The story of how Trump went from diminished ex-president to a...

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

71% : While aides described him as confident, Trump watched the TVs that had been set up in the ballroom intensely as he mingled.
64% : When Trump arrived at the Republican National Convention to formally accept his party's nomination for the second time weeks later, he seemed unstoppable.
62% : "Trump had appeared to be on a glide path to victory.
61% : "Trump is able to just chat," he said.
54% : With his commanding victory over Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump achieved a comeback that seemed unimaginable after the 2020 election ended with his supporters violently storming the Capitol after he refused to accept his defeat.
54% : Trump paid a visit to McDonald's, where he donned an apron, manned the fry station and served supporters through the drive-through window.
52% : After Fox News had called the race, Trump emerged, flanked by campaign staff and family.
51% : "They came from all quarters: union, non-union, African American, Hispanic American, Asian American, Arab American, Muslim American," Trump in his victory speech.
48% : "The campaign decided early that it would focus much of its efforts on low-propensity voters - people who rarely turn out to the polls and are more likely to get their news from non-traditional sources.To reach them, Trump began a podcast blitz, appearing with hosts who are popular with young men, including Adin Ross, Theo Von and Joe Rogan.
47% : Clips of those appearances racked up hundreds of millions of views on platforms like TikTok, which Trump embraced, despite having tried to previously ban the app at the White House.
46% : We will be back in some form," Trump told supporters at Joint Base Andrews, where he'd arranged a 21-gun salute as part of a military send-off before boarding Air Force One.
45% : "Trump received another boost when the International Brotherhood of Teamsters declined to endorse either candidate, citing a lack of consensus among its 1.3 million members.
45% : Still, Trump continued what felt, at times, like self-sabotage.
44% : "Trump had entered the general election after sweeping the GOP primaries and routing a crowded field of candidates.
42% : "I didn´t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black," Trump said of the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, who had attended a historically Black college and served as a member of the Congressional Black Caucus.
41% : The performance was so unhinged that Wiles was spotted coming out to stare at Trump as he spoke.
40% : Trump, onstage the next day, seemed to acknowledge their efforts as he repeated a familiar complaint about how he´s not allowed to call women "beautiful" anymore, and then asked that it be struck from the record - saying, "So I´m allowed to do that, aren´t I, Susan Wiles?"As his top aides huddled upstairs in his office at Mar-a-Lago, Trump spent much of election night holding court with friends and club members as well as Musk and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. - leaders of a new Make America Great Again majority that bears little resemblance to the Republican Party of old.
36% : Trump, the 78-year-old former president, would be the candidate of change - and one who had been tested.
35% : But yet again Trump caught a break.
34% : But the event - which Trump had talked of for years - was derailed long before he even took the stage as a series of pre-show speakers delivered vile, crude and racist insults, including a comedian who called Puerto Rico "a floating pile of garbage.
33% : Jaden Wurn, 20, a student at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania who was casting his ballot for Trump, said he was drawn to the former president in part because of his sense of humor.
32% : In one particularly hostile appearance, Trump questioned the racial identity of the first woman of color to serve as vice president and to lead a major-party ticket before the National Association of Black Journalists.
32% : While much of the campaign's messaging centered on the economy and immigration, Trump also tried to court voters with giveaways, promising to end taxes on tips, on overtime pay and on Social Security benefits.
31% : After the gunman had been killed, Trump stood, surrounded by Secret Service agents, his face streaked by blood, and raised his fist in the air - shouting "Fight!
29% : If you want to make somebody iconic, try to kill him," said Roger Stone, a longtime Republican operative who has known Trump for 45 years and was pardoned by the former president.
28% : Though Trump had left office with a dismal approval rating, that number had ticked up considerably in the years that followed, amid concerns over high prices and the influx of migrants who entered the country illegally after Biden relaxed restrictions.
28% : Days earlier, Trump had gone to the majority Arab American city of Dearborn, Michigan, for a campaign stop.
26% : In a scene that would have seemed unthinkable eight years ago, Trump - the man who called for "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims" entering the country and later perused targeted travel bans - appeared onstage at his last rally of the campaign with Amer Ghalib, the Democratic, Arab American mayor of Hamtramck, Michigan.
25% : She spent much of the final stretch of the campaign reverting to Biden´s strategy of casting Trump as a fundamental threat to democracy.
24% : But the change sent Trump into a tailspin.
22% : In the years that followed, Trump was widely blamed for Republican losses, indicted four times, convicted on 34 felony counts, ruled to have inflated his assets in a civil fraud trial and found liable for sexual abuse.
21% : But Trump managed to turn his legal woes into fuel that channeled voters' anger.
19% : "Trump was livid, angry that the event had been overshadowed by vetting failures and he was being attacked for something he hadn't said.
14% : "Trump quickly seized on the gaffe, coming up with the idea of hiring a garbage truck to ride in.

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