Election Live Updates: Biden Vows Peaceful Transition

“The American experiment endures,” Mr. Biden said during brief remarks in the Rose Garden at the White House. “We’re going to be OK, but we need to stay engaged. We need to keep going, and above all, we need to keep the faith.”

Mr. Biden, who had repeatedly called Mr. Trump an existential threat to democracy, acknowledged the pain of his supporters, saying that “setbacks are unavoidable.” But even as his own political career comes to an end, Mr. Biden said they should not stop fighting for the causes they believe in.

“Giving up is unforgivable,” the president said.

After his sweeping victory on Tuesday, Mr. Trump has shifted his focus to filling out his second administration with loyalists ready to turn his campaign promises into reality.

Mr. Trump will most likely return to Washington to a Congress ready to submit to his will. The size of his Senate majority has not yet been settled — swing-state Senate races remain uncalled in Pennsylvania, Nevada and Arizona — but it is clear that his sway with Republicans all but ensures the chamber will help him build the government he wants.

Control of the House has not been determined, but the diminishing number of uncalled races suggests the Republicans will hold a slender majority.

Mr. Biden said he has invited Mr. Trump, whom he has criticized with unsparing frankness, to the White House to discuss next steps.

Here’s what else to know:

• Trump’s agenda: The set of policies Mr. Trump laid out during his campaign is far more sweeping than what he enacted in his first administration. If he follows through on his campaign trail talk, he would make the government more partisan, further cut taxes while imposing punishing tariffs on foreign goods, expand energy production, pull back from overseas alliances, reverse longstanding health rules, prosecute his adversaries and round up theoretically millions of people living in the country illegally.

• R.F.K. Jr.’s role: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom Mr. Trump has suggested would have a “big role” in his second administration, laid out potential public health measures he would oversee if given the chance.

• Trump and Putin: A close ally of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia signaled that the Kremlin saw a second Trump presidency as a new opening to form a tighter bond with Mr. Trump, who has avoided condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

• Delays on Gaza: Any firm progress reaching a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza is likely to be delayed until after Mr. Trump’s inauguration, analysts said. The Biden administration has tried to mediate a truce for a year in the face of irreconcilable demands from Israel and Hamas.

• Black women and Harris: Black women led an outpouring of Democratic elation when Ms. Harris became the party’s nominee. But Mr. Trump’s victory affirmed the worst of what many of them believed about their country.

Chris Cameron contributed reporting.

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In Nebraska, 57 percent of voters approved a ballot initiative that repealed a small program intended to give low-income families tax dollars to pay for private-school tuition.

In Colorado, votes are still being counted. But it looks likely that voters have narrowly rejected a broadly worded ballot measure that would have established a “right to school choice,” including in private schools and home-school settings.

The results slow a private-school choice movement that had greatly accelerated since the Covid-19 pandemic.

About 1 million American children use some form of a private school voucher, a number that has more than doubled since 2019. The issue is one that Republicans hoped would be popular with parents across lines of race and class this year — especially those who were dissatisfied with how public schools served their children during the pandemic.

But private-school choice policies can lead to reduced funding for public schools, and the benefits sometimes go to families who would be able to manage the tuition without government help. Historically, rural Republicans have been skeptical of vouchers, since there are few private school options in sparsely populated regions.

Kentucky, Nebraska and Colorado all contain big rural swaths.

Michael McShane, director of national research at EdChoice, a group that supports vouchers, said he did not see the results in the three states as a major setback. He pointed to big electoral victories for Republican school-choice supporters in Texas — a much larger state that may establish a universal voucher program in the coming months.

“The path forward is the slow and steady one through the legislatures,” Dr. McShane said.

Teachers’ unions and their allies organized against vouchers, while business groups and some right-leaning education philanthropists supported them.

The unions logged some additional wins across the country.

In Florida, a ballot measure to add partisan labels to school board races for the first time in more than two decades failed. The effort to add them was backed by Gov. Ron DeSantis and approved by the state’s Republican Legislature. But opponents argued that it would only worsen polarization and discord in local education.

And in Massachusetts, high school students will no longer be required to pass standardized tests to receive a diploma, beginning with the 2025 graduating class.

The Massachusetts governor, Maura Healey, a Democrat, and the state’s business sector opposed the effort, calling the exam requirement a crucial part of the rigorous standards that makes the state’s public school system one of the nation’s best.

But about 59 percent of voters ultimately approved a proposal to end the mandate, siding with the state’s teachers’ union, which cast the exam as an unnecessary roadblock for disadvantaged students like teenagers with disabilities.

In a written statement, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second-largest teachers’ union, said the ballot initiative results showed that even as voters chose a Republican president, they remained broadly aligned with many Democratic values.

“While voters want public schools strengthened, they did not want their public schools defunded,” she said. “Democrats must fight for the means and agency to help working people get ahead, with public education and unions at the center of that vision.”

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Mr. Newsom called Thursday for a legislative special session to begin in Sacramento on Dec. 2, several weeks before Mr. Trump takes office, “to safeguard California values and fundamental rights in the face of an incoming Trump administration,” according to the governor’s office. It will initially focus on funding state litigation around Trump administration actions that might impact civil liberties, reproductive rights, immigrant protections and climate action in the state.

“The freedoms we hold dear in California are under attack — and we won’t sit idle,” Mr. Newsom said in a statement. “California has faced this challenge before, and we know how to respond.”

In a social media post, the governor said the state “will seek to work with the incoming president — but let there be no mistake, we intend to stand with states across our nation to defend our Constitution and uphold the rule of law.”

With nearly 39 million residents, California is the nation’s most populous state. Its economy is so large — dwarfing those in all but a handful of countries — that it can move markets and steer national policy. Throughout the four years that Mr. Trump was previously in office, California sued his administration more than 120 times.

The session would be an initial salvo in a contingency plan that has been underway for more than a year in Sacramento, involving not only the governor’s office but also legislators and state regulatory bodies. California’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, said in May that he and his staff had used Mr. Trump’s campaign platform to prepare legal challenges should the former president win another term.

California has partnered with West Coast states in recent years on the environment and other issues. There were indications on Thursday that similar relationships could soon emerge to fight Mr. Trump’s new administration.

Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington noted that “our state and others formed enduring alliances for progress during Trump’s first term in office,” adding that “when Trump messed with our state we sued him 97 times — only losing two cases on the merits while he was in office.” His successor, Bob Ferguson, has scheduled a news conference on Thursday with the incoming attorney general to discuss the state’s preparations for when Mr. Trump takes office.

Unlike in 2016, when Mr. Trump won in the electoral college but lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, the former president is expected to arrive in Washington, D.C., emboldened with a sweeping victory.

“I will govern by a simple motto,” Mr. Trump told supporters in Florida on Tuesday: “Promises made, promises kept.”

In a proclamation calling for the special session in California, which is expected to extend into next year, when Mr. Trump takes office, Mr. Newsom said the state could suffer “significant and immediate” consequences from this week’s presidential outcome.

His list of concerns included attempts by Mr. Trump to limit access to medication abortion; dismantle clean vehicle policies and longstanding environmental protections; repeal immigration policies such as the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program; withhold disaster response funding and victim assistance as political retribution; and “politicize grant programs to commandeer state and local governmental resources for federal purposes.”

