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      How California has been ‘Trump-proofing’ itself against federal reprisal

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      California prided itself on its resistance to Donald Trump during his first term as president and will hardly have to scramble to assume the same role a second time around.Indeed, as a bastion of Democratic party strength in a country moving sharply to the right, it has been preparing for this moment for a long time.“California will continue to be at the forefront of progress, the fulcrum of democracy, the champion of innovation, and the protector of our rights and freedoms,” Adam Schiff, the state’s newly elected senator and a frequent target of Trump’s wrath, promised supporters on election night.On Thursday, Gavin Newsom announced a special session of the California legislature to ensure the attorney general’s office and other state agencies have the funding they need. “We won’t sit idle,” the governor said. “California has faced this challenge before, and we know how to respond.”Even with Trump out of power since 2021, California has been setting up guardrails to protect its resident’s rights under an adversarial federal government. The state has enshrined abortion rights in its constitution, passed a ballot initiative explicitly defending the right of same-sex couples to marry and pushed for tougher gun laws that still adhere to the supreme court’s narrow interpretation of the right to bear arms.It has even considered establishing state funding to meet the cost of wildfires, earthquakes and other natural disasters in case the Trump administration decides to withhold emergency funds from states it deems to be politically hostile, as it sometimes did during its 2017-21 term.View image in fullscreen“We’ve been Trump-proofing the place,” said Elizabeth Ashford, a political consultant who has worked for governors on both sides of the aisle and was Kamala Harris’s chief of staff when she was California’s attorney general. “The work … has been to put measures in place that can withstand shifts in Washington and on the supreme court. These projects have been going on for years.”Asked how ready she thought California was for the new administration, Ashford said: “On a scale from one to 100, we’re starting at about 90.”California is both the most populous US state and its most powerful economy, making it an unusual counterweight to the power of the federal government. It has, for example, negotiated directly with car manufacturers over tailpipe emission standards, thus circumventing the avowed desire of Trump’s allies to end a long-established rule that allows the state to set its own standards.Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

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      Where it cannot work around the federal government, it can seek to challenge any hint of government overreach in the courts, as it did more than 130 times during the first Trump administration. Rob Bonta, the state attorney general, told the policy news outlet CalMatters last week that his team had prepared briefs and tested arguments on a range of issues – everything from limits on abortion medication to gun laws and upholding the civil rights of transgender young people.“The best way to protect California, its values, the rights of our people, is to be prepared,” Bonta told CalMatters. “Unfortunately, it’s a long list.”In a statement on Wednesday, Bonta said California will “continue to move forward driven by our values and the ongoing pursuit of progress”. He added: “I’ll use the full force of the law and the full authority of my office to ensure it.”It is unlikely to take long for California and the new administration to butt heads. Newsom has a long record as a Trump antagonist and spent much of the election campaign traveling the country to promote Democratic candidates – all of which makes him a likely lightning rod for Trump’s ire.View image in fullscreenTrump has called Newsom “one of the worst governors in the country” and nicknamed him “New-scum”. Their rivalry is also personal, since Newsom’s ex-wife, Kimberly Guilfoyle, is engaged to Donald Trump Jr.Trump’s former staffers have made little secret of their wish to disrupt the Democratic party’s stranglehold over California politics and have spelled out their intentions in documents like the Project 2025 blueprint that became a lightning rod during the election campaign. Despite Trump’s attempts to distance himself from it, California officials have studied Project 2025 carefully and are assuming it will form the policy backbone of the new administration. One California congressman, Jared Huffman, has described it as a “dystopian nightmare”.There are several ways in which the state can try to disrupt that nightmare. During Trump’s first presidency, for example, state agencies including the California highway patrol refused to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency tasked with aggressive round-ups of immigrants without papers. Police in so-called “sanctuary cities” were similarly protective of their immigrant populations.For all the preparation, though, state officials fear that the new Trump administration will be more organized and more radical than the old one, and that it will have more of a political mandate since a groundswell of California voters – many more than in 2020 or in 2016 – have indicated they are sympathetic to parts of the Trump agenda.Newsom said last week he was particularly concerned about the prospect of widespread raids on immigrants, which could prove devastating to the immigrant-dependent California economy including the vast agricultural concerns based largely in the inland Central valley.There may be other parts of the Trump agenda which, if enacted, could prove difficult to reverse – a national abortion ban passed by Congress, say, or a repeal of the Obama-era Affordable Care Act. And that has many advocacy groups deeply worried about the vulnerable populations they serve.“Our community is feeling very anxious and uncertain,” said Terra Russell-Slavin, a lawyer with the Los Angeles LGBT Center, “particularly given the number of attacks that Trump has explosively targeted toward the LGBTQ community and specifically the trans community”.In response, Russell-Slavin said her organization was working with state and local governments to find alternative funding streams should the federal government cut back on gender-affirming healthcare or homelessness services or senior services. “We’re very fortunate that our lawmakers are overwhelmingly supportive,” she said. “We are very confident they will fight for protections for us.”Will that be enough? For now, California officials are showing their teeth and vowing to fight. But Newsom, for one, is under no illusions about how much is at stake. “No state,” he said last week, “has more to lose or more to gain in this election.”Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

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      If I were a cautious, centre-left prime minister, Trump’s victory would have me worried | Andy Beckett

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      Whatever determinedly positive things centre-left leaders around the world have said about Donald Trump’s victory in public, in private they must have greeted it with a shudder. Not just because of the dark and chaotic prospect of another Trump presidency, but because in many ways the defeated Kamala Harris is just like them. She is a hard worker, a patient reformer, a reasonably good communicator, an instinctive mover towards the ideological centre, a supposed antidote to rightwing populism, and yet also an incumbent, in an era when such perceived protectors of the status quo are widely despised.Keir Starmer may have particular cause to worry. On her campaign website, Harris promised to “bring together” trade unions and business, “grow the economy” and increase both basic pay rates and employment. She said she had voted for legislation “creating hundreds of thousands of high-quality clean-energy jobs”, and “ensuring America’s energy security”. She said she would “cut red tape” to “build more housing”. She pledged “tough, smart solutions to secure the border … and reform our broken immigration system.” Above all, she presented her rightwing opponent as “cruel”, “dangerous” and “unfit to lead”.All these policy ideas and political messages, and sometimes their precise language, could come from a Starmer speech or Labour press release. If they’ve been rejected by voters in the US, could that also soon happen here?Supporters and members of the Starmer government who want to believe that Harris’s defeat is not cause for panic can point to the Conservatives’ weakness compared with the Republicans. While the catastrophes of Trump’s first presidency, such as his mishandling of Covid, appear to have been forgotten by many Americans, the Tories are weighed down by their more recent and much longer record in office, and are likely to be for years to come.Britain and the US can also be very different politically. In the week that the notoriously reactionary Conservative membership nevertheless elected Kemi Badenoch as party leader, many Americans seem to have been put off by Harris’s race and gender. Yet other contrasts between the countries are less reassuring. While the administration of which Harris is part has overseen strong economic growth, Starmer’s government is likely to bring only a more modest improvement, according to the official forecasts that accompanied last week’s budget. If many voters did not notice, or refused to give Harris credit for, the boom under her and Joe Biden, what chance is there that Starmer’s probably smaller economic successes will be electorally rewarded?This apparent breakdown in the relationship between a government’s achievements and its popularity poses a profound threat to centre-left politics. For decades, centrists have assumed that “what counts is what works”, as Tony Blair put it. As its name implies, centre-left politics is about compromise and alliances, which are meant to make steady, measurable progress on concrete issues. Yet it appears that more and more voters prefer the dogmas, tribalism, symbolic gestures and fantasy policies of rightwing populism. This dramatic, accelerated, often more short-term politics comes across better on digital media. It also expresses many voters’ anger about the present and anxiety about the future – or their desire to ignore looming disasters such as the climate crisis for as long as possible.In the two previous periods when western democracies were consumed by doomy thoughts, the 1930s and the 1970s, many centre-left governments also struggled and were sometimes replaced by authoritarian rightwing populists. At prime minister’s questions this week, hours after Trump’s election, there was a new mood, which could not just be attributed to the fact that Badenoch was making her debut. She beamed with satisfaction at Trump’s victory, and woundingly remarked that Labour’s budget had been “cut and paste Bidenomics”. Meanwhile, Starmer gave unconvincing assurances that Anglo-American relations would continue as normal.In these exchanges was possibly the beginning of a political shift: towards a situation where his government, while still theoretically dominant at Westminster because of its majority, in fact loses the ideological initiative and becomes isolated, even beleaguered.We’re not there yet. Despite her aggression, Badenoch is not a commanding public performer and may never be one, given her tendency to bluff and her party’s lack of credibility and fresh ideas. Labour also has time on its side. By our next election, Trump’s final, four-year term may be over – and may also have demonstrated, as he did last time, that populists are better at electioneering than governing.It’s possible that his latest victory will be the Republican equivalent of the Tory win in 2019: achieved by making impossible promises in circumstances that favour the right to a greater than usual extent, with Biden’s infirmity analogous to the huge but fleeting Conservative opportunity created by the vote for Brexit.Yet simply waiting for Trump and other populists to fail in office again would be a slow and uninspiring strategy for the centre left: an acceptance that change can only come after further, possibly terminal, social and environmental damage. Instead, the centre left could make a better case, whether in government or opposition, by addressing inequality with more urgency, as Biden did before beating Trump in 2020, having incorporated ideas from Bernie Sanders’ insurgent campaigns to become the Democratic candidate.We live in a different world to the one that formed the modern centre left. Unless it becomes more aggressive and more class-conscious – effectively, more populist – it will continue to rule only occasionally and with modest success. The rest of the time, the radical right will run riot.

      Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist More

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      Trump has pledged to wage war on planet Earth – and it will take a progressive revolution to stop him | George Monbiot

