Donald Trump is back. But make no mistake: this was Joe Biden’s defeat.

In a razor-close election, everyone looks back at all the losing candidate’s decisions and gaffes for a sign of where it went wrong.

This doesn’t look that close. Trump is on pace to win the popular vote, sweep the swing states and carry some Senate races in his wake.

He’s widening his leads in red areas and narrowing his losses in blue ones.

Vice President Kamala Harris was carried along on a brilliantly orchestrated handoff, to be sure. But she picked a dud of a running mate in Tim Walz instead of Josh Shapiro, the popular governor of Pennsylvania.

She also hid from the press, then stumbled in interviews and delivered ‘word salad’ speeches.

Though none of that now seems to have mattered – for in the end, she was irrevocably tied to Biden.

She couldn’t escape her role in the coverup of his cognitive decline. Nor could she escape his disastrous legacy.

Before Biden dropped out of the race, it looked as if Trump would run the table.

Harris gave the Democrats enough enthusiasm to stave off a wider collapse, but she couldn’t change that trajectory. The election ended pretty much where it was in July – a Trump blowout.

Americans forgave a lot of Trump’s misdeeds. Not because they changed their opinions of him, but because they believed he could do a better job than Biden.

Years of runaway inflation ate away at family budgets. The border was let open. Crime surged. Afghanistan was abandoned to the Taliban after Americans had bled there for 20 years. Putin and Hamas ran wild. Crazy woke policies on gender pushed men into women’s sports.

Americans across the map rebelled, with Hispanic voters leading the way.

Democrats faced setbacks with blue-collar white Midwesterners, Southwestern Latinos, outer-borough New Yorkers, wealthy Virginians, and Southerners in North Carolina and Georgia. Arab voters in Michigan abandoning Kamala over the Gaza war were the icing on the cake.

Every time Biden surfaced in the campaign, he made things worse. He said Trump needed to be locked up, and that his voters were ‘garbage’. But he also defended Ron DeSantis when Harris tried to say the Florida governor was refusing to take her calls as devastating hurricanes barreled toward the Southern state.

Everything the Dems tried failed. They thought abortion would be a silver bullet, and – yes – they won some votes on the issue. But on the whole, voters didn’t buy that they should ignore the economy, the border and national security over abortion. DeSantis even defeated an abortion amendment in Florida (a first for Republicans since the overturning of Roe v Wade).

All the rest – the indictments, the endless harping on about January 6, the effort to throw Trump off the ballot, even the confected controversy over a roast comic telling bad jokes – fell flat.

It turned out that Americans cared more about themselves than about Trump. And they just decided, millions of them, that they were better off under him than under Biden.

Biden was handed a popular majority, control of both Houses of Congress, a compliant mainstream media, an atmosphere of national emergency during the Covid pandemic, and historians telling him he could be transformational.

He blew it.

Time for Joe to slink off to a retirement home. And time for the Democrats to go back to the drawing board. This isn’t working – and Americans have had enough.