Mr. Trump’s stated agenda for the environment alone could threaten California climate policies that for decades have helped set the pace for the rest of the world, such as the state’s rules on vehicle emissions.

Mr. Trump and other Republican leaders have denounced policies that underpin the social fabric in California. During the campaign, Mr. Trump said he would pursue mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. He also criticized California proposals and policies that provide benefits to those immigrants; the state currently provides Medicaid-level benefits to low-income residents regardless of immigration status.

Conservatives oppose the state’s constitutional protections for abortion rights and contraception, and they have resented Mr. Newsom’s efforts to provide reproductive services to women in states with abortion bans. California’s gun laws are among the nation’s toughest, and they are routinely tested through lawsuits that wend through federal courts.

During his first term, Mr. Trump sided with California’s agricultural industry in the perennial tug of war over scarce water supplies in the state. In August, he suggested that he would withhold federal wildfire aid if the state did not deliver more water to farmers.

Mr. Trump and Republicans also could seek to upend protections for the state’s transgender residents. In July, Governor Newsom signed a law that prohibited school districts from forcing educators to notify parents if their children ask to use different names or pronouns. The state has engaged in ongoing battles with conservative-led districts, and it is possible that Republican leaders could seek to intervene.

California is not uniformly liberal, and while Mr. Trump lost the state, he still has millions of California supporters and may have gained support in the state based on initial tallies, though millions of votes have yet to be counted.

Still, Democrats have firm control of the state legislature. In statements on Thursday, legislative leaders expressed support for buttressing the state’s legal options.

“Voters sent a clear message this election, and we need to lean in and listen,” said Robert Rivas, the speaker of the California State Assembly. “But we also must be prepared to defend California values.”

Mike McGuire, the leader of the State Senate, said that Mr. Trump had shown in his first term that “he’s petty, vindictive and will do what it takes to get his way, no matter how dangerous the policy may be.” He called the focus on litigation “an important first step.”

States have increasingly deployed lawsuits with success, particularly as political polarization has increased. According to a database maintained by Paul Nolette, a political scientist at Marquette University, Republican attorneys general have so far filed about 60 lawsuits against the Biden administration, winning about 76 percent of them. During the first Trump administration, Democratic attorneys general filed about 160 lawsuits, winning about 83 percent of the time.

Mike Baker contributed reporting from Seattle.

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“I’ve said many times you can’t love your country only when you win,” he added.

Ahead of the election, Mr. Biden had repeatedly called Mr. Trump an existential threat to democracy who would shatter efforts to rebuild the economy and strengthen alliances overseas.

But Mr. Biden said his administration committed to a peaceful transfer of power, which Mr. Trump did not do four years ago when he refused to concede and urged supporters to march to the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 as the electoral votes were certified.

“Yesterday, I spoke with President-elect Trump to congratulate him on his victory, and I assured him that I will direct my entire administration to work with his team to ensure a peaceful and orderly transition,” Mr. Biden said after receiving a standing ovation from members of his staff. “That’s what the American people deserve.”

For most of the past four years, Mr. Biden expected that he would be the one to face Mr. Trump again. But concerns among Democrats about his age and mental fitness forced him to abandon his re-election bid to Vice President Kamala Harris. In his remarks, Mr. Biden praised her for giving her “whole heart” to the campaign.

“She has a backbone like a ramrod,” he said. “She has great character, true character. She gave her whole heart and effort, and she and her entire team should be proud of the campaign they ran.”

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Mr. Trump’s ambitions for a second term will ultimately have to compete with the signature accomplishment from his first: the giant tax package that Republicans passed and Mr. Trump signed into law in 2017. Large swaths of that tax cut expire at the end of next year, setting up an expensive debate that could overshadow Mr. Trump’s other goals.

“Nobody wants to acknowledge at all the sheer enormity of the challenge,” said Liam Donovan, a Republican strategist. “There’s a reckoning coming.”

Unlike in 2016, when Mr. Trump’s victory surprised many in Washington, Republicans have spent months preparing for their return to power. They have been discussing using a fast-track budget process that skirts the supermajority requirement for legislation in the Senate, a tactic that would allow for a party-line passage of more tax cuts if Republicans ultimately keep control of the House.

But lawmakers and advisers to Mr. Trump are undecided about how much money they can commit to lowering the nation’s taxes again. The cost of just preserving the status quo is steep. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has estimated that continuing all of the expiring provisions would cost roughly $4 trillion over a decade, and Mr. Trump’s campaign proposals could add trillions more to the debt.

In interviews before the election, some Republicans said the party would have to show some fiscal discipline.

“We can’t just have it be unlimited, whatever we want to it to be,” Senator James Lankford, a Republican of Oklahoma and member of the Finance Committee, said of the cost of a tax bill next year.

In financial markets, investors are preparing for higher deficits under a second Trump administration, selling bonds that could become less valuable if the government has to issue many more to finance a larger debt. Republicans and some advisers to Mr. Trump are already looking at ways to bring down the cost of his agenda.

For proposals like not taxing Social Security benefits, for example, Republicans could raise the income threshold for tax-free benefits, rather than eliminating the tax entirely, according to John Paulson, a billionaire hedge fund manager advising Mr. Trump on economic issues.

Mr. Paulson, a potential nominee for Treasury secretary, said that several other of Mr. Trump’s proposed tax cuts — including not taxing tips or overtime, and restoring a deduction for state and local taxes — should also become narrower so they benefit fewer people and cost less money.

“You need to keep the concept of what he wants to achieve, and put guardrails around it so you achieve the goals, but lower the revenue impact,” Mr. Paulson said in an interview before the election. “And I have discussed that with members of his economic team, and they’re all cognizant of that.”

Beyond the cost, the policy goals of some of Mr. Trump’s campaign proposals, including creating a new deduction for interest on car loans, runs counter to traditional conservative ambitions of simplifying the tax code.

Mr. Trump and his team have put forward a number of ideas to offset the cost of his tax cuts. Those include rescinding tax credits for clean-energy projects passed under President Biden, as well as creating a commission run by the billionaire Elon Musk to find deep spending cuts.

But some of those plans could face skepticism from Republicans who favor programs that Mr. Trump has targeted for cuts. For instance, several Republicans have already pressed House Speaker Mike Johnson to move cautiously on repealing clean-energy subsidies, which they say benefit their districts.

Mr. Trump’s chief idea for raising federal revenue has been to impose steep tariffs on imported goods. Some advisers to Mr. Trump have presented those ideas as only a negotiating position, and they have also debated whether Mr. Trump can unilaterally impose such broad levies or if he will need the approval of Congress. Many Republicans on Capitol Hill oppose broad tariffs, meaning such a plan may not be able to become law.

“I’m also one who’s not anxious to budget around tariff revenues, and we need to be very careful not to pursue inflationary policies,” said Representative Adrian Smith, a Nebraska Republican and member of the House Ways and Means Committee.

Even if Mr. Trump does impose broad tariffs, though, it would likely not be enough to cover the cost of his other plans. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has estimated that Mr. Trump’s agenda, including higher tariffs, could add roughly $7.5 trillion to the debt over the next decade.

Adding to fiscal concerns is the unusually large size of the deficit, which stood at roughly $1.8 trillion last fiscal year. While Mr. Trump said little about the deficit during his campaign, Republicans have routinely criticized the gap between what America spends and what it earns through taxes and other revenue since President Biden took office.