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      We were losing slowly. Now we are losing quickly. Democracy, accountability, human rights, social justice – all were rolling backwards as money swarmed our politics. Above all, our life-support systems – the Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, ecosystems, ice and snow – have been hammered and hammered, regardless of who is in power. Donald Trump might strike the killer blows, but he is not the cause of an ecocidal economic system. He is the embodiment of it.Under Joe Biden, the US was missing its own climate goals, and those goals were insufficient to meet the global objective of limiting heating to 1.5C above preindustrial levels. That target in turn might not be tight enough to prevent a tipping of Earth systems. Already, at roughly 1.3C of heating, we see what looks alarmingly like climatic flickering: the ever wilder perturbations that tend to precede the collapse of a complex system.Trump has pledged to wage war on planet Earth, ripping up US climate commitments and reverting to unrestrained fossil fuel extraction and burning. If he follows the Project 2025 agenda, he will leave the UN climate framework altogether, making his assault on Earth systems much harder to reverse.His evangelical base, eager to advance the biblical apocalypse, will love him for it. Most simply deny climate breakdown. Others perceive events such as floods and fires not as warnings, but as joyous portents of the end of times: a great cleansing, in which the righteous will be uplifted to sit at the right hand of God, while their enemies will be cast into the fiery pit. What we will see under a new Trump presidency is a neat alignment of the interests of fossil fuel companies and a constituency gunning for Armageddon (and hoping that Benjamin Netanyahu will assist its delivery).But let’s not forget: the greatest predicament that humanity has ever faced scarcely featured in this election campaign. If Trump mentioned it, it was to denounce climate breakdown as “one of the great scams of all time”, while Kamala Harris was almost silent on the issue. Perhaps that’s unsurprising, when both candidates relied so heavily on billionaire funding. Capital is always hostile to restraint, and effective environmental policy would be the greatest restraint of all.On almost all fronts, decency and humanity have been retreating for years. Genocide, colonial conquest, the seizure of resources from the poor: all are resurgent, even before Trump returns to the White House. The rich have learned how to game our political systems. Capital has found the means of solving its longstanding problem: democracy.Trump’s conquest of the US is widely seen as something new. But it looks to me like a reversion to the default state of centralised, hierarchical societies. For many centuries, these societies were characterised by extreme power vested in the leader. This power was brokered by a favoured caste, which drew on a justifying belief in the inherent superiority of some groups over others. This caste was empowered to treat other people’s lives as disposable, to criminalise dissent and inflict extreme violence and cruelty upon those who challenged the leader or his ideology. Instead of rational argument, it used symbols, slogans, ceremony and pageantry to reinforce power and create social consensus.A centralised democratic system was always a contradiction. However enlightened the founding fathers of the US (or the liberal reformers in the UK) may have seemed, they created systems in which elite power would never fully relinquish control. These systems were highly vulnerable to capture and reversal. Only a far more decentralised, participatory democracy could resist the reversion to autocratic rule.We have laboured for years under a folk theory of democracy: to win power, you must “make the case” for the politics you want to see, using reasoned argument. Voters will assess the competing arguments. On this basis, and considering the records of the candidates, they will decide which of the factions operating from a distant centre they will elect to govern them for the next four or five years. Then they will trust those representatives to act on their behalf until the next election, on the basis of presumed consent. It was always a fairytale.People seek to destroy what they feel excluded from. Centralised “democracies” exclude all but a rarefied circle from genuine power. Disempowered people tend to be profoundly unimpressed by “rational arguments” for this faction or that one: they have an entirely reasonable desire – however unreasonable its expression may be – to kick the system over. There are constructive ways of doing so, and destructive ways. The majority of US voters have now chosen the destructive path. The message of Trump’s victory seems clear: to hell with your reasoned arguments. Give us reassuring homilies and blood sacrifice.Trump could still be reined in by the midterm elections, but his appointments to the supreme court and its reciprocal grant of almost full-spectrum immunity will enable him to rule in some respects without restraint. In some ways, he can exercise greater power than medieval monarchs could have dreamed of, as the inequality of arms between state and citizens has grown massively in the “democratic” era.Sophisticated propaganda on new media channels, surveillance technologies, new means of crowd control, targeted assassination: as we have seen in other countries, these can be used to snuff out dissent with horrifying efficiency. When I saw the mini drones being used by the Russian government to drop grenades on individual citizens in the Ukrainian city of Kherson, I thought: one day, that could be any of us.Monstrous as he is, Trump is no outlier. He is the distillation of capitalist pseudo-democracy. His values, entirely extrinsic – fixated on prestige, status, image, fame, power and wealth – are the dominant values projected for years on to every screen and into every mind. His criminality is the system’s criminality. His abuse of women, of staff, of customers, of Muslims, of immigrants, of disabled people, of ecosystems, is the abuse the majority of the world’s people have suffered for centuries.What do we do? Stop it from happening in our own countries. This, I believe, requires a massive decentralisation, a devolution of politics to the people, the creation of a genuine democracy that cannot so easily be captured, the building of an ecological civilisation that subordinates economics to Earth systems, not the other way round. No one would claim any of this is easy. But right now, we are readily handing our lives to the Donald Trumps that lurk in every country.

      George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist More

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      Post-election in Saginaw, Michigan, the swing county in the swing state that swung right

