Trump surmounted multiple obstacles to reclaim the White House

Nov. 6, 2024 5:16 AM PT

The former president defeated Vice President Kamala Harris by harnessing the abiding dissatisfaction of many Americans.
His victory makes the 78-year-old Trump the oldest person elected president and only the second to win nonconsecutive terms.

From the moment he rode a golden escalator downward and into the queasy gut of American political life, Donald Trump has done it his way — unbridled by precedent, often powered by “alternative facts” and dedicated to the proposition that only he could “make America great again.”

The real estate mogul and onetime reality TV star captured a second term as president of the United States early Wednesday morning — nearly a decade after his now iconic entrance on the nation’s political stage. His candidacy again surmounted innumerable obstacles and defied much of a political establishment that views him with utter disdain.

The former president defeated Vice President Kamala Harris by harnessing the abiding dissatisfaction of many Americans — uneasy about the high cost of living, unsettled about a southern border they view as insecure and disturbed over an evolving culture they feel has strayed too far from traditional values.

Donald Trump, with a bandaged ear, looks over a crowd

“The closing argument was basic and it worked: The country is broken. I’m a builder. I will fix it,” a senior Trump campaign advisor told The Times. “The economy is better under Trump. Illegal immigration will stop under Trump. You will have more of your money in your pocket under Trump. And also, with Trump, we will prevent boys from playing girls’ sports.”

His victory makes the 78-year-old Trump the oldest person elected president and only the second to win nonconsecutive terms. (Grover Cleveland accomplished the feat at the close of the 19th century.)

Ferocity and flights of fancy

In its nearly 250-year history, America has never before chosen a president who was convicted of a felony, judged liable for sexual abuse or one who took extraordinary steps to overturn the result of the previous election. Trump also survived a gunshot that could have taken his life, and a little more than a week later absorbed another thunderbolt — President Biden’s departure from the race.

Again in 2024, Trump aggressively tossed aside imperatives of traditional campaigns — such as striking a more conciliatory tone to try to win over moderate and nonpartisan voters. His ferocity and flights of fancy alienated some voters, but endeared him to many others, who considered him more authentic than standard-issue politicians.

“People were tired of someone talking in this bull—, pre-prepared politician lingo,” Joe Rogan, one of America’s most popular podcast hosts, told Trump during an interview a little more than a week before election day. “Even if they didn’t agree with you, they at least knew, whoever that guy is, that’s him. That’s really him.”

That kind of acceptance infuriated millions of other Americans — from the mainstream journalists who painstakingly parsed Trump’s myriad lies (for instance, claiming that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating dogs and cats, and that children are undergoing sex changes at public schools without their parents’ permission) to everyday voters who shuddered when the Republican vilified immigrants as “poisoning the blood” of America and pledged retribution against opponents he called “the enemy within.”

Dating to Jan. 6, 2021, when he rallied thousands of his most fervent acolytes and urged them to march on the U.S. Capitol, the former president seemed like anything but a sure thing to rise again.

Even mainstays of his own party, such as Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell and House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy, talked privately about their support for impeachment, before they reversed course. Threats on lawmakers and Vice President Mike Pence left Trump loyalist Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) declaring, “Count me out. Enough is enough.”

But the populist president never lost his base, at first largely white and working class but growing marginally more diverse over time. They remained unified behind a president who promised to stick it to undocumented immigrants, ungrateful foreign leaders and out-of-touch elitists in academia and the media.

Trump supporters line up outside an area for a rally

Fending off Republican challengers

Myriad pundits predicted Trump couldn’t survive multiple criminal indictments. Those included state and federal charges of election tampering and another federal indictment alleging the criminal mishandling of secret documents. But, one by one, procedural and legal challenges assured that those cases against Trump would not be tried until after the election.

Later this month, however, the president-elect will be sentenced for his criminal conviction in New York state related to hush money payments to a porn actor before the 2016 election.

A little less than two years before election day, Trump declared he would run again. Ambitious Republicans lined up to take on the politically wounded 45th president. But he positioned himself as a singular, historic figure.

“I stepped up to fight for America because no one else would do it or would do it properly,” Trump said at an early rally. Any attacks on him were really an attack on everyday Americans, he said, adding: “When they go after me, they’re going after you.”

In an early poll last spring, Trump won nearly 50% approval among Republican voters, far ahead of the rest of the GOP field. His closest rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, attracted only half that level of support.

The Republican favorite saw no reason to debate his rivals and he didn’t. They struggled to distinguish themselves, while Trump seemed to make news virtually every time he opened his mouth.

