How Trump Did It: A Look at a Wild Ride for American Democracy

WASHINGTON – It began when practically no one was looking.

Well, to be fair, they were looking. But nobody saw the moment for what it was: the beginning of arguably the biggest comeback in U.S. political history.

When Trump left the White House early on the morning of Jan. 20, 2021, avoiding the inauguration of a successor that he still claimed “won” a “rigged” 2020 presidential election, the former commander in chief, his family and aides were all in a state of shell shock.

According to Bob Wooward, who includes an account of the day in his recently published “War,” Trump was ensconced in his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, well before Joe Biden took the oath of office.

“He stayed in his quarters the rest of the day,” Woodward wrote.

It was, understandably, a time of intense pain for the now former president.

A few days later, however, he appeared to rebound.

“Hey, it’s your all-time favorite president,” Trump said after placing a call to House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif.

“I want to talk,” Trump says in Woodward’s account. “I’m down in Florida.”

Back in Washington, the nation’s capital was still embroiled in the controversy surrounding the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, riot, during which angry Trump supporters stormed the Capitol building in the hope of blocking the certification of the presidential election results.

McCarthy was just one member of Trump’s party that had criticized Trump for his role in fomenting the siege that left five people dead, and more than 172 police officers injured.

In fact, 10 House Republicans had voted to impeach the president for his alleged actions before, during and after the riot just days before he left town.

Even as he spoke to the former president in South Florida exile, the Senate was preparing for an impeachment trial at which it would ultimately acquit Trump of wrong-doing.

“Sure,” McCarthy is reported as saying. “I’ll stop by.”

McCarthy’s visit, on Thursday, Jan. 28, 2021, showed that for all that had happened, Trump was still in firm control of the Republican party.

“You know, it’s good for you and me, right?” Woodward quotes Trump as saying as he greeted McCarthy at the Mar-a-Lago club’s entrance.

Above their heads, four TV news helicopters hovered, trying to capture the scene.

“All right, whatever,” McCarthy replied.

Once inside, according to a readout of the meeting provided by Trump’s Political Action Committee Save America, the two Republicans discussed strategy for winning the House majority in the 2022 midterm elections.

With that, the restoration of the former president’s political relevance had begun.

The readout stated the two men had discussed “many topics, number one of which was taking back the House in 2022.”

It added: “President Trump’s popularity has never been stronger than it is today, and his endorsement means more than perhaps any endorsement at any time.”

McCarthy later released a statement of his own, confirming Trump’s account of their discussion over lunch.

“A Republican majority will listen to our fellow Americans and solve the challenges facing our nation,” the future House speaker said. 

“Democrats, on the other hand, have only put forward an agenda that divides us — such as impeaching a president who is now a private citizen and destroying blue-collar energy jobs,” he said.

“A united conservative movement will strengthen the bonds of our citizens and uphold the freedoms our country was founded on,” McCarthy added. 

Not everyone was pleased with the optics.

“Mar-a-Lago? What the hell, Kevin?” asked Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., then the third-ranking member of the House Republican leadership, upon his return.

“They’re really worried,” McCarthy told Cheney, according to her memoir “Oath and Honor.” 

“Trump’s not eating, so they asked me to come see him,” he said.

Cheney was dubious.

“He’s really depressed,” McCarthy offered.

Though Trump had been infuriated by McCarthy’s comments related to Jan. 6 — and would disavow Cheney’s account of their meeting — he wouldn’t forget that the Republican leader made his way to Florida when he was called upon.

After the Republicans won a meager House majority in the 2022 elections, Trump tried to quell the dissent that was blocking McCarthy’s ascension to speaker, talking to far-right members of the caucus via Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s cellphone.

McCarthy’s tenure as House speaker would last less than a year; nevertheless, Trump made sure everyone knew he’d done McCarthy and “our country … a big favor” when it came to the fight for the speakership.

“Thank you,” he said in a post on his social media platform Truth Social.

But then, Trump was once again riding high as the self-proclaimed leader of the Republican party. Now all he needed was to reclaim the presidency.

Trump Enters Race Amid Doubts

In reality, Trump had already kickstarted the 2024 election cycle.

In the run-up to the 2022 midterms, he made a series of high profile endorsements that all seemed to fizzle.

There was TV’s “Dr. Oz,” Mehmet Oz, who crashed and burned as a Senate candidate in Pennsylvania.

Then there was ex-television news anchor Kari Lake, who fell well short in her bid to be elected Arizona governor.

Where these and other failed endorsements would have been egg on the face of another political leader, the publicity that surrounded them, good and bad, only served to energize Trump.

By Nov. 8, 2022, Election Day, he was champing at the bit to launch his presidential campaign. Though he held off for a week at the urging of advisors — so as not to overshadow the expected Republican successes, it was said later — he filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission, formally launching his candidacy, just eight days later.

“In order to make America great and glorious again I am tonight announcing my candidacy for president of the United States,” Trump told supporters gathered in the gilded ballroom at Mar-a-Lago that same time.

“America’s comeback starts right now,” he said.

To many, it didn’t seem like an auspicious time for Trump to launch his third campaign for the White House.

In fact, as he stood before more than a dozen American flags, a number of Republicans were already enamored with an alternative — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Not only had DeSantis just come off a big victory, winning reelection over former governor and Democratic Party nominee Charlie Crist by 19 percentage points; polls suggested that a large number of registered Republican voters preferred DeSantis to Trump as the party’s 2024 nominee.

An internal memo circulated by the Club for Growth, the conservative, pro-business, low-tax group, that very week, showed DeSantis 11 percentage points ahead of Trump with likely voters in the Iowa caucus, and even further behind — by 15 percentage points — in New Hampshire.

