How did a highly educated prosecutor lose to a convicted megalomaniac?

Donald Trump has achieved what many believed was the impossible – win a second term in a US election as a convicted criminal and edging out a highly educated prosecutor.

As close as the race was, plenty of Trump fans believed all along that the former president would defeat Vice President Kamala Harris, while others remained convinced it wouldn’t happen.

But at around 6am UK time on Wednesday, just as Fox News and Decision Desk HQ projected Trump winning the critical swing state of Pennsylvania, a University of Oxford presidential historian said: ‘It looks like he’s tracking to do the impossible, twice’.

Four and a half hours later, that is exactly what he did.

‘Grover Cleveland had two non-consecutive terms but it’s not like we talk about Grover every day,’ Laura Smith, an assistant teaching professor at Arizona State University, said.

‘I don’t know anyone like Donald Trump.’

Smith, who is British and living in the US, pointed to another piece of American history – Ronald Reagan’s question in the final week before the 1980 presidential election, which he ended up winning. Trump raised the same question in his final string of rallies: ‘Are you better off than you were four years ago?’

‘I even see ads here in Arizona, and I think that resonated especially in North Carolina,’ Smith told the Metro.

‘I think it speaks a lot to the undercurrents of a lot of unresolved, divided issues but probably in the short-term, most people feel like they’re not in a good spot, especially economically.’

Just after midnight, a Democratic National Committee member from Pennsylvania, Sean Meloy, 27, said he still had faith that Harris could win his home state, Michigan and Wisconsin.

But, he said: ‘It would surprise me that so many people were so short-sighted in looking at these two candidates and forgetting or being ignorant of the very glaring problems and vulnerabilities of Donald Trump over an extremely well-qualified woman.’

Meloy, who has been canvassing, knocking on doors and doing political work for two decades, pointed out that Trump is a ‘convicted felon and someone who literally tried to steal an election previously’.

‘I think this is a man who has lied more than any person in modern history and he has told every person what they want to hear and sadly, it seems like people voted for him (thinking) that he is going to deliver whatever their wildest dreams are,’ he told Metro.

‘Even though that wasn’t true from when he was in office and his nature is not to do anything for anyone except himself.

‘A megalomaniac only doing this to engrandise himself, that’s why he was selling watches and shoes and NFTs along the way. (It’s) unheard of to comingle so many special interests.’

Meloy, who is also vice president of political programmes for the LGBTQ+ Victory Fund, said a Harris loss would not be for a lack of credentials or political experience.

‘I think she is one of the most well-qualified candidates we have ever had to run for president,’ he said.

‘However, that was also true for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and I think those two were similar in only one regard, which is really, really disappointing.

‘The level of toxicity and machismo, and faux masculinity for masculinity’s sake, has really infected a lot of folks.’

Trump has received criticism in the past for comments he has made about migrants. He was also the first former president to be indicted and was charged in four criminal cases in five months. He was found liable for sexual abuse. As president, he was impeached.

News about Trump spread beyond the US borders, with leading politicians in other nations criticising him.

The now-UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy previously called him ‘a woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath’ who was a ‘profound threat to the international order’ in a Time magazine in 2018, claims which Trump has previously denied.

Following Trump’s confirmed victory, Lammy said on Wednesday: ‘The UK has no greater friend than the US, with the special relationship being cherished on both sides of the Atlantic for more than 80 years.’

Harris did not have much time, only around 100 days to campaign after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race, Smith noted.

The daughter of an Asian woman and a Black man, Harris came from a middle-class family and became a prosecutor specialising in child abuse cases. As a district attorney, she took on domestic and gun violence and increased the conviction rate to put murderers and rapists in prison. She spent four years as a senator before becoming Biden’s vice president.

‘The attack and maybe one of the sharpest votes for Trump was saying, “well she had four years”,’ Smith said of Harris’ time in the Biden administration.

Smith added that people generally do not pay much attention to vice presidents.

‘She was trapped between the idea of having experience and being anchored, but at the same time (people) not knowing her,’ the presidential historian said.

‘Damned if she did, damned if she didn’t.’

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