Donald Trump has won the 2024 election and will be President for a second time, according to the Associated Press. The AP called the race early Wednesday morning after determining that Vice President Kamala Harris had no mathematical path to victory based on the votes tallied so far.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Trump’s win marks a stunning political comeback for the former President and celebrity businessman after he lost in 2020 to Joe Biden and then refused to accept the results, encouraging his supporters to violently storm the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 to try to overturn his loss.
Trump, 78, campaigned with a central message that the Democrats had fumbled the economy and the border, and that he could fix it all. He pledged to ease taxes on the rich, ramp up tariffs on foreign made goods, and move to deport millions of people living in the country without authorization. After the three Supreme Court appointments from his first term led to the Court ending a federal right to abortion access in 2022, Trump said he would leave the issue up to the states.
His stump speeches were marked with dark images of immigrants as violent criminals. During his one debate with Harris, he repeated a baseless conspiracy theory that immigrants in Ohio were eating people’s pets. He pitched himself as a strongman who would not let the typical constraints on the Presidency hold him back from going after his political opponents, who he repeatedly called the “enemy within.” Trump also said he’d use the military to put down protests and help him implement his immigration policy.
In the final months of his tumultuous 2024 campaign, Trump survived two assassination attempts and the FBI foiled a third plot by Iran to hire a hitman to kill him. After an assassin’s bullet grazed his ear during a rally in Butler, Pa. in July, Trump rose and pumped his fist and told the crowd to “fight.” In September, a Secret Service agent opened fire on a man aiming a rifle at Trump on the edge of his golf course in West Palm Beach.
Trump won the election despite being convicted on 34 counts of fraud by a New York jury, facing charges for interfering with the 2020 election in Georgia and being the subject of federal criminal investigations into his effort to overturn the 2020 election results and his handling of classified documents. Though he has no control over the state charges, Trump is likely to shut down the federal cases against him.
Trump’s win makes him only the second President in American history to win back the White House four years after being voted out. It hasn’t happened since Grover Cleveland won his way back to the Oval Office in 1892 after being kicked out by voters in 1888.