For his part, DeSantis remained mum. As he had done so often in the past, Trump shrugged off the naysayers.

Then, just three days later, the naysayers appeared to be proven right for having concerns.

That was the day Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that Jack Smith, a former Justice Department prosecutor who was then investigating alleged war crimes in Kosovo in The Hague, would oversee the inquiry into Trump’s handling of government documents and parts of the investigation into Trump’s alleged role in the mayhem that transpired Jan. 6.

“The extraordinary circumstances presented here demand” the appointment of a special counsel, Garland said.

That night, a Friday, Trump responded, telling Fox News he considered the move a “disgrace” and “the worst politicization of justice in our country.”

“I am not going to accept,” Trump vowed. “The Republican party has to stand up and fight.”

The Real Race for the White House Begins

On Valentine’s Day, 2023, Trump got his first challenger for the Republican nomination.

Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor who had served as Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, announced her candidacy via a three-minute video posted to YouTube and shared across social media platforms.

In it, she declared that the time had come, “for a new generation of leadership to rediscover fiscal responsibility, secure our border, and strengthen our country, our pride and our purpose.”

The following week, Vivek Ramaswamy, an entrepreneur who’d made a fortune in biotech entered the race, positioning himself to the hard-right by declaring war on the “woke left.”

With that, she embarked on a series of town-hall style meetings in Iowa and New Hampshire, where she hoped strong showings a year later would propel her to a favorite daughter victory in her native South Carolina, and from there, to a decisive showdown with Trump or whoever else was left to compete for the nomination on Super Tuesday.

“I’m not a politician, I am an entrepreneur,” he declared, but such pronouncements, along with his penchant for big promises — like his vow to fire three-quarters of the federal workforce in his first term — only seemed to work against him.

It wasn’t long before he was branded a “baby Trump” and dismissed to the ranks of second-tier candidates.

Where was DeSantis? Many asked. The answer, still on the sidelines.

But it wasn’t long before all this was overshadowed by a major development in Trump world — the former president’s indictment in a New York “hush money” case brought by first term Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg.

The case had been set in motion by Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus Vance.

When the office’s investigation came to a head, Bragg charged Trump with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records as part of a scheme to keep adult film star Stormy Daniels from publicly alleging an affair with Trump ahead of the 2016 election. 

But there were questions about the validity of the case from the start, with independent legal observers referring to how it was presented to the court as “legally untested” and “a bank shot.”

The case focused specifically on how Trump reimbursed his lawyer, Michael Cohen, for the payments and how they were — according to Cohen — bogusly entered into Trump’s company records as legal expenses.

Under New York state law, falsifying business records is, in most cases, a misdemeanor, but it can rise to being a felony offense, carrying a possible four-year prison term, if the falsification of the records was committed to hide another crime.

Bragg’s contention that Trump committed a higher level offense was based on his assertion that the payment to Stormy Daniels was a campaign finance violation because it ultimately would have aided the real estate magnate’s White House bid.

But this raised a novel legal issue: whether a campaign finance violation — a matter of federal law — could be joined to what otherwise was purely a New York state law case.

“This is political persecution and election interference at the highest level in history,” Trump said in a statement after learning of the indictment. 

“Even before I was sworn in as your president … the radical Left Democrats — the enemy of the hard-working men and women of this Country — have been engaged in a witch-hunt,” he said.

Some wondered whether his becoming the first former president to face criminal charges would torpedo Trump’s current White House bid.

In fact, it only seemed to strengthen it, with diehard Trump supporters, many of whom still believed the 2020 election was rigged, rallying around the former president.

In their view, Bragg’s being a Democrat, advancing a novel legal theory, was just one more piece of evidence of a political conspiracy against the man they still considered their president.

Trump pleaded not guilty.

Biden Launches 2024 Reelection Bid

President Joe Biden launched his reelection bid on April 25, 2023, officially announcing his intention to seek a second term with a three-minute video.

“Freedom,” Biden said following the display of images from the Jan. 6 riots at the Capitol with protests over the Supreme Court decision overturning abortion rights.

“Personal freedom. These are the fundamentals to who we are as Americans,” he said. “There’s nothing more important, nothing more sacred …

“But, you know, around the country, MAGA extremists are lining up to take on those freedoms, cutting the Social Security you paid for your entire life, while cutting taxes for very wealthy, deciding what health care decisions women can make, and banning books and telling people who they can love, all while making it more difficult for you to be able to vote,” he said.

“When I ran for president four years ago, I said we are in a battle for the soul of America. And we still are,” Biden continued. “The question we are facing is whether in the years ahead we have more freedom or less freedom. More rights or fewer.”

Though Biden’s decision to run surprised no one, some Democrats worried privately whether at 80, the president gave them the best chance at winning in 2024. 

The problem was the party saw itself as having no real viable alternatives. Biden was, everyone knew, the only possible candidate who had ever beaten Trump in an electoral contest.

Trump himself immediately responded to the challenge. The same day Biden released his video, Trump rolled out a four-and-a-half minute video of his own on his Truth Social platform.

“You could take the five worst presidents in American history and put them together and they would not have done the damage Joe Biden has done to our nation in just a few short years — not even close,” Trump said, blaming the Biden administration for a litany of ills ranging from inflation to the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan during which a suicide bomber killed 13 U.S. service members and 170 Afghan civilians.

With the battle joined, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s announcement that he intended to challenge Biden for the Democratic nomination was greeted mostly with a shrug.

What, Trump Worry?

The next four months were not an auspicious time for the Trump campaign.

