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    The Long Wave: Unearthing the real story of Black voters at the US election

    Hello and welcome to The Long Wave. This week, I had a chat with Lauren N Williams, the deputy editor for race and equity at the Guardian US, about the country’s election results and the role Black voters played. I wanted to discuss the reported swing among Black voters to Donald Trump, which seemed pretty significant. However, talking to her made me see things from a different angle. But first, the weekly roundup.Weekly roundupView image in fullscreenBarbados PM invites Trump for climate talks | At the UN’s Cop29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, Mia Mottley told the Guardian that she would “find common purpose in saving the planet” with the president-elect of the US. Trump’s re-election has aggravated fears about the future of climate action.Malcolm X family sues over assassination | The family of Malcolm X have filed a $100m federal lawsuit against the CIA, FBI and New York police department over his death. The lawsuit alleges that law enforcement agencies knew of the plot to assassinate the civil rights leader in 1965 but did not act to stop it.Kenyans embrace standup comedy | Comedy is booming in Kenya, with new venues and a fresh wave of standups picking up the mic. As our east Africa correspondent, Carlos Mureithi, reports: “Topics encompass daily life and the entire range of challenges that beset the country … as performers tap into the power of standup to make people laugh about their difficulties.”Steve McQueen reveals cancer treatment | The Oscar-winning film director and artist Steve McQueen underwent treatment for prostate cancer in 2022. The Blitz producer, whose father died of the disease in 2006, has helped raise awareness of the higher risk of prostate cancer among Black men, and directed a short campaign film, Embarassed.Evaristos connect at Rio book festival | The British Booker prize-winner Bernardine Evaristo and Brazil’s most celebrated living Black author, Conceição Evaristo, met for the first time at Festa Literária das Periferias in Rio de Janeiro last Wednesday. The two Evaristos, who are unrelated, spoke on a panel discussion about their shared surname and its ties to Brazil and the transatlantic slave trade.In depth: A Black political shift – math or myth?View image in fullscreenThe headlines seemed clear: Trump’s support among Black voters had soared. In the US election this month, some media reported that he doubled his share of the Black male vote and won more Black voters than any other Republican in almost 50 years. This was history! Well, not quite, Lauren N Williams tells me. “The numbers overall are almost identical to how people voted in 2020,” she says. According to exit polls, Black voters turned out for Harris at 85%, and for Joe Biden at 87%. The only real difference is that the number of Black men who voted for Kamala Harris dropped slightly, while Black male Trump support increased slightly from 19% in 2020 to 21% in 2024. But, she says, more than 7 million fewer people voted for Harris than Biden. While Trump picked up more Black male voters than he did back then – a detail heavily emphasised in media coverage before and after the election – the prevailing narrative does not account for the fact that: “It’s not only this switch to Trump,” Lauren says. People stayed home, or people voted third party. If you don’t look at the whole picture, then yes, you arrive at the narrative that Black people are swinging one way.”Why was this contextualisation missing from post-election analysis? Because it doesn’t make for a sexy story. “It’s really interesting to people when you have a character like Trump and he attracts folks who you wouldn’t normally think would be into his policies and persona,” Lauren says. “It’s typical that white male voters vote for him overwhelmingly – but what’s not typical is when people of colour do so. For a lot of news media, that is a really attractive story.”I asked her about the viral clip of Barack Obama scolding Black male voters for seemingly not turning out as strongly for Harris as they did for him when he ran. Even I flinched when I saw it, and thought, wow, the Democrats must really be in trouble. But, according to Lauren, the emergency button on that narrative had so constantly been pressed by poll analysts (a narrative that, if I may, the Guardian avoided), that even the Democrats panicked and fell for it, sending Obama to “finger-wag” at prospective voters.