How Donald Trump defied the odds and made a historic return to the White House
It comes after four indictments, one conviction and a campaign of ups and downs.
Four years ago, on Inauguration Day, a bitter Donald Trump left Washington with a modest farewell at Joint Base Andrews.
"We will be back in some form," the twice-impeached, electorally-defeated president said in a vague-sounding vow, before boarding a plane to Florida and a kind of exile at his Mar-a-Lago estate.
In the moment, it seemed his time in presidential politics had come to an end.
But Donald Trump was not one to fade into obscurity.
Now, his extraordinary and improbable political comeback will turn complete when he is sworn into office on Monday.
"Trump is sui generis," said longtime Republican pollster Whit Ayres. "He is a unique figure in American politics, and he has had a stunning influence on our entire political life. There is no one who is remotely close to his ability to pull off what he has accomplished."
Trump is only the second president in U.S. history, after Grover Cleveland in 1892, to win election to a non-consecutive second term.
He will be the first convicted felon.
All in all, he's been criminally indicted four times, one of which resulted in the unprecedented conviction of a former president by a jury of his peers. Amid the 2020 campaign, they found him guilty on 34 felony counts in connection with a hush money payment made to an adult film star during the 2016 presidential race.
"We have not seen a moment in American history where a president with so much baggage has been reelected after being out of office," said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston and co-creator of the Presidential Greatness Project.
Despite his legal troubles, Trump ran a yearslong run for the White House that saw sitting President Joe Biden suddenly drop his reelection bid 100 days before Election Day and Vice President Kamala Harris rise to the top of the Democratic ticket.
Trump also experienced two assassination attempts, including surviving an incredibly close call at a rally in Pennsylvania in July that left him bloodied from a bullet wound to his right ear and one of his supporters dead.
Roughly 48 hours later, he received a hero's welcome at the Republican National Convention as he walked into the arena with a bandage on that ear and a fist raised in the air.
"He's going into 2025 with a much stronger candidacy than he did going into his first administration," said Ron Bonjean, a Republican strategist who advised Trump's 2016 transition team.
That wasn't always guaranteed, however.
Post-White House struggles
When he departed the White House in 2021, Trump was something of a pariah among the Republican Party. Ten House Republicans voted to impeach him over the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, though he was later narrowly acquitted by the Senate. Sen. Mitch McConnell, the longtime Republican leader, pointedly suggested Trump would be held accountable in the courts.
Trump announced his 2024 presidential bid in November 2022, just days after the Republican Party's lackluster performance in the midterm elections. Several of Trump's hand-picked candidates lost in that cycle, leading to questions about whether he still wielded influence.
He didn't hold a rally until March 2023, where his dark campaign rhetoric first emerged. The country would be destroyed if he didn't win, he said.
Then, not long after, he faced his first indictment in the New York hush money case. That summer, he was charged in three in three other cases, two federal and one state. He denied any wrongdoing.
Yet, while surveys showed many Americans viewed the charges as serious, Trump didn't suffer a major hit in 2024 polling.
In fact, Republicans overwhelmingly rallied around him, asserting the investigations were a manifestation of a weaponized justice system. Supporters, too, indicated they had no qualms about backing him.
And while more than a dozen GOP candidates launched challenges to Trump, including big names like Florida's Ron DeSantis and former Vice President Mike Pence, none made a significant dent.
His political resurgence
Polls showed an incredibly tight race between Harris and Trump after she became the Democratic nominee following Biden's decision to withdraw, which was prompted by growing Democratic concern after his halting debate performance.
A tumultuous 10-week sprint to Election Day ensued, during which time Trump ramped up his personal attacks on Harris and on all his political opponents.
At times, his dark, vengeful tone concerned GOP strategists, but his also zeroing in on inflation and border policy proved to be a successful formula for attracting voters deeply unhappy about the state of the economy.
"You put together a more favorable pre-pandemic Trump economy, a border out of control and a liberal mindset that appears to be dominating many institutions, and you have the makings of a Trump winning coalition," said Ayres, the veteran GOP pollster.
"Trump made an incredible political comeback because he was focused on the problems that America was facing in terms of inflation and immigration," Bonjean said. "He was relating to voters in a way that the Harris campaign wasn't capable of accomplishing."
Not only did Trump win back the presidency, he will enjoy Republican control of Congress for at least two years. And some of the most affluent individuals in the world, including Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, will be by Trump's side as he is inaugurated.
Trump has called the sweep a "mandate" for his agenda, which includes priorities such as mass deportations of immigrants without legal status, new tariffs on trade partners and reshaping the civil service.
But Bonjean, a former senior GOP Senate and House leadership aide, warned a Republican trifecta doesn't mean it will be "easy" to make good on Trump's most ambitious promises because of how narrow the majorities are.
Still, he believed Trump was determined to see it get all done in the next four years.
"He doesn't care how the legislation gets to him," Bonjean said. "He wants the optics of showing him as a powerful president, signing his key agenda items in the law."
"This will truly be the golden age of America," Trump said on election night.
History will judge that vow.
But on this Inauguration Day, there will be no doubt -- Trump is back.
