Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward, Donald Trump, and his former Chief of Staff General John Kelley. PHOTOS COURTESY OF HOMELANDSECURITY.COM AND STOCK PHOTOS

Just so it is not forgotten, when Donald Trump first sought the presidency in 1916, it was as a candidate who, at another time, would never have made it past the primaries. It was worse in 2020 and more so this year.

The U.S. House of Representatives twice impeached the former president. A jury convicted him on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to hush money paid to an adult actress to cover up a sexual encounter. He was indicted of sexual abuse. He was convicted of trying to overturn the 2020 election results. He was convicted on civil fraud charges related to his business. He faces charges of inciting the mob that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and with illegally removing classified government documents.

Several senior former members of his administration opposed his re-election. Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward wrote that Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley told him Trump was a “fascist to the core.” Chief of Staff John Kelley told The New York Times that Trump “prefers the dictator approach to government.” Other critics included Defense Secretary Mark Esper and National Security Adviser John Bolton.

Trump set aside civility and called his opponents “communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country and lie and cheat on elections.” He declared that “the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within.” He deemed his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, “retarded” and having “low IQ.” He made more than 100 threats “to investigate, prosecute, imprison or otherwise punish his perceived opponents,” NPR reported.

He demeaned migrants by repeating lies that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were eating neighbors’ pets and that a Venezuelan gang had taken over an apartment building in Aurora, Colorado. He said the United States is “a dumping ground. We’re like a garbage can for the world” and promised to deport all undocumented immigrants, estimated at 11 million.

Despite all that, Trump resoundingly won re-election. In 2020, he obtained 74 million popular votes and 232 electoral votes, losing to President Joe Biden who received 81 million and 306, respectively. But, this year, Trump won 76 million popular votes and 312 electoral votes, convincingly defeating Vice President Kamala Harris, who garnered 74 million and 226, respectively.

No credible reports have surfaced that Trump stole the election, as he continues to claim happened with him in 2020, whether by manipulating electoral systems or the ballots. Rather, it was voters themselves who were manipulated through a strategy which was directed at the same objective of winning and was evidently legal. Voters fell for a con.

Large segments of the electorate, especially non-European Americans, have said that they voted for Trump because of the state of the economy, which, for them, translated into higher cost of goods and services. That was an obvious reason but a Nov. 15 Washington Post report added another wrinkle: a “false flag” campaign deployed to deliberately mislead voters.

“Muslims in Michigan began seeing pro-Israel ads this fall praising Vice President Kamala Harris for marrying a Jewish man and backing the Jewish state. Jews in Pennsylvania, meanwhile, saw ads from the same group with the opposite message: Harris wanted to stop U.S. arms shipments to Israel,” The Post reported.

“Another group promoted ‘Kamala’s bold progressive agenda’ to conservative-leaning Donald Trump voters, while a third filled the phones of young liberals with videos about how Harris had abandoned the progressive dream. Black voters in North Carolina were told Democrats wanted to take away their menthol cigarettes, while working-class white men in the Midwest were warned that Harris would support quotas for minorities and deny them Zyn nicotine pouches,” The Post added.

Political advisers to Tesla founder Elon Musk, who had worked on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign, were behind the creation of the “false positives,” The Post said, citing a presentation on “ads that appeared to be something they were not” and focusing on battleground states.

“With digital spots, direct mail, text messages, influencer marketing and mobile billboards, the overall project was a high-tech experiment in misdirection — an old political tactic that has been sharpened in recent decades with increasingly precise targeting techniques,” The Post reported.

That “high-tech experiment in misdirection” came out of research by Building America’s Future, an organization which Republican consultants Generra Peck and Phil Cox, former advisers to DeSantis, created during Trump’s presidency. It also involved America PAC, which was funded by Musk, who donated to Building America’s Future, The Post said, citing a Wall Street Journal report.