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      Saginaw county’s Democrats were sure that the lessons had been learned and that this time it would be different.The Kamala Harris campaign flooded this bellwether county in the crucial battleground state of Michigan with canvassers and advertising, a reaction to Hillary Clinton’s complacent and, as it turned out, misguided belief that she had the area sewn up in 2016.The vice-president and Tim Walz campaigned in Saginaw. Leftist hero Bernie Sanders rallied the local university’s students. Door-knockers and phone bankers urged people to the polls in the hope and expectation of at least eking out the narrow win Joe Biden enjoyed in Saginaw county four years ago.But through it all, there were warnings from those closest to key groups of Saginaw’s voters – union organisers, Black community leaders, social workers for lower-income families, Latino activists – that denouncing Republican demagogue Donald Trump and making vague promises from Harris of a better future were not enough.They cautioned that Harris was not getting through to large numbers of those who struggled the most in a county marked by large economic disparities because she was failing to directly address their concerns, not least inflation and the cost of living.Others said that Harris looked too much like one of the machine politicians so many voters have come to despise, particularly as she avoided taking a stand on key issues or bent to the prevailing political wind.All of them warned that it could cost her the election in Saginaw county, and beyond.And so it proved.Trump won Saginaw county decisively. The vice-president lost by three times as many votes as Clinton in 2016 and did even worse when compared with Biden four years later.Trump beat Harris by more than 3,400 votes on about the same turnout as 2020. In that election, the then president lost to Biden by 303 votes.This year, Trump won an outright majority in Saginaw county with nearly 51% of the vote, more than 1% up on his 2020 tally.On election night, the leader of the county Democrats, Aileen Pettinger, a retired firefighter, bounced into a watch party at a local union hall confident that female voters angry about the US supreme court ruling on abortion and the broader assault on women’s rights had won it for Harris.Local Democrats worked hard to try to bring female Republican voters on board over access to abortion, even leaving Post-it notes in women’s bathrooms reminding them that no one would know if they secretly voted for Harris.But as the results trickled in, the party began to feel like a wake. People drifted away. Whoever was in charge of the music stopped playing Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now. A silence fell as hope bled away.Across town at the Republican watch party, Trump supporters burst into a rendition of the Christian hymn How Great Thou Art after the former and future president gave his victory speech.The initial election results for Saginaw appear to show that Harris lost Biden voters to Trump in some of the poorer areas of the county, including minority neighbourhoods, as well as mostly white suburbs. Harris also failed to mobilise the large numbers of people who usually do not vote in Saginaw. The turnout in the main city was only about 50%.A month ago, Jeff Bulls, president of the Community Alliance for the People in Saginaw, told the Guardian that many voters in lower-income parts of Saginaw were disenchanted with the political process because they did not see that it improved their lives.Bulls warned that Harris’s failure to address issues such as inflation and the cost of housing in a way that would make a difference to those struggling to get by was undermining her campaign. After Harris’s defeat, Bulls said “it’s not unexpected for me”.“She wasn’t really speaking to real people’s issues. You have a lot of poverty here in this county, whether it’s in the city of Saginaw or whether it’s rural people out there. And if you don’t speak to that, you’re not going to inspire people to vote for you, and I felt like her campaign was mostly about just blaming Trump or saying he’s racist. She wasn’t really inspiring people with her own policies, with her own vision, and I think that cost her,” he said.Similar warnings came from union organisers who saw members going with Trump, even though Biden kept telling them how good the economy was, because rising inflation had hit them hard. As loyal Democrats, some couched their warnings carefully in public, not wanting to give ammunition to the Trump campaign.Others were more forthright, including Carly Hammond, a Saginaw organiser for the US’s largest union confederation, the AFL-CIO. She told the Guardian a month ago that the Harris campaign was failing to address the deep distrust of politicians in general, and the Democratic party in particular, among many working people.“It’s the Donald Trump voters in unions that I see. I think most of them are still in the same place,” she said in October.“The trend that I see with labour people who are Trump supporters is a tendency to be very upset with the status quo, which everyone should be. People are going to stick with Trump until they see and they feel like things are getting better for them.”Hammond, whose grandfather worked at one of the many car factories that were once dotted around Saginaw but have since closed, said the Democratic campaign was the biggest election mobilisation she had seen but that Harris lacked “concrete plans” to motivate voters.After the result, Hammond issued a statement saying she was “angry that neither presidential candidate had real acknowledgement of, or plans to address, the real suffering and struggle so many Americans are going through”.Black and Latino community leader organised get-out-the-vote campaigns in the last days before the election as they warned of disenchantment and lack of enthusiasm for Harris.Dan Soza, whose father was the first Latino elected to the Saginaw city council, is a child welfare officer who is deeply alarmed by Trump’s threat of mass deportations. He said that Harris failed to connect with large numbers of Latino voters in the city on what they cared about most: the economy.“There was never any really specific plans. OK, the $25,000 for new home buyers was specific, but where was the specific plan for inflation? Not that the other side added any better answers, but they just never really came out with any concrete plans on what they were going to do,” he said.Soza said that the rise in Latino men voting for Trump in other parts of the country was replicated in Saginaw. He said a lot of that had to do with “fear of a female leader, machismo”.But he said the Democrats also made a mistake in thinking that opposition to Trump’s stance on immigration would play well with Latino voters in places such as Saginaw, where there is a long established Latino community, mostly of Mexican origin, when many of those crossing the border are from Central and South America.“Immigration isn’t as important to them as we think. They took to heart issues like the economy,” he said.The scale of Harris’s loss was emphasised by the success of other Democrats in Saginaw.Kristen McDonald Rivet decisively beat a Republican former prosecutor, Paul Junge, for the open seat in the US House of Representatives covering Saginaw and neighbouring counties. McDonald Rivet took about 51% of the vote, meaning that some people split their vote to support her and Trump.But Bulls is not alone in thinking that the Democratic party needs a wholesale rethink of what it stands for if it is to win back voters in Saginaw.“The Democratic party has to have a come-to-Jesus moment and really revisit who they represent because they’re not speaking to kitchen-table issues. There’s a lot of rhetoric around the middle class. We largely don’t have a middle class, especially in the Black community. We have working class. We have people that are in poverty, and they’re not speaking to them and their struggle, to real issues that poor people are really, really dealing with,” he said.“I would hope that there’s a reckoning and that they revisit who they actually represent, because right now it’s not us.”Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

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      US election live: Trump prepares to choose top team as Harris tells supporters ‘do not despair’

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      After Donald Trump’s US election victory, here’s what will happen next:

      US president, Joe Biden, spoke to Trump on Wednesday and invited him to the White House. Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said Trump “looks forward to the meeting, which will take place shortly, and very much appreciated the call”. It would be the first time they had met since Biden’s disastrous debate performance against Trump in June that forced him out of the race.

      Biden will make an address to the nation on Thursday, vowing a peaceful transfer of power to Trump after his crushing election win over Kamala Harris. In what promises to be an agonising moment for Biden, he will speak in the Rose Garden of the White House at 11am (4pm GMT) to “discuss the election results and the transition” to Trump’s second term.

      Despite Trump’s election success being apparent pretty early on election night, the full US election results are still not in. Out of 51 states (including DC), results for 49 have been called so far. Donald Trump currently has 295 electoral votes and Harris has 226. For context, Joe Biden was declared the winner offcially four days after the election in 2020.

      Harris will preside over a joint session of Congress in January to certify the results of the election. Harris delivered a speech conceding defeat in the presidential election to Trump on Wednesday afternoon.

      Trump will be sworn in as the 47th US president on 20 January 2025.
      Robert F Kennedy Jr, who previously said that Donald Trump had promised him control over a broad range of public health agencies if he returned to the White House, said on Wednesday that there are “entire departments” within the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that “have to go”, reports The Hill.The website, citing an MSNBC interview, reports that Kennedy said:
      In some categories … there are entire departments, like the nutrition department at the FDA … that have to go, that are not doing their job, they’re not protecting our kids.”
      When asked if he would eliminate any health agencies, Kennedy told MSNBC, “to eliminate the agencies, as long as it requires congressional approval, I wouldn’t be doing that.”“I can get the corruption out of the agencies,” he added.Trump on Sunday told NBC that Kennedy, the anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist and former independent candidate who dropped out and endorsed Trump, would have a “big role in the administration” if he won Tuesday’s presidential election.After Donald Trump’s US election victory, here’s what will happen next:

      US president, Joe Biden, spoke to Trump on Wednesday and invited him to the White House. Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said Trump “looks forward to the meeting, which will take place shortly, and very much appreciated the call”. It would be the first time they had met since Biden’s disastrous debate performance against Trump in June that forced him out of the race.

