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    Second Trump reign could make life ‘a lot harder’ for EU’s far-right leaders

    In the end Viktor Orbán didn’t, as he’d promised, celebrate Donald Trump’s win with “several bottles of champagne”. He was in Kyrgyzstan, he apologised, “where they have different traditions” – so it was vodka. But it was still a “fantastic result”.“History has accelerated,” Orbán crowed at an EU summit in Budapest last week. “The world is going to change, and change in a quicker way than before. Obviously, it’s a great chance for Hungary to be in a close partnership and alliance with the US.”Hungary’s illiberal prime minister – and the EU’s disrupter-in-chief, lauded by Trump as a “very great leader, a very strong man” – was not the only figure on Europe’s nationalist right to hail the president-elect’s larger-than-expected victory.Geert Wilders, the Dutch anti-Muslim firebrand whose Freedom party finished first in last year’s elections and is the senior partner in the ruling coalition, also posted his congratulations, jubilantly urging Trump to “never stop, always keep fighting”.Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, commended a “historic friendship” which “will now grow even stronger”, while Alice Weidel of Alternative for Germany (AfD) hailed a defeat for “woke Hollywood”, adding that Trump “is a model for us”.Europe’s fast-advancing far-right parties, in power in eight EU member states and knocking at the doors in more, have long seen in Trump a powerful ally who shares their populist, nation-first, conservative, Eurosceptic and immigration-hostile views.View image in fullscreenBut what can they actually expect to gain from Trump 2.0? For all their enthusiastic words, analysts and diplomats say, Europe’s mini-Trumps will probably not get much – and may even find themselves worse off. What’s more, some appear to realise it.Certainly, there may be some political upside to basking in reflected Trumpian glory. “The coming Trump presidency will most probably embolden Europe’s far right and illiberal actors,” concluded experts at the Centre for European Reform thinktank.“Trump will strengthen far-right parties not just by normalising and amplifying their ideas, but by boosting their electability.” His win legitimises their grievances and rubber-stamps their sovereigntist vision; history seems to be moving their way.Besides Orbán, Meloni, Wilders and Weidel, Europe’s longstanding Trump admirers include Marine Le Pen of France’s National Rally (RN), Slovakia’s prime minister Robert Fico, Austrian chancellor Karl Nehammer and Serbia’s Aleksandar Vučić.They may well be joined after elections next year by Andrej Babiš in the Czech Republic, and – with both France and Germany, the EU’s traditional powerhouse, weakened by domestic political crises – their influence is plainly on the rise.Some experts argue selected European far-right leaders could be strengthened personally by Trump’s win: Meloni, for example, has put in the groundwork, praising his brand of politics as a model for Italy and regularly travelling to his rallies.Common views on issues ranging from immigration to abortion, and her flourishing rapport with Elon Musk, could see her become Trump’s “main interlocutor in Europe”, said Lorenzo Castellani of Rome’s Luiss University.Hungary’s foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, expressed much the same ambition for Orbán. “We can have a good hope that Hungarian-American political cooperation will return to its peak form,” he said: Orbán and Trump have “similar thoughts”.But the dynamics are a lot more complicated than that. While Europe’s far-right leaders may align comfortably with Trump in their hostility to immigration and international institutions, there are also significant differences.View image in fullscreenMeloni’s staunch support for Nato and continued international aid to Ukraine in its struggle against Russia’s full-scale invasion, for example, will not be greeted with enthusiasm by the more isolationist voices in the incoming US administration.Similarly, Orbán’s cosy “all-weather comprehensive strategic partnership” with China, which Hungary has welcomed with open arms as a key economic partner and foreign investor, is a long way from Trump’s aggressively hardline approach to Beijing.As US Republican Mitch McConnell put it, “when Chinese state enterprise says jump, Hungarian officials ask how high”. Those words “caution against any guarantee of deeper [US-Hungary] collaboration”, foreign policy expert Zsuzsanna Szelényi said.Trump’s promised America first trade policies could also prove complicated to negotiate for Europe’s far-right parties. As members of the EU’s single market, they could not respond individually to US-imposed tariffs and a likely trade war.Le Pen’s lukewarm response to Trump’s second triumph – in marked contrast to her joy at his first in 2016, which she hailed even before he had officially won – reflects widespread concern over the consequences of Trump 2.0 for EU industry and jobs.“Americans have freely chosen their president,” Le Pen said. “This new political era should contribute to the strengthening of bilateral relations and the pursuit of constructive dialogue and cooperation on the international stage.”Her protege, Jordan Bardella, even echoed French president Emmanuel Macron, saying that for “us French and Europeans, this US election should be a wake-up call … an opportunity to rethink our relationship with power and strategic autonomy”.Far-right voters in Europe are far from uncritical of Trump’s brand of politics, polls suggest: a pre-election YouGov poll found, for example, that people who backed Le Pen would rather have Kamala Harris in the White House than Trump.View image in fullscreen“Trump’s attitude towards Europe … will be harmful to far-right parties’ core electorate – think inflation, de-industrialisation, job losses,” said Catherine Fieschi of the European University Institute. “Trump is bad news for them.”The idea that Trump himself “gives a damn about building relationships with these people strikes me as very very unlikely”, Fieschi added. “He will think about them on a case-by-case basis, and see whether he can extract something.”Faced with the concrete threats to the continent posed by a second Trump presidency that promises to be even more radical than the first, the EU that Europe’s far-right parties have so long reviled may start to look a little less unattractive.Orbán may be strong at home, said Szelényi, “but Hungary is small, deeply integrated in the EU, and its people like being Europeans. The country’s progress and success is far more dependent on the success of the EU than on anything else.”Like other far-right leaders, said Catherine de Vries of Bocconi University in Milan, Orbán has “tried to play both sides, be strategically ambiguous. The thing about Trump is, he’s not going to let you do that. He’ll force you to make a choice.”Europe’s populists will continue to “say Trumpian things, especially if they have an election coming up”, De Vries said. “But when push really comes to shove – Europe’s security in Trump’s hands, Nato not guaranteed – then maybe quite a few are going to say, maybe we need to work on this in Europe.”Far from uniting Europe’s far right in triumph, Trump’s return could actually deepen the conflicts between them. Ultimately, concluded Fieschi, Trump “is going to make the lives of Europe’s far-right leaders, as Eurosceptics, a lot harder. They’re going to be caught between staying Eurosceptic, lining up with Trump and hurting their base – or lining up with the EU, shedding their specificity and losing voters. They’ve been ‘out-populist-ed.’”Additional reporting by Angela Giuffrida in Rome More

