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      US climate envoy says fight against climate crisis does not end under Trump

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      The US climate envoy John Podesta said the fight “for a cleaner, safer” planet will not stop under a re-elected Donald Trump even if some progress is reversed, speaking at the Cop29 UN climate talks on Monday as they opened in Baku, Azerbaijan.“Although under Donald Trump’s leadership the US federal government placed climate-related actions on the back burner, efforts to prevent climate change remain a commitment in the US and will confidently continue,” said Podesta, who is leading the Biden administration’s delegation at the annual talks.Trump has pledged to deregulate the energy sector, allow the oil and gas industry to “drill, baby, drill”, and pull the US from the Paris climate agreement, which committed countries to taking steps to avoid the worst impacts of the crisis. Yet while Trump will try to reverse progress, “this is not the end of our fight for a cleaner, safer planet”, Podesta said.Last week’s re-election of Trump to the White House, which will see him inaugurated for a second term in January, has cast a shadow on the UN talks after the Republican defeated Kamala Harris. Harris had been expected to continue the climate policies of Joe Biden, who passed the Inflation Reduction Act, the largest down payment on the green transition seen in US history.Experts say Trump’s second term could be even more destructive, as he will be aided by an amenably conservative judiciary and armed with detailed policy blueprints such as the Project 2025 document published by the rightwing Heritage Foundation.Trump’s incoming administration is already reportedly drawing up executive orders to erase climate policies and open up protected land for ramped-up oil and gas production. “We have more liquid gold than any country in the world,” the president-elect said on Wednesday.Staff at the US Environmental Protection Agency, which was targeted the last time Trump was president, are already bracing for a mass exodus. Swaths of work done by the EPA under Biden, such as pollution rules for cars and power plants, as well as efforts to protect vulnerable communities living near industrial activity, are set to be reversed.A June analysis warned that Trump’s forthcoming rollbacks could add 4bn additional metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere by 2030 when compared with a continuation of Biden’s policies. That “would be a death sentence to our planet”, said Jamie Minden, the 21-year-old acting executive director of Zero Hour, the US-based youth-led climate non-profit, at a press conference about the election result in Baku on Monday.Trump’s looming presidency could also place a damper on other countries’ climate action plans, said Todd Stern, who was the US special envoy for climate change and the United States’ chief negotiator at the 2015 Paris climate agreement – especially China, which is currently the top global contributor to planet-warming emissions.“The two biggest players in the ring are the US and China, and China is extremely aware of that. It has just got a guarantee that the US president won’t be bringing up climate change with them for the next four years and that means something,” he said. “It will make things easier on China and that can’t help but have some impact.”Yet “the fight is bigger than one election, one political cycle in one country,” said Podesta. The UN climate conference in Baku represented a “critical opportunity to cement our progress”, he said.At Cop29, activists are pushing the Biden administration to file a bold climate plan under the Paris climate agreement – known as a nationally determined contribution – and to make big pledges to support global climate finance efforts.And the president “still has critical opportunities to cement his climate legacy” on the domestic level as well, said Allie Rosenbluth, co-manager of the climate NGO Oil Change International, including by rejecting pending permits for fossil fuel projects.At least $1tn is needed to help poor countries reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, shift to a low-carbon economy and adapt to the impacts of climate disasters. If the US fails to meaningfully contribute, other countries can also fill the climate finance gap left by the US, noted Teresa Anderson, the global climate justice lead at the climate non-profit ActionAid, at another Monday press conference.“This is a test for rich countries,” she said. “If they believe in the climate emergency then they should be willing to pay more than their fair share, not less.”The US senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a climate hawk who will arrive at Cop29 later this week, said Trump and other US Republicans were “aiming a torpedo” at climate progress, but that the pressure to slash US emissions would stay strong.“I’m heading to Baku to reassure the international community that large swaths of the US remain committed to steering the planet away from climate catastrophe, a catastrophe that is already doing massive economic harm and driving up prices for insurance, food, and other goods and services,” he wrote in an email.Tina Stege, climate envoy for the Marshall Islands, noted that the Paris agreement had 195 signatories and “will not collapse in the face of a single election result”.“The Paris agreement has survived one Trump presidency and it will survive another,” she said. 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      John Oliver on the US election: ‘Despair doesn’t help anything’

