Donald Trump has been elected the 47th president of the United States in a stunning political resurrection that sent shockwaves through America and around the world.
Trump becomes the first convicted criminal to win the White House. At 78 he is also the oldest person ever elected to the office.
The result will sound alarm bells in foreign capitals given Trump’s chaotic leadership style and overtures to authoritarians such as Vladimir Putin of Russia and Kim Jong-un of North Korea. He was branded 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 proved willing to push such concerns aside and hand the nuclear codes to the property developer turned reality TV star for a second time.
Trump defeated Harris, a Democrat who had been seeking to make history herself as the first woman, first Black woman and first south Asian American to become president in the US’s 248-year history. At 5.37am ET the Associated Press called Wisconsin for Trump, with the state’s 10 electoral college votes tipping the Trump’s total to 277 – well past the 270 votes that is needed to win the presidency.
Harris, 60, made reproductive rights and personal freedoms a rallying cry and backed a national law codifying access to safe abortion. Her loss represents a devastating, anxiety-inducing blow to supporters reminiscent of Hillary Clinton’s crushing defeat in 2016.
But for Trump, the unlikeliest of comebacks is now complete. Many analysts assumed that his defeat by Joe Biden in 2020 spelled the end of his political career, especially when an angry mob of his supporters – fuelled by his lie that the election was stolen – stormed the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, resulting in his second impeachment.
But while Trump’s grip on the Republican party was briefly shaken, it held firm. The thrice-married New Yorker, found liable for sexual abuse, remained an unlikely hero of evangelical Christians and the white working class, and polling suggested that he gained small but significant traction among African American and Latino voters.
Four criminal cases – including a conviction on 34 felony counts over concealing hush-money payments to the adult film performer Stormy Daniels – would have been devastating to any other politician but only appeared to strengthen Trump’s standing with his “Make America Great Again” (Maga) base.
Spewing crass insults, Trump swatted challengers aside to claim the Republican presidential nomination for a third consecutive time. 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 would-be assassin was caught at one of Trump’s Florida golf courses in September).
Meanwhile, after a disastrous debate performance, Joe Biden stepped aside as the presumptive Democratic nominee in July and anointed Harris his successor. Her “politics of joy” gave Democrats a jolt of energy and appeared to change the trajectory of a race that had been slipping away.
The contest unfolded over little more than 100 days, the shortest in modern memory, against a backdrop of hurricanes at home and wars overseas. Trump received a major assist from the world’s richest man, the tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, who gave away millions of dollars to voters in swing states who signed a petition tied to his political action committee.
The race looked extraordinarily close until the end. The candidates were tied at 48 percent each for the popular vote, according to the final New York Times/Siena College national poll published on 25 October.
Trump’s victory suggests that his pitch – often crude and rambling, mendacious and racist – still resonated 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 that Trump poses to US institutions and global security.
The election result threatens convulsions and mass protests across the country. Trump ran on a now familiar campaign theme of nativist populism that promised the biggest ever deportation of undocumented people, whom he branded as “animals” with “bad genes” who were “poisoning the blood of the country”. He complained that the US was “like a garbage can” for the rest of the world.
The former president also cast his criminal indictments as a political attack, vowing “retribution” against perceived enemies and embracing increasingly dystopian rhetoric. He made ominous comments threatening to deploy the military domestically against “enemies from within” and promised to pardon supporters imprisoned for the January 6 insurrection.
Trump will be the first president to serve non-consecutive terms since Grover Cleveland, who was in office from 1885 to 1889 and from 1893 to 1897.
As vice-president, Harris will preside over a joint session of Congress in January to certify the results of the election. She will be succeeded as vice-president by JD Vance, a 40-year-old senator from Ohio who, unlike the former vice-president Mike Pence, has refused to acknowledge that Trump lost four years ago.
By David Smith