      Biden will make an address to the nation on Thursday, vowing a peaceful transfer of power to Trump after his crushing election win over Kamala Harris. In what promises to be an agonising moment for Biden, he will speak in the Rose Garden of the White House at 11am (4pm GMT) to “discuss the election results and the transition” to Trump’s second term.

      Despite Trump’s election success being apparent pretty early on election night, the full US election results are still not in. Out of 51 states (including DC), results for 49 have been called so far. Donald Trump currently has 295 electoral votes and Harris has 226. For context, Joe Biden was declared the winner offcially four days after the election in 2020.

      Harris will preside over a joint session of Congress in January to certify the results of the election. Harris delivered a speech conceding defeat in the presidential election to Trump on Wednesday afternoon.

      Trump will be sworn in as the 47th US president on 20 January 2025.
      The Philippines expects US policy in the Indo-Pacific and support for its treaty ally amid South China Sea tensions to remain steady under Donald Trump, driven by bipartisan resolve in Washington, its ambassador to the US said on Thursday, reports Reuters.Both Democrats and Republicans prioritise countering China’s influence, including in the South China Sea, Jose Manuel Romualdez said, suggesting that military cooperation, economic ties and security commitments with the Philippines will continue.“It is in their interest that the Indo-Pacific region remains free, peaceful and stable, especially given the economic part of it, with trillions of dollars passing through the South China Sea,” Romualdez told Reuters in an interview.US-Philippine security engagements have deepened under president Joe Biden and Philippine counterpart Ferdinand Marcos Jr, with both leaders keen to counter what they see as China’s aggressive actions in the South China Sea and near Taiwan.Marcos said in a congratulatory message after Trump’s victory:
      I am hopeful that this unshakeable alliance, tested in war and peace, will be a force of good that will blaze a path of prosperity and amity, in the region, and in both sides of the Pacific.”
      Under Marcos, the Philippines has increased the number of its bases accessible to US forces to nine from five, some facing the South China Sea, where China has built artificial islands equipped with runways and missile systems. The US has proposed $128m for infrastructure improvements at those bases, in addition to a $500m pledge for the Philippine military and coastguard.According to Reuters, Romualdez expressed confidence that these commitments, including joint US-Philippine maritime exercises that began last year, would continue under Trump.“We have very strong bipartisan support in the US Congress where the money comes from. Every single one of our friends in the Republican side has signified their concern and strong support for whatever we’re doing right now in relation to the challenges we face with China today,” Romualdez told Reuters. He suggested potential changes under Trump would be “minimal” and could even be favourable.Analysts say it is hard to separate the president-elect’s bluster from his actual plans but it’s clear his priority is to bin many of Joe Biden’s policies, writes Andrew Roth in this analysis piece:The US foreign policy establishment is set for one of the biggest shake-ups in years as Donald Trump has vowed to both revamp US policy abroad and to root out the so-called “deep state” by firing thousands of government workers – including those among the ranks of America’s diplomatic corps.Trump’s electoral victory is also likely to push the Biden administration to speed up efforts to support Ukraine before Trump can cut off military aid, hamper the already-modest efforts to restrain Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu in Gaza and Lebanon and lead to a fresh effort to slash and burn through major parts of US bureaucracy including the state department.Trump backers have said he will be more organised during his second term, often dubbed “Trump 2.0”, and on the day after election day US media reported that Trump had already chosen Brian Hook, a hawkish state department official during the first Trump administration, to lead the transition for America’s diplomats.And yet analysts, serving and former US diplomats and foreign officials said that it remained difficult to separate Trump’s bluster from his actual plans when he takes power in January. What is clear is that his priority is to bin many of the policies put in place by his predecessor.“I’m skeptical that the transition process will be super-impactful since the natural instinct of the new team will be to toss all of Biden’s foreign policy in the dumpster,” one former senior diplomat said.“If you go back to 2016, Mexico didn’t pay for the wall. And, you know, it doesn’t look like there was a secret plan to defeat Isis,” said Richard Fontaine, the CEO of the Center for a New American Security thinktank. “Some of these things didn’t turn out the way that they were talked about on that campaign trail and we go into this without really knowing what the president’s proposal will be for all of this – and what he will do.”South Korean president, Yoon Suk Yeol, spoke with Donald Trump on Thursday and congratulated him on winning the US presidency on the “Make America Great Again” slogan as officials in Seoul worked to prepare for “significant” economic changes, reports Reuters.Yoon and Trump held a 12-minute phone call and discussed the close security and economic ties of their two countries across all areas, a senior South Korean official said on Thursday.South Korea’s ambassador to the US also visited Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida to meet with members of the president-elect’s camp, the foreign ministry said.Trump’s election has renewed attention in South Korea on his “America First” foreign policy plans and how his unpredictable style will play out in his second term, reports Reuters.Officials worked past midnight on Wednesday to prepare for changes expected from US policies, with the Bank of Korea and thinktanks seeing a potential hit to exports if the US raises tariffs.Meetings at the trade ministry that began in the hours after Trump’s victory led to back-to-back discussions early on Thursday as South Korea’s economic leaders weighed the impact on exports of potential tariffs.“Should policy stance that has been stressed by president-elect Trump become realised, the impact on our economy is expected to be significant,” finance minister Choi Sang-mok said at a 7.30am (10.30pm GMT on Wednesday) meeting with trade and foreign ministers.South Korea would probably suffer less than China, Mexico and the EU, but Asia’s fourth-largest economy could be forced into another renegotiation of its bilateral free trade agreement with Washington, according to Kim Young-gui, an economist at the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy (KIEP).Polish prime minister Donald Tusk said on Thursday that Poland would work on strenghtening its relations with the US after Donald Trump won the presidential election.Yesterday, Tusk joined other European leaders in congratulating Trump.The Australian prime minister who vowed before the last election to herald a “kinder, gentler parliament” has now hailed Australia’s rowdy, robust and combative style of political debate as proof of a functioning democracy, warning “only dictatorships pretend to be perfect”.In remarks to a global democracy conference in Sydney a day after the United States returned Donald Trump to the presidency eschewing warnings about his autocratic style, Anthony Albanese suggested the adversarial tendencies of the Westminster political system were “a virtue, not a flaw”.“A fierce contest can be a good thing, as long as it’s a contest about substance, about things that matter to people and issues that affect the country,” Albanese told the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, in a speech distributed in advance.For today’s First Edition newsletter, my colleague Nimo Omer spoke with Guardian US live news editor Chris Michael about what a Donald Trump presidency might look like. Here’s a snippet:“Autocrats are rejoicing,” Chris says about Trump’s victory. “That probably tells you all you need to know”. Trump has on many occasions praised Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, and the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-un. His admiration for other strongman leaders such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, China’s Xi Jinping and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is well documented and long held.Trump has said that he would end Russia’s war in Ukraine “in one day”, though he has not provided specific details on how. Expectations are that Ukraine will see a significant reduction in military aid from the US – the Trump team have made clear they have no intention of indefinitely maintaining commitment to Kyiv as the war continues to drag on.Over on the Guardian’s business live blog, my colleague Graeme Wearden writes that the a looming new trade war triggered by Donald Trump could push the eurozone economy from sluggish growth into “a full-blown recession”.That’s according to the investment bank ING, who fear the recession could begin even before Trump – who has said he wants to impose a 10% tariff on all non-US goods – is sworn in next January.China warned on Thursday there would be “no winners in a trade war” after the re-election in the US of former president Donald Trump, who has pledged huge new tariffs on Chinese imports.“As a matter of principle, I would like to reiterate that there will be no winners in a trade war, which is also not conducive to the world,” foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP). 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      in US Politics

