Donald Trump’s win is an unmistakable cry of rebellion

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The election of Donald Trump is a shout across the American stage, an unmistakable cry of rebellion, a clear expression of political revolt – and an event, embraced by his loyal base but decried by his ardent opponents, that injects an inimitable character of chaos into the leadership of a country that is in a chaotic search for its character.

Hegel called Napoleon after his triumph at the 1806 Battle of Jena “the world spirit on horseback.” Mr. Trump is the world populist spirit in a red ball cap.

A populist with an elite education, a Manhattan mogul spurned by the grandees of America’s financial capital, a rebel with a fast-changing set of causes, Mr. Trump – the only president with no military or political experience – was once a curiosity, then a phenomenon, and now a political magus.

Donald Trump elected president in a stunning return to the White House

He has pulled off the political trick of the age, perhaps of all of American political history: taking voter rejection, judicial indictment, jury conviction, assassination attempts, and the bitter opposition of the political establishment and moulding them, one by one and with iron determination belied by rambling speeches, into a formidable cultural movement that has changed the nature of the country domestically and likely will transform the profile of the United States globally.

For the first time in a century-and-a-third, a former president will return to the White House he departed in defeat and despair. But the reinstatement of Mr. Trump as president of the United States will not be a reprise of the experience of Grover Cleveland, who in 1893 became the only other chief executive to serve non-consecutive terms.

Though Mr. Trump, full of sound and fury, is the kind of figure that Shakespeare might have conjured – and though the second Trump term almost certainly could be titled “The Tempest” – a line from that drama may not apply. What’s past may not be prologue.

The next act of this reality television star will not be a rerun. The next play by Mr. Trump will not be a golf mulligan.

That’s because the Donald Trump who returns to the White House is angrier and more resentful than the Donald Trump who first entered it in January, 2017. Bloodied but not unbowed, he is freighted with resentment against, among many other forces, those who opposed, impeached, sued, indicted and convicted him. He is shorn of the traditional Republican figures who in many cases restrained or defied him in office.

He is, in short, Trump in full.

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The ironies and contradictions defining the president-elect are manifest and manifold. A president who once led the government is at war with the government. (Bureaucrats beware.) A business executive who became a billionaire has become the sentinel of a movement against the power of corporations. (Apple, Google, Amazon, Meta and others are in his crosshairs.) A man who bellows a message about a return to a past of American greatness has become a relentless critic of the flying buttresses of American postwar greatness. (NATO, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, once unassailable emblems of pride of a nation victorious in wartime and generous in peacetime, are among his targets.)

On the surface, there is no internal logic to the Trump movement. No matter. His jealous critics might repair to Shakespeare again, this time from A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The kind of love that his adherents have for Mr. Trump is “winged Cupid painted blind.” Poets and playwrights have struggled with understanding human love. Historians will long struggle with understanding Trump love.

On the stump and in the voting booth the movement has its own logic: Change the culture. End the ascendancy of the snobbish and foppish. Invade the power centres of the Establishment. Repel the money changers of the economy from their heights.

The implications are vast: Replace Brown Brothers Harriman (where Prescott Bush, a senator, father to George H.W. Bush and grandfather to George W. Bush, was a partner and thus a symbol of the old economic ruling class) at the commanding heights of power with SpaceX and Tesla (identified with Elon Musk, who hurried to Mar-a-Lago to celebrate with Mr. Trump as the polls closed Tuesday). Replace the celebration of immigration to America (praised by the poet Emma Lazarus whose excerpt from the 1883 The New Colossus appears on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty and by John F. Kennedy in a 1958 book called A Nation of Immigrants) with the demonization of immigrants (who, if in the country illegally, now face mass deportation).

Mr. Trump’s campaign began as entertainment. Now the country is entertaining the prospect that the president-elect – who wants to slap tariffs on all imports, who is raising questions about American military and economic aid to Ukraine, and who has promised to “do a lot for Israel” but has said little about civilian casualties in Gaza – will put the country on an entirely different footing.

Whether this election points to a MAGA future or is just the next stage in political-theory gridlock is a matter of conjecture. Why a movement with a conservative streak when it comes to issues of gender has embraced a leader whose vocabulary is punctuated with vulgarities is a matter of constant postulation.

These conditions, these questions, come at a time when research-and-development investment at 3.5 per cent of GNP – the highest in the world except for Israel and South Korea – is actually making America great again, though many Americans have been left behind as the economy has grown. It comes as inflation has been sated even as high prices for gasoline and food have persisted and have been a greater burden on workers and the poor than on those whose portfolios have burgeoned as the stock market has climbed. All this is part of the explanation of the re-ascendancy of the man who will be remembered as both the 45th and the 47th president.