Those concerns could factor into a looming debate over raising the nation’s debt limit, which caps the total amount of money that the federal government can borrow to fund its operations and pay its bills.

The debt ceiling, which was temporarily suspended after a bruising political fight last year, will come into place again on Jan. 2. That will give lawmakers a matter of months to raise the limit and avoid a potentially catastrophic default. Even among Republicans, that negotiation could inflame political concerns about the nation’s fiscal situation and create pressure to limit the size of another tax cut.

Republican lawmakers and some advisers to Mr. Trump argued that his tax agenda would spur more economic growth, which would generate more tax revenue. While studies have found that his first tax law did help jump-start some growth, the additional economic activity was not found to be enough to offset the cost of the tax cuts.

“There is an increasing concern among rating agencies and markets that the debt that we are building up is going to reach a point of being unsustainable,” said Shai Akabas, an economic policy analyst at the Bipartisan Policy Center. “As that happens, the economic consequences will come into focus and may themselves put constraints on what policymakers will consider on tax cuts or spending increases.”

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The prediction seemed fanciful — Mr. Stryk’s small firm averaged about $4.8 million a year in lobbying fees after bursting onto the scene early in the first Trump administration — but it reflected a gleefulness about a sudden surge in demand for lobbyists with ties to Mr. Trump’s orbit.

In corporate boardrooms and foreign capitals, there was a scramble on Wednesday to sign lobbyists who could help navigate an incoming administration viewed with uncertainty and concern. Even after his first presidential term ended four years ago, Mr. Trump remained something of an enigma to the deep-pocketed interests whose fates depend on staying in Washington’s good graces, or at least out of its cross hairs.

They wanted help and were willing to pay for it.

Companies and foreign countries have long relied on lobbyists to guide them through the shifts in power on Capitol Hill or the White House. But since Mr. Trump first upended global politics in 2016, he has continued to confound establishment gatekeepers on K Street, the Washington boulevard that was traditionally home to many lobbying firms. They largely kept their distance from him for fear of alienating blue-chip clients who worried about brand damage from being associated with his inflammatory rhetoric.

Mr. Trump’s team, in turn, at times tried to restrict access for lobbyists who either opposed him or stayed on the sidelines, as well as for those seen as profiteering off their connections to him. It has led to a delicate dance in which a relatively small group of lobbyists have sought to demonstrate their value to him — including by raising money for his cash-strapped campaigns — and to cautious clients, without running afoul of the sensitivities of either.

In an ironic twist for a politician who first ran on a pledge to “drain the swamp” of Washington special interests, Mr. Trump’s election is expected to be very lucrative for lobbyists who have struck that balance.

Near the top of that list is Brian Ballard, who was a leading fund-raiser for Mr. Trump, helping to bring in more than $50 million for committees supporting the campaign, according to a person familiar with Republican fund-raising who was not authorized to speak on the matter. He also donated more than $250,000 of his own money.

Mr. Ballard had a thriving lobbying practice in Florida, where he represented Mr. Trump’s company, but had never lobbied in Washington before opening an office after Mr. Trump’s election in 2016.

He quickly became a go-to for major corporations facing scrutiny from the Trump administration and Congress, like Amazon for its competitive practices and Boeing for its safety record, and foreign governments like Qatar and Turkey. His firm raked in tens of millions of dollars in federal lobbying fees during Mr. Trump’s first term, while hiring an army of lobbyists from both parties and opening offices in California and Saudi Arabia.

On Wednesday, Mr. Ballard’s firm posted a statement on social media congratulating Mr. Trump, saying that “we pray that all Americans will unite together in support of our President-elect.” That evening, the lobbyist was seen at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, where he is a member.

Another go-to lobbyist in Trump world, Jeff Miller, donated more than $100,000 to committees supporting Mr. Trump and raised millions more, according to Federal Election Commission filings. Mr. Miller, who helped clients try to secure support from Mr. Trump’s first administration, was seen on election night at Mar-a-Lago, where Mr. Trump hosted an event for his top supporters.

“K Street lobbyists tend to be relatively short-armed when it comes to donations, particularly when it comes to Trump, and that is still a relatively small world,” said David Tamasi, a veteran Washington lobbyist. Mr. Tamasi raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Mr. Trump’s campaigns in 2016 and 2020, and he donated $15,000 to committees supporting Mr. Trump this time around.

Mr. Tamasi’s firm, Chartwell Strategy Group — which represents the Republic of Georgia, the blacklisted Israeli spyware maker NSO Group and Hyundai Motor Company, among other clients — has been preparing for a possible Trump win for months. It has briefed clients about what to expect from a second Trump administration. And it has met with prospective clients who indicated that, if Mr. Trump won, they would “seek our help navigating a potential Trump administration,” Mr. Tamasi said.

His phone has been ringing frequently since election night, Mr. Tamasi said, adding that “what is unnerving for C.E.O.s and international folks is that things happen quickly” under Mr. Trump.

Just as lobbyists with ties to Mr. Trump’s team are planning for a surge, a decline might be in store for those whose business surged under President Biden, such as Jeff Ricchetti, the brother of the White House counselor Steve Ricchetti.

It is a cycle that repeats itself with each change in power, though Mr. Trump’s staggered stints in the White House created a new twist.

Businesses and foreign interests have already been paying for insight from former officials on Mr. Trump’s previous campaigns and first administration who have joined lobbying or advisory firms, or started their own.

More are expected to make the jump from Mr. Trump’s victorious campaign, which had its own high-level connection to the influence industry. It was led partly by Susie Wiles, who retained a senior position with the lobbying firm Mercury Public Affairs during the campaign, according to a person familiar with the firm, and was a registered lobbyist for a tobacco company through at least earlier this year.

“My phone has started to ring from people with Trump backgrounds on the campaign looking to go to K Street,” said Ivan Adler, a recruiter who specializes in finding influence industry jobs for former political and government officials. “The Trump people will have their day. They’re the new ‘it’ girl.”

Ja’Ron Smith, a former Trump administration official who is a partner at the corporate lobbying firm CGCN, had joined other firm partners in warning clients in the weeks before the election to expect a realignment of traditional race and class dynamics.

K Street “seems to have purposely ignored” those shifts, said Sam Geduldig, the firm’s managing partner, who donated more than $11,000 to Mr. Trump’s committees. “We were not surprised by the result.”

One Trump-linked lobbyist began receiving texts from clients on election night as it became clear that Mr. Trump was going to win, offering to increase retainer fees, according to a person familiar with the communications.

Other Republican lobbyists were optimistic that the incoming administration would make it easier to help business clients.

“It releases a lot of the pressure going forward,” said Tripp Baird, the founder of the small lobbying firm Off Hill Strategies, which represents tech companies, defense contractors and retail businesses, among others. “They’re not on the menu at the moment.”

Mr. Stryk’s firm, which specializes in helping foreign clients facing sanctions and other scrutiny from the international community, had seen its lobbying revenues decline since the end of the Trump administration. He said he had received inquiries since the election from several foreign leaders, characterizing the jockeying among firms as “a free-for-all right now.”

As Mr. Stryk’s election night party at the cigar lounge wound down, he thanked his guests for coming and declared it “a great night for American democracy, and a great night for capitalism.”

