Donald Trump returns to power, ushering in new era of uncertainty

By Shane Goldmacher and Lisa Lerer / © 2024 The New York Times Company

Donald Trump rode a promise to smash the American status quo to win the presidency for a second time Wednesday, surviving a criminal conviction, indictments, an assassin’s bullet, accusations of authoritarianism and an unprecedented switch of his opponent to complete a remarkable return to power.

Trump’s victory caps the astonishing political comeback of a man who was charged with plotting to overturn the last election but who tapped into frustrations and fears about the economy and illegal immigration to defeat Vice President Kamala Harris.

His defiant plans to upend the country’s political system held appeal to tens of millions of voters who feared that the American dream was drifting further from reach and who turned to Trump as a battering ram against the ruling establishment and the expert class of elites.

In a deeply divided nation, voters embraced Trump’s pledge to seal the southern border by almost any means, to revive the economy with 19th-century-style tariffs that would restore American manufacturing and to lead a retreat from international entanglements and global conflict.

Now, Trump will serve as the 47th president four years after reluctantly leaving office as the 45th, the first politician since Grover Cleveland in the late 1800s to lose re-election to the White House and later mount a successful run. At the age of 78, Trump has become the oldest man ever elected president, breaking a record held by President Joe Biden, whose mental competence Trump has savaged.

His win ushers in an era of uncertainty for the nation.

To roughly half the country, Trump’s rise portends a dark turn for American democracy, whose future will now depend on a man who has openly talked about undermining the rule of law. Trump helped inspire an assault on the Capitol in 2021, has threatened to imprison political adversaries and was denounced as a fascist by former aides. But for his supporters, Trump’s provocations became selling points rather than pitfalls.

As of early Wednesday, the results showed Trump improving on his 2020 showing in counties all across America with only limited exceptions. Trump had secured the necessary swing states — including Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania — to guarantee him the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the White House.

Republicans also picked up at least two Senate seats, in Ohio and West Virginia, to give the party a majority in the Senate. Control of the House of Representatives was still too close to call.

In a victory speech in West Palm Beach, Florida, Trump declared he was the leader of “the greatest political movement of all time.”

“We overcame obstacles that nobody thought possible,” he said, adding he would take office with an “unprecedented and powerful mandate.”

Trump seemingly had to win two races this year.

First, he overcame Biden, who quit the race after a halting debate performance raised questions about the president’s fitness to serve four more years. Then, he defeated Harris in a caustic 107-day crucible of a campaign that was ugly, insult-filled and bitter. Trump questioned Harris’ racial identity at one point and frequently denigrated her intelligence. They clashed over wildly divergent views of not just the issues facing the country but also the nature of democracy itself.

Trump has systematically sought to undercut some of the country’s foundational principles, eroding trust in an independent press and the judicial system and sowing doubts about free and fair elections. He has refused to accept his loss four years ago, falsely claiming to this day that a second term was stolen from him in 2020. Instead of hindering his rise, his denial took hold across a Republican Party he remade.

Now, Trump has vowed a radical reshaping of American government, animated by his promises of “retribution” and of rooting out domestic opponents he casts as “the enemy within.” He has pledged to oversee the biggest wave of deportations in U.S. history, suggested deploying troops domestically, proposed sweeping tariffs and largely advocated the greatest consolidation of power in the history of the presidency.

Pointing to the mob of Trump supporters who sacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, violently trying to prevent the certification of his defeat, Harris’ campaign loudly cautioned Trump in a second term would be “unhinged, unstable and unchecked.” But voters heeded neither her warnings nor those of some of the most senior former Trump administration officials and military advisers who testified to his autocratic instincts.

After nearly a decade as the dominant face of the Republican Party, Trump and his blunt-force approach to politics seemed to lose their shock value. Instead, for millions of disillusioned Americans mistrustful of institutions and of a political system they felt had failed them, his agent-of-chaos persona became an asset.

Trump’s campaign had aimed to put together a new political coalition anchored not just by blue-collar white voters but working-class Black and Latino voters, as well. By Wednesday morning, there were some early signs the campaign had succeeded.

