US Politics

I turned on MSNBC after the election results came in and this, verbatim, was the commentary I heard: “This really was a historic, flawlessly run campaign. She had Queen Latifah [who] never endorses anyone! She had every prominent celebrity voice, she had the Taylor Swifties, she had the Beyhive. You could not run a better campaign in that short period of time.” Democrats, it seems, are already blaming their defeat this week on a host of contingent factors and not on their own shortcomings.It’s, of course, true that inflation has hurt incumbents across the world. But that doesn’t mean that there was nothing that Joe Biden could have done to address the problem. He could have rolled out anti-price-gouging measures early, pushed taxes on corporate super profits and more. Through well-designed legislation and the right messaging, inflation could have been both mitigated and explained. That’s what president Andrés Manuel López Obrador offered his supporters in Mexico and his governing coalition enjoyed commanding support.However, more than policy, Americans craved a villain. An incompetent communicator in old age, Biden couldn’t provide one. He couldn’t grandstand about hauling profiteers in front of Congress or taking on billionaires. He couldn’t use his bully pulpit effectively to tout his successes creating good manufacturing jobs or put America’s inflation (and GDP growth) in global context. He couldn’t do much of anything.As a result, 45% of voters, the highest number in decades, said they were financially worse off than they were four years ago. These people weren’t misled by the media, they were lamenting what’s obvious to everyone who lives in the United States: the soaring costs of groceries, housing, childcare and healthcare are both distributional and supply problems that the government has not tackled with urgency.Donald Trump, for his part, ran a less than impressive campaign. He wasn’t as coherent as he was in 2016 when he more frequently spoke to the economic grievances and personal experiences of ordinary workers. In a less populist mood, Trump felt comfortable enough to openly pander to unpopular billionaires like Elon Musk.As for Kamala Harris, her problem began all the way in 2020 when she was selected on identitarian grounds as a vice-presidential candidate despite performing terribly in the Democratic primaries. At a debate in March 2020, Biden pledged he would nominate a woman as vice-president. A host of influential NGOs then urged him to pick a Black woman. From the beginning, Harris was a choice driven more by optics than merits.Harris had an uphill battle from the start. She was forced to govern alongside an increasingly senile president and given poison-pill assignments like a role as “border czar”. Biden’s belated departure from a race he couldn’t win meant Harris didn’t have the legitimacy afforded by an open primary, a primary that if conducted early enough might have yielded a stronger candidate like the Georgia senator Raphael Warnock.Once given the reins of the party, the vice-president ran a campaign that was in both style and substance – like today’s Democratic party as a whole – driven by the professional class. Weakly populist ads targeted to swing states sat uneasily with attempts to make the race about abortion rights or Trump’s contempt for democracy. There was no unifying economic message that blamed elites for the country’s problems and laid out a credible vision of change. People knew that Harris was not Trump, but they didn’t know what she was going to do to solve their problems. She had the burden of incumbency without its benefits.Harris was smart enough to not overemphasize her own personal story and how historic her victory would have been. But the Democrats as a whole were still associated with the identitarian rhetoric and an emphasis on anti-discrimination over class-based redistribution that drove Harris’s selection as vice-president to begin with. Many of us sounded the alarm early about the prominence of efforts like White Women: Answer the Call and Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders for Kamala that focused on mobilization through skin color and gender instead of shared class interest. But a party increasingly divorced from workers ran with the activist base that it had rather than the voting base it needed to have.The result was a staggering shift in working-class support across demographics. Exit polls suggest that Harris lost 16 points with “voters of color” with no degree compared with Biden, with particularly sharp losses among Latinos. The abortion emphasis didn’t pan out either – Biden led among those who believed that abortion should be “legal in most cases” by 38 points. Harris appears to have tied Trump with those voters.In the lead-up to the 2016 election, Senator Chuck Schumer infamously argued: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” Without a New Deal–sized economic vision with a unified working class at the center, the Democrats have seen that calculation fail for the second time in eight years.

Bhaskar Sunkara is the president of the Nation, founding editor of Jacobin and author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequalities More

A key figure in Donald Trump’s election campaign and a likely figure in his incoming administration is Robert F. Kennedy Jr, or RFK Jr for short. After abandoning his own tilt at president, the prominent anti-vaxxer endorsed and campaigned for Trump, helping propel him to victory.

