Donald J. Trump has defeated Vice President Kamala Harris, riding a wave of anxiousness over inflation and illegal immigration to bring a strongman-style politics to the White House, and making him the first former president since Grover Cleveland to win a second term after a re-election defeat.
Mr. Trump’s remarkable comeback was confirmed just after 5:30 a.m. Eastern time Wednesday, when The Associated Press declared him the winner in the battleground state of Wisconsin, putting him above the threshold of 270 electoral votes needed to secure the presidency.
Voters chose Mr. Trump as the stronger leader for uncertain times and as one they saw as a proven economic champion. They looked past his 34 felony convictions, his role inspiring an assault on the Capitol and his indictments on charges of attempting to subvert the 2020 election and to hold on to classified documents.
Mr. Trump’s victory in one of the most tumultuous campaigns in memory — including two failed assassination attempts — makes him, at 78, the oldest man to be elected president.
Speaking to supporters in Palm Beach, Fla., in the early hours of the morning, Mr. Trump declared, “This will forever be remembered as the day the American people regained control of their country.”
He will return to Washington with his party firmly in control of the Senate after four years in the minority. That will ease his push to install proven loyalists in his cabinet and other high-level posts in the government.
Republicans are still battling to hold their slim majority in the House. The outcome could determine the lengths Mr. Trump could go to with his legislative agenda, but he has vowed to carry out many of his plans whether Congress agrees or not.
For Ms. Harris, who sought to make history not only as the first woman but also as the first Black and Asian American woman to be elected president, the hard-fought contest was a three-month sprint that began after President Biden bowed out of his re-election campaign under pressure.
In the end, the headwinds of post-pandemic inflation, soaring housing prices and economic uncertainty were too much for her to overcome.
Mr. Trump centered his campaign on sealing the U.S.-Mexican border and deporting undocumented immigrants by the millions. He promised to impose sweeping tariffs to strengthen domestic industries. And in the final weeks of the campaign, he made a flurry of expensive financial promises to different sectors of the electorate, promising to abolish taxes on tips, overtime pay and Social Security benefits.
His closing message boiled down to blaming Ms. Harris for all the perceived failures of the unpopular Biden administration, under the slogan “Kamala Broke It. Trump Will Fix It.” With polls showing the electorate hungry for change, that message — and Ms. Harris’s status as the sitting vice president — helped deliver him victory.
The seesaw election of 2024 began with widespread voter disaffection with the presumed nominees of both parties, Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden. Voters saw both men as too old and neither as a fresh beginning for a nation weary of conflict, division and economic dislocation.
But in June, in their first presidential debate, Mr. Biden stumbled badly, appearing aged and at times incoherent. Two weeks later, Mr. Trump survived an assassination attempt in Butler, Pa., buoying his image as an almost indestructible leader with fresh new evidence: photos of him, blood streaked across his face, fist aloft, shouting, “Fight, fight, fight.”
He headed into the Republican convention that month with a clear and widening lead in the polls, anticipating a November landslide.
But Mr. Biden’s withdrawal from the race just three days after the convention unleashed a surge of Democratic relief and enthusiasm for Ms. Harris that reset the race and made it what was expected to be among the closest in modern American history.
Ms. Harris, backed by scores of Republicans, including many from Mr. Trump’s administration, tried to make the case that he harbored authoritarian and bigoted impulses and was a true threat to democracy. In the closing weeks, she and others began calling him a fascist, as Mr. Trump’s campaigning became darker, more threatening and more xenophobic.
Many of the ads by the Trump campaign or supporting it leaned on images of migrants storming the border, mug shots of Hispanic criminals and open hostility toward transgender people, appealing to fear and distrust. The former president called the vice president lazy, stupid and “dumb as a rock.”
The violence in his rhetoric amped up as well. He promised a “bloody story” in the mass deportation of criminal aliens, suggested he would give police free rein for “one rough hour” to end crime and said he would use the military against what he called “the enemy from within.” In his campaign’s final days, he suggested that one of his fiercest Republican critics, former Representative Liz Cheney, should be put on a battlefield “with nine barrels shooting at her.”
None of it meaningfully dented his appeal, which rested on his promise of what he called an American “comeback” under his leadership.
