Trump stuns Harris to become 47th president of the United States
Erik Uebelacker
(CN) — Former President Donald Trump will return to the White House as the 47th President of the United States.
After a grueling election season that included two assassination attempts and a historic last-minute candidate change, the race was called for the Republican just before midnight Pacific Time on Tuesday.
It didn’t take days, as most pollsters had predicted. After Trump clinched Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania on election night, his Democratic opponent Vice President Kamala Harris had virtually no path to victory.
At 78, Trump is the oldest person to win the U.S. presidency. And he’s just the second to win nonconsecutive terms — Grover Cleveland did it, too, more than a century ago.
Trump is also the first convicted felon to win the nation’s highest office. In June, a Manhattan jury found him guilty of falsifying business records to cover up a hush-money scheme related to his first presidential run in 2016.
Harris had her eyes on becoming the first female president in American history. In a historic turn of events, Harris replaced sitting President Joe Biden as the party’s nominee after Biden dropped out of the race in July.
Going into Election Day, the race looked like a coin flip, with all eyes on seven battleground states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Trump outperformed in every state, clinching the presidency and — for the first time in his three presidential campaigns — the popular vote, too.
Shades of 2016 emerged just after midnight in Washington on Wednesday, when Harris' campaign co-chair Cedric Richmond announced that Harris would not be addressing the crowd at her election party at Howard University. The race hadn’t yet been called, but by that point, momentum had swung heavily in Trump’s favor.
It was strikingly similar to the scene at Hillary Clinton’s election party eight years ago at the Javits Center in New York City.
Early Wednesday morning in West Palm Beach, Florida, Trump addressed supporters at his election party at the Palm Beach County Convention Center, where he called the MAGA movement the “greatest political movement of all time.”
“We overcame obstacles that nobody thought possible,” Trump said onstage, flanked by his family and political allies.
Trump has indeed faced a slew of obstacles since he lost the 2020 presidential election, including a pair of assassination attempts — one that left him wounded when he was struck by a bullet that grazed his ear during a Pennsylvania rally in July.
He’s also faced numerous serious legal roadblocks since his 2020 loss. This year, he was ordered by a federal court to pay more than $83 million in damages to writer E. Jean Carroll, who Trump was found liable for sexually assaulting and subsequently defaming.
A month later, a New York court issued a $355 million civil fraud judgment against Trump for shortchanging banks he did business with by lying about his net worth on annual financial statements. With interest, Trump now owes roughly half a billion dollars in that case.
Trump is due to be sentenced in the aforementioned Manhattan criminal conviction later this month. He also faces ongoing federal charges in Washington and Georgia for his failed efforts to cling to power — which included inciting a violent riot at the U.S. Capitol — following his 2020 presidential election loss to Biden.
Despite his baggage, Trump performed well enough in battleground states to seize the victory on election night, shocking pundits around the nation.
“I think we just witnessed the greatest political comeback in the history of the United States of America,” Trump’s vice presidential pick JD Vance said at the West Palm Beach election party.
The results were a blow for Harris, who ran a wide-reaching campaign targeting voters from progressives to anti-Trump Republicans and everyone in between. She homed in strongly on abortion access, which was dismantled nationally by the Republican-led U.S. Supreme Court’s bombshell 2022 overruling of Roe v. Wade.
Harris was expected to have a big advantage with women; NBC’s final national poll gave Harris a 16-point lead over Trump in that category. But exit poll data from election night showed that Harris’ true lead was closer to 10 points.
Exit polls in some swing states showed the Biden-Harris policy on the war in Gaza may have cost them key votes, too.
The current administration has faced heat from progressives and Arab Americans for its arming of Israel in conflict against Palestinians. That appeared to hurt Harris in certain Michigan counties — Biden won the Detroit suburb of Dearborn by a 3-to-1 margin in 2020. This time around, Harris won just 28% to Trump’s 47%, according to an NBC projection.
Trump’s precise margin of victory is yet to be tallied as votes are still being counted nationwide.