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      “It has been a rough week,” said John Oliver on Sunday evening, days after the majority of American voters elected Donald Trump to a second term as president, “which is, to put it mildly, not what I was personally hoping would happen. And honestly, in Trump’s victory speech, he couldn’t seem to believe it either.”Oliver played a clip from Trump’s characteristically rambling victory speech, in which he boasted: “We overcame obstacles that nobody thought possible, and it is now clear that we’ve achieved the most incredible political thing … Look what happened. Is this crazy?”“Yeah, it is crazy,” Oliver answered. “It’s really fucking crazy. He’s basically one sentence away from saying, ‘I mean, you guys saw what I did, right? And you still voted for this. That doesn’t make any sense.’“I know being a shambling verbal mess is part of Trump’s brand,” he added, “but it is still incredible to see an incoming president ad-lib a victory speech with the same energy as the best man who didn’t realize he had to give a toast.”Oliver then looked into the blame game entertained by those disappointed by Kamala Harris’s loss. “People are pointing the finger in all directions, from Latino voters to young men to Joe Rogan,” he said. “You can basically play your own ‘wheel of blame’ and generally make sure it lands on whoever you were mad at in the first place. And I’ll be honest, I get the appeal. It is fun to blame people. Trump was literally just elected president again on a platform of doing exactly that.”Oliver jokingly blamed the election on Katy Perry, citing her performance at Harris’s final rally on the eve of election day, where she covered Whitney Houston’s 1986 classic The Greatest Love of All.“Why would you try to cover Whitney Houston?!” he exclaimed, referring to the rendition as a “drunk bachelorette karaoke night performance”.Others have attributed Trump’s victory to inflation and frustration with the cost of living, even as macro indicators point to a strong economy. “It is not news that Trump’s overt white supremacy and misogyny appeal to many of his voters,” said Oliver. “It’s also not news that many like to hide that by claiming all they’re really worried about is the economy. But clearly for others, there is a willful denial going on about him. Because Trump lies so constantly, people have a sense that you can pick and choose what things he actually believes and create a version of him that suits you. And that can be the case even when his intentions are very clear.”The host then looked ahead to Trump’s second term, starting with a chart of potential Trump administration appointees that “looks like a choose your fighter screen where the only thing they’re fighting is the arc of the moral universe. It looks like an advent calendar where every circle opens up to a tiny piece of literal shit. It looks like a game board for Guess Who? Oops, all assholes.“If you are watching this right now and thinking, ‘You know what, I’m not actually ready for this either,’ I totally get it,” he said. “It is understandable not to want yet another guy in a suit doom-squawking at you. So if you are too angry, depressed or worried to watch the rest of this show, no problem. I have been in each of those places this week, and they are all a correct reaction because, look, we did a show like this after the election in 2016 when no one expected Trump to win.“This time, though, his winning felt like a real possibility all year long, lots of people mobilized to stop it, but it happened anyway, which feels somehow worse,” he continued.Trump will be sworn back into office on 20 January, and “that is very depressing”, said Oliver. “So what do the rest of us do next? Well, for the next few days, I’d say whatever you want. I am not gonna judge you for how you get through the next week.“There is no right reaction right now,” he added. “Lots of us are grieving and grief has stages. We take different amounts of time for different people. The stage I’m currently locked in is anger. I am mad for trans people who’ve been threatened. I’m disgusted at the prospect of mass deportation. I’m furious at Biden for not dropping out earlier, and that the egos and inaction of two men older than credit cards themselves have led us to this point. I’m mad that women have to hear ‘your body, my choice’ from rightwing dipshits.“I’m mad that Elon Musk is apparently sitting in on meetings with the president of Ukraine,” he continued. “I’m mad about the myriad of damage Trump will do that cannot easily be undone, like setting back efforts to fight climate change and appointing more supreme court justices. And I’m mad at the prospect of four more years of people saying, ‘So is your job like so much easier with Trump as president?’ No, it is not! No, it fucking isn’t! Fuck you so much!“So whether you’re angry right now, or despairing, or Googling ‘new country no fascists how move’, do what you’ve gotta do. But try not to completely obliterate yourself in despair,” he concluded. “Despair doesn’t help anything. If anything, it makes things worse.” Oliver did not encourage false hope, but instead counting the small victories to avoid burning out – such as Delaware’s election of the first openly trans member to the US House, or the rollback of abortion bans in several states and indicators that “Democratic policies are still popular even in a year that their candidate wasn’t”.“You might well be exhausted, confused, scared and running on fucking fumes right now,” he added. “Which is fucking understandable, but you might be surprised just how far you can still get even on fumes.” More

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      Trump didn’t just win. He expanded his voter base | John Zogby

