America Elects Convicted Felon to be President
Donald Trump — the twice impeached former president, Jan. 6 coup leader, convicted felon, adjudicated sexual abuser, and man who mismanaged the 2020 economic implosion and coronavirus disaster that killed more than 1 million people in this country — has persuaded American voters to give him another term in the White House.
After a campaign marked by nativism, open bigotry, and aspiring authoritarianism, Trump triumphed over Vice President Kamala Harris, despite being denounced by several of those who worked most closely with him in his first term as a “fascist.” The 45th president will become the 47th in late January.
Trump got out to an early lead on Tuesday and never looked back, securing North Carolina and Georgia before shattering the Democratic “blue wall” of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. The race was called at 5:35 a.m. EST by The Associated Press after Trump earned 270 electoral college votes by winning Wisconsin.
Trump declared victory to a packed crowd of jubilant supporters at the Palm Beach convention center, promising a “golden age” for the nation while surrounded by his family and closest allies. He added toward the end of his characteristically rambling speech that his win was “a massive victory for democracy and freedom,” and that “many people have told me that God spared my life for a reason.”
“I will govern by a simple motto: Promises made, promises kept,” Trump said.
The stakes of a Trump victory could not be higher for many of the most vulnerable people living in this country. Trump’s central campaign promise has been to embark on the largest mass-deportation program in the nation’s history, a supercharged version of a racist Eisenhower-era program called “Operation Wetback.” Trump has promised to forcibly remove millions, and said that it will be a “bloody story.” He has vowed to employ local law enforcement, sheriffs, and, if necessary, the armed forces.
Trump has also vowed to use the Justice Department as an instrument of revenge on his political enemies, to crack down on media outlets that have criticized him, to hollow out the professional ranks of the federal government (and stock it full of his MAGA cronies), and to impose massive tariffs that will increase the cost of everything from avocados and automobiles to iPhones and apparel.
America’s democracy has rarely been in a more fragile place. The country has chosen a leader who has promised to govern as a strongman, and who will not be held accountable for breaking the law, thanks to a ruling by his hand-selected, far-right Supreme Court majority that puts the presidency beyond the reach of criminal prosecution.
This implausible victory — coming after a chaotic campaign that saw Democrats change candidates mid-election, and Trump galumph down the closing stretch with an increasingly bizarre series of stunts, including dressing up as a garbage man — also has huge stakes for Trump personally.
As early as the summer of 2021, according to three sources familiar with the matter, longtime political operatives and GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill who had remained in direct contact with Trump were coalescing around a shared belief: If the criminal investigations into the former president keep ramping up, and especially if charges materialize, there is no way he doesn’t run for the presidency again.
This conviction was based on conversations these Trump allies had been having with the ex-president at the time, when Trump’s fixation on, and barely veiled anxiety about, prosecution and potential prison sentences was already palpable. As time inched closer and closer to the 2022 midterm elections, Trump would, in discussions with close advisers about running again, increasingly ramble about the unique legal protections from prosecution that a sitting American president enjoys.
Two years, several history-making indictments of a former president, and billions of dollars later, those anxieties continued to fester in Trump’s brain. Over the 2024 election season, he and his allies had brainstormed and plotted numerous ways to shield him from dire legal consequences; earlier this year, the former president personally pressured multiple Republican lawmakers to pass legislation essentially designed to keep him out of prison forever. (This law did not pass, but stay tuned.)
Trump appears in the clear for at least another four years after voters handed him his long-coveted get-out-of-jail-free card on Tuesday.
The special counsel cases against the president-elect are headed for spiteful decimation — and likely reprisals — by Trump and his government-in-waiting. “If Jack Smith and his team don’t already have [their own] lawyers looking into worst-case scenarios, they’re not thinking straight,” says a lawyer close to Trump, who has been in the room multiple times this year when Trump has railed against Smith’s supposedly “illegal” investigations. “I am not saying that as a threat,” this attorney adds. “I’m saying it as someone who has a TV and can see what Donald Trump says … when he talks about what he will do once reelected.”