‘Complicating the narrative’View image in fullscreenIt’s still interesting to me that a candidate like Trump, with his record on racism, could win over more Black men, even in context. But Lauren calls my attention to a far bigger and more interesting story that has been reduced to a footnote of the election: Harris won almost the entire Black female vote. “If you had white women voting 90%-plus for a candidate, you would not hear the end of that story. It would be endlessly curious and interesting and fascinating. We lose a lot by not applying that same level of curiosity to the ways that other demographics vote.” I can see that this also applies to Black men, three-quarters of whom still voted Democrat. “This story could have been ‘look at the power that Black voters wield’, but that’s just not the American narrative.”And what we lose is a big deal. By writing off those who voted for Harris as doing so simply out of blind loyalty, the reasons for Trump’s victory risk becoming detached from reality. Another broad headline after the election was that there was actually nothing sinister going on – it was “just” the economy. But the Black people who voted for Harris are disproportionately working class, Lauren says, and have made informed decisions despite their economic status because they are accustomed to making compromises and always thinking about “the greater good”. “In the discussions that a lot of the media has about the working class, the undertone is that they are only talking about the white working class”, because considering Black voters as part of the American working class “complicates the narrative”. People would have to reckon with the fact that “Black Americans who experience disfranchisement and a huge racial wealth gap were not wooed by this idea of economic anxiety”.Anti-racism has fallen out of fashionView image in fullscreen“Complicating the narrative” raises the question: why is it that white people are seemingly more anxious about the economy than Black people who are less well off? There is little interest in the answer to this question, says Lauren. “I think people have decided that race is boring,” she says, even though it’s “at the root of so much. Any time we talk about identity politics, we’re talking about people of colour, even though Trump ran on white male identity.” By only treating white people as rational economic voters, we pay “an undue amount of attention” to factors outside race, even though it’s “right up there”. I have definitely noticed a shift since Trump’s first election victory eight years ago. The myriad “white rage” takes of 2016 are thin on the ground this time, despite Trump’s 2024 campaign being even more explicitly racist.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA growing backlash to Black Lives Matter also played a role. “We shifted so far after George Floyd,” Lauren says, “whether we saw corporations – symbolic or not – changing their behaviour and relationships to racism and people were pissed about that. Not everyone was on the Black Lives Matter bandwagon.”What next for Black Americans?View image in fullscreenIf this is how the election analysis has played out, it does not bode well for the next four years. Perhaps we’ll see wall-to-wall coverage of Trump’s “appeal” to the white working class and continued disregard for the millions of Black people who didn’t vote for him, who now have to live under a regime that “aims to dismantle federal anti-discrimination policies”. Lauren’s approach is to widen the historical lens. “One thing that has helped me is just remembering that we have been here before. Any time there is progress, there is always a backlash to it. One step forward, two steps back. That is peak American history.”As a journalist, Lauren says showing Black lives as fuller than they are often depicted in the mainstream media, insisting on art, culture, and “the Black rodeo down in Mississippi”, is the way to plough ahead. In other words: if you’re a glass-half-full person, which I am, it’s focusing on that one step forward and then the next one. Or, to borrow from Harris, “weeping may endure for a night but joy cometh in the morning”.What we’re intoView image in fullscreen

