‘Los Angeles Times’: Room at the top for Donald Trump

Donald Trump is surrounded by Secret Service agents after he was wounded in a shooting during a campaign rally in Butler, Pa., in July.
Photo: Associated Press

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, writes ‘The Los Angeles Times’.

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.

“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.)

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.”

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.

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.

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

“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.”

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.”

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.

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?”

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.”

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.”

The ad played repeatedly in the final days of the campaign, with one Trump advisor saying they believed it was devastating to Harris.

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.”

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