Donald Trump Wins the 2024 Election, Putting Democracy on the Brink

Four years after launching an unprecedented attack on democracy, and leaving the White House in disgrace, Donald Trump will return to Washington, DC, as the 47th president of the United States.

His 2024 election victory against Vice President Kamala Harris marks a startling political rebound for the Republican demagogue since his losing reelection bid in 2020—and a deeply troubling turn for the country, as a twice-impeached convicted felon with authoritarian aspirations will assume the most powerful job in the world.

Thus concludes a long, tumultuous presidential cycle, one in which Trump survived an assassination attempt and his initial opponent, President Joe Biden, unexpectedly exited the race amid concerns about his age. (Meanwhile, Trump, at 78, has become the oldest person to ever be elected president.) Harris, 60, entered the presidential race back in July, infusing a fatigued Democratic Party with much-needed energy and optimism, and tapped Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her running mate the following month. She would have been the first woman—as well as the first Black and South Asian woman—to win the White House.

While polls indicated that Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, were on track to lose the popular vote in the run-up to Election Day, they pulled off an overwhelming victory in the Electoral College by hammering Harris and Biden on the economy and immigration while capitalizing on divisions within the Democratic Party. Trump ultimately prevailed in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, and Wisconsin, which tipped him above 270 electoral votes.

The 2024 election began at something of a political nadir for Trump, who had been suffering from reputational fallout in the aftermath of the US Capitol insurrection he stoked on January 6, 2021. That month he was impeached by the House for inciting the riot. While Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell said during the trial proceedings that Trump was “practically and morally responsible” for the assault on the Capitol, he did not push for a conviction, helping Trump avoid an outcome that could have prevented him from ever running for federal office again. After his acquittal, the former president eventually retreated to his Mar-a-Lago resort, which, the following year, was raided by the FBI over his alleged mishandling of classified government documents.

On November 15, 2022, just a week after a “red wave” failed to materialize for Republicans, Trump formally announced his candidacy with a rambling, low-energy speech that even drew mockery from typical allies, like Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post. He was seen then by much of the political establishment as persona non grata, mired in political and personal scandal, while his GOP primary challengers offered various paths for the party to move forward.

As his campaign progressed, Trump became increasingly steeped in legal battles: In Georgia, Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis was probing his attempt to pressure state election officials and flip the results of the 2020 race. In Washington, DC, DOJ special counsel Jack Smith was investigating Trump’s broader attempts to subvert the election, including by inciting the Capitol riot. Meanwhile, in New York, the former president was being sued by columnist E. Jean Carroll for defamation, after she had accused him of a rape dating back to the mid-1990s, and by New York attorney general Letitia James for inflating the valuations of his assets from 2011 to 2021.

Later, in April of 2023, Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg charged Trump with falsifying business records to cover up a hush money payment made to porn star Stormy Daniels. Trump would ultimately be found liable for financial fraud—as well as for defaming and sexually abusing Carroll—and was convicted in May on 34 counts of falsifying business records. (His sentencing date for that conviction has been pushed until after the election.)

All of these legal entanglements portended poorly for Trump’s presidential bid. And many believed his White House hopes might be altogether dashed by convictions, particularly in the classified-documents and election-interference proceedings. However, the former president successfully managed to delay those cases, while his top primary challengers, including former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley and Florida governor Ron DeSantis, struggled to gain traction with a Republican base still in Trump’s thrall. With little to gain from participating in the primary debates in 2023, the former president strategically skipped them, and by the end of the year, it was all but clear that he’d secure the nomination once more.

By early 2024, 81-year-old Biden’s cognitive capacity was becoming more of a problem for his reelection bid; the president’s increasingly gaffe-prone rhetoric—and media-shyness—only punctuated his senescence. Then, in June, Biden delivered a notoriously abysmal debate performance against Trump, instilling widespread doubt among institutional Democrats about his ability to campaign and govern. The president’s prospects seemed to dim even further after Trump survived an assassination attempt at a mid-July rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, where he held up a fist in defiance as he bled from a bullet that grazed his ear.

