Donald Trump’s miraculous political comeback

WASHINGTON: Donald Trump has pulled off a modern political miracle. His return to the White House is a story about American society, but it is also a story of Trump’s political resilience.

No other leader in any democracy, let alone a democracy of the complexity, history and sophistication of the United States, has ever done what Trump has done in the last nine years. He is the only person since Franklin D. Roosevelt who has been a nominee of a major party for president thrice in a row. He is the only former American president who, after a criminal conviction, not just won his party’s nomination but has also won the national elections yet again, with an even bigger margin. And he is the only leader who has taken over one of the two major parties and completely reshaped its ideological worldview and political base.

Trump’s electoral win of 2024 has to be seen in the context of his political debut in 2015.

No one thought that Trump would win the Republican presidential nomination for the 2016 elections. Yet, Trump decisively beat his more established rivals, from scions of established dynasties such as Jeb Bush to senators such as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, to make the most unusual political debut in the presidential race.

Few thought he would defeat Hillary Clinton in the presidential election that year. Yet, Trump defeated the former First Lady, senator, and Secretary of State and demolished the Blue Wall, picking Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin in the elections, and reshaping the American presidency.

Few believed that Trump could survive the investigation into the Russian role in his election or his encouragement to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate a political rival, Joe Biden. Yet, Trump managed to ride through both the Russia-related independent investigation and the Ukraine-related impeachment.

No one thought that Trump could politically survive after his defeat in 2020, especially after his refusal to admit that defeat and the decision to egg on a mob to attack the US Capitol. Yet, with little factual basis, Trump constructed an alternative political story about how the elections were indeed stolen from him and got half the country to believe it. From being relatively isolated, he rebuilt his political ecosystem. And he constructed a parallel information architecture to push out his narrative.

Few thought that Trump would survive the avalanche of legal cases, ranging from those related to business fraud and sexual assault to those related to obstructing election results or stealing classified files. Indeed, Trump has spent a lot of his money and a fair bit of time in the past four years with lawyers and in courtrooms. He went through a humiliating public trial in New York, where both his business practices and personal history were on display. And he was convicted. Yet, Trump managed to make this a story about the “weaponisation of the justice system” against political opponents, and emerged as a victim and hero from the saga.

Few thought that Trump would be able to survive the setback faced by his loyalists and the party in midterms after 2022 — Trump’s decision to run for the presidency again was announced when the political mood in his camp was low — or even win the party primaries at a time when other emerging stars in the party were challenging him. Yet, Trump defeated Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley comfortably and showed that the Republican Party was his, and his alone.

And few believed that Trump would be able to withstand the fact that his own vice president, Mike Pence, refused to endorse him; his own chief of staff (John Kelley) and former top military general (Mark Milly) called him a fascist; his own former secretaries of defence and state (Rex Tillerson and Mark Esper) warned against electing him; and his own party’s former vice president Dick Cheney endorsed a Democratic nominee. Yet, Trump showed that these voices were rather irrelevant and he had a connection with the base that bypassed traditional intermediaries.

Few thought that Trump would be able to get any support of minority communities, especially Blacks and Hispanics, given the frequent turn to hate speech and slurs directed at them from both him and his ecosystem. Yet, Trump expanded this support, demolishing conventional assumptions about what’s kosher in politics and what’s not, and what appeals to the electorate and what doesn’t.

In a 1989 interview with the journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, recounted in Woodward’s recent book War, Trump said he fundamentally relied on his instinct to make decisions and his basic philosophy in life was never to fold, never to give in. “If you fold, it causes you much more trouble than it is worth...if people know you are a folder, if people know you are going to be weak, they are going to go after you.”

Thirty-five years later, irrespective of what one thinks of his politics, Donald Trump’s return to power, with a clear mandate, and with the greatest support that he has had since his political debut, is a vindication of his philosophy to not fold. It is a story of unmatched political resilience in modern American history.

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