Donald Trump with wife Melania
Credit: Reuters Photo
Donald Trump is on the way to become the 47th President of the United States of America and gave his victory speech in Florida even as Democratic challenger Kamala Harris skipped her address.
Trump's swearing-in will officially be on January 20, 2025, after the electoral college votes are counted.
Trump, addressing the nation, urged Americans to put aside their differences and work to make the "country great again", while acknowledging that the US needs a lot of things "fixed".
Trump's presidency was marred the first time around when his supporters stormed the Capitol building on January 6, 2021, refusing to believe that the Republican candidate had lost to Joe Biden. However, Trump has stressed that "common sense is the common core" of the Republican party, while addressing voters in his speech.
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Donald Trump rode a promise to smash the American status quo to win the presidency for a second time on Wednesday, surviving a criminal conviction, indictments, an assassin’s bullet, accusations of authoritarianism and an unprecedented switch of his opponent to complete a remarkable return to power.
Trump’s victory caps the astonishing political comeback of a man who was charged with plotting to overturn the last election but who tapped into frustrations and fears about the economy and illegal immigration to defeat Vice President Kamala Harris.
His defiant plans to upend the country’s political system held appeal to tens of millions of voters who feared that the American dream was drifting further from reach and who turned to Trump as a battering ram against the ruling establishment and the expert class of elites.
In a deeply divided nation, voters embraced Trump’s pledge to seal the southern border by almost any means, to revive the economy with 19th-century-style tariffs that would restore American manufacturing and to lead a retreat from international entanglements and global conflict.
Now, Trump will serve as the 47th president four years after reluctantly leaving office as the 45th, the first politician since Grover Cleveland in the late 1800s to lose reelection to the White House and later mount a successful run. At the age of 78, Trump has become the oldest man ever elected president, breaking a record held by President Joe Biden, whose mental competence Trump has savaged.
(With NYT inputs)