Millions of Americans woke up to a transformed country and a rattled world on Wednesday following the realisation of Donald Trump’s stunning return to power.
As the extent of Trump’s victory began to sink in – including clear dominance not only in the electoral college but also probably in the popular vote, with at least 71 million votes, as well as control of the US Senate – there were expressions of jubilation in Trump world. On the other side of America’s ever more gaping partisan divide, confusion, foreboding, and in some prominent circles silence reigned.
“This is going to be glorious,” said Trump’s eldest son Don Jr. He summed up the Maga mood on X, the social media platform owned by tech billionaire Elon Musk who played an outsized role in the triumph.
Democratic and progressive Americans, at least 67 million of whom voted for the Democratic candidate, Vice-President Kamala Harris, struggled to come to terms with the overnight reality. They were confronted by the fact that Trump’s pitch to the American people, built on his dark and lie-packed vision of a country in terminal decline, “swamped” by murdering “illegal aliens”, and on the point of a communist takeover, had prevailed.
Van Jones, the political commentator, talked for many when he said that people were waking up “in a nightmare. But we will find a way through.”
Trump made little attempt to assuage the fears of those who did not vote for him when he gave a victory speech in West Palm Beach, Florida at 2.30am – three hours before the Associated Press officially called the result. He talked of creating a “strong, safe and prosperous America”, but also said that he was going to “seal up those borders”, and referred to the media as the “enemy camp”.
Harris staged an election night watch party at her alma mater in Washington DC, Howard University, but failed to address the crowd after the prevailing winds of the election became irrefutable. She was expected to speak to the nation from the same location at 4pm on Wednesday east coast time.
A couple of hours ahead of her speech, Harris had a phone conversation with Trump, an aide said, in which she congratulated him and emphasised the importance of a peaceful transfer of power. The remark was no doubt sincere, but it also carried a punch given Trump’s efforts to subvert his 2020 defeat culminating in the Capitol insurrection on 6 January 2021.
Her aborted victory party, followed by a delayed concession speech, bore chilling echoes with Hillary Clinton’s painful experience in 2016. For the second time in eight years, a woman had failed to break through the “highest, hardest glass ceiling” to become America’s first female president – thwarted by a man who campaigned against them in the most disparaging terms.
Trump denigrated Harris as “low IQ” and attempted to question her racial background. Even then, Harris’s own appeal to American voters based largely on her counterattack on Trump as a would-be authoritarian and even “fascist” leader who was a threat to democracy, failed to stick.
With four states yet to be called, including the critical battlegrounds of Arizona and Nevada, Trump had comfortably passed the 270 electoral college votes needed to send him back to the Oval Office. He was on 292, to Harris’s 224.
With the vote leaning 51% to 48% in his favour, and with the popular count of all voters nationwide also leaning towards Trump, 2024 was in line to become the most convincing victory by a Republican presidential candidate since George W Bush’s re-election in 2004. The contrast was stark with opinion polls that for weeks had almost universally predicted a razor-thin finish.
Michigan was projected for Trump by Wednesday lunchtime. The news was poignant, as it meant that for the second time Trump had shattered the so-called “blue wall” of rust-belt states. The three states – Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin – have voted as a block in every presidential election since 1992, always for the Democrat, other than in 2016 when Trump smashed his way through it the first time.
The matching jubilation and consternation that swept the US rippled around the world. Leaders in Trump’s “strong man” image raced to congratulate him on his victory, led by Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister who has held close to him for years.
“The biggest comeback in US political history!” Orbán gushed.
The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, also heralded what he called “a new beginning for America and a powerful recommitment to the great alliance between Israel and America”.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president, presented a brave face, complimenting Trump’s approach to “peace through strength”. But coming at a time when Russia is making battlefield advances, the US election result spelled possible catastrophe for Ukraine, given Trump’s threat to pull military funding.
Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage
Trump’s victory also came five days before world leaders gather in Baku, Azerbaijan, for the Cop29 climate summit at which they will attempt to forge a deal in which rich nations help the developing world avoid fossil fuel-powered growth. Trump’s mantra of “drill, baby, drill”, and his warning that he will pull the US out of the Paris agreement for a second time, now hang ominously over the proceedings.
With 11 weeks to go before Trump is inaugurated, Americans now have the challenge of coming to terms with a seismic shift. Trump will be the first convicted felon to hold the presidency – a distinction that pales into insignificance beside the unprecedented nature of the promises on which he ran.
He has pledged to smash the US government as we know it, firing hundreds of thousands of civil servants and replacing them with “yes” people. He has threatened to carry out the largest mass deportation of undocumented immigrants in US history – amounting to many millions. He has vowed to end the independence of the US justice department, and pursue prosecutions of his political enemies while eradicating the federal cases against himself.
And he has said he aspires to be a “dictator”, albeit only on day one.
Already by Wednesday the inevitable Democratic post-mortem had begun over Harris’s defeat. Questions were being asked over whether Joe Biden, whose diabolical approval ratings appeared to act as a drag on his vice-president, should have stood down earlier, and whether there should have been an open primary rather than an anointing of her.
Lindy Li, a senior Democratic official in Pennsylvania, wondered whether Harris did enough to separate herself from Biden’s record. The economy, and especially inflation, ranked high in voters’ list of concerns, according to exit polls.
Focus, too, was starting on the extraordinary flood of money into the presidential contest. Some $5.5bn was spent on the race by the two candidates, political parties and outside groups, making it the second most expensive race in recent times other than 2020.
Musk’s controversial involvement in the battle, stumping for Trump and offering legally dubious $1m checks who signed his Trump-friendly petition, as well as allowing misinformation to spread with abandon across X, will also be part of the after-debate. Critics noted that within hours of Trump’s victory being declared, Musk’s shares in his company Tesla rose by more than $13bn.
In the course of the campaign, Musk pumped in about $119m through his America Pac funding body to encourage Trump supporters to get to the polls. In return, Trump has indicated that the Tesla and SpaceX owner might be given responsibility in his second administration, with a remit to slash trillions of dollars from the federal budget.
Musk delighted his fans and goaded his detractors with a bizarre post marking Trump’s victory on X in which he is photoshopped walking into the Oval Office carrying a bathroom sink. “Let that sink in,” he wrote.
Other structural fault-lines opened up in the election which, over time, Democratic leaders will have to grapple with. Trump made inroads with Latino and Black male voters, including in the vital swing states, the exit polls suggested.
Harris’s performance in the big urban centers – including Philadelphia, Detroit and Milwaukee in the blue-wall states – also dipped slightly on Biden’s figures in 2024, raising further cause for concern about the party’s dependence on white women voters in the cities and suburbs.
On MSNBC on Tuesday night, the commentator Joy Reid expressed disappointment at white women in North Carolina for not coming out to vote for Harris and contributing to the Democrat’s loss in the swing state.
“In the end, they didn’t make their numbers, we have to be blunt about why,” Reid said. “Black voters came through for Harris, white women voters did not.”
Anna Betts also contributed reporting
