Donald Trump has used his own inauguration speech to highlight what a stunningly unlikely moment in history this was.
The former president who once departed the office in disgrace and was written off by almost everyone, has just completed the greatest political comeback in living memory to reclaim the White House.
‘Many people thought it was impossible for me to stage such an historic political comeback but as you see today, here I am. The American people have spoken,” Trump said, amid cheers from the crowd.
“I stand before you now as proof that you should never have a doubt that something is impossible to do. In America the impossible is what we do better.’
Impossible is how almost everyone described Trump’s prospects of regaining the presidency when he announced he would run again in November 2022. Many people forget that at that time there was no momentum for Trump, indeed much of America seemed fed up with him in the aftermath of the January 6 invasion of the Capitol.
The media mocked him with headlines like ‘Florida man makes announcement,’ and a new generation of Republicans like Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis were seen as the future of the party.
His prospects seemed even less likely the following year when Trump was hit by a raft of criminal charges from electoral interference to a hush money porn-star case to hoarding classified documents.
But Trump rightly saw the charges against him as a political opportunity, making capital out of his police mugshot and even creating T-shirts saying ‘I’m voting for the convicted felon.’
With polls showing he was leading his Republican rivals, Trump did not even bother to debate them in the lead up to the primary race. When he thumped his opponents in the first primary in Iowa early last year, everybody except Haley abandoned the race, and she only stayed several months longer before she too bowed out leaving Trump as his party’s presumptive nominee.
With Trump’s lawyers succeeding in delaying most of his court cases, Trump instantly looked competitive against an aging Joe Biden.
Trump knew that inflation and illegal immigration were the biggest issues in Middle America and he targeted Biden mercilessly on them. He portrayed Biden and the Democrats as the party of identity politics who pandered to inner city elites and had forgotten about the bread and butter issues which mattered to ordinary Americans.
In June, Trump monstered an incoherent Joe Biden in the first presidential debate. After Biden delivered one nonsensical sentence, a bemused Trump replied: ‘I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said either.”
The debate effectively doomed Biden’s campaign.
But just when Trump looked to have Biden’s measure, he almost lost everything when, in July, the bullet of a would-be assassin grazed his ear during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Trump’s courage in giving the crowd a defiant fist-pump as the secret service tried to drag him away only endeared him more to his supporters. A photo of his fist pump, with blood flowing from his ear in front of an American flag became instantly iconic.
Once again, Trump used the moment to his advantage, producing T-shirts and signs with the image of him pumping his fists with the words ‘fight, fight, fight.’
But Trump’s dominance of Biden in the polls after Biden’s disastrous debate led the Democrats to force the president to abandon the contest,
His replacement, Vice President Kamala Harris, re-energised the Democrat base and she soon appeared to reverse her party’s fortunes by taking the lead over Trump in the polls.
For a while, Harris’ ascension put Trump in a funk as he tried to work out how best to attack his new opponent. But in the end, Trump crept up slowly on his opponent by making the central argument that as Biden’s Vice President, she could not escape the blame for the key issues of inflation, cost of living and illegal immigration.
Just a month before the November election, the polls put Harris 2.2 points ahead of Trump nationally but by October 26, just 11 days before the election, Trump had nudged past her.
What made his comeback even more surprising was that Trump ran a largely undisciplined campaign, He was largely maverick and unscripted, giving long, meandering campaign rallies and which focussed heavily on the ‘stolen’ election of 2020 or of his planned retribution against his enemies.
But Trump was determined to do it his way - even adopting Frank Sinatra’s My Way as a key campaign song.
On election day, polls had Trump and Harris at a dead-heat, but once again the polls underestimated the support for Trump across America. Trump ended up winning all seven swing states and even the popular vote, giving him not just a comprehensive victory but a huge mandate and a congressional majority in both the Senate and the House to implement his agenda.
There is no playbook in American politics for the sort of comeback which Trump has achieved. Now that Trump is president once again, the focus will be on the future rather than the past. But how he got there is a remarkable story in the annals of American politics.
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