Trump heads back to White House

REPUBLICAN candidate and former president Donald Trump has won the November 5 US presidential election.

The race for the White House was a tight one, with Vice President Kamala Harris and Trump going down to the wire in the push for the magical number of 270 electoral votes needed to become the 47th US president.

On November 6, Trump was declared the winner, having won over 270 votes to Harris' 223 or so (some states have not yet been declared). He also won the popular vote, for the first time, by several million.

The Democrats' hopes for Harris to win the election were dashed when Trump secured wins in the key swing states, such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Around 11.41 pm om November 6, news sources including Associated Press, NBC and the UK Guardian put the electoral vote count between Harris and Trump at 112/198, 115/ 230 and 179/214 respectively.

Early results projected Harris would win Vermont, Colorado, New Hampshire, Maryland, Massachusetts, Columbia, Delaware, Illinois, Oregon, Virgina and Rhode Island.

Trump was projected to win Kentucky, Indiana, West Virginia, Ohio, Florida, South Carolina, Missouri, Arkansas, Tennesse, North Dakota, South Dakota and Alabama.

Results in several other states where the polls had closed were too close to call, as votes were being counted late into the night and early morning.

In 2020, the split between then Democratic candidate Joe Biden and Trump was 306-232 votes.

In 2016, the margin of votes between Trump and his then Democratic rival Hillary Clinton was 304-227 votes.

Earlier in the day, information suggested the presidential race was deadlocked.

Reports from sources such as ABC News and CNN said the polls were exceptionally close across the US, and in all the swing states – Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin in the industrial Midwest; Nevada and Arizona in the west; and Georgia and North Carolina in the south.

A final New York Times/Siena poll on November 4 had shown Harris leading by a very small margin or tied with Trump in all the swing states. The exception was Arizona, where Trump led by a few percentage points.

Harris spent November 4 in Pennsylvania, whose 19 electoral votes offered the largest prize among the states expected to determine the Electoral College outcome.

Trump held his final rallies in Michigan, Pennsylvania and North Carolina on the same day.

His re-election will make him the first former president since Grover Cleveland to be re-elected to office.

At 78, Trump will also be the oldest person to serve as president after a second non-consecutive term.

The White House website showed Cleveland was the only president to leave the White House and return for a second, non-consecutive term four years later. Those terms were 1885-1889 and 1893-1897.

No other former president in US history has sought or won re-election.

Trump entered the campaign with considerable political baggage.

This includes a grand jury indictment on August 1, 2023 in the District of Columbia US. District Court on four charges for his conduct after the 2020 presidential election through the January 6, 2021 Capitol attack and a May 30 conviction in a hush-money case in New York (where he was found guilty of falsifying business records in connection with a payoff to Stormy Daniels, a porn star who claimed she had a sexual encounter with him).

A June 13, 2023 Politico report said, "Over a five-month span (in 2023), former president Donald Trump was charged in four criminal cases. Together, the indictments accused him of wide-ranging criminal conduct before, during and after his presidency. One of those indictments has now led to the first criminal conviction of a former president; the other three remain pending."

The report added, "For the first 234 years of the nation’s history, no American president or former president had ever been indicted."

In May, a jury in New York found Trump guilty on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.

During the election campaign, there were two assassination attempts on Trump.

The first was on July 13 at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, which killed one rallygoer and wounded two others. Trump was shot in the ear before being hustled off the stage.

The second attempt happened on September 24, when a suspect was arrested at Trump's golf club in West Palm Beach, Florida.

Trump, who was the 45th president from 2017-2021, announced his campaign for the 2024 election on November 15, 2022. He was officially nominated as the Republican presidential candidate on July 15.

Harris became the Democratic candidate only in August this year, after Biden, who at 81 was the oldest sitting president in US history, was persuaded to withdraw over concerns about his mental fitness for the role.

Throughout his campaign, Trump made a series of false and misleading statements and used racist and incendiary rhetoric advanced by various conspiracy theories.

He made several personal attacks against Harris which were viewed as sexual in nature, racist and misogynistic and considered a continued breaking of political norms.

Trump's campaign rhetoric has also has regularly espoused anti-immigrant nativism and anti-transgender fearmongering.

The former includes claims which have been publicly dismissed about Haitian immigrants eating people's pets in Springfield, Ohio.

The latter involved advertisements issued by Trump's campaign which say, “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”

Trump's public support of world leaders such as Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean President Kim Jong-un, who are viewed as dictators, raised concerns inside and outside the US that should he be re-elected, he will become one too.

When he lost the 2020 election to incumbent President Joe Biden, Trump claimed the election was stolen from him, but produced no bonafide evidence to support his claim.

He repeated that claim during this year's campaign.

A November 5 report in the UK Guardian said Trump and top allies such as the multibillionaire Elon Musk have created a blizzard of false voting misinformation portraying Democrats as bent on stealing the election, undermining trust in the voting process and leading to potential violence.

The report also said Trump has made baseless claims that Harris could only win "if it was a corrupt election."

Trinidad and Tobago comments on US election

In a statement on November 4, Foreign and Caricom Affairs Minister Dr Amery Browne said given the longstanding and productive relationship the country maintained with the US, his ministry had monitored the build-up to the 2024 presidential election, including positions espoused by the two main candidates.

He pointed out: “The results will be profoundly consequential to the people of this hemisphere and across the world.

“Best wishes to the US for a free, fair and safe election in the best spirit of democracy, and we look forward to working with the winning team on all matters of mutual interest in 2025 and beyond."