Donald Trump Scores Epic Comeback, Wins Second Term; GOP Takes Control of Senate

WASHINGTON — Donald John Trump was elected the 47th president of the United States on Tuesday, Nov. 5, completing an extraordinary political comeback that saw him overcoming two prior impeachments, four federal indictments, and a felony conviction to secure a second term in office.

“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 gathered at the Palm Beach Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Florida, last night.

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

Recapturing the White House wasn’t the only good news Trump received late Tuesday night. The Republican party also took control of the Senate after four years in the minority.

The did so by flipping three seats, in West Virginia, Ohio and Montana, giving them at least 52 seats in the chamber.

With his victory, Trump, 78, becomes only the second U.S. president, after Grover Cleveland, to win non-consecutive presidential terms.

Unlike the Cleveland rematch against incumbent President Benjamin Harrison in 1892, a contest later recalled by the historians as “the cleanest, quietest, and most creditable” of its era, Trump’s campaign was an often nasty, polarizing affair in which he repeatedly called into question the foundational ideals of American democracy.

On Sunday, during a rally at an airport Lititz, Pennsylvania, Trump veered off script, abruptly shifting from outlining what he and his campaign see as the stakes in the race, to his regrets over eventually leaving office in the wake of the 2020 election.

“I shouldn’t have left, I mean, honestly,” Trump said, as many in the audience clapped.

“We did so well,” he continued, adding, “So now every polling booth has hundreds of lawyers standing there. It’s all about the lawyers. Nobody should have that.”

Trump went on in the same speech to dismiss his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, as a “vessel” of a “demonic” Democratic Party.

Indeed, to the very end of his campaign, Trump never committed to accepting the 2024 elections results unless he considered them fair — in other words free of the alleged — and later roundly debunked “voter fraud” he claimed occurred after the 2020 election.

More controversially, however, Trump made a statement in Lititz that suggested he wouldn’t mind if members of the press were in the line of fire of a potential assassin.

Trump made the remark while complaining about the lack of protective glass around him, a feature of his outdoor rallies since he survived an assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July. 

Some, he suggested, had decided “screw him, don’t give him the glass.” In actuality, Harris had the same protective glass set up at her “closing argument” rally in Washington, D.C., last week — a single large pane of glass directly in front of her, and one at each side, with a large gap between them.

“To get to me, somebody would have to shoot through fake news, and I don’t mind that much, ’cause, I don’t mind. I don’t mind,” he said.

Referencing the gap in the protective glass, he gestured to the press area. 

“They’re my glass,” he said. “Those people are my glass.”

Asked about the comment later by ABC News, Karoline Leavitt, the national spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, said, “obviously, he was joking.”

According to ABC News, Leavitt went on to call the question “exhausting” and complained that the media “picks apart every single word that Donald Trump says when the majority of his speeches are focused on the issues that Americans care about.”

As of Wednesday morning, Trump won 24 states decisively, and was poised to be declared the winner in 6 more including the battlegrounds of Pennsylvania, Georgia and Wisconsin.

By the time the Associated Press called the race, the former president and now, president-elect had garnered 277 electoral college votes compared to Kamala Harris’s 224.

His victory also means Republican Sen. JD Vance, of Ohio, will be sworn in in January as the 50th vice president of the United States.

Though he often ventured off script over the course of his campaign, Trump relied heavily on the same playbook that got him elected to the White House in 2016, albeit a much darker and more chilling version.

“The most important day in the history of our country is going to be Nov. 5,” Trump told Fox News host Brian Kilmeade back in March.

“Our country is going bad. And it’s going to be changed on Nov. 5, and if it’s not changed we’re not going to have a country anymore,” he said, airing a view he would refer to time and again on the campaign trail.

Though the Trump campaign did make efforts to reach out to Black and Latino voters, Trump himself mainly relied on his appeal to blue-collar White and working-class voters who believe they’ve been left behind by the Democratic party and the federal government as a whole.

“The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer,” Trump promised eight years ago.

For the former president, 2024 was an “us” against “them” campaign, just as it had been in 2016, with undocumented migrants and the transgender community being singled out for the harshest and most stigmatizing rhetoric.

For the second time in a decade, the results appear to be a head-scratching repudiation of popular Democratic policies and programs.