Kennedy promoted the banner “Make America Healthy Again” during the campaign. Now Trump has made clear Kennedy will play a significant role in health.

He has been promised a “big role” in guiding health policy, and Trump has said he would enable Kennedy to “go wild” on health, food and medicines.

So, who is Kennedy and what could his vision of a healthy America mean for public health in the US and globally?

Who is RFK Jr?

RFK Jr was born into a famous American political dynasty. He is the son of Robert F. Kennedy, who served as US attorney general under his brother John F. Kennedy, who was president. Robert F. Kennedy was then a senator before he was assassinated during his own run for the presidency in 1968.

His son, RFK Jr, was a prominent and effective environmental lawyer and activist, helping to pursue litigation against corporations, including Montsanto and DuPont.

For the past 20 years, however, he has been better known for his embrace of various conspiracy theories and as a key source of vaccine misinformation spreading on social media.

Kennedy has recently said he is “not going to take anyone’s vaccines away”. However, he continues to make false claims about COVID vaccines, and to promote false facts about vaccines and autism when there is scientific consensus there is no causal link.

What role will he have?

Although Trump has publicly committed to Kennedy having a major role, it is unclear what that will be.

Based on a video obtained by Politico, Kennedy said he was promised control of federal public health agencies, including the Department of Health and Human Services and its sub-agencies, as well as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Food and Drug Administration and National Institutes of Health.

Such broad authority would be unprecedented. Appointments to major agencies and cabinet positions in the US government require approval by Congress. Kennedy’s lack of experience in health care or public health, and his absence of scientific training and credentials, will make such an approval uncertain. His unscientific allegations would resurface and there would be an almost certain media circus.

Even if Kennedy was in a position of authority, many changes to these federal agencies would require Congressional oversight. For instance, any changes to how drugs are approved would be challenging to implement in the short term.

This is not to underestimate the damage Kennedy could do. In the past, Trump circumvented Congressional approval for various posts by appointing “acting officials”. So even without any official post, Kennedy’s potential influence in the Trump administration is alarming.

More misinformation

It is no surprise Trump has embraced Kennedy as the “health czar” of his second presidency. They have both spread COVID misinformation and promoted unproven treatments, particularly early in the pandemic. These include promoting hydrocholoroquine (when there is strong evidence of its toxic effects to the heart).

Kennedy leverages the language of science to give a veneer of credibility. He promises to return health agencies “to their rich tradition of gold-standard, evidence-based science” and to “clean up” agencies he accuses of being corrupt. He may well roll back regulatory controls that protect the health of Americans from unproven treatments.

If Kennedy is to be the health czar of the Trump presidency, his platform to recruit Americans to his anti-science agenda would be considerably enhanced. The result? The very real threat of worsening the public’s health.

Outbreaks of vaccine-preventable infections, such as measles, will rise.

Many Americans also grew up with fluoridated water and have not witnessed the impacts of widespread dental caries (tooth decay). So, Kennedy may be well placed to convince enough of the American people that fluoridated water is dangerous, and that fluoride should be an individual’s choice.

Governments and public health officials may face an uphill battle to maintain fluoride in the community water supply, rolling back one of the greatest public health achievements of the past century.

If Kennedy’s anti-science claims gain traction, his legacy will be the opposite of the banner “Make America Healthy Again”. The health of the American population will deteriorate with far-reaching impacts for decades to come.

There are global implications, too

The potential harms of elevating someone like Kennedy to positions of authority and influence will not just affect Americans.

For instance, after Kennedy and his anti-vaccine organisation visited Samoa in 2019, the deaths of two children were falsely attributed to the measles vaccination. Vaccination rates in Samoa plummeted to 31% (half the previous rate) and a subsequent measles outbreak killed 83 people.

Kennedy questioned if the deaths were related to a “defective vaccine” and denied he had any hand in spreading misinformation.

One of the outstanding achievements of the previous Trump presidency was Operation Warp Speed, which enabled the development, testing and mass production of COVID vaccines at unprecedented speed, saving many millions of lives around the world.

Should another pandemic occur over the next four years, with Kennedy in the White House, the US is unlikely to provide similar leadership.

Kennedy has been deeply critical of COVID vaccine development, including in his best-selling 2021 book, The Real Anthony Fauci, about the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Kennedy said COVID vaccines were not sufficiently tested and continued to advocate for disproven COVID treatments, specifically hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin.