Between the first week of May and the second week of August, his legal woes would grow exponentially and three additional Republicans would jump into the presidential race.

It all began on May 9, 2023, when a nine-person jury found the former president liable for battery and defamation — while clearing him of a separate claim of rape in a lawsuit brought by writer E. Jean Carroll.

Carroll first accused Trump of rape in a magazine article published in 2019. 

In that article she claimed she had met Trump at Bergdorf Goodman’s flagship store on Fifth Avenue in New York sometime in 1995 or 1996.

According to Carroll, she was helping Trump pick out a present, when he led her into a dressing room and sexually assaulted her.

Carroll sued shortly before he announced his presidential bid after a law passed in New York allowed claims previously barred by the statute of limitations to be resurrected.

“Today, the world finally knows the truth,” Carroll said in a statement after the court ordered Trump to pay her $5 million in damages. “This victory is not just for me but for every woman who has suffered because she was not believed.”

“I have absolutely no idea who this woman is. This verdict is a disgrace — a continuation of the greatest witch hunt of all time!” Trump said in a statement of his own.

A month later, Trump was indicted on charges stemming from a raid that federal agents conducted on his home at Mar-a-Lago.

At issue was the president’s removal of several boxes of classified documents from the White House when he left Washington in early 2021.

According to the government, Trump had recklessly stored the material — including files marked “top secret” — in an unsecured room in his Florida home.

One photograph submitted as evidence showed several boxes stacked in a bathroom.

Trump insisted the controversy was a difference of opinion over the requirements of the Presidential Records Act, which sets out who retains control of documents and other records created over the course of a presidential administration.

Upon learning he’d been indicted in the case, Trump once again took to Truth Social.

“This is indeed a dark day for the United States of America,” he said.

The dust had barely settled, when Special Counsel Jack Smith indicted Trump for a second time in less than a month, on federal charges related to what Smith described as the former president’s “unprecedented” attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

“The attack on our nation’s Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was an unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy,” Smith said during a press conference announcing the four-count indictment.

“It was fueled by lies, lies by the defendant targeted at obstructing a bedrock function of the U.S. government: the nation’s process of collecting, counting and certifying the results of the presidential election,” Smith added.

Trump pleaded not guilty to all charges, his campaign pushed back, asking why it had taken two-and-a-half years for Smith to bring them.

But even this wasn’t the end of Trump’s legal headaches.

On Aug. 14, 2023, a grand jury convened by District Attorney Fani Willis in Fulton County, Georgia, indicted Trump and 18 of his allies on violations of 16 Georgia statutes in their attempt to overturn the 2020 election results in the state — even after recounts confirmed he had lost there. 

Any one of these controversies would have sunk a traditional candidate and likely ended their political career.

A case in point is that of former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, a Democrat, who was indicted after his 2008 presidential campaign on six felony charges of violating multiple federal campaign contribution laws to cover up an extramarital affair to which he eventually admitted. 

Edwards was found not guilty on one count and the judge overseeing the case declared a mistrial on the remaining charges. The Justice Department later decided to drop those counts.

Despite not being convicted of anything, the revelation in the media that he had engaged in an extramarital affair and fathered a child while his wife, Elizabeth Edwards, was dying of cancer was his political ruin.

How did Trump avoid such a fate in the midst of a presidential campaign?

Here again, it’s helpful to turn to Bob Woodward’s new book, and particularly its opening chapter, which focuses on “the lost interview” he and Watergate reporting partner, Carl Bernstein, conducted with Trump during the winter of 1989.

At the time, Trump was New York City’s most famous real estate mogul and such a constant, bold-faced name presence in the city’s tabloids that New York Post gossip columnist Cindy Adams christened him “The Donald.”

As a native New Yorker, even if he wasn’t an avid sports fan, he well knew that the road to being a champion was fraught with challenges and even failure — after all, the legendary New York Yankee Babe Ruth struck out 1,330 times on his way to hitting 714 home runs.

While it was the successes that ultimately matter, Trump told Woodward and Bernstein “I always like to sort of prepare for the worst.”

Like a Major League Baseball player bracing for a slump, Trump said matter of factly, “I know times will get bad. It’s just a question of when.”

Like another quintessential New Yorker at the time, the author Norman Mailer, who often came in for some of the same criticism Trump gets today, the future president also drew lessons from boxing.

Speaking with Woodward and Bernstein, Trump said he’d recently seen a boxing match in which the underdog, a good but unknown fighter, won.

Afterwards, Trump said, the winner was asked how he pulled off the upset.

“And he said, ‘I just went with the punches,’” Trump told the two journalists. 

“I thought that was a great expression,” Trump said. “Because it’s about life just as much as it is about anything else. You go with the punches.”

Trump also revealed another aspect of his strategy for living with Woodward and Bernstein.

When it came to dealing with authorities that he felt were treating him badly, he stonewalled them.

At the time of the interview, his nemesis were building inspectors who cited him for violations on buildings “that were absolutely perfect.”

“From day one, I said f*** them,” he said.

He explained his attitude was that if he gave an inch, “they’d always come back” for more.

“The point is, if you fold it causes you much more trouble than it’s worth,” he said.

Hoping to capitalize on Trump’s travails, three more Republicans entered the Republican presidential contest during this period: South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who had established himself as one of Trump’s harshest critics in the GOP, and, at long last, the much anticipated Ron DeSantis. 

But as the former president soon made clear, he wasn’t about to stoop to giving their campaigns the time of day.

Trump Opts Out of Primary Debates

Political candidates often opt not to utter their challengers’ names in campaign speeches.

Trump went that tactic one better, by refusing to be on the same stage with them during an anticipated series of Republican primary debates.

