Former United States President Donald Trump has defeated Vice President Kamala Harris in a historic political comeback, recapturing the White House following an election loss in 2020.
As at the last count, the Republican Party candidate, who required 270 electoral college votes to win the election, emerged with six more, while challenger Harris of the Democratic Party had 223 votes. Trump has established a gap of 53 electoral college votes, whereas there are 40 electoral college votes yet to be announced.
Trump will return to the nation’s highest office four years after inciting a violent insurrection at the US Capitol as part of an effort to hold on to power as he refused to accept the results of the 2020 election, which he lost to President Joe Biden.
Trump’s election presents an unprecedented legal situation as the president-elect was scheduled to be sentenced in New York criminal court this month after being convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records earlier this year. Trump also faces other criminal charges brought by special counsel Jack Smith in his ongoing federal election subversion case. The former president made the multiple criminal charges against him a focal point in his 2024 campaign as he argued he was being unjustly targeted and vowed to seek “retribution”.
Trump, 78, will also become the second former president in history to win back the White House after losing a reelection bid while in office — Grover Cleveland was the first. Trump is now the same age that Biden was when Biden became the oldest president in US history to be inaugurated.
The former President’s election comes months after surviving two assassination attempts against him. Since his first successful White House bid in 2016, Trump has reshaped the Republican in his image and holds an iron grip over a party that once appeared ready to move on from him after the Capitol insurrection on 6 January 2021.
