IN a historic turn of events, the 45th president of the United States of America left the White House after a humiliating defeat after the 2020 elections.
He did not concede his loss and never congratulated his successor Joe Biden. But Donald Trump made sure to let the new administration know that he would be back on Pennsylvania Avenue.
The words he spoke four years ago came true in the early hours of 6 November, when he was elected the 47th president.
This is the second time in the history of US elections that a one-term president has been reelected. Grover Cleveland was the first to stage such a political comeback as he served from 1885 to 1889 and then 1893 to 1897.
Despite two assassination attempts and being convicted of 34 felonies, Trump emerged successful. And this time around he won the popular vote, unlike in 2016 and 2020. Just a few weeks ago Trump was a man staring into the abyss. He was going to jail.
Therefore, winning the presidential elections of 2024 was crucial to him — it was personal and probably the only way out of his legal battles.
At first, the former president was poised to face off with Biden. It wasn’t long after their first presidential debate of 2024 that the Democratic Party realised that they were in trouble, thereby prevailing on Biden to step down and pave the way for his vice president, Kamala Harris.
She would only have 107 days to run an effective campaign to defeat the Trump machinery. The amount of money Harris raised in that short time was unbelievable.
It is reported that she raised over $1 billion. But Harris fell short of being a convincing candidate with a message that resonated with the people. A good number of analysts argued she was unable to put brakes on Trump’s Make America Great Again campaign.
He has a base of supporters who, no matter what he represents, will not think of voting for anyone else. The mainstream media and some polls kept suggesting that this was the closest race in recent history.
The established media kept insisting that this election could go either way, even though Harris was leading in all swing states within the margin of error.
This simply meant Harris was losing. There is no way that she was leading all seven swing states within the margin of error of 3 points. Also, Trump carefully played the victim, and people began to see his arrest, charges and even court hearings as injustice, and most of the country began to see this as unfair treatment. But all in all, Harris had no coherent message for the people.
Her appeal of bringing back the politics of joy only lasted the early days of her campaign and failed to stick. Harris was manufactured from the get-go. She was not subject to any litmus test to prove herself; she didn’t have to do primaries with anyone but was rather handpicked by her boss, Biden, then endorsements started flocking in. – M&G