    I am broadly not a fan of beauty pageants. But I can’t lie, the variations of African dress during this year’s Miss Universe had me mesmerised. It’s impossible to pick a favourite as each one was more stunning the next. Nesrine

    The Afrikan Alien mixtape by Pa Salieu is going platinum on my phone. I love his musings on family, alienation and freedom (he was released from a 21-month prison stint in September). Jason

    I know we are at a saturation point with social media, but hear me out: Bluesky is like the old, less toxic Twitter, and has a handy way of grouping users so you can follow by theme. I mass followed Blacksky, a selection of interesting Black accounts on the app. Check it out. Nesrine

    I can’t wait to catch Cynthia Erivo’s performance as Elphaba in the film Wicked. She is a generational talent and I can’t stop watching her perform an R&B rendition of The Sound of Music on The Tonight Show. Jason
    Black catalogueView image in fullscreenWhen the prominent Fani-Kayode family fled the civil war in Nigeria, the UK gained a curious and radical artist and photographer in Rotimi Fani-Kayode, famous for his portraits exploring race, culture, sexuality, desire and pain. He had a short career, with much of his work accomplished between 1983 and his death from Aids-related complications in London in 1989. Fani-Kayode was a member of the Brixton Artists Collective and a founding member of the Autograph ABP (Association of Black Photographers), and much of Rotimi’s never-before-seen works are being presented at a new exhibition in London that captures his legacy and impact.Tap inDo you have any thoughts or responses to this week’s newsletter? Share your feedback by replying to this, or emailing us on thelongwave@theguardian.com and we may include your response in a future issue. More

