Trump’s improbable upset
Here’s where things stood in January 2021, when President Donald Trump left office. He had lost his re-election bid. He was widely . blamed for inciting, or at least not stopping, a violent invasion of the U.S. Capitol building by his supporters. He had been impeached twice, though not removed from office. He had been caught on tape calling election officials to demand that they “find” enough votes for him to win. When that didn’t work, he tried to interrupt the ceremonial certification of the 2020 vote. And then , all his options exhausted, he didn’t attend the inauguration of his successor, as is customary. He seemed finished.
But now, less than four years later, the American voters have just handed him a convincing victory. How did this happen?
There are plenty of factors that helped bring him back to office, but one person in particular must bear a large portion of the responsibility, and that is his successor (and now predecessor), Joe Biden.
You might remember that Biden ran for office in 2020 promising a return to normalcy and pledging to be a transition candidate. People widely interpreted that as a pledge to serve only a single term and to enact a limited, centrist agenda. Voters were exhausted of the scandals and drama of Trump’s first term in office. They were afraid of the uncertainty of COVID-19. They trusted Biden, a veteran legislator and former vice president. They rewarded him with the presidency and turned Trump away.
But soon after he took office, Biden decided to pursue a much bolder agenda than what he promised during his campaign. He signed two massive bills: they increased spending in health care, green technology, housing, transportation, and economic development; they gave targeted tax cuts to households and subsidies to businesses; and they expanded government offices. Separately, Biden aggressively forgave government student loans.
Many people did support parts of Biden’s agenda. But when you put it all together, it amounted to a staggering amount of spending, subsidies, and debt forgiveness. And although one of the laws was called the Inflation Reduction Act, the spending really supercharged inflation.
So point number one was, Biden promised to be a transitional candidate, but then pursued a very bold agenda that voters had not asked for.
Here’s point number two. Biden’s administration let a massive issue fester for almost his entire presidency: the southern border. Who can forget this? Trump had implemented . harsh and restrictive policies at the U.S.-Mexico border, where migrants cross illegally. Upon taking office, Biden relaxed a lot of these policies. He wanted to treat migrants better—a noble aim. But as America’s stance at the border became more humane, it also became much, much more permissive.
Potential migrants noticed. Soon, more and more migrants attempted to cross the border, and they started to come from more and more places. Homeless shelters, schools, hospitals, and city services around the country—not just in border towns—they all struggled to accommodate the influx of migrants.
American voters can be open to immigration, but this was beyond what they were willing to accept. Illegal immigration has always been Donald Trump’s number-one strength with his supporters. And Joe Biden handed this issue right back to him on a silver platter.
As if that weren’t enough, there is a third way that Joe Biden helped Donald Trump, and it is this. It became clear during 2023 and 2024 that Biden was slipping. This was easy for voters to see, but Biden and his advisors insisted he was fine, that he was the only person who could beat Trump a second time. It was hard to believe these statements if you also watched Biden in public. And then it all blew up. Concerns about Biden’s age burst out into the open after his awful debate in June. It then took him three agonizing weeks to make the only sensible decision, which was to withdraw from the race.
So those were Biden’s contributions to Trump’s victory. Another Democrat also played an important role in Trump’s comeback, and that is a prosecutor in New York State. His name is Alvin Bragg, and he is the one who took the former president to court, charging him with falsifying his business records. The allegation was, Trump paid a woman to keep quiet about their affair, and then he called it “legal services” in his business records.
Donald Trump did many outrageous things in office and during his first campaign, but this was not one of them. Very few people are ever charged under this law, but prosecutors aggressively went after Trump for it.
Trump used his showman’s instinct to turn the trial into a media circus. He expertly played the victim. He claimed that prosecutors were using the law as a weapon against their political enemies. This charge only bolstered his longstanding argument that elites use the government for their own purposes against the common man. He leaned into his stance as a victim. Many voters took his side.
You know the saying, if you’re going to go after the king, you’d better kill him? Alvin Bragg went after Donald Trump. And Donald Trump came out stronger than ever.
Now, what about Kamala Harris? She was in a difficult position. She was Biden’s vice president. As you may remember from a previous story , the vice president has very little power, but is associated with the president. So she got a lot of the blame for inflation and immigration. But as a candidate, she chose not to repudiate Joe Biden on any issue.
She also ran a very cautious campaign based on her biography and her personal contrast with Trump. Her biggest issue was abortion, but that didn’t motivate voters as much as she thought it would. Ultimately, she only had 105 days as the candidate. Her campaign operation was very good. But the message and the messenger and the timing just weren’t right for voters this year.
This may seem like I’m crediting only Democrats with Trump’s victory. But Trump and his campaign deserve a lot of credit, too. First, you must say this for Donald John Trump: he never gave up.
In his lowest moment, he stayed defiant and started plotting his comeback. He also never stopped being himself, not even after he was shot in the head. Trump has a unique bond with his supporters, going back years. All during the campaign, he was bombastic, profane, vulgar, chaotic, rambling, and untruthful. But this is why people like him. This a feature, not a bug .
But one thing in Trump’s world did change: the professionalism of his campaign. His 2024 campaign was far more disciplined than his previous campaigns. He had more professional managers and his campaign stuck to a strategy.
Yes , he indulged himself by repeatedly claiming the 2020 election was stolen from him. Yes, his campaign rallies were rambling, often incoherent streams of consciousness. Yes, he lost his cool at a debate. But he and his campaign focused like a laser on two things: prices are too high and people are streaming into the country unfairly. He never stopped talking about these two issues. They were very important to voters. And he pinned them both squarely on Biden.
When Kamala Harris replaced Biden on the ballot, Trump didn’t miss a beat. He tied Harris to the policies of the president she served. Harris chose not to distance herself from Biden on a single issue. When asked if she would do anything differently from Joe Biden if she had been president, she said she couldn’t think of a single thing she would do differently than the current unpopular president.
Jeff’s take
Donald Trump is now just the second person in American history to have lost the presidency, and then to have won it again. The only other person to do it was Grover Cleveland in 1892. Trump will be both the forty-fifth and the forty-seventh president.
Typically, presidents who are re-elected win a smaller majority the second time. But that is not true this time. Trump’s 2024 victory was big—a lot bigger than what he won in 2016. The Republicans also took control of both houses of the legislature and conservatives hold a majority on the Supreme Court.
So that means the full power of the national government will be with Trump and his allies starting on January 20, 2025.
Great stories make learning English fun