When he won in 2016, the big target on Trump’s wall was the Obama-era Affordable Care Act, which he unsuccessfully tried to repeal.

This time around, he’ll be taking aim at the cornerstones of President Joe Biden’s legacy, including the Inflation Reduction Act, the Chips and Science Act and a wide range of programs related to renewable energy and climate change.

Trump’s third campaign for the White House began amidst an air of uncertainty in 2023.

At the time, a number of Republicans privately expressed concerns about a Trump candidacy due to his loss in 2020, his purported role in inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, siege on the U.S. Capitol, the ongoing criminal cases against him, and the results of the 2022 midterms, in which a number of Trump-endorsed candidates lost.

As a result of these concerns, a crowded field of candidates emerged to vie for the Republican nomination, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former South Carolina governor and ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, wealth management executive Vivek Ramaswamy, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, and South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, among others.

Trump, however, still garnered high favorability marks from likely Republican voters, particularly in battleground states, and received strong backing from many Republicans on Capitol Hill and in red state statehouses.

And while Trump’s eligibility to appear on the ballot was challenged by some voters and political leaders in Colorado, Maine and Illinois, based on his alleged involvement in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, these efforts were rejected by a unanimous Supreme Court.

With that support at his back, Trump proceeded to mostly win the ensuing primaries and caucuses.

In mid-January, on the night of the Iowa Republican Caucus, Trump won in a romp, soundly defeating DeSantis, who came in second, and Haley, who came in third.

Following the Iowa caucuses, Ramaswamy and DeSantis dropped out of the race and endorsed Trump, leaving Trump and Haley as the only remaining major candidates.

Trump would defeat Haley again in New Hampshire, but this time, his margin of victory was much smaller and the former governor seemed to be gaining momentum.

That momentum stalled in her home state of South Carolina a month later, when Trump soundly beat her again.

Haley vowed to fight on, but Trump’s strong showing on Super Tuesday left her with no viable options to continue.

Haley suspended her campaign on March 6, having only won Vermont and the District of Columbia.

Trump became the presumptive nominee six days later, on March 12, with his victory in the Washington primary bringing him over the 1,215-delegate threshold needed to clinch the nomination.

In mid-July Trump and his running mate, Vance, were officially nominated as the Republican presidential and vice-presidential candidates at the Republican National Convention, but by then the race the former president thought he’d be running in come November was experiencing some major convulsions.

The Democratic race to White House started with the DNC upending its longstanding caucus and primary calendar.

At the request of Biden, who wanted to see diversity emphasized during the primaries, the DNC designated South Carolina’s Feb. 3 primary as its first sanctioned contest.

For the first time since the early 1970s, there would be no meaningful Iowa Democratic Caucus to kick things off in mid-January. 

Instead, the state party opted for something closer to a prolonged primary, with voters casting their ballots, exclusively by mail, beginning on Jan. 12 with the results being announced on Super Tuesday, March 5.

While that compromise appeared to satisfy both the national party and its state affiliate, no such agreement could be reached with New Hampshire, traditionally the second state in the process and the first to hold a primary.

State officials claimed they were bound by law to hold their primary in January, and they went ahead and did so, holding it on Jan. 23 despite the DNC’s insistence that it wouldn’t recognize the results.

Balking at leaving the media attention accorded the first two contests to the Republicans, author Marianne Williamson and retiring Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips decided to run in New Hampshire anyway.

Biden, meanwhile, appeared as a write-in candidate thanks to a grassroots effort, and ultimately prevailed.

With that, Biden ran the table of the remaining intra-party contests, and by March 12, he had won enough delegates to become the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party.

Then, in a fateful move, in mid-May, Biden challenged Trump to a pair of televised debates before the November election, bypassing the nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Elections, which had run presidential debates for more than three decades.

Biden’s proposal was to hold the first debate with the presumptive Republican nominee in late June, and to hold a second in September, before early voting began in the general election.

To the president, the early showdown, to be held on June 27 at CNN’s Atlanta studios, was the perfect opportunity to both dispel concerns about his age and knock the legs out from under the Trump campaign ahead of the Republican National Convention.

Instead, it turned into a debacle, with the president suffering one of the few shortcomings of incumbency — getting out of practice when it comes to public debating.

