Donald Trump was elected president, capping a remarkable comeback four years after he was voted out of the White House and ushering in a new American leadership likely to test democratic institutions at home and relations abroad.

Trump, 78, recaptured the White House on Wednesday by securing more than the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the presidency, Edison Research projected, following a campaign of dark rhetoric that deepened the polarization in the country.

The former president’s victory in the swing state of Wisconsin pushed him over the threshold.

“America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate,” Trump said early on Wednesday to a roaring crowd of supporters at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in Florida.

Trump’s political career had appeared to be over after his false claims of election fraud led a mob of supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in a failed bid to overturn his 2020 defeat.

But he swept away challengers inside his Republican Party and then beat Democratic candidate Kamala Harris by capitalizing on voter concerns about high prices and what Trump claimed, without evidence, was a rise in crime due to illegal immigration.

Harris did not speak to supporters who had gathered at her alma mater Howard University. Her campaign co-chair, Cedric Richmond, briefly addressed the crowd after midnight, saying Harris would speak publicly later on Wednesday.

“We still have votes to count,” he said.

Republicans won a U.S. Senate majority, but neither party appeared to have an edge in the fight for control of the House of Representatives where Republicans currently hold a narrow majority.

JOBS AND ECONOMY

Voters identified jobs and the economy as the country’s most pressing problem, according to Reuters/Ipsos opinion polls. Many Americans remained frustrated by higher prices even amid record-high stock markets, fast-growing wages and low unemployment. With the administration of President Joe Biden taking much of the blame, a majority of voters said they trusted Trump more than Harris to address the issue.

Hispanics, traditionally Democratic voters, and lower-income households hit hardest by inflation helped fuel Trump’s election victory. His loyal base of rural, white and non-college educated voters again showed up in force.

Trump prevailed despite persistently low approval ratings. Impeached twice, he has been criminally indicted four times and found civilly liable for sexual abuse and defamation. In May, Trump was convicted by a New York jury of falsifying business records to cover up hush money payments to a porn star.

His victory will have major implications for U.S. trade and climate change policies, the war in Ukraine, Americans’ taxes and immigration.

His tariff proposals could spark a fiercer trade war with China and U.S. allies, while his pledges to reduce corporate taxes and implement a spate of new cuts could balloon U.S. debt, economists say.

Trump has promised to launch a mass deportation campaign targeting immigrants in the country illegally.

He has said he wants the authority to fire civil servants he views as disloyal. His opponents fear he will turn the Justice Department and other federal law enforcement agencies into political weapons to investigate perceived enemies.

A second Trump presidency could drive a bigger wedge between Democrats and Republicans on issues such as race, gender, what and how children are taught, and reproductive rights.

HARRIS FALLS SHORT

Vice President Harris fell short in her 15-week sprint as a candidate, failing to galvanize enough support to defeat Trump, who occupied the White House from 2017-2021, or to allay voters’ concerns about the economy and immigration.

Harris had warned that Trump wanted unchecked presidential power and posed a danger to democracy.

Nearly three-quarters of voters say American democracy is under threat, according to Edison Research exit polls, underscoring the polarization in a nation where divisions have only grown starker during a fiercely competitive race.

Trump ran a campaign characterized by apocalyptic language. He called the United States a “garbage can” for immigrants, pledged to save the economy from “obliteration” and cast some rivals as the “enemy within.”

His diatribes were often aimed at migrants, who he said were “poisoning the blood of the country,” or Harris, whom he frequently derided as unintelligent.

Despite legal woes and controversies, Trump is only the second former president to win a second term after leaving the White House. The first was Grover Cleveland, who served two four-year terms starting in 1885 and 1893.

UNPRECEDENTED CAMPAIGN

In May, Trump was convicted by a New York jury of falsifying business records to cover up hush money payments to a porn star. Two months later, a would-be assassin’s bullet grazed his right ear during a campaign rally, exacerbating fears about political violence. Another assassination attempt was thwarted in September at his Florida golf course. Trump blamed both attempts on what he claimed was the heated rhetoric of Democrats including Harris.

Barely eight days after the July shooting, Biden, 81, dropped out of the race, finally bowing to weeks of pressure from his fellow Democrats after a poor performance during his debate with Trump called into question his mental acuity and the viability of his reelection bid.

Biden’s decision to step aside turned the contest into a sprint, as Harris raced to mount her own campaign in a matter of weeks, rather than the typical months. Her rise to the top of the ticket reenergized despondent Democrats, and she raised more than $1 billion in less than three months while erasing what had been a solid Trump lead in opinion polls.

Harris’ financial advantage was partly countered by the intervention of the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, who poured more than $100 million into a super PAC mobilizing Trump voters and used his social media site X to amplify pro-Trump messaging.

As the campaign drew to a close, Harris increasingly focused on warning Americans about the perils of reelecting Trump and offered an olive branch to disaffected Republicans.

She highlighted remarks from several former Trump officials, including his former chief of staff and retired Marine Corps General John Kelly, who described Trump as a “fascist.”

Trump’s victory will broaden the fissures in American society, given his false claims of election fraud, anti-immigrant rhetoric and demonization of his political opponents, said Alan Abramowitz, a political science professor at Emory University who studies voter behavior and party politics.

A TRUMP SECOND TERM

Trump has vowed to reshape the executive branch, including firing civil servants he views as disloyal and using federal law enforcement agencies to investigate his political enemies, violating what has been a longstanding policy of keeping such agencies independent.

During his first term, Trump’s most extreme demands were sometimes stymied by his own cabinet members, most notably when Vice President Mike Pence refused to block Congress from accepting the 2020 election results.