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      Donald Trump defied the polls and pundits and received both a majority of the popular vote and of the electoral college. His margin of 3.4 percentage points (thus far) was well beyond anything that anyone projected and it is the first time a Republican candidate for president received a majority of popular votes since 2004. It is probably safe to say that even his own pollsters did not see this tornado coming, otherwise the president-elect’s team would not have issued statements earlier in the day attacking voting irregularities and election tampering. Certainly not if you are expecting to win.Published polls and the television network-sponsored exit polls both revealed some new truths that help explain what really happened and must be studied by winners and losers, academics and both political strategists and junkies.For starters, Trump has built on his coalition of angry and disaffected voters. The Maga movement (“Make America great again”) was once the exclusive club of angry white voters, conservatives who wanted to win, people filled with status anxiety – the fear of losing their middle-class status – and folks deeply concerned about the loss of traditional values like hard work, the nuclear family, frequent church attendance, marriage of only men and women, and heterosexuality. They also feared that the day had arrived when America lost its standing in the world. To be sure, the doors to this movement were not-so-subtly opened to white nationalists and supremacists. Their standard bearer was seen only as an aberration, and protest against Hillary Clinton, who represented government paternalism and patronage and a candidate not to be trusted.But 2024 exit polling has clearly shown that Maga has expanded beyond its original base. Trump outperformed his previous runs by substantial numbers among men and women, particularly young men; Black people, Latinos, Asian/Pacific Islanders; and suburban voters. He grew his support among voters in every state.There are lessons to be learned here. Democrats have targeted demographic groups by using one-dimensional definitions and messages. This view suggests that Black people are mainly concerned about civil rights. Latinos are obsessed about immigration and women are defined by second-class status and reproductive rights. Following the successful playbook of Barack Obama in 2008, Democrats bought into the idea of a coalition of young voters, particularly young women, along with people of color and suburbanites that would only produce a winning formula for the ages. Two authors, John Judis and Ruy Teixeira even wrote the manual for the party The Emerging Democratic Majority, in which they argue that these groups were growing in numbers and thus constituted the future. Both authors have since repudiated their own argument because, while it worked for Obama again in 2012, it failed miserably in most off-year elections and fell short in the 2016 Trump/Clinton election when key elements of the coalition chose to not vote.The election of 2024 put the final nail in the coffin of that theory. While there was a 21-point gender gap with men overwhelmingly choosing Trump and women supporting Kamala Harris, Trump won a majority of men and women in the suburbs. He received 50% of the vote among those earning less than $100,000 last year, compared with 46% voting Harris. He also won 21% of Black men and 55% of Latino men and 66% of voters with less than a college degree. Even though the president-elect has made several controversial statements about combat veterans, he won the vote of veterans by 26 points (65% for him, 34% for Harris).The vice-president managed to win only 17% of those who identify as born-again/evangelical Christians, even though every Democratic candidate since Barack Obama had won at least 30% of this group.Pre-election polls showed the race too close to call. Our John Zogby Strategies poll showed a 3.7 -point margin for Harris as of Sunday with minor candidates in the mix. Our simple head-to-head brought Harris’s “lead” down to 2.4 points. We all caught the anxiety over the economy, the threat to American democracy, the loss of reproductive rights, immigration and the security of the southern border, and crime. We also showed a majority with a negative view of Trump.But he still won – and convincingly. At a moment when the sitting president has a 40% approval rating and about seven in 10 voters feel that things in the US are headed in the wrong direction, voters wanted change. Now Trump will have to steer the ship of state during turbulent times. He will have to govern. That is the hard part.

      John Zogby is senior partner at the polling firm of John Zogby Strategies and is author of Beyond the Horse Race: How to Read the Polls and Why We Should (Rowman & Littlefield) More

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      Not changing course on Gaza was a colossal mistake by Kamala Harris | Moustafa Bayoumi

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      Could Kamala Harris have won the election if she had promised to change course in Gaza? It’s impossible to know, of course, but there’s reason to think so. Instead, Harris hewed far too closely to Biden’s position, alienating large numbers of voters along the way. The result? We can expect the catastrophe for the Palestinian people to continue, while we learn to live with a much more dangerous Donald Trump, a man whose far-right agenda threatens many of us in and out of the United States.What seems to have doomed Harris most was not so much traditional Democrats casting votes for the Republican Trump, though there was some of that. In fact, party loyalty, at around 95% for both parties, was basically the same as in 2020. Rather, Harris’s shortcomings point to the rank-and-file of the Democratic party not coming out to vote and to more first-time voters casting Republican ballots. We don’t have the final voter tally yet, but so far Harris has amassed just over 68m votes, compared with Trump’s 72m. Biden, by contrast, earned over 81m votes in 2020. By the time the final numbers are in, it’s likely that Trump will have won more than the 74m votes he had in 2020, and Harris will have been the first Democrat to lose the popular vote in 20 years.Some of those lost votes surely must be attributable to Harris’s weak position on Palestine. A significant majority of young people sympathize with Palestinian rights, according to the Pew Research Center, and young people are also highly critical of Biden’s policies on Palestine. Meanwhile, reporting from around the nation indicates that voter turnout among young people in this election was low. The Chicago board of elections noted that 53% of registered voters between the ages of 18 and 24 cast a ballot, well below the city’s average turnout of 58%. And compared with the 2020 election, Trump doubled his support from first-time voters there.In Dearborn, Michigan, where 55% of the population is of Middle Eastern descent, Trump scored a victory over Harris, an upset considering Biden won Dearborn with almost 70% of the vote in 2020. And while Black voters continued to overwhelmingly support Harris, their numbers also dropped, reflecting a lack of excitement for the vice-president. Christopher Shell, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Foreign Policy magazine that “it’s hard to ignore the impact of US war-making under the Biden-Harris administration and the administration’s inconsistent stance on issues like the Israel-Palestine conflict, which likely deflated enthusiasm for Harris among the influential Black voting bloc”.If you’re wondering what such inconsistencies regarding Gaza could be, you can watch a report by CNN that aired on 1 November, which showed how the Harris campaign aired two completely different ads about their position. One ad, aimed at Arab American voters in Michigan, shows Harris speaking from a podium. “What has happened in Gaza over the past nine months is devastating,” she says. “We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering, and I will not be silent.” Meanwhile, in another ad, this time aimed at Jewish voters in Pennsylvania, she says: “Let me be clear. I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself, and I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself, because the people of Israel must never again face the horror that a terrorist organization called Hamas caused on October 7.”It gets worse. In the Pennsylvania ad, the campaign also spliced together two parts of a Harris speech, which enabled them to cut out the part where Harris talks about ending the suffering in Gaza so that “the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination”. CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski sums this all up understatedly. “Here you have two entirely different constituencies,” he says, “and they are getting two entirely different messages.”I realize I sound like I’m Monday-morning quarterbacking, but many thousands of people – myself included – had been warning the Democrats for months that they had to take a stand against the wholesale slaughter of innocent people if they wanted to earn our trust, let alone earn our vote. Instead, not only did the Harris campaign refuse to let a Palestinian American on stage during their national convention in August and not only did they remove an Arab Muslim Democrat from a rally in late October, but they also decided in their wisdom to trot out two different messages to two different communities, thinking no one would notice. It seems they believed that Democrats would not vote for Trump in any large number, but how did they not realize that if you are repeatedly ignored, insulted and slighted by your party, then you just might not come out to vote.Obviously, Gaza was not the only issue in this campaign, and voters had multiple reasons for their choices, including the economy and concerns over asylum policies, among others. But conventional wisdom already seems to be lining up to say that Gaza played no discernible role in Harris’s defeat, pointing out that the margins in Trump’s victories in swing states such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Georgia appear to be greater than any measurable voter discontent over a largely US-funded genocide, the term, incidentally, that prominent experts increasingly use to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza.But much of that post-election analysis is based on exit polling, and exit polling, as far as I know, does not aim to capture why people did not come out to vote in the first place. Why Democratic voters didn’t show up is the crucial question that must be posed. And the answer, I suspect, is abundantly clear. Not changing course on Gaza was a colossal mistake on the part of the Harris campaign, a fatal error certainly for Palestinians and quite likely, as we now see, for Americans, too.

