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      ‘Democrats presented no alternative’: US voters on Trump’s win and where Harris went wrong

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      “It’s like being sucked into a tsunami,” said Vivian Glover, a Kamala Harris voter from South Carolina, about the realisation that Donald Trump had been re-elected as president.“The contrast between the two campaigns couldn’t have been more stark. On the one hand an intelligent, highly qualified public servant with a unifying message, and the opponent someone who epitomizes corruption, immorality, dishonesty, incompetence, racism, misogyny, tyranny and has clearly indicated his willingness to embrace authoritarianism.”View image in fullscreen“This election felt like a chance for real change, and I was inspired by the idea of having a female president,” said Sydney, 40, a teacher from New York. “I believed in her vision for a more inclusive and just America, and it’s difficult to let go of that hope.”Despite Sydney’s disappointment, Trump’s decisive victory and remarkable political comeback did not surprise her. “I think the biggest issue for a lot of Americans is simply the economy,” she said.Glover and Sydney were among many hundreds of US voters who shared with the Guardian via an online callout and follow-up interviews how they felt about the outcome of the presidential election, what had decided their vote and what their hopes and fears were for Trump’s second presidential term.Among those who had voted Republican, many said they had expected a Trump win, and that the polls had never properly reflected the atmosphere on the streets of their communities. They had voted for Trump, many said, because they felt he would handle the economy and international geopolitics better than Harris would have done, and because they wanted a crackdown on illegal immigration.Various Trump voters, among them young first-time voters, women and citizens with immigration backgrounds, said they had voted for the billionaire this time because they saw a vote for Trump as a “vote against woke” and against what they saw as leftwing extremism, a vote for “common sense”, and as a vote against “biased” media, which they felt had unfairly persecuted Trump for years and could no longer be trusted.Scores of Trump voters expressed outrage about Democrats including Harris and Hillary Clinton likening Trump to Hitler and calling him a fascist.Some male respondents said they had voted for Trump because they were tired of men being “vilified”, unfairly called “misogynist” and “blamed for everything”.Although Trump was far from perfect, many supporters said, his second term would hopefully lead to more peace globally, economic stability and an improvement to their financial situation, more secure borders, and a return to meritocracy and “family values”.Of those who said they had voted for the Harris-Walz ticket, many were shocked by the election result and had expected a Democratic victory, citing extremely tight polls and Harris’s perceived strong pull among younger people and women.Various Democratic voters blamed Trump’s landslide victory on a lack of education among his supporters, as well as on social media platforms such as X and YouTube, where the “manosphere” has become highly effective at undermining progressives, their policies and campaigns.Becky Boudreau-Schultz, 50, a receptionist and the mother of a teenage boy from Mason, Michigan, felt the Democrats had underestimated the sway of these platforms.Trump, she said, “put on a show” that sought to tap people’s fears about immigration and loss of independence.“His followers eat that up. Kamala ran on civility but, obviously, that is not America’s mood. Mainstream media seemed to warn people of Trump’s horrible potential but his supporters weren’t and aren’t watching.”Instead, she felt, voters were turning to “social media echo chambers that masquerade as actual news sources”.Many Democratic voters were highly critical of the Harris campaign, which, scores felt, had been out of touch with the average voter, did not sufficiently connect with concerns of young men and ethnic minorities, and had failed to address Americans’ most pressing worries. It had been a mistake, many said, that the campaign had centered on vague, abstract slogans such as “saving democracy” and “not going back”.“What I’m reading and watching suggests the Harris team and many others misjudged much of the electorate,” said Judith, a retired Harris voter from Vermont.“The population needed more attention on food prices, gas prices. Hearing how robust the economy is does not buy their groceries. The Hispanic and Black populations feared their job security would be threatened by allowing more immigrants into this country. These things mattered more than Trump’s reputation and criminal record. I get it, sadly.”View image in fullscreen“We lost it because we’re not speaking to the issues that Americans are so concerned about,” said 77-year-old Bill Shlala, from New Jersey, a Democrat who has voted Republican in some races over the years, and who worked in special education.“We’re not talking about, how do I not lose my house to medical bills? How do I afford to send my child to college? Joe Biden has attempted to correct that a little bit, especially with outreach to unions, but we became the party of the elites.“The Republicans and the extremists understand the angst of the American people, and they’re calling on that angst without any real plan. But then we presented no alternative.”Many Harris voters felt that the vice-president had not been a good candidate, but mostly reckoned that it had been too late to find another one, citing Biden’s late decision to pull out of the race.“Harris had an impossible job with minimal time to reach voters,” said Carla, 71, a retired professional in the legal sector from Ohio.“Biden should have never run for re-election. There would have been a different outcome if Democrats had had the time to run primary elections and pick a strong candidate.”Various people suggested that Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor, had been a poor running mate. Others defended Harris.View image in fullscreen“I feel Kamala Harris did an excellent job of campaigning,” said 81-year-old Pat, from Colorado, who holds a college degree in journalism and is retired. “But too many felt that ‘they were better off four years ago than now’.”Pat is now plagued by concerns about Trump firing experienced federal workers, deporting immigrants, exposing pregnant women to severe health risks, ignoring climate change and rolling back support for Ukraine.“I’m appalled. I’ll never understand why someone as vulgar and unhinged as Trump is so popular with voters, including my sons in Missouri,” she said. “I can only hope that his bark is worse than his bite regarding democracy, immigration and abortion.”Jack, a 19-year-old college student from Minnesota, was among a string of Democrats who said they had only reluctantly turned out for Harris, citing a lack of clear policy and the party’s move to the right on some issues, such as immigration.“This was my first election, and I voted for Kamala with minimal enthusiasm,” he said.“I don’t think Kamala was the right candidate, but this [loss] is owed to the complete strategic failure of the Dems in focusing on getting votes of independents and moderate Republicans. A [moderate] Democrat will lose to a real Republican every time.”View image in fullscreenHe was “not at all surprised that Trump won”, as the economy had “not improved for the average American on the ground”, he said.“I also believe this nation is too fundamentally misogynistic to elect a female president. We can elect a rapist before we can elect a woman.”“I completely reject the accusation that men like me voted for Trump because of misogyny,” said a male professional with Hispanic roots in his mid-40s from Florida who wanted to stay anonymous.“My wife and I did not vote for Trump because we could not live with a female president, but because we wanted Trump to be our president. We think he’ll do great things for our country and the world, and as a family with grandfathers on both sides who fought the Nazis in [the second world war], we are outraged by claims that Trump voters are fascists.“We are decent citizens who are very active in our community. We just want less crime, secure borders, a strong economy driven by entrepreneurial growth not state handouts, affordable prices, and fairness in the labor market. We believe President Trump will deliver on those.”Although he felt “vindicated” by the election result, he and his wife remained “afraid to come out publicly as Trump supporters”, he said. “We fear social and professional repercussions. That’s why the polls keep getting it wrong.