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    With Trump heading for the White House, the Democrats must learn these lessons – and fast | Owen Jones

    Did the Democrats really lose because they were too “woke”, too obsessed with minorities, too radical? After defeat, there always comes the battle for the narrative about why the party lost. As the US left is rediscovering, the most influential voices tend to be those platformed by corporate media outlets whose siren cry is always to march rightwards. And yet even the New York Times concluded that one of the main problems was in fact Kamala Harris’s “Wall Street-approved economic pitch”, which her brother-in-law – chief legal officer at Uber – reportedly helped craft, and which “fell flat”.The liberal order, always riddled with hypocrisies and illusions, is collapsing, partly because mainstream liberals cannot be trusted to defend liberalism: they are set to conclude that Trumpism must be defeated through imitation. But here’s a polling fact that cannot be ignored. In the past 50 years, the number of Americans who believe the Democrats “represent the working class” has plummeted, while the numbers who believe they “stand up for marginalised groups” has dramatically risen, now exceeding the former.This is what happens if you lack a convincing economic vision to uplift the working class – in all its diversity – as a whole. Even if your commitment to minority rights is superficial and rhetorical, your rightwing opponents will tell Americans that your interest is reserved for “marginalised groups” rather than “the average Joe”. Or as one Republican attack ad put it: “Kamala is for they/them; President Trump is for you.”This is a feature, not a bug, with the Democrats. Since the civil rights era, they have been a coalition including a chunk of corporate America, a shrinking labour movement and minorities. This cross-class alliance stopped them offering European-style social democracy, which would mean hiking taxes on their wealthy backers. In fact, under the Democratic administrations of John F Kennedy and Lyndon B Johnson in the 60s, hefty tax cuts benefited big businesses and affluent Americans the most. While the tax burden of the average US family nearly doubled between the 1950s and the election of Ronald Reagan, corporate taxes as a share of gross federal receipts fell by a third.This means that the big government spending projects of those eras, like the anti-poverty measures of the Great Society, were largely paid for by middle-income Americans. This encouraged a backlash against the beneficiaries of the programmes, demonised as the undeserving Black poor.In this context, white American workers became increasingly associated with conservatism, as converts to Richard Nixon’s Republicans and the segregationist George Wallace. “The typical worker – from construction craftsman to shoe clerk,” wrote New York Times labour correspondent AH Raskin in 1968, “has become probably the most reactionary political force in the country.” But as the working-class writer Andrew Levison wrote a few years later: “There is nothing strange in the fact that workers began deserting liberalism once liberalism so decisively deserted them.”There are obvious differences today. The previous backlash against liberal failures paved the way to Reaganism, which did at least offer a coherent vision for society. Trumpism, on the other hand, is more emblematic of what the American literary critic Lionel Trilling said of US conservatism in 1950, that it was a series of “irritable mental gestures”, defined by fiery opposition to perceived progressive sensibilities rather than a cogent plan for what the US could look like. Policies that favour wealthier Americans – rather than many of the struggling Americans who voted for Trump – piggyback on this emotive backlash.But Kamala Harris made her dividing lines abortion rights and the defence of democracy: crucial questions, no doubt, but not answers to the struggles of workers on stagnating wages. Trumpism, on the other hand, attempted to vocalise the rage many Americans felt about their difficult circumstances, and sought to portray the Democrats as driven by championing demonised minorities instead, such as migrants and transgender people. That Harris did no such thing in her campaign is irrelevant: the lack of a compelling cut-through message on bread-and-butter issues allowed the Republicans to “flood the zone with shit”, as Republican strategist Steve Bannon puts it.The answer, then, is not to throw minorities under the presidential Cadillac. That will alienate progressive Americans, and given Trump won a similar number of votes as 2020 – while Democrats haemorrhaged natural supporters who stayed home – this would be a political as well as a moral failure. It is also true that the majority of citizens in any country will never be driven by a desire to improve the lot of minorities, and nor should the left wish to focus only on the most marginalised.Instead, an economic populism that champions the interests of the American majority – irrespective of gender, race, religion, sexual or gender identity – will drown out claims that the Democrats care only for the marginalised “other”. Instead of the Democrats being drawn into toxic rows about the existence of transgender people, the Republicans would be forced on the defensive instead: as Reagan once wisely put it, in politics, “If you’re explaining, you’re losing”. The Democrats need a plan that unites the shared interests of low- and middle-income Americans in an age of crisis and turmoil.As for the siren voices demanding a corporate-friendly Democratic party which refuses to champion minorities: the voters were just offered that, and it lost.

    Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

    Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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    Harris ran from the Biden policies that were actually popular with voters | Daniela Gabor

    The post-mortems of Kamala Harris’s loss to Donald Trump all agree on one thing: that Harris stuck too close to Biden. It was deliberate, pundits charge, pointing to the now infamous October appearance on ABC’s The View, where Harris said “There is not a thing that comes close to mind” that she would have done differently. But the pundits are wrong.Harris did distance herself from Biden where it hurt her most. She dumped his Rooseveltian transformative ambitions to bring back big government. Instead, she returned to the Obama-Clinton of a small or neoliberal state that highly influential Democrats like Jake Sullivan had already known was an electoral dead end during the first Trump administration.Freshly bruised from his experience as senior adviser to Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential campaign, Sullivan set out a new vision for the Democratic party in his 2018 essay The New Old Democrats. The nutshell: “It’s not the 1990s anymore. People want the government to help solve big problems.”The problem for Democrats, he warned, was not that the party had been hijacked by progressive forces (a familiar lament, now framed in the conservative language of “woke”) but the opposite. The political centre of gravity had shifted, leaving the Democrats behind an American public clamoring for more energised government. To stave off the long-run threat of Trumpism, Democrats had to abandon centrist politics and embrace a new policy playbook, a return of the state guided by Roosevelt’s principles of “bold, persistent experimentation”. The main task was to “embrace the fact that transforming our economy will require substantial public investments”, paid for through progressive taxation of wealth and concentrated corporate power – big government, beating back big business.As Biden hung a portrait of Roosevelt above the Oval Office fireplace after winning the election, his team, with Jake Sullivan as national security adviser, set to work on the return of big, transformative government. Even with congressional politics in the way, the several legislative initiatives together – Chips, IRA, the Infrastructure and Jobs Act – amounted to a $2tn push to reshape the American economy. The conflation of transformative ambitions and China hawkishness, once remarkably absent from Sullivan’s vision, worried some, but most took it as either imperative or the price to pay for bipartisan support.By late 2023, even ideological enemies approved of Bidenomics. The free market evangelists at the Economist applauded Biden’s as the most “energetic American government in nearly half a century”. It helped revive beleaguered unions, and “produced an industrial policy that aims to reshape the American economy”, with immediate results: investment in manufacturing facilities more than doubled, soaring to its highest on recent historical record. Similarly, Lina Khan, chair of the US Federal Trade Commission, was taming concentrated corporate power without destroying corporate profitability or slowing the record number of new businesses created during Biden’s first years.If the Economist expected four more years of Biden to mean even bigger government, Harris backtracked. Where Sullivan called for a Democrat-led economic revolution for America, her “opportunity economy” read like a sad list of bullet points on a crammed slide headed “Smallish Government”: boost child tax credits, increase deductions for new small businesses, help for first-time homebuyers, incentives for new developments.This was not the transformative vision that Biden had championed. Her plans to oppose price gouging framed corporate power as an occasional, rather than structural, threat against American consumers, and said nothing about American workers. Alongside speculation that she would bow to billionaire pressure to oust Khan, Harris dropped union leaders and her early position as a scourge of Big Business to instead court favor with Wall Street, Mark Cuban and the minuscule Liz Cheney fanbase.Under Harris, the Democratic party returned the mantle of change to the Trump campaign, and to a JD Vance prepared to denounce corporate power and voter economic misery often more trenchantly than Harris.What if Harris shifted to the right of Biden because she had no choice? The most energetic government in decades had failed to make it through to voters, who heard inflation when Democrats shouted Bidenomics. But here Sullivan, by now tainted by his unwavering support for Israel’s destruction of Gaza, had already given the answer, or, rather, asked the important question in his 2018 essay: The New Old Democrats, he had insisted, should not ask whether transformative government, but how? How can transformative government both check corporate power and support workers and families?The hard truth about Biden’s transformative project is that it failed its ambitions to roll back the power of capital. There was a brief moment in 2021 when big finance spoke and nobody listened, when investors lamented being excluded from Biden’s old-style “government spending on infrastructure”. But then the “politics of the possible” in Congress curtailed that momentum, in no small part due to conservative Democrats like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, private equity’s best friend.Bidenomics might not have started, but it certainly ended, as a capital-first, trickle-down-to-workers project. Its transformative ambitions morphed into generous subsidies (tax incentives) for private investors. These investors got to opt out of worker-friendly tax credits. Where Roosevelt would have decried the new generation of subsidy-chaser capitalists as class and democracy enemies, Biden invited the biggest of them all – Larry Fink, CEO of the asset manager BlackRock – to join him at the G7 meeting in Rome in June 2024. There, Fink delivered a long sermon on why the privatisation of social and climate infrastructure, with state subsidies for investors, is the only way forward.Biden officials might have waved a copy of Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution on their way to the White House, but distributional politics hasn’t changed that much since the glory days of neoliberalism. The richest 20% by income account for 40% of spending, twice as much as the poorest 40%. This is the widest gap on record, according to Oxford Economics.Rich millennials got virtually all the $51tn gains to US wealth this decade. Having tried and failed to extend the Covid-19 social safety net, the Biden administration instead continued to hand big finance – in its private equity guise – chunks of the state’s social contract with citizens, from housing to healthcare, dentistry, prisons, retirement homes. Voters heard inflation because nowhere does the paycheck rule as it does in a deeply unequal United States.If Sullivan was right this time too, and there is little reason to believe otherwise, the winning strategy for Harris was to revive and even amplify Biden’s Rooseveltian dream of big government. Democrats now choosing to interpret her defeat as “progressive hijacking” would do well to heed Sullivan’s warning against a return to centrist politics, the most accurate prediction of his entire career.

