We’ll probably never know the truth, but was Donald Trump more surprised than anyone by his undisputed victory in his third presidential election bid? From being the pariah-in-chief after his supporters stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, the business tycoon has made an improbable comeback. He succeeded despite several obstacles, long supported by a handful of loyal advisers and his clan.
By early 2021, Trump was a man of the past. He continued to spread lies about electoral fraud, refusing to concede defeat. He railed against the United States’ chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, despite having laid the foundations of it through a deal with the Taliban. He saw no merit in the massive legislative plans the Biden administration passed through Congress. Trump took the Supreme Court’s June 2022 decision to end the federal right to abortion as a personal victory. His party, however, paid the price for it in the mid-term elections, five months later. Despite winning the House of Representatives, the predicted red wave turned out to just be a splash. Several extremist candidates that Trump had endorsed washed out. Despite all that, the former president wasted no time in announcing his latest presidential candidacy.
His campaign was completely configured for a rematch with Joe Biden. A July 13 assassination attempt in Pennsylvania, from which he escaped mostly unharmed, seemed to cement a form of invincibility for him. Yet Kamala Harris’s arrival on the political scene, a few days later, was a major setback for Trump, who struggled to find the right rhetoric and hard-hitting angles of attack against this new adversary. The Trump campaign was, once again, a one-man show, one that was often erratic, with no clear strategy, even if his running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance, supported him fervently, campaigning for him throughout the swing states.
Behind the scenes, his campaign team, led by veteran political operatives Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, controlled everything it could, after having completely taken over the Republican National Committee at the beginning of the year. The team convinced Trump to promote early voting procedures, in which Republicans were at a decisive disadvantage. It also sought to distance itself from Project 2025, a collective platform document put forward by the Heritage Foundation think tank. What irritated Trump most was not its content – which is provocative and reactionary – but the suggestion that he would implement other people’s ideas.
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