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreen“I voted for Trump and consider myself a moderate,” said Hayden Duke, 45, a teacher from Maryland. “I’ve voted for all parties in the past.“I couldn’t be happier that we have rejected the Biden-Harris wokeness, weakness and lack of common sense which have destroyed our economy and allowed wars to take place all over the world. I have been called a Nazi, a fascist, a nationalist and more by supporters of Harris. Normal people are so tired of being lectured by these suffocating moral guardians, looking down on us and speaking down to us and shoving their viewpoints on everyone else.“This crowd has likened Trump to Hitler – but Hitler killed [millions of] Jews and others, Trump hasn’t killed a single person. They say Kamala Harris lost because of misogyny, but I’m ready for a female president. I voted for [would-be Republican presidential candidate] Elizabeth Dole all the way back in 2000.”Had Harris chosen the, in Duke’s view, the more broadly appealing Pennsylvania governor, Josh Shapiro, as her running mate, Duke felt she might have won Pennsylvania and possibly the election – an opinion that was shared by various people.Others took the opposite view. “The Democrats refused to listen to the public on Gaza which I think lost them support,” said Tom, 28, a higher education professional from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who “had a feeling” Trump would win. Having voted “unenthusiastically” for Biden in 2020, he did not vote at all in 2024.“I think the assassination attempt on Trump really solidified and unified his base, while the Democrats have gotten deeply fractured over Gaza and didn’t have strong messaging,” he said.“I don’t think that Kamala Harris ran a strong campaign. It was unclear what her values and policies actually were, other than ‘I am not Trump.’ I do not think that is enough for many people, but that’s what Harris was banking on – people rejecting Trump again. What was the Harris plan for healthcare? I don’t think she did enough to differentiate herself from Biden.”Tom was among a number of people who said they were actively looking into moving abroad now. “This Trump term is going to be terrible,” he said. “I want to finish my master’s degree and then look into moving to another country.”“This election proves that centrist, pro-war Democrats weren’t the answer,” said Margarito Morales, 40, from Austin, Texas, who works in tech and said he had voted for Harris. “Biden won the popular vote with over 80m votes, and now Trump won it with much fewer votes.”View image in fullscreenMany younger people, Morales felt, chose to abstain or to vote for Jill Stein in the absence of strong leftist policies that would have excited them, such as universal healthcare, student loan forgiveness or lowering the cost of going to college.“The Democrats went with the status quo, and it isn’t working. People didn’t feel inspired. People with immigrant parents did not know what may happen to their families under the Democrats,” he said, citing the party’s recent moves to tighten border restrictions.Several people who got in touch said they had backed Trump for the first time in 2024, despite having concerns about him and his Maga movement.A 25-year-old mechanic from Iowa who wanted to stay anonymous “disliked both candidates in 2020 – their policies, personalities, and campaigns.“This year,” he said, “I voted for Donald Trump.”A key point in his decision had been his financial stability, which has been crumbling over the past few years, he said.“I believe Donald Trump’s administration will do a better job helping the American people financially and improving international stability. I do, however, have concerns for young adults who are pro-choice, and those in the trans community whose rights may be under attack under the new presidency.”Milly, in her 40s, from Washington state, was another first-time Trump voter. “I voted for Obama twice, but the liberal movement in America has lost me, because it completely changed,” she said.“The DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] movement has completely radicalized itself, from initially wanting to push back against actual sexual and racial discrimination to pursuing an absurd, deeply unfair equality-of-outcome agenda. These extremists are alienating so many people with pretty liberal views.”Being pro-choice, Milly said she was planning on lobbying the Republican party to soften its stance on harsh abortion bans in some states.“I still identify as a liberal, but I’m a liberal with limits: society’s norms can’t be overhauled entirely just to suit tiny minorities and extreme political fringe movements. I hope Donald Trump will bring common sense and realism back into American political discourse.”Jacqueline, 63, a retired photographer and writer from Arizona who described herself as disabled, fears that the new reality under Trump may become unsurvivable for people like herself who depend on the social security net, which she believes the new administration wants to get rid of.“We’re talking about social security for the elderly, for disability, for veterans, death benefits for widows, food stamps. I live in a very poor area. People can’t feed their families without food stamps. People like me, my neighbors, this whole community, many people that voted for them, will have no way to survive.”Another huge worry of hers is Trump’s possible environmental policy. “Climate change affects everything, and if we don’t fix that, nothing else matters. He’s going to reverse everything that the Biden administration has set up to mitigate climate change and to make the transition to renewable energy.”Jacqueline also struggles to wrap her head around the new reality that America now has a president with a criminal conviction.“If you’re a felon, you can’t get a good job, you have to put that on every job application, that label follows you around. But you can be president of the United States. It’s literally insane.”Josh, an engineer in his 50s from Pennsylvania, has an answer for people who cannot understand why more than 74 million Americans were not put off by Trump’s criminal record.“The people calling Trump ‘a convicted felon’ need to understand: many people like me voted for Trump not despite this kangaroo court conviction, but because of it. His trial was a shameful persecution of a political opponent by a Democratic prosecution. It fired me up.”JT, 28, a full-time employee from Texas, was one of various people who said they considered Trump “the lesser evil”, and voted Trump in 2020 and 2024, despite disliking the available candidates in both elections.“I voted for Trump based on two reasons,” he said. “I feel I was better off economically when he was in charge. And I’m originally from California, and watched as the Democratic party’s rule there made it so much harder for people like me to get ahead.”Alongside exploding prices, high taxes, and higher crime and homelessness rates, he pointed to California having become “way too focused on identity politics.“Harris is from California, and I don’t want the USA to become like California. I’m a mixed-race person of colour and have never liked identity politics. I don’t care about race or gender or orientation; I want results.”He wants stronger borders and immigration enforcement, considering it “insulting” that people like his foreign-born family had to wait for years in difficult circumstances before being able to immigrate legally while others cross the border illegally.“Harris fixated on democracy being in danger and abortion, ignoring the two huge concerns of economy and immigration,” he said.“I have a ton of concerns about Trump, mostly about his personality and lack of morals, his weird tirades and personal attacks. He outright lies, a lot. But as long as he is able to improve the economy like in 2016 and improve on the immigration issue, I’ll consider it a win.”View image in fullscreenElizabeth McCutchon, 61, a psychiatric nurse practitioner and mother of five, voted for Harris, but is married to a Republican.“The mistake of the Democrats has been to keep asking the question, ‘How could you?’ rather than, ‘What did we not understand about American voters?’” she said.“There are some Harris voters who are now saying they will have nothing to do with people who voted for Trump. I think this sort of behavior will be used by Trump voters to demonstrate how out of touch Harris voters are.“I don’t think Trump will provide the change that his voters were promised. But he is different than the status quo.” More

