Donald Trump wins 2024 election: News, analysis, and explainers

In 2004, life as a Democrat was pretty bleak.

The party lost a presidential election to George W. Bush for a second time. Adding insult to injury, Democratic nominee John Kerry lost the popular vote. The party was seemingly losing ground, after having won the popular vote in 2000 and losing the Electoral College thanks only to an exceedingly close (and contested) loss in Florida. It was a different world back then, but Democrats sensed that voters resoundingly had rejected what they had to offer — even while running against a Republican candidate broadly considered vulnerable.

Donald Trump announced Thursday that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would be his nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), setting the stage for a potentially radical remaking of the nation’s health care.

Kennedy’s nomination was not a surprise. Last month, Kennedy said Trump had promised him control of the department and its many subagencies, which include the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS), and others. Trump himself pledged during the campaign to let Kennedy “go wild on health.”

President-elect Donald Trump has begun naming members to his White House team, offering a strong signal about the direction he’ll take on important issues, including foreign policy, immigration, and climate.

Trump’s picks have included multiple immigration hardliners, underscoring his commitment to proposals like mass deportation, as well as a number of staffers who hold adversarial stances toward China and Iran and supportive positions of Israel. Notably, most of Trump’s selections are longtime loyalists who could put up less opposition to his policy proposals than staffers did during his first administration. And he’s selected a number of people who have little to no experience in the subject matter they’ll be overseeing.

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Since the war in Gaza began, the threat of a protest vote — in which voters would choose to abstain from the presidential election or vote for third-party candidates who had no shot of winning — hung over Democrats’ heads because of President Joe Biden’s unconditional support for Israel and its right-wing government. When Vice President Kamala Harris became the nominee, her lack of willingness to distance herself from Biden on this issue didn’t help alleviate that threat. Meanwhile, Donald Trump accused Democrats of not being sufficiently pro-Israel.

President-elect Donald Trump is pushing for the next Senate majority leader to allow recess appointments, which would allow him to install some officials without Senate confirmation.

Typically, the Senate must approve presidential nominations for high-level posts, including cabinet positions, ambassadorships, and inspector general jobs, in a process outlined in the US Constitution. This procedure is meant to be a check on presidential power — a way of ensuring officials directly elected by citizens can guard against the appointment of unqualified or corrupt personnel.

Democrats have faced a bitterly disappointing defeat, and the debate is on about why that happened.

Amid the opportunistic finger-pointing and evidence-free assertions that Vice President Kamala Harris could have won if only she had done this or that, there is a genuine search for explanations about what happened. The answer Democrats find most persuasive could greatly influence the party’s direction as it tries to win again.

A Vox reader writes: “Trump can’t run for a third term, right? (Yes, we know what the Constitution says ... but he really, truly can’t run for a third term, right??)”

President-elect Donald Trump has won his second — and final — term in office.

The relationship between Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has always been, to put it mildly, a little complicated. In 2019, there was the “perfect phone call,” in which Trump allegedly leveraged US aid to Ukraine to pressure Zelenskyy to investigate Hunter Biden. And the more recent awkward meeting in New York during the 2024 presidential campaign in which Trump talked about his good relationship with Vladimir Putin in front of the man whom the Russian leader had reportedly tried to kill.

But Trump has also expressed some grudging admiration for Zelenskyy, a fellow TV star-turned-politician who has demonstrated he knows how to close a deal. “I think Zelenskyy is the greatest salesman in history — every time he comes into the country, he walks away with $60 billion,” Trump said at a rally in September.

In the weeks after Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, many top tech leaders found themselves at a meeting in Trump Tower, frowning and quite obviously full of dread. Now, the same executives sound enthusiastic when they say they’re looking forward to working with the next president.

After Tuesday’s election, the congratulations from the tech elite to Trump came in fast. The day after he secured the White House, everyone from Tim Cook to Mark Zuckerberg posted their well wishes for Trump’s second term. Even Jeff Bezos weighed in, hailing Trump’s “extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory.” This, from a man who has been in more than one public feud with Trump.