      Moustafa Bayoumi is a Guardian US columnist More

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      First came the bots, then came the bosses – we’re entering Musk and Zuck’s new era of disinformation | Joan Donovan

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      I’m a researcher of media manipulation, and watching the 2024 US election returns was like seeing the Titanic sink.Every day leading up to 5 November, there were more and more outrageous claims being made in an attempt across social media to undermine election integrity: conspiracy theories focused on a tidal wave of immigrants plotting to undermine the right wing, allegations that there were millions of excess ballots circulating in California, and rumors that the voting machines were already corrupted by malicious algorithms.All of the disinformation about corrupt vote counts turned out not to be necessary, as Donald Trump won the election decisively. But the election proved that disinformation is no longer the provenance of anonymous accounts amplified by bots to mimic human engagement, like it was in 2016. In 2024, lies travel further and faster across social media, which is now a battleground for narrative dominance. And now, the owners of the platforms circulating the most incendiary lies have direct access to the Oval Office.We talk a lot about social media “platforms”. The word “platform” is interesting as it means both a stated political position and a technological communication system. Over the past decade, we have watched social media platforms warp public opinion by deciding what is seen and when users see it, as algorithms double as newsfeed and timeline editors. When tech CEOs encode their political beliefs into the design of platforms, it’s a form of technofascism, where technology is used for political suppression of speech and to repress the organization of resistance to the state or capitalism.Content moderation at these platforms now reflects the principles of the CEO and what that person believes is in the public’s interest. The political opinions of tech’s overlords, like Musk and Zuckerberg, are now directly embedded in their algorithms.For example, Meta has limited the circulation of critical discussions about political power, reportedly even downranking posts that use the word “vote” on Instagram. Meta’s Twitter clone, Threads, suspended journalists for reporting on Trump’s former chief of staff describing Trump’s admiration of Hitler. Threads built in a politics filter that is turned on by default.View image in fullscreenImplementing these filtering mechanisms illustrates a sharp difference from Meta’s embrace of politicians who got personalized white-glove service in 2016 as Facebook embedded employees directly in political campaigns, who advised on branding and reaching new audiences. It’s also a striking reversal of Zuckerberg’s free speech position in 2019. Zuckerberg gave a presentation at Georgetown University claiming that he was inspired to create Facebook because he wanted to give students a voice during the Iraq war. This historical revisionism was quickly skewered in the media. (Facebook’s predecessor allowed users to rate the appearance of Harvard female freshmen. Misogyny was the core of its design.) Nevertheless, his false origin story encapsulated a vision of how Zuckerberg once believed society and politics should be organized, where political discussion was his guiding reason to bring people into community.However, he now appears to have abandoned this position in favor of disincentivizing political discussion altogether. Recently, Zuckerberg wrote to the Republican Jim Jordan saying he regretted his content moderation decisions during the pandemic because he acted under pressure from the Biden administration. The letter itself was an obvious attempt to curry favor as Trump rose as the Republican presidential candidate. Zuckerberg has reason to fear Trump, who has mentioned wanting to arrest Zuckerberg for deplatforming him on Meta products after the January 6 Capitol riot.X seems to have embraced the disinformation chaos and fully fused Trump’s campaign into the design of X’s content strategies. Outrageous assertions circle the drain on X, including false claims such as that immigrants are eating pets in Ohio, Kamala Harris’s Jamaican grandmother was white, and that immigrants are siphoning aid meant for Fema. It’s also worth noting that Musk is the biggest purveyor of anti-immigrant conspiracy theories on X. The hiss and crackle of disinformation is as ambient as it is unsettling.There are no clearer signs of Musk’s willingness to use platform power than his relentless amplification of his own account as well as Trump’s Twitter account on X’s “For You” algorithm. Moreover, Musk bemoaned the link suppression by Twitter in 2020 over Hunter Biden’s laptop while then hypocritically working with the Trump campaign in 2024 to ban accounts and links to leaked documents emanating from the Trump campaign that painted JD Vance in a negative light.Musk understands that he will personally benefit from being close to power. He supported Trump with a controversial political action committee that gave away cash to those who signed his online petition. Musk also paid millions for canvassers and spent many evenings in Pennsylvania stumping for Trump. With Trump’s win, he will need to make good on his promise of placing Musk in a position on the not-yet-created “Department of Government Efficiency” (Doge – which is also the name of Musk’s favorite cryptocurrency). While it sure seems like a joke taken too far, Musk has said he plans to cut $2tn from the national budget, which will wreak havoc on the economy and could be devastating when coupled with the mass deportation of 10 million people.In short, what we learn from the content strategies of X and Meta is simple: the design of platforms is now inextricable from the politics of the owner.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThis wasn’t inevitable. In 2016, there was a public reckoning that social media had been weaponized by foreign adversaries and domestic actors to spread disinformation on a number of wedge issues to millions of unsuspecting users. Hundreds of studies were conducted in the intervening years, by internal corporate researchers and independent academics, showing that platforms amplify and expose audiences to conspiracy theories and fake news, which can lead to networked incitement and political violence.By 2020, disinformation had become its own industry and the need for anonymity lessened as rightwing media makers directly impugned election results, culminating in January 6. That led to an unprecedented decision by social media companies to ban Trump, who was still the sitting president, and a number of other high-profile rightwing pundits, thus illustrating just how powerful social media platforms had become as political actors.In reaction to this unprecedented move to curb disinformation, the richest man in the world, Musk, bought Twitter, laid off much of the staff, and sent internal company communications to journalists and politicians in 2022. Major investigations of university researchers and government agencies ensued, naming and shaming those who engaged with Twitter’s former leadership and made appeals for the companies to enforce its own terms of service during the 2020 election.Since then, these CEOs have ossified their political beliefs in the design of algorithms and by extension dictated political discourse for the rest of us.Whether it’s Musk’s strategy of overloading users with posts from himself and Trump, or Zuckerberg’s silencing of political discussion, it’s citizens who suffer from such chilling of speech. Of course, there is no way to know decisively how disinformation affected individual voters, but a recent Ipsos poll shows Trump voters believed disinformation on a number of wedge issues, claiming that immigration, crime, and the economy are all worse than data indicates. For now, let this knowledge be the canary warning of technofascism, where the US is not only ruled by elected politicians, but also by technological authoritarians who control speech on a global scale.If we are to disarm disinformers, we need a whole of society approach that values real Talk (Timely, Accurate Local Knowledge) and community safety. This might look like states passing legislation to fund local journalism in the public interest, because local news can bridge divides between neighbors and bring some accountability to the government. It will require our institutions, such as medicine, journalism, and academia, to fight for truth and justice, even in the face of anticipated retaliation. But most of all, it’s going to require that you and I do something quickly to protect those already in the crosshairs of Trump’s new world order, by donating to or joining community organizations tackling issues such as women’s rights and immigration. Even subscribing to a local news outlet is a profound political act these days. Let that sink in.Joan Donovan is the founder of the Critical Internet Studies Institute and assistant professor of journalism at Boston University More