In a podcast earlier this year, Fauci recalled a presentation Kennedy gave him about vaccinations. For 40 minutes Kennedy “showed slide after slide after slide that […] made no sense at all”.

Later, Fauci spoke with Kennedy saying:

Bobby, I believe you care about children and you care that you don’t want to hurt them. But you got to realise that from a scientific standpoint, what you’re saying does make no sense.

Unfortunately, in the distorted reality of a Trump administration with Kennedy at his side, truth and science may no longer matter. And the health of the world will suffer. More

China is bracing itself for four years of volatile relations with its biggest trading partner and geopolitical rival, as the dust settles on the news that Donald Trump will once again be in the White House.On Thursday China’s president, Xi Jinping, congratulated Trump on his victory and said that the two countries must “get along with each other in the new era”, according to a Chinese government readout.“A stable, healthy and sustainable China-US relationship is in the common interest of both countries and is in line with the expectations of the international community,” Xi said.But the reality is that Trump’s second presidency, which will begin as China grapples with a difficult economic situation and an entrenched, bipartisan hawkishness in Washington, will be a challenge for Beijing.“Trump 2.0 is likely to be more destructive than the 2017 version,” said Wang Dong, a professor of international relations at Peking University, in a pre-election interview with Chinese media.“Compared with his first term in office in 2017, Trump’s views in his second campaign in 2024 have not changed much, but the domestic situation and international environment have changed dramatically … during the Trump 2.0 period, China and the United States are likely to have constant friction and conflict”.The trade war ‘will be worse’Analysts have said Trump’s approach to China will be hard to predict. During his last presidency he swung from praising Xi as a great leader and friend, to presiding over a raft of hawkish policies and waging a trade war that pitted the world’s two biggest economies against each other.Xi, now presiding over a far worse domestic economy, is likely hoping to avoid a repeat of the trade war, but may be out of luck. During the campaign, Trump promised to impose tariffs of 60% on all Chinese imports, which could affect $500bn worth of goods, asset managers PineBridge Investments suggested to Reuters.View image in fullscreenYu Jie, a senior research fellow at Chatham House, said that policymakers in Beijing have been preparing for a Trump victory for months. The trade war “will be worse than the first term of Trump,” Yu said. So the Chinese government is trying to lessen its exposure to the US ahead of time.One approach has been to increase China’s trade volumes with global south countries. In September, at the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation summit in Beijing, Xi announced that China would introduce a regime of zero tariffs for developing countries that have diplomatic relations with Beijing, including 33 in Africa. Such policies stand in stark contrast to the economic barriers between China and the US.And amid restrictions from the US and its allies on China’s ability to purchase the most advanced technology for making semiconductors, Chinese firms have become focused on building their own alternatives.The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology recently revealed that it had built a lithography scanner capable of producing chips as small as 65 nanometers. That is still well behind the most cutting-edge technology made by ASML, the Dutch company that has been blocked from selling certain equipment to China because of a Dutch government agreement with the US, but it is still an improvement on where China’s capabilities were even two years ago.‘A poisoned chalice’When it comes to geopolitics, Trump’s unorthodox approach may be an opportunity for Beijing, some analysts noted. With Trump in the White House, “there will be no violence in Taiwan,” said Shen Dingli, a senior international relations scholar in Shanghai. “He will make a deal”.Whether or not any such deal would be acceptable to either Beijing or Taipei is another matter. Trump’s position on Taiwan, which China regards as part of its territory, has been very unclear. During his first presidential term the US increased arms sales to Taiwan and lifted restrictions on contacts between US and Taiwanese officials.However earlier this year Trump called into question the US’s continued support of Taiwan, accusing it of stealing American semiconductor industry, and suggesting Taiwan should pay for US protection.But in an interview last month, Trump said that that he wouldn’t have to use military force to prevent a blockade on Taiwan – one mooted option for a possible Chinese attempt at annexing it – because Xi “respects me and he knows I’m f— crazy”, he was quoted as saying.View image in fullscreenHe promised tariffs of 150-200% if China tried a blockade. But that too raises complications. There are reportedly hundreds of Taiwanese businesses in China, who would all be vulnerable to China-targeted tariffs. On Thursday, Taipei said it would help Taiwanese businesses to relocate production from China, ahead of Trump tariffs. Economy minister JW Kuo said the impact on the businesses otherwise would be “quite large”.Drew Thompson, senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam school of international studies says Trump would be unlikely to use Taiwan as a bargaining chip in any “deal” with Xi. If only because Xi is unlikely to accept it as one.“The trade itself is a poisoned chalice for Xi because he is conceding [Taiwan] is not already part of China and he needs to trade for it.”Alexander Huang, an associate professor at Tamkang University, told a panel in Taipei on Thursday that while Trump’s behaviour may be unpredictable, his logic was not. “He does not want the US to be taken advantage of,” Huang said, suggesting that if Trump were to commit US forces to defend Taiwan against China, it would be purely to protect US interests.One of the major sticking points in China’s relationship with the west in recent years has been its continued economic and political support for Russia during the invasion of Ukraine. Xi presents himself as a global statesman who can help to broker peace, but western analysts say that China’s deepening economic and political ties have prolonged rather than resolved the crisis.Trump has claimed that he could end the war “in 24 hours”. But many US allies fear the more likely outcome is that Trump reduces the flow of military aid to Ukraine, or pressures Kyiv to accept a deal in which it loses control of some territory to Russia.“If Trump’s support to Ukraine reduces, that gives China a chance to jump to the negotiating table,” Yu said. Along with the ongoing war in Gaza, “Beijing will exploit the line that the US is the single most destructive force in the world, while Beijing brings stability”. More

