Trump Won Because America Wanted Him To
As the Biden-Obama coalition fractured under the immense weight of its own contradictions and failures, the Trump coalition built new strengths.
www.newsweek.com
Just after 5:30am on Wednesday, the Associated Press called Wisconsin for former and now future president Donald J. Trump, raising his total of electoral votes to the majority of 270 needed to win the electoral college. The popular vote count was on track to deliver a national mandate.
Republicans also retook the
Senate with a larger majority than anyone had predicted and appear poised to expand their slim House majority.
Trump's Democratic opponent,
Kamala Harris, sheepishly snuck out of her own election night party in Washington, leaving subordinates to tell her assembled crowd of supporters simply to go home. Trump moved from celebrations at his Mar-a-Lago residence and private club to West Palm Beach's convention center to deliver a victory speech to a larger gathering that included a wide media audience.
Trump's victory has the makings of a blowout, with all swing states either solidly in his column or leaning in his direction by several points at the time the race was called. These results flew in the face of most pre-election day polls, which predicted statistical ties or slight leads for Harris. Trump's comeback—arguably the greatest in American history—defied nearly a decade of unremitting mass media hostility, a once-in-a-century pandemic, open defiance from the federal bureaucracy, multiple criminal prosecutions, damaging civil legal actions, two impeachments, electoral defeat in 2020, dogged opposition within the
Republican Party, myriad slights and slanders, and two assassination attempts.
Harris, whose campaign raised a billion dollars, outspent Trump at least three to one and commanded the loyalty not only of the
Democratic Party but of virtually the entire Washington establishment and most of American institutional life.