At the same time, top Democrats were orchestrating a behind-the-scenes pressure campaign to get the president, whose popularity was actively in free fall, to drop out. And on July 21, Biden finally heeded those calls, clearing the way for Harris to replace him as the nominee. Immediately after Harris took the mantle, the electoral map shifted back in Democrats’ favor—an unwelcome development for Trump’s campaign, which was reportedly banking on an easy triumph over Biden.

In July, just ahead of his formal nomination at the GOP convention, Trump officially unveiled Vance as his running mate. While Vance initially had to answer for unsavory past remarks about women and children, the Ohio senator slowly gained his footing as Trump’s attack dog in interviews with mainstream media. Vance also displayed oratorical skill during his October debate with Walz, who at times faltered. As for Trump’s September debate against Harris, the former president was thought by many to have performed worse than the vice president, who simultaneously highlighted his past improprieties and parried his mistruths with ease.

In his attacks against Harris throughout the cycle, Trump leaned hard on Biden-era inflation and Harris’s past as a left-wing prosecutor, and sought to highlight the perceived failings of her vice presidency. Perhaps chief among them was her handling of immigration—an issue that Vance and Trump aggressively campaigned on in the final months of the election. Their anti-immigrant invective reached a moral low ground in mid-September, when they suddenly began to promote a racist, baseless lie that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating residents’ pets. (Trump had previously claimed that immigrants were “poisoning the blood” of the country, while Vance had amplified the “great replacement” theory.) The Trump campaign, and the GOP, also put major resources behind anti-transgender ads.

On top of his demeaning remarks, the former president employed authoritarian rhetoric throughout his campaign, vowing “retribution” against his opponents, whom he intimated were “vermin” that should be rooted out of the country. The former president likewise promised to weaponize the federal government against his political enemies, including Biden, anti-Trump Republicans, congressional Democrats, and members of the press. His authoritarian tendencies came into stark relief just weeks ago, when his former chief of staff John Kelly recalled to The Atlantic that Trump, as president, expressed frustration about his generals failing to display the same fealty as Hitler’s. (Trump has denied that this occurred.) The report later prompted Harris to publicly call Trump, for the first time, a “fascist.”

During Trump’s first White House campaign in 2015, many Republicans expressed disapproval of his rhetoric, character, and conduct. And throughout his first presidential term, top officials in his own administration—as well as justices on the Supreme Court—blocked the former president from executing many items on his extreme political wish list.

However, Trump’s second term, which the party coalesced around in near-complete concert, is far less likely to be riven by internal dissent. The former president will assume powers that were dramatically expanded by the Supreme Court’s conservative majority just months before Election Day, granting presidents near-total immunity from criminal prosecution—a ruling that further delayed the DOJ’s election-subversion trial. (Meanwhile, Trump-appointed judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the classified-documents case; she’s reportedly on a list of potential attorney general candidates.)

Trump also plans to comprehensively reshuffle the federal bureaucracy with civil servants who will pose little to no resistance to his political plans—which, among other things, include the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, the further erosion of reproductive rights, the imposition of massive tariffs on foreign goods, the persecution of political foes, and potentially a US withdrawal from NATO.

Despite the radical nature of this vision, the Republican Party has given little indication that it would seek to put up any guardrails against Trump. And with the GOP having won the Senate, the party has set the stage for the former president to shape American politics and culture even more radically than he did his first time around.

What the next four years will bring, exactly, is sure to be an ever-present source of dread for Democrats, pro-democracy Americans, and those whose rights and livelihoods have been most directly threatened by the MAGA movement. And while the consequences of Trump’s victory can’t immediately be known in full, one thing is certain: They will be far-reaching.

His return will allow him to cement the Supreme Court’s far-right majority for decades to come; reinstate his destructive social, economic, and environmental policies; dissemble the administrative state and international alliances; and threaten Americans’ rights and vulnerable communities—but he could also go even further, pushing American democracy itself to the brink as he and his allies seek more power.

The nation’s democratic infrastructure withstood his efforts to break it down four years ago, when he tried to overturn his loss to Biden. But he will enter office this January far more empowered than he was at that time. Trump has made clear how he would like to wield the broad powers he will now inherit. What remains to be seen is whether his opposition—both in and out of government—can find the means to resist it.