Donald Trump Elected US President
Donald Trump was elected president of the United States on 8 November 2016, winning 304 electoral votes to Hillary Clinton's 227 while losing the popular vote by about 2.9 million. The margin was roughly 78,000 votes across Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — three states that had voted Democratic in every presidential election since 1992. He had never held public or military office, which no previous president had managed. He entered the Republican primaries in June 2015 and beat sixteen candidates, most of them governors and senators, by dominating television coverage and by identifying issues — immigration, trade, and the wars — on which the party's base disagreed with its leadership. His campaign promised a border wall paid for by Mexico, tariffs, an end to foreign entanglements, and the restoration of manufacturing. Clinton's campaign was damaged by the FBI director's public reopening of the investigation into her email server eleven days before the vote, by hacked Democratic emails published through WikiLeaks, and by a decision not to campaign heavily in the upper Midwest. American intelligence agencies concluded that Russia had conducted an influence operation to help him; the subsequent special counsel investigation documented the interference and did not establish criminal conspiracy. Nearly every forecaster and poll aggregator had predicted a Clinton win. The result is generally read alongside the Brexit vote five months earlier as the moment populist and anti-establishment politics broke through in the Anglosphere, on a coalition of non-graduate white voters in regions hollowed out by deindustrialisation. He lost re-election in 2020, disputed the result, and won again in 2024. The Republican Party he took over in 2016 no longer exists in its earlier form.
- Year: 2016 CE
- Category: Political