    Daniela Gabor is professor of economics and macrofinance at SOAS, University of London. She is working on The Wall Street Consensus, a book on the return of the transformative state More

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    Who is Mehmet Oz, Trump’s pick to lead Medicare and Medicaid?

    Donald Trump has chosen Mehmet Oz, best known for starring in his eponymous daytime talkshow for more than a decade and leaning heavily into Trumpism during his failed 2022 run for a Pennsylvania Senate seat, to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). The cardiothoracic surgeon, who faced immense backlash from the medical and scientific communities for pushing misinformation at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, will oversee the agency that operates on a $2.6tn annual budget and provides healthcare to more than 100 million people.“I am honored to be nominated by [Donald Trump] to lead CMS,” Oz posted on X on Tuesday. “I look forward to serving my country to Make America Healthy Again under the leadership of HHS Secretary [Robert F Kennedy Jr].”In the announcement of Oz’s selection, Trump said that Oz will “make America healthy again” and described him as “an eminent Physician, Heart Surgeon, Inventor, and World-Class Communicator, who has been at the forefront of healthy living for decades”.Oz has been on US television screens for nearly 20 years, first appearing on the Oprah Winfrey show in 2004. In that time, he’s talked to his audience about losing weight with fad diets and what it takes to have healthy poops and, toward the end of his run, touting hydroxychloroquine as a potential remedy for Covid-19.Here’s what to know about the New York University professor and surgeon turned television show host, and now Trump appointee.Who is Mehmet Oz?Oz, 64, is a Turkish American Ohio native best known for The Dr Oz Show, which ran from 2009 to 2022. His father was a surgeon in Turkey, and after Oz graduated high school in Delaware, he was admitted into Harvard. He also served in the Turkish military in order to maintain dual citizenship, the Associated Press reports.Before entering US homes via daytime TV, he had more than 20 years of experience as a cardiothoracic surgeon at Presbyterian-Columbia Medical Center in New York. He was also a professor at Columbia University’s medical school.His bona fides at the prestigious institutions earned him quick credibility with viewers, and his popularity garnered him nine Daytime Emmy awards for outstanding informative talkshow and host.Though his show ended in 2022, Oz maintains a YouTube channel filled with old episodes of his shows where he interviews guests like Penn Jillette about his weight loss and Robert F Kennedy Jr about his 2014 book about the presence of mercury in vaccines. He also has an Instagram account that boasts more than a million followers, where Oz shares photos of his family and sells products from iHerb, an online health and wellness brand for which he is global adviser.Oz’s questionable medical advice and time in politicsThroughout his TV tenure, Oz dabbled in the hallmarks of weight loss culture like detoxes, cleanses and diets that promised rapid weight loss. He also faced a grilling by senators in 2014 over claims he made and alleged false advertising on supplements he promoted on his show. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, Oz regurgitated misinformation that came from the fringes of the right and medical communities.These comments continued when he threw his hat into the race to represent Pennsylvania in the US Senate in 2022 against John Fetterman. At the time, the Guardian wrote:“Oz was dogged by questions about his actual connection to the state during the campaign. Oz lived in New Jersey for decades before he moved to Pennsylvania in October 2020, into a home owned by his wife’s family. He announced his bid to be the state’s US senator just months later.”Following Fetterman’s stroke, during which he said he “​​almost died”, the Oz campaign launched unsavory attacks against him, with one Oz aide, Rachel Tripp, claiming Fetterman might not have had a stroke if he “had ever eaten a vegetable in his life”.Oz ultimately lost to Fetterman, who garnered 51% of the vote compared with Oz’s 46%.What will Oz run?Oz will succeed Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, the current administrator of CMS, to lead programs including Medicare, the federal health insurance program for people aged 65 or older and disabled people, and Medicaid, the state-based health insurance program for lower-income people, which is jointly funded by states and the federal government. The two programs provide health insurance for more than 140 million Americans.Also in the CMS fold are the Children’s Health Insurance Program (Chip) and the Health Insurance Marketplace, which was created by the Affordable Care Act under Barack Obama in 2010.Trump’s economic advisers and congressional Republicans are currently discussing possible cuts to Medicaid, food stamps and other government welfare programs to cover the costs of extending the president-elect’s multitrillion-dollar 2017 tax cut. More

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    Trump picks former WWE executive Linda McMahon for education secretary

    Linda McMahon, co-chair of Donald Trump’s transition team, has been named as the president-elect’s pick for education secretary in his upcoming administration.In a statement, Trump extolled the “incredible” job McMahon, the billionaire co-founder of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), has been doing as transition team co-chair and said: “As Secretary of Education, Linda will fight tirelessly to expand ‘Choice’ to every State in America, and empower parents to make the best Education decisions for their families. … We will send Education BACK TO THE STATES, and Linda will spearhead that effort.”McMahon was made transition team chair in August, after having donated $814,600 to Trump’s 2024 campaign as of July. She served in Trump’s cabinet in his first administration as the administrator of the Small Business Administration from 2017 to 2019. McMahon chaired America First Action, a super PAC that backed Trump’s reelection campaign, where she raised $83m in 2020. She provided $6 million to help Trump’s candidacy after he secured the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, according to the Associated Press.McMahon is the former chief executive of WWE, which she co-founded with her husband, Vince McMahon.In October, McMahon was named in a new lawsuit involving WWE. The suit alleges that she and other leaders of the company allowed the sexual abuse of young boys at the hands of a ringside announcer, former WWE ring crew chief Melvin Phillips Jr. The complaint specifically alleges that the McMahons knew about the abuse and failed to stop it.An attorney for the McMahons told USA Today Sports that the allegations are “false claims” stemming from reporting that the couple deems “absurd, defamatory and utterly meritless”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMcMahon stepped down from her position as WWE’s chief executive to enter politics. She ran twice for a US Senate seat in Connecticut, but lost in 2010 to Richard Blumenthal and in 2012 to Chris Murphy.Since 2021, McMahon has been the chair of Washington DC-based thinktank America First Policy Institute’s board and chair of its Center for the American Worker.McMahon is seen as a relative unknown in education circles, though she has expressed support for charter schools and school choice. She served on the Connecticut Board of Education for a year starting in 2009. She told lawmakers at the time that she had a lifelong interest in education and once planned to become a teacher, a goal that fell aside after her marriage. She also spent years on the board of trustees for Sacred Heart University in Connecticut.Trump has promised to close the Education Department and return much of its powers to states. He has not explained how he would close the agency, which was created by Congress in 1979 and would likely require action from Congress to dismantle.McMahon’s co-chair on the transition team and billionaire founder of the financial firm Cantor Fitzgerald, Howard Lutnick, was named as Trump’s pick for commerce secretary. More

