The result gives Trump a free hand

Donald Trump has done it again. Eight years after his stunning upset with Hillary Clinton and four years after Joe Biden ousted him from the White House, the former president is poised to return to power.

Thanks to a victory that swept key early voting battleground states – and improved his electoral margins in much of America – he claimed an “unprecedented and powerful mandate” to govern.

“This will truly be America’s golden age,” he promised the cheering crowd at his campaign rally in West Palm Beach, Florida.

His victory confirms a fundamental realignment of American politics toward a conservative populism that began in 2016 and was thought to have been pushed aside with his 2020 defeat.

His political movement is back and seemingly more sustainable than ever.

Trump will now have a chance to build his new administration and implement the policies he has promised will create a new golden age.

Trump will be joined in power by a Senate that is now back in Republican hands after four years of Democratic control. This will pave the way for Trump’s political appointees, including Cabinet officials and judicial nominees, to require Senate confirmation.

It will take days, if not weeks, to determine whether Republicans retain control of the House of Representatives. But early Wednesday morning, Trump predicted that his party would gain the upper hand there too.

A Republican Congress will be integral to Trump’s plan to implement a platform that includes an aggressive plan to restructure the federal bureaucracy, replacing senior government officials with political appointees. His supporters have vetted thousands of loyalists poised to take control of all facets of the expanding federal government.

Among those swept into the corridors of power along with the new president are multi-billionaire Elon Musk, vaccine skeptic Robert F Kennedy Jr., Democrat-turned-Republican Tulsi Gabbard, tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and a host of other figures featured here become part of it. unusual electoral coalition.

Trump has also pledged to impose broad new tariffs on imported goods to protect domestic industries, implement a series of new targeted tax breaks and credits and implement a mass deportation of undocumented migrants living in the US.

On foreign policy, he said he would quickly end the wars in Ukraine and Gaza and put American interests above all others. He will have to solve these global crises as soon as he comes to power in January.

Kamala Harris, her fellow Democrats and some former Trump White House officials warned that these policies will cause massive economic and social disruptions and threaten global stability — and that a second Trump presidency would become unhinged and disconnected from the political guardrails.

On Sunday, Trump himself said his second presidential term “could be a little tedious at times, and maybe especially in the beginning,” but he promised the end results would be good.

On Tuesday, an electoral majority – and probably even a majority of the American voting public – agreed.

If Congress is fully under Republican control, this will give the new president the opportunity to roll back many of the programs implemented during the past four years of Democratic rule and enact conservative legislation – on tax policy, government spending, and trade and immigration – which will allow him to leave a more lasting mark on the American government.

Trump’s victory represents a remarkable comeback for a man who left the presidency amid the rubble of Jan. 6 with his reputation seemingly in tatters. After being roundly condemned by Democrats and even some Republicans, he embarked on a four-year journey that took him back to the pinnacle of American power.

Along the way, he was indicted in federal and state courts. He was convicted of several crimes. He was found liable in civil court in a case involving sexual assault. Another court imposed huge fines on his business empire.

He shook it all off and persevered to march toward the Republican nomination.

Trump was sometimes unfocused and abrasive in his rally speeches, but he surrounded himself with a smart, professional staff. Polls showed that Americans trusted Trump on the two most important issues of this election — immigration and the economy — and his campaign relentlessly hammered home his message.

Most importantly, we were on the right side of the big issues, at a time when the electoral mood in the US – and indeed in many democracies around the world – was decidedly anti-establishment.

Around the world, the former president has improved many of his margins from 2020, sometimes dramatically. His campaign successfully turned out rural voters who were intensely loyal to him and eroded Democratic margins in the cities. While exit polls are still being adjusted to reflect the latest results, Trump appears to have made inroads into the traditional Democratic coalitions of young, Hispanic and black voters.

While Trump’s team initially seemed unsure of how to handle Biden’s late switch to Kamala Harris, the former president eventually found his footing and rode the wave of anti-incumbent sentiment back to the White House.

Now he has four more years to govern – this time with a more developed political organization behind him, eager to translate his campaign promises into action.

North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher provides insight into the race for the White House in his biweekly US Election Unspun newsletter. Readers in Britain can sign up here. Those outside Britain can sign up here.