Donald Trump’s fatal flaws are also his superpowers – and have propelled him back to the White House

He’s become only the second US president ever to defy the political adage that once you are out, you are out – and it’s thanks to personality traits that would have finished off any other candidate, says John Rentoul

Grover Cleveland – the only other non-consecutive two-term president of the United States – has long been a pub-quiz staple. He was different from Donald Trump.

Cleveland was a Democrat who won popularity by opposing corruption and supporting free trade. He won in 1884, but voters in northern industrial states decided free trade was a threat to their jobs and elected Benjamin Harrison in 1888, who promised tariffs to protect them. Tariffs turned out to be a bad idea, pushing up prices. So Cleveland, whose reputation for personal probity remained strong, won again in 1892.

The only similarity between Cleveland and non-consecutive two-term president-elect Trump is that inflation helped them both back into the White House.

Re-election after a period out of office has, for the past half century, been rare in democracies around the world.

The last time it happened here was when Harold Wilson returned to No 10 in February 1974. He only just made it, in an inconclusive election that had to be repeated eight months later, securing the barest of majorities. As prime minister in the 1960s, Wilson hardly had a record to be proud, but he was a good operator of internal party politics and fended off limp challenges from his rivals, none of whom had a big idea.

But before him, non-consecutive terms as prime minister were quite normal. Winston Churchill came back in 1951 – a special case, perhaps, after his wartime service. Before that, Stanley Baldwin had three goes in the 1920s and 1930s, alternating with Ramsay MacDonald. Gladstone had four, alternating with first Disraeli and then Salisbury. Working backwards: Derby, Russell, Palmerston, Peel, Melbourne, Wellington and Pitt all had more than one consecutive stint.

Since Wilson, it hasn’t happened here. The convention has hardened that when you lose office, you are out. Tony Blair left parliament on the day he stood down as prime minister. David Cameron came back as foreign secretary, but no one ever thought he could be prime minister again.

Boris Johnson plainly dreams of making a comeback, with his teasing reference to Cincinnatus and his plough – the Roman dictator who put the affairs of the republic in order and retired voluntarily to his farm, only to be begged to return, which he did, saving the republic from renewed turmoil. But if Johnson wanted to hold high office again, he should have stayed in parliament, instead of running away from the voters of Uxbridge, refusing to fight a by-election that the replacement Conservative candidate won.

It takes something exceptional to win back the top job in a modern democracy after a time out. Politics is faster and more unforgiving. But in Trump, politics has met its match: a candidate who is faster and more unforgiving.

You do not have to approve of Trump to recognise that he is different from most politicians. It is not just that he is a convicted felon, but that the thing he has not yet been convicted of – namely inciting the riot at the Capitol – arose from a pathological refusal to accept defeat. Here is a man whose ego is so large that mere facts are immaterial. Of course the 2020 election wasn’t “stolen” as a matter of fact – but as a matter of Trump’s psychology, yes it was, because someone else was in the White House afterwards.

So he fought and fought to right that wrong, as he saw it, and that fighting spirit, however unhinged it looks to those on the outside, plainly has an exceptional appeal to large numbers of American voters. His response to his attempted assassination, the raised fist and the “Fight, fight, fight”, was a defining moment.

He was aided by circumstances. Rising prices helped him, just as they helped restore Cleveland to office in 1892. When Trump lost four years ago, voters, especially in the northern rust belt – the same swing states that turfed out Cleveland and turfed him back in again – felt he had betrayed his promise to restore their prosperity. But after four years of Bidenomics, those fickle voters look back on Trump’s first term as a golden age of plenty.

But the most remarkable thing about Trump’s comeback is his personality. The things that scare his opponents – and the Ukrainian people – are his impulsiveness, his megalomania, his reckless disregard for democratic norms. But those are precisely what make him exceptional, able to reconnect with his voters after four years out of office, able to defy the trend of modern politics that decrees: once you have lost, you have lost.