How Trump Won
It was the moment he had fantasized about for four years. At 2:24 a.m. on Nov. 6, Donald Trump strutted on stage in a Florida ballroom, surrounded by advisers, party leaders, family and friends. The Associated Press had yet to call the race, but it was clear by then that the voters had swept him back into power. Staring out at a sea of supporters sporting red MAGA hats, Trump basked in the all-but-certain triumph. “We’ve achieved the most incredible political thing,” Trump said. “America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate.”
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How Trump, 78, won re-election will be the stuff of history books, and already America’s choice can be traced to some key decisions. To Trump’s top aides, the thesis of the campaign could be summed up in a simple slogan: “Max out the men and hold the women.” That meant emphasizing the economy and immigration, which Trump did relentlessly. It meant diverting attention away from the chaos of his first term, the abortion bans he ushered in, and his assault on American democracy four years ago. It meant a campaign that rode the resentment of disenchanted voters and capitalized on the cultural fractures and tribal politics that Trump has long exploited.
Most of all, the outcome can be credited to a singular figure whose return to the White House traced a political arc unlike any in 250 years of American history. Trump left office in 2021 a pariah after inciting a mob of supporters to ransack the U.S. Capitol at the end of an attempt to overturn his electoral defeat. Three years later, he engineered an unprecedented political comeback. Trump effortlessly dispatched his GOP rivals, forced President Joe Biden out of the race, and vanquished Vice President Kamala Harris in a dominant victory that exceeded virtually everyone’s expectations. Along the way, Trump shrugged off a 34-count felony conviction and an array of other criminal indictments.
The scale of his success was stunning. Trump carried North Carolina, flipped Georgia back to his column, and smashed through the Blue Wall. His campaign outperformed its goal of turning out men and holding women. Exit polls showed Trump winning large numbers of Latino men in key battleground states, improving his numbers with that group in Pennsylvania from 27% to 42%. Nationally, Trump’s support among Latino men leaped from 36% to 54%. Trump also increased his share of voters without a college degree, gained ground with Black voters in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and held steady nationally with white women, shocking Democrats who had expected a post-Dobbs uprising. Among first-time voters, Trump boosted his support from 32% four years ago to a 54% majority.
Read More: How Far Trump Would Go.
He got his share of big breaks. When Trump launched this campaign on the heels of a third straight rebuke in national elections, Republican leaders tried to ignore him. His primary opponents were too timid to take him on. A combination of friendly judges and legal postponements pushed his most damning criminal trials to after the election. Until July, Trump’s general-election opponent was an unpopular incumbent viewed by many as too old to continue in the job. Biden only confirmed those suspicions when he bumbled through their first, and only, debate. The Democrats’ hasty replacement of the first-term president with Harris deprived them of a better-tested candidate who could potentially have rallied broader support. Voters took Trump’s own advanced age and increasingly incoherent trail rhetoric in stride. Much of the country read Trump’s legal woes as part of a larger corrupt conspiracy to deny him, and them, power. And he benefited from a global restiveness in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic that has ousted incumbent leaders around the world.
The consequences may be historic. Trump has dominated American politics for nine years now, and after four years of his tumultuous residency punctuated by an insurrection, the country chose to reinstall him. Trump campaigned on an authoritarian agenda that would upend America’s democratic norms, and he is already preparing to deliver on it: mass detention and deportations of migrants; revenge against political enemies via the justice system; deploying the military against his own civilians. How far he chooses to go with the power the public has handed him is a question that will shape the fate of the country.
To the MAGA faithful, Trump’s victory is a thrilling vision coming into view. For the less fervent supporters who helped put him over the top, his rhetoric is largely bluster in service of reforming a government out of touch with America’s economic and social needs. To the rest of the country and much of the world, a second Trump term looks like a blow to democracy in the U.S. and beyond. That split screen will animate American discourse for the next four years. The nation is more polarized than at any point since the Civil War. But soon, there will be at least one thing that binds us all together: Come Jan. 20, we will all be living in Trump’s America. This account of how Trump did it, based on more than 20 interviews over the last eight months, offers a glimpse of what that may look like.
As always, the strategy started with Trump’s instinct. In April 2023, he was huddled with advisers at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, days after he had made history as the first former President charged with a crime. The subject of the conversation: How could he control the political narrative? Trump had just gotten off the phone with his friend Dana White, the CEO of the Ultimate Fighting Championship. There was a fight that Saturday in Miami. “I think those guys would love me,” Trump said.
When Trump entered the arena on April 10, he was met with thunderous applause. While there, he ran into the Nelk Boys, a group of influencers who host a right-wing podcast. Trump had gone on their show a year earlier, but it was removed by YouTube for spreading election lies. The chance meeting led to a second appearance. His closest confidantes didn’t realize it at the time, but interviews on male-focused podcasts would become a throughline of his extraordinary political resurrection.
