Donald Trump elected US president in stunning, historic White House comeback
Also wins popular vote; vows to ‘stop wars’ not start them, says his initial focus will be on domestic priorities; in state after state, Harris does less well than Biden in 2020
PALM BEACH, Florida (Reuters) — Donald Trump was elected the 47th president of the United States on Wednesday, an extraordinary comeback for a former president who refused to accept defeat four years ago, sparked a violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, was convicted of felony charges and survived two assassination attempts.
With a win in Wisconsin, Trump cleared the 270 electoral votes needed to clinch the presidency.
As of 5:45 a.m. ET (1045 GMT) Trump, 78, had won 279 electoral votes to Harris’ 223 with several states yet to be counted. In state after state, Trump outperformed what he did in the 2020 election while Democratic candidate Kamala Harris failed to do as well as Joe Biden did in winning the presidency four years ago.
He also led Harris by about 5 million votes in the popular count.
“America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate,” Trump said early on Wednesday to a roaring crowd of supporters at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in Florida.
Trump’s political career had appeared to be over after his false claims of election fraud led a mob of supporters to storm the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, in a failed bid to overturn his 2020 defeat.
But he swept away challengers inside his Republican Party and then beat Harris by capitalizing on voter concerns about high prices and what Trump claimed, without evidence, was a rise in crime due to illegal immigration.
With his decisive victory, Trump became only the second defeated president in US history to win a fresh White House term, 132 years after Grover Cleveland achieved the feat.
The results cap a historically tumultuous and competitive election season that included two assassination attempts targeting Trump and a shift to a new Democratic nominee just a month before the party’s convention. Trump will inherit a range of challenges when he assumes office on Jan. 20, including heightened political polarization and global crises that are testing America’s influence abroad.
His win against Harris, the first woman of color to lead a major party ticket, marks the second time he has defeated a female rival in a general election. Harris, the current vice president, rose to the top of the ticket after Biden exited the race amid alarm about his advanced age. Despite an initial surge of energy around her campaign, she struggled during a compressed timeline to convince disillusioned voters that she represented a break from an unpopular administration.
Harris did not speak to supporters who had gathered at her alma mater Howard University. Her campaign co-chair, Cedric Richmond, briefly addressed the crowd after midnight, saying Harris would speak publicly later on Wednesday.
“We still have votes to count,” he said.
Republicans won a US Senate majority, but neither party appeared to have an edge in the fight for control of the House of Representatives where Republicans currently hold a narrow majority.
Major stock markets around the world rallied following Trump’s victory, and the dollar was set for its biggest one-day jump since 2020.
‘I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars’
Trump in his victory speech called his return to the presidency “a political victory that our country has never seen before.”
Addressing the American people, he said, “Every single day, I will be fighting for you, and with every breath in my body. I will not rest until we have delivered the strong, safe and prosperous America that our children deserve and that you deserve. This will truly be the golden age of America.”
He described the Republican party as “the party of common sense. We want to have borders, we want to have security, we want to have things be good, safe. We want great education, want a strong and powerful military and ideally we don’t have to use it.”
And he vowed to stop wars rather than start them: “You know, we had no wars [in my previous term], four years we had no wars, except we defeated Isis, we defeated Isis in record time. But we had no wars. They said ‘he will start a war’. I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.”
Trump also said some supporters believe divine intervention had prevented his assassination: “Many people have told me that God spared my life for a reason. And that reason was to save our country and to restore America to greatness. And now we are going to fulfill that mission.”
In a call for unity, he declared: “It’s time to put the divisions of the past four years behind us. It’s time to unite … We have to try. And it’s going to happen. Success will bring us together… and we are going to start by all putting America first.”
He also said his initial focus would be on domestic priorities: “We have to put our country first for at least a period of time. We have to fix it, because together we can truly make America great again for all Americans.”
Jobs and economy
Voters identified jobs and the economy as the country’s most pressing problem, according to Reuters/Ipsos opinion polls. Many Americans remained frustrated by higher prices even amid record-high stock markets, fast-growing wages and low unemployment. With the administration of US President Joe Biden taking much of the blame, a majority of voters said they trusted Trump more than Harris to address the issue.