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Though votes were still being counted in some states, Mr. Trump had received more than 72.6 million votes, against around 68 million for Ms. Harris, a gap of around 4.6 million votes.

The last Republican presidential candidate to win more votes than his opponent was former President George W. Bush in 2004, when he won re-election against John F. Kerry. The last Republican before Mr. Bush to do so was his father, George H.W. Bush, the sitting vice president, who defeated Michael Dukakis in 1988.

The tally is a further measure of the scale of Mr. Trump’s win and another blow to Democrats. The consensus among pollsters before Election Day was that while Mr. Trump and Ms. Harris would run neck and neck in the Electoral College votes that decided the presidency, Ms. Harris would likely gain more votes overall.

The assumption was partly based on recent elections. In 2000, George W. Bush lost the popular vote to Democrat Al Gore, but prevailed in the Electoral College. In the 2016 election, Mr. Trump defeated Hillary Clinton, but some Democrats took comfort in the fact that she had gained nearly three million more votes nationally than he did.

At the same time, Mr. Trump has so far gained approximately 1.5 million fewer votes in 2024 than he did during his election defeat in 2020. In 2016, by contrast, he gained around 63 million votes, which is around 13 percent less than he did in this year’s election. The changes reflect fluctuations in overall turnout.

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His regulators filed antitrust charges against Meta and Google and launched investigations into Apple and Amazon. He accused Meta and Twitter of censorship, resulting in Republican-led congressional hearings grilling tech executives. He moved to ban TikTok and blasted Amazon for shirking its tax obligations.

Now with Mr. Trump’s election victory on Tuesday, tech executives face the prospect of another four years of similar uncertainty. The president-elect has promised to put the tech billionaire Elon Musk in a newly created position to bring efficiencies to the government and vowed to deregulate industry. He has indicated that the government’s efforts to break up Google for a monopoly in search may go too far, even though the investigation into the company started in his term. He has flip-flopped on the fate of TikTok, which again faces a U.S. ban. And he has promised more tariffs, which could affect chipmakers and smartphone manufacturers.

The stakes are high. American tech companies — some of the most valuable in the world — are central to how people shop, communicate and consume information online. The industry pours billions of dollars into new and existing technologies, including most recently artificial intelligence. The industry is also in the middle of a geopolitical battle with China and other nations over technological supremacy.

“He’s been incredibly unpredictable on tech and seems prone to changing positions on any topic,” said Scott Babwah Brennen, director of the Center on Technology Policy at New York University.

A spokesman for Mr. Trump’s campaign, Brian Hughes, said in a statement that Mr. Trump had the support of “some of the nation’s most respected tech innovators and Silicon Valley leaders.”

“These people understand that President Trump’s agenda includes economic, tax and regulatory policies that will bolster American innovation and restore us to a position of global dominance in the technology sector,” Mr. Hughes said.

To potentially get ahead of Mr. Trump’s unpredictable streak, tech chiefs began making overtures to him weeks ago, with private calls after a July assassination attempt. On Wednesday morning, Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder and owner of the rocket company Blue Origin; Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Google; Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta; and Andy Jassy, the chief executive of Amazon, all congratulated Mr. Trump.

“Wishing @realDonaldTrump all success in leading and uniting the America we all love,” Mr. Bezos wrote on X.

Nu Wexler, a former policy official at Twitter, Meta and Google, said, “The tech companies are wiser and more pragmatic.” While tech executives felt pressure from employees to stand up to Mr. Trump in his first term because of his language and policies against Muslims and immigration, “employee voices don’t matter as much anymore,” added Mr. Wexler, founder of Four Corners Public Affairs in Washington.

After the 2016 election, Mr. Trump’s early tech policy decisions were largely in line with the Republican establishment. In 2017, his Federal Communications Commission repealed net neutrality rules, which barred internet providers like Comcast and Verizon from blocking certain content online.

Mr. Trump’s agenda also reflected a hawkish approach to geopolitical competition with China. In May 2019, he moved to prohibit American telecommunications companies from using foreign equipment as part of a crackdown on Chinese manufacturers like Huawei.

That same year, Mr. Trump’s appointees to the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission opened antitrust investigations into Google, Meta, Apple and Amazon. Before he left office, the Justice Department sued Google, accusing it of abusing a monopoly over online search. In August, a judge ruled against Google, and the government has signaled that it may ask for the company to be broken up.

Mr. Trump said in 2020 that he would ban TikTok unless its Chinese owner, ByteDance, sold the app to an American company. ByteDance’s ownership was a national security problem, he said. It ultimately appeared that the app might be sold to investors including Oracle, the cloud computing firm, and Walmart. Oracle’s chief executive, Safra Catz, and one of its founders, Larry Ellison, have been longtime supporters of Mr. Trump. The deal fizzled, and Mr. Trump left office.

This year, President Biden signed a bill into law that would again force ByteDance to sell the app or face a ban. But — in one of many reversals — Mr. Trump joined the app in June and has since suggested that he would rescue TikTok from a U.S. ban. He has not been clear about how he would do that.

“For all of those that want to save TikTok in America, vote for Trump,” he said in a September video posted to Truth Social, the online platform he owns.

Mr. Trump made another reversal after the F.T.C. sued Amazon in September last year, accusing it of antitrust violations. Mr. Trump criticized the suit, which had originated from an investigation that began during his tenure.

“Whether you like Amazon or not, how can the Federal Trade Commission sue to break it up?” he wrote on Truth Social.

Mr. Trump has found fans in Silicon Valley, which has typically leaned liberal. His relationship with Mr. Musk, who is chief executive of Tesla and owns X and the rocket company SpaceX, was front and center in the final weeks of the campaign. In his victory speech on Wednesday, Mr. Trump called Mr. Musk a “supergenius.”

Truth Social, in which Mr. Trump owns a 57 percent stake, also introduces a wrinkle to social media regulation.

But some of Mr. Trump’s grievances against the industry have deepened since he left office, former advisers said.

He still has many complaints about censorship and believes that the tech companies’ leaders favor Democrats, said Barry Bennett, a Republican strategist and former Trump adviser. While Mr. Trump has become increasingly fascinated by tech — in part because of Mr. Musk — the president-elect still thinks the platforms were biased against him and “won’t forget,” Mr. Bennett said.

“It’s a tremendous opportunity for tech because they’ve learned lessons from his first four years,” he said. “That is, if they learned.”

Danielle Kaye contributed reporting from New York.

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But Mr. Trump has also praised Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, saying on a Joe Rogan podcast that he was a “brilliant guy” for controlling 1.4 billion people with an “iron fist.”

Regardless of the direction of Mr. Trump’s rhetoric, Beijing has likely concluded after Mr. Trump’s first presidency that he intends to wage a fierce rivalry with China, no matter what he says.

“Xi Jinping is an unsentimental leader with a dark interpretation of America’s intentions toward China,” said Ryan Hass, the director of the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution. “He would be open to a friendlier leader-level relationship with Trump, but he would not expect a warmer personal relationship with Trump to dampen America’s competitive impulses toward China.”

Buttressing Beijing’s view is the fact there is bipartisan consensus in the United States about confronting China. Trump may have started an era of bare-knuckled competition with the trade war and increased American support for Taiwan, but that approach didn’t change under President Biden.