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    Kevin Rudd will remain as Australia’s ambassador to US, Anthony Albanese says

    Anthony Albanese says Kevin Rudd will remain as Australia’s ambassador to Washington despite the apparent disquiet about Rudd’s past commentary on president-elect Donald Trump among some in Trump’s inner circle.Albanese is digging in against media speculation that Trump could demand Rudd’s withdrawal or that others in his administration could make the ambassador’s position untenable, insisting he will stay in the job no matter what.“That’s what we’d expect,” he told ABC’s Insiders program on Sunday.

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    “He’s Australia’s appointment,” Albanese said, speaking from the Apec summit in Peru. “And it says something about the importance of the United States that we have appointed a former prime minister. That’s a sign of how seriously we take this relationship, which is a relationship between our peoples based upon our common values.”Albanese declined to say whether Rudd should apologise for past remarks, which included social media posts calling him “the most destructive president in history” and a 2021 interview in which he described Trump in a 2021 interview as “the village idiot” and “not a leading intellectual force”.“We’re focused on the future, and I’m sure President Trump will be as well, and that is the important thing,” Albanese said.The emergence last week of video of the 2021 remarks this week coincided with a social media post from Trump’s now newly appointed deputy chief of staff, Dan Scavino, depicting sand running through an hourglass, above a screenshot of the congratulatory message Rudd had issued about Trump’s election win.But Albanese said Rudd had been doing “a terrific job” and would continue in the role.He praised the former prime minister’s work building bipartisan relationships and boosting Australia’s ties in the US capital.“Ambassador, Rudd has been working with people across the political spectrum. He attended both the Republican and the Democrat national conventions and engaged with people across the board. I know that he was in regular contact with the head of the Republican campaign committee as well, as well as the Democrats.”In a separate interview with Sky News, also from Peru, Albanese said his 10-minute congratulatory phone conversation with Trump had been “very constructive and positive” and Rudd was not mentioned.“He’s Australia’s ambassador to Washington, and he’s doing a very important job,” Albanese said. “The work that he did with Aukus was a difficult task to get that through the Congress and the Senate. But when I was there, one of the things that struck me was just how extensive the links that Kevin Rudd had developed at the US, Congress and the Senate were.” More