Dawn had barely broken, and nor had Kamala Harris publicly conceded, when Keir Starmer tweeted his congratulations to the not-quite-officially President-elect Donald Trump.Britain would, he said, stand “shoulder to shoulder” with its old ally, as it always does. Though he got the early opportunity he wanted to congratulate the new president-elect even more fulsomely down the phone, those words will have been gut-wrenching for many people. How can it be business as usual, with a president whose own former chief of staff said he met the definition of a fascist? What on earth makes Starmer think he can influence Trump for the better, the usual rationale for engaging with unsavoury leaders, where Trump’s own advisers repeatedly failed? The only people he ever really heeded, the British-born former White House adviser Fiona Hill once told one of Theresa May’s aides, were the now late Queen and the pope.Starmer’s obvious answer, of course, is that it would be an act of breathtaking negligence not to even bother trying; that he can’t be squeamish when there are workers afraid of losing their jobs in a trade war, Ukrainians dying under Russian bombardment, and future generations who would pay a terrible price for the US reneging on its climate commitments. The less obvious one, however, is that if he cannot get Trump’s ear then Trump will get his hot takes on the British national interest elsewhere. Starmer may have got that phone call, but it was Nigel Farage who spent election night at the Trump victory party in Mar-a-Lago.Though this isn’t the result a Labour government wanted, it’s the one it has war-gamed hardest. The charm offensive began months before Starmer and Trump’s relatively cordial dinner in September, with the foreign secretary, David Lammy, making surprisingly deep inroads in Republican circles for a man who once called Trump a woman-hating, neo-Nazi sociopath. But as Lammy’s allies point out, JD Vance once called Trump an idiot who might be the US’s Hitler, which didn’t stop Trump picking Vance as a running mate. The president-elect is both intensely transactional – if anything, he may see British desperation to make up lost ground with him as useful – and wildly unpredictable, a combination offering both opportunity and threat.The lesson Downing Street takes from studying Trump is essentially the one many Republican voters do: that he says a lot of wild stuff but doesn’t always mean it, and if he does he often unexpectedly changes his mind. Already there are hints he might give Ukraine more time to win its war, if only because he hates being associated with losing, while senior Republicans are signalling that “friendly” nations could escape his threatened trade tariffs – a crude signal that there will be rewards for compliance.But there will surely also be a price: Starmer could easily find himself pushed to pick a side in trade negotiations between the US and Brussels, just as he is trying to mend fences with Europe. What if a British government that has staked everything on economic growth finds its business interests pulling one way, and its shared interest in the defence of Europe against Russian aggression pulling the other? At the very least, those budget forecasts – and the money set aside for extra defence spending – may well soon need revisiting.In her memoirs, Theresa May describes the acute anxiety of standing beside then president Trump at a press conference where he was supposed to send a critical signal to Russia by stressing his commitment to Nato, not knowing whether he’d actually say it until he opened his mouth. But at least she could plan for that scenario in advance: harder to deal with was Trump’s tendency to blindside Britain with things nobody saw coming. For her, that meant Trump pulling troops out of Iraq and Syria without warning or concern for British forces fighting alongside them, lobbying her to bring Farage into cabinet, and casually retweeting incendiary social media posts by the British far right. This time, he won’t just be surfing X when he’s bored but actively integrating its owner, Elon Musk – who is already regularly kicking lumps out of Starmer, most recently over cutting inheritance tax relief for farmers – into his administration.The Southport riots, during which Musk tweeted that “civil war is inevitable” and promoted conspiracy theories about white protesters being more harshly treated than ethnic minority ones, convinced many Labour MPs that hate and disinformation online must be tackled. But how brave are ministers prepared to be if that means a direct hit on someone in Trump’s inner circle?Labour MPs in seats where Reform came second in July are, meanwhile, now visibly rattled, and newly fearful of handing Farage further sticks to beat them with. Though Starmer learned his own lesson about the salience of immigration or the risks of alienating white working-class voters way back in 2019, Harris’s defeat is only likely to underline that message for him.There’s no denying that for progressives, the world now looks lonelier than it did; that the choice the US has made will have consequences smaller countries can only do so much to contain. But that doesn’t mean Britain can afford to sit the coming battles out, assuming someone else will do the dirty work. Starmer’s job now is to pull whatever levers he can reach, in alliance with whoever he can persuade to join him; ours, meanwhile, is never to give up hope.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist More

