Election Night Ends With Trump Victory, Surging Markets

Today on the Big Take: Donald Trump has been elected the 47th president of the United States. The so-called Trump Trade is surging. What’s next?

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In a stunning political comeback, Donald Trump has been elected the 47th president of the United States. Just before 2:30 on Wednesday morning, he took the stage at his campaign headquarters in Mar-a-Lago, heralding the “greatest political movement of all time” after Vice President Kamala Harris’ path to the Oval Office had all but evaporated.

On today’s Big Take podcast, Bloomberg’s Wendy Benjaminson joins host Sarah Holder to break down how Election Day played out, the surge of the so-called Trump Trade, and what we can expect from a second Trump term.Listen and follow The Big Take on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcastsTerminal clients: click here to subscribe.Here is a lightly edited transcript of the conversation:

Sarah Holder:  At around 2:30 on Wednesday morning, Donald Trump took the stage at his campaign headquarters in Mar-a-Lago to claim victory in the US presidential election.

Donald Trump: Look what happened. Is this crazy? But it’s a political victory that our country has never seen before, nothing like this. I want to thank the American people for the extraordinary honor of being elected your 47th president and your 45th president.

Holder: Earlier, as the campaign watch party for Vice President Kamala Harris wound down at her alma mater Howard University, her campaign co-chair Cedric Richmond, briefly addressed the crowd.

Cedric Richmond: You won’t hear from the vice president tonight, but you will hear from her tomorrow.

Holder: When Trump spoke – alongside his family, inner circle, and running mate JD Vance, he’d already secured 267 of the 270 electoral college votes he needed, clinching wins in the key battleground states of Georgia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. And at 5:30 a.m., Trump was declared the projected winner of Wisconsin’s 10 electoral college votes, bringing his total to 277. As the results came into focus, markets reacted and the so-called Trump Trade surged. Bitcoin spiked. The dollar posted its biggest gain against major currencies since 2020. Clean energy took a hit and treasury bonds tumbled. Today on the show: How Election Day played out, reactions from around the world, and what we can expect from a second Trump term. I’m Sarah Holder, and this is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. It’s 4 a.m. in Washington, DC. I’m joined by Bloomberg senior Washington editor Wendy Benjaminson. So Wendy, for people waking up today and catching up, what happened overnight?

Wendy Benjaminson: Donald Trump has won the presidency. It was not as close as we expected it to be.

Holder: Well, Wendy, how does this year’s Trump win compared to his path to victory in 2016?

Benjaminson: Well, it’s not that dissimilar. He took all of the South, he took a large swath of the Midwest, the Plain States, and this time again, he managed to break through that so-called blue wall. I think we’re going to have to rename that now. Because, in 2016, Hillary Clinton failed to get all of the Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, that industrial blue wall the Democrats have to win, and it appears that Donald Trump succeeded in that blue wall.

Holder: What was Trump able to do this campaign cycle that he failed to do in 2020?

Benjaminson: Well, this is one of those weird Donald Trump can get away with stuff sort of elections. He fared far better with Hispanic voters than he did in 2016 or 2020. And remember in 2016, one of his famous lines was Mexico was sending us their criminals and rapists. And a lot of Hispanic voters took offense to that. The Sunday before, October 27th, he held a rally at Madison Square Garden where a comedian called Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage. And yet he fared far better according to exit polls with Latino voters than he ever has. 

Holder: That didn’t seem to matter in the way that people thought it might.

Benjaminson: Right. And remember, Donald Trump also won — this time against 2016 with 34 felony convictions, a civil claim, holding him responsible for rape, appointing Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe versus Wade and a number of other comments that he’s made or, or proposals that he’s put forward that seem anathema to most Americans, and yet here we are. And while the gender gap and reproductive rights were the issues that were going to push her over the top, it failed to materialize against the popular support that Donald Trump seems to have had. 

Holder: You mentioned some of these issues that didn’t seem to phase voters when it came to Donald Trump. But let’s talk about some of the issues that did decide this election. We’ve been talking all election season about the polls, including the Bloomberg News/Morning Consult polls, that showed that voters considered the economy their number one issue. Abortion also ranked highly, immigration. What do we know at this point about how those issues specifically impacted the results we saw tonight?

