Former President Donald Trump told Americans exactly what he planned to do.

He would use military force against his political opponents. He would fire thousands of career public servants. He would deport millions of immigrants in military-style roundups. He would crush the independence of the Department of Justice, use government to push public health conspiracies and abandon America’s allies abroad. He would turn the government into a tool of his own grievances, a way to punish his critics and richly reward his supporters. He would be a “dictator” — if only on Day One.

And, when asked to give him the power to do all of that, the voters said yes.

This was a conquering of the nation not by force but with a permission slip. Now, America stands on the precipice of an authoritarian style of governance never before seen in its 248-year history.

After defeating Vice President Kamala Harris, who would have become the first female U.S. president, Trump will bring his own historic firsts into the White House: the only president convicted of dozens of crimes, accused of dozens more and twice impeached.

Unlike in 2016, when he scored a surprise electoral victory but lost the popular vote, Trump will go to Washington able to claim a broad mandate. Over his four years out of power, he rebuilt the Republican Party in his image, creating a movement that only seemed to strengthen with every recrimination. He will begin his second term bound by few political norms, after a campaign in which he seemed to defy every one.

He did well in the battleground states, winning at least five of the seven, and appeared on track to win the popular vote — the first time a Republican candidate has done that since President George W. Bush in 2004 for his second term. Trump’s party flipped the Senate and was in range of maintaining control of the House. Blue areas shifted toward him, with Trump improving his performance in places like New York City by double digits. So did suburbs, rural areas, even college towns.

“America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate,” Trump told supporters at the convention center in West Palm Beach, Florida, for a victory party before the result was official. “I will govern by a simple motto: promises made, promises kept.”

His victory was a direct repudiation of some top aides, military brass and Republican officials who served in his first administration. They had publicly warned he would not save the nation but destroy it.

Yet the electoral climate was ripe for Trump — though he had a hand in creating the weather.

In the wake of the pandemic, which critics said his administration badly mismanaged, the country grew more skeptical of government. Trust in the media, science, medicine, the judicial system and other mainstay institutions plunged as more voters embraced the doubts Trump had sown for years.

Public opinion shifted in his direction on issues that had long been the centerpiece of his political movement. Even Democrats embraced stricter policies on immigration and crime, underscoring how much his relentless focus on the border resonated.

After his defeat, Trump spent four years tightening his grip on the Republican Party, to the point where both lawmakers and voters professed to believe his lies that the 2020 election was stolen from him. The number of Americans identifying themselves as Republican edged ahead of that of Democrats for the first time in decades.

Instead of softening the crude rhetoric that has long been one of his hallmarks, he became more obscene, even appearing to pantomime a sex act at a rally in the campaign’s final week. He wooed Black and Latino voters with false claims that migrants were stealing their jobs and were responsible for a wave of violent crime.

Trump uttered the kind of insults about Harris and other prominent female politicians that were once unthinkable to say in public. Even his appeals to women, a group he was struggling to win, were laced with a sense of menace: In the final weeks of the race, he promised to protect women — “whether the women like it or not.”

And he ended the race by insulting the Puerto Rican voters his campaign had spent months trying to woo.

Throughout the race, Trump’s most faithful supporters showed little discomfort with this abrasive style.

Whether Americans — even some of those who voted for him — will like the reality of Trump’s plans remains to be seen.

What is clear, in the end, is that Americans wanted change. And now, they will surely get it.