Trump will win second term, CNN projects, in historic comeback after losing four years ago

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 charges.

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.”

But 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.”

 

The promises that Trump made on the campaign trail leave many Americans braced for one of the most disruptive and divisive periods in the country’s modern memory. Trump has promised to immediately launch the biggest deportation operation in history on Day 1 – targeting undocumented immigrants and legal Haitian refugees whom he falsely accused of eating the pets of Ohio residents. The president-elect has also pledged a fundamental overhaul of the US economic system and plans to introduce sweeping tariffs on foreign imports – with especially punitive hikes on Chinese goods – that will cause global shockwaves.

Republicans have already won back the Senate, according to CNN’s projection, meaning that the president-elect will have huge latitude to complete his bid to transform the judiciary to ensure conservative legal dominance continues for decades. The race for the House of Representatives is still in the balance, but if Republicans can retain their narrow majority, Trump will face few challenges to his rule in Washington.

An unfettered presidency?

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.

His plans will almost certainly cause a showdown over the extent of presidential powers between the White House and the courts. And any efforts to use the instruments of government to push his own personal and political agendas and to punish his enemies could severely test the rule of law. But Trump has made no secret that he plans to fully exploit this summer’s Supreme Court ruling that granted commanders in chief substantial immunity for White House official acts and bolstered his already questionable claims that the president enjoys unchecked power.

Trump’s return to power is also certain to end the federal prosecutions that resulted from his attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Trump’s new attorney general will be able to end the case being brought by Smith on election interference and his appeal to revive a trial over Trump’s hoarding of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. The status of a state prosecution in Georgia over Trump’s bid to overturn Biden’s victory there is more uncertain but is likely to result in a legal tussle over the capacity of a state to put a sitting president on trial. Trump has, meanwhile, made clear that he is open to pardoning supporters convicted and sent to prison for their role in the Capitol insurrection.

 

Abroad, Trump is likely to again turn the United States into the one of the world’s greatest sources of unpredictability. A mercurial foreign policy that mirrors his volcanic character is expected to further erode Washington’s position as the head of a rules-based, Western democratic world order. He has pledged to end the war in Ukraine shortly after taking power. His affinity for Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom he referred to as a “genius” on the campaign trail, risks a resolution that validates the Kremlin’s illegal and bloody assault on a sovereign democratic nation. Such a strategy would raise questions about America’s potential appeasement of foreign autocrats and its traditional support for upholding the territorial integrity of its allies in Europe and the Pacific, including NATO partners and Taiwan.

The president-elect has not wavered in his view that American allies have been freeloading off US security guarantees for decades, and he is likely to put intense pressure on them to do more to ensure their own means of defense. Some experts credit him with forcing NATO nations into bolstering their own military capacity in his first term. And his victory is likely to be welcomed by Israel, as it pursues its wars against Hamas in Gaza and against Hezbollah in Lebanon, and in some Gulf states that agreed with Trump’s extreme hardline stance against Iran in his first term. Trump’s supporters believe that he will fix what they see as America’s weakness abroad, especially after the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan on Biden’s watch.

A new test for a rattled national psyche

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.

 

The former president’s return to the Oval Office makes him only the second president since Grover Cleveland in 1892 to claim a second term after losing reelection.

His supporters will be waiting with high anticipation – while millions of other Americans will be watching with dread – for the second iteration of his “American carnage” inaugural address from 2017, when he raises his hand to pledge to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution, in January.