Trump's populism is unleashed after resounding White House comeback

Donald Trump is on his way back to the White House. He crashed through many of the informal guardrails governing US political life during his turbulent first term. This time he'll be operating with even fewer restraints.

And he's said he's out for revenge.

The populist idol's victory culminates one of the most stunning comebacks in American history. Trump left Washington four years ago defeated and disgraced — spurned even by members of his own cabinet, two of whom resigned in protest over his role in inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. Since then, he's been indicted multiple times, found liable for sexual assault and convicted in a New York state court of 34 felony counts.

Yet he's strengthened his hold on the Republican party and swiftly dispatched rivals in a presidential primary. As of early Wednesday, he was on track to win the popular vote, the third time a Republican presidential nominee has done so since 1988.

"America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate," Trump told supporters as the results came in.

In less than 11 weeks, he will take the oath of office on the same Capitol steps where a mob of supporters battled police in a failed attempt to override his 2020 election loss.

The improbable Trump restoration marks the triumph of a grievance-based populism driven by a working-class backlash against transgender rights, the shift to a service economy, trade globalization and a wave of immigration that has pushed up the share of foreign-born residents in the US to the highest level since 1910. His second victory shows his first term was no aberration.

The 78-year-old will be the oldest person ever elected US president. His win flashes a warning sign on US voters' tolerance for transformative change as global warming raises costly challenges and recent leaps forward in artificial intelligence tantalize investors with the promise of revolutionary upheaval in work.

And it leaves Ronald Reagan's corporate-friendly party of free markets, free trade and optimism on the ash heap of history.

Trump's victory reverberated through financial markets, sending US stock futures rallying, Treasury yields jumping and the dollar surging the most since March 2020. Bitcoin spiked to a record, while the Mexican peso, Chinese yuan, Japanese yen and euro all slid. A cohort of Wall Street investors have wagered his promises of corporate tax cuts, deregulation and tariff increases would boost stocks and could fuel inflation, spurring bond yields and the dollar higher. Crypto is seen as benefiting from Trump's public embrace.

The world's richest man, Elon Musk, threw his personal reputation and financial power into Trump's candidacy, amplifying pro-Republican messaging on his X social media platform. Trump has said Musk could take a major role in a future administration. Shares in Musk's Tesla soared early Wednesday.

At home, Trump has set his sights on tax cuts and deregulation that are friendly to business interests while promising sharp tariff increases that threaten to fuel inflation, complicate supply chains and slow growth. He's vowed to launch a massive roundup of undocumented migrants.

Abroad, he is determined to pull back support for alliances that have underpinned US foreign policy since World War II, reach accommodation with Russia's Vladimir Putin and ratchet up economic confrontation with China. The tariff increases Trump has promoted are far more drastic and sweeping than he imposed in his first term and would deal a possibly mortal blow to the global trading system in place since the late 20th century.

But how far Trump ultimately will go is unclear. Trump's record of acting based on improvisation and instinct injects considerable uncertainty in how he will handle a second term. If it is anything like his first, there will be sharp turns ahead.

Fears of an authoritarian swerve run high. Trump ordered investigations of opponents in his first term, refused to accept his 2020 election loss and regularly showers admiration on foreign strongmen.

On the campaign trail, he has talked about deploying the US military against the "enemy from within" and threatened to purge the government of non-loyalists. He disparages whole categories of people in dehumanizing terms, calling political opponents "vermin" and undocumented migrants "animals." He muses approvingly about the use of violence.

He's seethed over the criminal prosecutions against him and said he would go after those he deems responsible.

John Kelly, Trump's longest-serving White House chief of staff, warned in a New York Times interview shortly before the election that the former president meets "the general definition of fascist" and repeatedly expressed envy of the personal loyalty Adolf Hitler's generals showed toward their leader.

Even so, the real estate impresario's love of showmanship leaves many unsure how seriously to take his more extreme rhetoric. He campaigned against Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016 to chants of "Lock her up," yet she never faced prosecution.