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    Trump loyalist Kash Patel in contention to be named FBI director

    Donald Trump is keeping his controversial adviser Kash Patel in the running to be the next FBI director, according to two people familiar with the matter, as the transition team conducted interviews for the role on Monday night at the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago club.The existence of the interviews, made public in a since-deleted post by the vice president-elect JD Vance, underscored the intent to fire the current FBI director, Christopher Wray, years before his current term is up.Vance revealed that he and Trump had been interviewing finalists for FBI director in a post responding to criticism he received for missing a Senate vote last night that confirmed one of Joe Biden’s nominees for the US court of appeals for the 11th circuit.“When this 11th circuit vote happened, I was meeting President Trump to interview multiple positions for our government, including for FBI director,” Vance wrote.Trump has a special interest in the FBI, having fired James Comey as director in 2017 over his refusal to close the investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, and then complaining about perceived disloyalty from Wray.Patel’s continued position as a top candidate for the role makes clear Trump’s determination to install loyalists in key national security and law enforcement positions, as well as the support Patel has built up among key Trump allies.The push for Patel – who has frequently railed against the “deep state” – has come from some of the longest-serving Trump advisers, notably those close to former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, a faction that got Trump’s personal lawyers picked for top justice department roles.That faction has also suggested to Trump in recent days that if Patel gets passed over for the director role, he should be given the deputy FBI director position, one of the people said – a powerful job that helps run the bureau day to day and is crucially not subject to Senate confirmation.Patel has made inroads with Trump by repeatedly demonstrating his loyalty over several years and articulating plans to restructure the FBI, including by dismantling the firewall between the White House and the bureau.During the criminal investigation into Trump’s retention of classified documents, for instance, Patel refused to testify against Trump before a federal grand jury in Washington and asserted his fifth amendment right against self-incrimination.Patel ultimately testified only after he was forced to, when the then chief US district judge Beryl Howell allowed the justice department to confer limited immunity from prosecution to him to overcome his fifth amendment claim.But Patel also has multiple detractors among other Trump advisers who came from the presidential campaign and carry outsize influence. That group is said to prefer former House intelligence committee chair Mike Rogers, who left Congress in 2015.Rogers is generally seen as a more establishment pick who has experience dealing with intelligence agencies, one of his allies said. But Trump has also suggested to advisers he is less interested in Rogers than Patel, the person said.Still, Trump has increasingly paid little attention to whether a nominee is likely to be confirmed by the Senate, evidenced by his move to pick Matt Gaetz for attorney general and Pete Hegseth for defense secretary despite both being dogged by allegations of sexual misconduct.Patel rose to notoriety in 2018 when he served as an aide to Devin Nunes, who was the top Republican on the House intelligence committee, and became involved in attempts by the White House to discredit the Russia investigation.He then went to work for the Trump administration in 2019 on the national security council, before becoming chief of staff to the defense secretary in the final months of the presidency.In 2020, when Trump weighed firing the then CIA director Gina Haspel, he floated Patel as a potential replacement. Patel was also briefly considered to become the deputy FBI director in the waning months of the presidency but was talked out of the appointment. More

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    SpaceX live: Donald Trump and Elon Musk arrive at launch site for Starship rocket

