Four years after his attempted coup and two subsequent federal indictments and a state-level criminal conviction, Donald Trump has been reelected president.
The 2024 victory portends a far different administration from his first term, when he was largely seen — and treated — as a dog that caught the car, albeit a vicious one.
This time, Trump has surrounded himself with advisors, many from his first term in office, that understand how government operates. Republicans have won back the Senate, and may still win the House, securing a trifecta.
Trump campaigned explicitly on a plan to target his political opponents and to use the federal government’s power to sustain and prolong his own. Three generals who served during the Trump administration described him as authoritarian, nativist, and a fascist; his campaign fronted promises to conduct nationwide mass deportations, revoke birthright citizenship, and pack the federal workforce with loyalists.
It would all be in service of a central goal: making those that Trump deems enemies feel pain, be they immigrants, civil servants, political opponents or whoever else.
“There has to be somebody you can blame for your plight,” Ivo Daalder, a former U.S. Ambassador to NATO, told TPM, comparing Trump to Hitler. “And it’s the mobilization of that enemy image that is ultimately what succeeds.”
Specifically, Trump and his allies have pledged to punish “the enemy from within,” including his Democratic rivals — he has named Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Sen.-elect Adam Schiff (D-CA), specifically. He has also pledged to go after their donors, their lawyers, and the press. He has repeatedly discussed deploying the military against Americans in furtherance of this goal.
Throughout 2024, Trump refused to commit to accepting the result of any election in which he is defeated. That, along with his 2020 auto-coup attempt, raises grave questions about how he will handle any future elections in which he is on the ballot, and how he might make use of the American government to more firmly hold on to power.
In a victory speech early on Wednesday morning, Trump claimed that God had “spared” him from an assassination attempt in July “to save our country and to restore America to greatness.”
It was a messianic tone that Trump struck throughout the speech. At one point, he said that “America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate.”
A Trump victory signifies a further erosion of American democratic institutions, Richard White, a Stanford professor of American history, told TPM before the election.
“The institutions have been formidably weakened,” White said, pointing to a series of failures to confront Trump over the past several years: Trump’s acquittal in an impeachment trial after January 6, the accommodation and subservience of Republican elected officials, the Supreme Court’s decision that Presidents cannot be prosecuted for actions taken in the execution of their office.
It’s the third consecutive presidential election in which Trump has appeared. He’s now the second president in American history, after Grover Cleveland, to win a second, non-consecutive term. His authoritarianism, penchant for election denial and mendacity have been core issues in each campaign he has mounted. But nearly a decade after Trump first declared his candidacy, the guardrails on what he can do have been weakened and, in some cases, stripped entirely away. The Republican Party no longer can muster even the faintest of criticism of his excesses.
His reelection “opens a door that has never been opened in American history before,” White said.
Trump spent much of the 2024 campaign undertaking a broader and more intense version of what he did in 2020 and 2016: casting doubt on the election, saying that any loss would be the result of fraud, the result of a system rigged against him.
His victory, Trump has said, needed to be “too big to rig;” his supporters need to “be careful, because remember, they cheat like hell” he said, and, in a speech to the Fraternal Order of Police, he urged allies to “watch for the voter fraud, because we win without voter fraud, we win so easily.”
It’s a well-worn tactic for Trump: undermining confidence in any outcome other than his total victory. But it serves other purposes as well.
It also sets up targets for retribution.
In 2020, Trump and his campaign ended up scapegoating somewhat smaller fish: two Georgia poll workers who later collected on a $148 million defamation judgment; Dominion Voting Systems; an Italian defense contractor, among others. He was leaving power, and flailed as it ebbed away from him.
Now, Trump is returning to power. On his path there, as the election neared, Trump promised prosecutions and “long-term prison sentences” for anyone who “CHEATED.”
“Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country,” he warned during the campaign.
During his victory speech early on November 6, Trump referred to retribution obliquely, but clearly. “This is karma,” he told supporters.
Yet he was entirely silent about his opponents. There was no congratulation to Harris on running a race; nor was there a straightforward threat of the kind that he repeatedly brought to bear during the campaign.
Trump ran on a clear platform. He promised to jail his opponents, go after reporters, be a “dictator,” and put his opponents in pain. America elected him anyway.
“In some ways, he can claim a mandate,” Daalder remarked.
TPM working late.
This news scares the hell out of me.
Well folks , I guess that is who we are
No other words
The wheels come off.
Time to make plans. Please protect yourselves at all costs. We are in so much trouble. I am broken hearted to find out that all these years I was wrong; most people aren’t innately good.