If anything, Beijing says U.S. pressure has only intensified. Mr. Xi has accused the Biden administration of unfairly containing and suppressing China. He points to the deepening security arrangements between the United States and its allies and partners in Asia; restrictions on Chinese access to American technology like advanced chips; and the use of U.S. sanctions to punish Beijing for its tacit support for Russia’s war in Ukraine.

While the precise details of Mr. Trump’s foreign policy agenda will likely remain unclear until he picks his cabinet, China is already showing it is more prepared for whatever is in store compared to Mr. Trump’s first presidency.

In just the past month, China has been cozying up to American allies and partners who might feel uncertain about the future of Washington’s reliability. It struck a deal with India to ease its border tensions, and Chinese troops exchanged sweets with Indian soldiers during the festival of Divali, along the disputed territory. It hosted senior British and Japanese officials in Beijing to smoothen ties. And it lifted restrictions on key Australian exports to China, like wine and lobster.

Over the years, China has also doubled down on efforts to become more self-reliant on technology, investing billions into developing its own top-of-the-line chips. And China has continued to build up its military. Mr. Xi, in a show of strength earlier this week, inspected his country’s elite Airborne Corps, paratroopers trained to “liberate Taiwan.”

China’s bid to insulate itself from a potential Trump shock, however, could be constrained by its weak economy, which has been battered by a property crisis. China was not nearly as vulnerable during the first Trump administration, and it may have fewer options to retaliate in a trade war.

Some voices in China are urging the country to exercise restraint. Jia Qingguo, a professor of international relations at Peking University, urged China to prepare for greater competition with the United States not only by investing in its military and economy, but also by avoiding accidental military conflict in the South China Sea and Taiwan and sidestepping unnecessary disputes with other countries.

But some Chinese analysts like Zhou Bo, a retired colonel in the People’s Liberation Army and a senior fellow at Tsinghua University’s Center for International Security and Strategy in Beijing, said that China was getting better at standing up to the United States because it has weathered the opposing styles of the first Trump presidency and the Biden administration.

China responded to Mr. Trump’s blustery Twitter diplomacy by introducing its own brand of muscular and acerbic statecraft known as “Wolf Warrior,” a nickname inspired by ultranationalistic Chinese action movies of the same name. And to counter President Biden’s democratic alliance building, China aggressively courted deeper ties with developing nations and with Russia. As the United States has built ties with Taiwan, China has ramped up exercises near it, including large-scale drills to encircle the island in a simulated blockade.

“Some people in China say Trump bashed China with a hammer and Biden cut China with a surgical knife,” Mr. Zhou said. “We have experienced both of them. But the trend is, China is gaining in strength, despite the stress.”

Ties had sunk to their lowest point in decades in early 2023 after the United States shot down a Chinese surveillance balloon as it floated over the United States. But the relationship had stabilized in the past year as the Biden administration has emphasized intensive diplomacy — dispatching the White House national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, to meet with China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, several times.

Whether such engagement will continue under the new Trump administration will depend in part on whom Mr. Trump selects as his advisers. Those could include China hawks, such as Robert E. Lighthizer, the former U.S. trade representative. Depending on who is picked, his cabinet members might also restrain Mr. Trump’s transactional tendencies and instead advocate for a more ideological approach to China based on an opposition to the Chinese Communist Party’s authoritarian rule.

Parts of Mr. Trump’s agenda may turn out to be favorable to China. During his first term, Mr. Trump showed little interest in human rights, favoring trade and business deals first. In 2020, he told Axios that he shelved a plan to punish Chinese officials and entities linked to the internment of Uyghurs to avoid jeopardizing trade talks.

Mr. Trump’s isolationist-leaning “America First” policy could also lead to Washington weakening its alliances around the world. That could give China an opportunity to fill the void and expand its global influence.

It remains to be seen how China will negotiate with Mr. Trump the second time around. With President Biden, China sought leverage by agreeing to work together on fentanyl and allowing members of its military to hold talks with American counterparts. It is unclear if Mr. Trump would value any of those concessions.

On Wednesday, as Mr. Xi conveyed his congratulations to Mr. Trump on his electoral victory, he emphasized Beijing’s argument that confrontation would hurt both countries. Mr. Xi has sought to push back on efforts by the United States to define the relationship primarily by competition, seeing it as cover for a campaign to block China’s rise.

He said he hoped the leaders could “find a correct way for China and the United States to get along in the new era.”

Some Chinese scholars urged Beijing to move quickly to set up a meeting between Mr. Xi and Mr. Trump once he assumes office, noting that direct communication would be needed to manage differences.

Wu Xinbo, the dean of the Institute of International Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai, noted that during Mr. Trump’s first term, Chinese officials underestimated the American leader, possibly because they were unfamiliar with his approach, but that they should be more prepared for his second term.

“This means being ready for negotiations as well as confrontations; both will be necessary, and we may need to engage in talks and conflicts simultaneously,” Mr. Wu said.

Li You contributed research from Beijing and Hari Kumar from New Delhi.

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Mr. Fabrizio had predicted to colleagues that brutal media coverage of Mr. Trump’s performance in a debate watched by 67 million people would lift Ms. Harris in the polls. He was right about the media coverage but wrong about the rest. His first post-debate poll shocked him: Ms. Harris had gained on some narrow attributes, like likability. But Mr. Trump had lost no ground in the contest.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Mr. Fabrizio said on a call with senior campaign leaders, according to two participants.

It was yet more proof — as if more were needed — of Mr. Trump’s durability over nearly a decade in politics and of his ability to defy the normal laws of gravity.

He overcame seemingly fatal political vulnerabilities — four criminal indictments, three expensive lawsuits, conviction on 34 felony counts, endless reckless tangents in his speeches — and transformed at least some of them into distinct advantages.

How he won in 2024 came down to one essential bet: that his grievances could meld with those of the MAGA movement, and then with the Republican Party, and then with more than half the country. His mug shot became a best-selling shirt. His criminal conviction inspired $100 million in donations in one day. The images of him bleeding after a failed assassination attempt became the symbol of what supporters saw as a campaign of destiny.

“God spared my life for a reason,” he said at his victory speech early Wednesday, adding, “We are going to fulfill that mission together.”

At times, Mr. Trump could be so crude and self-indulgent on the stump that aides wondered if he were engaged in an absurdist experiment to test how much aberrant behavior voters would tolerate.

But Mr. Trump successfully harnessed the anger and frustration millions of Americans felt about some of the very institutions and systems he will soon control as the country’s 47th president. Voters unhappy with the nation’s direction turned him into a vessel for their rage.

“The elites cannot come to grips with how alienated they are from the country,” said Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, an informal adviser to the former and now future president.

But more than just broad societal forces were at play. His victory owed, in part, to strategic decisions by a campaign operation that was his most stable yet and was held together for nearly four years by a veteran operative, Susie Wiles — even if the candidate himself was, for much of 2024, as erratic as ever.

The Trump team schemed ways to save its cash for a final ad blitz, abandoning a traditional ground game to turn out its voters and relying instead on a relatively small paid staff buttressed by volunteers and outsiders, including the world’s richest man, Elon Musk. Mr. Trump relentlessly pushed to define Ms. Harris not just as radically liberal but as foolishly out of the mainstream. The inspiration, his advisers said, was a memorable Nixon-era saying by the Republican strategist Arthur Finkelstein: “A crook” — or, in Mr. Trump’s case, a convict — “always beats a fool.”

