Anthony Zurcher: A powerful mandate hands Trump free rein

Donald Trump has done it again. Eight years after his stunning upset of Hillary Clinton and four years after Joe Biden evicted him from the White House, the former president is about to return to power.

On the back of a victory that swept across the key early voting battleground states – and improved on his electoral margins in much of America – he claimed an “unprecedented and powerful mandate” to govern.

“This will truly be the golden age of America,” he promised the cheering crowd at his election night rally in West Palm Beach, Florida.

His victory cements a fundamental realignment of American politics toward a conservative populism that began in 2016 and was thought to have been discarded with his defeat in 2020.

His political movement is back and seemingly more durable than ever.

Trump now will have the opportunity to set about building his new administration and enacting the policies that he has promised will create that new golden age.

Trump will be joined in power by a Senate that is now again in Republican hands after four years of Democratic control. This will ease the path for Trump’s political appointees, including Cabinet officials and judicial picks, who require Senate confirmation.

It will take days, if not weeks, to determine if Republicans retain control of the House of Representatives. But in the early hours of Wednesday morning, Trump predicted his party would prevail there as well.

A Republican Congress will be integral to Trump’s plan to enact a platform that includes an aggressive plan to restructure the federal bureaucracy, replacing senior career government employees with political appointments. His supporters have vetted thousands of loyalists who are poised to take control of all facets of the sprawling federal government.

Among those being swept into the corridors of power along with the new president are multi-billionaire Elon Musk, vaccine sceptic Robert F Kennedy Jr, Democrat turned Republican Tulsi Gabbard, tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and a host of other figures who have become part of this unusual electoral coalition.

Trump has also pledged to impose broad new tariffs on imported goods to protect domestic industry, enact a range of new targeted tax breaks and credits, and implement a mass deportation of undocumented migrants living in the US.

On foreign policy, he said he would quickly end the wars in Ukraine and Gaza and prioritise America’s interest above all others. Those global crises will be his to solve once he takes office in January.

Kamala Harris, her fellow Democrats and some former Trump White House officials warned that these policies will create massive economic and social disruptions and threaten global stability – and that a second Trump presidency would be unhinged and set loose from political guardrails.

On Sunday, Trump himself said that his second presidential term might be “nasty a little bit at times, and maybe at the beginning in particular,” but he promised the end results would be good.

On Tuesday, an electoral majority – and likely even a majority of the America’s voting public – agreed.

If Congress is fully under Republican control, it will give the new president the opportunity to roll back many of the programmes implemented under the past four years of Democratic rule and enact conservative legislation – on tax policy, government spending, and trade and immigration – that will allow him to leave a more lasting mark on American government.

Trump’s victory represents a remarkable comeback for a man who departed the presidency amidst the wreckage of 6 January, with his reputation seemingly in tatters. After being roundly condemned by Democrats and even some Republicans, he set out on a four-year journey that returned him to the pinnacle of American power.

Along the way he was indicted in federal and state courts. He was convicted of multiple felonies. He was found liable in a civil court in case relating to a sexual assault. Another court levied massive fines on his business empire.

He shrugged all these off and pressed on to march to the Republican nomination.

Trump was at times unfocused and abrasive in his rally speeches, but he surrounded himself with a savvy, professional staff. Surveys indicated that Americans trusted Trump on the top two issues of this election - immigration and the economy – and his campaign relentlessly hammered his message on them.

Being on the right side of the big issues, at a time when the electoral mood in the US – and, for that matter, across may of the world’s democracies – was decidedly anti-incumbent was what mattered most.

Across the map, the former president improved many of his margins from 2020, sometimes dramatically. His campaign successfully turned out rural voters that were intensely loyal to him and ate into Democratic margins in the cities. While exit polls are still being adjusted to reflect the latest results, Trump appears to have made inroads into the traditional Democratic coalitions of young, Hispanic and black voters.

While Trump’s team appeared initially uncertain about how to handle the late switch from Biden to Kamala Harris, the former president ultimately found his footing and rode the wave of anti-incumbent sentiment back to the White House.

Now he has four more years to govern – this time with a more developed political organisation behind him, eager to turn his campaign promises into action.

North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher makes sense of the race for the White House in his twice-weekly US Election Unspun newsletter. Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.