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      Black women on what Harris’s loss says about the US: ‘Voters failed to show up for her’

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      In the hours after Joe Biden’s decision to end his re-election bid and endorse Kamala Harris as the democratic nominee for president, 40,000 Black women – leaders in politics, business and entertainment – met on a Zoom call to rally around the vice-president.“We went from that call to organizing our house, our block, our church, our sorority, and our unions,” said Glynda C Carr, president and co-founder of Higher Heights, an organization that works to help Black women get elected to political office. “That is what we did for the 107 days that she ran for office. Black women used our organizing power around a woman that we knew was qualified, that had a lived experience.”View image in fullscreenFor many, Harris seemed to be the one woman to break the glass ceiling of reaching the highest office in the US. Harris, a graduate of Howard University, a historically Black college in Washington DC and a member of the country’s oldest Black sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Inc (AKA), who had become the first Black female vice-president after spending a career as a prosecutor, California’s attorney general and senator, had reached a point where voters would welcome a woman – many deemed to be beyond qualified – versus Donald Trump, an embattled former president then awaiting sentencing on more than three dozen felony convictions.“Here is a woman that has had access to be able to build upon legacies and blueprints,” Carr said. Harris’s candidacy was so exciting because “she literally embodies Black excellence for Black women.”Harris’s 107-day campaign to become president began in a year of recognizing the anniversaries of pivotal advancements for Black people during the Jim Crow era and Civil Rights movement – 70 years after Thurgood Marshall, Constance Baker Motley and the NAACP dismantle school segregation; 60 years after Fannie Lou Hamer spoke at the 1964 Democratic national convention; and 52 years since Shirley Chisholm became the first woman and first Black to run for president.“It gave so much hope,” said Christian F Nunes, president of the National Organization for Women and part of generation X, who never thought she’d see a Black president – let alone a Black woman president. “It was like the opportunity and manifestation of our ancestors’ wildest dreams. That’s what I thought to myself like, if she is elected, this is what our ancestors have dreamt about, and women, and Black women have dreamt about our entire lives.”It was that hope that fueled a wide-range of support from Democratic leadership, including former president Jimmy Carter who cast his ballot for Harris weeks after turning 100. Republicans such as former congresswoman Liz Cheney and her father, Dick Cheney, who served as vice-president in the George W Bush administration. Bipartisan support, an aggressive and energized campaign with a huge funding arm from several groups supporting Harris wasn’t enough to overcome the second election of Trump, who saw growth in his voting base among Black and Latino voters. Trump garnered more than 75m votes as of Sunday evening, and won the popular vote for the first since he began his ascension to the White House.“Harris’s candidacy was working for unity and democracy and protecting freedom,” Nunes, 46, said. “Then we had another candidate who basically ran on a campaign to take away freedoms. I felt that this loss was not a reflection of her ability to lead. I felt like it was a reflection of voters who said that they would show up for her, but failed to show up for her. And also, people’s inability to trust women and stand up for women – particularly, especially a Black woman. And I feel like this continuously resonates and shows up in so many spaces and I think that’s the part that was hurtful.”View image in fullscreenTrump’s victory came from voters who were so put off by the US’s trajectory that they welcomed his brash and disruptive approach. About three in 10 voters said they wanted total upheaval in how the country is run, according to AP VoteCast, a sweeping survey of more than 120,000 voters nationwide. Even if they weren’t looking for something that dramatic, more than half of voters overall said they wanted to see substantial change.Both nationwide and in key battleground states, Trump won over voters who were alarmed about the economy and prioritized more aggressive enforcement of immigration laws. Those issues largely overshadowed many voters’ focus on the future of democracy and abortion protections – key priorities for Harris’s voters, but not enough to turn the election in her favor.Rarely has ethnicity, race or gender been mentioned in many after-election interviews, as reasons for not supporting Harris’s bid for president or why they preferred Trump, but some Harris supporters believe they were an underlying reason many will not admit to.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionShavon Arline-Bradley, president and CEO of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) said Harris’s campaign of inclusion and strong support from the Democrats’ most loyal voting block – Black women – could not withstand “the wall of white nationalism and racism and classism and sexism and misogyny”.“It could not withstand the wall of an electorate that used class, race and gender to block the opportunity for an all-inclusive society that our country is so-called built on,” she said. “This idea of womanhood in leadership still becomes unfathomable for many.”New Orleans resident Laureé Akinola-Massaquoi is the mother of a two -year-old daughter, and said that Harris being the Democratic nominee for president, meant a more equal, progressive future for all of America, not just for Black people, but for everybody.But when Akinola-Massaquoi, 36, woke up on 6 November and saw that Trump had won the election, she was “disgusted, disappointed, just annoyed, really annoyed”.“Nowhere else can other people do the things he does or say the things he does, or have the record he has and become president of the United States. I just don’t even know how he even got this far,” she said. More

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      What kind of host will Donald Trump be for the World Cup and Olympics?

