Donald Trump touted his ability to "get away with it" as a defining theme of his life story when he first ran for president in 2016 – boasting that he could shoot someone on New York's Fifth Avenue without losing a single vote. Fast-forward eight years and the United States of America's incoming 47th president looks like Nostradamus, winning the keys to the White House on Wednesday despite incredible odds. He is the most controversial man in the country, narrowly avoided being killed in an assassination attempt, and at 78 will become the oldest person to take the Oval Office in US history.
And that's before throwing in the fact that he's out on bail in three criminal jurisdictions and fighting gigantic civil penalties for sexual assault and fraud. Despite victory, he faces sentencing in just a few weeks on nearly three-dozen felonies related to his 2016 presidential campaign. Yet in defeating Democrat Kamala Harris, Trump has once more shown he can defy all political and legal gravity.
Many thought this time he wouldn't manage. He'd closed out November of last year with a 47.4 percent average in opinion polls – a number that only shifted by one point upward in the intervening year.
Far from moving to the center, he continued to publicly praise foreign dictators, while threatening fellow US Citizens with military reprisals. He re-upped his once unprecedented, now trademark, claims that Democrats were trying to rig the election against him. Trump's longest-serving chief-of-.