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    Trump picks oil and gas industry CEO Chris Wright as next energy secretary

    Donald Trump said on Saturday that Chris Wright, an oil and gas industry executive and a staunch defender of fossil fuel use, would be his pick to lead the US Department of Energy.Wright is the founder and CEO of Liberty Energy, an oilfield services firm based in Denver, Colorado. He is expected to support Trump’s plan to maximize production of oil and gas and to seek ways to boost generation of electricity, demand for which is rising for the first time in decades.He is also likely to share Trump’s opposition to global cooperation on fighting climate change. Wright has called climate change activists alarmist and has likened efforts by Democrats to combat global warming to Soviet-style communism.“There is no climate crisis, and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition, either,” Wright said in a video posted to his LinkedIn profile last year.Wright, who does not have any political experience, has written extensively on the need for more fossil fuel production to lift people out of poverty.He has stood out among oil and gas executives for his freewheeling style, and describes himself as a tech nerd.Wright made a media splash in 2019 when he drank fracking fluid on camera to demonstrate it was not dangerous.US oil output hit the highest level any country has ever produced under Biden, and it is uncertain how much Wright and the incoming administration could boost that.Most drilling decisions are driven by private companies working on land not owned by the federal government.The Department of Energy handles US energy diplomacy, administers the Strategic Petroleum Reserve – which Trump has said he wants to replenish – and runs grant and loan programs to advance energy technologies, such as the Loan Programs Office.The secretary also oversees the aging US nuclear weapons complex, nuclear energy waste disposal and 17 national labs.If confirmed by the Senate, Wright will replace Jennifer Granholm, a supporter of electric vehicles and emerging energy sources like geothermal power, and a backer of carbon-free wind, solar and nuclear energy.Wright will also likely be involved in the permitting of electricity transmission and the expansion of nuclear power, an energy source that is popular with both Republicans and Democrats but which is expensive and complicated to permit.Power demand in the United States is surging for the first time in two decades amid growth in artificial intelligence, electric vehicles and cryptocurrencies.Trump also announced on Saturday that he had picked one of his personal attorneys, Will Scharf, to serve as his White House staff secretary. Scharf is a former federal prosecutor who was a member of Trump’s legal team in his successful attempt to get broad immunity from prosecution from the supreme court.Writing on Twitter the day after Trump’s election, Scharf greeted the news that Jack Smith, the special counsel who indicted the former president for his attempt to subvert the 2020 election, was winding down the Trump case and planned to resign with the words, “Bye Jack.” More

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    UK must choose between EU and Trump, trade experts warn

