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Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post Donald Trump walks out to speak at a rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, on Monday.
The Washington Post / Amber Phillips
12:53 JST, November 7, 2024
Donald Trump will be the next president of the United States, returning to the White House after he was impeached twice and convicted of state crimes. He campaigned on bringing about massive change to the country by instituting tariffs on most imports, attempting a mass deportation, rolling back climate regulations and cracking down on dissent.
Trump won after he campaigned on nativist and, at times, racist rhetoric about immigrants. He spent his campaign trying to convince voters that their financial livelihoods were better when he was in office. Trump also unleashed a tidal wave of falsehoods, promised to deport millions living in the country illegally, said he would protect American women whether they “like it or not” and threatened to exact retribution against his opponents.
Here’s what happens next and what changes Trump could make during his second presidency.
Trump has promised tariffs, a rollback of climate rules and a crackdown on dissent
Trump has indicated he’ll try to greatly expand presidential power to crack down on dissent and install loyalists in the federal government. Some specifics:
– Trump said he would not rule like a dictator if he returned to office – “except for Day One.” And those who served at high levels in his first administration, including his former chief of staff and a top general, have said Trump has fascist tendencies.
– He still denies he lost the 2020 election, and as part of that effort, he once proposed “the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution” – though it’s not clear what he meant or whether he could even do that as president.
– He says his political opponents – from Democrats to protesters to journalists – are “the enemy from within” and “should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard or, if really necessary, by the military.”
– He wants to pardon those who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
– He has a plan to fire “rogue bureaucrats and career politicians” and install loyalists in the federal government.
– He wants to use the military to put together one of the country’s biggest deportation efforts in the past century, setting up detention camps at the border.
– He plans to fire special counsel Jack Smith, who has brought two federal cases against him after the Justice Department’s investigations into his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and the hoarding of classified documents.
– He has indicated he will use the government – and potentially violence – to target his perceived enemies: He has talked of appointing a special prosecutor to “go after” President Joe Biden and his family; he has suggested that former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney should have guns “trained on her face” during a war and mused about jailing his political opponents.
It’s also widely expected that at least some of the plans from Project 2025 will come to fruition. Project 2025 is a proposal written by former and likely future leaders of his administration designed to lurch the country to the right. It calls for making reproductive care – particularly abortion pills – harder to get, eliminating the Education Department, shuttering the government’s hurricane forecasting agency, building camps to detain children and families at the border, banning transgender people from the military, and potentially requiring mandatory military service. Trump distanced himself from the document during the campaign, but many who wrote it served in his first administration and could join the next.
Trump’s central economic pitch is to institute tariffs on nearly all U.S. imports. He says it will help bring back manufacturing jobs. Many economists say this would jolt global trade and raise prices for all Americans by potentially thousands of dollars a year because so many goods Americans buy are made overseas. Trump has also said he would cut taxes for corporations and end taxes on tips, overtime and Social Security.
On health care, Trump said he will let Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic open to removing fluoride in drinking water, run federal health policy. And Trump and congressional Republicans have said they’ll try to overhaul the Affordable Care Act if they win control of Congress, too.
Trump has said climate change is a “hoax” and campaigned to end the Biden administration’s climate initiatives and rules aimed at lowering emissions that contribute to global warming and extreme weather. Trump instead has said he will expand oil and gas drilling in the United States.
He and his allies have also drafted plans to crack down on legal immigration by making it harder for U.S. companies to hire foreign-born seasonal workers.
On foreign policy, Trump could further disrupt the world order by leaving NATO or severely weakening the 75-year-old transatlantic military alliance. He has also expressed skepticism at continuing U.S. aid for Ukraine to fight back Russia’s invasion. He has said little of the war in the Middle East but has privately expressed support for Israel’s prime minister “to do what you have to do,” The Washington Post reported.
While Trump waffled during the campaign on whether he would veto a national abortion ban, he tweeted early last month that he would do so.
His agenda got a boost because Republicans also won back the Senate, which is increasingly filled with Trump loyalists. The GOP, however, is still fighting to keep control of the House of Representatives. If Democrats win it, they could block legislation with a simple majority.
Trump put together a broad coalition for this victory
Trump is the first former president to lose and then come back and win reelection since Grover Cleveland in 1892. At 78, he will also be the oldest person elected president, just slightly older than Biden was. And he is first president to be convicted of a crime after he was found guilty in May of falsifying business records to hide a hush money payment to an adult-film actress.
The U.S. election is really 51 elections, and it’s the electoral college that decides who is president. Each state and the District of Columbia have an allotted number of electoral college votes.
To win the presidency, Trump had to secure 270 of those votes. Results are still being counted, but he has surpassed that number. He did this by winning North Carolina for the third presidential election in a row, then winning back Georgia, Pennsylvania and Michigan – three states he lost in 2020.
Trump dominated among his base, particularly White working-class men. But he also did well with Latino voters and ate into Democrats’ edge with younger voters and in some urban centers, according to preliminary exit polls.
In 2020, Biden won Latinos by 33 percentage points. Harris won Latino voters by only 8 percentage points. And Trump became the first Republican president to win Miami-Dade County, a heavily Hispanic area, since 1988.
“It’s a political victory that our country has never seen before – nothing like this,” Trump said as he addressed supporters in Florida early Wednesday morning.
It’s also possible that Trump wins the popular vote for the first time
The popular vote is the total number of votes in the election, regardless of state. It doesn’t decide the winner – that’s the electoral college – but winning it can give a president more of a mandate.
Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the eight past elections, even when they lost the electoral college. But Trump’s strong performance across the country, not just in battleground states, could mean he wins the popular vote for the first time in any of his three presidential runs. We’ll know once all the votes are counted, which could take days.
Vice President Kamala Harris conceded on Wednesday
She decided not to address supporters on election night. But she addressed them on Wednesday at Howard University, where she said she called Trump and conceded the race, and she promised as vice president to uphold “a peaceful transfer of power.”
The election results will take months to be certified
Here’s the process:
– Local election officials will spend the next few weeks counting and certifying the results.
– States must certify all the results by Dec. 11.
– Electors will meet in their states on Dec. 17 and cast their votes for the candidate who won their state’s popular vote. Most states have laws preventing electors from voting for the candidate who lost their state.
– Congress certifies all states’ votes on Jan. 6. Harris, as vice president, will oversee the certification of her own loss. Other vice presidents have certified their own losses, and after Trump pressured his last vice president to intervene during the certification of the 2020 election results – and the former president’s supporters stormed the Capitol – Congress passed a law emphasizing that the vice president’s role is purely ceremonial.