“The public knows who I am and what a successful presidency I had, with energy independence, strong borders and military, biggest ever tax and regulation cuts, no inflation, strongest economy in history and much more,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “I will therefore not be doing the debates.”

Trump’s decision broke with the long standing tradition of leading presidential contenders confronting each other face-to-face before the American public.

But as far as Trump was concerned, there were no other leading candidates.

The very week that he walked away from the debate stage a CBS poll showed that 62% of likely Republican primary voters planned to vote for him. The best DeSantis, the next most popular candidate, could muster was 16%.

The debate, hosted by Fox News, went on anyway, with eight GOP candidates participating. But for most viewers it felt like they were watching the undercard.

Nothing happened to turn the race on its head. Depending on which media outlet one relied on, Trump’s lead in the race was described as “massive” and “commanding.”

The day after the televised debate, Trump surrendered to Georgia authorities in Atlanta, and later posted his mugshot on social media. Within hours, the Trump campaign racked up more than 85,000 donations.

The next weeks, however, would be tumultuous. In New York, a civil trial got underway in which Trump, his oldest sons — Eric and Don Jr. — and his business were accused of inflating the value of their assets by more than $2 billion in total to obtain hundreds of millions in bank loans.

“The frauds found here leap off the page and shock the conscience,” Judge Arthur Engoron would write three months later when he handed down his decision in the case.

Trump was ordered to pay over $355 million, plus interest, for lying on years of financial statements to bolster his real estate empire.

Trump haters rejoiced, believing his image as a mega-wealthy and shrewd businessman had been shattered beyond repair. As was true so many times in the past, however, the former president’s supporters rallied around him.

In any event, Trump’s problems were far overshadowed by the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas, which left an initial 1,200 Israelis dead, and saw hundreds more taken hostage.

The terrorist attack led to a full-scale military response from Israel that soon spawned a major rift within the Democratic party as the Biden administration continued to back the Israelis even as the deaths of Palestinian civilians mounted.

In the meantime, Robert Kennedy dropped his Democratic primary challenge to Biden, opting instead to run as an independent.

Weeks later, Christie exited the Republican race after failing to qualify for the fifth GOP candidate debate. The night of the debate, Trump appeared on a televised town hall on Fox News.

Insurrectionist or No?

With Christmas approaching the Trump campaign was focused squarely on the looming Iowa Republican Caucus when it learned Colorado’s secretary of State had disqualified him from the state’s primary ballot.

Secretary of State Jena Griswold had based her decision on a post-Civil War era constitutional amendment that banned officials who had engaged in “insurrection or rebellion” from holding office.

Enacted to punish Southern leaders for the role they played in the war, Griswold had now applied it to Trump’s purported role in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.

Her decision was later affirmed by a divided Colorado Supreme Court.

“We do not reach these conclusions lightly,” the justices in the majority wrote. “We are mindful of the magnitude and weight of the questions now before us. We are likewise mindful of our solemn duty to apply the law, without fear or favor, and without being swayed by public reaction to the decisions that the law mandates we reach.”

The Trump campaign slammed the ruling, vowing to file an emergency appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Other states, most notably Maine and Illinois followed Colorado’s lead.

Though it wouldn’t act until the day before the Super Tuesday primaries in March, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously restored Donald Trump to the 2024 presidential primary ballots from which he’d been removed.

In an unsigned opinion the justices said states couldn’t invoke a post-Civil War law, holding only the U.S. Congress has the power to do so.

Trump was succinct but jubilant: “Big win for America!!!” he wrote on Truth Social.

On to Iowa

Democrats have long known they’ve got a problem in rural America.

David “Mudcat” Saunders, a veteran Democratic Party strategist whom we first met when he was an advisor to John Edward’s first presidential campaign, had already spent years by that time encouraging Democratic candidates to respect and be mindful of rural culture.

“One of the things they have to recognize is that the trade policies and the energy policies and a host of other policies of the Bill Clinton administration decimated our culture here … in rural America,” he said in 2016, as the Trump phenomena was just picking up steam.

“If you look at the primaries and caucuses that have been held to date, the people Trump is appealing to are those caught in a real bind,” he continued then.

“Everybody says his appeal is based on anger. Is there anger? Yes. But what is the source of the anger? It’s more than simple frustration. It’s a matter of survival,” Saunders said.

He also offered an assessment of why Trump seemed impervious to any and all bad press he was getting during his race against the then-Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton.

“He’s like the Incredible Hulk,” Saunders said. “You can hit him with a missile and he only gets stronger. I mean, the fact that they are hitting him, that they are unified and hitting him, is angering a lot of people.”

Despite the years that have passed since, the Democratic party has seemed no closer to adopting what some continue to dismiss as “a bubba strategy” or embracing the so-called NASCAR vote in all its permutations.

During a Democratic National Committee meeting at National Harbor in Maryland in 2022, several members of the party’s rural caucus said they believed their party had turned its back on rural America as it focused on other key areas of support like the nation’s cities and suburbs.

“As a result a lot of people have given up and you find a lot of rural counties with poor or no organization at all,” a gentleman from Nebraska said.

This year, the DNC gave rural America a little more to be chagrined about.

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

That meant, 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.

In essence, many Democratic voters in the very rural state felt sidelined, which suited Iowa GOP chairman Jeff Kaufmann, who was still holding a January caucus, just fine.

“Ultimately, if we want to maintain the specialness that Iowa now enjoys, we have got to do a caucus. People know that,” Kaufmann said.

“That’s why the Democrats are going to have to have a political born-again experience … or else they are going to lose this state for good,” he said.

