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After 2am, Trump emerged to speak, surrounded by his family, close aides and JD Vance, the hard-right Ohio senator he made his vice-presidential pick.

“This is a movement like nobody’s ever seen before,” Trump said. “This is I believe the greatest political movement of all time. There’s never been anything like this in this country and now it’s going to reach a new level of importance, because we’re going to help our country heal.

“We’re going to fix our borders. We’re going to fix everything about our country … I will not rest until we have delivered the strong, safe and prosperous America that our children deserve, this will truly be the golden age of America.”

By 5.37am ET the Associated Press called Wisconsin for Trump, with the state’s 10 electoral college votes tipping Trump’s total to 277 – well past the 270 votes needed to win the presidency.

In Congress, Republicans also recaptured the US Senate, but control of the House of Representatives remained unclear on Wednesday morning, with many of the most competitive races still uncalled.

Harris, 60, made reproductive rights and personal freedoms a rallying cry and backed a national law codifying access to safe abortion. Her loss represents a devastating, anxiety-inducing blow to supporters reminiscent of Hillary Clinton’s crushing defeat in 2016. She was expected to speak later on Wednesday.

But for Trump, the unlikeliest of comebacks is now complete. Many analysts assumed that his defeat by Joe Biden in 2020 spelled the end of his political career, especially when an angry mob of his supporters – fuelled by his lie that the election was stolen – stormed the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, resulting in his second impeachment.

But while Trump’s grip on the Republican party was briefly shaken, it held firm. The thrice-married New Yorker, found liable for sexual abuse, remained an unlikely hero of evangelical Christians and the white working class, and polling suggested that he gained small but significant traction among African American and Latino voters.

Four criminal cases – including a conviction on 34 felony counts over concealing hush-money payments to the adult film performer Stormy Daniels – would have been devastating to any other politician but only appeared to strengthen Trump’s standing with his “Make America Great Again” (Maga) base.

Spewing insults, Trump swatted challengers aside to claim the Republican presidential nomination for a third consecutive time. Just before the party convention in July he survived an assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, an escape that many allies took as a sign from God (another would-be assassin was caught at one of Trump’s Florida golf courses in September).

Meanwhile, after a disastrous debate performance, Joe Biden stepped aside as the presumptive Democratic nominee in July and anointed Harris his successor. Her “politics of joy” gave Democrats a jolt of energy and appeared to change the trajectory of a race that had been slipping away.

The contest unfolded over little more than 100 days, the shortest in modern memory, against a backdrop of hurricanes at home and wars overseas. Trump received a major assist from the world’s richest man, the tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, who gave away millions of dollars to voters in swing states who signed a petition tied to his political action committee.

The race looked extraordinarily close until the end. However, Trump’s significant victory suggests that his pitch – often crude and rambling, mendacious and racist – still resonated among voters disillusioned with the political establishment. It was also a repudiation of Biden’s legislatively productive presidency and his dire warnings of the danger that Trump poses to US institutions and global security.

The election result threatens convulsions and mass protests across the country. Trump ran on a now familiar campaign theme of nativist populism that promised the biggest ever deportation of undocumented people, whom he branded as “animals” with “bad genes” who were “poisoning the blood of the country”. He complained that the US was “like a garbage can” for the rest of the world.

The former president also cast his criminal indictments as a political attack, vowing “retribution” against perceived enemies and embracing increasingly dystopian rhetoric. He made ominous comments threatening to deploy the military domestically against “enemies from within” and promised to pardon supporters imprisoned for the January 6 insurrection.

Trump will be the first president to serve non-consecutive terms since Grover Cleveland, who was in office from 1885 to 1889 and from 1893 to 1897.

As vice-president, Harris will preside over a joint session of Congress in January to certify the results of the election. She will be succeeded as vice-president by Vance, the 40-year-old senator who, unlike the former vice-president Mike Pence, has refused to acknowledge that Trump lost four years ago.

Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage