Trump’s victory validated the Republican Party’s risky decision to remake the party in his image

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Donald Trump is a survivor.

He survived two impeachment proceedings during his first term.

He survived two assassination attempts during the 2024 presidential campaign.

He survived constant character assassination, not to mention a handful of legal cases, most of which are still pending, that could have sent him to prison and prevented a return to the White House.

By defeating Vice President Kamala Harris in an election that wasn’t as close as the pollsters thought it would be, Trump becomes only the second president in US history to lose a battle to win a second consecutive term, only to end up being voted back in four years later. Grover Cleveland was the other, back in 1893.

Trump also prevailed in the face of a full-throated public relations campaign from pundits and left-leaning mainstream media outlets aimed at discrediting him and boosting Harris’s chances, even as it became obvious that she peaked in the polls as soon as her candidacy was announced. The final attempt was a faulty poll by a normally reliable pollster showing Harris ahead in Iowa by three points the weekend before Election Day, when he ended up winning the Hawkeye State by his biggest margin out of the three races in which he ran.

In retrospect, the only people the Harris hypesters fooled were themselves. They tried to convince voters that Donald Trump was a threat to democracy. They backed it up with exit polls showing that voters in key swing states said that was a key issue for them in their decision-making process — almost as important as the economy.

They harped on the fact that Donald Trump never won as much as 50% of the popular vote the two times he ran.

Guess what? Trump was standing at 51.2% of the popular vote as we went to print.

Trump’s victory validated the Republican Party’s risky decision to remake the party in his image. It also validated the decisions GOP primary voters made to stick with Trump at the polls despite a handful of reasonably attractive candidates who dared to challenge him.

Trump’s victory will also spark much handwringing and second-guessing among Democrats, who stuck with President Biden too long into the 2024 campaign, despite his frailties. They will also revisit their hasty decision to replace him with Harris, and her coronation based on joy, hope, and hype, which rang hollow.

Harris never distinguished herself during her four years as vice president, and failed to create any separation between herself and Joe Biden, whom a majority of Americans viewed as a failure. She sounded vacuous with her inability to articulate positions on vital issues such as the economy and illegal immigration.

In choosing Harris, Democrats severely overestimated the appeal of identity politics to voters, and seriously underestimated Trump’s growing appeal to blacks, Hispanics, Jews, and youth voters. Trump’s critics accused him of closing the campaign with a dark message of American decline, but enough American voters viewed it through a different lens, confident that Trump was representing a realistic view of America’s problems and a range of solutions, especially on pocketbook issues.