WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) — As he bid farewell to Washington in January 2021, deeply unpopular and diminished, Donald Trump was already hinting at a comeback.
“Goodbye. We love you. We will be back in some form,” Trump told supporters at Joint Base Andrews, where he'd arranged a 21-gun salute as part of a military send-off before boarding Air Force One. “We will see you soon.”
Four years later, he's fulfilled his prophecy.
With his commanding victory over Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump achieved a comeback that seemed unimaginable after the 2020 election ended with his supporters violently storming the Capitol after he refused to accept his defeat.
In the years that followed, Trump was widely blamed for Republican losses, indicted four times, convicted on 34 felony counts, ruled to have inflated his assets in a civil fraud trial and found liable for sexual abuse. He still faces fines that top more than half a billion dollars and the prospect of jail time.
But Trump managed to turn his legal woes into fuel that channeled voters' anger. He seized on widespread discontent over the direction of a country battered by years of high inflation. And he spoke to a new generation — using podcasts and social media — to tell those who felt forgotten that he shared their disdain for the status quo.
And he did so while surviving two attempted assassinations and a late-stage candidate replacement by Democrats.
“This was a campaign of October surprises," Trump campaign senior adviser Chris LaCivita said hours after clinching victory. “When you think about it, whether it was indictments, convictions, assassination attempts, the switching out of the candidate — I mean it was a campaign of firsts on so many different levels.”
Trump had entered the general election after sweeping the GOP primaries and routing a crowded field of candidates. The indictments against him dominated news coverage and forced even his rivals to rally around him as he cast himself as the victim of a politically motivated effort to hobble his candidacy.
A late June debate against President Joe Biden — which the Biden campaign had pushed for — ended disastrously for the president, who struggled to put words together and repeatedly lost his train of thought.
When Trump arrived at the Republican National Convention to formally accept his party's nomination for the second time weeks later, he seemed unstoppable. Just two days earlier, a gunman had opened fire at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, unleashing a hail of bullets that grazed his ear and left one supporter dead.
After the gunman had been killed, Trump stood, surrounded by Secret Service agents, his face streaked by blood, and raised his fist in the air — shouting “Fight! Fight! Fight!” — as the crow erupted into cheers. The moment became a rallying cry for his campaign.
“If you want to make somebody iconic, try to throw them in jail. Try to bankrupt them. ... If you want to make somebody iconic, try to kill him," said Roger Stone, a longtime Republican operative who has known Trump for 45 years and was pardoned by the former president. ”All of those things failed. They just made him bigger and more powerful as a political force. Every one of those things turbocharged his candidacy."
Trump had appeared to be on a glide path to victory. But just days later, Democrats, fearing a blowout loss and panicking over Biden's age and ability to do the job for another four years, successfully persuaded the president to step aside and end his bid, making way for Harris’ history-shattering candidacy.
Trump campaign aides insisted they were prepared. Videos for the convention had been cut with two different versions: One featuring Biden, the other Harris, and versions attacking both were played on the big screens in Milwaukee.
But the change sent Trump into a tailspin. He had spent millions, he complained, beating Biden, and now had to “start all over” again — this time facing a candidate who was not only nearly two decades younger, embodying the generational change voters had said they wanted, but also a woman who would have become the country's first female president.
In one particularly hostile appearance, Trump questioned the racial identity of the first woman of color to serve as vice president and to lead a major-party ticket before the National Association of Black Journalists.
“I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black,” Trump said of the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, who had attended a historically Black college and served as a member of the Congressional Black Caucus.
On his Truth Social site, he amplified a post that suggested Harris had used sexual favors to advance her career.
Trump's campaign aides quickly pivoted to taking Harris down. They belittled her as unserious, with ads focused on her laugh. They labeled her “dangerously liberal," highlighting the progressive policies she had embraced when she first ran for president in 2020.
They argued her “joyful warrior” messaging was fundamentally at odds with the sour mood of the electorate, and responded gleefully to Harris telling voters “We are not going back" when many voters seemed to want just that.
Though Trump had left office with a dismal approval rating, that number had ticked up considerably in the years that followed, amid concerns over high prices and the influx of migrants who entered the country illegally after Biden relaxed restrictions.