Though he scored some solid points against Trump, the consensus immediately after the debate and in the days that followed was that the president had “blown it,” coming off as old, tired, a mangler of words, and occasionally befuddled.

With that, the drum beat for his withdrawal from the race began, first in the media and then among leaders of Biden’s own party.

Convinced he was still the party’s best bet to defeat Trump, the president initially dug in and refused to give up.

In fact, when he finally decided to step away from the race, on Sunday, July 21, he already had fundraisers and campaign events planned.

In the end, he said later, he realized uniting the party required sacrificing personal ambition.

“It’s been the honor of my life to serve as your president. But in the defense of democracy, which is at stake, I think it’s more important than any title,” he said from the Oval Office a few nights later.

The question was what would come next. 

While there was no doubt Biden saw Harris as the obvious choice to replace him in the contest against Trump — the president endorsed her shortly after announcing his intention not to run — the party had to find a way to make the transition and guarantee her legitimacy.

Meanwhile, many Republicans were crying foul, claiming Biden could not be lawfully removed from the ballot — a claim for which there was no legal basis — and that even if he could, it would be undemocratic for the DNC to opt for an alternative candidate that hadn’t been vetted by primary and caucus voters.

In the end, the rules committee of the Democratic National Convention approved a virtual nomination process that assured the party would have a nominee two weeks before it gathered in Chicago, Illinois, for the pomp and circumstance of its in-person convention.

Harris became the nominee of the Democratic Party on Aug. 5 following the virtual roll call vote, becoming the first nominee who did not participate in the primaries since Vice President Hubert Humphrey in 1968.

She selected Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate the following day. But what stunned everyone was the fundraising that ensued. 

In the first 24 hours of her candidacy, the Harris campaign raised more than $81 million. Ten days later, the campaign’s haul was $310 million, almost all of it coming in small-dollar donations.

And the dollars kept coming, right on through the remaining weeks of the election. In early October, despite spending ferociously on advertising and other campaign-related expenses, the Harris campaign and affiliated committees still had $346 million on hand, according to federal filings.

Harris’ rise as party nominee and cultural phenomenon appeared to set Trump back on his heels.

The reality was until Biden dropped out of the race, Trump was winning in the polls and his campaign believed all he had to do was coast to reelection. When Kamala-mania erupted, Trump actually appeared to pine for his former nemesis to get back into the race.

He even went so far as to muse on his social media platform Truth Social that Biden would “crash” the Democratic National Convention in August in Chicago and try to “take back the nomination.”

“What are the chances that Crooked Joe Biden, the WORST President in the history of the U.S., whose Presidency was Unconstitutionally STOLEN from him by Kamabla, Barack HUSSEIN Obama, Crazy Nancy Pelosi, Shifty Adam Schiff, Cryin’ Chuck Schumer, and others on the Lunatic Left, CRASHES the Democrat National Convention and tries to take back the Nomination, beginning with challenging me to another DEBATE,” Trump wrote.

Trump continued: “He feels that he made a historically tragic mistake by handing over the U.S. Presidency, a COUP, to the people in the World he most hates, and he wants it back, NOW!!!”

Trump’s downward spiral appeared to continue during a presidential candidate debate in Philadelphia hosted by ABC News.

Over the course of a high-stakes 90 minutes, Harris seemed to repeatedly rattle the former president with attacks that threw him off message time and again.

Among other things, she needled him about the size of his rally crowds, his conduct on Jan. 6, and on the former Trump administration officials who had come out and said he was unfit for a second term.

Trump’s most memorable moment during the debate — the only one he’d have, it turned out — was his extended riff on a debunked report that Haitian immigrants in the town of Springfield, Ohio, were abducting and eating their neighbors’ pets.

“They’re eating the dogs; they’re eating the cats,” he said.

Despite all this, the race remained tight, with neither candidate able to pull away and virtually all polls showing it a dead-heat going into election day.

From the debate on, Trump stuck to his mostly angry message — vilifying undocumented aliens as rapists and criminals, railing against the “radical left” for its “transgender craziness,” and threatening news organizations that he claimed were misusing their power to game the system against him.

And just like in 2016, his unfiltered and largely improvisational style, coupled with his homilies to nationalism and economic populism, helped him to hold on to his support among disillusioned voters, of whom there were far more than the Democrats counted on.

Trump is set to take the oath of office on Monday, Jan. 20.