WEST PALM BEACH, Florida – Donald John Trump, the 45th U.S. president, will soon become the 47th president, after he was projected to win not just the 270 electoral college votes needed to return to the White House but also the national popular vote. His humiliation of the political elite is now complete.

The conservative Fox News channel was first to call the race for Trump while the Associated Press and the legacy television networks held off until early Wednesday morning. After Pennsylvania turned red, however, even liberal MSNBC News conceded that the Republican’s lead over Vice President Kamala Harris had become mathematically insurmountable. The AP finally called the race at 5:45 a.m.

Trump is on track to become the first Republican to win a majority of the vote since George W. Bush in 2004, and he will become the first president to serve two nonconsecutive terms since Grover Cleveland in 1892. His triumph represents a wholesale repudiation of the establishment. Big business, Hollywood, the media, and both major political parties treated him as an unwelcome interloper. He delivered his rebuttal on Election Day.

A celebrity known for his starring role on a reality television show, a career in New York real estate, and a knack for showing up in the tabloids, Trump wasn’t even a “citizen politician” when he arrived on the political scene in 2015. He wasn’t a politician at all and had never run for office or been involved in party politics. Dismissed by the commentariat as unserious, he defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016, and was impeached (but not convicted) for his troubles. Four years later, he was again declared politically unviable after he refused to accept the results of his loss to Joe Biden and his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell condemned him as “practically and morally responsible” for the Jan. 6 riot, but efforts by an increasingly obsolete cohort of GOP were singularly unsuccessful in sidelining the man.

Trump declared his candidacy immediately after the 2022 midterms, marched almost effortlessly through a crowded field of primary challengers, and secured a third consecutive presidential nomination. He did not regain his grasp on the GOP so much as he tightened his grip on that party.

“I think that we just witnessed the greatest political comeback in the history of the United States of America,” Trump running mate J.D. Vance said after Tuesday’s election returns rolled in. There was no exaggeration in his words.

The first time Trump won the White House, he did so as the leader of a white working-class coalition, promising those he would call in his inaugural address “the forgotten men and women” to reverse the “American carnage” brought on by deindustrialization, globalization, and unchecked immigration. The former, and now future, president did not moderate. Opponents condemned his calls for mass deportations as “racist” and his vow to root out the ill-defined “enemy within” as “fascist.”

Those denunciations ultimately had little effect. Not only did Trump maintain his support with the white working class, but he also made significant........

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