Trump wins presidency a second time, completing comeback

WASHINGTON — In the end, the convicted felon out-foxed the prosecutor.

Donald Trump has been projected by The Associated Press to win enough Electoral College votes to secure another term in the White House, marking the first time a candidate who had been convicted on criminal charges has been elected president of the United States.

The AP made the call just after 5:30 a.m. Eastern time on Wednesday.

As Tuesday night became Wednesday morning, it became harder and harder to see Vice President Kamala Harris’ path to victory. The crowd at a Harris event at the vice president’s alma mater, Howard University in Washington, D.C., began to thin out after midnight amid, for her, the bleak electoral math, before being sent home. The real party was in West Palm Beach, Fla., where television cameras caught Trump supporters wearing “Make America Great Again” garb, drinking from plastic cups and dancing to some of his political rally playlist songs, including the Village People’s “YMCA.”

“Frankly, this was, I believe, the greatest political movement of all time … and now it’s going to reach a new level of importance,” Trump said hours earlier. “Look what happened; is this crazy? But it’s a political victory that our country has never seen before, nothing like this.”

Trump spoke before the AP called the election but about when the wire service called Pennsylvania for him, putting him just three votes short of the 270 electoral votes needed to win.

“America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate. We have taken back control of the Senate,” Trump said, adding that it was also looking favorable for Republicans in the House — though the reported vote totals at the time Trump stepped on stage made that pronouncement premature. Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., received accolades from the president-elect from the stage.

Trump was projected by AP to win at least 277 votes in the Electoral College. The final piece of the electoral math for him came with the call of Wisconsin and its 10 electoral votes for the 45th — and, soon, 47th — president after Harris, a former California district attorney, state attorney general and senator, spent her final day campaigning exclusively in the commonwealth on Monday.

Trump, who will be at 78 at his swearing-in, now becomes the first person since Grover Cleveland to win the presidency for two nonconsecutive terms.

Trump ran a campaign heavily focused on his greatest hits, warning of a country “occupied” by illegal immigrants and vowing to impose tariffs on foreign-made goods — dismissing economists who warned that doing so would further drive up prices. He promised to be a “dictator on day one” with executive orders to “close” the U.S.-Mexico border and ramp up domestic energy extraction, a move that would build on the Biden administration’s record-level moves.

The former president also vowed to make permanent the tax cut law he signed during his first term, while also making populist references to ending taxes on a number of things, like service sector tips. He even floated the notion of placing caps on credit card debt. On foreign policy, he made no secret of his intention to reinstate his “America first” philosophy and withdraw Washington from global affairs. Experts predicted he would give Israel a green light to step up its conflicts with Hamas and Hezbollah, while potentially ending U.S. assistance to Ukraine, which is entrenched in a war with Russia.

The twice-impeached Trump will be the 47th commander-in-chief despite being convicted earlier this year on criminal charges related to a hush-money payment to an adult film star. What’s more, he also was found liable for sexual abuse by a Manhattan civil jury. The final months of his third campaign were rife with controversies, as the former reality television host said extreme things about women and his political rivals. At his lone debate with Harris, he falsely claimed that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were “eating” residents’ pet dogs and cats.

Democrats were so concerned that Trump could win that party bigwigs led an internal party revolt against President Joe Biden. The incumbent president dropped his reelection bid in late-July, and Harris soon became the nominee. She immediately went hard against Trump, calling him a threat to American democracy, a dishonest person and a candidate only interested in his own interests rather than those of the American people.

Harris brought out major music and entertainment stars in the campaign’s final weeks, and deployed former President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle Obama, to key swing states. She even held a large rally on the Ellipse near the White House, delivering a speech in which she contended another Trump term would erode constitutional rights, as the overarching theme of her campaign was “freedom.”

Yet, it was not enough to derail the Trump juggernaut. He served french fries and bags of fast food from a Pennsylvania McDonald’s drive-thru window and rode in a Trump-themed garbage truck during the campaign’s final weeks. He turned what, in another era, would have been a major last-week controversy instead into a problem for his opponent after Biden’s garbled and unclear attempt to comment on a pro-Trump comedian insulting Puerto Rico.

To be sure, Trump won a second term despite a rocky final week on the campaign trail.

During the campaign’s final stretch, that pro-Trump comedian called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” as the Republican standard bearer was courting Latino voters. Trump vowed to “protect” women “whether the women like it or not,” as polling suggested that women voters likely would play a huge role in deciding the race in seven swing states.

At a rally on Friday night, Trump appeared to mimic a sexual act with a microphone stand while complaining that the mic that once rested on it did not work. And at a Saturday night rally in Greensboro, in the central part of socially conservative North Carolina, he did not disagree with a rally-goer who yelled out that Harris had “worked on a corner.” Instead, Trump smiled wide and told the crowd of his supporters, “This place is amazing.”

He also directed violent rhetoric at former GOP Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, imagining during a campaign event in Arizona that nine “barrels are trained on her face” after calling her a “radical war hawk.” On Sunday, during a morning rally, Trump joked about a fictional third would-be assassin shooting the “fake news” media assembled at the event instead, adding: “I don’t mind that so much.”

‘Gotten away with everything’

In the end, enough voters in the right states simply did not care, or put other matters ahead of his rhetoric and antics.

Barbara Perry, co-chair of the Presidential Oral History Program at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, said Trump’s win means he has “gotten away with everything.”

“Where’s the moral outrage? That will always be the question. How did he win a single term? How did he avoid some prosecutions? How did he win the nomination again, and how did he win the presidency again?”

What’s more, she said — referring to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob — it means history likely would never settle on an answer to “the most important question: How did he get away with Jan. 6 and an insurrection to overturn an election?”

Perry also said that had Harris been victorious, it would have meant that “our system overcame the worst of the Trump era, including Jan. 6.” What’s more, it would have marked a major political and cultural milestone, with “the first woman president — and a woman with Black and Indian roots” and that “the American dream is still alive.”

Former GOP Rep. Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania said in a telephone interview that Trump’s return to the White House makes it likely he would “pursue his perceived enemies and retaliate against them.”

“We just have to believe what he says. … He’s been talking about his list of grievances. We have to believe him that he’ll also use his executive authorities to impose tariffs and do a whole range of things on the [U.S.-Mexico] border — and who knows what else.

“More frighteningly is what he’ll do at the Justice Department and how he will populate his administration,” Dent added. “Because the people who were there as guardrails during his first term are not coming back. We should expect his White House and administration to be made up of sycophants and grifters who serve as enablers of Trump and his worst instincts.”

In an internal memo obtained by Roll Call on Tuesday night, Harris campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon told staffers they had concluded the vice president’s lone path was through the Rust Belt states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. But those hopes got bleaker and bleaker as more votes were counted in each states, and ultimately were squashed when AP made its Keystone call.

____

(Mary Ellen McIntire and Niels Lesniewski contributed to this report.)

___

©2024 CQ-Roll Call, Inc., All Rights Reserved. Visit cqrollcall.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.