Donald Trump defeats Kamala Harris to win the presidency

Donald Trump has won a second term in the White House, becoming the first convicted criminal to be elected president in the United States and allowing him to carry out his radical vision for a far more conservative country, with power concentrated in his hands.

The president-elect, who is the second person to be elected to America’s highest office for non-consecutive terms, claimed his win was “a political victory that our country has never seen before” when he addressed supporters Wednesday morning after he was projected to win Pennsylvania and closed off Vice President Kamala Harris’s path to the White House by preventing her from reaching the requisite 270 electoral votes.

Speaking from the West Palm Beach, Florida, convention center where his campaign held an election watch party, Trump thanked the American people for the “extraordinary honor” of being elected the 47th president in addition to his previous term as the 45th.

“I will fight for you, for your family and your future. Every single day I will be fighting for you 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,” said Trump, who pledged that his second term would “truly be the golden age of America.”

“This is a magnificent victory for the American people that will allow us to make America great again,” he said.

The president-elect’s surprise victory came about by way of double-digit gains among minority voters in urban centers, bettering the margins he earned four years ago when he was defeated by President Joe Biden.

It comes eight years after his shock win over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential race, and just four years after he lost his bid for re-election to Biden amid the chaos of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Biden — who’d stepped away from the 2024 race this past July after a meandering, unfocused debate performance — quickly endorsed Harris to replace him atop the Democratic ticket. And the vice president, the first Black and South Asian woman to win a major party presidential nomination, appeared to have the upper hand against Trump in the closing weeks of the election.

Polls taken in late October showed Harris surging with strong support from female voters, while Trump appeared to be hemmorhaging Latino and Black voters.

The ex-president also made headlines with some bizarre behavior at campaign events during the final week. At one rally last weekend, he appeared to simulate performing oral sex on a malfunctioning microphone, and in his final appearance before Election Day — a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan — he said he would blame his own supporters for a loss to Harris. He drew scorn and outrage after failing to condemn a comedian who called the US territory of Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage” during a rally he held at Madison Square Garden in New York City last month, with some formerly pro-Trump influencers renouncing their endorsements of the ex-president.

Trump also had commentators questioning his fitness for office after he told blatant lies about Haitian immigrants allegedly eating dogs and cats in an Ohio town where his outrageous comments sparked death threats to officials and bomb threats against hospitals.

Despite the chaos engulfing his campaign, Trump was able to pull off a win for the second time against a female opponent. His victory also comes after two different people made unsuccessful attempts on Trump’s life as he sought to regain the presidency, and after a full two years of campaigning amid upheaval and scandal — often brought on by his own words and actions.

Democrats and experts on authoritarianism have warned that Trump would use a second term to dismantle the American constitutional system in favor of a Hungary-style “illiberal democracy.” Trump himself has said he would be a “dictator” on his first day in office and has promised to use the power of the federal government to go after Democrats, who he has called “the enemy within.”

Although he faces sentencing for 34 felony convictions in his former home state of New York later this month, Trump’s victory over Harris makes it unlikely that he will serve a single day in prison for those crimes.

Trump will now be able to order the end of the two criminal cases pending against him in federal courts, including a case stemming from his effort to illegally remain in office after he lost the 2020 election. A fourth case pending in Fulton County, Georgia, is now likely to be paused or dropped because of constitutional issues that bar the prosecution of a sitting president.

Even as recently as last week, new accusations of sexual assault were being levied against Trump, who has faced such charges from dozens of women over the years and was found civilly liable for attacking writer E Jean Carroll following a trial in a New York federal court last year.

American voters were unfazed by those incidents and the myriad scandals that have surrounded Trump since he left office in disgrace after being accused of fomenting an attempted coup against the incoming Biden administration.

Many Republican leaders, including the former Senate Republican leader, Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell, condemned his conduct in the aftermath of the sacking of the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob on January 6. A majority of the Senate — including seven from the Republican Party — voted to convict him for inciting the riot.

But the 57 senators who voted to convict Trump fell 10 short of the two-thirds that would have been needed to trigger a second vote barring him from holding federal office again.

In less than four months, he will emerge from the same door where rioters poured into the Capitol to attack police officers and search for Democratic lawmakers, and he will take the oath of office once more.