There is no sugarcoating it: Donald Trump’s victory on Tuesday is a major setback for many antipoverty policies. With a Republican majority in the Senate (and likely in the House as well), there’s little doubt that spending cuts will be up for debate, and tried-and-failed ideas like imposing work requirements on welfare recipients will be back on the table.

Throughout the campaign, Trump promised that he wouldn’t cut Social Security. But his proposed changes to the program — like cutting taxes on Social Security benefits — would likely result in reducing benefits sooner rather than later. Other tax-cutting ideas, like his “No Tax on Tips” plan, would likely be a bigger payoff for big businesses than for workers because it could push wages down.

After winning the 2024 election in part due to high inflation early in President Joe Biden’s term, President-elect Donald Trump wants to enact policies that would lead to the very same kind of inflation that doomed Democrats.

Though Trump inherits a strong economy and low inflation, he’s proposed a 10 to 20 percent tariff on all imports, and a 60 percent tariff on all imports from China. The Budget Lab at Yale estimates that this policy alone could raise consumer prices by as much as 5.1 percent and could diminish US economic growth by up to 1.4 percent. An analysis by the think tank Peterson Institute for International Economics, finds that Trump’s tariffs, when combined with some of his other proposals such as mass deportation, would lead to inflation rising between 6 and 9.3 percent.

In the immediate aftermath of the 2024 presidential election, Democrats and liberals have been grasping at reasons for Vice President Kamala Harris’s loss to former (and soon-to-be again) President Donald Trump. Some analysis suggests that Harris simply couldn’t escape Joe Biden’s unpopularity and his late exit from the race.

“The biggest onus of this loss is on President Biden,” said Andrew Yang, who ran against Biden in 2020 and endorsed Harris. “If he had stepped down in January instead of July, we may be in a very different place.”

In the wake of President-elect Donald Trump’s 2024 victory, online misinformation claiming the election was rigged in his favor has proliferated — including theories about missing votes and voting machine dysfunction.

As was the case with election denialism following the 2020 election, these conspiracy theories about election fraud are false. According to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the federal body that oversees risks to election systems, there haven’t been signs of meddling or hacks on machines affecting the race outcome.

President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to launch a mass deportation program starting on day one of his second term. That could have devastating consequences for the millions of people residing in “mixed status” households: those in which both undocumented immigrants and people with permanent legal status reside.

Trump has said he would rely on an 18th-century law to carry out mass deportations and that he intends to first target “known or suspected gang members, drug dealers, or cartel members.” Vice President-elect JD Vance has set an initial goal of 1 million deportations. A representative for the Trump transition team did not respond to a request for comment about whether any exceptions would be made for undocumented immigrants who have lived in the US for a long time or who have immediate family here, including US-citizen spouses and children.

As leaders scramble to assign blame for Donald Trump’s decisive win on Tuesday, this round of post-election finger-pointing differs markedly from recent cycles. Unlike past elections with narrow margins, Trump’s likely popular vote victory and his uniform swing across states and counties defy simple explanations like a racist electorate or discontent over President Joe Biden’s foreign policy. Even chalking the election entirely up to inflation seems rather convenient and incomplete.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, who earned about 6,000 fewer votes in his reelection bid than Kamala Harris did in Vermont, came out on Wednesday with a statement blasting the Democratic Party for abandoning working-class people, who appeared to break overwhelmingly for Trump. This critique quickly gained traction, with commentators arguing that Harris and the Democrats had lost touch with working people’s needs, prioritizing issues like democracy and abortion rights too much.

Donald Trump is once again the president-elect of the United States, a development that promises to profoundly affect the world order.

During his first term in office, from 2017 to 2021, Trump’s foreign policy was protectionist and transactional; he cast doubt on the utility of alliances, alienated partners, and attempted complex diplomacy on his own. At times, Trump’s methods strained US relationships and made the US the target of ridicule.

In 2020, when Joe Biden won the White House, generative AI still looked like a pointless toy, not a world-changing new technology. The first major AI image generator, DALL-E, wouldn’t be released until January 2021 — and it certainly wouldn’t be putting any artists out of business, as it still had trouble generating basic images. The release of ChatGPT, which took AI mainstream overnight, was still more than two years away. The AI-based Google search results that are — like it or not — now unavoidable, would have seemed unimaginable.

