President Donald Trump’s electoral victory makes him an anomaly in the annals of U.S. history—not only for winning non-consecutive terms, which no one has accomplished since Grover Cleveland over a century ago, but also for surviving multiple assassination attempts and becoming the first elected president convicted of felony crimes.  

Whether or not the convictions are justified, prognosticators have rightly called his win one of the greatest comebacks ever in American politics—greater even than Richard Nixon’s rise from the ashes after losing to John F. Kennedy in 1960.  

Unlike in 2016, when he failed to clinch the popular vote but won the Electoral College, Trump outpaced Kamala Harris by nearly 2.5 million votes, making gains among racial, gender, age, and geographic demographics with whom Democrats typically have excelled, particularly blacks, Latinos, and blue-collar workers.  

His populist message on reducing inflation and protecting the Southern border undoubtedly resonated with Americans. It signals the next stage in an ongoing political realignment—against the legacy media, wokeism, bureaucratic and celebrity elitism and in favor of economic and national stability and law and order. In short, Americans want to achieve the American Dream—and, at least in this presidential election, they demonstrated they had enough of the Biden Administration’s progressive policies. Economic woes and safety concerns, vigorously aggravated by a massive influx of migrants, were the hallmarks of an administration that fixated on maximally polarizing cultural issues such as abortion, transgenderism, and the supposed fascism of half the country.