Mr. Trump’s aides gambled on mobilizing men, though men vote less than women, and it paid off. And they gambled on trying to cut into Democrats’ typically big margins among Black and Latino voters, and that paid off, too.

His close-knit campaign team navigated the hacking of a top official’s emails by Iranians, constricting security measures by American authorities following two assassination attempts and a final phase that included the use of multiple planes, in addition to the one with Mr. Trump’s name on it, to keep the former president safe.

How Mr. Trump won is also the story of how Ms. Harris lost.

She was hobbled by President Biden’s low approval ratings and struggled to break from him in the eyes of voters yearning for a change in direction. She had only three-plus months to reintroduce herself to the country and she vacillated until the end with how — and how much — to talk about Mr. Trump.

First, she and her running mate, Tim Walz, tried minimizing him by mocking him as “weird” and “unserious,” setting aside Mr. Biden’s grave warnings that Mr. Trump was an existential threat to American democracy. Then she focused on a populist message: Mr. Trump cared only about his rich friends, while she would bring down the prices of groceries and housing for ordinary people. Finally, late in the campaign, Ms. Harris pivoted again: Mr. Trump was a “fascist,” she warned — just the existential threat Mr. Biden had invoked.

Some finger-pointing emerged from the wreckage, including over whether Ms. Harris had focused too much on appealing to wayward Republicans or whether Mr. Biden had dealt her an unwinnable hand. “We dug out of a deep hole but not enough,” David Plouffe, a senior Harris adviser, wrote on X.

In the end, Ms. Harris got only the one debate with Mr. Trump to make her case. He never accepted a rematch and Ms. Harris’s team was left to wonder if they had missed a chance to box him in. During her debate preparations, they had discussed challenging him live onstage to a second debate — almost daring him to look afraid — but Ms. Harris decided against the move.

That meant no more national moments and eight weeks left to fill — a challenge for a candidate who had spent the first half of the race avoiding unscripted settings. Mr. Trump scored one break from the justice system when a judge pushed his September sentencing until after the election; Mr. Trump privately told people he thought that would have tested what voters would tolerate.

Not every decision Mr. Trump made was genius because he won, and not every decision Ms. Harris made was poor because she lost. But in a race and in a nation so narrowly divided, Mr. Trump and his team made just enough of the right ones.

The strength of his convictions

For almost any other politician, Mr. Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts related to hush-money payments to a porn star would have been the worst day of his candidacy. Instead, it gave him financial rocket fuel.

Small donors poured $50 million into his coffers in 24 hours. And his main super PAC was informed by its bank of a $50 million wire transfer the day after the conviction — but needed to first confirm who had sent it first to make sure it wasn’t fraudulent. The problem was they didn’t know because one of the biggest contributions in American history had been sent without any heads up. Eventually, they determined the amount and its source: the reclusive billionaire Timothy Mellon.

The $100 million day helped narrow the financial chasm Mr. Trump had been facing.

To finance a late fusillade of television ads, his team had stretched legal limits to shunt tens of millions of dollars in expenses from the campaign onto the Republican Party and other groups. More significantly, once he became the presumptive nominee, they scrapped the traditional campaign-run, party-funded field operation and outsourced it instead to unproven super PACs.

A scrub of the party’s books from 2020 by James Blair, the campaign’s political director, and Chris LaCivita, one of Mr. Trump’s co-campaign managers, found that the field operation had cost more than $130 million. That amounted to at least $100 for each conversation with a voter.

“We said we just simply can’t do that,” Mr. Blair recalled. “We just simply can’t spend that much money.”

A surprise ruling from the Federal Election Commission, however, had allowed candidates for the first time to coordinate with billionaire-funded super PACs, and the Trump campaign quickly did so, though Mr. Blair was widely second-guessed by veteran operatives in both parties. No one knew how well those outside groups and their mercenary operatives would fare at persuading and motivating people to vote.

The Harris campaign had spent months hiring 2,500 workers and opening 358 offices across the battleground states — enormous fixed costs the Trump campaign did not have to bear. Last weekend, some 90,000 Democratic volunteers knocked on more than three million doors, the pace reaching 1,000 doors a minute in Pennsylvania at one point.

Polls showed the race was one of the closest in modern history, and Ms. Harris’s team believed their superior infrastructure and army of believers would make the difference. But Mr. Fabrizio’s internal polling told a different and, it turned out, more accurate story — one in which Mr. Trump kept a consistent lead.

A ground game only matters in an exceedingly close race. In the end, Ms. Harris did not come close enough.

The gender gap

Mr. Trump had long been nervous about the issue of abortion.

He blamed the fallout from the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade for the G.O.P.’s poor performance in the midterms in 2022. He considered the issue so politically fraught that it had the potential to single-handedly sink his campaign.

And so, on the first Tuesday in April, he settled into his seat on the jet his aides call Trump Force One, a thick stack of papers before him on his desk. On top was a document his senior political advisers had prepared, spelling out a simple and compelling argument against his coming out in favor of a national abortion ban.

The title, in all caps: “How a National Abortion Policy Will Cost Trump the Election.”

A 15- or 16-week ban — which Mr. Trump was seriously contemplating — would be more restrictive than existing law in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, the three “blue wall” states that were crucial to victory in November. The news media, his advisers told him, would relentlessly portray his position as rolling back the rights of women, who were already in revolt against the G.O.P. over abortion.

On the flight to Grand Rapids, Mr. Trump began dictating the script of a video he would release the following week: He would leave the abortion issue to the states and would not say how many weeks he considered appropriate — disappointing some social conservatives but making it harder for Democrats to use the issue against him.

Mr. Trump’s approach to gender could not have been more different from Ms. Harris’s.

His team’s data clearly showed that the highest return on investment would be a group that didn’t often vote: younger men, including Hispanic and Black men who were struggling with inflation, alienated by left-wing ideology and pessimistic about the country.

The Trump campaign committed its limited resources, including the candidate’s time, to communicating with these young men, embracing a hypermasculine image. His first campaign stop after his criminal conviction was an Ultimate Fighting Championship event. He entered the Republican National Convention one night to James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World.” He spent relatively little time doing mainstream media interviews and instead recorded a series of podcast interviews with male comedians and other bro-type personalities who tapped into the kind of audiences Mr. Fabrizio’s data said were most receptive to Mr. Trump’s message.

They included a three-hour podcast with Joe Rogan that racked up more than 45 million views on YouTube, and won Mr. Rogan’s election-eve endorsement. Aides and allies like Mr. Musk made explicit appeals to men to vote for Mr. Trump in the contest’s final hours.

Ms. Harris’s team was trying equally hard to mobilize women in the first national election since the fall of Roe v. Wade, showcasing the stories of women who suffered catastrophic medical emergencies in states where Republicans had enacted strict abortion bans. Michelle Obama made an impassioned case to vote for women’s interests. And there were efforts to encourage wives to ignore their husbands, with sticky notes left in women’s restrooms reminding them that their vote was a secret. The actress Julia Roberts recorded an ad calling the ballot box one of the last places where women still had the freedom to choose.

Mr. Trump was aghast. “Can you imagine a wife not telling a husband who she’s voting for? Did you ever hear anything like that?” he said on Fox News.