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      Very soon after the outcome of the US presidential election was clear, Fifa’s president issued an old photograph of himself shaking hands with a beaming, football-clasping, Donald Trump.“Congratulations Mr President! We will have a great Fifa World Cup and a great Fifa Club World Cup in the United States of America!” Gianni Infantino wrote on social media. It was the latest example of Infantino’s oleaginous flattery of Trump, whom in 2018 Infantino called “part of the Fifa team”. And vice versa, it seems.In January 2020, during Trump’s first impeachment trial, Infantino introduced him at a dinner for CEOs in Davos and said Trump had the same “fibre” as world-class footballers. “He is a competitor,” Infantino said. “He says actually what many think, but more importantly, he does, then, what he says.” Trump called Infantino “my great friend”.The US will be the centre of the sporting world during Trump’s second term as hosts of the 2025 Club World Cup, the 2026 men’s World Cup and the 2028 Olympic Games. The expanded 48-team tournament in 2026 is a joint effort with Mexico and Canada but most matches will take place in the US. “Football Unites The World!” Infantino added in his victory message to Trump.The next American president’s power to set tone and policy may be problematic, though, given his status as a confrontational figurehead who uses sports as a tool for sowing division and scoring points against rivals, and as a politician whose nativist conservative beliefs run contrary to the progressive internationalist values espoused by many leagues and governing bodies.The competitions are money-making operations for Fifa and the International Olympic Committee and public relations opportunities for the hosts. “Every time countries host the Olympics and the World Cup they’re trying to get their message out to the world, trying to use it as an opportunity to show off. That’s kind of what hosting these mega-events are about,” says Adrien Bouchet, director of The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport. “His idea of what the United States is these days – it’ll be interesting to see what it entails.”Trump is a leader with authoritarian instincts who swept to power with a dark and violent vision of “a nation that is dying”, calling the US “like a garbage can for the rest of the world to dump the people that they don’t want”. His political platform could spark tension between the culturally open and cosmopolitan cities that will stage events and a national government stoking insularity and intolerance.If his anti-democracy aspirations are realised, the American showpieces are at risk of becoming the latest in a lengthening line of mega-events in illiberal countries. Since 2008, the Olympics have been held in Russia and twice in China; there have also been World Cups in Russia and Qatar, with tournaments in Morocco and Saudi Arabia on the horizon.The 2026 World Cup is the first “to incorporate human rights in its bidding process, which requires the US government to adhere to the highest human rights standards,” says Andrea Florence, director of the Sport & Rights Alliance, a coalition of advocacy groups. “Trump’s previous disregard to international human rights obligations could have far-reaching consequences, not only jeopardising protections in the US but potentially setting a troubling precedent for future global sporting events.“Trump’s track record of exploiting workers and weaponising trans women and girls in sport, potential plans for mass deportation of immigrants and turning military forces against citizens, and general racist, misogynistic and transphobic rhetoric are areas of particular concern – all of which can and will exacerbate human rights violations at mega sporting events.”Like Trump, Infantino spends much of his time in Florida: Fifa’s legal and ethics divisions are newly based in Miami. Fifa promises it is “committed to respecting all internationally recognised human rights and shall strive to promote the protection of these rights.”But rights groups have already sounded the alarm over Fifa’s handling of Saudi Arabia’s uncontested bid. “Fifa’s failure to implement its own human rights policies in relation to Saudi Arabia’s bid to host the 2034 World Cup make it all the more important that national, state and local officials in the US, Canada and Mexico move forward to implement the 2026 human rights framework,” said Minky Worden, director of global initiatives at Human Rights Watch.With stadiums already built, the 2026 World Cup presents less risk to construction workers than Qatar 2022, Saudi Arabia or the 2030 edition that will largely be held in Morocco, Portugal and Spain. But Trump’s agenda contradicts some of the pledges outlined in Fifa’s 2026 Human Rights Framework, which says the organisation aims to make the World Cup “one of the most diverse and inclusive celebrations of all time”.The framework highlights a commitment to support potentially at-risk groups, including women, ethnic minorities, disabled people, immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers, migrant workers, LGBTQ+ people and journalists. These are all sections of society that Trump has attacked, whether through rhetoric, policy, or both.Many American sports bodies, including all the major leagues and the US Soccer Federation, have incorporated Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives into their corporate cultures and hiring practices in an attempt to boost support for, and representation of, minority groups.View image in fullscreenThese types of initiatives are certain to be targets for the Trump administration, and perhaps the