this year’s GOP primary. Trump easily captured his party’s nomination without ever participating in a debate against DeSantis or other GOP candidates.
As Trump dominated the Republican race, a New York jury in May found him guilty of 34 felony counts in a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election through a hush-hush payment to a porn star who said the two had sex. He faces sentencing later this month, although his victory raises serious questions about whether he will ever face punishment.
He has also been found liable in two other civil cases in New York: one for inflating his assets and another for sexually abusing Council columnist E. Jean Carroll in 1996.
Trump is facing additional criminal charges in a Georgia election meddling case that has stalled. At the federal level, he has been indicted for his role in trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election and mishandling classified material. When he becomes president on January 20, Trump could appoint an attorney general who would drop the federal charges.
As he prepares to return to the White House, Trump has vowed to quickly enact a radical agenda that would change nearly every aspect of American government. It includes plans to launch the largest deportation drive in the country’s history, to use the Justice Department to punish his enemies, to dramatically expand the use of tariffs and to once again pursue a zero-sum approach to foreign policy that threatens to upset longstanding foreign alliances including the NATO pact.
When he arrived in Washington in 2017, Trump knew little about the levers of federal power. His agenda was stopped by Congress and the courts, as well as senior staff who took it upon themselves to act as guardrails.
This time, Trump has said he would surround himself with loyalists who will adopt his agenda, no questions asked, and who will arrive with hundreds of draft executive orders, bills and sweeping policy documents in hand.
Colvin reported from West Palm Beach, Florida.
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