Hispanics, traditionally Democratic voters, and lower-income households hit hardest by inflation helped fuel Trump’s election victory. His loyal base of rural, white and non-college educated voters again showed up in force.
Trump prevailed despite persistently low approval ratings. Impeached twice, he has been criminally indicted four times and found civilly liable for sexual abuse and defamation. In May, Trump was convicted by a New York jury of falsifying business records to cover up hush money payments to a porn star.
His victory will have major implications for US trade and climate change policies, the war in Ukraine, Americans’ taxes and immigration.
His tariff proposals could spark a fiercer trade war with China and US allies, while his pledges to reduce corporate taxes and implement a spate of new cuts could balloon US debt, economists say.
Trump has promised to launch a mass deportation campaign targeting immigrants in the country illegally.
He has said he wants the authority to fire civil servants he views as disloyal. His opponents fear he will turn the Justice Department and other federal law enforcement agencies into political weapons to investigate perceived enemies.
A second Trump presidency could drive a bigger wedge between Democrats and Republicans on issues such as race, gender, what and how children are taught, and reproductive rights.
Harris falls short
Vice President Harris fell short in her 15-week sprint as a candidate, failing to galvanize enough support to defeat Trump, who occupied the White House in 2017-2021, or to allay voters’ concerns about the economy and immigration.
Harris had warned that Trump wanted unchecked presidential power and posed a danger to democracy.
Nearly three-quarters of voters say American democracy is under threat, according to Edison Research exit polls, underscoring the polarization in a nation where divisions have only grown starker during a fiercely competitive race.
Trump ran a campaign characterized by apocalyptic language. He called the United States a “garbage can” for immigrants, pledged to save the economy from “obliteration” and cast some rivals as the “enemy within.”
His diatribes were often aimed at migrants, who he said were “poisoning the blood of the country,” or Harris, whom he frequently derided as unintelligent.
Despite legal woes and controversies, Trump is only the second former president to win a second term after leaving the White House. The first was Grover Cleveland, who served two four-year terms starting in 1885 and 1893.
Unprecedented campaign
Two months after Trump’s conviction in the hush money case, a would-be assassin’s bullet grazed his right ear during a July campaign rally in Pennsylvania, exacerbating fears about political violence. Another assassination attempt was thwarted in September at his Florida golf course. Trump blamed both attempts on what he claimed was the heated rhetoric of Democrats including Harris.
Barely eight days after the July shooting, Biden, 81, dropped out of the race, finally bowing to weeks of pressure from his fellow Democrats after a poor performance during his debate with Trump called into question his mental acuity and the viability of his reelection bid.
Biden’s decision to step aside turned the contest into a sprint, as Harris raced to mount her own campaign in a matter of weeks, rather than the typical months. Her rise to the top of the ticket reenergized despondent Democrats, and she raised more than $1 billion in less than three months while erasing what had been a solid Trump lead in opinion polls.
Harris’s financial advantage was partly countered by the intervention of the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, who poured more than $100 million into a super PAC mobilizing Trump voters and used his social media site X to amplify pro-Trump messaging.
As the campaign drew to a close, Harris increasingly focused on warning Americans about the perils of reelecting Trump and offered an olive branch to disaffected Republicans.
She highlighted remarks from several former Trump officials, including his former chief of staff, retired Marine Corps General John Kelly, who described Trump as a “fascist.”
Trump’s victory will broaden the fissures in American society, given his false claims of election fraud, anti-immigrant rhetoric and demonization of his political opponents, said Alan Abramowitz, a political science professor at Emory University who studies voter behavior and party politics.
A second Trump term
Trump has vowed to reshape the executive branch, including firing civil servants he views as disloyal and using federal law enforcement agencies to investigate his political enemies, violating what has been a longstanding policy of keeping such agencies independent.
During his first term, Trump’s most extreme demands were sometimes stymied by his own cabinet members, most notably when vice president Mike Pence refused to block Congress from accepting the 2020 election results.
Once the 2024 vote is certified by Congress on January 6, 2025, Trump and his incoming vice president, US Senator JD Vance, are due to take office on Inauguration Day, January 20. Throughout his two-year-long campaign, Trump has signaled he will prioritize personal fealty in staffing his administration. He promised roles in his administration to Musk and former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., both avid supporters.
Agencies and ToI staff contributed to this report.
