President Trump’s triumph Tuesday, as astounding an event as has ever happened in an American election, will be seen as many things — but our first hope is that it will serve as an acquittal by the American people in the legal warfare levied against him by the Democrats these past four years. He won not only the electoral vote but the popular vote, animated by millions who were offended at the violations of due process that Trump has had to face down. 

It is not our intention to suggest that the policies for which he plumped were not part of the victorious equation. One of the things Americans came to understand about Donald Trump, though, is that he is a man of remarkable fortitude. Two days after he announced he would stand for a second term, the Biden administration appointed a special prosecutor to parry the move. Never mind that he’d already been acquitted by a vote of the Senate.

Trump hardly missed a beat. With each legal assault, or humiliation, he soared in the polls. The J6 committee ignored the constitutional prohibition on attainder and went after him in the House. The special prosecutor, Jack Smith, and the D.C. appeals circuit laughed at the notion that some of the counts against him might be for acts covered by immunity. Mr. Smith lost and Trump won in the Supreme Court, sharpening our understanding of presidential power.

Then, in a horrifying episode, a would-be assassin shot him in the ear — upon which Trump stood up, shook off his bodyguards, and shouted defiance. Hollywood couldn’t have confected this, and Americans seemed to come to view it all as its own kind of test of character. Trump himself has suggested that the experience changed him, and we don’t doubt it. An assassination attempt changed Reagan, too, making him humbler and more religious.

One of the libels the Democrats threw at Trump was the idea that a second term might destroy our democracy. Trump, after all, had spoken of retribution. Yet when challenged on that head, Trump said that “my retribution is going to be success. We’re going to make this country successful again, because right now it’s a failing nation. My retribution is going to be success.” It was a glimpse adroitly offered of an exit from the politics of personal destruction.

Our sense is that voters took the point. And why not? As the Biden-Harris administration wore on, the country was beset with war abroad, a border crisis at home, and an economy fueled, if that’s the word, by inflation. It morphed into the opposite of Trump’s own first term, when we weren’t faced with wars, inflation hadn’t hit consumer prices, and an actually successful peace process was under way in the Middle East.

This is the context in which Trump offered a pro-growth combination of tax cuts, tariffs, and deregulation designed to produce jobs and opportunity. “The exit polls show the economy in particular was Mr. Trump’s best issue,” the Wall Street Journal noted in its own editorial on Trump’s victory, adding: “No matter the media lectures that the economy is great, voters who depend on wages and salaries (not assets) felt differently.”

To be sure the economic challenges facing Trump when he returns to the White House are daunting. One of the most urgent challenges will be to tackle the flood of federal red ink. The national debt is projected to soar to “a record 106 percent of GDP by 2028,” our M.J. Koch reports. The need to address it is underscored by the fact that Congress set the debt ceiling’s return for January 2, 2025 — and he could be facing a House controlled by the Democrats.

In his victory remarks, the 47th president-elect declared that “it’s time to put the divisions of the past four years behind us, It’s time to unite.” That’s a message to make stick — from a president who now has an opportunity to fulfill the vows that hoisted him to the White House in 2016. Second chances are rare in presidential politics, but Trump has won one on the merits and on a mandate to make, as he famously puts it, America great again.