Harris’ momentum was just a sugar high, they said. Tony Fabrizio, the campaign pollster, called it “a kind of out-of-body experience where we have suspended reality.” Soon, they predicted, what they dubbed the “Harris honeymoon” would subside.
Trump’s campaign insisted they did not fundamentally change their strategy with Harris as their rival. Instead, they tried to cast her as the incumbent, tying her to every one of the Biden administration's most unpopular policies. Trump, the 78-year-old former president, would be the candidate of change — and one who had been tested.
Harris played right into their hands. Asked during an October appearance on “The View" if there was anything she would have done differently than Biden over the last four years, she responded that there was “not a thing that comes to mind.”
Trump's campaign rejoiced when they heard the clip, which they quickly cut into ads.
Harris, they believed, failed to articulate a forward-looking agenda that represented a break from the unpopular incumbent. And she struggled to distance herself from some of the far-left positions she had taken during the 2020 Democratic primary — sometimes denying positions she was on record as having taken, or failing to offer a clear explanation for her change of heart.
She spent much of the final stretch of the campaign reverting to Biden’s strategy of casting Trump as a fundamental threat to democracy.
But the country made clear it was "ready to move in a different direction,” said longtime Trump adviser Corey Lewandowski. “They want someone who’s going to change. They don’t have to think back 20 or 30 years. They can think back to four and five years ago. And they want that back in the White House.”
After his 2020 loss, Trump's campaign worked to grow his appeal beyond the white working-class base that had delivered his first victory. The campaign would court young people and Black and Latino men, including many who rarely voted but felt like they weren't getting ahead. They seized on divisions in the Democratic Party, courting both Jewish voters and Muslims.
In a scene that would have seemed unthinkable eight years ago, Trump — the man who called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims" entering the country and later perused targeted travel bans — appeared onstage at his last rally of the campaign with Amer Ghalib, the Democratic, Arab American mayor of Hamtramck, Michigan. Days earlier, Trump had gone to the majority Arab American city of Dearborn, Michigan, for a campaign stop.
“They saw him as their last hope to end these wars in the Middle East and bring back peace. And this was made very clear when he came to Dearborn," said Massad Boulos, the father of Trump’s son-in-law, who led Trump’s outreach with Arab Americans. He noted Harris "didn’t even come close to Dearborn.”
Trump received another boost when the International Brotherhood of Teamsters declined to endorse either candidate, citing a lack of consensus among its 1.3 million members.
While much of the campaign's messaging centered on the economy and immigration, Trump also tried to court voters with giveaways, promising to end taxes on tips, on overtime pay and on Social Security benefits.
And his aides seized on the culture wars surrounding transgender rights, pouring money into ads aimed at young men — especially young Hispanic men — attacking Harris for supporting “taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners," including one spot featuring popular radio host Charlamagne tha God that aired predominantly during football games.
“Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you," the narrator said.
Trump's campaign succeeded in its mission, picking up a small but significant share of Black and Hispanic voters, and forging a new working-class coalition crossing racial lines.
“They came from all quarters: union, non-union, African American, Hispanic American, Asian American, Arab American, Muslim American,” Trump in his victory speech. “We had everybody and it was beautiful. It was a historic realignment, uniting citizens of all backgrounds around a common core of common sense.”
The campaign decided early that it would focus much of its efforts on low-propensity voters — people who rarely turn out to the polls and are more likely to get their news from non-traditional sources.
To reach them, Trump began a podcast blitz, appearing with hosts who are popular with young men, including Adin Ross, Theo Von and Joe Rogan. He attended football games and UFC fights, where audiences erupted into cheers at arrivals broadcast live on sports channels.
The campaign also worked to create viral moments. Trump paid a visit to McDonald's, where he donned an apron, manned the fry station and served supporters through the drive-through window. Days later he delivered a news conference from the passenger seat of a garbage truck, while wearing a yellow safety vest.
Clips of those appearances racked up hundreds of millions of views on platforms like TikTok, which Trump embraced, despite having tried to previously ban the app at the White House.
The appearances helped to highlight an aspect of Trump's appeal that is often lost on those who aren't supporters.
