Donald Trump wins the 2024 presidential election and once again defies all odds

Donald Trump was expected to become the 47th president early Wednesday, pulling off the most incredible political comeback in American history.

Trump, 78, was on track for a landslide Electoral College victory over Vice President Kamala Harris after he was expected to recoup his 2020 losses in the crucial states of Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – giving himself large majorities with its white rural and working-class base. At the same time, significant progress was made among ethnic minorities.

The former president's victory was the highlight of a big night for Republicans, who were also expected to regain control of the Senate after four years in the minority.

The House's fate was too close to call early Wednesday, and a majority decision is not expected to be made for several days.

In an eerie repeat of the scenes on election night 2016, thousands of Harris supporters who had gathered on the campus of the Veep's alma mater, Howard University, to watch the release of the results were shocked and wept as it became clear that their candidate could not win this.

In the end, it was not Harris, but her campaign co-chair Cedric Richmond, who had to tell the desperate crowd that the Democratic candidate would not show up.

“We still have votes to count … So you won’t hear from the vice president tonight,” said Richmond, a former Louisiana congressman and Biden White House official. “She’ll be back here tomorrow.”

“Go HU and go Harris.”

The 45th president had shown supreme confidence in the 60-year-old Harris in the final days of the race, with extensive messaging aimed at male voters and a marathon schedule of rallies and media appearances – including a shift at a McDonald's in Pennsylvania.

Meanwhile, Harris downplayed both her potential to make history as the first female president and her racial identity as the child of Jamaican and Indian immigrants.

Instead, she championed the middle class as a pro-small business campaigner, seemingly repudiating a range of previous left-wing positions she had taken as San Francisco district attorney, California attorney general and as a senator from the Golden State.

Trump's victory makes him the second president elected in non-consecutive cycles, joining Democrat Grover Cleveland, who was elected the 22nd president in 1884 and the 24th president in 1892, with Indiana Republican Benjamin Harrison serving four years in between.

The race was widely seen as a back-and-forth affair leading up to Election Day, as both candidates' surrogates made rhetorical errors that drew widespread media attention.

Both Trump and Harris had to face American voters as incumbents, as the 45th president was rejected by voters after his first term in 2020 and Harris only ascended to the Democratic nomination after President Biden announced on July 21 that he would not seek a second term in office.

On October 27, a large Trump rally at Madison Square Garden descended into a media frenzy after comedian Tony Hinchcliffe made a joke that missed the mark by calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of trash.”

Days later, Biden tempered Harris' message of “joy” and bipartisanship by calling Trump's supporters “trash” – a comment that was quietly edited by White House press staff without input from the mansion's official stenographers.

At other times, Biden, 81, has overshadowed his former vice president by delivering harsher messages that may have angered some swing voters about the dangers of a second Trump administration.

“We have to lock him up,” the president said at a Democratic campaign office in Concord, New Hampshire, two weeks before voters went to the polls, before immediately correcting course: “Politically, lock him up – lock him up out, that's what we do.” “Gotta do.”

Biden also exhibited strange behavior after abandoning his own 2024 run — including donning a red “TRUMP” hat at a fire station in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after a 9/11 memorial event.

Meanwhile, the 45th president has been dogged by unprecedented criminal indictments from New York, South Florida, Washington, DC and Georgia – two of which alleged he illegally conspired to overturn the 2020 election results.

In the most astonishing moments of the race, Trump was killed twice after he was tracked down by suspected assassins at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13 and at his golf course in West Palm Beach on September 15.

Republicans sharply rebuked Democrats for potentially inciting the gunmen with their rhetoric that Trump could end American democracy and comparing him to “fascist” dictators such as Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.

Trump's campaign has also been in the shadow of both espionage campaigns and potential death threats from Iran, leading to another foiled assassination attempt by a suspected Tehran agent and the indictment of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps hackers.

Harris secured her party's nomination in August after congressional leaders like House Speaker Emeritus Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and influential party donors like Hollywood movie star George Clooney voted the oldest president ever 2024 had overthrown vote.

That effort followed Biden's disastrous debate against Trump on June 27 – the earliest such showdown in an election cycle – in which the president spoke haltingly and at times incoherently.

Biden's campaign staff later said he had a cold, and Harris continued to describe the performance as merely a “bad night” and dodged pointed questions about when she first learned of her boss's mental weakness, which attracted millions of viewers that night was put on display.

The vice president raised record amounts of donations totaling more than $1 billion in the short sprint from July to September.

The funding paid for targeted ads that showcased Harris on the national stage as a former prosecutor-turned-lawmaker who leans toward the center on border security and the economy.

Trump-driven fundraising received massive support from Democratic renegades like hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who even launched a new PAC to spend $80 billion on the former president's candidacy.

Harris reversed previous pledges to ban fracking, pass Medicare for All and decriminalize border crossings — even as she faced more radical proposals she had supported as a senator, such as taxpayer-funded gender reassignment surgeries for detained migrants.

Trump campaigned on commitments to close the border and halt the record number of border crossings during the Harris-Biden administration, repeal regulations throttling the domestic oil and gas industry and end the Russia-Ukraine conflict .

He also floated proposals to introduce taxpayer-funded in vitro fertilization for couples and eliminate taxes on tips for service workers – something Harris adopted as part of her own platform.