But Mr. Trump declined to call upon Nikki Haley, the runner-up in the Republican primaries, as an emissary to female voters. He didn’t think he needed her, and people close to him said he continued to thoroughly dislike her. “You have the issue of abortion,” he said on “Fox and Friends.” “Without abortion, the women love me.”

Trump’s gamble on anti-trans ads

About a week after the September debate, Mr. Trump started spending heavily on a television ad that hammered Ms. Harris for her position on a seemingly obscure topic: the use of taxpayer funds to fund surgeries for transgender inmates. “Every transgender inmate in the prison system would have access,” Ms. Harris said in a 2019 clip used in the ad.

It was a big bet: Mr. Trump was leading on the two most salient issues in the race — the economy and immigration — yet here he was, intentionally changing the subject.

But the ad, with its vivid tagline — “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you” — broke through in Mr. Trump’s testing to an extent that stunned some of his aides.

So they poured still more money into the ads, running them during football games, which prompted Charlamagne Tha God, the host of the Breakfast Club, a popular show among Black listeners, to express exasperation — and his on-air complaints gave the Trump team fodder for yet another commercial. The Charlamagne ad ranked as one of the Trump team’s most effective 30-second spots, according to an analysis by Future Forward, Ms. Harris’s leading super PAC. It shifted the race 2.7 percentage points in Mr. Trump’s favor after viewers watched it.

The anti-trans ads cut to the core of the Trump argument: that Ms. Harris was “dangerously liberal” — the exact vulnerability her team was most worried about. The ads were effective with Black and Latino men, according to the Trump team, but also with moderate suburban white women who might be concerned about transgender athletes in girls’ sports.

Those were the same suburban women Ms. Harris was trying to mobilize with ads about abortion.

Democrats struggled to respond. At one point, former President Bill Clinton told an associate, “We have to answer it and say we won’t do it.” He even raised the issue in a conversation with the campaign and was told the Trump ads were not necessarily having an impact, according to two people familiar with his conversations. He never broached the topic publicly.

The Harris team debated internally how to respond. Ads the Harris team produced with a direct response to the “they/them” ads wound up faring poorly in internal tests. The ads never ran.

For the Trump team, the transgender attacks — along with other ads showing Ms. Harris laughing or dancing in a colorful blouse and pink pants — fit into a broader Trump goal: to make her look like a lightweight.

Mr. Trump was already running as a felon. In the eyes of his team, the transgender ads made her look unserious, foolish and outside the political mainstream.

Change and Obama

By early October, the Trump team had been trying for weeks to blunt Ms. Harris’s efforts to portray herself as the change candidate.

The Trump team’s internal polling had showed Ms. Harris succeeding at portraying herself as a change agent in August. She had settled on the slogan “A New Way Forward” and was pressing a generational argument against Mr. Trump, who was vying to become the oldest man ever elected president.

It was one of the most worrying findings for the Trump team in the early weeks of her candidacy.

Then she went on “The View.”

In what was otherwise an anodyne talk-show appearance, Ms. Harris was asked if she would have done something differently from Mr. Biden. She paused, then said: “There is not a thing that comes to mind.”

In their group texts, Trump advisers rejoiced. They were stunned Ms. Harris did not have a ready-made answer to such a foreseeable and strategically important question.

Mr. Blair, the campaign’s political director, told the team they needed to get the clip seen by as many voters as possible.

By that afternoon, up to 10 million voters received text messages containing the clip on their cellphones. Television ads broadcast it to tens of millions more over the following weeks.

How Ms. Harris talked about Mr. Biden was clearly a problem for her. But so was how she talked about Mr. Trump.

At the Harris campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Del., which was never fully redecorated after the candidate swap, leaving conference rooms covered with images of Mr. Biden’s signature sunglasses, officials continued to debate how the vice president should attack the former president as the short campaign waged on. A broader group of strategists held three meetings on the subject in September and October.

Mr. Trump’s approval ratings were getting rosier despite early predictions that voters would sour on him the more they saw of him.

The Harris campaign’s pollsters seemed to press for a label — “dangerous” — that echoed how Mr. Trump was trying to pigeonhole Ms. Harris ideologically. But the idea ran into opposition, including from Jen O’Malley Dillon, the campaign chair. In 2016, Hillary Clinton had tried to brand Mr. Trump as “Dangerous Donald,” but the tactic had flopped then.

Weeks of deliberations left some participants on the Harris team frustrated and exhausted by the inability to reach a decision. Finally, they agreed on what campaign officials described as the “three U’s.”

Unhinged, unstable, unchecked.

Ads featuring that tagline soon followed. But Democratic allies immediately began to second-guess the focus on Mr. Trump’s character. Those doubts grew after Ms. Harris called attention to a report that Mr. Trump’s former White House chief of staff had said Mr. Trump fit the definition of a fascist.

Republicans argued that calling Mr. Trump a fascist — as Ms. Harris indeed soon did herself — would not persuade anyone.

“I’m sorry, we had him as president for four years — we know he’s not a Nazi,” said Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, a close Trump ally. “We know he’s not a fascist.”

Days later, Ms. Harris traveled to the Atlanta area for her first rally with former President Barack Obama.

Her campaign had already announced the location of her closing speech — the Ellipse, where on Jan. 6, 2021, Mr. Trump had revved up the crowd that overran the Capitol — and it hinted at her intentions.

Mr. Obama had other ideas.

In a roughly 10-minute talk in a trailer on the campus of a high school, he urged Ms. Harris to infuse her closing argument with more of her biography, to tell the story of who she was in order to get across the kind of president she would be, according to three people briefed on the conversation.

Mr. Obama also spoke with Ms. Harris’s speechwriter, Adam Frankel, who had once worked for him. The share of the speech that focused on Mr. Trump ultimately shrank, two of the people said.

On the final Sunday evening of the campaign, at a rally in East Lansing, Mich., Ms. Harris did not mention Mr. Trump once. It was the first time she had omitted his name from a speech at a campaign rally.

Trump turbulence

Mr. Trump was, as usual, demonstrating who was actually in charge.

Seated aboard his plane in the late summer, he scribbled signed copies of his book for two of his advisers: Ms. Wiles, the woman who had led his 2024 campaign from the very first day, and Corey Lewandowski, who had just recently re-entered the fray after managing Mr. Trump’s 2016 race and getting fired from that job.

Mr. Trump gave copies of the book to each and, in a characteristically over-the-top gesture, asked who got the first book and who got the second one. It was Ms. Wiles, and then Mr. Lewandowski.

“That’s the order,” Mr. Trump said. “One, two.”

That brief behind-the-scenes moment — establishing the pecking order that Ms. Wiles was in charge as his No. 1 — captured the tensions that had been roiling the Trump operation.

Mr. Trump had previously been listening to outside allies who suggested he needed a change and told some associates he feared people might be stealing from him. Mr. Lewandowski had come aboard in August and immediately embarked on a “forensic audit” of the books. He told some people he would be the campaign chairman and began assembling a team of loyalists. (Mr. Lewandowski said he never heard the pecking-order comment from Mr. Trump and denied saying he would have that title.)

The senior team — and ultimately Mr. Trump — closed ranks around Ms. Wiles, but Mr. Lewandowski had nonetheless destabilized the Trump operation at one of its most vulnerable junctures. Mr. Trump’s original team would ultimately stay in charge through a white-knuckle finish.

