Donald Trump wins back presidency

Washington, DC

He’s back: Donald Trump will be elected the 47th president of the United States.

In the end, it was not a close affair: Trump triumphed over Vice President Kamala Harris, with a win in Pennsylvania called by Fox News at 1:20 a.m. ET bringing him within a whisker of the requisite 270 Electoral College votes and a call in Wisconsin at 1:47 a.m. pushing him over the precipice. Decision Desk, meanwhile, included Alaska’s Electoral College votes and called the election for Trump at 1:21 a.m. ET.

Victory in the remaining states — Arizona, Michigan and Nevada — would give him a landslide. The New York Times is also currently projecting a popular vote triumph for Trump. The Republicans have also won control of the US Senate.

“We made history for a reason tonight,” Trump said in Palm Beach when he began speaking just before 2:30 a.m. “Look what happened, is this crazy? It’s a political victory that our country’s never seen before.”

“This will be remembered as the day the American people regained control of their country,” he said.

The Republican candidate managed to build a coalition that drew from a number of demographics, with young men and Hispanics proving particularly decisive.

Trump ran an unorthodox campaign — he announced his bid to win back the presidency almost two years ago, shortly after a substantial Republican defeat in the 2022 midterms. He brought his party to heel in a primary process where his most consequential challengers, his former UN ambassador Nikki Haley and Covid champion Florida governor Ron DeSantis, failed to gather steam despite hundreds of millions of dollars in donor money spent on them.

He then found himself facing two presumptive Democratic nominees: first, the incumbent President Joe Biden, who gambled big and staked his candidacy on an early debate in June — in which he performed disastrously. Trump then had to change tack to run against Biden’s VP Kamala Harris after she was swapped in. Oh, and he had his ear clipped by a bullet in an assassination attempt in between. A second attempt on Trump’s life was foiled by the US Secret Service in September.

Despite the Biden-Harris campaign’s best efforts to characterize the Project 2025 agenda from the Heritage Foundation as Trump’s platform, Team Trump was able to build a broad coalition and appeal to moderates, turning the election into a referendum on the existing administration and its actions, or lack thereof, on the state of the economy, inflation and the US-Mexico border. Their roster of surrogates proved particularly helpful, including 2024 Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who brought with him a cadre of Big Ag, Big Pharma-skeptical independents; anti-war 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard, and billionaire businessman Elon Musk, who poured millions into his America PAC in a voter-turnout effort.

Attention will now turn to the Trump transition team as they vet candidates — surely including Musk, Gabbard and RFK Jr. — for cabinet positions in a second Trump administration. The Democratic Party, meanwhile, will be left wondering how they managed to lose two of three “referendums on Donald Trump.”