Despite epic cold and back-to-back blizzards caucus week, DeSantis and Haley both ran spirited campaigns in Iowa, providing the media — largely ensconced in the large “media center” set aside for it in Des Moines — a horse race to follow.

Though Trump’s victory in Iowa was a foregone conclusion — he’d ultimately garner the support of 51% of the state’s Republican caucus goers — the race for second place soaked up the media coverage and even had a surprise twist.

With DeSantis seen as kind of a “Trump Lite,” and with Trump himself being in the race, Nikki Haley was seen by many as likely second place finisher and expected to do especially well in traditional Democratic strongholds like Ames, Iowa.

What was discounted was the strength of DeSantis’s ground operation, which turned out to be formidable enough to edge out Haley, garnering 21.2% of the vote. Haley was third at 19.1% and Vivek Ramaswamy came in a distant fourth, with 7.7%.

Ramaswamy immediately dropped out of the race and endorsed Trump.

Though buoyed by his second-place finish, the contest in Iowa so depleted DeSantis’s resources that he was forced to suspend his campaign two days ahead of the next contest, in New Hampshire.

“I can’t ask our supporters to volunteer their time and donate their resources if we don’t have a clear path to victory,” DeSantis said.

He said the margin of Trump’s impressive victory in Iowa made it clear “a majority of Republican primary voters want to give Donald Trump another chance.”

“They watched his presidency get stymied by relentless resistance and they see Democrats using lawfare to this day to attack him,” he added.

Like Ramaswamy, he endorsed Trump, explaining that while they had their differences, “we can’t go back to the old Republican guard of yesteryear.”

Haley responded to DeSantis’s announcement while campaigning in New Hampshire.

“He ran a great race. He has been a good governor, and we wish him well. Having said that, it’s now one fella and one lady left — may the best woman win,” she said.

Momentum Builds for Trump

Despite polls that showed her at a decided disadvantage, Haley was having her moment in the Granite State, campaigning aggressively with the support of New Hampshire’s popular governor, Chris Sununu.

At one point, she even tooled around with the governor in his red 1966 Mustang convertible, and served patrons drinks when they stopped in a local tap room before a campaign stop near Concord, the state’s capital.

On primary night, it was Trump who cruised to victory, besting Haley by garnering 54.3% of the vote, compared to her 43.3%.

“This race is far from over. There are dozens of states left to go,” Haley said at an election night gathering of her supporters.

The reality was Trump had seized command of the race for the Republican nomination. Not only that, but he did so while becoming the first Republican presidential candidate to win open races in Iowa and New Hampshire since both states began leading the election calendar in 1976.

The outcome in New Hampshire showed how quickly Republicans were rallying around the former president, and how confident they were in him to make him their nominee a third consecutive time.

“Just a little note to Nikki,” Trump said on primary night. “She’s not going to win.”

Once again, there was no sanctioned contest in which Democrats could compete. While the DNC had managed to reach a compromise with state party officials in Iowa, New Hampshire officials balked at such a deal, noting that their state’s first-in-the-nation status was written into their state Constitution.

Balking at leaving all 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 refused to campaign in the state or even to seek a place on its ballot. Instead, a grassroots army of elected officials and volunteers spearheaded a drive on his behalf as a write-in candidate.

On election night, Biden handily defeated the two official candidates, garnering 63.6% of the vote, compared to Phillips’s 19.7% and Williamson’s 4%.

A month later, Trump resoundingly defeated Haley in her home state of South Carolina, besting her by 20 percentage points in all but one of the state’s seven congressional districts.

Haley vowed to fight on, but Trump’s strong showing a week later, on Super Tuesday, left her with no viable options to continue and she suspended her campaign on March 6.

In the end, despite the splash she made, Haley had won only in Vermont and the District of Columbia. Tellingly, she did not immediately endorse the presumptive nominee.

Six days later, both Trump and Biden reached delegate thresholds needed to clinch their respective party’s nominations.

But in true best-of-times, worst-of-times fashion, their headaches continued.

For Biden it came down, primarily to his age and to his mental acuity.

In early January, before a single ballot had been cast, Attorney General Garland had appointed Robert Hur to investigate the president’s potential mishandling of government documents that were found in the garage of his home in Delaware and his former private office in Washington.

Hur’s report, released in early February, caused a firestorm due to the special counsel’s description of the president as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

Despite the good news that he was not recommending any criminal charges against the president, Hur’s commentary intensified concerns about the president’s age.

Biden responded by having his staff hastily organize a press conference, at which he forcefully defended himself against Hur’s critique.

“My memory is fine,” he assured reporters.

Biden’s other problem became evident with the Michigan Democratic primary on Feb. 27.

Though he handily won the contest, the headline after election night was that 13.3% of the state’s registered Democratic voters voted “uncommitted” in protest to the president’s continued support for Israel’s military action in Gaza.

In 2020, Biden had defeated Trump in Michigan by 154,188 votes; in the 2024 primary, the number of people who voted uncommitted exceeded 101,000.

It was little wonder then, that Biden was fired up when he delivered what would turn out to be his third and final State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress.

Knowing his every word and movement was being scrutinized, the president was in full campaign mode, repeatedly attacking his “predecessor” and laying out an aggressive agenda for a second term.

In the meantime, running the table in Republican caucuses and primaries in no way diminished Trump’s legal woes.

In New York, Trump was ordered to finally pony up the $530 million he owed in his civil fraud case, a figure that had ballooned to more than $450 million with interest. He later convinced the court to allow him to post just $175 million to delay enforcement, insisting it would simply be impossible for him to obtain the full amount.