    The former head of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) has said that the UK should side with the European Union over trade and economic policies rather than a Donald Trump-led US, as fears grow over a possible global trade war.Pascal Lamy, who was head of the WTO from 2005 to 2013, said it was clear that the UK’s interests lay in staying close to the EU on trade, rather than allying with Trump, not least because it does three times more trade with Europe than the US.His comments came after a key Trump supporter, Stephen Moore, said on Friday that the UK should reject the EU’s “socialist model” if it wanted to have any realistic chance of doing a free trade deal with the US under Trump and, as a result, avoid the 20% tariffs on exports that the president-elect has promised.In an interview with the Observer, Lamy said: “It’s an old question with a new relevance given Brexit and given Trump. In my view the UK is a European country. Its socio- economic model is much closer to the EU social model and not the very hard, brutal version of capitalism of Trump and [Elon] Musk.“We can expect that Trump plus Musk will go even more in this direction. If Trump departs from supporting Ukraine, I have absolutely no doubt that the UK will remain on the European side.“In trade matters, you have to look at the numbers. The trade relationship between the UK and Europe is three times larger than between the UK and US.“This is a very structural inter-dependence which will hardly change unless – which I don’t think is a realistic assumption – the UK will decide to leave the EU norms of standards, to move to the US one. I don’t believe that will happen.“My answer is that the option to unite politically, economically and socially with the US and not with Europe makes absolutely no sense. I believe that, for the UK’s interests and values, the European option remains the dominant one.”Ivan Rogers, the former British ambassador to the EU, said it was clear that after Trump’s re-election the UK would have to choose between the US and EU. “Any free trade agreement that Trump and his team could ever propose to the UK would have to contain major proposals on US access to the UK agricultural market and on veterinary standards. It would not pass Congress without them. If the UK signed on the dotted line, that’s the end of the Starmer proposed veterinary deal with the EU. You can’t have both: you have to choose.”Their remarks come as Keir Starmer heads to Brazil on Sunday for a meeting of the G20 where issues of global security and economic growth are set to dominate. The prime minister is expected to hold talks with President Xi of China, on whose country Trump is proposing slap huge 60% import tariffs. Trade experts expect that the US will demand that the EU and UK follow suit, which both will strongly resist for their own trade reasons.The UK is seeking to increase trade with Beijing while also stepping up efforts to find greater ways to access the EU single market. Last week, the governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, made clear that leaving the EU had “weighed” on the domestic economy.A government source said that developing a trade strategy in the new world order was now the top priority. “It has gone from being very important to being number one in the one tray [following Trump’s re-election].”However, João Vale de Almeida, the former EU ambassador to London, said he believed there was common “territory for agreement” which would involve minimal pragmatic deals between the EU and the UK, and the US and the UK.“We know that Trump will try to divide European member states and divide the UK and EU. This is already what [Nigel] Farage is trying to do. But I think we can walk and chew gum at the same.“Given that a fully fledged trade deal with the US is not possible because agricultural issues will get in the way, and an EU deal is limited by UK red lines, any deals will have to be limited. So there may be a way through.” More

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    Biden heads for last meeting with Xi Jinping before Trump takes office

    Joe Biden will meet with Xi Jinping Saturday afternoon in what is expected to be the last time the two leaders meet before Donald Trump assumes the US presidency in January.The two leaders are attending the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) summit in Peru and are expected to have a meeting on the sidelines of the summit.The White House said that Biden will communicate that the two countries need to maintain “stability, clarity and predictability through this transition”.“Transitions are uniquely consequential moments in geopolitics. They’re a time when competitors and adversaries can see possible opportunity,” Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, said earlier this week.Biden is expected to talk with the Chinese president about increasing Chinese efforts to halt North Korea’s escalating role in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. In recent weeks, the Pentagon and Nato confirmed that about 10,000 North Korean troops were sent to help Russia’s offense in Ukraine.Biden met on Friday with Yoon Suk Yeol, the South Korean president, and Shigeru Ishiba, the Japanese prime minister, and affirmed the alliance among the three countries. The three leaders agreed that “it should not be in Beijing’s interest to have this kind of destabilizing cooperation take place in the region”, a senior administration official said in a briefing on background.Trump’s imminent return to the White House casts a dark shadow over the conversation as it remains unclear what his second term will mean for the relationship between the US and China.On the campaign trail, Trump touted a hawkish approach to China, promising to increase tariffs to 60% on Chinese imports, which could be as much as $500bn worth of goods. Trump has also promised to end Russia’s war in Ukraine “in 24 hours”, which some fear means decreasing the flow of military aid to Ukraine or pushing the country to lose territory to Russia. A general backing away from the conflict could give room for China to step up as an intermediary, increasing its presence on the global stage.Among Trump’s blitz of cabinet nominee announcements was the appointments of Florida senator Marco Rubio as secretary of state and Republican representative Mike Waltz as national security adviser, both of whom have have voiced hawkish views on China.Xi congratulated Trump on his election win earlier this month, saying that their two countries must “get along with each other in the new era”, in a statement.“A stable, healthy and sustainable China-US relationship is in the common interest of both countries and is in line with the expectations of the international community,” Xi said.But in prepared remarks at Apec earlier in the week, Xi took on a more foreboding tone, saying that the world has “entered a new period of turbulence and transformation” and proffered vague warnings of “spreading unilateralism and protectionism”.Adding more uncertainty to the relationship between the two countries, US officials have been on edge in recent weeks about an FBI investigation showing that the Chinese government tried to hack into US telecommunications networks to try to steal the information of American government workers and politicians. Officials said last month that operations linked to China targeted the phone of Trump and running mate JD Vance, along with staff of Kamala Harris. More

