Donald Trump gestures to the crowd after speaking during his Election Night Watch Party in West Palm Beach, Fla. on Nov. 6. Credit – David Butow—Redux for TIME
It was the moment he had fantasized about for four years. At 2:24 a.m. on Nov. 6, Donald Trump strutted on stage in a Florida ballroom, surrounded by advisers, party leaders, family and friends. The Associated Press had yet to call the race, but it was clear by then that the voters had swept him back into power. Staring out at a sea of supporters sporting red MAGA hats, Trump basked in the all-but-certain triumph. “We’ve achieved the most incredible political thing,” Trump said. “America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate.”
How Trump, 78, won re-election will be the stuff of history books, and already America’s choice can be traced to some key decisions. To Trump’s top aides, the thesis of the campaign could be summed up in a simple slogan: “Max out the men and hold the women.” That meant emphasizing the economy and immigration, which Trump did relentlessly. It meant diverting attention away from the chaos of his first term, the abortion bans he ushered in, and his assault on American democracy four years ago. It meant a campaign that rode the resentment of disenchanted voters and capitalized on the cultural fractures and tribal politics that Trump has long exploited.
Most of all, the outcome can be credited to a singular figure whose return to the White House traced a political arc unlike any in 250 years of American history. Trump left office in 2021 a pariah after inciting a mob of supporters to ransack the U.S. Capitol at the end of an attempt to overturn his electoral defeat. Three years later, he engineered an unprecedented political comeback. Trump effortlessly dispatched his GOP rivals, forced President Joe Biden out of the race, and vanquished Vice President Kamala Harris in a dominant victory that exceeded virtually everyone’s expectations. Along the way, Trump shrugged off a 34-count felony conviction and an array of other criminal indictments.
The scale of his success was stunning. Trump carried North Carolina, flipped Georgia back to his column, and smashed through the Blue Wall. His campaign outperformed its goal of turning out men and holding women. Exit polls showed Trump winning large numbers of Latino men in key battleground states, improving his numbers with that group in Pennsylvania from 27% to 42%. Nationally, Trump’s support among Latino men leaped from 36% to 54%. Trump also increased his share of voters without a college degree, gained ground with Black voters in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and held steady nationally with white women, shocking Democrats who had expected a post-Dobbs uprising. Among first-time voters, Trump boosted his support from 32% four years ago to a 54% majority.
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He got his share of big breaks. When Trump launched this campaign on the heels of a third straight rebuke in national elections, Republican leaders tried to ignore him. His primary opponents were too timid to take him on. A combination of friendly judges and legal postponements pushed his most damning criminal trials to after the election. Until July, Trump’s general-election opponent was an unpopular incumbent viewed by many as too old to continue in the job. Biden only confirmed those suspicions when he bumbled through their first, and only, debate. The Democrats’ hasty replacement of the first-term president with Harris deprived them of a better-tested candidate who could potentially have rallied broader support. Voters took Trump’s own advanced age and increasingly incoherent trail rhetoric in stride. Much of the country read Trump’s legal woes as part of a larger corrupt conspiracy to deny him, and them, power. And he benefited from a global restiveness in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic that has ousted incumbent leaders around the world.
The consequences may be historic. Trump has dominated American politics for nine years now, and after four years of his tumultuous presidency punctuated by an insurrection, the country chose to reinstall him. Trump campaigned on an authoritarian agenda that would upend America’s democratic norms, and he is already preparing to deliver on it: mass detention and deportations of migrants; revenge against political enemies via the justice system; deploying the military against his own civilians. How far he chooses to go with the power the public has handed him is a question that will shape the fate of the country.
To the MAGA faithful, Trump’s victory is a thrilling vision coming into view. For the less fervent supporters who helped put him over the top, his rhetoric is largely bluster in service of reforming a government out of touch with America’s economic and social needs. To the rest of the country and much of the world, a second Trump term looks like a blow to democracy in the U.S. and beyond. That split screen will animate American discourse for the next four years. The nation is more polarized than at any point since the Civil War. But soon, there will be at least one thing that binds us all together: Come Jan. 20, we will all be living in Trump’s America. This account of how Trump did it, based on more than 20 interviews over the last eight months, offers a glimpse of what that may look like.
As always, the strategy started with Trump’s instinct. In April 2023, he was huddled with advisers at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, days after he had made history as the first former President charged with a crime. The subject of the conversation: How could he control the political narrative? Trump had just gotten off the phone with his friend Dana White, the CEO of the Ultimate Fighting Championship. There was a fight that Saturday in Miami. “I think those guys would love me,” Trump said.
