Former U.S. President Donald Trump has been elected as the country’s 47th president, defeating Vice President Kamala Harris to earn a new four-year term in the White House starting in January.
In a tightly contested race, Trump secured at least 292 of the possible 538 electoral votes in Tuesday’s election, easily giving him the necessary majority to become only the second U.S. leader to win nonconsecutive terms, after Grover Cleveland in the 1890s.
Trump, at 78 the oldest elected U.S. presidential candidate, claimed victory early Wednesday as he thanked his supporters at a rally in Florida.
“This was a movement like nobody’s ever seen before, and, frankly, this was, I believe, the greatest political movement of all time,” Trump said.
Trump, who vowed in his campaign to deport millions of undocumented migrants living in the U.S. back to their homelands, pledged to “fix our borders” with Mexico and “fix everything in our country.”
Trump also said he would work to deliver a “strong, safe and prosperous America.”
A Harris campaign official told a crowd of her supporters in Washington that she would not address the gathering overnight but would speak later Wednesday.
Harris, 60, the Democratic candidate who joined the race late after President Joe Biden dropped out in July, was trying to become the first woman elected to the U.S. presidency and its second Black president after Barack Obama.
Harris, according to aides, called Trump on Wednesday afternoon to concede the election. She is expected to publicly offer a concession later in an address at Howard University in Washington, her college alma mater.
Trump is the billionaire head of his family’s New York real estate conglomerate who first emerged on the U.S. political scene in 2015. In winning the presidency again, he overcame an array of obstacles, including scathing condemnations from some of his closest advisers who served him during his 2017-2021 term as president.
Some contended that if elected again, Trump would govern as an authoritarian and that he met the definition of a fascist.
He faced two assassination attempts in recent months, with one shot grazing his right ear at a campaign rally.
Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts linked to his hush money payment to a porn film star just ahead of his successful 2016 run for the presidency and faces sentencing on November 26.
He was impeached twice by the House of Representatives stemming from actions during his presidency, including for fomenting a riot at the U.S. Capitol seeking to block his 2020 election loss to Biden, although both times the Senate acquitted him, once after he left office in 2021.
On Tuesday, exit polls of voters showed that he rode a wave of voter dissatisfaction with the direction of the country under Biden and Harris.
She pledged to push for “a new way forward” in the country, characterizing Trump as “an unserious man” and a threat to the country’s democratic norms.
But when first asked the question of what she would have done differently than Biden over his White House tenure, she said, “There is not a thing that comes to mind.”
Trump linked Harris to rising consumer prices over the last four years and the influx of thousands of undocumented migrants across the southwestern U.S. border with Mexico. Trump accused the immigrants of causing a crime surge in the U.S. despite evidence that violent crime had declined.
Exit polls of voters on Tuesday showed he won a new term in office by winning a majority of votes from men and White voters without college degrees, while cutting into two usual Democratic constituencies, Latinos and young voters.