“They’re poisoning the blood of our country,” Trump said of the immigrants coming to America from Mexico and other countries. The media and others slammed him for adopting language Adolf Hitler once used.

But Republicans in early voting states shrugged, or even registered their approval. A poll in Iowa found that 42% of those likely to participate in the state’s first-in-the-nation caucuses would be more likely to support him for the “poisoning the blood” comment, while 29% said it made no difference.

Trump went on to carry Iowa with 51% of the vote to 21% for DeSantis and 19% for former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley. He won 98 of the state’s 99 counties, the strongest showing by a GOP candidate in almost half a century of Republican caucuses.

Trump stands on a farm surrounded by people and farm equipment

His Republican rivals began to drop from the field. Haley would hold on for two more months — perhaps betting that one of Trump’s legal problems would trip him up — but no one seriously challenged his grip on the Republican Party.

One of the primary arguments against Trump, that he couldn’t win in the general election, never gained traction. Polls showed he was competitive with Biden, or even ahead. And Trump exuded bravado and strength.

By some measures, Biden had achieved a lot in his term — passing a $1-trillion bipartisan measure to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure, bolstering the critical microchip industry with another law, forgiving debt on some student loans, capping insulin prices for senior citizens and increasing subsidies for insurance under the Affordable Care Act.

Some of those measures will have longer-term impacts, and many Americans said they didn’t feel them as viscerally as they did increasing prices of groceries and gasoline. Word of new manufacturing jobs couldn’t compete with reports about record-high levels of illegal crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border, even if those declined markedly late in the Democratic administration.

Just before Trump lost the White House to Biden in 2020, only 20% of Americans expressed satisfaction with the way things were going in America. On the same question this October, only 22% of those surveyed told the Gallup organization they were satisfied — a bad omen for the party in the White House.

Age concerns that cost Biden did not stick to Trump

By the summer, 57% of Americans said they disapproved of Biden’s job performance. The octogenarian president’s bent posture and halted speaking manner didn’t reassure many Democrats, even as they pointed to the many verbal miscues of Trump, just three years his junior.

It seemed that allegations of frailty and inability to lead did not stick to Trump — who might ramble and give odd answers but typically sounded forceful and self-assured.

On June 27, a CNN debate essentially settled the matter, as Biden appeared listless and unable to fend off Trump.

Less than a month later, Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed Harris. With a little more than three months left before election day, Democrats quickly agreed to band together behind the vice president. By definition, that meant there would be no primaries, open to popular Democrats like Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro.

“The fault lies with Joe Biden and his selfish hold on the office, when it was obvious to everyone that he was not capable of serving another four years in the White House,” said Whit Ayres, a veteran Republican pollster who was not working for a presidential candidate this year. “It prevented the Democrats from having a full-blown primary process that could have yielded a stronger candidate than Kamala Harris.”

Still, members of Trump’s team acknowledged that the presence of a younger and more dynamic leader in Harris had energized Democrats and some of the “double haters” who had bemoaned having to choose between two senior citizens, Biden and Trump.

The former president also struggled for a time to adjust to Biden’s absence from the race. More than a month later, he complained at a rally that he had spent $100 million to defeat the man who had beaten him in 2020. “We weren’t fighting anyone else,” Trump said, suggesting later that the U.S. electoral system was once again being rigged against him. “It’s a very unfair thing.”

A senior Trump campaign advisor, who asked not to be named discussing internal deliberations, conceded that the Republicans had been caught “flat-footed” on how to approach a candidate who was younger (now 60) and a woman of color.

The Trump camp had no opposition research about Harris. It has no ads laid out to attack her.

A gunshot wound — and ‘Fight, fight, fight!’ — becomes a symbol of defiance

But the Republican nominee had shown a habit for transcending and even thriving in moments of adversity. Eight days before Biden exited the race, a rifleman had opened fire on Trump while he spoke at a campaign rally in Butler, Pa.

A bullet clipped Trump’s ear and sent blood streaming down his face. Barely missing a beat, Trump waved his fist and shouted in defiance, “Fight, fight, fight!” It became an image that his campaign would broadcast repeatedly in ads in the final weeks of the campaign.

“This is it. He’s won the election,” presidential historian Joan Hoff concluded as she watched the images at home. “I couldn’t believe he had such self-awareness to continue to campaign while he’s being hauled off. I mean, he’s fearless. He’s indestructible.”

Hoff, of Montana State University, also said she believes Trump is “a real danger” to the country, threatening its democratic norms.