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    ‘A Russian asset’: Democrats slam Trump’s pick of Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence

    Democratic lawmakers are slamming Donald Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, saying their former House colleague is a vocal supporter of Russia who poses a threat to US national intelligence.Jason Crow, a House Democrat from Colorado and a member of the House intelligence committee, told NBC News that he has “deep questions about where her loyalties lie”.“We get a lot of intelligence from our allies, and there I would be worried about a chilling effect,” he said.Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a House Democrat from Florida, told MSNBC on Friday: “There’s no question I consider her someone who is likely a Russian asset.”Abigail Spanberger, another House Democrat on the intelligence committee and a former CIA case officer, said on X that she is “appalled” by Gabbard’s nomination.“Someone who has aligned herself with Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad and trafficked in Russian-backed conspiracy theories is an unsuitable and potentially dangerous selection,” Spanberger wrote. “The objections to her nomination transcend partisan politics. This is a matter of national security.”Gabbard is just the latest of Donald Trump’s cabinet picks to garner alarm over her nomination. Questions and criticism have been raised by members of both parties over the qualification of other Trump nominees, including representative Matt Gaetz as attorney general, Robert F Kennedy Jr as secretary of health and human services and Fox News weekend host Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense.It’s unclear whether all of Trump’s nominees will be able to get through a Senate confirmation, even with the chamber’s Republican majority.Moderate Republicans like Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska have voiced reservations about nominees like Gaetz, who Murkowski said is not “a serious nomination”. Former Republican House speaker Kevin McCarthy similarly said that “Gaetz won’t get confirmed”.“Everybody knows that,” he told Bloomberg.Gabbard was a Democratic representative from Hawaii from 2013 to 2021 and was the first Samoan and Hindu elected to Congress. She served in the military in Iraq and was once a surrogate for Bernie Sanders during his 2016 primary campaign.She has since become a contributor on Fox News and said that she quit the Democratic party, which she said is run by an “elitist cabal of warmongers”. Gabbard has been a staunch critic of US foreign policy. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Gabbard accused the US of running biological weapon laboratories in Ukraine – a falsehood often touted by Russia.Michael Waldman, president of the Brenna Center for Justice, told the New York Times on Wednesday that Trump’s cabinet nominations “seem designed to poke the Senate in the eyes”.“They’re so appalling they’re a form of performance art,” he said. More

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    In a gun-slinging, dick-swinging Trump vibe, it’s small wonder Die Hard appeals | Alison Phillips

    Donald Trump’s appointments to his top team continue, as Rishi Sunak would have said, “at pace”. There’s a vaccine sceptic in at health, a misogynist as attorney general, a possible Russia sympathiser as director of national intelligence and first choice for defence is a Fox News anchorman. Oh, and the new US ambassador to Israel believes there’s no such thing as the West Bank.Yet what they may lack in intellectual rigour, moral rectitude and empathy, they more than compensate for in fake tans, chiselled jaws and mistresses. Where once Gordon Brown worked to build a “goat” (government of all talents), Trump is opting for a government of old goats. We could discuss the social, economic and cultural failings over two centuries of US history that have brought it to this place. But I’ve only got 400 words, so let’s talk Die Hard instead. (Die Hard 1, 2 and 3 obviously. Everyone lost interest by the last two.)Anyway, Pete Hegseth, the Iraq and Afghanistan veteran who has worked as a Guantánamo Bay guard and New Year’s Eve countdown host for Fox News and is poised to be defence secretary if a previous sex assault allegation doesn’t scupper it, is a big Die Hard fan. His recent bestselling book, The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free, is a deeply troubling rant about elites, where he condenses the world’s ills into that fateful Christmas Eve when something incredible was born. He writes: “Our ‘elites’ are like the feckless drug-addled businessmen at Nakatomi Plaza, looking down on Bruce Willis’s John McClane in Die Hard.“But there will come a day when they realize they need John McClane – their ability to live in peace and prosperity has always depended on guys like him being honorable, powerful and deadly.” It’s easy for the left to snigger at the testosterone-fuelled, gun-slinging, dick-swinging vibe of this new Trump administration. But more than half the US population voted for it. Meanwhile, Die Hard remains one of the most re-watched movies ever. It’s time the left acknowledged the need for heroes. And time it reclaimed John McClane, the brave public servant from an immigrant family fighting the evil of global greed. More importantly, it needs to answer once and for all: is it really a Christmas movie?Score drawView image in fullscreenI’m slightly bemused by the outrage over Premier League referee David Coote. First, audio was revealed of Coote swearing about Liverpool FC and Jürgen Klopp. Then there was video of him snorting a “white powder”.It was a great exclusive for the Sun. Clearly Coote has been done up like a kipper and is in big trouble. But, but, but… Klopp, Liverpool fans and football fans more broadly have sworn at referees with just such language week in, week out – to their faces. And anyone who’s been near a Premier League stadium in recent years will know how much of fans’ excitement is being fuelled by an epidemic of “white powder”. A study in 2021 revealed one-third of fans had seen other supporters taking cocaine at matches. I’d say Coote was just making it a score draw.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTime to ex-X View image in fullscreenToday I am mainly going to be spending the day signing up to Bluesky. It’s time to become ex-X. It was an admirable step by the Guardian to quit Elon Musk’s X in the wake of the social media platform’s increasing ugliness. This will come at a cost in terms of traffic numbers – and potentially revenue – but is unquestionably the right thing to do. Even Stephen King has quit, calling the site “too toxic”. And he’s a man comfortable with horror.Recent months on X have felt like being locked in a King film. Or maybe a morgue staffed by creeps and ghouls. All that’s missing is the rubber shoes. But Musk is about to discover that in the media there is something worse than the wokery he despises, and that’s irrelevance. And it’s coming X’s way very soon. More

