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.
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.