conservative-dominated US supreme court. This year a right-wing legal group founded by Stephen Miller, an architect of Trump’s anti-immigration policies, filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the NFL arguing that its Rooney Rule, which obliges teams to interview minority candidates for senior posts, is illegal.The Olympics and World Cup were awarded to the US during Trump’s first term and he clearly feels a sense of ownership: as the Paris Games closed, Trump credited himself with securing the Olympics. Though Trump is a friend of Fifa, relations are considerably cooler between the president-elect and the IOC, which has not commented on his victory.After some Christians criticised segments of the Paris Olympics opening ceremony as blasphemous, Trump labelled the show “a disgrace” and promised to prevent any sacrilegious content appearing in 2028.Friction between Democrat-run cities and Republican state and national leaders is a feature of American politics and it is not hard to imagine a war of words breaking out between LA 2028 organisers and the White House given the $900m in federal infrastructure funds committed ahead of the Games and since California is a liberal state Trump has routinely assailed as a hellscape. In 2020, Karen Bass, now the mayor of Los Angeles, called Trump a racist who “essentially [gives] license to racists”.Environmental goals are now routine for sporting events – LA wants to be “no car” – but it is hard to imagine a Republican administration will push organisers to keep their promises given that Trump has called climate change “a hoax” and intends to scupper clean energy projects.Trump is also expected to roll back federal protections for gay and transgender people. He targeted two female boxing Olympic gold medallists in his election campaign, claiming they are men as a justification for his plan to revoke anti-discrimination measures issued by the Biden administration. “We will of course keep men out of women’s sports,” he said – a stance that seems sure to put him at loggerheads with the IOC and other governing bodies who set gender eligibility criteria.Hurling sports deeper into the culture wars also brings risks for sponsors. In September the IOC lost one of its key supporters, Toyota, with the automaker’s chairman complaining that the Games are “increasingly political”.But Trump has sought to blur the lines between sport and politics, looking for confrontations with the NFL, NBA and the US women’s soccer team over national anthem protests against civil rights abuses. Using sports as a patriotic purity test, he has termed players with opposing political stances as un-American and said the US team were eliminated from the 2023 Women’s World Cup because players were too woke and “openly hostile to America”.He can again be expected to strain the structural tensions in American professional leagues, exploiting and widening schisms between owners, players and fans. A Guardian analysis found that nearly 95% of total political contributions to federal elections since 2020 from owners of major-league North American sports teams went to Republican causes. But many players are Democrats. Basketball’s biggest star, LeBron James, endorsed Kamala Harris, while the NBA commissioner, Adam Silver, donated to the Harris campaign.“He uses sports to divide people because so many people pay attention to sports,” Bouchet says. “There’s always going to be social tensions as it relates to politics. Unfortunately I think the next four years are probably going to be a rocky road.”Trump has cultivated friendships with sports personalities and spent election night in the company of the NHL legend Wayne Gretzky, Dana White, CEO of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, and the 2024 US Open golf champion Bryson DeChambeau. As well as using sports to burnish his celebrity status and seek political advantage, the president-elect has a direct financial stake through his golf courses, three of which hosted tournaments last year on the Saudi-financed LIV Golf tour, with another stop in 2024.Rory McIlroy expressed optimism this month that Trump can act as a peace broker between LIV and the PGA Tour. “Trump has a great relationship with Saudi Arabia. He’s got a great relationship with golf. He’s a lover of golf. So, maybe. Who knows?” McIlroy said. If Trump were to pressure Ukraine into a ceasefire in the war with Russia, Vladimir Putin may see an opening, perhaps with Trump’s help, to push for Russia’s reintegration into Fifa, Uefa and Olympic competitions.He may be less conciliatory towards Iran, who are likely to qualify for 2026: the country was allegedly behind a plot to kill him. Stadiums should be packed in a diverse nation of more than 335 million people. But Trump has vowed to reinstate and expand his first-term “Muslim travel ban”, which affected countries including Iran and Nigeria.Citizens of only 42 countries are allowed visa-free entry to the US and in some places it may already be too late for foreign fans to apply for a tourist visa to attend the finals. Last week the wait for an appointment in Bogota was 710 days; in Istanbul it was 692 days. Given Trump’s intention to devote resources to mass deportations and curtailing legal immigration, reducing Biden-era backlogs for visitors is unlikely to be a priority.Even if restrictions are temporarily eased for the tournaments, upheaval at the border, combined with an abrasive and isolationist foreign policy and economic stresses from Trump’s proposed trade tariffs, may strain relations with allies, dissuade visitors and tarnish the US’s image abroad; hardly conducive to a festive atmosphere for international sports’ biggest parties. More