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    The ‘foolproof’ election forecaster who predicted Trump would lose – what went wrong?

    Surely not even Nostradamus could get it right all of the time.Allan Lichtman had correctly forecast the result of nine of the past 10 US presidential elections (and even the one he didn’t, in 2000, he insists was stolen from Al Gore). His predictive model of “13 keys” to the White House was emulated around the world and seemed all but indestructible.Until, that is, Donald Trump, the notorious human wrecking ball, came along and broke his crystal ball. Lichtman had prophesied that Democrat Kamala Harris would win eight of his keys, claiming the presidency, forcing him to face the harsh truth that his winning streak was over. Was it a big personal blow?“Of course,” the 77-year-old admits by phone. “But I care far less about the personal blow than I care about the blow to our democracy. Even before the election I said, ‘Look, if I’m wrong, the implications are vastly greater for our society than they are for the keys.’ It’s much more important to look at the broader implications.”Lichtman, a history professor who has been teaching at American University in Washington for more than a half a century, developed his keys to the White House in the early 1980s. With Vladimir Keilis-Borok, a Soviet expert on earthquake prediction, he analysed elections in terms of stability (the party holding the White House holds it) versus earthquake (the party holding the White House is ejected).The pair devised 13 true/false questions: if six or more keys went against the White House party, it would lose. Lichtman used the model to successfully predict Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1984 and (nearly) every election that followed. After the 2016 election, he received a copy of his Washington Post interview with a message written in a Sharpie pen: “Congrats, professor. Good call. Donald J Trump.”The 2024 election was always going to be a tough test for Lichtman. Joe Biden dropped out in favour of Harris while Trump, who survived two assassination attempts, is a norm-busting figure who was bidding to become the first former president to win back the White House since Grover Cleveland in the 19th century.Why did he think Harris would win, and what went wrong? “The keys are premised on the proposition that a rational, pragmatic electorate decides whether the White House party has governed well enough to get another four years,” he explains. “Just as this kind of hate and violence is new, there are precedent-shattering elements now to our political system, most notably disinformation.“There’s always been disinformation but it has exploded to a degree we’ve never seen before. It’s not just Fox News and the rightwing media. It’s also rightwing podcasters and we have a brand new player, the $300bn guy, Elon Musk, whose wealth exceeds that of most countries in the world and has heavily put his thumb on disinformation.”Musk’s Super Pac reportedly spent about $200m to help elect Trump while his social media platform X, formerly Twitter, amplified rightwing propaganda. Musk was a leading Trump surrogate and has since become a near-permanent fixture at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida. Along with the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, he will now head an effort to reduce wasteful government spending.Lichtman continues: “It’s been reported that the disinformation that he disseminates has been viewed billion of times. The disinformation extends to every aspect of our society and our economy. Many people are living in an alternative universe and that calls into question the fundamental basis of political decision-making in this country.”That includes disinformation about inflation, jobs, employment, the stock market, growth, hurricane aid, the Ukraine war and undocumented immigrants, falsely portrayed as dangerous killers when in fact they commit crimes at far lower rate than native-born Americans.Another problem for Lichtman’s model was a presidential candidate who has constantly torn up the rulebook and defied categorisation. “We’ve seen Trump far more than we’ve ever seen in the history of this country channel the darkest impulses in American life – things that have always been with us but were increased exponentially this time: racism, misogyny, xenophobia, antisemitism.