After an unforgettable election year swirling with uneasy questions and vivid, often unbelievable turns, America now has its answer. The Republic will be reimagined in the vision and will of its 47th president, Donald J Trump, for at least the next four years.
The 78-year old Republican candidate’s defiant and vengeful campaign ended in the early hours of Wednesday morning with an emphatic repudiation of the Democratic Party’s message that Kamala Harris represented a better way forward for the country.
Instead, persuaded by Trump’s 11-month odyssey through the heartland, where he performed with trenchant rhetoric and comic interludes, a clear majority trusted his vow that he will return them to a place and state of being that represents a more bountiful and recognisable version of their homeland.
“We are going to help our country heal,” he said in victory early on Wednesday morning.
“We are going to fix our borders. We are going to fix everything about our country. We made history tonight for a reason. It is a political victory that our country has never seen before. I will not rest until we have delivered the strong safe and prosperous America that our children deserve and that you deserve. This will truly be the golden age of America.”
This is the promise – the dazzling vision – that over 70 million Americans voted for.
Now, the second Trump administration must deliver on it. And he has the mandate. The New York billionaire has led the Grand Old Party, or the Make America Great Again version of republicanism, to a stunning return to power. He becomes the first candidate to lose a re-election bid and then return to the White House since Grover Cleveland in 1892.
With votes still coming in, he led the electoral college vote by 292 to Harris’s 224 on Wednesday. Control of the US Senate, too, has been won.
Unlike the shock of his victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016, there was a dauntless force to Trump’s third campaign, as he dealt with myriad legal indictments and a Manhattan court case which labelled him a felon after a guilty verdict, a procedure his supporters decried as a kangaroo court initiated by a Democratic shadow machine.
Ever the salesman, he quickly converted the infamy of those legal troubles into part of his anti-establishment credo. On Wednesday, special counsel Jack Smith was in talks with the department of justice to effectively end the outstanding cases.
Trump mocked and pilloried president Joe Biden through the spring campaign. When Trump came within millimetres of being shot in the head at a televised rally in Butler, he had the extraordinary awareness of occasion to emerge from a thicket of Secret Service men, face bloodied and fist raised as he shouted “Fight, Fight”. The election may have been decided there and then.
The Democrats’ midsummer swap of Biden, an ailing figure in the White House, with vice-president Kamala Harris brought a swell of August exuberance which the campaign believed would carry through to the ballot. But the final year of the Biden-Harris administration has been defined by a fog of confusion.
On January 5th, Biden launched his re-election campaign with a speech at Valley Forge, the Revolutionary War site, in his native Pennsylvania. The belief was that the 2024 election would be a lofty battle for the soul of American democracy.
It took them months to pivot to the kitchen table worries gripping vast swathes of America. The shocking hike in grocery and household bills, in property prices. There was a fear and an unease caused by the influx of migrants across the southern border states, which Trump and his running mate JD Vance translated into a vivid and often horrific picture. And also a more vague sense that some essence of America was vanishing before their eyes.
Joe Biden watched on from the White House as Trump ransacked his childhood state of Pennsylvania, where he claimed the largest Republican margin of victory since Ronald Reagan declared it was morning again in America in 1984.
The detailed analysis of the counties in which Harris fell short will continue, but this loss leaves the Democratic Party at a crossroads of identity and with new questions.
Is there some truth in the claim of Robert Kennedy Junior, an anticipated appointee now in Trump’s cabinet, that the present day Democratic Party is no longer recognisable as the movement of which his father and uncle remain patron saints? Can they regain the trust and faith of the once-Democrat blue collar families who have turned Republican? What does it mean now to be a Democrat?
The Republican movement has none of those internal conflicts. Its representatives and senators have never been clearer about the voice and image of their party as Donald Trump, more powerful than ever, thrusts America – and the world – on a radical new journey that leaves everyone in the dark as to where it will lead.