When Trump entered the arena on April 10, he was met with thunderous applause. While there, he ran into the Nelk Boys, a group of influencers who host a right-wing podcast. Trump had gone on their show a year earlier, but it was removed by YouTube for spreading election lies. The chance meeting led to a second appearance. His closest confidantes didn’t realize it at the time, but interviews on male-focused podcasts would become a throughline of his extraordinary political resurrection.
Read More: The Full Transcripts of Donald Trump’s Interviews With TIME
It’s easy to forget how shaky Trump’s prospects seemed at the outset of his campaign. He announced his third bid for the White House in Nov. 2022, days after Republicans took a beating in the midterms—the third straight national election in which the former President was seen as a drag on his party. Trump’s hand-picked candidates embraced his lie that the 2020 election was stolen and lost critical races across the country. Elected Republicans took it as a sign that America was done with Trump and nearly all shunned his grievance-riddled kickoff speech at Mar-a-Lago. They just hoped he would fade away.
But the early campaign launch turned out to be a savvy move, positioning Trump to cast his looming criminal prosecutions as politically motivated. With each indictment, he gained ground with the GOP base and raked in millions in cash. His primary challengers spent more time trying to beat up on each other than take out the man who stood in their way. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, arguably Trump’s most formidable opponent, dropped out after the Iowa caucuses. By March, Trump had secured enough delegates to become the presumptive Republican nominee. It was the fastest contested presidential primary in modern American history.
Trump’s landslide in the primary was the product of a strategy honed by Trump’s two campaign managers: Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita. Wiles, a veteran Florida-based strategist, had worked for DeSantis’s 2018 run for governor, but they had a falling out after he was sworn in. Following the 2020 presidential election, Wiles took charge of Trump’s primary PAC, Save America. In exile but already plotting his path back to Washington, Trump suspected his toughest obstacle in the 2024 primary would likely be DeSantis, sources close to him say. Who better to help him than Wiles?
Wiles recruited LaCivita, a hard-nosed Republican operative. Together, they drafted the campaign’s strategy. The MAGA base was strong enough to assure Trump’s victory in the GOP primaries, they concluded, giving them time to test-run a plan to defeat Biden in November. Trump’s team focused on building an operation that could identify and turn out Trump supporters who were not reliable voters.
Wiles and LaCivita, political director James Blair, and Trump’s longtime pollster Tony Fabrizo, believed that gender would be key. In 2020, Biden won by holding the same 13-point lead among women that Hillary Clinton had over Trump in 2016, while narrowing the gap among men by five points. “Men cost us the last election,” a top Trump campaign source says. “Our objective became not to let that happen again.”
Surveys found that men, particularly young men, were turning away from Biden the most, especially over the economy. In a head-to-head matchup, Trump’s lead was the most dominant among unreliable male voters younger than 40. Advisers concentrated on activating this cohort, which, by and large, saw Biden as an elderly man who shouldn’t be President. These young men didn’t get their news from mainstream media and were less concerned with reproductive rights or democratic backsliding. When they did interact with politics, it was mostly through edgy bro podcasts and social media. They appreciated Trump’s brashness and habit of smashing norms. It was a risk to focus significant energy on turning out voters who don’t care much about politics. But LaCivita would often repeat a Winston Churchill line that became a campaign mantra: “To try to be safe everywhere is to be strong nowhere.”
As Trump pursued the male vote, he also had to avoid losing women by larger margins than in 2016 and 2020—no easy feat after his Supreme Court appointments helped overturn Roe v. Wade and pave the way for abortion bans across the country. Whenever abortion came up, Trump insisted the issue was now up to the states, and pivoted as much as possible to the economy, immigration, and crime—issues the campaign believed triggered anxiety with well-to-do suburban women who were open to backing him.
When Trump spoke with TIME in April 2024, Biden’s poll numbers were tanking and Trump’s camp believed they were well on their way to a decisive victory. In two interviews, Trump laid out a second-term agenda that would reshape America and its role in the world. All the while, a constellation of Trump-allied groups, such as the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and the Center for Renewing America, were laying the groundwork to implement Trump’s strongman vision. Many of their ideas—from imposing harsh abortion restrictions to gutting environmental protections and placing the entire federal bureaucracy under presidential control—were broadly unpopular with wide swaths of the electorate. But Trump seemed to think a victory in the fall was preordained.
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The campaign’s confidence only grew over an intense three weeks that began with Biden’s disastrous June 27 debate performance. On July 13, Trump survived an assassination attempt in Butler, Pa., with the shooter’s bullet piercing his ear and Trump rising to his feet and pumping his fist as blood streaked down his face, a spectacle of defiance that thrilled his supporters. Trump’s announcement of 39-year-old Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance as his running mate at the Republican convention days later seemed like a statement of confidence that the MAGA movement would endure long after its leader exited the scene.
The high didn’t last for long. Three days after the GOP convention concluded, Biden announced he would not seek reelection and endorsed Harris. In a matter of days, the Vice President consolidated Democratic support. Soon she was outraising Trump by hundreds of millions of dollars, and hosting rallies that attracted the kind of attendance and enthusiasm her party hadn’t seen since the Obama era. Trump’s victory no longer seemed like a foregone conclusion.
In a series of meetings in Palm Beach and at Trump’s New Jersey golf club, Wiles, LaCivita and their staff held bull sessions to address the threats posed by their new opponent. A younger candidate made it harder for them to attract voters disillusioned with Biden. Holding down losses with women while running against one would be even tougher. Democratic efforts to tie Trump to extreme agendas like that of Project 2025 were starting to bear fruit. Early internal polling indicated the challenge, according to Trump sources. Fabrizio had surveys showing that there was a broad appetite for change, and the biggest risk they had was letting Harris become the change-agent candidate.
The Trump team began running ads, and having their surrogates go on cable television, blaming Harris for Biden’s presidency, surmising that she would inherit many of the same vulnerabilities of her boss. They focused on her role working on immigration for the Administration, in which she was assigned to address the root causes of migration from Central America, to blame her for a surge in border crossings. At the same time, Trump set out to distance himself from Project 2025, while working to paint Harris as further to the left than she really is.
Privately, the campaign estimated that Trump’s message on abortion—to leave it to the states—was insufficient. Surveys showed that abortion rights were the third or fourth most important issue to voters. After months of Trump dancing around the issue of federal restrictions, Trump’s top lieutenants told him it was time to address it head on. On Oct. 1, Trump posted on Truth Social that he wouldn’t support a national ban.
Read More: How Trump 2.0 Would Remake Washington.
There were internal challenges as well. Trump was becoming increasingly restless and agitated. He brought allies from his previous campaigns, including Corey Lewandowski, one of his 2016 campaign managers. One of the most consistent proponents of “let Trump be Trump,” Lewandowski believed Wiles and LaCivita were blowing it, according to multiple campaign officials. In August, Lewandowski held a meeting with Trump in which he advised the Republican nominee to fire his entire campaign leadership, according to two sources familiar with the meeting. Trump made no commitments but nodded and heard him out. Wiles and LaCivita soon held a meeting with Trump to say that Lewandowski was creating a distraction, throwing the campaign off course. What they have been doing has worked, Wiles told him, and it was not the time to deviate. Trump agreed. On his next plane ride, he held a meeting with all of them, including Lewandoski, who over the final weeks of the race was sidelined as an adviser, largely relegated to appearances on cable news.
Harris’ momentum seemed to continue through September. She won the lone debate between the two candidates, baiting Trump into mistakes. “There was a lot of internal worry that she was a stronger opponent than we realized and that the ground has shifted,” says a top Trump official. But the campaign was relieved a week later, when polling showed that the debate hardly changed the race and with the candidates tied in the polls. Trump returned to his mantra: accelerate the push to win over young, male voters. In late July, Wiles tasked Alex Bruesewitz, a 27-year-old GOP consultant, with presenting Trump with a list of online podcast personalities for interviews, several people familiar with the matter tell TIME. Bruesewitz and Danielle Alvarez, another Trump senior adviser, reached Trump on the golf course the next morning.
“I have a list of podcasts I wanted to pitch you on,” Bruesewitz said. Trump stopped him there. “Have you talked this over with Barron?” he asked, referring to his 18-year-old son.
“No, sir,” Bruesewitz said.
“Call Barron and see what he thinks and let me know,” Trump said, and abruptly hung up. Bruesewitz reached Barron later that day and learned that he was particularly fond of Adin Ross, a provocateur mostly known for collaborating with celebrities on live-streams of video games, such as NBA2K and Grand Theft Auto. They agreed that’s where Trump should start. The podcast strategy was in motion.