Ryan Tyson, another former DeSantis adviser, also played a key role, holding 25 focus groups in February comprising “specific communities of targeted voters, with most of the research effort focused on likely Democrats who were uncertain about voting,” The Post said. “The goal was to figure out how to help Donald Trump win during a campaign in which Democrats were vastly outspending Republicans on digital advertising.” A separate project sought to depress turnout for Harris “knowing that Trump would be unlikely to drastically expand his vote totals.”

Overall, the disinformation campaign borrowed heavily from tactics which Susie Wiles, Chris LaCivita and James Blair – also former DeSantis operatives — used to hide the source of the deceptive messaging, including creating non-existent organizations such as Future Coalition PAC, Duty to America PAC, Americans for Consumer Protection and Progress 2028, The Post said, quoting people involved.

For example, using Americans for Consumer Protection, disinformation was presented in “more than 247 million ads and 70 million video completions” directed at 2.7 million voters. One of the falsehoods was that the Biden administration – i.e., Harris -supported a ban on menthol cigarettes. That was directed at African American voters in Ohio, which Trump won with 56 percent of the votes, and it most likely helped in the defeat of incumbent Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown.

Another aspect of this campaign to re-elect a candidate who told 30,573 lies or misstatements in his first presidential term is the cynicism of some of the multi-billionaires who donated tens of millions of dollars to help Trump’s campaign after publicly disavowing him as unfit for the presidency, according to a New Yorker magazine report by Susan B. Glasser. They included investor Nelson Peltz, who called the Capitol attack a “disgrace,” said, “As an American … I’m embarrassed,” expressed regret for voting for Trump and stopped speaking to him. But Peltz hosted a fundraising dinner for two dozen of the country’s richest Republican donors and told them, “I don’t like Donald Trump. … He’s a terrible human being, but our country’s in a bad place, and we can’t afford Joe Biden,” Glasser reported, citing an unnamed attendee. As a result, regardless of how much they disliked the idea, Peltz told his guests that “we’ve all got to throw our support behind him.”

Kenneth Griffin, C.E.O. of the hedge fund Citadel and a top Republican donor, called Trump a “three-time loser” and an “idiot,” a friend told Glasser. Griffin did not donate to Trump this year, saying, “I’m so torn on this one. I know who I’m going to vote for, but it’s not with a smile on my face.” Glasser said Griffin told her that “Americans enjoyed greater economic opportunity, and the world was a safer place, under President Trump’s leadership.”

Stephen Schwarzman, C.E.O. of Blackstone, the world’s largest private-equity fund, endorsed Trump but had donated $2 million to the presidential campaign of former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who had called Trump “unfit” to be President.

Thomas Peterffy, a six-figure donor to Trump in 2020, later vowed to do “whatever I can” to make sure he was not re-elected. But he eventually donated $844,660 to the Trump 47 joint fund-raising committee, which helped support his campaign

“A lot of the donors have just come to the conclusion that, when you add it all up, the risks with Trump are behavioral—personal behavior and what he says—versus the policies,” an attendee at a dinner hosted by Florida sugar magnate José (Pepe) Fanjul told Glasser. It was a “rationalization” adopted by “even those who were initially very put off, very alienated, by his behavior at the end of his presidency.”

Fred Wertheimer, a public-interest lawyer, told Glasser. “The amount of money sloshing around Washington now is beyond any sense of reality,” adding, “It’s like a sandbox for billionaires, and they treat it like a sandbox, and they go in and play.”

And Sean Wilentz, a Princeton University historian, said that Trump’s billionaire backers, many of whom have made their fortunes as hedge-fund managers, activist investors and corporate raiders, tended to be highly motivated ideologues and individual operators. “It’s transactional, but their end of the bargain is a lot different than just having access to the President of the United States,” Wilentz said. “They see Trump as their instrument. This is an investment for them to take power.”

Unlike the “traditional corporate conservative élite” dating back to the Gilded Age, Wilentz said, this new “class of the super-rich” appeared both more numerous and less civicminded. “The other guys might have been robber barons. These guys are oligarchs” And they now have political power.