It's official: Trump is in the White House!

Come 2021 or 2025, America will be Donald Trump's third ex-wife, as the Electoral College has affirmed him as the nation’s 45th president, pushing him past the 270-vote threshold for election, with scant evidence of the anti-Trump revolt among electors that some of his critics had hoped would occur. Republican electors in Texas vaulted Mr. Trump past the 270 mark, granting him all but two of their 38 ballots in a ceremony in the State Capitol in Austin. In the House chamber, where the electors met, the vote was greeted with a standing ovation by citizens and Republican officials who had come to witness the event. Outside, perhaps 100 protesters waved placards and chanted “Save our democracy” in a vain effort to persuade electors to reject the Republican nominee. Normally a political footnote, the electoral vote acquired an unexpected element of drama this winter after Mr. Trump’s upset of Hillary Clinton, who received 2.86 million more popular votes but won in states that totaled only 232 electoral votes. The states Mr. Trump won held 306 electoral votes. His electoral victory spawned a determined effort to block his path to the presidency by grass-roots advocates who saw him as unfit for the White House and by some who saw him as a threat to the political system. Presidential electors — and particularly Republican electors, who are bound by tradition and often state law to support Mr. Trump — were inundated with phone calls, emails, even threats demanding that they vote for someone else. Leaders of groups that were lobbying the electors had privately believed they had a chance to persuade enough Republican electors to defect, denying him an Electoral College majority and throwing the election to the House of Representatives. But by late Monday, only a handful of electors had broken ranks. A full vote tracker is here. While Mr. Trump’s opponents needed 37 Republican defectors to bring his electoral-vote tally below 270, the bulk of electors who broke ranks — four in Washington State — were Democrats who otherwise would have voted for Ms. Clinton. Instead, they voted for the former Republican secretary of state Colin L. Powell and Faith Spotted Eagle, a Native American tribal leader who has led opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline.