Donald Trump has won the 2024 presidential election, the Associated Press projects, capping a remarkable comeback from his electoral defeat four years ago and the legal cases that have threatened to end his political career and potentially send him to prison. His victory is an affirmation of the alternate vision of America he has pitched to voters since his stunning rise to political prominence nearly a decade ago.

Even as the economy and markets recovered and hit new heights under president Joe Biden, Trump reached out to Americans who felt that institutions had failed them. He seized on a chaotic southern border as emblematic of Washington’s enduring dysfunction. But the stakes were bigger even than that, he said. In his telling, Biden and vice-president Kamala Harris are just the latest standard-bearers of an American elite that is permanently set against him and his supporters.