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      Will the American project survive the anger of white men? | Carol Anderson

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      A friend recently asked: “Do you think the United States will survive the anger of white men?” As blunt as the question is, the core element is not so far-fetched. In fact, the majority of white men (and women) who voted in the presidential election in 2024 have rallied around a man who has called for the “termination of the constitution”, vowed to be a “dictator”, and threatened to deploy the US military against Americans. They support a man who is a convicted felon, an adjudicated rapist, a proven liar, who has been fined nearly half a billion dollars for fraud, who incited an insurrection that injured 140 police officers, and who mismanaged the Covid-19 pandemic causing hundreds of thousands to die needlessly.The fact that Donald Trump’s candidacy was even viable, given that horrific track record, was because of the support of white men. White men, whose anger was on full display at Madison Square Garden as they spewed racist, misogynistic venom. White men who attacked poll workers and also voters of Kamala Harris. White men who chafed at the thought that their wives and girlfriends would not vote for the man who thought it was “a beautiful thing” that reproductive rights had been destroyed. And, as the New York Times reported, the downwardly mobile, frustrated “white men without a degree, [who] have been surpassed in income by college-educated women”.And let’s be clear. Trump has laid out an agenda that will provide the “wages of whiteness” to his male supporters but very little else. The racist hate that undergirds Maga can only provide threadbare comfort. The planned enormous tariffs, the rollback on workplace, food and environmental safety regulations, the dismantling of labor protections, the planned deportation of tens of millions of undocumented people and naturalized citizens, the assault on reproductive rights and alignment with dictators – all of this will destroy the economy, explode the deficit and leave the United States severely isolated and weakened.This is nothing new. White male anger, especially at the nation’s inclusion of African Americans, has repeatedly privileged white supremacy over the viability of the United States. During the war of independence, when the nation was fighting to become the United States, South Carolina’s government fumed at Congress’s request to arm the enslaved and give them their freedom in exchange for fending off a British force that was more than 10 times the size of what those in Charleston could muster. Government officials flat out refused and barked that they weren’t sure that the US “was a nation worth fighting for” and would rather take their chances with the king of England. In short, enslaving those of African descent was infinitely more important than the United States.Later on, during the subsequent battles over drafting the constitution, far too many white slaveholding men were willing to hold the United States hostage unless they got their way. That meant reinforcing slavery and the power of slaveholders, despite the document’s language about “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”. They threatened. They raged. They schemed. And they succeeded.The three-fifths clause, which partially counted each enslaved human being by that fraction, gave the slaveholding south disproportionate and unearned power in the US House of Representatives. The Fugitive Slave Clause allowed them to hunt down beyond their state borders those seeking that elusive freedom from bondage. The additional 20 years of the Atlantic Slave Trade meant they could secure more human cargo directly from Africa to engorge the coffers of those placing racialized slavery above democracy.The disastrous contradictions embedded in the founding of the United States could not help but erupt into civil war. Once again, a group of white men were angry. Angry that the country had elected a man who did not want to see slavery spread beyond the South. Angry that Abraham Lincoln’s position meant a diminution of the south’s national political power. Angry that Lincoln was a Republican, a party founded on anti-slavery. So, in cold, calculated anger they attacked the United States of America. They set out to destroy it.They did not succeed. But that war sowed the dragon’s teeth that undermined the promise of a true multi-racial democracy and led to the horrors of Jim Crow. When the need for correcting the US’s decidedly unequal democracy ran headlong into the threat of nuclear annihilation during the cold war, the choice should have been obvious. But, once again, white men’s anger put the United States in jeopardy.In 1957, the Soviets launched Sputnik, a satellite, which proved that the USSR unexpectedly had the capabilities to launch its nuclear arsenal across the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. The US was no longer safe. President Dwight Eisenhower responded by proposing the National Defense Education Act, which would pump hundreds of millions of dollars into universities so the US would have the “brainpower to fight the cold war”.The bill was shepherded through Congress by two Alabama legislators, the representative Carl Elliott and the senator J Lister Hill. Both wanted the money but neither wanted what came with it. In other words, they wanted to continue to deny admission to African Americans to their racially exclusive universities, such as Ole Miss, LSU, the University of Georgia and the University of Alabama. If this was about educating those who could give the US an edge in the cold war, then limiting that access by race was folly.Yet Elliott and Hill, both signatories to the virtually insurrectionist Southern Manifesto, which vowed to use every weapon at the congressional membership’s disposal to stop Brown v Board of Education from darkening their states’ doorsteps, refused to move the bill forward. They demanded, instead, that Eisenhower provide assurances that those hundreds of millions of dollars would be as whites-only as their universities. Faced with the dilemma of Jim Crow or possible nuclear annihilation, the angry white men chose to protect Jim Crow, not the United States.Similarly, today, despite the warnings from generals who served with Trump, police officers who endured the attacks on January 6, and a God-fearing then vice-president Mike Pence who was targeted for a hanging with gallows constructed during the insurrection, the angry white men who propped up Trump’s return to the White House ignored everything they say they valued – the military, law enforcement and God – to give into the rage of white grievance, the “pastiche of sweaty anger” that the Trump-Vance campaign peddled, and to the fear and violence embedded in the “great replacement” theory.Once again, unfortunately, the anger about a multi-racial democracy has put the viability of the United States in jeopardy.

      Carol Anderson is the Robert W Woodruff Professor of African American Studies at Emory University and the author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide More

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      Make no mistake: this Trump presidency will continue to attack abortion rights | Moira Donegan

