Former President Donald Trump wins the White House in political comeback

Former President Donald Trump has been elected the 47th president of the United States, marking an extraordinary comeback.

With a win in Wisconsin earlier today, Trump cleared the 270 electoral votes needed to clinch the presidency.

His victory included winning Alabama’s nine electoral votes. That projection was made the moment Alabama’s polls closed at 7PM on Tuesday.

“I want to thank the American people for the extraordinary honor of being elected your 47th president and your 45th president,” Trump told throngs of cheering supporters in Florida.

In state after state, Trump outperformed what he did in the 2020 election while Vice President Kamala Harris failed to do as well as Joe Biden did in winning the presidency four years ago. Upon taking office again, Trump also will work with a Senate that will now be in Republican hands, while control of the House hasn’t yet been determined.

“We’ve been through so much together, and today you showed up in record numbers to deliver a victory,” Trump said. “This was something special and we’re going to pay you back,” he said.

The results cap a historically tumultuous and competitive election season that included two assassination attempts targeting Trump and a shift to a new Democratic nominee just a month before the party’s convention. Trump will inherit a range of challenges when he assumes office on Jan. 20, including heightened 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, after beating Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016. Harris, the current vice president, rose to the top of the ticket after Biden left the race amid alarm about his age and mental acuity. Despite an initial surge of energy around her campaign, she struggled during a compressed timeline to convince voters that she represented a break from an unpopular administration.

The vice president has not publicly spoken since the race was called. Her campaign co-chair, Cedric Richmond, said she would speak Wednesday. “She will be back here tomorrow” he said to the crowd that had gathered at Howard University in Washington, DC, at what they had hoped would be a victory party.

Trump is the first former president to return to power since Grover Cleveland regained the White House in the 1892 election. 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 vice president, 40-year-old Ohio Sen. JD Vance, will become the highest-ranking member of the millennial generation in the U.S. government.

Congratulations started pouring in from world leaders even before Trump’s victory was announced.

Trump has plans to swiftly enact a sweeping agenda that would transform 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 U.S. Supreme Court, which includes three Trump-appointed justices, issued a ruling earlier this year affording 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 strongman leaders, warned that he would deploy the military to target political opponents he labeled 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 dire public warnings about his return to the presidency.

While Harris focused much of her 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 about crime and migrants who illegally entered the country on Biden’s watch. He also highlighted wars in the Middle East and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to cast Democrats as presiding over – and encouraging – a world in chaos.

It was a formula Trump perfected in 2016, when he cast himself as the only person who could fix the country’s problems.

“In 2016, I declared 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.

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 and raised his fist in the air, shouting “Fight! Fight! Fight!” Weeks later, a second assassination attempt was thwarted after a Secret Service agent spotted the barrel of a gun poking through the greenery while Trump was playing golf.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who had challenged Trump for the Republican nomination earlier this year, lamented that the indictments Trump faced “sucked out all the oxygen” from this year’s GOP primary. Trump easily captured his party’s nomination.

With Trump dominating the Republican contest, a New York jury found him guilty in May of 34 felony charges in falsifying business records related to a hush money payment made to a porn actor who said the two had sex. He faces sentencing later this month.

He also has been found liable in two other New York civil cases: one for inflating his assets and another for sexually abusing advice columnist E. Jean Carroll in 1996.

Trump is subject to additional criminal charges in an election-interference case in Georgia that has become bogged down due to the personal relationship between the district attorney and the special prosecutor. On the federal level, he’s been indicted for his role in trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election and improperly handling classified material.

When he arrived in Washington 2017, Trump knew little about the levers of federal power. His agenda was stymied by Congress and the courts, as well as senior staff members who took it upon themselves to serve as guardrails.

This time, Trump has said he would surround himself with loyalists who will enact his agenda and who will arrive with hundreds of draft executive orders, legislative proposals and in-depth policy papers in hand.

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