L J Ravi 
Washington : Donald J. Trump’s chief pollster, Tony Fabrizio, had seen just about everything in his three races working for the controversy-stoking former president. But even he seemed to be bracing for bad news.
Mr. Trump had just debated Vice President Kamala Harris, repeatedly taking her bait, wasting time litigating his crowd sizes and spreading baseless rumors about pet-eating immigrants.
Mr. Fabrizio had predicted to colleagues that brutal media coverage of Mr. Trump’s performance in a debate watched by 67 million people would lift Ms. Harris in the polls. He was right about the media coverage but wrong about the rest. His first post-debate poll shocked him: Ms. Harris had gained on some narrow attributes, like likability. But Mr. Trump had lost no ground in the contest.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Mr. Fabrizio said on a call with senior campaign leaders, according to two participants.
It was yet more proof — as if more were needed — of Mr. Trump’s durability over nearly a decade in politics and of his ability to defy the normal laws of gravity.
He overcame seemingly fatal political vulnerabilities — four criminal indictments, three expensive lawsuits, conviction on 34 felony counts, endless reckless tangents in his speeches — and transformed at least some of them into distinct advantages.
How he won in 2024 came down to one essential bet: that his grievances could meld with those of the MAGA movement, and then with the Republican Party, and then with more than half the country. His mug shot became a best-selling shirt. His criminal conviction inspired $100 million in donations in one day. The images of him bleeding after a failed assassination attempt became the symbol of what supporters saw as a campaign of destiny.
“God spared my life for a reason,” he said at his victory speech early Wednesday, adding, “We are going to fulfill that mission together.”
At times, Mr. Trump could be so crude and self-indulgent on the stump that aides wondered if he were engaged in an absurdist experiment to test how much aberrant behavior voters would tolerate.
NNA Editors’ Picks
But Mr. Trump successfully harnessed the anger and frustration millions of Americans felt about some of the very institutions and systems he will soon control as the country’s 47th president. Voters unhappy with the nation’s direction turned him into a vessel for their rage.
“The elites cannot come to grips with how alienated they are from the country,” said Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, an informal adviser to the former and now future president.
But more than just broad societal forces were at play. His victory owed, in part, to strategic decisions by a campaign operation that was his most stable yet and was held together for nearly four years by a veteran operative, Susie Wiles — even if the candidate himself was, for much of 2024, as erratic as ever.
The Trump tea for a final ad blitz, abandoning a traditional ground game to turn out its voters and relying instead on a relatively small paid staff buttressed by volunteers and outsiders, including the world’s richest man, Elon Musk. Mr. Trump relentlessly pushed to define Ms. Harris not just as radically liberal but as foolishly out of the mainstream. The inspiration, his advisers said, was a memorable Nixon-era saying by the Republican strategist Arthur Finkelstein: “A crook” — or, in Mr. Trump’s case, a convict — “always beats a fool.”
Mr. Trump’s aides gambled on mobilizing men, though men vote less than women, and it paid off. And they gambled on trying to cut into Democrats’ typically big margins among Black and Latino voters, and that paid off, too.