Jaden Wurn, 20, a student at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania who was casting his ballot for Trump, said he was drawn to the former president in part because of his sense of humor.
“Trump is able to just chat," he said. “It can be policy. It can be culture. It could be golf. It could be whatever it is, and he’s just able to sit down and have a nice, good conversation. Be relatable. Crack some jokes. He’s a funny guy. It’s refreshing.”
Unlike past campaigns marked by backstabbing and turnover, Trump's operation was widely praised for being his most competent and disciplined, with credit given to Florida operative Susie Wiles, who will now serve as his White House chief of staff.
Haunted by lessons from 2020, aides were careful to save money for the race's final stretch even as they were dramatically outraised by Democrats and shelled out millions on legal expenses.
And they took risks, including outsourcing a large portion of their paid get-out-the-vote operation to outside groups, taking advantage of an FEC ruling that allowed unprecedented coordination with a PAC formed by billionaire Elon Musk, his newest benefactor, and Charlie Kirk's Turning Point group.
As the race headed into the race's final stretch, Trump's team continued to project confidence, even as public polling showing a dead heat. They were on offensive, scheduling rallies in Democratic states like Virginia and New Mexico, as well as what was intended to be the marquee event of the campaign's end: a rally at New York's Madison Square Garden.
But the event — which Trump had talked of for years — was derailed long before he even took the stage as a series of pre-show speakers delivered vile, crude and racist insults, including a comedian who called Puerto Rico “a floating pile of garbage.”
Trump was livid, angry that the event had been overshadowed by vetting failures and he was being attacked for something he hadn't said.
While aides insisted they saw no impact on their polling — their internal data had him leading through the final three weeks of the race, albeit with a razor-thin margin — even Trump's most diehard supporters expressed concerns that the fallout was resonating with undecided friends and family members.
“A couple of them were making the comment that he was against Puerto Rico or he’s racist and I’ve been trying to educate them,” said Donna Sheets, 51, a caregiver who lives in Christiansburg, Virginia, describing friends who had yet to make up their minds in the race's final stretch.
But yet again Trump caught a break. Biden, in a call organized by a Hispanic advocacy group, responded to the insults by calling Trump's supporters “garbage.”
Trump quickly seized on the gaffe, coming up with the idea of hiring a garbage truck to ride in. Aides quickly scrambled to find a truck and print a “Trump” campaign decal to tape to its side.
They also presented him with an orange worker's vest — which he decided he liked so much that he continued to wear it onstage at a subsequent rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Supporters began showing up at his rallies wearing their own vests and garbage bags.
Still, Trump continued what felt, at times, like self-sabotage. He doubled down on his controversial pledge to “protect women," saying he would do so whether they “like it or not.” He railed against former Rep. Liz Cheney, saying she would be less inclined to send Americans into war if she experienced what it felt like to be standing with nine rifles “trained at her face.”
And on the Sunday before the election, at a rally in Pennsylvania, an exhausted Trump, fully unleashed, abandoned his stump speech altogether to deliver a profane and conspiracy-laden diatribe in which he said he “shouldn’t have left” the White House after his 2020 loss and wouldn't mind much if reporters were shot.
The performance was so unhinged that Wiles was spotted coming out to stare at Trump as he spoke.
While aides were alarmed, they urged him to stick with the plan. Trump, onstage the next day, seemed to acknowledge their efforts as he repeated a familiar complaint about how he’s not allowed to call women “beautiful” anymore, and then asked that it be struck from the record — saying, “So I’m allowed to do that, aren’t I, Susan Wiles?”
As his top aides huddled upstairs in his office at Mar-a-Lago, Trump spent much of election night holding court with friends and club members as well as Musk and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — leaders of a new Make America Great Again majority that bears little resemblance to the Republican Party of old.
While aides described him as confident, Trump watched the TVs that had been set up in the ballroom intensely as he mingled. This was more than an election, friends noted. He was fighting for his freedom. He will be able to end the federal investigations he faces as soon as he takes office.
After Fox News had called the race, Trump emerged, flanked by campaign staff and family.
“This will forever be remembered as the day the American people regained control of their country,” he said.