By our reporter
Former US President and the Republican party flag bearer in the 2024 polls, Donald Trump has won the presidential election, even as voting continues in some states
. He is the second president to be elected to two nonconsecutive terms and the first convicted of felonies.
Vice President Kamala Harris underperformed across the country, falling behind in several swing states that President Joe Biden had won.
She sent her supporters home early this morning without addressing the crowd. She is expected to speak later today.
Republicans will control the Senate. House control remains uncalled.
Although he has not been officially declared the winner, Trump is being projected to win by top media outlets across the globe.
According to CNN, ” Former President Donald Trump will defeat Vice President Kamala Harris and return to the White House, CNN projects, in a moment of historic consequence for American democracy. His projected win in battleground Wisconsin put the Republican over the top with 276 electoral votes as counting continues in some key states”.
In a speech before the race was called, Trump said he would usher in a “golden age of America.” He made the economy and immigration a focus of his campaign, many times pushing false claims. He also celebrated Republicans’ projected control of the Senate. Harris is expected to speak later today.
Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress are congratulating Donald Trump on his historic reelection.
House Speaker Mike Johnson said in a statement, “With President Trump back in the White House, there is no obstacle too great and no challenge too difficult.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham called on special counsel Jack Smith to end his federal investigations into Trump.
“To Jack Smith and your team: It is time to look forward to a new chapter in your legal careers as these politically motivated charges against President Trump hit a wall,” Graham posted on x.com.
“The Supreme Court substantially rejected what you were trying to do, and after tonight, it’s clear the American people are tired of lawfare. Bring these cases to an end. The American people deserve a refund,” he said.
Sen. John Thune said on X, “The incoming Senate Republican majority will work hand-in-hand with the Trump-Vance administration to lower costs for families, secure our southern border, and renew America’s energy dominance.”
Earlier, CNN projected that Republicans will win control of the Senate. It remains unclear which party will hold the majority in the House.
Sen. John Cornyn said in a statement, “I’m confident President Trump will hit the ground running to restore the Office of the President to what it should be – one that keeps the American people safe and prosperous.”
Cornyn added, “Come January, we must be ready to confirm his nominees, pass a budget, address our debt, extend the Trump tax cuts, and reverse Kamala Harris’ disastrous border security policies.”
A peek into Trump’s second term, which will look nothing like the first
Donald Trump’s election victory will return him to the White House, but both his allies and detractors have made clear his second time around will look nothing like the first.
With the Republican Party now entirely his, its anti-Trump figures banished for good, Trump will enter the Oval Office with both the experience of having done the job before and a wealth of resentments over how he believes the system failed him.
Figures who once hoped to act as stabilizing forces — including a string of chiefs of staff, defense secretaries, a national security adviser, a national intelligence adviser and an attorney general — have abandoned Trump, leaving behind a string of recriminations about his character and abilities.
They’ve been replaced by a cohort of advisers and officials uninterested in keeping Trump in check. Instead of acting as bulwarks against him, those working for Trump this time around share his views and are intent on upholding the extreme pledges he made as a candidate without concern for norms, traditions or law that past aides sought to maintain.
Trump’s axis of influence has shifted greatly since he left office in January 2021. While his daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, were once prominent campaign surrogates and senior White House staffers, they’ve since stepped away from the daily churn of politics. Ivanka Trump has made clear she has no plans to return to the West Wing, and while Kushner has been involved in the transition efforts, sources familiar with his thinking said he is unlikely to leave his private equity firm.
Instead, Trump has found himself relying on people like Donald Trump Jr., Elon Musk and Susie Wiles throughout his third run for the White House.
Where Harris’ campaign went wrong
Vice President Kamala Harris appears on The View on Tuesday, October 8. WABC
It was supposed to be everything short of a free ad – a panel of women not containing their excitement to welcome Kamala Harris, ready to introduce her to their committed daytime audience of exactly the type of women the vice president’s campaign always hoped were going to be critical to her base.
It was a moment that encapsulated one of the biggest challenges facing her campaign – which, in the end, proved insurmountable.
“What, if anything, would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?” co-host of ABC’s “The View” Sunny Hostin asked Harris, looking to give her a set for her to spike over the net.
“There is not a thing that comes to mind,” she said.
Even Harris realized she had a problem, trying to adjust a moment later by saying she would put a Republican in her Cabinet.
Aides didn’t wait until Harris was off the set to start trying to clean it up. A Democrat who had spoken with her told CNN at the time that she didn’t want to name her differences with President Joe Biden – including a higher capital gains tax rate, a bigger child tax credit and a tougher border policy – because she thought it would look disloyal to the man who had picked her as his running mate and then stepped aside for her.
The thud fell in a campaign already struggling with a listless October, which had replaced the late summer exuberance and a September debate that nearly everyone political observer other than Donald Trump acknowledged she crushed. As aides new to the Harris orbit exerted control, she struggled with preparation. She grew hesitant, losing some of the confidence and swagger that had defined the early weeks of her reintroduction to the country. Aides who had successfully pushed her out of her comfort zone earlier in the year felt like they were running into the kind of walls she used to put up.
How Trump Won The Election
Four years after leaving Washington as a pariah, following his attempt to overturn the 2020 election to stay in office, Trump’s victory defied two assassination attempts, two presidential impeachments, his criminal conviction and many other criminal charges.
The former president outpaced his own performance in a losing cause four years ago, putting the states of Georgia and Pennsylvania back into the GOP column and retaining North Carolina for his party – all of which Democrats had targeted as part of the vice president’s path to the White House.
Trump campaigned on searing authoritarian-style rhetoric and false claims that the nation’s towns and cities were under “occupation” from foreign criminals and gangs. But he also tapped into a palpable thirst for change among Americans still feeling the painful aftereffects of a now cooled run of high inflation. And he warned that only he could stop a slide to World War III as foreign crises rage.
Given the extreme nature of his campaign, his election may also augur a period of national and international turmoil. Trump has vowed to use his second term to seek “retribution” against his political adversaries and mused aloud about using the military against “the enemy from within.” Overseas, US allies are bracing for the return of the wild unpredictability in US foreign policy that Trump whipped up in his first term. There are also concerns about his willingness to enforce NATO’s bedrock principle of mutual defense.
Trump’s return to power is also certain to end the federal prosecutions that resulted from his attempts to overturn the 2020 election.
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 GOP 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 January 6, 2021.
Nigerian community in America reacts
Meanwhile, the Nigerian communities across the United States painted a picture of gloom as the re-election of Trump became a reality.
Some of the Nigerians who spoke to National pilot expressed disappointment and sadness over outcome of the election.
Joseph Anifowoshe who works in a popular shopping mall described the re-election of Trump as bad news.
“It is bad news for most Nigerians here, especially the illegal immigrants among us. Given what he did last night, life is uncertain for those living here without valid papers. But let’s wait and see”.
Another Nigerian, Nnamdi Orji, a medical doctor who has been living in America for 30 years and had acquired the citizenship, said It’s not only Nigerians who were disappointment over Trump’s return, ” most blacks felt bad . This is because, blacks traditionally supportt the Democrats. ”
James Alele, Nigerian-American resident in New York said although the result did come to him as a surprise, but the Americans have decided and the nation moves on.
