Four years after he left in disgrace, 45th president of the United States Donald Trump will return to the White House as the 47th president, a result once again proving him to be impervious to electoral gravity and reestablishing him as the center of the political universe.
After a summer of upheaval in the presidential race, Trump’s decisive win promises to reverberate from the hills of West Virginia to the halls of the Kremlin. He immediately throws a cloud of uncertainty over U.S. commitments to Ukraine and NATO, recalling the chaotic nature of his first administration. And he shows that, for all of his political flaws and legal troubles, he is the one true constant of modern American politics.
Despite a turbulent close to his campaign in the final weeks, Trump did better than his 2020 margins in the vast majority of counties. Networks and the Associated Press called the race for Trump Wednesday morning just after 5:30 a.m. ET, once a final slate of votes in Wisconsin came in and the state was placed in the Trump column. He looks like he could win every battleground state. He even looks like he’ll win the popular vote.
By the time Trump took the stage in triumph at his watch party — 2:30 a.m. ET — Pennsylvania had been called and the presidency was all but secured.
“This will truly be a golden age of America,” Trump said, before delivering another classic, rambling, rhetorical victory lap.
What was clear Wednesday morning is that Trump was able to run up the score in rural areas enough to withstand Kamala Harris’ gains in urban areas. The backlash from women wasn’t as fierce as Democrats had hoped. And the suburban realignment never really materialized.
Trump’s victory all but guarantees that the Republican Party will lean harder into his MAGA brand of politics, and it places him not only as the GOP’s standard-bearer but as the future kingmaker of a party remade in his image.
What that means in the short and long term is the real question. Trump has promised mass deportations on his first day in office — a challenging and panic-inducing objective to start a second term — and he has said he will finally construct the border wall between the U.S. and Mexico that he first promised almost 10 years ago.
While the House had yet to be called Wednesday morning, the Senate had already flipped to GOP control, and Trump’s commanding electoral performance looked like it could push Republicans into majorities in both chambers, meaning he might have the votes to enact some of his most extreme policies.
For the millions of undocumented immigrants living in the United States, Trump’s election leaves them with uncertain futures. But his victory also leaves the entire United States with an uncertain future.
Trump has promised extensive new tariffs — “the most beautiful word in the dictionary,” according to Trump — and he’s said he wants to immediately slash interest rates, even if that means getting rid of Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell and putting in place a new chair.
Economists have predicted that his policies — lower taxes, new tariffs and reduced interest rates — would drastically increase inflation, just as the U.S. had finally gotten inflation to around 2% after the COVID-19 pandemic. But congressional GOP leaders have already signaled that they’ll look to pass a tax cut plan in the first 100 days of Trump’s new presidency.
Despite strong economic benchmarks, Trump was able to ride voter angst over the high inflation of the first half of Joe Biden’s administration back to the White House. He leaned into the frustration and convinced half of the nation that he was the answer.
From “no taxes on tips” to his plans to institute tariffs on potentially everything, Trump once again hit the populist vein on the campaign trail and found traction. That’s just as true from a foreign policy standpoint as it is from an economic one.
Trump’s isolationist tendencies leave America’s war-weary allies precariously positioned. He has said he would end the war in Ukraine on Day One of his second presidency, suggesting he would force Ukraine to cede territory to Russia, and he has proposed ending foreign aid for a number of countries.
Trump also becomes the first convicted felon elected to the Oval Office, a fact relegated to the archives by the madness that unfolded after his May conviction. Untouchable by controversy or scrapes with death, the Trump effect — where lies are considered hyperbole and threats are considered rhetorical flourishes — ensured that his campaign gaffes just rolled off the padded shoulders of his navy suits.
Trump has promised revenge against many of his enemies, including Democrats in Congress and those who debunked his 2020 election fraud claims. What that revenge means remains to be seen, but he has literally suggested that former Rep. Liz Cheney should face a firing squad.
Trump has always benefited from voters only taking some of his words literally. But he has said this second term would be one of action. Where there were guardrails during his first presidency, a so-called “deep state” that contained many of Trump’s most drastic impulses, he has promised to fill his second administration with only the most loyal followers.
That could mean voters finally see the effects of the real Trumpism, for better and for worse, or it could be just more Trumpian bluster.
It’s clear that Trump is free from the accountability of most of his promises. He could choose to govern in a dramatically different way from his first term, but as the dust settled from the election Wednesday morning, no one was counting on the 78-year-old Trump to be anything different from the man he’s been for decades.
Trump — the businessman, the politician, the president and the defendant — has proven himself to be a man free from consequences.
Despite voter anger over the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, Trump won. Despite a comedian’s comments that Puerto Rico was a “floating island of garbage” at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally nine days before the election, Trump won. Despite Trump questioning Harris’ race, and his comments about immigrants being “bloodthirsty criminals” and “the most violent people on earth,” and his insistence that the 2020 election was stolen from him, and the realities about his economic record, he won.
From the beginning, his campaign struck a novel path. He traded a traditional ground game for expensive lawsuits over the 2020 election. He outsourced his get-out-the-vote operation to untested auxiliary groups, like Elon Musk’s America PAC.
And yet he still won.
For Democrats, the soul-searching is just beginning. While the decision to ditch Biden for Harris at the top of the ticket will certainly be litigated and relitigated again and again, the assassination attempt against Trump in July will forever be a crystallizing moment of the 2024 race.
Over and over, Trump returned to the images from Butler, Pennsylvania, with blood smeared across his face and his fist raised in the air, to cut against his campaign’s weaknesses. Trump was able to dismiss concerns about his rhetoric, his policies and his personal problems largely by inspiring his voters to come out for him. Looking back, the assassination attempt may have been integral to Trump winning.
But given his dominance, it’s clear there wasn’t just one reason Trump won — and there isn’t just one reason Harris lost.
—
Ben T.N. Mause is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.
Reese Gorman is a reporter at NOTUS.