The 2024 election is the second time Trump has defeated a woman trying to break through the nation’s highest gender barrier — the presidency — after he prevailed over Hillary Clinton eight years ago. His history of sexual misconduct, along with his three appointees to the Supreme Court and their role in ending the constitutional right to an abortion in 2022, transformed the race into a referendum on gender and women’s rights.

But abortion may not have been as salient an issue as it was in the 2022 midterm elections. Florida on Tuesday became the first state since Roe v. Wade was overturned to reject an abortion-rights ballot measure.

Polls heading into the election showed a country divided at historic levels along gender lines. Men, including many younger male voters, powered Trump’s popularity, as women were at the heart of Harris’ coalition.

It was also the first election in which a major candidate was a felon. Yet the specifics of Trump’s crimes were rarely broached by Harris, who instead tried to focus on kitchen-table issues.

In May, in a criminal case brought by the Manhattan district attorney, Trump was found guilty of 34 felony counts for covering up hush-money payments made to a porn star during the 2016 race. In a sign of the extraordinary circumstances facing him, Trump awaits sentencing tentatively scheduled for later this month, just as he will be ramping up the presidential transition process.

The race featured more than $1 billion in television advertising alone, as Harris, 60, offered herself as the vanguard of a new generation of leadership focused on the middle class, rolling out a series of policy plans to tackle grocery prices, housing costs, child care and elder care. She flipped her position on the border, promising a crackdown after arguing when she ran for president in 2019 that it should not be a crime to enter the United States without authorization.

Trump cast her as responsible for many of the country’s problems, countering with an array of sloganeering tax cuts: no tax on tips, no tax on Social Security, no tax on overtime, among them. He denigrated her as a “stupid person,” and called her “failed” and “dangerously liberal.”

Harris called for turning the page on the divisive Trump era. “We are not going back,” she said, and crowds chanted the line back. But she could never fully wrest the mantle of change away from Trump, given her perch as the current president’s second-in-command.

The Biden administration may have accelerated the country’s recovery from the coronavirus pandemic, engineered a softer landing than most economists expected and passed a raft of sweeping legislation tackling manufacturing, climate change and infrastructure. But rising food and housing prices caused a painful economic pinch that packed a political punch.

Trump also promised to disentangle the country from conflicts abroad, a turn toward isolationism that found a fresh audience with a war raging in Europe between Russia and Ukraine for nearly three years, and with the Middle East on the precipice of a wider conflagration. His election raises questions about the future of NATO and the U.S. backing of Ukraine; Trump has long spoken glowingly about President Vladimir Putin of Russia.

Seeking to blunt the political backlash faced by his party since the Supreme Court overturned Roe, the landmark decision guaranteeing a federal right to an abortion, Trump adopted a stance of leaving abortion rights to the states.

Trump formally declared his candidacy nearly two years ago, just days after the 2022 midterm elections. The reality, though, is that he barely stopped running after losing the 2020 election.

He withstood a ban by social media companies after the violence of Jan. 6, corporate donor boycotts, a $454 million civil fraud judgment against him in New York and multiple indictments, including one for a conspiracy to defraud the United States.

Trump crushed his Republican rivals into submission. In the 2022 congressional primaries, he unseated eight of the 10 Republican lawmakers who had voted for his second impeachment. Then he swept through the 2024 presidential primaries, winning every state but one after refusing to debate his opponents.

His supporters rallied behind him as a candidate of destiny even before a would-be assassin’s bullet grazed his ear in July, at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, days before the Republican National Convention. “Fight, fight, fight,” he shouted as he pumped his fist in the air and blood dripped down his face.

Eight days later, Biden, isolated at his Delaware home after testing positive for COVID, withdrew from the race. Harris’ entry unleashed a burst of money and momentum. The Democratic Party quickly consolidated behind her as she closed the polling gap with Trump. In September, she outmaneuvered and baited him at their only debate.

But Trump’s enduring appeal helped him navigate a bitter final phase that included his former White House chief of staff saying Trump met the definition of a “fascist.”

The label did not stick for many voters. Instead, come January, he will again take office as commander in chief.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.