      Thursday briefing: What lies ahead for the US in a second Trump administration

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      Good morning.Kamala Harris conceded the US election to Donald Trump overnight. In a speech at Howard University, the vice-president urged supporters not to lose hope, saying “this is a time to organise, to mobilise and to stay engaged for the sake of freedom and justice and the future that we all know we can build together”. Harris, hoarse from the frenzied campaign that began a little over 100 days ago, contrasted sharply with Trump following his defeat in the 2020 election, which he never formally conceded.Harris’s speech capped a turbulent election, marked by Trump’s dramatic political comeback. He won decisively, carrying both the electoral college and the popular vote. The Republican party also flipped control of the Senate and while the House of Representatives has not yet been called, the Republicans remain confident. With control over all three branches of government, Republicans could have a much smoother path for passing legislation.As Democrats begin soul-searching (and the inevitable blame game), Trump’s new GOP prepares to take power. For today’s newsletter, I spoke with Guardian US live news editor Chris Michael about what a Trump presidency might look like. But first, the headlines.Five big stories

      Environment | It is “virtually certain” that 2024 will be the hottest year on record, the European Union’s space programme has found. The prognosis comes the week before diplomats meet at the Cop29 climate summit and a day after a majority of voters in the US, the biggest historical emitter of planet-heating gas, chose to make Donald Trump president.

      Middle East | Many Israelis were reeling after Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to dismiss his popular defence minister, Yoav Gallant, in the midst of a multifront war. The prime minister said he had fired Gallant over what he described a “crisis of trust”. Gallant, a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party and a senior general, has been replaced by the foreign minister, Israel Katz, a Likud lawmaker and loyalist who has little military background.

      Politics | The Reform UK MP Lee Anderson has apologised after parliament’s watchdog on bullying and harassment told him to do so for telling a security guard who asked for his ID to “fuck off, everyone opens the door to me”.

      Economy | Rachel Reeves has committed not to increase taxes at Labour’s next budget and said the government would need to “live within the means” of her spending plans if public services came under mounting pressure.

