Trump triumphed. But will his presidency be as dark as his campaign?
After a campaign propelled by invective, fear and vows of retribution, Donald Trump will return to the White House to lead a divided nation.
Surrounded by bulletproof glass, former president Donald Trump walks out to speak at a campaign rally on Sunday at Kinston Regional Jetport in Kinston, North Carolina. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
By Dan Balz
November 6, 2024 at 3:40 a.m. MST
His was a campaign as dark as any in recent memory, filled with invective, fear and vows of retribution — hostile and divisive at its core. Yet, for all of that, Donald Trump is, once again, headed to the White House as president. He will carry into the Oval Office promises that would upend the governing order, shatter global alliances and further tear the country apart.
With this victory over Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump has cemented his claim to have remade American politics. As in 2016, many doubted that he could win, but once again he defied the doubters. He has reshaped the Republican Party by realigning some traditional voting blocs, scrambling what it stands for and diluting its ideological consistency. His dominance has deepened fault lines of gender and education in the electorate. Who thought any of that was possible when he first announced his candidacy in the summer of 2015?
He glided easily to the Republican nomination, setting himself on a course to reclaim the White House. After an assassination attempt in July that nearly took his life, his national convention was an outpouring of affection. His loyal base, fervent as ever, never wavered, never showed signs of defecting. And as the general election unfolded, he was able to add new supporters to his coalition, enough younger Latino and Black men to help him win.
Two years ago, he was at a low point after Republicans underperformed in the midterm elections and after some of his favored candidates lost their races, costing the GOP control of the Senate. He was weak enough at that point to attract a passel of challengers for the Republican nomination. His rise back to dominance in the party was fueled, ironically, by a series of indictments in the spring and summer of 2023, when the party consolidated around him.
Trump’s first election in 2016 came both as a surprise and a shock. Few believed it could happen, maybe not even Trump himself. His victory over Harris is not a surprise; all the indicators said it was possible. But it is no less shocking, if only because of the ways in which Trump talked about how he would use the powers of the presidency this time around.
His plans call for mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, possibly using the U.S. military. He proposes a 20 percent tariff on all imported goods, which would mean higher prices for consumers. He promises to end the war in Ukraine in a day, something that could only happen on terms favorable to Russia and a man he admires, President Vladimir Putin. He offers minimal assurances that he would honor commitments to NATO allies. “America First” means America first.
That is only part of what a second Trump presidency would mean. He has promised retribution against his adversaries, whom he describes as “the enemy within.” He would seek control of the Justice Department to carry out that plan and others. He would pardon many of those convicted in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. He could, in the name of “draining the swamp,” launch an assault on the executive branch and the career civil servants who do the work of government.
Trump has thumbed his nose at the Constitution. The repeated lie he has told for four years about the 2020 campaign having been stolen from him offers a textbook example of how he would seek to govern. He admires authoritarian leaders and seeks to be one, resisting the checks and balances the founders built into the Constitution.
The reverberations from the results of this election will be heard and felt around the world, in foreign capitals of both allies and adversaries. No American election has been as closely watched from abroad as this one. Trump is both a known quantity and an uncertain, often erratic, leader. In his first term and since, he has rattled America’s allies and cozied up to dictators, and nothing suggests a different approach for his second.
One caveat comes with all this, which is the belief even among some of his critics that his first term was not as bad as it could have been. On taxes, regulations and the courts, he governed as a conventional conservative, compliant to the wishes of Republican congressional leaders. He did not pull the United States out of NATO, despite constantly denigrating the alliance. He got some NATO allies to invest more in their defense budgets. He helped bring about the Abraham Accords in the Middle East. He took a tougher approach toward China, reorienting policy in a direction that has been adopted broadly among foreign policy experts. He brought attention to the negative effects of free trade policies — the damage suffered by workers left behind.
But a second Trump term could be more dangerous because of what would not be there. Through most of his first term, he found himself at least partially constrained by advisers who resisted some of his worst instincts. Many of them, having seen him up close, said publicly during the campaign that he was unfit to serve again. The list includes former vice president Mike Pence, former White House chief of staff John F. Kelly, former defense secretary Mark T. Esper, former national security adviser John Bolton. They provided guardrails to keep him in check. Whoever he taps for his White House staff and Cabinet, they are not likely to impose the same constraints. He will set the terms of his presidency and expect those around him to salute and go forward.
