Donald Trump gets his revenge four years later

On the cusp of achieving the 270 electoral votes he needed to become president again, Donald Trump appeared before a crowd of supporters to celebrate an unprecedented achievement: returning to the White House after four years, one insurrection, four criminal trials, a guilty verdict on 34 felony counts and two assassination attempts. Technically he had not yet won, but he was already taking it for granted, as was the rest of the planet, given that the battleground states of North Carolina, Georgia, and Pennsylvania had been awarded to him and projections indicated that he would win the votes of the other four decisive states that were still to be counted. “We are going to fix everything that is wrong with this country. We’re going to help our country heal. We have a country that needs help very badly,” Trump said at the beginning of his speech, which began after 2:30 a.m. “This will truly be a golden age for America.”

The Republican candidate appeared in the company of his family, his vice-presidential running mate J. D. Vance, and a handful of his closest collaborators, against the backdrop of dozens of American flags. He did so at a convention center in West Palm Beach located near his home, the mansion-golf club-hotel of Mar-a-Lago, the scene of some of his greatest triumphs and also of his lowest moments, in a story that would sound incredible if it were not true. Vance defined it as “the greatest political comeback in the history of the United States of America.”

Around 5,000 of Trump’s supporters, collaborators and other faithful of, as they like to define themselves, “the largest political movement in the history of humanity” were waiting for him. They had been summoned to an unmistakably MAGA party to witness the triumphant return of their leader and the consummation of a revenge that had been brewing since 2020, when Joe Biden ousted Trump from the White House.

“This will forever be remembered as the day the American people regained control of their country,” he said to a crowd filled with red caps and which included Elon Musk, the richest man in the world and a sudden and fervent Trump admirer, the television host Tucker Carlson, and Robert F. Kennedy, the famous anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist and repudiated descendant of a legendary Democratic dynasty. Trump heaped praise on Musk: “A star is born: Elon!” Trump also celebrated his victory in the popular vote, the first one of his political career, and a victory that means that the Republicans have taken control of the Senate and will surely win control of the House as well. That, coupled with the fact that the Supreme Court is dominated by a conservative supermajority, leaves him with a clear path to the White House.

That things were looking better for the Republican candidate than for his rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, the surprise contender after Biden declined to run for re-election — the first president to do so in nearly half a century — was clear shortly after the first polling stations on the East Coast closed. The first sign that a victory was coming for Trump emerged from Florida, where the former president carried what used to be a swing state but has long since ceased to be one: in 2016, the Republicans won it by one point. In 2020, by three. This time, the lead rose to 13 points.

Then came Virginia, where Trump did not win but achieved better results than four years ago. When Iowa turned red despite a poll that set off alarm bells on Saturday, and the U.S. media predicted that the decisive states of North Carolina and Georgia would fall to the Republican side, Trumpism put the champagne bottles on ice while Harris confirmed that she would not go out to speak to her supporters, summoned to Howard University in Washington.

Trump had spent the final days of the campaign stirring up the specter of voter fraud, in a way that was reminiscent of how he prepared the ground in 2020, with verbal attacks against early voting and mail-in voting, to claim that the White House had been stolen from him. It was the Big Lie of four years ago, which has been repeatedly proven baseless in the courts and led to the assault on the Capitol on 6 January, 2021. That day, a mob of Trump supporters attacked the seat of American democracy to interrupt the peaceful transfer of power. He had harangued the crowd at a rally in Washington and then spent hours watching the violence unfold. It seems clear that this memory did not weigh enough on the spirits of the millions of Americans who decided that it was a good idea to return this man to the helm of the world’s leading power.

Nor did the fact that Trump is the first former White House tenant to be charged in not just one, but four, criminal trials. In one of them, related to a hush money payment to porn actress Stormy Daniels to cover up an extramarital affair that he denies, he was found guilty by a jury in New York of 34 felony counts. His sentencing is scheduled for November 26. What will happen with his legal troubles if his return to the White House is finally confirmed is one of the many unknowns that now arise in a country more divided than ever in recent history.

On Tuesday, just before polls closed, Trump, who at 78 will be the oldest president in history to serve, falsely claimed that voter fraud was taking place live in Pennsylvania, the mother of all the battleground states, and in Detroit (the most populated city in another key state, Michigan) and that the police were on their way to stop it. In the end, he did not need to resort to these lies: his victory became clear as a long day progressed and Harris’ supporters, gathered at Howard University, began to lose hope. Trump’s mood was very different from that of election night in 2020, when he appeared at the White House around 2:30 a.m. to say that he had won, when in reality there were still millions of votes left to count. Three days later, it was clear that he had lost, a defeat that he has not yet admitted.

Everything indicates that this time he understood what the main concerns of voters were, and that the apocalyptic message that he painted in the speeches of his unpredictable campaign was a winning strategy in a race in which he survived two assassination attempts and which gradually took on a darker and more violent tone. The image he painted was one of a country with open borders, invaded by “migrant crime,” with middle-class families overwhelmed by the cost of living and an incompetent government incapable of managing domestic affairs or calming the waters on the international stage. His promises to single-handedly fix inflation, the migration crisis, thanks to “the largest mass deportation in history, and world peace” also seem to have convinced large numbers of voters.

Or perhaps it might once again prove that the United States is still not ready to elect a woman president.

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