      Health | Doing just five extra minutes of exercise a day could help lower blood pressure, a study suggests. High blood pressure affects 1.28 billion adults worldwide and is one of the biggest causes of premature death. It can lead to strokes, heart attacks, heart failure, kidney damage and many other health problems, and is often described as a silent killer due to its lack of symptoms.
      In depth: ‘All bets are off’View image in fullscreenReproductive rightsThroughout his campaign Trump “flip-flopped” on the issue of abortion, Chris Michael says. Sometimes he would brag about the singular role he played in overturning Roe v Wade; other times he publicly created distance from multiple anti-abortion positions and insisted that it was an issue for individual states to decide.In Tuesday’s elections, seven states passed measures that enshrine abortion rights in their constitutions – but this will not be the end of the story. Anti-abortion activists will likely challenge the reversal of bans in court, and will fight even harder to push legislation through before more bans are repealed.Crucially, if Trump returns to the White House with Republican control of the Senate and House of Representatives, it could have significant implications for abortion access. “Trump has said he would veto a national abortion ban if one reached his desk, but who knows —he could change his mind,” Chris points out. As his tone suggests, few have been reassured by Trump’s promise not to sign a federal ban. This scepticism stems not only from Trump’s history of lying but also from accusations that his camp is playing a verbal sleight of hand, replacing the term “national ban” with phrases like “national minimum standard”, which would essentially achieve the same goal.“But even if he doesn’t do that, the GOP could theoretically use this obscure piece of law called the Comstock Act,” Chris adds. This 150-year-old anti-obscenity law bans mailing abortion-related material and was outlined in Project 2025, an extreme 922-page policy document published by a rightwing thinktank as a way to bypass congress altogether and use the legislation to ban the mailing of abortion pills – in effect a national ban.Since Roe v Wade established a constitutional right to abortion, the Comstock Act could not be enforced. However, after Roe was overturned in 2022, anti-abortion groups have pushed the idea that the Comstock Act is valid once more.ImmigrationBorder control has always been the key Trump issue. Who can forget “Build the wall” and images of children in cages under the child separation policy. This time around, his crackdown on immigration is set to be even more controversial – and wide-ranging.As ever, much vitriol has been aimed at undocumented immigrants. But the president-elect has expanded his ire to potentially include those who legally live in the US. Trump has outlined a mass deportation plan that could target up to 20 million people. According to estimates, there are 11 million undocumented immigrants. There is little detail on how such an unprecedented policy would be put into practice, but as Trump appoints officials in the coming months, they will have a much easier time pushing through these changes regardless of the indirect consequences and larger fallout.Trump’s rhetoric has also become more violent, racist and xenophobic than ever. He has warned that mass deportations will “be a bloody story” and claimed immigrants are “poisoning the blood of the country”. Such language echoes the rhetoric of fascists like Mussolini and Hitler, whom Trump reportedly praised while in office, even lamenting that he didn’t have commanders as loyal to him as Hitler did. Trump’s words carry deeply troubling implications for immigrants who are fearful of reprisals from his second administration.The international stageView image in fullscreen“Autocrats are rejoicing,” Chris says about Trump’s victory. “That probably tells you all you need to know”. Trump has on many occasions praised Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, and the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-un. His admiration for other strongman leaders such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, China’s Xi Jinping and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is well documented and long held.Trump has said that he would end Russia’s war in Ukraine “in one day”, though he has not provided specific details on how. Expectations are that Ukraine will see a significant reduction in military aid from the US – the Trump team have made clear they have no intention of indefinitely maintaining commitment to Kyiv as the war continues to drag on. Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s president, congratulated Trump on his “impressive” election victory on Wednesday. “I appreciate President Trump’s commitment to the ‘peace through strength’ approach in global affairs.”Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was among the first leaders to congratulate Trump on his victory. A Trump win is great news for Netanyahu, as Julian Borger writes in this analysis. His return to the White House “removes a substantial barrier to Israel’s full control and potential annexation of at least part of Gaza and the West Bank”.The US is an anchor for many international organisations and treaties: Nato, the Paris climate accord (again) and other institutions could face upheaval due to Trump’s isolationist worldview. Trump has dismissed the climate crisis as “a big hoax” and has pledged to cut funding for Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which he derided as the “green new scam”. Instead, Trump plans to pivot heavily toward resource extraction, prioritising oil and gas drilling – including on public lands and in national parks. In July, he emphasised this shift, vowing to “drill, baby, drill”. Analysts warn that a Trump presidency could add billions of tonnes of heat-trapping gases to the atmosphere, which would have devastating global consequences.With the Cop29 climate conference beginning next week, the pressure is even higher for decisive action.Democratic normsIn recent months, Trump was labelled a fascist by Kamala Harris and his longest serving former chief of staff, retired general John Kelly.“In a weird way, the one thing that isn’t an issue, for now, is the ‘stop the steal’ movement,” Chris says. “Trump was preparing to contest the results of the election and to undermine democracy itself in order to stay in power but because he’s legitimately won, he doesn’t have to do that. So the whole machinery that was built up around this grievance has potentially had the wind taken out of its sails.”Trump, a man famous for never letting go of grudges, will probably continue with his mission to undermine and hollow out democratic norms and institutions. Trump has said in many interviews and rallies that he would mobilise the federal government against his personal political enemies and the army against citizens that he called “the enemy within”. A second Trump administration likely poses a severe threat to independence of the justice department and other institutions like the FBI and the CIA.Trump has also pledged to dismantle what he calls the “deep state” – in other words the federal bureaucracy – by firing thousands of non-political civil servants and replacing them with loyalists. This purge “poses a threat to the checks and balances system” that stood in the way of his most destructive instincts in his first term, says Chris.Freedom of the press, a cornerstone for any functioning democracy, will also likely be in jeopardy. Trump has threatened to jail reporters who do not give up sources and strip broadcasting licences from news outlets as punishment for coverage that he did not agree with. A CNN review of the president-elect’s interviews and speeches over the past two years found that he has called for every major American TV news network to be punished.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionNow the fevered campaigning is over, the real work begins. Trump will be appointing his top team in the coming weeks, which could even include anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert F Kennedy Jr and Elon Musk. For now “all bets are off”, Chris says.For more details on the consequences of a second Trump presidency, read our Guardian series The StakesWhat else we’ve been readingView image in fullscreen

      In the second edition of our Black diaspora newsletter, The Long Wave, Nesrine Malik reflects on Kemi Badenoch’s ascension to leader of the Conservatives, and asks if it really is a win for Nigerians. Charlie Lindlar, acting deputy editor, newsletters

      The story of the GP Thomas Kwan, sentenced to 31 years in jail yesterday for trying to poison his mother’s partner while disguised as a nurse, is truly bizarre, as Mark Brown describes it: “An Agatha Christie-inspired Columbo episode with a splash of Breaking Bad.” Toby Moses, head of newsletters

      “I’m just running free as a bird to give everyone a giggle” – Simon Hattenstone looks back at the rich history of streaking, meeting those who got their kit off for a cause … or because they just felt like it. Charlie

      As anyone who has seen the viral clips of Maggie Smith in the Nothing Like A Dame doc knows, she was a character – her friend Fiona Golfar confirms it in this lovingly told recollection. Toby