The Republican still appeared flummoxed on Sept. 10, however, when he faced Harris in their lone debate. She put Trump on the defensive for much of the night, baiting him into obsessing about crowd sizes at his rallies and fixating on an imagined crisis — Haitian immigrants eating household pets in one Ohio town.

It was a low moment, one Trump insider said. “He got stuck in the minutiae and sucked into these peripheral things,” said the person, who declined to be named. The Republican’s team also quietly acknowledged that Harris had probably persuaded “enough people” that “she’s capable of being the president of the United States.”

But for Team Trump, the evening was not entirely lost. Near the end, Trump got his cleanest shot at Harris. “She’s been there for 3½ years,” the Republican said. “They’ve had 3½ years to fix the border. They’ve had 3½ years to create jobs. ... Why hasn’t she done it?”

(Though job growth under the Democrats averaging more than 400,000 a month was twice the rate under Trump, it’s hard to mete out credit and blame, because of the outsized impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on both presidencies.)

The Republicans were convinced they would win if they made the election a prosecution of the last four years of Democratic rule. They knew they could lose if the contest became about Trump’s behavior and divisiveness.

Trump’s determination to hold the Democrats responsible for the country’s generally sour mood proved to be a winning one. And multiple observers in both parties said Harris did not do enough — perhaps given her loyalty to Biden — to separate herself from the unpopular president.

Early last month, during an appearance on ABC’S “The View,” Harris damaged her effort to exemplify her independence. When one of the hosts asked what she’d do differently than Biden, Harris responded: “There is not a thing that comes to mind,” adding, “and I’ve been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact.”

Steve Schmidt, a former Republican political consultant and Trump opponent, described the comment as a potential “killer asteroid” moment for the Harris campaign. Trump soon had an ad on the air, juxtaposing the vice president’s comment with images of chaotic crossings at the southern border, bloody overseas wars and a headline: “Prices still rising.”

After his humbling first confrontation with Harris, Trump didn’t agree to any other debates. He particularly decried the fact-checking that ABC’s moderators performed when he strayed from the truth.

A three-hour Joe Rogan interview

He chose to spend the closing two months of his campaign on decidedly friendlier turf, far from the control of the old-line media outlets — rallies in the battleground states, appearances before male-oriented podcasters and sit-down chats with friendly Republican women.

Like many of Harris’ media appearances, those events assured the former president steered well away from hectoring hosts and their inconvenient fact-checking.

Trump treated his appearance with Rogan as a gift, repeatedly thanking and praising the host. The three-hour bull session allowed the Republican nominee to launch fact-light tirades, including a riff about children undergoing sex change operations at school, along with boasts about his own toughness with adversaries such as China.

A week out from election day, the session with Rogan had been viewed 40 million times.

In the last days of October, both Harris and Trump delivered closing arguments. Trump went to Madison Square Garden on a Sunday. It was the rare rally televised on national cable networks. And it was everything Democrats had hoped for: racist jokes from a comedian, sexist remarks comparing Harris to a prostitute and a cascade of anger unleashed by Trump.

Trump strategists knew they were winning a majority of Americans if the conversation turned to inflation or immigration. But particularly in the closing days of the campaign, they also broadcast ads that plunged into the heart of the nation’s culture wars.

One showed a video of Harris from her days as attorney general of California, telling an interviewer she supported giving access to gender-reassignment surgery to prison inmates, saying “every transgender inmate would have access.” A narrator concludes: “Crazy liberal Kamala is for they-them. President Trump is for you.”

“Spending money on surgeries for those that want to transition from male to female, I’m not for any of that,” said Rachel Rogstad, a retired registered nurse from Mount Pleasant, Wis., who was undecided in the weeks before the election.

The ad played repeatedly in the final days of the campaign, with one Trump advisor saying they believed it was as devastating to Harris as the “Willie Horton” ads had been to Democrat Michael Dukakis in his 1988 loss to Republican George H.W. Bush.

Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump departs with former fir

Horton was a Black prison inmate. While on parole in Massachusetts, where Dukakis was governor, Horton raped a white Maryland woman and stabbed her boyfriend. Bush’s team was castigated for injecting race into the emotionally charged issue of crime. But the Republican soundly defeated Dukakis.

Rep. Jared Huffman, a Democrat from San Rafael, accused Trump of appealing to “the darkest underbelly of our society.” But Trump’s team had long since grown numb to such critiques.

“People are willing to put some of these things aside,” said the Trump advisor, “because they feel their own lives were better when he was president.”

Rainey reported from Los Angeles, Bierman from Washington.