Trump won this year even though — and, surely in some cases, because — he ran on imposing upon the American people and global community an openly authoritarian regime concerned largely with score-settling. In addition to pledging mass deportations, militarized crackdowns, and disassembling and reconstructing the federal government around protecting and empowering himself, the former president loudly and explicitly ran on a platform of letting fellow Americans die if he doesn’t get his way or if your local leaders don’t bend to his will. Trump has recently threatened to deny potentially life-saving natural disaster aid to states whose leaders don’t bend to his wishes, threats that should be taken seriously given his history of withholding such aid for political reasons.
Trump has also steadfastly denied that the increasing frequency of such natural disasters has anything to do with the climate crisis, which he has called a hoax. He has said he will be a “dictator for a day” in order to “drill, baby, drill,” and he has been working hand in glove with the fossil fuel industry. As climate writer Jeff Goodell wrote for Rolling Stone recently: “Trump is running a pro-climate chaos campaign. To him, a superheated planet is a feature, not a bug. Think about this way: The more chaotic our world becomes, the easier it is for him to stoke fear, build walls, deploy the military, and cosplay the Strong Man.”
Trump said in the home stretch of the campaign that the U.S. military should be used on Americans who oppose him, a frightening indicator of just how violent his second administration could be. Despite surviving an assassination attempt at a rally this past summer when a bullet barely missed his head, grazing his ear, Trump heads back into office wholly unrepentant for any of the political violence and wave of death threats he has inspired against so many others over the years.
“The idea that we are on the cusp of normalizing political violence in this country is false. We have already normalized it … especially over the past three and a half years … and in the aftermath of Jan. 6,” retired D.C. Metropolitan Police officer Michael Fanone, who was brutally attacked while fighting the pro-Trump mob at the Capitol during the riot, tells Rolling Stone. “It’s been normalized because elected leaders, government officials, and people in positions of authority in this country feel it’s OK to settle a policy disagreement by using violence and the threat of violence and inspiring their supporters to use violence. So, here we are.”
Fanone, who has been speaking out against Trump for years, notes that he regularly receives threats, all while Trump continues to glorify his supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol and beat him. Trump has indicated he plans to pardon those who have been convicted for their actions that day.
Despite everything that’s occurred over the past two years alone that screamed out as a warning to the American voter that this man may not be the greatest custodian of the nuclear launch codes, millions and millions of voters have renewed Trump’s contract of executive and near-absolute power.
The crowd inside the Palm Beach convention center on Tuesday and into Wednesday morning when the race was called couldn’t have been more excited for him to seize it. Multiple Trump campaign officials were absolutely giddy in their real-time assessments to Rolling Stone throughout the night, while MAGA luminaries like Rudy Giuliani, Corey Lewandowski, actor Kevin Sorbo, and far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer smiled for pictures with adoring supporters. Elon Musk, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., J.D. Vance, Mike Johnson, and other allies who figure to help Trump enact his agenda were in attendance, either at the convention center or at nearby Mar-a-Lago.
Trump aides fist-bumped each other as it became clear Trump would win, with songs like Jimmy Buffett’s “Margaritaville” and Elvis Presley’s “Suspicious Minds” blaring over the loudspeaker. So too was the Village People’s “YMCA,” accompanied by video of Trump dancing to his longtime favorite on the big screens set up in the hall. The crowd erupted, beside itself over the magnitude of the former president’s victory.
Trump’s team had been ready to challenge a close result, and late into the night, one of the conservative lawyers who had been working on Trump’s post-election legal strategies told Rolling Stone that they were unpacking the go-bag they had ready in case they needed to jet or drive to a swing state to contest close results. There were no close results to contest — Trump romped.
Trump’s win demonstrates that the most powerful people in the country are indeed above the law. An elderly, foul-mouthed, racist game-show host can try, in broad daylight, while the TV cameras are fixed on him, to execute a coup d’état in our nation’s capital, people can die from it, and in a few shorts years be rewarded with the full-throated support of his political party, and now the keys to the White House.
No matter what policies Trump does or doesn’t manage to shove through when he takes office in January, there is no doubt that he and his new Justice Department are going to shut down the federal cases against him. He will get away with it all, and his enemies will have to choke on that for the rest of their careers and lives.
And that will just be the beginning.
More from Rolling Stone
Best of Rolling Stone
Sign up for RollingStone's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.