In August, Trump appeared on Ross’ podcast, which went viral, racking up millions of views on the livestream. The ensuing weeks were marked by a succession of fawning interviews with laddish podcast hosts: Logan Paul, Theo Von, Joe Rogan. The campaign made a deliberate decision to avoid most traditional media interviews.
Trump took an unorthodox approach to outsiders. He neutralized a potential third-party threat by offering Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. control over healthcare policy in exchange for dropping out and endorsing him, Kennedy claimed. The campaign outsourced its most labor-intensive field operations in critical swing states to groups like Turning Point USA and America First Works. In the final weeks of the race, billionaire Elon Musk poured more than $100 million into his own political action committee to help Trump in swing states. Promised the leadership of a new “government efficiency commission” that would oversee the myriad federal agencies that regulate his companies, Musk hired staffers and incentivized them with payouts to reach voters. He personally camped out in Pennsylvania, seen by both sides as the pivotal battleground state, and handed out $1 million checks in sweepstakes for registered voters who signed a petition. Musk also turned X, his social-media platform, into a cauldron of conspiracy theories and characterized the stakes of the race to his more than 200 million followers as existential. In the election’s final weeks, he promulgated the far-right conspiracy theory that Democrats were “importing” undocumented immigrants to swing states to irrevocably tilt the electoral map in their favor. “If Trump doesn’t win,” Musk said, “this is the last election.”
As always, Trump’s self-destructive impulses posed a challenge. With a little more than a week before Election Day, he fulfilled a lifelong dream by holding a rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden. The event was marked by hateful, xenophobic and racist rhetoric by Trump’s warm-up speakers. The Trump campaign brought in an array of profane pugilists, including the insult comic Tony Hinchcliffe, who called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.” The campaign did not vet his remarks or upload them into the teleprompter ahead of his routine, according to two sources familiar with the matter.
Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly had recently gone on record saying that Trump praised Hitler’s generals. Trump’s former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Ret. Gen. Mark Milley, called him “fascist to the core.” Internal polling from the Harris campaign indicated that the odiousness of the rally was tipping late-deciding voters in her favor. It seemed like Trump might be imploding at the 11th hour.
Shortly after 9 p.m. on Election Night, Trump entered a ballroom in his Mar-a-Lago club to a raucous ovation and a crowd full of his well-heeled benefactors. Behind him were his family members, including his son Eric and daughter-in-law Lara, and his youngest son Barron. For the next three and a half hours, he watched with glee alongside Musk and White as the returns rolled in even more favorably than his most bullish champions predicted.
Trump’s transition team is stacked with loyalists like former Cabinet secretary Linda McMahon and businessman Howard Lutnick; his sons Don. Jr. and Eric; and his running mate Vance. All of them were tasked with making sure only true believers join his Administration-in-waiting. He’s expected to tap into the network of organizations that have been preparing to implement his ideas. That includes Russ Vought, his former Office of Management and Budget who runs the Center for Renewing America, who has been crafting draft executive orders Trump can sign within his first hours as President.
The first, and most aggressive, agenda item is expected to be immigration and the border. In his interview with TIME, Trump said he plans to use executive power to begin mass deportations of undocumented migrants, ordering the National Guard, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and federal law enforcement to conduct raids. Tom Homan, a former Trump official now affiliated with Project 2025, is expected to lead the effort, according to campaign sources.
At the same time, top Trump advisers tell TIME, there will be a massive purge of the federal bureaucracy. The most satisfying part of that to Trump, they say, will be firing Jack Smith, the Special Counsel prosecuting him on charges of willfully mishandling classified information and conspiring to overthrow the 2020 election.
Trump’s most controversial moves are all but certain to face significant legal and political fights. He has vowed on the campaign trail to pick an attorney general who will investigate and prosecute his political rivals and critics. Trump will be emboldened by a Supreme Court ruling last summer that granted U.S. presidents potential immunity from some criminal prosecution for official acts. Between Trump’s psychological disposition, his vows to seek revenge on his adversaries, and the removal of many of the guardrails that hindered him in a first term, scholars of authoritarianism see a nation on the brink of crisis.
Ultimately the election is as much a judgment on the American people as it is on the man they have returned to office. Trump’s comeback didn’t happen at random. By building a social and political movement that gave him coercive power over the Republican Party, Trump systematically demolished many of the nation’s long-standing norms, ushering in a cohort of lackeys who will enable his most autocratic impulses. He will enter his second term committed to creating a governing environment with few restraints on his power. He did not hide any of this. It was what the American people decided they wanted.
With reporting by Philip Elliott/Washington
Contact us at letters@time.com.