This time, Trump will have far more leeway to govern as he pleases, with the Republican party remade in his image and his nominees making up more than one-quarter of the federal judiciary. His party won the Senate and still had a chance of holding onto the House of Representatives.

The Supreme Court, three of whose nine justices are Trump appointees, loosened an important legal check with a July ruling establishing broad immunity for presidents against criminal charges tied to their official acts. Impeachment isn't much of a threat for a president who already beat the sanction twice.

Crucially, Trump also doesn't have to depend on establishment Republicans to work his will on the executive branch, as he did early in his first term. In many cases, the traditionalists who staffed his prior administration used their positions to block or tamp down Trump's impulses.

Running mate JD Vance has made he clear he wouldn't follow first-term Vice President Mike Pence's example in resisting Trump overreach. Vance has said he wouldn't have certified the 2020 election results on Jan. 6.

Trump has accumulated many loyalists, and allies have prepared a database of thousands of potential candidates for political appointments vetted to suit Trump's approach to governing. Trump also will return to the White House fully schooled in the levers of power available to the president.

Trump's victory was driven by deep divisions and discontent within the US. Seventy-three percent of voters were angry or dissatisfied with the direction of the country, according to a CNN exit poll.

The nation careened from the wrenching disruption of the pandemic to a bout of rapid inflation that squeezed Americans' family budgets. The Federal Reserve responded with a campaign of interest-rate increases that hit consumers again by raising the cost of credit card balances, car loans and home mortgages. Concern over the economy consistently dominated the election campaign.

The US economy may have bounced back from the Covid emergency with stronger growth than international peers such at the EU, UK and Japan. And the stock market may be on a bull run. But the soaring value of tech emblem Nvidia Corp. mattered less to most voters than the price of eggs.

Adjusted for inflation, median household income barely budged in the first three years of Democrat Joe Biden's presidency, rising only a cumulative 1.3% from 2020 to 2023. That nurtured middle-class nostalgia for the pre-pandemic period of the Trump presidency. Real median income was up more than 10% during Trump's first three years in office, just before the pandemic hit.

Vice President Kamala Harris tried to run as a candidate of change but struggled to balance loyalty to Biden with communicating a distinct and compelling economic vision over an unusually abbreviated campaign.

Trump ran an us-against-them campaign of grievance in a nation polarized along multiple lines: rural versus urban, college-educated versus not, cultural traditionalists versus cosmopolitans, even men versus women.

No recent major presidential candidate has leaned into aggressive masculine identity more than Trump's "bro" campaign. Trump vowed at a rally to "protect" women whether they "like it or not" and chose as the warm-up for his Republican nomination acceptance speech former pro wrestler Hulk Hogan, who ripped away his shirt before Trump came onstage.

His bet on men paid off. Trump expanded his margin among men from 2020 while Harris did no better than Biden among women, according to national exit polls. He gained ground compared to 2020 with Black voters of both genders and with Latino men.

Trump veered into exaggeration and falsehoods as he whipped up fears over the direction of the country, notably including untrue claims he made in a debate with Harris that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing and eating pet cats and dogs. Those and other racially tinged attacks drew criticism.

But his pitch succeeded in a nation where political and cultural tribes increasingly are separated into enclaves and Americans have fewer strong connections with anyone outside their homes. The US surgeon general last year identified increasing social isolation as a pressing public health threat while polls show voters' trust in each other and even in a shared sense of facts have hit record lows.

An all-time low 31% of Americans told Gallup in September that they trust mass media to accurately report news. In 1974, 69% said they did. The portion who trust American democratic majority-rule to work out issues also hit a record low, 54% versus 83% in 1974.

That suggests a society less cohesive than the US was after the upheavals of the 1960s and early 1970s, when American unity was strained by divisions over civil rights, the Vietnam War, the counterculture and a newly emergent feminist movement.

It is the moment an unleashed Donald Trump returns as leader.