Donald Trump was elected the 47th president of the United States on Wednesday, an extraordinary comeback for a former president who refused to accept defeat four years ago, sparked a violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, was convicted of felony charges and survived two assassination attempts.
With a win in Wisconsin, Trump cleared the 270 electoral votes needed to clinch the presidency.
The victory validates his bare-knuckle approach to politics. He attacked his Democratic rival, Kamala Harris, in deeply personal – often misogynistic and racist – terms as he pushed an apocalyptic picture of a country overrun by violent migrants. The coarse rhetoric, paired with an image of hypermasculinity, resonated with angry voters – particularly men – in a deeply polarized nation.
As president, he’s vowed to pursue an agenda centered on dramatically reshaping the federal government and pursuing retribution against his perceived enemies. Speaking to his supporters Wednesday morning, Trump claimed he had won “an unprecedented and powerful mandate.”
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. Harris, the current vice president, rose to the top of the ticket after President Joe Biden exited the race amid alarm about his advanced age. Despite an initial surge of energy around her campaign, she struggled during a compressed timeline to convince disillusioned voters that she represented a break from an unpopular administration.
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.
Donald Trump took to the the stage at West Palm Beach in Florida with a host of family members including wife Melania and sons Eric, Donald Trump Jr and Barron.
JD Vance was also on stage – he and Trump were introduced as president and vice-president “elect”.
As he has for all his election rallies, Trump walks on with “God Bless the USA” by Lee Greenwood ringing out.
There were chants of “USA, USA” as he waited to speak.
“I want to thank you all very much,” he says, praising the “incredible” MAGA movement.
“Frankly I believe this was the best political movement of all time,” he said, adding it’s going to go to another level.
“We have a country that needs help very badly,” he adds, promising to “fix everything”.
“It’s clear that… this is a political victory,” he adds.
“I want to thank the American people for the extraordinary honour of being elected your 47th president and your 45th president,” he says, effectively claiming victory.
“This is a magnificent victory for the American people that will allow us to make America great again.”
Trump has already won the swing states of North Carolina and Georgia and holds leads in several others, according to Edison Research.
The former president was showing strength across broad swaths of the country, improving on his 2020 performance everywhere from rural areas to urban centers.
Republicans won a U.S. Senate majority after flipping Democratic seats in West Virginia and Ohio. Neither party appeared to have an edge in the fight for control of the House of Representatives where Republicans currently hold a narrow majority.
Trump went into Election Day with a 50-50 chance of reclaiming the White House, a remarkable turnaround from Jan. 6, 2021, when many pundits pronounced his political career to be over. That day, a mob of his supporters stormed Congress in a violent attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
Trump picked up more support from Hispanics, traditionally Democratic voters, and among lower-income households that have keenly felt the sting of price rises since the last presidential election in 2020, according to exit polls from Edison.
Trump won 45% of Hispanic voters nationwide, trailing Harris with 53% but up 13 percentage points from 2020.
About 31% of voters said the economy was their top issue, and they voted for Trump by a 79%-to-20% margin, according to exit polls. Some 45% of voters across the country said their family’s financial situation was worse off today than four years ago, and they favored Trump 80% to 17%.
Global investors were increasingly pricing in a Trump win late on Tuesday. U.S. stock futures and the dollar pushed higher, while Treasury yields climbed and bitcoin rose – all flagged by analysts and investors as trades that favor a Trump victory.
At Howard University, where a large watch party was being held for Harris, supporters were leaving in droves, anticipating that the vice president would not address the crowd on Tuesday night.
Cedric Richmond, a co-chair of the Harris campaign, briefly addressed the crowd and said Harris would not speak. “We still have votes to count,” he said. “We still have states that haven’t been called yet.”
TRUMP OUTPERFORMS 2020
Trump was earning a bigger share of the vote than he did four years ago in nearly every corner of the country.
By 12:30 a.m. ET, officials had nearly completed their count of ballots in more than 1,600 counties – about half the country – and Trump’s share was up about 2 percentage points compared to 2020, reflecting a broad if not especially deep shift in Americans’ support for the president they ousted four years ago.
He improved his numbers in suburban counties, rural regions and even some large cities that are historically bastions of Democratic support; in high-income counties and low-income ones; and in places where unemployment was comparatively high and in places where it is now at record lows.
Harris had banked on big margins among urban and suburban voters, but her support in those places was running well behind President Joe Biden’s in the 2020 election.
Nearly three-quarters of voters said American democracy is under threat, according to the exit polls, underscoring the depth of polarization in a nation where divisions have only grown starker during a fiercely competitive race.
Trump employed increasingly apocalyptic rhetoric while stoking unfounded fears that the election system cannot be trusted. Harris warned that a second Trump term would threaten the underpinnings of American democracy.
Hours before polls closed, Trump claimed on his Truth Social site without evidence that there was “a lot of talk about massive CHEATING” in Philadelphia, echoing his false claims in 2020 that fraud had occurred in large, Democratic-dominated cities. In a subsequent post, he also asserted there was fraud in Detroit.
“I don’t respond to nonsense,” Detroit City Clerk Janice Winfrey told Reuters.
A Philadelphia city commissioner, Seth Bluestein, replied on X, “There is absolutely no truth to this allegation.”
DIZZYING CAMPAIGN
Trump voted earlier near his home in Palm Beach, Florida.
“If I lose an election, if it’s a fair election, I’m gonna be the first one to acknowledge it,” Trump told reporters.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk, a prominent Trump backer, watched the results at Mar-a-Lago with Trump.
Millions of Americans waited in orderly lines to cast ballots, with only sporadic disruptions reported across a handful of states, including several non-credible bomb threats that the FBI said appeared to originate from Russian email domains.
Tuesday’s vote capped a dizzying race churned by unprecedented events, including two assassination attempts against Trump, Biden’s surprise withdrawal and Harris’ rapid rise.
No matter who wins, history will be made.
Harris, 60, the first female vice president, would become the first woman, Black woman and South Asian American to win the presidency. Trump, 78, the only president to be impeached twice and the first former president to be criminally convicted, would also become the first president to win non-consecutive terms in more than a century.
Via Reuters