Once the 2024 vote is certified by Congress on Jan. 6, Trump and his vice president, U.S. Senator JD Vance, are due to take office on Inauguration Day, Jan. 20. Throughout his two-year-long campaign, Trump has signaled he will prioritize personal fealty in staffing his administration. He promised roles in his administration to Musk and former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., both avid supporters.

-Reuters

Imo State of Nigeria women in the United States under the auspices of Imo Women Elite Club have sent good wish message to the Imo State Congress of America ahead of their 2023 Annual Convention holding in Houston Texas from 20 to 23 July.

According to a media release issued by Evangelist Evelyn Childs, the public relations officer of the Imo Women Elite Club (IWEC), are in forefront of advancing the progress of the female gender.

Through their foundation, they have been supporting women and girls in navigating mental and health problems.

A deep-sea submersible carrying five people on a voyage to the century-old wreck of the Titanic was found in pieces from a “catastrophic implosion” that killed everyone aboard, the U.S. Coast Guard said on Thursday, ending a multinational five-day search for the vessel.

A robotic diving vehicle deployed from a Canadian ship discovered a debris field from the submersible Titan on Thursday morning on the seabed some 1,600 feet (488 meters) from the bow of the Titanic, 2 1/2 miles (4 km) beneath the surface, in a remote corner of the North Atlantic, U.S. Coast Guard Rear Admiral John Mauger told reporters.

The Titan, operated by the U.S.-based company OceanGate Expeditions, had been missing since it lost contact with its surface support ship on Sunday morning about an hour, 45 minutes into what should have been a two-hour dive to the world’s most famous shipwreck.

Five major fragments of the 22-foot (6.7-meter) Titan were located in the debris field left from its disintegration, including the vessel’s tail cone and two sections of the pressure hull, Coast Guard officials said. No mention was made of whether human remains were sighted.

“The debris field here is consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vehicle,” Mauger said.

Even before the Coast Guard’s press conference, OceanGate issued a statement saying there were no survivors among the five men aboard the Titan, including the company’s founder and chief executive officer, Stockton Rush, who was piloting the Titan.

The four others were British billionaire and explorer Hamish Harding, 58; Pakistani-born businessman Shahzada Dawood, 48, and his 19-year-old son, Suleman, both British citizens; and French oceanographer and renowned Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77, who had visited the wreck dozens of times.

“These men were true explorers who shared a distinct spirit of adventure, and a deep passion for exploring and protecting the world’s oceans,” the company said. “Our hearts are with these five souls and every member of their families during this tragic time.”

Search teams and support personnel from the U.S., Canada, France and Britain had spent days scanning thousands of square miles of open seas with planes and ships for any sign of the Titan.

Intense worldwide media coverage of the search largely overshadowed the aftermath of a far greater maritime disaster stemming from the wreck of a migrant vessel off the coast of Greece last week, killing hundreds of people

SOUNDS FROM THE DEEP

Mauger said it was too early to tell when Titan met its fate. Search teams had sonar buoys in the water for more than three days in the area without detecting any loud, violent noise that would have been generated when the submersible imploded, Mauger said.

But the position of the debris field relatively close the shipwreck and the time frame of the last communication with the Titan seemed to suggest the failure occurred near the end of its descent on Sunday.

The U.S. Navy separately acknowledged that an analysis of its own acoustic data had detected “an anomaly consistent with an implosion or explosion” near the submersible’s location when its communications were lost.

“While not definitive, this information was immediately shared” with commanders of the search mission, a senior Navy official said in a statement first quoted by the Wall Street Journal.

The Journal, citing unnamed U.S. defense officials, said the sound was picked up by a top-secret system designed to detect enemy submarines.

In an interview with Reuters on Thursday, filmmaker James Cameron, who directed the Oscar-winning movie “Titanic” and has ventured to the wreck in submersibles himself, said he learned of the acoustic findings within a day, and knew what it meant.

“I sent emails to everybody I know and said we’ve lost some friends. The sub had imploded. It’s on the bottom in pieces right now. I sent that out Monday morning,” he recounted.

Sonar buoys dropped by aircraft had picked up some sounds on Tuesday and Wednesday that temporarily offered hope that the Titan was still intact and that its occupants were alive and trying to communicate by banging on the hull.

But officials said analysis of the sound was inconclusive and that the noises probably emanated from something else.

“There doesn’t appear to be any connection between the noises and the location on the sea floor,” Mauger said on Thursday.

REMOTE-CONTROLLED VEHICLES

Robotic craft on the seabed will continue to gather evidence, Mauger said, but it was not clear whether recovering the victims’ remains will be possible given the nature of the accident and extreme conditions at those depths.

“We will begin to demobilize personnel and vessels from the scene over the course of the next 24 hours,” the admiral said.

The search had grown increasingly desperate on Thursday, when the submersible’s estimated 96-hour air supply had been expected to run out if the Titan were still intact, a countdown that proved irrelevant.

The RMS Titanic, which struck an iceberg and sank during its maiden voyage in 1912, killing more than 1,500 people aboard, lies about 900 miles (1,450 km) east of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and 400 miles (640 km) south of St. John’s, Newfoundland.

The undersea expedition to the wreck, which OceanGate has been operating since 2021, cost $250,000 per person, according to the company’s website.

Questions about Titan’s safety were raised in 2018 during a symposium of submersible industry experts and in a lawsuit by OceanGate’s former head of marine operations, which was settled later that year.

The sweeping search covered more than 10,000 square miles of ocean. On Thursday, the deployment of two specialized deep-sea robot vehicles expanded the search farther into the ocean’s depths, where immense pressure and pitch-black darkness complicated the mission.

The fate of the tourist submersible captured global attention in part due to the mythology surrounding the Titanic. The “unsinkable” British passenger liner has inspired both nonfiction and fiction accounts for a century, including the blockbuster 1997 “Titanic” movie, which rekindled popular interest in the story.

-Reuters