Benjaminson: Donald Trump, he pinned the economy, the post-COVID economy, even though it has recovered by all measures, he pinned that on Joe Biden and by extension Kamala Harris. He kept doing that over and over again. Even though his rhetoric on immigration was authoritarian, talking about deporting millions of people, closing the border, building the wall, all those sort of things. Voters want a secure border. And he talked about it constantly, even down to the falsehoods about Haitian immigrants eating cats in Springfield, Ohio. It all spoke to voters’ deep fears about the other, in quotes, coming in. Kamala Harris has talked a little about immigration, saying that she would sign the bill that Donald Trump killed last year in Congress. She talked about a caring economy and opportunity economy, but a lot of the time, the Democrats focused on just how awful Donald Trump is. And people who think he’s awful already think he’s awful. The people— then there are people who think he’s an awful person, but they like his policies. And then there’s the people who actually don’t think he’s awful. “Donald Trump is awful” is now a proven two-time losing strategy, and yet the Democrats kept doing that over and over again, and here we are.

Holder: Well, what about Trump’s economic policies attracted voters? And how much are we going to see the results?

Benjaminson: Well that’s going to be the big question, Sarah, because his economic policies, he promised to offer, he offered so many tax cuts that if every single one of them were enacted, I’m not even sure the US government could function because there just wouldn’t be enough money coming in. So, some of those will be enacted, but it couldn’t be all of them. The tariffs he is proposing, placing 60% tariffs or more on imports from China, that many economists say is going to raise prices for consumers. And his immigration policy, if he carries out the deportation of 12 million undocumented workers in this country, an undertaking that, uh, I don’t even know how something like that works or how long it would take. Nevertheless, that is going to put a huge hole in the construction industry, in the agricultural industry, and could possibly hurt the American economy. So we’ll see how popular these ideas are after he begins to enact them.

Holder: Well, despite these long-term concerns, and even before some of these key states we’re talking about were called, we saw markets responding to Trump’s lead. How did they respond?

Benjaminson: Well, the dollar got stronger overnight in preparation for these tariffs to be enacted. It’s very good news for Bitcoin. He’s a huge supporter of crypto and a number of markets rose in anticipation of certainty, I think. It is not necessarily that they are happy Donald Trump won. It’s they know who the president is and they are reacting to that.

Holder: After the break, we’ll dig deeper into the Trump campaign promises that could become the administration’s policies – and what it all means for the global economy. Wendy, what have Donald Trump’s promises on the campaign trail told us about what his next administration is likely to prioritize in office?

Benjaminson: His priorities will certainly be the economy and immigration first and foremost. The difference this time is that, in 2016, a lot of traditional Republicans — because that was the only kind there was in 2016 — joined his cabinet, joined his administration because they wanted to show this newcomer how government works and, you know, set up some guardrails for some of his more outlandish ideas. That’s not happening this time. This time he is going to be surrounded by people who are loyal to him. Loyal to him is the key word, not the constitution, the rule of law, things like that. So I think there is some fear out there about the disappearing of the guardrails that were there in his first term.

Holder: What do tonight’s results say about the future of abortion access in this country?

Benjaminson: Well, it is certainly now a state’s issue. There is not enough, Democrats or pro-reproductive rights members of Congress to codify Roe v. Wade to put abortion rights back into law. And so the Supreme Court decision to send it to the states and have a patchwork of laws all over the country seems to be now, the way it is. Remember also that there are still two Supreme Court justices who are nearing the age at which they might retire or pass on. And Donald Trump will have an opportunity with a Republican Senate — at least for the first two years — to appoint two more conservative justices on the Supreme Court, which would, of course, make the Supreme Court one of the most conservative in US history.

Holder: So if Republicans do maintain control of both chambers of Congress and the presidency, what will it mean for US spending on geopolitical conflicts, like the war in Ukraine or in the Middle East?

Benjaminson: Well, the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky put out a statement this morning. congratulating Trump and looking forward to his decisive leadership. And that was the right thing to say diplomatically. Donald Trump is very much into making deals. He wants Putin and Zelensky to come to a table and come to terms. Those terms would end up probably being more favorable to Russia than to Ukraine. And the US would no longer support Ukraine in its fight against the invasion. It is also extremely good news for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Kamala Harris had at least suggested some interest in the humanitarian crisis going on in Gaza and what former President Trump has said is that Bibi, Netanyahu’s nickname, Bibi needs to finish the job in Gaza. And so, despite the fact that I think he got more Arab American support than one would have suspected, I think this is a very good day for Putin and Netanyahu.