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      Abortion rights initiatives were on the ballot in 10 states on Tuesday, and won in seven of them. One of the losers was prop 4, Florida’s abortion rights measure, which received a whopping 57% of the vote but failed to meet the state’s unusually high 60% threshold, meaning that the state’s six-week ban will remain in place. Asked about the Florida abortion rights proposition ahead of the election, Trump said that when he went to cast his ballot near Palm Beach, he would vote against it.It has always been a little hard to believe that Donald Trump personally hates abortion, even if it is abundantly clear how little he thinks of women. Trump, after all, has claimed to have numerous conflicting positions on abortion rights throughout his life. And his brand of masculinity is boorish, vulgar, and above all, sexually entitled – far from the priggish, repressed moralism of more classical anti-abortion figures like Mike Pence.Maybe this is why, though Trump appointed three of the six justices who overturned Roe v Wade and has boasted about his role in ending the right to an abortion, many voters seem to not quite believe that he will continue to suppress the procedure further in his coming second term. Abortion rights measures won in several states that Trump carried on Tuesday – including Arizona, Nevada, Montana and Missouri, all states that Trump won. A lot of people, it seems, voted for abortion rights in their own states, and then also voted for Donald Trump – who, make no mistake, will move to restrict abortion access nationwide when he returns to the White House next year.Trump, of course, has insisted that this will not happen – which on its own might be a decent indication that it will. But there is evidence that the new Trump administration will pursue a broad agenda restricting women’s rights, including nationwide attacks on abortion access, even beyond that offered by Trump’s habitual pattern of self-serving dishonesty.Republicans have won control of the Senate and are likely to capture the House of Representatives; if they do, they may well advance legislation to ban abortion nationwide. (And to pass it: there is no reason to believe that a Republican governing trifecta will preserve the filibuster.) A bill like this would probably not be termed a “ban” by its sponsors: Republicans, wary of the public disapproval of abortion bans, have started calling their new abortion restrictions by chillingly imprecise euphemisms, such as “standard” or even “protection”. But the effect of the laws are the same: to outlaw abortions. This could take the form of a gestational limit, or of the federal recognition of fetal personhood. Trump may well sign such legislation into law, eliminating abortion rights even in Democratic-controlled states and those that have recently passed abortion rights referendums with the stroke of a pen.But Republicans do not even need to manage to pass a bill through Congress to make abortion much more difficult to get. Trump can simply restrict abortion through federal agencies. He will soon be in control of the FDA, for example, which regulates the abortion drug mifepristone, part of a two-drug regimen that now accounts for most abortions in the United States. Mifepristone is a safe, effective drug that allows abortions to be performed in the privacy of patients’ homes, with little of the expensive clinical involvement and overhead that makes surgical abortions more time-intensive and costly for providers and patients alike.Naturally, the anti-abortion movement hates it. Since Dobbs, a coalition of anti-choice groups and Republican attorneys general have been suing the FDA, seeking to overturn the agency’s 2000 approval of the drug. Trump will be able to rescind access to it almost immediately, taking the drug off the legal US market. If he gives the anti-choice movement what they want, he may also direct the FDA to revoke approval of the most reliable forms of female-controlled contraception, like Plan B, IUDs, and certain birth control pills, which the anti-choice movement falsely claims cause abortions.Trump is likely to also revive enforcement of the Comstock Act, a long-dormant 1873 law that bans the shipment of anything that could be used to induce an abortion through the US mail. The Comstock Act has not been enforced in decades – parts of it were repealed in the 20th century, and other sections were long rendered moot by supreme court precedents like Roe and Casey – and would have the effect of criminalizing much abortion care. Since Dobbs, several Democratic-controlled states have passed what are called shield laws, which protect doctors who mail abortion drugs from states where the procedure is legal into states that have bans. This mail-order abortion operation is, for now, technically legal: it has preserved women’s independence and dignity and no doubt saved thousands of lives.But when the Comstock Act is enforced, much of this sector of abortion provision will disappear. Combined with the revocation of FDA approval for mifepristone, this will inevitably mean that many women seeking abortions will turn to black market surgical abortion providers, and suffer the risks attendant to such procedures. A return to pre-Roe levels of abortion ban-related mortality could probably follow.Trump is also likely to reverse the Biden administration’s guidance on Emtala, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, a federal law that requires emergency rooms to provide stabilizing care to all patients facing health crises. Emtala has been the subject of much post-Dobbs litigation, as states like Idaho and Texas have sought to argue that their abortion bans supersede the federal law, thus requiring hospitals in their states to withhold emergency abortions from women in medical emergencies who will suffer or die without them. The US supreme court declined to decide the issue last summer; a Trump administration may help to resolve it for them.This is all just what Trump could do on his own in his first years back in office. But the impact of a Trump term on American women’s access to abortion will be felt long after Trump himself is no longer with us. Trump will probably appoint at least two supreme court justices to lifetime seats in his coming term; he will also fill an unknown number of vacancies on the lower federal courts, whose judges also serve for life. These judges are all likely to be anti-abortion zealots, as are the federal bureaucrats Trump will bring in to staff agencies such as the FDA, CDC and Department of Health and Human Services.We are already living in an era when abortion access is restricted more than it has been in decades. Now, it will be restricted more. We may well never have as much reproductive freedom as we do now ever again.American women are well advised to prepare for this, to not wait for the Trump administration to restrict the tools they use to control their own bodies. Sterilization and long-acting birth control remain accessible, for now; women who want these should move quickly to get them. Plan B and abortion pills can both be purchased ahead of time and kept on hand in the privacy of a medicine cabinet; such purchases may provide security and peace of mind to those staring down the barrel of another Trump term. Abortion, as we know, will never be eliminated; it can only be less safe, and less dignified. But there are few things as strong as women’s determination to control their own lives. That determination is certainly stronger than the law.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Trump ducked criminal charges – right into the most powerful office in the world | Sidney Blumenthal