At one particularly unmoored event, in Lititz, Pa., on the final Sunday, Mr. Trump said he should never have left the White House in the first place and mused approvingly about the prospect of reporters being shot.

Numerous advisers, including Jason Miller and Ms. Wiles, were blunt that day, saying Mr. Trump had created a problem for himself, according to two people briefed on the discussions. Sean Hannity, the Fox News anchor and an old friend of Mr. Trump’s, called him and described how the speech was being received.

Mr. Trump has long chafed at advisers’ efforts to contain him. The next day at a rally, he made a show of stopping himself after calling a young woman “beautiful,” asking aloud to strike it from the record. “So I’m allowed to do that, aren’t I, Susan Wiles?” he asked, in a rare use of her given first name.

Mr. Trump’s capacity to resist handling kept his aides on edge right up to the end.

In just the final 10 days, Mr. Trump promised to be the protector of women “whether they like it or not.” He called himself the “father of fertilization.” He made a crack about Liz Cheney facing battle and standing with nine rifles “trained at her face.” His campaign put a comic’s racist set onstage at Madison Square Garden. And he diverted his campaign plane from the seven main battlegrounds where he had run nearly all his ads to make stops in New Mexico, Virginia and New York, simply because he wanted to.

Some of the Harris team’s final measurements suggested his late wild antics were breaking through and that they believed voters were weighing them against the former president. The election results showed the opposite.

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But the Europeans have a long way to go. A second Trump presidency could serve as a catalyst for Europe to fortify itself in the face of a more undependable America. But it is far from clear the continent is prepared to seize that moment.

With both the French and German governments weakened by domestic politics, a strong European response may be difficult to construct. And even after one term of Mr. Trump and a war in Ukraine, Europeans have been slow to change.

“A Trump victory is very painful for Europeans, as it confronts them with a question they’ve tried hard to hide from: ‘How do we deal with a United States that sees us more as a competitor and a nuisance than a friend to work with?’” said Georgina Wright, deputy director for International Studies at the Institut Montaigne in Paris. “It should unite Europe, but that does not mean Europe necessarily will unite.”

The unpredictability of Mr. Trump — emboldened and empowered by what may be a Republican sweep of both houses of Congress — concerns European allies, since unpredictability cannot be prepared for.

But they also know that Mr. Trump will maintain some clear positions. Those include skepticism for multilateral alliances, an admiration for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, and dislike of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, said François Heisbourg, a French defense analyst.

The Europeans will continue and intensify their efforts to keep lines of communication open to a new Trump administration and the key officials within it, even as they maintain close ties to American legislators who support the trans-Atlantic alliance and NATO.

The main issues are the economy, security and democracy.

When in comes to the economy, the European Union has been planning for months how it might deal with a President Trump.

E.U. officials have put together an initial offer to buy more American goods to try to forestall new tariffs, and drafted reciprocal tariffs on American goods to respond if Mr. Trump does go more protectionist.

On security, there are worries about what a Trump presidency will mean for Ukraine, a war Mr. Trump insists he can end very quickly, and about Mr. Trump’s intermittent threats to withdraw the United States from NATO.

Mr. Trump has been correct and effective in demanding more military spending from Europeans, said Mr. Heisbourg. “But NATO’s Article 5,” a commitment to collective defense, “is not supposed to be a protection racket,” he said. “But that’s Trump’s position, and this time he’ll have more power than he had in the first term.”

Article 5 depends on credibility. Some, like Ivo Daalder, a former American ambassador to NATO, think Mr. Trump could destroy that credibility and tempt Mr. Putin to test NATO simply by saying that he would not defend any country that does not pay at least NATO’s goal of 2 percent of gross domestic product toward defense.

Currently 23 of 32 member states do pay that amount or more, including those states most vulnerable to Russia, like Poland and the Baltic nations. But there is also general understanding that 2 percent “must be a floor, not a ceiling,” as NATO leaders keep saying, and that countries must spend even more given the Russian threat.

The new NATO secretary general, Mark Rutte, a former prime minister in the Netherlands, knows Mr. Trump from his first term, and Mr. Trump has praised him. Mr. Rutte has told Europeans that they must spend more in their own interests, regardless of who the American president is.

At the same time, there have been some efforts to “Trump proof” support for Ukraine.

NATO is taking over the Ukraine Contact Group, which coordinates support for Ukraine, from the United States. NATO countries have promised to deliver at least 40 billion euros, or about $43 billion, to Ukraine next year, the same amount as this one. And the Group of 7 nations have agreed on using billions of dollars in frozen Russian assets to provide Ukraine $50 billion for next year.

Poland and other countries of Central Europe, including the Baltic nations and Hungary, had a good relationship with Mr. Trump during his first term.

The foreign minister of Poland, Radoslaw Sikorski, said in Warsaw that he was in regular contact with security advisers around Mr. Trump. But Europe, he said, “urgently needs to take more responsibility for its security with increased defense spending.”

He vowed that “Poland will be a leader in strengthening Europe’s resilience.”

That would be best done in cooperation with Britain, France and Germany, said Jana Puglierin of the European Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin. But like Mr. Heisbourg, she said that the weakness of the French and German governments can undermine that goal, and that Europeans may instead try to make bilateral deals with Mr. Trump, as they did last time.

“There is little leadership in Europe, and Europe can’t be led by the Commission or by the European Union institutions,” she said, referring to the bloc’s bureaucracy in Brussels, “but only by its strongest members.”

But Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany chose to prioritize his close relationship with President Biden and has not invested in Europe.

Paralyzed and divided, the governing coalition in Berlin collapsed Wednesday night. “Germany is seen as a problem in Europe now,” she said.

Most importantly, Ms. Puglierin said, “We in Europe must confront a lifetime illusion, thinking that Trump was the real aberration and overlooking the deep structural changes in America,” including the shift toward Asia and a growing fatigue with its global responsibilities. “So this is an election that Europeans should take very seriously,” she said.

The German government’s trans-Atlantic coordinator, Michael Link, said Trump’s re-election meant that both the European Union and the European pillar of NATO had to be strengthened and avoid divisions.

“We can’t just passively wait for what Trump will do, or what Putin will do,” he told German radio. But he also said that Europeans must “make clear what we expect of the U.S., that it must fulfill its NATO obligations, and that if it disengages from Ukraine, in the end that would only help China. That if Russia wins in Ukraine, China wins, too.”

There is also concern about democratic values and the rule of law, and Mr. Trump’s evident admiration for those he considers strong leaders, like Mr. Putin, Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and President Xi Jinping of China.

Mr. Trump is seen as the standard-bearer for those populist center-right and right-wing leaders in Europe like Mr. Orban, who has established what he calls an “illiberal democracy,” as well as Prime Minister Robert Fico of Slovakia and Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy.

His victory is inevitably going to inspire them and encourage others to duplicate more nationalist and less liberal policies built on stopping unwanted migration and on protectionism.

Europe is already seeing a decline in support for democratic, liberal, progressive values and the rise of extremist parties on the right. Mr. Trump’s victory will embolden them and weaken Europe’s coherence and its voice.

“Spreading liberal values is a lot harder when the president of the largest democracy, the United States, openly contests them,” Ms. Wright said.