By late January 2021, just days into Donald Trump’s unhappy new life as a former president, his world had shrunk to a size he could not abide.
Self-exiled in Florida as a twice-impeached semi-pariah, he golfed and glowered, boiling over his 2020 defeat and still refusing to acknowledge its legitimacy.
His social media bullhorns had been silenced after Jan. 6, with Twitter citing “the risk of further incitement of violence.” His circle had dwindled to a smattering of junior aides, straining to keep him on the fairways and away from the television.
“Get the pool,” Trump instructed at one point, referring to the hive of reporters who had trailed him daily as president. “I want to make a statement.” He was told that he did not have one anymore.
By late February, Trump had waited long enough. In his first public appearance as a newly private citizen, he accepted an invitation to Orlando for a conference of right-wing activists.
“Do you miss me yet?” he asked, his arms splayed wide as if waiting to be hugged.
It had been five weeks. Outside of that room, most Americans did not seem to miss him much at all.
Now, less than four years later, Trump’s arc back to power is complete — an extraordinary reversal carried off by a man who never especially changed, never accepted the reality of his 2020 loss, never stopped understanding the core of his own rampaging appeal, never doubted that he could bulldoze anyone in his way.
Day after day, his team’s decision-making revolved principally around what he wanted, what would soothe and sate him. And his instincts, as ever, were guided by raw impulses, a tendency toward race-baiting and near-boundless risk tolerance.
“I am who I am,” he told anxious donors privately last summer)
Yet if Trump’s nine-lives life can feel divinely fated to his allies — transcending scandal, felony convictions, two attempts to assassinate him — what becomes clear in a close accounting of Trump’s trajectory since 2021 is that none of this was inevitable.
His path back to Washington was the product of foresight and chance, brazen calculation and Trump’s intuitive political skills amid almost unfathomable campaign volatility.
As much as anything, it required figures at every rung of American civic and political life making choices that helped deliver Trump to this point.
Republican senators acquitted him after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, even as some seemed to hope that he would be sidelined.
The authorities pursued him and brought four criminal cases against him, one of which led to his conviction on 34 felony counts, but their actions only deepened his base’s attachment to its leader.
Donors, conservative media titans and social media executives determined, eventually, that opposing Trump was unsustainable. The Democrats initially stuck by an unpopular, visibly ageing incumbent.
And the voters, appraising it all, saw it fit to rehire Trump.
He has heaped praise on authoritarian leaders like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, whom he said were “at the top of their game, whether you like it or not”.
He has talked about trying to silence critics in the press. Just days before the election, he also made comments that implied he wouldn’t mind if members of the media were killed.
And he has continued to amplify conspiracy theories and unfounded claims of election fraud – even though the election ultimately led to his victory.
Now, voters will find how much of what he said during the campaign was just loose talk – “Trump being Trump”. And remember: it’s not just Americans who have to confront the reality of a second Trump term.
The rest of the world will now discover what “America First” really means. From the global economic consequences of 20% tariffs that he has proposed on US imports to the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East that he has vowed to end – regardless of which side wins.
Donald Trump did not manage to implement all of his plans in his first term. Now with a second mandate and significantly less encumbered, America, and the world, will see what he can really do.
