In Tuesday’s election against Democrat Hillary Clinton, Trump is making his first run for public office. Trump called it a movement, not a campaign.
He drew enthusiastic crowds to rallies where people cheered him for “just saying what everybody’s thinking.” Critics labeled him misogynistic, ill-informed, uncouth, unpresidential, a racist, a hypocrite, a demagogue and a sexual predator, all accusations he denied.
It took Trump, 70, little more than 10 months to vanquish 16 other candidates and become the first major party nominee since General Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s to have no government experience. He drew a record number of votes in primary contests, creating a rift in the party.
Then he squared off against Clinton in a race marked by controversies that included upheaval in his staff, charges he had groped women, and his claim, never supported, that Clinton and the media had rigged the election against him.
He shocked many by saying he might not accept the election result if he lost, repudiating a US tradition of peaceful government transition. He said that as president he would investigate Clinton for her use of email while secretary of state. He vowed to send her to jail.
His campaign took a scandalous turn in October with the release of a 2005 video in which Trump, unaware he was being recorded, told a reporter he liked to kiss women without invitation and could grab them by the genitals without recriminations.
Gloom over AmericaThroughout his campaign Trump described a dark America that had been knocked to its knees by China, Mexico, Russia and Islamic State. The American dream was dead, he said.
Trump said he would make America great again through the force of his personality, offering vague plans to win economic concessions from China, to build a wall on the southern US border to keep out undocumented immigrants and to make Mexico pay for it.
He used Twitter as a weapon, firing off insults and mockery at those who offended him, including “Crooked Hillary” and Republican rivals “Little Marco” Rubio, Jeb “Low Energy” Bush and “Lyin’ Ted” Cruz.
As of late October, The New York Times had counted 282 people and things he had insulted on Twitter since declaring his candidacy.
Hillary Clinton has one of the strongest resumes of anyone ever to run for US president, with stints as first lady, senator and secretary of state, but she is also a polarising figure and a Washington insider with decades of political baggage.
Should Democrat Clinton, 69, defeat Republican Donald Trump, 70, in Tuesday’s election, she would become the first woman elected US president, having already been the only first lady to win elected office and the first woman nominated for president by a major US party.
Clinton entered the 2016 race as her party’s odds-on favorite, but was perceived as an establishment figure and the ultimate insider at a time when voters seemed enamored with outsiders.
For decades Clinton has battled conservatives and Republican adversaries and weathered controversies including her husband Bill Clinton’s infidelity, a failed Republican effort to remove him from office, investigations into past business dealings and her use of a private email server as secretary of state.
Many Democrats back her for championing women’s rights at home and abroad, social justice and access to healthcare, but opinion polls show a majority of US voters do not trust her.
Against Trump, she portrayed her candidacy as a bulwark against a unique threat that she said the real estate developer posed to American democracy.
‘What to make of me’A mistrust of rivals and the media has long prompted Clinton to keep her guard up.
“The truth is, through all these years of public service, the ‘service’ part has always come easier to me than the ‘public’ part,” Clinton said in accepting the 2016 Democratic nomination. “I get it that some people just don’t know what to make of me.”
Republicans have accused Clinton of breaking the law while corresponding through a private email server as secretary of state. In July, FBI Director James Comey called Clinton “extremely careless” in her handling of classified information by email, but Obama’s Justice Department accepted his recommendation not to bring criminal charges.
The controversy flared again on October 28, 11 days before the election, when Comey told US lawmakers the FBI was investigating a new trove of emails as part of its probe.
On Sunday, Comey said the FBI found nothing in those emails to change the agency’s July decision not to bring charges against Clinton, lifting a cloud over her campaign just two days before the election.