Then, on April 15, income tax day, Trump’s hush-money criminal trial began in New York.

Ordered to be in the courtroom for the proceedings, the trial would keep him off the campaign trail four days a week for the next five weeks.

The trial would end on May 30, with the former president being found guilty on all counts — making him the first president in history ever to be convicted of criminal charges. 

Outside the courtroom, with his son Eric at his side, Trump called the outcome of the “rigged” trial “disgraceful.”

“I’m a very innocent man,” he declared. 

“I’m fighting for our country. I’m fighting for our Constitution … And we’ll keep fighting,” he said.

“We’ll fight until the end and we’ll win because our country has gone to hell,” Trump continued, adding, “The real verdict is going to be Nov. 5 by the American people.”

Trump’s fundraising exploded, with more than 1 million individual donations pouring in in the days after his conviction.

Immunity

What the nation doesn’t know is that Trump is about to score a major victory in the U.S. Supreme Court.

On April 25, the nine justices assembled to hear oral arguments in Trump v. United States, a case in which they’d been asked to decide the limits of presidential immunity.

On July 1, a sharply divided court ruled Trump — and by extension, all presidents — have absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for any actions they take to exercise their “core constitutional powers.”

In addition, the 6-3 majority held presidents are entitled “to at least presumptive immunity” from prosecution for all of their official acts.

“The president enjoys no immunity for his unofficial acts, and not everything the president does is official. The president is not above the law,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority. 

In an angry dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor accused the majority of reshaping “the institution of the presidency.”

Rather than confirming the foundational principle that no man is above the law, Sotomayor said the majority had made “a mockery” of it.

The ruling meant all of Trump’s federal trials were effectively put on ice until after the election as lower courts weighed the charges he faced against the new immunity standard.

“Big win for our constitution and democracy,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Proud to be an American.”

Storm Clouds Gather in Atlanta

Trump couldn’t help but be pleased with the good news from the Supreme Court. In the meantime, the Biden campaign was reeling thanks to the president’s surprisingly disastrous debate performance a week earlier in Atlanta.

In what would prove to be a fateful move, Biden challenged Trump in mid-May 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.

There was only one problem, Biden had already committed to a schedule that included two separate trips to Europe in early June, as well as a major fundraiser.

“I wasn’t very smart,” the president told reporters later, admitting he didn’t listen to staff who suggested he should rest up more ahead of his face-to-face clash with Trump.

As a result, the 51.3 million people who tuned in to watch the debate saw a president who gave rambling answers and appeared at times to lose his train of thought.

“I nearly fell asleep on stage,” Biden later said of his performance.

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

A day after the debate, Rep. Lloyd Doggett, of Texas, became the first Democratic lawmaker to call for Biden to “make the painful and difficult decision to withdraw.” 

With that, the drum beat for the president to end his reelection campaign continued to grow louder.

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

A Reuters/Ipsos poll released at the time reflected his and his party’s dilemma. Though one in three fellow Democrats felt Biden should stand down, no prominent elected Democrat did any better than the president in a hypothetical matchup against Trump.

At a solo press conference during the NATO conference in Washington, Biden tried to put the situation in perspective.

“The idea that senators and congressmen running for office worry about the ticket is not unusual,” he told reporters, reminding them that there was still “a long way to go in this campaign.”

“I’m just going to keep moving,” Biden said, adding that he’d beaten Trump once, “and I’ll beat him again.”

Shots Ring Out in Pennsylvania

Then the inexplicable happened. On Saturday, July 13, a shooter later identified by the FBI as Thomas Matthew Crooks, fired several shots at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

The event was a much ballyhooed campaign stop ahead of the Republican National Convention, which was scheduled to open in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, just two days later.

Trump was rushed offstage to his motorcade with blood visible on his right ear and streaking across his cheek, but not before he regained his footing behind the podium and defiantly shouted “fight, fight, fight” to the scrambling spectators as he pumped his fist in the air.

A photograph of the moment, captured by Associated Press photographer Evan Vucci, was widely published by news organizations across the country, and quickly became the iconic image of the election cycle.

Unfortunately, Crooks was able to kill one spectator and critically wound others before being killed himself by Secret Service agents. The FBI quickly deemed the incident an assassination attempt.

“We pray for the recovery of those who were wounded, and hold in our hearts the memory of the citizen who was so horribly killed,” Trump said on Truth Social the following morning. 

“It is more important than ever that we stand united, and show our true character as Americans, remaining strong and determined, and not allowing evil to win,” he added.

Trump also said that despite what had happened, he looked forward to “speaking to our great nation this week” from the convention, where he formally accepted the Republican nomination for president four days later.

In the interim, the shooting drew condemnation from across the political spectrum.

“There’s no place in America for this kind of violence,” Biden said.

Two days after the shooting, on the first morning of the convention, Trump named Ohio Sen. JD Vance as his running mate, a selection intended to appeal to blue-collar voters in the all-important swing states in the Midwest.

Trump also garnered the endorsement of billionaire Elon Musk during this period, gaining a deep-pocketed financial backer at a crucial point in the campaign.

Biden Steps Aside

Despite the debate in Atlanta now being overshadowed by subsequent events, top Democratic officials and lawmakers continued to press for Biden to drop out of the race.

Stay in, they said, and he’d not only risk handing the White House back to Trump, but he would imperil Democratic candidates up and down the ballot.

Biden remained committed to the race, urging his critics to take heart and look forward. 

In fact, only a day before he finally decided to step away from the race, on Sunday, July 21, Vice President Kamala Harris was assuring donors at a fundraiser in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, that the Biden–Harris ticket was going to win.

