Inside Donald Trump’s political comeback for the ages
This election victory wasn’t built on just one moment, and the only person who seemed to know Donald Trump’s path back to the White House was Donald Trump.
Donald Trump’s political comeback for the ages was not built on just one moment, because there were so many of them.
It didn’t start in July when he reacted bravely to the bullet of a would-be-assassin with a bloody and defiant fist pump.
It didn’t start in June when he monstered an incoherent Joe Biden in the first presidential debate, dooming the 81-year-old’s candidacy.
And it didn’t start last year when he was charged in four criminal cases over five months, which triggered fury and abiding loyalty among his MAGA army.
Trump’s comeback, which culminated in his all-but-official victory against Kamala Harris, started the moment when he decided that he would follow his biggest strength – sheer gut instinct for politics – in his third campaign for the White House.
Yes, he had advisers, but can you name any of them? Even if you can name them, you know that he didn’t listen to them.
The only person who seemed to know Donald Trump’s path back to the White House was Donald Trump. Indeed, when he announced he would run in November 2022, much of America seemed to be fed up with the former president.
His role in the January 6 invasion of the Capitol Building was still raw, and the country was still coming out of its Covid slumber. He was mocked by his enemies and by the media, with headlines such as “Florida man makes announcement”.
Trump’s meandering, listless hour-long announcement of his candidacy in Mar-a-Lago seemed to confirm that he was yesterday’s man. A new generation of rising Republicans, including Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, were ready to take his place.
The next year he got slapped with a slew of criminal charges, from the hush-money porn-star case to election interference, both in Georgia and federally, to hoarding classified documents.
But when his opponents were smelling blood in the water, Trump saw opportunity.
He ensured that his police mugshot became a campaign T-shirt. When he finally got a conviction in the hush-money case, he produced a T-shirt for his supporters saying “I’m voting for the convicted felon”.
Trump’s team of lawyers became one of his biggest assets, successfully delaying all his cases and even his sentencing in the hush-money case. But there is zero evidence that any of these cases hurt him politically.
Even so, the 78-year-old Trump still had to defeat his younger Republican rivals in the primary contest, especially Florida Governor DeSantis who was initially seen as the most likely candidate to take over Trump’s populist moment.
Trump without the baggage, they called him.
But DeSantis flamed out before he even started.
Before long, Trump was so far ahead of all his rivals in the polls that he refused to join them on the debate stage. Why bother, he said.
It was a break from political convention not to debate your primary opponents but Trump didn’t care.
He had already decided he would do it his way, going so far as to include the Frank Sinatra song on his rally playlist.
When Trump stormed home in the first primary in Iowa early this year, his opponents melted away. Only the plucky Haley stayed in the race for longer, but she was never going to successfully challenge Trump who dismissed her as “birdbrain” – and soon he emerged as the presumptive nominee.
Trump began his campaign against Biden buoyed by the ageing President’s ever sinking approval ratings. He knew he had two winning issues on his side: the soaring cost of living after three years of heavy inflation and the weak border controls for Biden’s first 3½ years during which many millions of illegal migrants flooded into the country.
Trump held nothing back in prosecuting his case, even going so far as to make the ugly claim that immigrants were “poisoning the blood” of America.
Once again, Trump didn’t care about the outcry.
By June, Trump looked to have the advantage over Biden but this turned into dominance after the first presidential debate when the Democrat leader gave a spectacularly incoherent performance. 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 moment was the beginning of the end for Biden.
At this point Trump’s confidence was sky high. He flouted political convention once again to choose a fellow MAGA warrior, JD Vance, as his running mate rather than someone with different attributes who would round the ticket out. And then just before the convention began, the unbelievable occurred. Trump’s ear was ruptured by a bullet fired by a would-be assassin and the subsequent photo of Trump responding with a defiant fist pump became instantly iconic.
Once again, the image was turned into T-shirts and signs with the words “fight, fight, fight”, which Trump supporters placed in front yarns around the country.
But Trump’s dominance over a clearly infirm Biden was so dominant that the Democrats launched a barely concealed coup against their President, ensuring that he had little choice but to abandon his candidacy.
These events suddenly and unexpectedly brought Trump back to the pack with a thud. By vanquishing Biden so comprehensively, he had opened the door to a new and younger opponent.
To Trump’s chargrim, the Democrats did not splinter when choosing Biden’s successor. They coalesced quickly and unanimously around Vice President Harris as their candidate. The relief in Democrat ranks was so overwhelming that Harris enjoyed a meteoric rise and an extended honeymoon.
Trump had been beating Biden by 47.9 percentage points to 44.8, but within two weeks of Harris becoming the candidate, she had caught up to him.
This new opponent sent Trump into a temporary funk. He complained about the process by which the Democrats chose her and he bizarrely kept attacking Biden at his rallies even though he was gone. He even struggled to find a good nickname for Harris.
Trump was off his game for several weeks and then his worst campaign moment came when he debated Harris and delivered a sloppy performance in which he drifted off topic and failed to hold her to account for the failings of her administration.
Trump realised that a second debate was not a good idea and simply refused to do it – once again choosing to buck convention and do it his way. The most remarkable thing about Trump’s winning campaign was that he was so undisciplined for much of it. He was unscripted and maverick in almost all that he did. He ignored his adviser’s pleas to keep his rally speeches shorter and focus his attacks on Harris and her policies. Instead he devoted enormous time talking about the “stolen” election of 2020 and about how much he disliked his enemies, saying he planned to deal with them if he was elected.
Even so, at this late stage he somehow managed to execute his final comeback, once again against the odds.
A month ago, on October 4 Harris was 2.2 points ahead of Trump nationally. But Trump forged ahead in his own unique style and rekindled his momentum, eventually nudging past Harris in the polls on October 26, just 11 days before the election. They began election day deadlocked according to the polls. But, just like in 2016 and in 2020, the polls underestimated support for Trump.
While votes are still being counted, Trump has all but won this election. It will be remembered, studied and analysed for years as the penultimate comeback by the most unique politician of our generation.
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