’I’m not supposed to be here’: How Donald Trump defied the odds in White House return
Donald Trump, who survived assassination attempts, is now the second president in history to return to the White House after being voted out of office.
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Silence had rarely been so electric. Inside Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum, thousands of Republicans sat transfixed by the man they were nominating as their presidential candidate.
Donald Trump had been here twice before, his supporters long convinced he was the saviour of their party and country. This time, however, his coronation seemed providential.
Five days earlier, at a rally in the Pennsylvania town of Butler, the former president swivelled his head on stage at the exact moment 20-year-old Thomas Crooks started shooting. A bullet destined for Mr Trump’s brain instead grazed his ear.
“I’m not supposed to be here tonight,” the 78-year-old told the hushed crowd at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, as he recounted his brush with death for the first time.
“I’m not supposed to be here.”
In that and so many other ways, Mr Trump is not supposed to be where he is now: the second president in history to return to the White House after being voted out of office.
Two impeachments, four sets of criminal charges, a shocking and ultimately violent effort to overturn his 2020 defeat, several more assassination plots – nothing could stop the most extraordinary political comeback that will culminate in his second inauguration on January 20.
How this happened rests on a word once used to criticise Mr Trump that became a compliment after that July evening in Butler: defiant.
Surrounded by Secret Service agents with blood all over his face, he stood up, pumped his fist and shouted: “Fight, fight, fight!”
In a campaign like no other, however, Mr Trump could not rely on that instantly iconic moment to propel him to victory. A week after he was shot, his Democratic opponent Joe Biden dropped out, up-ending the race and pitting him against Kamala Harris.
Mr Trump’s post-shooting pledge to unify the country quickly gave way to politics as usual – whatever that term means in an era dominated by such an unconventional politician, whose belligerence and bravado deliberately leads him into trouble as much as it gets him out of it.
When he announced his third presidential campaign two years ago, many Republicans hoped and indeed believed an alternative candidate would claim the party’s nomination.
It was easy to understand why. A week before, Mr Trump’s preferred congressional candidates performed poorly in the midterm elections, leaving the Democrats in control of the Senate and the Republicans with only a razor-thin House of Representatives majority.
These surprising results – despite Mr Biden’s weaknesses – left Mr Trump as vulnerable as he had been since he left the White House. Back then, even his allies were furious that he refused to accept his defeat and riled up a mob to storm the US Capitol on January 6.
The idea that Mr Trump could come back seemed outlandish at the time – even to him. When his vice president Mike Pence urged him to “take a bow”, telling him he could run four years later, Mr Trump replied: “I don’t know, 2024 is so far off.”
Other Republicans leapt into the nomination race last year, led by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. He had been convincingly re-elected in what was once a battleground state, and had become known as “Trump without the crazy”.
Meanwhile, the craziness kept adding up.
In New York, Mr Trump was charged with falsifying records to cover up hush money paid to silence a porn star’s claim that they had an affair on the eve of his 2016 victory. In Florida, he was hit with federal charges of mishandling classified files after leaving the White House. In Washington DC, more federal charges followed over his effort to overturn his 2020 defeat.
And in Georgia, where he and his allies were arraigned over a conspiracy to subvert the election results in the state, Mr Trump posed for one of the most famous mugshots in history.
No president had been charged with a crime until he was – four times in five months.
But each indictment fuelled his election aspirations – perhaps because a get-out-of-jail-free card came with victory – and that of his backers. Donations flooded in and he soared in the polls.
Mr Trump won this year’s Republican primary elections by record-breaking margins. To make America great again, his fans saw no reason to rely on a replica over the original.
And despite all his baggage, Ms Harris was unable to drag him down. The central issues of the campaign – the cost of living and the record influx of illegal immigrants – were to his advantage.
At times, his aides fretted that only Mr Trump was standing in his own way. During his debate against the Vice President, he aired the false claim that Haitian migrants were eating pets. At rallies, he invented what he called “the weave” to explain rants veering from Hannibal Lecter to a golfer’s manhood, and sometimes he just swayed to music.
“The American people are witnessing Donald Trump becoming increasingly unstable and unhinged,” Ms Harris warned.
In the end, in what Mr Trump called “the most important election in the history of our country”, they once again embraced him nonetheless.
They replaced the oldest president in history with a man who will break that record in four years.
Mr Trump’s second term is shaping up to be even more dramatic than his first. In three weeks, the president-elect is due to be sentenced in the Manhattan Criminal Court, having been convicted in May over the $US130,000 he paid Stormy Daniels. If his lawyers do not succeed in delaying it, his punishment will likely be suspended until he leaves office.
With control of the Department of Justice, he will also throw out the federal cases against him, while vowing to pardon those jailed over the January 6 riot and investigate his enemies.
America is preparing for Trumpism to the extreme: no time to waste in his final four years in power, no more staff who are not committed to his mission, no threat of prosecution thanks to the Supreme Court’s sweeping decision to grant immunity for official presidential acts.
Whether this sounds either delightful or frightful depends on who you ask. But Mr Trump is promising a future that is “bigger, better, bolder, brighter, happier, stronger, freer, greater and more united than ever before” – and all Americans need him to deliver.
Originally published as ’I’m not supposed to be here’: How Donald Trump defied the odds in White House return