“It’s not going to be easy,” she acknowledged, but she was certain it would happen so long as Democrats continued to “believe in something” and went for it.

In the end, Biden 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. Harris quickly declared her intention to run in Biden’s place, vowing to “do everything in my power to unite the Democratic party — and unite our nation — to defeat Donald Trump.”

Though there was no doubt Biden also saw Harris as the obvious choice to replace him as the party’s nominee — the president endorsed her almost immediately — the party had to find a way to make the transition and guarantee her legitimacy.

There were suggestions that the party hold a one-off national primary, giving the likes of California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer a chance to get into the race.

But the calendar, as well as Harris’s ability to swiftly shore up support, quickly made that an impossibility.

Instead, 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 Brings Compelling Backstory to the Race

Eighteen years younger than her Republican opponent, Harris brought a compelling backstory to the race for the White House.

She was the daughter of Shyamala Gopalan, a breast cancer scientist who emigrated to the United States from India when she was 19 years old, and Stanford University emeritus professor Donald Harris, a naturalized U.S. citizen originally from Jamaica.

Though her parents divorced when she was still quite young, she and her sister Maya would be marked by their mutual interest and involvement in the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Harris graduated from Howard University, a historically Black university in Washington, before earning a law degree from the University of California, Hastings, setting down roots in the Golden State, and becoming a prosecutor.

Her political career began in 2003, when she was elected San Francisco district attorney.

Seven years later, she was elected attorney general of California, and six years after that, she was elected to the U.S. Senate.

It was during her tenure as attorney general that Harris met Doug Emhoff, a corporate lawyer whom she married in 2015. In the process, she not only gained a husband and two grown stepchildren, but also a steadfast and tireless partner and political ally.

Affable and dedicated, the nation’s first Second Gentleman would soon become a fixture on the presidential campaign trail, spending almost as much time in the contest’s battleground states as Harris herself.

While Harris’s rise in Democratic politics had been swift, the one blemish on her resume was her 2020 bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.

She had kicked off her campaign that year in front of 20,000 supporters in Oakland, California, and consistently drew large crowds to her initial campaign appearances in early primary states; despite a strong start, however, her campaign never really took off.

Her “moment” in that race came during the first Democratic presidential debate when she confronted Biden about his early opposition to federal busing policies.

Standing on a debate stage in late June 2019, Harris stressed that while she didn’t believe Biden was a racist, she did find it unfortunate that he’d worked, amicably, with two segregationist senators during his early years in the senate.

Harris then zeroed in on Biden’s opposition to school busing in the 1970s.

“There was a little girl in California who was a part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me,” Harris said.

Biden called her remarks “a mischaracterization of my position across the board,” but the exchange would grab the next day’s headlines.

By the fall, however, Harris’s momentum was gone. Two months before the 2020 Iowa Caucus, she called it quits.

“I’ve taken stock, and I’ve looked at this from every angle, and over the last few days, I have come to one of the hardest decisions of my life,” Harris said in a video announcing her decision. “As the campaign has gone on, it has become harder and harder to raise the money we need to compete.”

Eight months later, Biden selected her as his running mate, describing Harris as a “fearless fighter for the little guy and one of the country’s finest public servants.”

For Trump, Harris’s entry into the 2024 contest should have seemed like a slam dunk. In every one of his presidential campaigns, he’d made illegal immigration into the U.S. from Latin America a central campaign issue.

Now, he’d get to face the vice president that Biden tasked with getting to the root causes of an ongoing surge in undocumented immigrants coming across the border.

But rather than treat his new Democratic opponent like his latest punching bag or piñata, Trump seemed to struggle to adjust to the new realities of the race.

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!!!”

Richard Migliori, a retired jockey and racing analyst, once offered the following description of the complexity of a thoroughbred horse race.

After getting a clean start and falling into the pace set by the other competing horses, he explained, a jockey’s main job was to hold his mount’s immense power in check until the precise moment when it could surge ahead of the field.

“The analogy I use is, it’s like a rubber band,” he explained. “You hold one end of the rubber band in one hand and you steadily pull the other end, increasing the tension until that last moment when you let it go.”

“That’s what horse races are like, you know your competitors, you know where you are on the track, and you’re waiting for the precise moment when you release the tension and allow your horse’s power and momentum to carry you past everyone else and to the finish line,” he said.

For however briefly, Trump must have felt like he was in the final turn and headed for the wire when a fresh competitor entered the race at the top of the stretch. His momentum was all wrong and it showed.

His lowest moment came during an ill-advised appearance before the National Association of Black Journalists, which was holding its annual meeting in Chicago.

Facing a trio of journalists, the former president attempted to cast doubts over Harris’s racial identity.

“I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?” Trump said.

At other appearances, the Republican candidate, who’d already been on the campaign trail for more than 18 months, seemed more erratic and freestyle than usual, veering wildly off script.

In Their Only Debate, Harris Comes Out on Top

In early September, Harris and Trump met in the final presidential debate of the campaign, a 90-minute face-off in which the vice president took the fight to Trump in ways that Biden had not.

Time and again, Harris poked at Trump, needling and baiting him on his economic policies, his refusal to concede the 2020 election and his stand on abortion.

“You will not hear him talk about your needs, your dreams and your desires,” Harris said in summation. “And I’ll tell you, I believe you deserve a president who actually puts you first.”

Early on, Trump tried to remain measured in his responses, but it was clear by the end that he was angry and uncomfortable. 

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.

Afterwards he announced there would be no more debates.

The night ended with Harris scoring the endorsement of none other than the biggest music star in the world, Taylor Swift.

But among the ashes of a bad few weeks, the Trump campaign saw the embers of an opening.

