Donald Trump wins 2nd term in historic return to White House

Former President Donald Trump is projected to win the presidential race by ABC News, defeating Vice President Kamala Harris in a frenzied contest to stage an improbable historic comeback.

Trump ended up with at least 279 electoral votes after clinching wins in the swing states of Pennsylvania, Georgia and Wisconsin. Harris has won at least 219 votes. The race was marked by literal history, including two assassination attempts and 34 felony convictions against Trump, already having been impeached twice and faulted for mismanaging the COVID-19 pandemic response.

Maybe even more memorable was President Joe Biden's decision to drop out of the race after a ruinous June debate in which he struggled at times to form sentences.

Trump's victory underscores just how deep voters' frustrations were surrounding inflation and immigration, Republicans' two top issues this election cycle as polls consistently showed Americans' unhappiness with how Biden handled them.

His return to the White House also suggests that Democrats were not motivated enough by the prospect of electing the first female president and that its base's fury over the Supreme Court's revocation of constitutional abortion protections has waned since 2022.

For Trump personally, the win offers both political vindication and legal protection. Since his win, he and his brand were soundly rejected in 2018, 2020 and 2022. And once in office, he'd be able to undermine criminal cases against him surrounding his handling of classified documents while out of office and efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.

"I want to thank the American people for the extraordinary honor of being elected your 47th president and your 45th president," Trump said in his victory speech.

Trump's victory is likely to set off transformations in both parties.

His win will likely help cement his "Make America Great Again" brand of politics as the dominant strand of Republicanism for the foreseeable future, with Vice President-elect JD Vance seemingly well positioned to carry on Trump's mantle after the current administration ends in a little over four years.

Democrats, meanwhile, will likely have to sift through the rubble to understand what voters found so unappetizing about them that they'd choose instead to support a twice-impeached convicted felon who had already been voted out of office once.

The former and future president has not substantively outlined his goals for a second term -- at his debate with Harris he boasted of having "concepts of a plan" when it comes to health care -- though he has warned that he could go after his political opponents and journalists. He also could use his familiarity with the federal bureaucracy to help install civil servants who are loyal to him.

He will at least have a friendly, GOP-controlled Senate, though the House majority remains up in the air.

Among the chief policy areas where Trump could leave his imprint are on the world stage, where he has forecasted less support for Ukraine; on trade, where he has boasted of tariffs of as high as 100% on some imports, and on immigration, where he supports a mass deportation force and eliminating the Temporary Protected Status program.

He's also vowed to "drill, baby, drill" and lower costs, though his tariffs would likely raise the price of many goods, economists say, and he promised to eliminate tax on tips, overtime and Social Security benefits for seniors.

Perhaps more than anything, though, Democrats will be on the lookout for any form of retribution from a candidate who repeatedly dubbed his detractors the "enemy from within," though he never went after Hillary Clinton after leading chants of "lock her up" in 2016.

Trump's victory this year was far from assured.

Republicans across the spectrum panned Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack by his supporters on the U.S. Capitol to stop certification of the 2020 election, with even allies like Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., suggesting the party should move on from the former president and his brand. That nascent push was largely abandoned weeks later when then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., ventured down to Mar-a-Lago to make amends and discuss House strategy.

Republicans' disappointing 2022 election results tore open those divides once again. After an anticipated red wave instead gave way to the loss of a Senate seat and only marginal House gains, GOP leaders wondered if the time had come to elevate other lawmakers as the party's future.

Buzz mounted around Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as a younger Republican and culture warrior who could synthesize Trump's brawler style into more widespread appeal, with Wyoming Sen. Cynthia Lummis calling him the party "leader." Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and former Vice President Mike Pence offered more traditional conservative credentials in a snapback of sorts to a pre-Trump party.

Millions of dollars flooded a crowded 2024 GOP primary field, with DeSantis in particular leaning on a historically well-heeled and involved super PAC to proselytize his fighter credentials.

None of it mattered.

Pence dropped out before the calendar even turned to 2024. DeSantis ended his campaign before the New Hampshire primary after falling far short of expectations in Iowa. And while Haley stuck around for months, even drawing thousands of votes in primaries after she ended her own campaign in March, no candidate ever held a candle to Trump's share of the primary electorate.

All of the 2024 contenders endorsed Trump except for Pence and former Govs. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas and Chris Christie of New Jersey, none of whom made close to a dent in the nominating contest.

Even though he clinched the nomination as the GOP's dominant figure and former president, Trump's campaign was ultimately anything but conventional.

Trump was dogged by a slate of investigations into his handling of classified documents upon leaving office, his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results and payments made to the porn star Stormy Daniels in 2016. He was able to fend off or delay many of the federal investigations he faced, and while he was convicted in a New York trial of 34 felony counts over the Daniels payments, his sentencing was delayed until after the election.

Compounding on the history of the election were two assassination attempts against Trump, the first of which, in July, saw him grazed in the ear by a bullet. Trump was able to use the threats to juice his fundraising and expound on his victimhood narrative, though they did not lead to any fundamental polling shifts.

But perhaps more than anything, Trump's campaign was roiled by chaos in the Democratic Party.

Trump appeared to initially struggle to figure out how to attack Harris once she took over as Democrats' nominee, even continuing to go after Biden.

However, Trump eventually settled on a line of attack that Harris had four years to fix the country's woes, mocking her argument about what she'd do on Day One, arguing that day one was in 2021.

Still, Trump kept Republicans nervous by mixing in messages of grievance up until the very end of the race, veering off a script on inflation and immigration that operatives believed was more effective in winning over persuadable voters.

In the end, though, Trump's playbook was just enough to win.