Donald Trump’s second victory is even more remarkable than his first. The first was unexpected. He captured magic in a bottle. But magic comes once in a lifetime. The second time, he had to fight for it, sometimes fight what seemed like the whole world, especially the media. Fight and win. Love him or hate him, Trump is America’s real-life ‘Rocky.’ 

Mention Rocky and you can hear the original theme song playing in your head. You can picture him running up the steps to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, throwing his fists in the air like a champion.

That’s how legends are made.

Every culture creates its myths. We write books, plays and movies about our heroes. That’s what Sylvester Stallone did. He crafted a perfect Hollywood myth – an everyman who overcomes all odds to become a champ, to become larger than life. There is no one alive today larger than life more than Trump.

When ‘Rocky’ was released on Dec. 3, 1976, it became the perfect American story. An ordinary boxer who got a title shot from a champ who planned to mop the floor with him. Trump was a mere 30 then, building his own legend. 

The Rocky saga – nine movies so far – is similar to the political life of The Donald. Rocky lost his first big fight. Then he won the championship. He got beaten again against a bigger, tougher Clubber Lang, played by Mr. T, in ‘Rocky III.’ Then Rocky had to take back what had been his. Along the way, he learned how to be a husband, a father and, yes, even a diplomat. 

Trump’s career arc has been much the same. He came from money, there’s no denying that. But he built The Donald himself. A Nov. 1, 1976, New York Times piece about the future president admitted as much: ‘Donald Trump, Real Estate Promoter, Builds Image as He Buys Buildings.’ He’s had his share of mistakes and failures, heroes always do.

Just weeks before ‘Rocky’ hit the theater, the Times was describing a young Trump in ways he couldn’t buy today with all his cash: ‘He is tall, lean and blond, with dazzling white teeth, and he looks ever so much like Robert Redford. He rides around town in a chauffeured silver Cadillac with his initials, DJT, on the plates.’

That was the beginning of the Trump we know. He grew larger with media appearances and self-promotion. The press loved him because he symbolized the business community and was a great interview. He turned that celebrity into books, TV and movie spots, including a humorous cameo in ‘Home Alone 2: Lost in New York.’ 

NBC’s ‘Apprentice’ made Trump a household name as he laughingly fired people. The network gave him the red-carpet welcome in 2005 on ‘Today.’ They introduced him to the sounds of ‘The Imperial March,’ from ‘Star Wars.’ Weatherman Al Roker called Trump, ‘the intergalactic king of the universe.’ Trump parlayed that fame into a political career.

He launched it, no one else. Even when he ran for president the first time, he was his own best spokesman. If you had a radio or TV show somewhere in America, Trump would go on. I used to do a fair number of talk radio appearances. I lost track of how many times he would be on right before or right after me. No politician does that.

Trump did. That drive got him into the White House. That was the rise of Trump. 

Enough has been written about his fall to fill the Library of Congress. Not one, but two impeachments. An endless stream of prosecutions, friends and allies turning on him, countless media hit pieces, books and even a movie, all designed to knock Trump out of politics and either shove him onto the sidelines or into a prison cell.

Only one problem. He wouldn’t go. He wouldn’t quit. He kept on fighting. Kept on because, like Rocky, he doesn’t give up. That’s Trump’s real superpower. Not his charisma or storytelling. It’s that you can hit him with the kitchen sink or a garbage truck and he keeps on going. He survived not one, but two, assassination attempts. After getting shot, he stood up, fist aimed skyward, telling his supporters to ‘Fight, fight, fight!’

That photograph of a bloody, defiant Trump should win the Pulitzer Prize. There he is, surrounded by Secret Service agents, with his arm thrust in the air. It’s an unforgettable image, but It probably won’t win because it captured the essence of the man more than the media ever wanted. Even wounded and targeted by an assassin, Trump’s instinct was the American one. To fight.

That was the voice of our anger, the voice of our pain and the voice of our loss. The shooter wounded two and murdered former fire chief Corey Comperatore, Americans who were there just to hear the former president speak. But the assassin couldn’t stop Trump.

Now, Trump has another chance to rewrite the history books. No American has ever fallen from grace this far to come back on top like he has. That victory gives him a chance to do great things, perhaps even unite a fractured nation.

At the end of his brutal fight against the Russian Ivan Drago, right in the heart of the old USSR, Rocky won over the opposing crowd, and beat the powerful Russian boxer. Rocky took the microphone to win over, not just the crowd, but the world. There he was, bloody, battered and wrapped in an American flag: ‘I’ve seen a lot of people hatin’ me and I didn’t know what to feel about that, so I guess I didn’t like you much then either,’ he says. ‘During this fight, I seen a lot of changing. The way yous felt about me and the way I felt about you.… If I can change and you can change, everybody can change.’

Perhaps, after three knockdown elections, Americans, too, can change and stop fighting one another. That’s my prayer for Trump’s second term.

There is a minimum skills set that is required of the Commander-in-Chief and it involves making decisions of life and death in real and often hurried time, decisions about protecting America and its troops. 

Long before the Afghanistan debacle many doubted President Biden’s ability to correctly make those decisions, including former Secretary of Defense Gates. Vice President Harris never gave a single interview in which she even attempted to demonstrate the skills set required which begins with thinking and talking on your feet even if only to filibuster effectively or provide cover for ongoing sidebar or secret negotiations. 

The second skills set are the varied abilities required to assemble a team of 3,000 or more people to join you in the administration. Not surprisingly President Donald Trump’s first time as a ‘president-elect’ had its share of ‘swings-and-misses’ on personnel because he’d never been a politician, had no large, lifelong cadre of political and government professionals on which to draw for guidance and support.