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

Harris, they noticed, had defaulted to the talking points of her stump speech whenever she was asked a direct question in the debate.

And for a variety of reasons, ranging from the time she had to campaign to loyalty to Biden, she wasn’t devoting much time to defining herself or distancing herself from Biden administration policies.

As an aspirational candidate espousing “joy” and talking glowingly of the future of the American people, some conceded, she likely couldn’t be beat.

Now, however, there was the makings of an environment they could operate in.

With that, a new Trump campaign trope was born: “Why hadn’t Harris sat for any one-on-one interviews?”

When she responded by scheduling a number of them, they got their answer: she wasn’t particularly good at turning them to her advantage.

The reaction to a televised town hall with CNN anchor Anderson Cooper was typical; commentators grew more, not less skeptical, maintaining that she focused more on Donald Trump than her own policies.

To many in Trump’s world, the real turning point in the campaign was her Oct. 8 appearance on the ABC talk show “The View.”

After Harris answered a series of softball questions, co-host Sunny Hostin asked the vice president if there was anything she would have done differently than Biden during the past four years.

“There is not a thing that comes to mind in terms of — and I’ve been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact,” Harris said, virtually gift wrapping a damaging sound bite for the Trump campaign.

And where Harris seemed loath to define herself, the Trump campaign was more than happy to fill the void on its own terms.

In the final weeks of the campaign, not only did Trump continue to vilify undocumented aliens as rapists and criminals, he now attached Harris’s face to their alleged misdeed.

He did the same while railing against the “radical left” for its “transgender craziness,” repeatedly airing a television ad from coast to coast that ended with a voice over declaring “Kamala Harris is for ‘they/them’; Donald Trump is for you.”

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 still far more than the Democrats counted on.

Amidst all this, there is a planned second attempt on Trump’s life. 

According to prosecutors, Ryan Wesley Routh, of Hawaii, stalked Trump over the course of a month before setting up what they described as a “sniper’s nest” near the fence bordering the former president’s West Palm Beach golf course.

Routh was spotted by a Secret Service agent who was running surveillance ahead of Trump’s progress on the course. 

When the agent saw the barrel of a rifle move, he opened fire, causing Routh to flee.

He was captured about an hour later on a highway in nearby Martin County, Florida, and later charged with attempting to assassinate a presidential candidate, gun charges and assaulting an officer.

End Game

Every election ends with long days and a flurry of activity.

From Oct. 1, when JD Vance and Tim Walz traveled to CBS News’s studios in New York for the only vice presidential debate of this election cycle, through election eve, both candidates and scores of surrogates made repeated appearances in battleground states.

Trump made his closing pitch to voters at a rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden, but saw it overshadowed by his opening act, comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who described Puerto Rico as “a floating island of garbage,” and the racist and misogynistic comments of other speakers on the bill.

These included businessman Grant Cardone, who likened Harris to a prostitute who, along with “her pimp handlers will destroy our country.”

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a former personal lawyer to Trump, falsely claimed that Harris was “on the side of the terrorists” in the Gaza war, and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson dismissed Harris as “a Samoan, Malaysian, low-IQ former California prosecutor.”

The next day, Trump and his allies scrambled to contain the fallout from the event.

Harris delivered her own “closing argument” two nights later, speaking on the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., the same spot where Trump held his Jan. 6, 2021, rally before his supporters laid siege to the U.S. Capitol.

The event drew an enthusiastic crowd of more than 70,000 people, and was by far the largest Harris has addressed during her three-month-long presidential campaign.

Harris used the event to repeatedly lambast Trump, describing her Republican rival as “consumed with grievance,” “out for unchecked power” and “wholly unqualified” to have a second term in the White House.

At the same time, in a nod to the many voters still undecided watching the televised event from key battleground states, the vice president also spoke at length about the experiences that shaped who she is, the reasons she wanted to be president and some of the specific policies she would pursue if the American people gave her the job.

“In less than 90 days, either Donald Trump or I will be in the Oval Office,” she said, gesturing to the White House that was aglow behind her. 

“On Day 1, if elected, Donald Trump would walk into that office with an enemies list. When elected, I will walk in with a to-do list,” she said.

During her remarks, which lasted around 30 minutes, Harris acknowledged that hers had “not been a typical campaign.”

“Even though I’ve had the honor of serving as your vice president for the last four years, many of you are still getting to know who I am,” she said.

“I am someone who has spent most of my career outside of Washington, D.C. So I know that not all the good ideas come from here,” Harris continued. “I am not afraid of tough fights against bad actors and powerful interests, because for decades as a prosecutor and a top law enforcement officer of our biggest state, I won fights against big banks that ripped off homeowners, against for-profit colleges that scammed veterans and students, against predators who abused women and children and cartels that trafficked in guns, drugs and human beings. 

“And I did this work because for as long as I can remember, I have always had an instinct to protect,” she said. “There’s something about people being treated unfairly or overlooked that, frankly, just gets to me. I don’t like it. 

“It’s what my mother instilled in me, a drive to hold accountable those who use their wealth or power to take advantage of other people, the drive to protect hard working Americans who aren’t always seen or heard and deserve a voice. And I will tell you, that is the kind of president I will be,” she said.

“What do you think? One reporter said to another as they stood on a riser not far from where Harris was speaking.

“If you asked me four weeks ago, I’d have said, ‘Harris has got this,’” he said. “Tonight, if I’m being honest, I think Trump is going to win.”

After responding to a text from his editor he added: “The election is just a week away. It’s far too late to still be introducing yourself to the electorate.”

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Dan can be reached at [email protected] and @DanMcCue