    The weather is looking “fantastic” for the rocket launch, a SpaceX employee said.“Light breeze, no clouds in the sky,” he said.Beyond a return to the moon, Elon Musk is relying on Starship to be an integral part of his much more ambitious plan to get humans to Mars.In September, the billionaire SpaceX founder revealed he was optimistic that the first astronauts could reach the red planet inside four years, and be living there in a self-sustaining city in 20.Some observers say that’s an inconceivable timeline, while others see purpose in Musk’s assertions. Regular shuttle flights to Mars on Starship are absolutely achievable in the short to midterm future, they say.Here’s our article looking at how, and when, Musk might actually achieve his dream of making humans an interplanetary species.A banana has been placed inside the Starship flight, SpaceX says.“Today’s Starship flight test has a special payload onboard – a banana!” Starlink writes.“This universally-accepted measurement of scale is approximately the size of one Starlink Mini.”Responding to Donald Trump’s message wishing him good luck on today’s launch, Elon Musk replied on X:
    Honored to have President Trump at our Starship launch!
    The term Starship refers to the entire launch vehicle, namely the booster rocket and spacecraft of the same name.A main purpose of the program is to return humans to the surface of the moon for the first time since 1972.Nasa’s Artemis III mission, currently scheduled for September 2026, will incorporate a Starship lander, a variant of the spacecraft currently under test, to take a crew of two astronauts to the moon’s south pole.SpaceX has begun sharing its live broadcast of its Starship rocket launch.SpaceX says today’s flight test “aims to expand the envelope on ship and booster capabilities” and to “get closer to bringing reuse of the entire system online”.“Objectives include the booster once again returning to the launch site for catch, reigniting a ship Raptor engine while in space, and testing a suite of heatshield experiments and maneuvering changes for ship reentry and descent over the Indian Ocean,” the company says.Donald Trump has arrived at the site of the rocket launch with Elon Musk.Trump was seen wearing a red “Make America Great Again” baseball hat and blue suit; Musk wore an all-black outfit and sunglasses.SpaceX has said the propellant load of the super heavy booster is now under way.Donald Trump wished Elon Musk good luck on an “incredible” project as he confirmed that he will be attending the SpaceX rocket launch in Texas.Trump, in a post on his Truth Social platform on Tuesday, wrote:
    I’m heading to the Great State of Texas to watch the launch of the largest object ever to be elevated, not only to Space, but simply by lifting off the ground. Good luck to Elon Musk and the Great Patriots involved in this incredible project!
    Donald Trump has arrived in Texas to watch the launch, according to the account Trump Jet (Tracking) on Bluesky.The president-elect’s private Boeing 757 jet landed in Brownsville just under an hour ago after a 2hr 49min flight from West Palm Beach, close to Mar-a-Lago, his Florida home.Today’s launch is the sixth test of the mighty Starship, and its fourth flight this year.The world’s most powerful space launch system has about twice the thrust of the Saturn V rockets of the Apollo era that sent astronauts to the moon.One significant difference is that Starship is designed to be reusable.Its first-stage super-heavy booster was successfully captured in SpaceX’s so-called chopsticks – giant mechanical arms on the launch site “catch tower” – during the fifth test mission last month.Tuesday’s launch of the SpaceX rocket Starship comes just a week after Donald Trump announced that Elon Musk will co-lead the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, along with the former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.Musk had pushed for a government efficiency department and has since relentlessly promoted it, emphasizing the acronym for the agency: Doge, a reference to a meme of an expressive shiba inu dog and the inspiration for the name of the cryptocurrency Dogecoin, which Musk promotes.According to a statement by Trump, Musk and Ramaswamy will work from outside government to “pave the way for my administration to dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies”.SpaceX will be conducting its sixth test of its Starship rocket, the largest and most powerful rocket ever built, on Tuesday.The test launch is planned for 6pm CT (5pm ET or 2200 GMT) from SpaceX’s sprawling rocket development site in Boca Chica, Texas, Reuters reports.You can watch the launch on SpaceX’s website.Welcome to our live coverage of the launch of the sixth test of SpaceX’s giant Starship rocket from Texas, where the US president-elect, Donald Trump, is expected to attend alongside the company’s CEO, Elon Musk.The rocket launch is scheduled for 4pm CT (5pm ET or 2200 GMT) from SpaceX’s sprawling rocket development site in Boca Chica, Texas, Reuters reports.Trump is expected to be joined by his son Donald Jr, and the Republican senator from Texas, Ted Cruz.Trump’s attendance underscores his increasingly close friendship with Musk, whom he has tapped to co-lead a new Department of Government Efficiency with the former Republican presidential candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy. More