In the world of AI, four years is a lifetime. That’s one of the things that makes AI policy and regulation so difficult. The gears of policy tend to grind slowly. And every four to eight years, they grind in reverse, when a new administration comes to power with different priorities.

The Democratic Party lost the presidency to an unpopular, indisciplined authoritarian with a penchant for rambling incoherently about Hannibal Lecter — again.

Despite January 6, the Dobbs decision, and the GOP ticket’s many forays into racial incitement, Americans not only elected Donald Trump on Tuesday, but — by all appearances — gave him a popular mandate: Ballots still need to be tabulated but, as of this writing, Trump is poised to win the popular vote by a hefty margin.

Election night 2024 felt like the sequel to Election 2016: Many of the beats were the same, but the particulars were different. The early returns were ominous, and prospects did not improve from there. I was not as surprised, and yet it affected me as deeply if not more so.

If you are anything like me, you have been trying to hold many different ideas in your head at once these past few days — and you still have a lot of questions. I won’t pretend to have all the answers, because nobody does. But we have collected your questions from the Vox Instagram page, our Explain It to Me inbox, and the Explain It to Me podcast phone line.

As Democrats struggle to come to terms with the results of this week’s election, some young women are looking abroad for inspiration. Women across social media have been exploring an idea called 4B, a protest movement in South Korea that calls for women to boycott men.

“Now I am, how you say this, a ho, but I really want to get behind this 4B movement,” begins one TikToker, who goes on to say she approves of women withholding sex from men. “After this election — where women were pretty much told to their faces that no one gives a shit about them — don’t forget, ladies, we do have power. And you know the kind of power I’m talking about. Giving up our bodies to men is a choice. We don’t have to do this.”

Donald Trump has won a second term in the White House, and if his next administration is anything like his first, he’ll likely further weaken what few legal protections exist for animals.

During his first four years in office, Trump’s Cabinet:

In a key test of public attitudes toward homelessness after the Supreme Court greenlit broader camping bans this past summer, Arizona voters approved a measure that will allow property owners to claim tax refunds if their local governments fail to clear out encampments.

Proposition 312, which passed this week with 58 percent of the vote, was born from a bitter fight in Phoenix over “The Zone,” an area where more than 1,000 homeless people once camped near the state capitol building. It marks conservatives’ latest effort to push local governments toward tougher and less discretionary enforcement of outdoor homelessness. Its success with voters suggests openness to more aggressive enforcement of public camping as cities grapple with their recently affirmed powers.

Elon Musk spent Election Day on X praising men, amplifying anti-immigrant conspiracies, and accusing Democrats of voter fraud. It was all pretty on-brand for the billionaire, who has become one of Donald Trump’s biggest supporters and a one-man misinformation machine. When it was clear early Wednesday morning that Trump would win the presidency, Musk told his followers: “You are the media now.”

A statement like that would have been laughable even a month ago, when estimates showed that X, formerly Twitter, had dropped nearly 80 percent in value since Musk purchased the platform for $44 billion in 2022. Until its transformation into X, the platform was regarded by some as a once-vibrant place on the internet that Musk utterly destroyed. But after Musk spent at least $119 million to get Trump elected and turned his platform into a MAGA megaphone — and then Trump won — the social media site’s real value is starting to take new shape.

The red shift in 2024 was so broad that no one localized issue appeared to tip the election in President-elect Donald Trump’s favor. However, one key factor may have been voters’ widespread dissatisfaction with the economy.

Enduring pessimism about the US economy has puzzled political analysts, given that most major indicators suggest it is strong and that the US has recovered better than other countries from a pandemic-induced slump. Inflation has come down significantly from its peak in June 2022, slowing price hikes for basic goods. The Federal Reserve started cutting interest rates, making borrowing money cheaper. The economy has continued to grow at a solid rate. Unemployment dipped to its lowest level in 54 years in 2023 and stayed within a desirable range.

This story originally appeared in Kids Today, Vox’s newsletter about kids, for everyone. Sign up here for future editions.

My older kid knows this was an election week, but his biggest concern has been his school’s Scholastic Book Fair. My younger kid, who is 2, does not know what an election is.