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      US presidential election updates: Trump demands Senate streamline his cabinet picks as recruitment begins

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      President-elect Donald Trump has demanded the incoming Republican leader in the Senate streamline the temporary approval of his cabinet appointees, as his team begins assembling the incoming White House team.Three Republicans are vying to replace incumbent majority leader Mitch McConnell ahead of a party vote on Wednesday. Senator Rick Scott of Florida has earned endorsements from Trump’s Maga camp, including from Robert F Kennedy Jr, Elon Musk and Marco Rubio – each of whom has been speculated to be among Trump’s top team.“Any Republican Senator seeking the coveted LEADERSHIP position in the United States Senate must agree to Recess Appointments,” Trump posted on social media, referring to a controversial measure that would put his cabinet picks in office while temporarily sidestepping a lengthy Senate confirmation process.

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      The president-elect also announced he was bringing back hardline immigration official Tom Homan to oversee the country’s borders and deportation efforts in the incoming administration, labelling Homan “the border czar”. Trump is meeting with potential candidates to serve in his administration and has charged his longtime friend Howard Lutnick with recruiting officials who will deliver, rather than dilute, his agenda.Here’s what else happened on Sunday:US presidential election news and updates

      Trump spoke with Vladimir Putin on Thursday and advised him not to escalate the war in Ukraine, reminding him of “Washington’s sizeable military presence in Europe”, the Washington Post reported on Sunday. The US president-elect expressed interest in follow-up conversations on “the resolution of Ukraine’s war soon”, the Post reported. Trump also spoke with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Sunday evening, agreeing to work together towards peace in Europe.

      Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he has had “good and very important conversations” with Trump, speaking three times since Tuesday’s election, according to Reuters. “We see eye to eye on the Iranian threat in all its components, and the danger posed by it,” Netanyahu said. In the US, the anti-war Uncommitted movement plans to continue its activism and has blamed Trump’s win on Democrats’ handling of conflict in the Middle East.

      Trump was declared the winner in Arizona, completing the Republicans’ clean sweep of the so-called swing states and rubbing salt in Democrats’ wounds as it was announced that the president-elect is scheduled to meet with Joe Biden at the White House on Wednesday to discuss the presidential handover.

      Republicans on Sunday appeared close to clinching control of the US House of Representatives, after Republican Eli Crane won reelection to a US House seat representing Arizona’s second congressional district late on Saturday.

      Bitcoin soared to a new record high, passing $80,000 for the first time in its history shortly after 7pm ET, according to Agence France-Presse. The cryptocurrency has kept climbing since Trump’s victory.

      Trump’s talk of revoking broadcast licenses and jailing journalists could undermine press freedom, advocates have warned. The president-elect’s campaign was marked by hostile rhetoric towards journalists and calls for punishing television networks and prosecuting journalists and their sources.

      Some companies have been moving factories from China to Southeast Asia, anticipating Trump could slap high tariffs on Beijing when he returns to the White House, industrial park developers in the region say.

      Bernie Sanders said he opposes any move to urge the senior liberal justice on the US supreme court to step down for a younger liberal replacement before Biden’s term ends. Sonia Sotomayor, 70, is known to suffer from health issues, and some Democrats fear Trump could have the opportunity to nominate a new justice and further shore up the top court’s conservative bent.

      Sanders also defended his comments that Democrats abandoned working-class voters, after Nancy Pelosi slammed Sanders for his statement, telling the New York Times, “I don’t respect him [for] saying that that”. The party is grappling with the implications of its electoral defeat and faces a likely brutal civil war over the best way forward.
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