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Donald Trump was elected US president this week. Despite vastly outspending her opponent and drafting a galaxy of celebrities to her cause – Jennifer Lopez, Oprah Winfrey, Ricky Martin, Taylor Swift – Democratic candidate Kamala Harris lost the Electoral College, the popular vote and all the swing states.

This has bewildered and dismayed liberals – and much of the mainstream media. In the aftermath, progressive Senator Bernie Sanders excoriated the Democratic Party machine.

It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.

He continued:

Unbelievably, real, inflation-accounted-for weekly wages for the average American worker are actually lower now than they were 50 years ago.

Harris ran a campaign straight out of the centrist political playbook. Sanders observed that the 60% of Americans who live pay cheque to pay cheque weren’t convinced by it.

Bernie Sanders has excoriated the Democratic Party for abandoning the working-class.
Bernie Sanders/AAP

She sought to dampen social divisions rather than accentuate them. She spoke of harmony, kindness and future prosperity, of middle-class aspiration rather than poverty and suffering. Her speeches often repeated rhetoric like her promise to be “laser-focused on creating opportunities for the middle class”.

This was unlikely to endear her to those for whom social mobility appears impossible.

Words of blood and thunder resonated

Jaime Harrison, the Democratic National Committee chair, refuted Sanders’ claims, saying:

[Joe] Biden was the most pro-worker president of my lifetime – saved union pensions, created millions of good paying jobs and even marched in a picket line.

But did those workers feel like the Democrats were speaking to them? And did they like what they heard?

Class politics needs to not only promise to redistribute wealth, but do so in a language that chimes with people’s lived experience – more effectively than Trump’s right-wing populism.

Harris’s genial, smiling optimism failed to strike a chord with voters hurting from years of inflation and declining real wages. And her use of celebrity advocates echoes writer Jeff Sparrow’s criticism of the left as “too often infatuated with the symbolic power of celebrity gestures” after Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential election loss.

Kamala Harris’ ‘galaxy of celebrities’ did not help her.
Annie Mulligan/AAP

By contrast, Trump’s words of blood and thunder hit the spot – not only in his rural and outer suburban strongholds, but among those voters in rust-belt inner cities, who had voted decisively for Biden four years earlier. The greatest threat to America, he said, was from “the enemy from within”. He defined them as: “All the scum that we have to deal with that hate our country; that’s a bigger enemy than China and Russia.”

Harris’s attempt to build her campaign around social movements of gender and race failed abjectly. In particular, the appeal to women on reproductive rights, and to minority voters by preaching racial harmony resonated less than Trump’s emphasis on law and order and border control. Women voted more strongly for Harris than for Trump, but not in sufficient numbers to get her into the Oval Office. Latinos flocked to Trump despite his promises to deport undocumented immigrants.

This shows it takes more than political rhetoric to bake people into voting blocs.

