Donald Trump returns to the White House
Donald Trump has won the presidency, lurching America's center of power to the right after defeating Kamala Harris in a tumultuous race that set the nation on edge — and that ultimately will make the 45th president the 47th, too.
His return to power was fueled by widespread dissatisfaction with Washington and the state of the country, including with the rising cost of living, and by a campaign that demonized migrants and the U.S. justice system while rallying the working class and men.
Trump will become only the second U.S. president to regain the office after losing it — returning to the White House after being defeated four years ago and campaigning since then on promises to punish his political enemies . He'll enter office at a time of deep cultural and political division, after overperforming his 2020 margins across the map .
The first president in U.S. history to become a convicted felon , his path back to the White House was even more unpredictable than the campaign that jettisoned him from it four years ago amid a pandemic and civil unrest. The criminal cases brought by special counsel Jack Smith — for Trump's attempt to subvert the 2020 election and his decision to hoard classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago compound — are virtually certain to go away as soon as Trump takes office. Trump's long-delayed criminal case in Georgia, also related to the 2020 election, would likely be frozen until at least 2029, when he leaves office at 82 years old. Trump may still face sentencing in his New York case over a 2016 hush money scheme. But Trump is likely to use his imminent presidency to stave off any consequences — particularly if Justice Juan Merchan seeks a jail sentence.
This year, Trump claims victory after a final five months of a campaign that included his felony convictions on 34 charges related to hush money payments to a porn star; being shot in the ear by a would-be assassin during a campaign rally, the first of two attempts on his life; and a July change at the top of the Democratic ticket a week later that made the contest significantly more competitive than it appeared earlier in the summer, when Trump was facing Joe Biden.
But the Democrats' elevation of Harris was not enough. Trump ultimately succeeded in portraying Harris as an extension of an administration that was widely unpopular with Americans, hurling crass personal attacks at Harris and framing her as even more unqualified for the job than an aging Biden while lacing into her past positions in favor of "Medicare for All," taxpayer-funded gender transition care for prisoners and detained immigrants, cutting funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and banning fracking.
Trump's victory cements his now decadelong grip on the Republican Party, transforming the GOP under him into a more nativist, less interventionist, more working class and more ethnically diverse party. While defending his role in overturning , he has pledged to veto a national abortion ban if one reaches his desk. Trump has called for mass deportations , a wide array of tax cuts and for imposing stiffer foreign tariffs . Trump will have powerful allies as he works to execute on that agenda. Republicans flipped the Senate, while control of the House remained unclear. Republicans in Washington are likely to line up behind him — as they did in his campaign — and he will likely try to push policies through by executive action .
Trump declared victory early Wednesday morning in West Palm Beach .
Trump's selection of Sen. JD Vance as his running mate, seen by some critics as a mistake that would alienate critical moderate voters in the battleground states, elevates the 40-year-old Ohio senator as the heir apparent of Trump's political movement, setting him up to be a top contender in the party's 2028 presidential primary.
Trump, at 78, is now older than Biden was when he became the oldest person elected president in 2020. And despite keeping a frenetic pace of campaigning in the final couple months — holding more events than 60-year-old Harris — Trump's critics accused him of exhibiting signs of cognitive decline as he struggled to stay focused on any one idea during his meandering speeches, a habit Trump called a rhetorical "weave." Trump has said he has " no cognitive problem " and is "not that close to 80," but has declined to release detailed medical records .
Even those in his own party launched such criticisms against Trump early in the race, when he faced more than a dozen GOP challengers seeking to replace him as the Republican standard-bearer. Nikki Haley, who was the last candidate to continue sparring with Trump in the GOP primary, repeatedly suggested he was too old to return to office and questioned his cognitive state . But just a few months into his third campaign for president, Trump was regaining favor he lost with some Republicans after his 2020 loss — including some who turned away from him after the January 2021 storming of the Capitol by Trump supporters.
Trump's victory followed a closing period of the race that even some Republicans feared could be disastrous for his campaign. He held a rally marked by racist rhetoric in New York, at which comedian Tony Hinchcliffe called Puerto Rico a " floating island of garbage. " Criticizing Republican former Rep. Liz Cheney as a "radical war hawk," he said she should "face nine barrels shooting at her," a comment his campaign spokesperson said was a reference to her having not fought in a war.
In an escalation of his inflammatory and violent rhetoric in the final days of the campaign, Trump said he "shouldn't have left" the White House in January 2020, and suggested he wouldn't "mind" if someone had to " shoot through the fake news " to get to him, another remark his campaign sought to clean up, claiming Trump was not referring to shooting reporters.
Meanwhile, crowds at his signature rallies appeared to dwindle. But Trump's appeal — and his campaign's ability to turn out voters — were unaffected.
Trump's campaign had faced criticism from some within the Republican Party for failing to invest adequately into get-out-the-vote efforts, instead outsourcing the majority of the campaign's field work to other conservative groups, including a super PAC funded by Elon Musk and a political organization affiliated with Charlie Kirk's Turning Point USA. But the Trump campaign's decision to dramatically shift its rhetoric on early voting compared to 2020 — even as Trump at times veered off message and railed himself against early voting — proved to be an effective strategy.
Republican early voting levels far exceeded the party's turnout during the same period four years ago, putting Harris' team on their heels in the final stretch as Democrats frantically worked to mobilize voters to the polls.
Harris was elevated as the party's standard-bearer just over three months ago when Biden, pushed aside by members of his own party concerned about his age and voters' perceptions of his mental acuity after a disastrous debate performance, dropped out of the race. The vice president benefited from an early surge in momentum, energizing voters apathetic about another Biden-Trump rematch.
But after making significant gains with voters compared to Biden's performance in the campaign, Harris' early momentum fizzled, leaving her locked into a neck-and-neck race with Trump.
Harris faced criticism from some Democrats in late summer for not being as visible as Trump on the trail, while her campaign attempted to build a robust ground game, pouring money into door-to-door efforts and staff in battleground states that exceeded the Trump campaign's operation.
Five years after she ran a flailing presidential campaign, pitching herself as a progressive, Harris in her 2024 race aggressively courted independent voters and disaffected Republicans. She leaned on former Trump officials and Republicans speaking out about the former president.
In the closing weeks of her campaign, the vice president homed in on an argument that a second Trump term posed a grave threat to democracy, returning to a message from the Biden era as she seized on Trump's "enemy from within" rhetoric — even holding an event on the Ellipse , where Trump spoke before his election-denying supporters broke into the Capitol building.
Besides Trump, only Grover Cleveland was elected again after losing reelection four years earlier.