“We’re seeing something new in our politics, which affected the prediction and could affect future predictions but has a much bigger message for the future of our democracy. George Orwell was 40 years too soon. He made it clear that dictatorships don’t just arise from brutality and suppression. They arise from control of information: doublethink. Famine is plenty, war is peace. We’re in the doublethink era and maybe we can get out of it, maybe not.”After Lichtman made his 2024 prediction, he and his wife received a backlash in the form of death threats, vulgar abuse and even people trying to breach their home. They were also the victims of swatting (false reports of a threat intended to draw a heavy police response at the target’s home) and doxing, in which their private information was published online.“I’ve been doing this for 42 years and I have never experienced anything remotely like this,” he says. “I haven’t had to call the police before ever; now they’ve been here several times. They’re on alert. They notified the FBI.”Once an idealistic 13-year-old who watched John F Kennedy speak in New York, Lichtman is dismayed that politics has come to this. “It tells me that America has fallen to an absolute new low,” he reflects.“All I have done is exercise my free speech and yet here I am, subject to all of this hate, attempts to breach the security of my family, and it’s consistent with what we heard from Donald Trump, who’s constantly invoking violence as legitimate, plus for dehumanising those he doesn’t agree with as vermin, scum, something less than human to be dealt with. We’ve never seen anything like this before in America.”Looking back at his 2024 miscalculation, Lichtman is not about to let Democrats off the hook. He had been a staunch defender of Biden until the end and condemned the party for forcing him to step aside in favour of Harris. He is now unimpressed by its epic blame game and self-flagellation over the election result.“They’re pointing the finger at everyone else but not taking any responsibility. This election proves what I’ve been saying for years. I can summarise American politics in one sentence. Republicans have no principles, Democrats have no spine.”As if to prove the point, Trump has nominated Matt Gaetz, a Maga bomb thrower once subject to a sex-trafficking investigation, as his attorney general. The post is currently held by Merrick Garland, whom Lichtman has known for 60 years.“I love the guy,” he says. “I thought he was maybe the greatest federal judge in America and he is now the poster child of the spineless Democrats who have let all this happen. He diddled for almost two years before appointing a special counsel [to investigate Trump’s role in the January 6 2021 insurrection].“We all knew on January 7 what Trump had done. Certainly we knew it by the time Merrick Garland was appointed in early 2021. If he had acted as he should have right away, everything would have been different. I believe Trump would have been convicted of serious federal crimes and either be in jail or be on probation and the whole political system would have been different.”Lichtman adds: “He epitomises the spineless Democrats. ‘Oh, I don’t want to do this because I might seem political and Republicans might criticise me.’ Didn’t he learn anything from his supreme court nomination? Republicans are going to do what they’re going to do.“It doesn’t depend on what you do. I always go by the mantra of: it’s not just the evil people who wreak havoc on this world, it’s the good people who don’t do enough to stop them. And Merrick Garland is right front and centre of that.”The Trump-Musk axis “broke my predictive model this year”, Lichtman admits, but he intends to pick himself up, dust himself down and try again in 2028. “I fully expect to adjust the keys according to what I see unfolding over the next several years,” he promises. “The beauty of being a presidential predictor is you have four years to correct your course.“Presuming I’m still around at 81 and fully engaged in my faculties, I will be very carefully monitoring developments over the next few years apropos of the keys and also speaking out in defence of our democracy. The keys are one thing – they’re totally non-partisan – but I have my own political views as well and I fully intend to express them. And when I think the Democrats are worthy of criticism, I don’t hold back.” More