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      Donald Trump’s most vital campaign did not involve his political consultants, the hysteria of his rallies, the paranoid TV spots about migrant murderers and transgender bogeymen, his blathering on “bro” podcasts or the prancing of a hopped-up Elon Musk. Nor was it about a garbage can in the ocean, eating pets or divine intervention.Trump’s vulnerability was always at the forefront of his mind. He knew he could have been eliminated at crucial moments before election day. He was anxious about more than an assassination. He understood that his most threatening adversary was the criminal justice system. Trump had to get away with his crimes to survive. The making of the president required the unmaking of justice.Trump’s bravado excited his Maga faithful even as it masked his furtive, frantic and desperate efforts to escape legal judgment. He committed new crimes to obstruct justice, to hide evidence for which he was additionally indicted. In all, he faced 54 felony charges apart from the 34 felony counts on which he was found guilty in the election and business fraud case involving hush money in New York. Among the federal charges against him were conspiracy to defraud the American people of a free and fair election, conspiracy against rights and corruptly concealing and destroying classified defense documents under the Espionage Act. In the Georgia state election interference case, he was indicted under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (Rico) Act along with 18 co-conspirators.The first result of Trump’s re-election was the removal of his existential threat. If he had lost, he would have faced his trials and their consequences for the rest of his life. But on the morning after, the justice department informed the press that it would seek to close the cases against Trump. Under the policy of a 2000 memo from the justice department’s office of legal counsel, a prosecution of a president would “unduly interfere in a direct or formal sense with the conduct of the presidency”. The old memo is Trump’s get out of jail card.That document was a revised version of a post-Watergate OLC memo issued in 1973. The 2000 memo concurred with the conclusion of the earlier one: “In light of the effect that an indictment would have on the operations of the executive branch, ‘an impeachment proceeding is the only appropriate way to deal with a President while in office.’”But the OLC memo is just a policy memo, not a judicial ruling, which was not updated to account for the new reality of alleged crimes of a former president. After Trump, it was complacently left to stand. Now that he has been elected again, the policy is being applied to the unanticipated and unique situation of years long ongoing cases to shutter the rule of law. Trump will be scot-free.The hammer blows that would have shattered his campaign never came. The gavel laid flat on the bench. As Trump eluded trial after trial, their looming shadows faded. If he had faced the music, he would have been convicted as an insurrectionist, thief of national security secrets and obstructer of justice and he would have been sentenced to prison months before the election. His strategy was justice delayed is justice denied.Instead of Trump’s dominant message being his war against the law, he was permitted to fill the space with variations on the racist great replacement theory. “Poison in the blood” was heard rather than “Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury”.Trump’s strongman image inflated every time he beat the process. Whenever he delayed justice his legend grew. Every time he should have been subject to the law and wasn’t, he appeared too big to fall. The inability to bring him to trial made the system seem weak and suspect. The law was anemic; he was indestructible. No man was above the law – with one exception. Without the presentation of the evidence in a courtroom setting and the verdict of a jury, he was able to sow doubt with the public about the charges and present himself as a political martyr. He played to the galleries he assembled, not juries empaneled under the law.Despite Trump’s incessant motions and filings to delay and distract in his court cases, he did not hold back the wheels of justice all by himself. He alone could not fix it. For Trump to succeed, justice had to fail. It did not fail passively. He was rescued from judgment by four people, acting sequentially on wholly different motives, but leading to the same conclusion of letting the culprit run loose. Without his enablers, Trump would not have been protected. He confounded, thwarted and escaped the law because of the perverse decisions of the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, the attorney general, Merrick Garland, the chief justice, John Roberts and the US district court judge Aileen Cannon.None of the four had a more sustained personal relationship with Trump than McConnell. From his proximity he came to regard him as a “despicable human being”, “stupid as well as being ill-tempered”, with “complete unfitness for office”, as he told an oral historian, according to his authorized biographer, Michael Tackett, in The Price of Power. McConnell stated that Trump’s defeat in 2020 “only underscores the good judgment of the American people. They’ve just had enough of the misrepresentations, the outright lies almost on a daily basis, and they fired him. And for a narcissist like him, that’s been really hard to take.”After Trump was impeached for the insurrection on January 6, McConnell wavered on voting guilty. If Trump were to be found guilty, he could never again run for federal office. McConnell fell back on his political instinct that Trump was utterly discredited, though there was a risk that he might support Maga candidates to primary Republican senators who voted guilty as revenge. Before the vote on 13 February 2021, McConnell declared Trump “practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day”, but sidestepped convicting him by asserting that the penalty could not be applied because Trump was no longer president.McConnell pointed out that Trump would be held accountable in criminal trials. “But this just underscores that impeachment was never meant to be the final forum for American justice,” he said.“Indeed, Justice [Joseph] Story specifically reminded that while former officials were not eligible for impeachment or conviction, they were – and this is extremely important – ‘still liable to be tried and punished in the ordinary tribunals of justice’. Put another way, in the language of today: President Trump is still liable for everything he did while he was in office, as an ordinary citizen, unless the statute of limitations has run, still liable for everything he did while in office, didn’t get away with anything yet – yet. We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one.”Joe Biden appointed Merrick Garland as his attorney general. Garland had a sterling and bipartisan record. He had sat as a judge on the US court of appeals for the District of Columbia circuit since 1997, including seven years as chief judge, been a prosecutor at the justice department, notably handling the Oklahoma City bombing case and had a reputation for integrity and decency. He was extraordinarily collegial with Republicans. He had served as a moderator on at least 10 panels at the Federalist Society.When President Obama nominated him for the US supreme court, Garland seemed the ideal candidate. McConnell rejected him outright, not because of his qualifications, but because he played for keeps. McConnell wanted the seat available for a Republican president to fill, and it was filled by Trump, who followed the appointment of Neil Gorsuch with Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett off the Federalist Society list. McConnell felt he had used Trump for his own purposes. Then, when Biden named Garland to head the justice department, McConnell voted for his confirmation. It would be up to Garland to deal with Trump’s crimes.On his first day at the Department of Justice, in his speech to its employees, Garland explained that he had in his “DNA” the “norms” upheld by his hero, Edward Levi, the post-Watergate attorney general, a moderate Republican who acted above partisanship. “That there not be one rule for Democrats and another for Republicans”, said Garland. And that was the “only way we can succeed and retain the trust of the American people …”Garland was punctilious in his belief that pursuing Trump reflected a partisan impulse. “The Justice Department’s painstaking approach to investigating Trump can be traced to Garland’s desire to turn the page from missteps, bruising attacks and allegations of partisanship,” the Washington Post later reported. “Inside Justice, however, some lawyers have complained that the attorney general’s determination to steer clear of any claims of political motive has chilled efforts to investigate the former president. ‘You couldn’t use the T word,’ said one former Justice official briefed on prosecutors’ discussions.”Garland’s hero-worship of Levi was historically misplaced as a guide to his own role. Levi presided after the Watergate affair was wrapped up. But events had not cast Garland as Levi but potentially to be Judge John Sirica, who broke the conspiracy open. Garland’s prosecution of the mob that attacked the Capitol was based on the theory of working from the bottom up. Those down the chain would then provide evidence against the crime boss.But Garland operated on the wrong theory of the case. He suffered a failure of imagination, unable to grasp he was dealing with an attempted coup, not merely a destructive riot. The evidence of the coup was clearly before him. Trump’s fake elector scheme to prevent certification of the election occurred in plain sight in real time as it was happening. Trump’s tape of pressuring Georgia election officials to forge ballots was publicly revealed three days before January 6.In the sort of investigation that Garland was conducting it might take months, if not years, for a low-level mafioso to wear a wire that might produce such incriminating evidence. Garland vowed to go after “all January 6th perpetrators, at any level”, but as he racked up hundreds of cases against the Capitol mob he shied away from acting against the kingpin.On 12 May 2021, Liz Cheney was removed as chair of the House Republican conference. She had voted for Trump’s impeachment and favored a congressional investigation into the January 6 insurrection. Those opposed to the rulings of the courts about January 6, she said, were “at war with the constitution”.A week later, on 19 May, McConnell refused to support the creation of a bipartisan joint committee to investigate. He claimed it would be “slanted”, and there were “no new facts”. The House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, rejected cooperation with any new probe. The House committee included Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, from Illinois, as the two Republicans. They were both censured by the Republican National Committee, which passed off the insurrection as “legitimate political discourse”.On 28 March 2022, the US district court judge David Carter, in ruling that Trump’s legal adviser John Eastman must turn over his relevant emails to the committee, stated that it was “more likely than not” that he and Trump “corruptly attempted to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021”, and that they staged “a coup in search of a legal theory”.After Trump’s former senior aides refused to honor the committee’s subpoenas, they were referred to the DoJ for prosecution for contempt of Congress. Garland would not act.