Read More: The Full Transcripts of Donald Trump’s Interviews With TIME
It’s easy to forget how shaky Trump’s prospects seemed at the outset of his campaign. He announced his third bid for the White House in Nov. 2022, days after Republicans took a beating in the midterms—the third straight national election in which the former President was seen as a drag on his party. Trump’s hand-picked candidates embraced his lie that the 2020 election was stolen and lost critical races across the country. Elected Republicans took it as a sign that America was done with Trump and nearly all shunned his grievance-riddled kickoff speech at Mar-a-Lago. They just hoped he would fade away.
But the early campaign launch turned out to be a savvy move, positioning Trump to cast his looming criminal prosecutions as politically motivated. With each indictment, he gained ground with the GOP base and raked in millions in cash. His primary challengers spent more time trying to beat up on each other than take out the man who stood in their way. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, arguably Trump’s most formidable opponent, dropped out after the Iowa caucuses. By March, Trump had secured enough delegates to become the presumptive Republican nominee. It was the fastest contested presidential primary in modern American history.
Trump’s landslide in the primary was the product of a strategy honed by Trump’s two campaign managers: Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita. Wiles, a veteran Florida-based strategist, had worked for DeSantis’s 2018 run for governor, but they had a falling out after he was sworn in. Following the 2020 presidential election, Wiles took charge of Trump’s primary PAC, Save America. In exile but already plotting his path back to Washington, Trump suspected his toughest obstacle in the 2024 primary would likely be DeSantis, sources close to him say. Who better to help him than Wiles?
Wiles recruited LaCivita, a hard-nosed Republican operative. Together, they drafted the campaign’s strategy. The MAGA base was strong enough to assure Trump’s victory in the GOP primaries, they concluded, giving them time to test-run a plan to defeat Biden in November. Trump’s team focused on building an operation that could identify and turn out Trump supporters who were not reliable voters.
Wiles and LaCivita, political director James Blair, and Trump’s longtime pollster Tony Fabrizo, believed that gender would be key. In 2020, Biden won by holding the same 13-point lead among women that Hillary Clinton had over Trump in 2016, while narrowing the gap among men by five points. “Men cost us the last election,” a top Trump campaign source says. “Our objective became not to let that happen again.”
Surveys found that men, particularly young men, were turning away from Biden the most, especially over the economy. In a head-to-head matchup, Trump’s lead was the most dominant among unreliable male voters younger than 40. Advisers concentrated on activating this cohort, which, by and large, saw Biden as an elderly man who shouldn’t be President. These young men didn’t get their news from mainstream media and were less concerned with reproductive rights or democratic backsliding. When they did interact with politics, it was mostly through edgy bro podcasts and social media. They appreciated Trump’s brashness and habit of smashing norms. It was a risk to focus significant energy on turning out voters who don’t care much about politics. But LaCivita would often repeat a Winston Churchill line that became a campaign mantra: “To try to be safe everywhere is to be strong nowhere.”
As Trump pursued the male vote, he also had to avoid losing women by larger margins than in 2016 and 2020—no easy feat after his Supreme Court appointments helped overturn Roe v. Wade and pave the way for abortion bans across the country. Whenever abortion came up, Trump insisted the issue was now up to the states, and pivoted as much as possible to the economy, immigration, and crime—issues the campaign believed triggered anxiety with well-to-do suburban women who were open to backing him.
When Trump spoke with TIME in April 2024, Biden’s poll numbers were tanking and Trump’s camp believed they were well on their way to a decisive victory. In two interviews, Trump laid out a second-term agenda that would reshape America and its role in the world. All the while, a constellation of Trump-allied groups, such as the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and the Center for Renewing America, were laying the groundwork to implement Trump’s strongman vision. Many of their ideas—from imposing harsh abortion restrictions to gutting environmental protections and placing the entire federal bureaucracy under presidential control—were broadly unpopular with wide swaths of the electorate. But Trump seemed to think a victory in the fall was preordained.
Read More: The Reinvention of J.D. Vance.
The campaign’s confidence only grew over an intense three weeks that began with Biden’s disastrous June 27 debate performance. On July 13, Trump survived an assassination attempt in Butler, Pa., with the shooter’s bullet piercing his ear and Trump rising to his feet and pumping his fist as blood streaked down his face, a spectacle of defiance that thrilled his supporters. Trump’s announcement of 39-year-old Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance as his running mate at the Republican convention days later seemed like a statement of confidence that the MAGA movement would endure long after its leader exited the scene.
The high didn’t last for long. Three days after the GOP convention concluded, Biden announced he would not seek reelection and endorsed Harris. In a matter of days, the Vice President consolidated Democratic support. Soon she was outraising Trump by hundreds of millions of dollars, and hosting rallies that attracted the kind of attendance and enthusiasm her party hadn’t seen since the Obama era. Trump’s victory no longer seemed like a foregone conclusion.
In a series of meetings in Palm Beach and at Trump’s New Jersey golf club, Wiles, LaCivita and their staff held
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