Donald Trump has won a second term in the White House , becoming the first convicted criminal to be elected president in the United States and allowing him to carry out his radical vision for a far more conservative country, with power concentrated in his hands.
The president-elect, who is the second person to be elected to America’s highest office for non-consecutive terms, claimed his win was “a political victory that our country has never seen before” when he addressed supporters Wednesday morning after he was projected to win Pennsylvania and closed off Vice President Kamala Harris’s path to the White House by preventing her from reaching the requisite 270 electoral votes.
Speaking from the West Palm Beach, Florida, convention center where his campaign held an election watch party, Trump thanked the American people for the “extraordinary honor” of being elected the 47th president in addition to his previous term as the 45th.
“I will fight for you, for your family and your future. Every single day I will be fighting for you with every breath in my body. I will not rest until we have delivered the strong, safe and prosperous America that our children deserve, and that you deserve,” said Trump, who pledged that his second term would “truly be the golden age of America.”
“This is a magnificent victory for the American people that will allow us to make America great again,” he said.
The president-elect’s surprise victory came about by way of double-digit gains among minority voters in urban centers, bettering the margins he earned four years ago when he was defeated by President Joe Biden.
It comes eight years after his shock win over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential race, and just four years after he lost his bid for re-election to Biden amid the chaos of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Biden — who’d stepped away from the 2024 race this past July after a meandering, unfocused debate performance — quickly endorsed Harris to replace him atop the Democratic ticket. And the vice president, the first Black and South Asian woman to win a major party presidential nomination, appeared to have the upper hand against Trump in the closing weeks of the election.