“Attorney General Garland, do your job so we can do ours,” beseeched Representative Elaine Luria of Virginia on 1 April. “We are upholding our responsibility. The Department of Justice must do the same,” echoed Representative Adam Schiff of California.“Mr Meadows and Mr Scavino unquestionably have relevant knowledge about President Trump’s role in the efforts to overturn the 2020 election and the events of January 6th. We hope the Department provides greater clarity on this matter,” the committee replied. But the justice department declined to indict Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows and social media director Dan Scavino.At last, in April, after Carter’s decision and the January 6 committee members’ public criticism, the FBI launched an investigation into the fake elector scheme. It had taken Garland 15 months after assuming office to begin exploring the coup as something beyond a riot.On 8 August, FBI agents with a warrant entered Trump’s residence in Florida, Mar-a-Lago, to seize classified national security material he had secreted there and refused to return to the government after longstanding multiple requests.On 15 November, Trump announced his presidential campaign. Three days later, Garland appointed Jack Smith, a DoJ prosecutor, as the independent special counsel to investigate both January 6 and the government documents cases. It was 21 months since Garland had become attorney general. He had fervently sought to avoid any taint of partisanship, but because of the delay the special counsel now worked under the color of a campaign.Smith worked swiftly. His indictments of Trump in the documents case came on 9 June 2023, following by additional ones for obstruction on 27 July. Then, on 1 August, he indicted Trump for January 6. The road to oblivion began.The US district court judge Tanya Chutkan set a trial date for 6 March 2024. Trump’s lawyers filed numerous motions to delay, including the claim that as president Trump enjoyed complete immunity over what were official acts. Chutkan rejected the motions as preposterous, but Trump’s stalling tactic worked, as she had to move back the trial date while a panel of three judges on the US court of appeals considered Trump’s immunity claim.Smith’s response on 23 December 2023 to Trump’s filing must rank as the most intriguing document in the investigation. It received little attention. In it, the special counsel suggested a series of crimes that “a President” might commit with impunity on the basis of Trump’s immunity claim. He could not accuse Trump of crimes for which he lacked the evidence. Yet his filing’s hypotheticals seemed to describe grave offenses.Trump’s “sobering” immunity theory might cover “a President who accepts a bribe in exchange for directing a lucrative government contract to the payer; a President who instructs the FBI Director to plant incriminating evidence on a political enemy; a President who orders the National Guard to murder his most prominent critics; or a President who sells nuclear secrets to a foreign adversary …”Did the special counsel have any evidence that pointed to any of those crimes? He presented them not as suspicions, but as logical extensions of Trump’s radical theory – “in each of these scenarios, the President could assert that he was simply executing the laws; or communicating with the Department of Justice; or discharging his powers as Commander-in-Chief; or engaging in foreign diplomacy.”The three-judge appeals court panel ruled expeditiously against Trump on 6 February that “any executive immunity that may have protected him while he served as President no longer protects him against this prosecution”.Trump appealed to the supreme court. It took its time to hear arguments on 25 April. Then, it waited until 1 July, the last day of its term, to issue its decision that Trump as a former president and private citizen had a presumption of “absolute immunity” for his “official actions”. Roberts’s opinion was a restatement of Smith’s wild hypothetical version of Trump’s immunity theory. The prosecution was ordered to tailor its indictment on those grounds, deleting anything to do with Trump’s “official actions”.Roberts had positioned himself as a high-minded institutionalist, whose principal concern was the reputation of the court as Olympian in its deliberations. But the curtain had been pulled back to reveal a fast and furious trade in cash gifts and luxury vacations lavished by self-interested Republican donors on justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. Ginni Thomas, a veteran far-right activist, was a cheerleader for the January 6 insurrection, especially the fake elector scheme in Arizona. Martha Ann Alito flew insurrectionist flags at the Alito house.Despite Roberts’s pose, his main contributions as a jurist were to trash the crown jewel of the civil rights movement, the Voting Rights Act, and to eviscerate campaign finance reform through the Citizens United decision, which opened the sluice gates for unregulated big money. Despite his rulings that transparently empowered the Republican party, he fretted about criticism of the court as having any partisan leaning.The conservative majority adhered to the dogma of “originalism”, claiming divination of the inner thoughts of the founders as a kind of legal scriptural fundamentalism. Yet Roberts’s unprecedented ruling on immunity established a charter for the kind of unaccountable authoritarian presidency that the founders sought to prevent in the constitution. His opinion severed the conservatives from their originalist mythology to shield Trump. At the entrance of the marble temple of the supreme court are engraved the words, “Equal Justice Under Law”, which are now an enduring tribute to its hypocrisy.Following the court’s new guidelines, Smith filed his new brief on 2 October. While it cut out some of the most dramatic evidence against Trump involving his pressure on Vice-President Mike Pence to toss out the legal electoral college votes and his manipulation of the justice department, the filing was still damning. It included the story of Trump’s response to being told Pence was endangered by the mob. “So what?” he replied. But the possibility for a trial before the election was by now long closed.In the documents case, the US district court judge Aileen Cannon ruled again and again to Trump’s advantage. She is a thoroughly processed product of the Federalist Society transmission belt, from law school to the federal bench. Cannon was on the Federalist Society list when Trump ticked her off for appointment. She is, as the communists used to say, a reliable.In decision after decision, Cannon’s reasoning was murky, her logic twisted and her rulings tilted. She denied Smith’s request for a December 2023 trial date, moving it to 20 May 2024 after the Republican primaries. After seemingly endless motions in which she created every obstacle for delay, on 15 July, the first day of the Republican national convention, she dismissed the entire case on the absurd notion that the justice department had no authority to appoint a special counsel “threatening the structural liberty inherent in the separation of powers”. That exact argument had been signaled in Justice Clarence Thomas’s opinion in the presidential immunity case issued two weeks earlier.Smith’s appeal on 26 August noted that the DoJ had been naming special counsels for 150 years and that the Congress had passed four enabling pieces of legislation and provided funding for the office. But, again, Trump had already succeeded, with the timely aid of a helpful judge, in moving any trial beyond the election. A month before, in October, the Trump campaign leaked that Cannon was under consideration to succeed Garland as attorney general.By acting as the indispensable servants of Trump’s lawlessness his helpers destroyed what they most venerated. McConnell had confided that “the Maga movement is completely wrong” and that President Ronald Reagan “wouldn’t recognize it today”. Just before the election, however, ever the myopic cynic, he remarked, “We’re all on the same team now.” Garland, by his desire to avoid being seen as partisan, created the critical space for Trump to re-emerge. Garland inadvertently tarnished the rule of law. Roberts, anxious about the court’s reputation, has shredded its legitimacy. But for Cannon, the Maga apparatchik, all is perfection.Trump’s squalor goes on. Smith can write a final report to be released before Trump takes office. Garland can make it public as his ultimate gesture. The Georgia Rico case has been on ice as a judge determines whether the prosecutor, Fani Willis, can continue in her role.If and when the case proceeds, Trump as president cannot be tried until his second term ends in 2029. But his 18 co-defendants, including Meadows, Eastman, Rudy Giuliani, and former acting attorney general Jeffrey Clark would face drawn-out trials that highlight Trump’s plot. It’s possible, however, that the Georgia judge overseeing the case may simply dismiss it in light of Trump’s re-election. In New York, on 26 November, Trump will appear in a courtroom to be sentenced for his 34 felonies falsifying business records to cover up hush-money payments during the 2016 campaign that also factors in his 10 counts of contempt of court.In Arizona, the state fake elector case there of 11 Arizona Republican officials and seven former Trump associates on nine felony counts of conspiracy, fraud and forgery, including Giuliani, Meadows, Eastman and Trump lawyer Boris Epshteyn, is scheduled for trial on 5 January 2026. The indicted former Trump attorney Jenna Ellis has flipped to cooperate with the prosecution.Trump cannot pardon his co-conspirators at the state level. They are left to their fates. Meanwhile, he has pledged to pardon the imprisoned felons from the mob that attacked the Capitol on January 6, whom he calls “hostages”. The pardons he signs will be symbols of his contempt for the law.Trump himself has escaped into the White House, which the US supreme court has declared the citadel of official immunity. Hail the Criminal-in-Chief!

      Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth More

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      The great danger is that this time, Trumpism starts making sense | Randeep Ramesh

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      Donald Trump’s unpredictable style and electoral success reflect a turbulent era when neither progressives nor authoritarians have secured control. Far from signalling an autocratic takeover, his rise shows a political landscape in flux. The 2008 crash and its uneven recovery marked the decline of the old economic order. But in 2016, the rise of Trump on the right and Bernie Sanders on the left highlighted a real shift, as neoliberalism’s grip loosened, making space for once marginalised ideas.Since then, two US presidencies have acknowledged the need to rebuild an economy that supports blue-collar workers affected by free trade, immigration and globalisation. While neither administration succeeded – and paid for it at the ballot box – the result has been a growing constituency on both sides of the American political divide that takes seriously, albeit often rhetorically, economic injustice. But for any political movement to become dominant, it has to shape the core ideas that matter to everyone, not just its diehard supporters.A subtle shift is taking place: once-taboo “protectionism” is now a bipartisan issue, with Joe Biden upholding Trump’s tariffs on China. The two presidents have encouraged US companies to reshore manufacturing. Industrial policy, missing since the 1990s, and antitrust actions now find advocates on both sides of the aisle. Both Trump and Harris gauged voters’ indifference to near-trillion-dollar deficits, promising on the campaign trail to protect social security and Medicare.While the methods are shared, the goals diverge. The US became the world’s top oil and gas producer in the last decade. Biden sought to cultivate a green economy, while Trump promoted fossil fuels so aggressively that it bordered on self-parody.Biden fell short of delivering the transformation he had promised. He set out to tackle inequality, improve public services and address the climate crisis with a $4tn plan funded by taxing the wealthy – a mission to unite social liberalism with economic fairness. But his ambitious plans were shrunk by lobbying by corporate interests and resistance from centrist Democrats.After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Biden shifted away from economic radicalism. When inflation surged, instead of controlling prices, he allowed the cost of essentials to soar, causing the steepest food-price hike since the 1970s. In 2022, the poorest 20% of Americans spent nearly a third of their income on food, while the wealthiest fifth spent just 8%. Biden avoided emergency price controls, unlike Richard Nixon who implemented them in 1971 – and won a landslide reelection the following year.Biden learned the lesson too late, promising to tackle “greedflation” as part of his reelection campaign. Once he dropped out, Harris said she would enact the “first ever federal ban” on food-price gouging. That was slamming the stable door shut long after the horse had bolted. However, in a sign that price controls were becoming mainstream in national politics, Trump promised to cap credit card interest rates.Trump’s populist rhetoric resonated with disillusioned voters, yet his first term’s policies had often mirrored the establishment he criticised, blending and betraying the US’s pro-market ideals. As the historian Gary Gerstle writes in his book The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: “If [the administration’s] deregulation, judicial appointments, and tax cuts pointed toward the maintenance of a neoliberal order … Trump’s assault on free trade and immigration aimed at its destruction.” Trump presents free trade and open borders as threats to US prosperity, advocating for strict controls that admit only goods and people aligned with American interests.The president-elect has abandoned the neoliberal tradition of keeping markets shielded from direct political influence, openly using his power to favour allies and enrich elites. While centrist Democrats support corporate interests by blocking progressive reforms, Trump aligns directly with billionaires, promoting a culture where justice serves the wealthy, prejudice is trivialised and power diminishes equality. This trickle-down bigotry will ultimately create a system where servility to power and social division become normalised, eroding fairness for everyone.Whether Trump can mobilise popular discontent over social and economic inequalities without alienating the oligarchs who support him remains an open question. In the months ahead, a struggle will unfold among factions within Trump’s circle. Economic populists such as the Republican senator Josh Hawley and the vice-president-elect, JD Vance, will differ from libertarians such as Vivek Ramaswamy and the self-interested deregulatory agenda of Elon Musk. Trump’s aim isn’t to lift all boats, but rather to lift enough to convince voters to tolerate the corruption, consumer scams and environmental degradation that enrich a plutocratic class. This strategy, boosted by a pliant mediasphere, enables him to present a party of private power as the voice of the ordinary voter.American political life often oscillates between “normal” and “revolutionary” phases – periods of stability interspersed with upheaval, where ideological shifts reshape public policy. After the crash but before Trump, the Tea Party was a rightwing populist movement frustrated by globalisation yet anti-worker in orientation. Revolutionary moments – such as the rise of nativist populism or democratic progressivism – trigger profound ideological shifts that reshape public values and policy. Trump’s victory was historic, but it is not yet ideologically cohesive or triumphant.If that changes, it could permanently shift certain constituencies. In 1948, Democratic support for civil rights led African Americans to abandon their traditional allegiance to the Republicans. They left the party of emancipation for the party of Jim Crow. Betting that working-class voters have nowhere else to go is a gamble centrist politicians will profoundly regret.For Democrats, the traditional strategy of pairing social liberalism with modest economic reform no longer connects with today’s voters. While social equality is a moral imperative, it requires bold, egalitarian economic policies to truly resonate. Until such policies take shape, political dysfunction and public frustration will persist. The pressing question now, for the US and beyond, is what vision and leadership will meet these urgent demands. More

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      Trump expected to appoint China critics Marco Rubio and Mike Waltz

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      President-elect Donald Trump has reportedly decided to appoint the prominent China hawks Marco Rubio and Mike Waltz as his respective secretary of state and national security adviser.Rubio was arguably the most hawkish option on Trump’s shortlist for secretary of state, and he has in past years advocated for a muscular foreign policy with respect to America’s geopolitical foes, including China, Iran and Cuba.Over the past several years the Florida senator has softened some of his stances to align more closely with Trump’s views. The president-elect accuses past US presidents of leading America into costly and futile wars and has pushed for a more restrained foreign policy.A failed challenger to Trump for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, Rubio had been rumored to be one of the leading contenders for Trump’s vice-presidential pick before JD Vance was announced.Since his failed run for president, Rubio has served as an informal foreign policy adviser and helped Trump prepare for his first debate against Biden in 2020.Trump has not confirmed the planned appointment, which was first reported by the New York Times. If confirmed, Rubio would be the first Latino to serve as America’s top diplomat once the Republican president-elect takes office in January.While the famously mercurial Trump could always change his mind at the last minute, he appeared to have settled on his pick as of Monday, sources told Reuters.While Rubio was far from the most isolationist option, his likely selection nonetheless underlines a broad shift in Republican foreign policy views under Trump.Once the party of hawks who advocated military intervention and a muscular foreign policy, most of Trump’s allies now preach restraint, particularly in Europe, where many Republicans complain US allies are not paying their fair share on defense.“I’m not on Russia’s side – but unfortunately the reality of it is that the way the war in Ukraine is going to end is with a negotiated settlement,” Rubio told NBC in September.Waltz, a Republican congressman and Trump loyalist who served in the national guard as a colonel, has criticized Chinese activity in the Asia-Pacific and voiced the need for the US to be ready for a potential conflict in the region.Last week, Waltz won re-election to the US House seat representing east-central Florida, which includes Daytona Beach. He defeated the Democrat James Stockton, a pastor and former president of a local NAACP branch.Waltz is a combat-decorated Green Beret and a former White House and Pentagon policy adviser. He was first elected in 2018, replacing the Republican Ron DeSantis, who ran for governor, in Florida’s sixth congressional district.Waltz served multiple combat tours in Afghanistan, and he was awarded four Bronze Stars. He was one of the lawmakers appointed in July to serve on a bipartisan congressional taskforce to investigate the attempted assassination of Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July.After Waltz left the US army, he worked in the Pentagon in the George W Bush administration as policy director for former defense secretaries Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates.Under the former vice-president Dick Cheney, Waltz served as a counter-terrorism adviser.In 2021, after Joe Biden ordered a chaotic evacuation from Afghanistan, Waltz asked Biden to reverse course and relaunch military operations in the region. The war in Afghanistan began under Bush after the 11 September 2001 attacks.The Intercept reported that before his run for Congress in 2018 Waltz managed a lucrative defense contracting firm with offices in Afghanistan.Waltz has consistently expressed the need for protecting the Afghan people, saying that US “soldiers will have to go back”. Government reports have stated that US nation-building efforts resulted in the deaths of more than 48,000 civilians and 66,000 Afghan police and military, and widespread torture.In other developments on Trump’s appointments, the governor of South Dakota, Kristi Noem, has been picked to become the next secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, CNN reported on Tuesday, citing two sources.Earlier this year, Noem was widely seen as a potential presidential running mate for Trump. She lost out after recycling a two-decade-old story designed to illustrate decisive leadership that involved her shooting dead a puppy that did not hunt and had bitten members of her family.Reuters contributed to this report More