As a private sector, private company developer, the former and future president knew land development and television, and the promotional talents to succeed at both. His early success in Manhattan development branched out to his casinos and luxury golf course properties and far from New York City, but that successful set of developments included a standard number of projects that didn’t work out and went bust. Developers—I represented many large developers, both public and private, when I practiced law from 1989 to 2016—are all alike in some crucial ways, and none of them escaped recessions and the vagaries of the business. They are not at all risk averse and they are very much learning machines but not of the bookish sort. ‘Cut and fill’ to ‘balance’ a development site and ‘units per acre’ are among the many terms of art in the business of residential planned community land and leisure development, but not many people make the jump from that to elected politics. The skills cross-over is limited. 

So Trump spent quite a lot of time learning the traps and water hazards of D.C. in his first term. Trump knows he can rely on many people who were with him in the first term: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Ambassador Robert O’Brien, Ambassador Richard Grenell, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, and many more. His old diplomatic corps includes ambassadors he may well ask to return like Ambassador David Friedman who did so much for the U.S.-Israel partnership or Ambassador George Glass who was Trump’s first ambassador to a European country (Portugal.) Trump knows now on whom he can rely tomorrow. 

The Trump transition team(s) are both formal and informal, and the president-elect’s choices in the personnel arena many and varied. He will be much better at this process than he was the first time simply because it is the second time. If there is any important skill that isn’t improved by practice, I’m unaware of it. 

Despite the incendiary rhetoric of cataclysm that came from over-wrought voices on both left and right as the election drew close, all will be well and the United States will soon be back on the world stage, led by a confident president and an experienced team. We will be fine. 

What I hope most for is that President Trump finds a Cap Weinberger to run the Pentagon and leaves him or her to it, allows that person to staff the building and that those political appointees commit to serve for four years. We need talent and continuity at our most important department of government.

Wish as well for a wordsmith who can persuade the returning president to borrow from Lincoln’s First Inaugural for Trump’s second, especially these lines from its closing: ‘We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.’

Hugh Hewitt is host of ‘The Hugh Hewitt Show,’ heard weekday mornings 6am to 9am ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh wakes up America on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990.  Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcast, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.

Vice President Harris’ second failed presidential bid mirrors aspects of her first trek on the campaign trail in 2019, proving to be short-lived and unfocused on key issues important to American voters, experts say.

‘Both started with great promise,’ Tevi Troy, a presidential historian and former senior official in the George W. Bush administration, told Fox News Digital in an interview. 

‘There’s the sense that she’s the savior of the new flavor, the next generation for Democrats, and both kind of failed spectacularly,’ he said.

In December 2019, then-Sen. Harris suspended her bid for the presidency 11 months after entering the race, citing a lack of campaign funds and a lag in the polls. It wasn’t long before staffers exposed the disarray in her campaign.

But before she was one of the more prominent early dropouts among the field of Democrat contenders, Harris’ campaign started off with significant momentum, marked by her strong launch that drew a large crowd in Oakland, California. She was initially seen as a top-tier candidate.

However, as the campaign progressed, her campaign’s messaging became unclear and faced tough opposition from then-candidate Joe Biden as well as Elizabeth Warren, Tulsi Gabbard and Bernie Sanders.

‘Both [campaigns] ran aground on the same two things. No. 1 is her inability to communicate even the most simple idea to the American people. And it’s not because she’s not intellectually capable of doing it, it’s because she is in a box,’ Troy said of Harris.

‘She’s trapped,’ he added. ‘On the one hand, her inclinations and her voters are on the left, and on the other hand, she wants to win the general election, and to appeal to people in the general election, she has to renounce the more woke policies that she’s espoused throughout her life.’

But to do that, Troy said, would cost her excited progressive big donors.

Harris became the Democrat frontrunner after President Biden suspended his bid for re-election in July amid reports of his declining mental acuity in the wake of a poor debate performance against Republican former President Trump in June. Biden quickly endorsed Harris, who made ‘reproductive rights’ a top issue on the campaign trail, a strategy that would ultimately not win over enough swing state voters. Harris was the Democrat nominee for only about four months.

‘I don’t think voters felt like abortion rights were at risk,’ another GOP strategist told Fox News Digital. ‘They largely agreed that the voters should decide, which was President Trump’s message that it should be sent to the states for voters themselves to decide.’

‘I think our biggest strength was Kamala’s own words that she had so many far-left San Francisco liberal policy proposals that were all explained by her on camera during the 2020 campaign that we were able to deploy really effectively and target into districts where people have really negative views of those,’ the Republican expert said. 

And voters may have wanted more substance from Harris when it comes to the economy and the border. Preliminary data from the Fox News Voter Analysis, a survey of more than 110,000 voters nationwide, provides an early look at the mood of voters as they cast their ballots.

Voters say the economy is far and away the top issue facing the country, followed distantly by immigration and abortion. In a sign of inflation’s economic toll, roughly three times as many voters feel they were falling behind financially as those who feel they were getting ahead.

Harris also faced the challenge of decoupling herself from Biden but otherwise ran an ‘expertly run campaign,’ according to Philadelphia-based Democrat strategist Mustafa Rashed.

‘It was going to be hard to distance herself from the sitting president; she couldn’t use him as a surrogate because he was just not an effective surrogate,’ Rashed told Fox News Digital. ‘He’s not great on the campaign trail, and he’s not popular enough to outweigh the downsides of having him as your partner.’

Harris conceded to Trump over the phone on Wednesday morning after he clinched a majority of the electoral vote overnight. She gave her concession speech later in the day at her alma mater, Howard University.

‘The outcome of this election is not what we hoped, not what we fought, not what we voted for,’ Harris said. ‘But hear when I say … the light of America’s promise will always burn bright as long as we never give up and as long as we keep fighting.’

Fox News Digital’s Polling Unit contributed to this report.