Attendees hold signs at a campaign event for Trump on Saturday in Greensboro, North Carolina. (Cornell Watson for The Washington Post)
Trump will not govern with a totally free hand, however. If he tries to go to the extremes in his second term, he will butt up against obstacles: the courts (which consistently ruled against him after 2020), a closely divided Congress (where 60 votes will still be needed in the Senate on most issues) and his own lack of attention to the details of policy. Even in the face of his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, the institutions of American democracy proved resilient enough to deny him what he sought.
But in a second term he will have something he lacked in his first, which is the knowledge that the Supreme Court has said presidents have immunity from criminal prosecution from many things they might do. He won that case last summer as part of his legal strategy to fight off the federal indictment in the Jan. 6 case that is still pending.
Trump’s election underscores the deep divide in the country, an obvious statement but nonetheless one worth repeating in the moment. America has become two countries occupying one set of boundaries — two worldviews, two competing policy prescriptions and above all two camps deeply suspicious of one another. Trump has always understood this. Rather than trying to overcome it, rather than attempting to bring Americans together, he seized on it for political advantage, stoking the fears and resentments toward political elites among people who feel left behind as the country changes.
This campaign was as raw as any in recent memory, more so than either the 2016 or 2020 elections, exposing the anxieties of a public that has weathered eight years of turmoil and political conflict. Trump became more unpredictable — erratic even — as the campaign wound to a close. One of his last major rallies, held in New York’s Madison Square Garden, was an ugly amalgam of racism and misogyny from one surrogate after another.
His first election sparked a resistance, symbolized by the huge women’s marches that took place in 2017 the day after he was inaugurated. That led to a Democratic victory in the 2018 midterm election and to Trump’s defeat in 2020. That resistance remains, enhanced by the decision to end the constitutional right to an abortion by a Supreme Court that included three Trump nominees. Harris had hoped all this would provide the fuel to power her to victory. Trump nonetheless prevailed, on the strength of roughly half the country who have lost trust in anything that smacks of the establishment, the elites or liberal governance.
That is another reason Trump is now the president-elect. Many Americans who voted for him recognized his flaws, his moral shortcomings, his conviction for falsifying business records, his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, his role in the attack on the Capitol. They were not blind to that part of Trump. But they were willing to set aside those reservations because they also saw in him someone who could make their own lives better financially, someone who could repair what they saw as the damage from four years of the Biden administration.
Harris’s inability to convince these voters otherwise is a failing with which she and the entire Democratic Party will have to come to terms. If the flaws of Trump were so obvious, what was it about her or the Democratic Party that allowed him to win? Through much of the campaign, when Biden was running and after he left the race, many Democrats were unwilling to acknowledge how deep the frustrations were with his administration. They can’t ignore it now.
Americans who voted for Trump see him as someone who could make their own lives better financially, someone who could repair what they see as the damage from four years of the Biden administration. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Trump has proved that he is the dominant politician of this era. From once being a flamboyant, publicity-seeking developer in New York and a reality TV star famous for saying “You’re fired,” he has now ascended to a position few politicians ever do. If Ronald Reagan was the dominant politician of the 1980s and beyond, someone who ushered in a conservative ascendance and changed the conversation about government’s reach, Trump has done something similar over the nine years he has occupied the stage. Which is why this election was, fundamentally, always about him — whether he would regain power or be forced to the sidelines.
Roughly half of the population had hoped this election would result in a Harris victory, eager to begin to put Trump and Trumpism in the rearview mirror, believing that a Republican Party remade by Trump and under his thumb would begin to look to a different future. There was never a likelihood that the Republicans would become again the party of Reagan or the Bushes, but had Trump been defeated for the second election in a row, there would be breathing room for those in the GOP to think anew. That’s now gone.
Trump can serve only four years and then he will be done, but in that time, if he is focused and disciplined and unrestrained, he can carry out many of the darker promises he made throughout the campaign — the deportations, the vengeance against his adversaries, the “America First” foreign policy priorities that could undermine America’s role as the leader of the free world. He will command center stage, pointing the direction ahead for his party and even trying to pick his successor to lead the GOP into the 2028 election.
No one imagined nine years ago that he would have had this much staying power or this much impact on his party or the country. America’s future is once again in his hands.
Dan Balz is chief correspondent at The Washington Post. He has served as the paper’s deputy national editor, political editor, White House correspondent and Southwest correspondent.