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      Democrat Ruben Gallego beats far-right Republican Kari Lake to win Arizona senate seat

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      Democratic congressman Ruben Gallego has won the race for US Senate in Arizona, becoming the first Latino to represent the state in the Senate, beating out the far-right firebrand Kari Lake.Gallego will replace the Democrat turned independent senator Kyrsten Sinema, who ran for office as a centrist and charted a way for Democrats to win statewide elections in the right-leaning state, but then consistently stood in the way of her party’s priorities in the Senate. She did not seek re-election.While the presidential race polled neck and neck throughout the election, Gallego polled ahead of Lake by several points the entire campaign, an unlikely position for a progressive congressman trying to win a battleground state. Gallego also outperformed Lake in fundraising, giving him more local airtime and mailbox presence.In the end, he edged out Lake with 50% of the vote to her 48%, while Trump easily beat Harris in the state.“Gracias, Arizona!” Gallego wrote on the social platform X. He planned to speak to his supporters during a news conference Monday night.After Gallego’s win, Democrats will have 47 seats in the 100-member Senate, versus the Republicans 52, erasing Democrats’ previous majority in the chamber.Republicans flipped Democratic-controlled Senate seats in West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Montana. In the latter three cases, defeated senators Sherrod Brown, Bob Casey and Jon Tester all polled ahead of Harris but couldn’t overcome their states’ shifts toward the Republicans.Lake ran into trouble winning over moderate Republicans and independent voters, both needed to deliver a victory. Attacks she had made against the late US senator John McCain reverberated, and the so-called McCain Republicans split on supporting her.Lake ran for governor in 2022, losing to the Democrat Katie Hobbs. Lake has yet to accept the results of that election.Republican efforts focused more on Trump’s bid to swing the state back red after he lost there in the narrowest victory nationwide in 2020. Billboards financed by the Arizona Republican party that boasted of “team unity” did not include Lake. Instead, Trump was pictured alongside out-of-staters like JD Vance, Elon Musk, Robert F Kennedy Jr, Vivek Ramaswamy and Tulsi Gabbard.Arizona has had six senators in just over a decade, creating an endless stream of high-priced elections for these coveted seats. Republicans there have run to the right of the electorate, creating an opening for Democrats to make a case to new residents and suburbanites who are shifting to the left.Gallego was able to tell his personal story frequently in his campaign. He is the son of Mexican and Colombian immigrants, who was raised by his mother and worked odd jobs at meat-packing plants and pizza shops to earn extra money for his family. He then graduated from Harvard and joined the Marine Corps, deploying to Iraq as part of a unit that saw some of the heaviest casualties of the war.Lake delivered the news as an anchor on the local Fox affiliate in Phoenix for decades, putting her in Arizonans’ homes daily. Raised in Iowa, she has talked about being the youngest of nine children and called herself a “mama bear”. She has embraced Trump and the Maga movement, happily saying “you can call me Trump in a dress any day.”Lauren Gambino contributed reporting More

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      US election updates: Trump reportedly looks to China hawks for key security and foreign policy roles

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      Donald Trump is reportedly tapping up politicians who hold hardline positions on China for key roles within his incoming cabinet. The US president-elect has asked US Representative Michael Waltz, a retired Army National Guard officer and war veteran, to be his national security adviser, multiple outlets reported, while the New York Times and Reuters said Florida senator Marco Rubio was favourite for secretary of state.Waltz is also on the Republican’s China taskforce and is considered hawkish – advocating for a more aggressive foreign policy – when it comes to China. He called for a US boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing due to what he termed the “suppression” of information about the Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan, and its ongoing mistreatment of the minority Muslim Uyghur population.Rubio is a top China hawk in the Senate. Most notably, he called on the treasury department in 2019 to launch a national security review of popular Chinese social media app TikTok’s acquisition of Musical.ly. As the top Republican on the Senate intelligence committee, he demanded the Biden administration block all sales to Huawei earlier this year after the sanctioned Chinese tech company released a new laptop powered by an Intel AI processor chip.During the campaign, Trump promised to impose tariffs of 60% on all Chinese imports, which could affect $500bn worth of goods.Here’s what else happened on Tuesday:

      Donald Trump has announced that he will nominate Lee Zeldin to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, saying the former New York congressman and gubernatorial candidate will focus on cutting regulations. Trump, who oversaw the rollback of more than 100 environmental rules when he last was US president, said Zeldin was a “true fighter for America First policies” and that “he will ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions.”

      Trump confirmed that New York Republican congresswoman Elise Stefanik would be nominated as the US ambassador to the United Nations in his administration. “She will be an incredible ambassador to the United Nations, delivering peace through strength and America First National Security policies!”, Trump said in a statement. He also pointed to her efforts against antisemitism on college campuses amid the war on Gaza.

      Trump has reportedly selected longtime adviser Stephen Miller, an immigration hardliner, to be the deputy chief of policy in his new administration. Miller is one of Trump’s longest-serving aides, and has been a central figure in many of his policy decisions, particularly on immigration. Since leaving the White House, Miller has served as the president of America First Legal, an organisation of former Trump advisers fashioned as a conservative version of the American Civil Liberties Union.

      Oklahoma senator Markwayne Mullin is reportedly being considered for a position to lead the Department of Interior or Veterans Affairs in Trump’s administration.

      Axios reported that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s envoy, Ron Dermer, met Trump at Mar-a-Lago on Sunday, and that Dermer also met Trump’s son in law, Jared Kushner.

      Kamala Harris made her first public appearance since her concession speech at a Veterans Day ceremony. The vice-president did not speak at the event.

      Democrat Cleo Fields has won Louisiana’s congressional race in a recently redrawn second majority-Black district. That flips a once reliably Republican seat blue, according to the Associated Press.

      Juan Merchan, the judge presiding over Trump’s business fraud trial in New York that saw him convicted of 34 felonies earlier this year, will decide on Tuesday whether to overturn the verdict, Reuters reports. The case is the only one of Trump’s four criminal indictments to reach a verdict, and Trump is scheduled to be sentenced on 26 November – though now that he is headed back to the White House, it is unclear if that will happen. More