      “Horrible direction, an appalling script, dreadful performances: it really does have it all” – Catherine Bray is unfestive and unsparing in her review of the so-bad-it’s-still-bad Christmas film Holiday Twist. Charlie
      SportView image in fullscreenFootball | Hakan Calhanoglu scored a first-half penalty to give Inter a 1-0 Champions League win over Arsenal, the Gunners’ first European defeat of the season. Aston Villa also lost 1-0, to Belgian side Club Brugge, after Tyrone Mings gave away a bizarre second-half penalty.Boxing | Imane Khelif, who won Olympic gold in women’s boxing amid a gender eligibility row, is taking legal action over media reports allegedly detailing her leaked medical records. Reports published in France this week claimed the 25-year-old has XY (male) chromosomes.Golf | Rory McIlroy has suggested Donald Trump’s return to the White House could accelerate peace talks between traditional golf tours and the Saudi Arabia-backed Liv Golf. McIlroy even floated the idea of Elon Musk becoming involved in golf’s elongated merger plans.The front pagesView image in fullscreen“American dread” says the Guardian while the Mirror asks “What have they done … again?”. The Express goes full Maga: “He’s been shot, convicted of a crime and branded a fascist … but he’s still the people’s choice”. The Times has “Trump promises golden age after sweeping Harris aside”. “Landslide” – that’s the i while the Daily Mail is a bit obvious: “A comeback to Trump all comebacks!”. The Telegraph calls it “Trump’s clean sweep”. “Trump is back” reports the Financial Times, while in the Metro it’s “America’s golden Age”. And finally, the Sun goes with “You’re rehired”.Today in FocusView image in fullscreenWhat will Trump do in power?The Guardian’s Washington bureau chief, David Smith, explains how Donald Trump won a second term and what he intends to do with it.Cartoon of the day | Ella BaronView image in fullscreenThe UpsideView image in fullscreenWhen Abi Wilkinson moved to the US after her partner got a new job, she assumed she could continue her work as a freelance journalist stateside. But when visa issues initially prevented her from continuing in her career, she gained a new perspective. She writes for A moment that changed me: “I don’t think I had fully understood how much my self‑esteem was tied to my work and how preoccupied I was with how I was perceived by strangers.”When her work permit did come through, Wilkinson “decided to prioritise mental wellbeing over status, ambition or self-aggrandising notions about significance. I found a job as a nanny. I was happier than I had been in years.”Sign up here for a weekly roundup of The Upside, sent to you every SundayBored at work?And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day. Until tomorrow.

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      in US Politics

      US diplomats brace as Trump plans foreign policy shake-up in wider purge of government

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      The US foreign policy establishment is set for one of the biggest shake-ups in years as Donald Trump has vowed to both revamp US policy abroad and to root out the so-called “deep state” by firing thousands of government workers – including those among the ranks of America’s diplomatic corps.Trump’s electoral victory is also likely to push the Biden administration to speed up efforts to support Ukraine before Trump can cut off military aid, hamper the already-modest efforts to restrain Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu in Gaza and Lebanon and lead to a fresh effort to slash and burn through major parts of US bureaucracy including the state department.Trump backers have said he will be more organised during his second term, often dubbed “Trump 2.0”, and on the day after election day US media reported that Trump had already chosen Brian Hook, a hawkish State Department official during the first Trump administration, to lead the transition for America’s diplomats.And yet analysts, serving and former US diplomats and foreign officials said that it remained difficult to separate Trump’s bluster from his actual plans when he takes power in January. What is clear is that his priority is to bin many of the policies put in place by his predecessor.“I’m skeptical that the transition process will be super-impactful since the natural instinct of the new team will be to toss all of Biden’s foreign policy in the dumpster,” one former senior diplomat said.“If you go back to 2016, Mexico didn’t pay for the wall. And, you know, it doesn’t look like there was a secret plan to defeat Isis,” said Richard Fontaine, the CEO of the Center for a New American Security thinktank. “Some of these things didn’t turn out the way that they were talked about on that campaign trail and we go into this without really knowing what the president’s proposal will be for all of this – and what he will do.”One clear priority, however, is to target many of those involved in crafting US foreign policy as part of a broader purge of the US government.Trump has vowed to revive Schedule F, a designation that would strip tens of thousands of federal employees of their protections as civil servants and define them instead as political appointees, giving Trump immense powers to fire “rogue bureaucrats”, as he called them in a campaign statement.Within the State Department, there are concerns that Trump could target the bureaus that focus specifically on issues that he has attacked during his reelection campaign such as immigration. In particular, he could slash entire bureaus of the State Department, including the bureau of population, refugees and migration (PRM, which resettled 125,000 refugees to the US in 2022 alone), as well as the bureau of democracy, human rights and labor, which has focused on the violation of the rights of Palestinians by Israel.Project 2025, a policy memo released by the conservative Heritage Foundation, suggested that Trump would merely reassign PRM to shift resources to “challenges stemming from the current immigration situation until the crisis can be contained” and said it would demand “indefinite curtailment of the number of USRAP [United States refugee admissions program] refugee admissions”.But the blueprint, authored by Kiron Skinner, a former director of policy planning at the State Department during the first Trump administration, went further, suggesting that Trump could simply freeze the agency’s work for a complete reevaluation of its earlier policy.“Before inauguration, the president-elect’s department transition team should assess every aspect of State Department negotiations and funding commitments,” a section of the memo said. After inauguration, Skinner wrote, the secretary of state should “order an immediate freeze on all efforts to implement unratified treaties and international agreements, allocation of resources, foreign assistance disbursements, domestic and international contracts and payments, hiring and recruiting decisions, etc” pending a review by a political appointee.“Everyone is bracing [themselves],” said one diplomat stationed abroad. “Some [diplomats] may choose to leave before he even arrives.”Trump has also vowed to “overhaul federal departments and agencies, firing all of the corrupt actors in our national security and intelligence apparatus”.As Joe Biden enters his lame duck period, the administration will focus on trying to push through $6bn in aid that has already been approved for Ukraine, as well as exerting whatever leverage remains in his administration to find an unlikely ceasefire in Gaza.At the same time, they will have to calm a nervous world waiting to see what Trump has planned for his second term.“I think they’re going to do everything they can to make the case that the United States needs to continue to aid Ukraine, and they’ll have to spend a lot of time, I’m sure, dealing with nervous Ukrainians and nervous Europeans,” said Fontaine. At an upcoming G20 summit in Rio, the current administration was “going to try to reassure the rest of the world that a lot of the things that they have done over the past four years are going to stick into the future rather than just be kind of undone”.“And,” he added, “we’ll see what the reaction to that is.” More