Those of us who fixate on politics and the news media tend to overread the ability of public debate to set political agendas, especially during election campaigns. In fact, few voters pay much attention to politics. They rarely watch, listen to or read mainstream media and have little political content in their social media newsfeeds. Exit polls indicate Trump led with these kinds of voters.

Donald Trump’s ‘words of blood and thunder’ seem to have hit the spot with many working-class voters.
Evan Vucci/AAP

Is populism the new class?

In much of the Western world, class has receded from the political vocabulary. As manufacturing industries declined, so did the old trade unions whose base was among blue-collar workers.

In 1983, 20.1% of Americans were union members. In 2023, membership had halved to 10%. Few of those in service jobs join unions, largely because many are precariously employed.

These days, politicians in the old social democratic parties, like the Democrats in the US and Labor here in Australia, are much more likely to have come up through law and business than the union movement. In the US, ex-teacher Tim Walz was the first candidate on a Democratic Party presidential ticket without law school experience since Jimmy Carter.

Ex-teacher Tim Walz is unusual as a politician without a law or business bavkground.
Anthony Souffle/Star Tribune/AAP

The language of populism – the people versus the elites – is a smokescreen that obscures real structures of power and inequality. But it comes much more easily to the lips of Americans than that of class.

Trump’s political cunning rests in his ability to identify as one of the people, even to paint the left as the enemy of disenfranchised so-called patriots. “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country,” he told a Veteran’s Day rally last year.

He conjures up (an illusory) golden age of prosperity in a once-great monocultural America, where jobs were protected by tariffs and crime was low, helped by the reality of rising cost of living and falling real wages. There is plenty of room on this nostalgic landscape for Mister Moneybags, an old-fashioned tycoon, even one with the “morals of an alley cat”, as Joe Biden said in the debate that finished his 2024 candidacy.

The elite, by contrast, are faceless: politicians, bureaucrats, the “laptop class”, as Elon Musk calls knowledge workers, and the grey cardinals of the “deep state” (a conspiratorial term for the American federal bureaucracy).

According to Trump’s narrative, they conspire in the shadows to rob decent, hardworking folk of their livelihoods. This accords with a real geographical divide: people in cities with high incomes and valuable real estate, and those in the rust-belt with neither.

Trump voters speak the language of populism.
Brandon Dill/EPA

Australian populism

In Australia, the language of populism has deeper roots than that of class. Students of Australian history learn that national identity was based on distinguishing ourselves from the crusty traditions of the motherland: the belief that, as historian Russel Ward wrote, all Australians should be treated equally, that “Jack is as not only as good as his master … but probably a good deal better”.

The Australian Labor Party was there when this egalitarian myth was born. But as the gap between rich and poor grows here, as elsewhere, it has become less plausible than once it was.

It remains to be seen whether Anthony Albanese – whose life journey has taken him from social housing to waterfront mansion – is prepared to bring the sharp elbows of class politics, in both policy and language, to next year’s election campaign. The experience of Kamala Harris suggests he would be well advised to do so. More

The Democratic party has begun to pick through Kamala Harris’s loss to Donald Trump in the presidential election, with the post-pandemic headwinds, a failure to distance herself from Joe Biden and overestimating abortion access instead of the economy as an election winner, all reported by congressional Democrats as reasons for the decisive loss.Biden struck an optimistic tone in an address to the nation, praising Harris for an “inspiring” campaign. Comments from the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, claiming Democrats had “abandoned working-class people”, earned a rebuke from the Democratic party chair, Jaime Harrison.Biden’s decision to pursue re-election and then his late withdrawal drew criticism from numerous former top Democrat advisers and politicians, including Michael Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor and presidential candidate, who said “it probably wasn’t great to cover up President Joe Biden’s infirmities until they became undeniable on live TV”.Biden’s press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, pushed back on the accusation that it was arrogant for the 81-year-old president to run for a second term: “This is the president who has been the only person [who] has been able to beat Donald Trump.”Here’s what else happened on Thursday:US presidential election news and updates

Trump has named Susie Wiles, the manager of his victorious campaign, as his White House chief of staff, making her the first woman to hold the influential role. She was seen as the leading contender for the job but has avoided the spotlight, even refusing Trump’s invitation to take the microphone during his victory speech on Wednesday. Learn more about Wiles here.

Vladimir Putin has congratulated Trump on his victory and expressed admiration for Trump’s response to an assassination attempt. Putin said he was ready for dialogue with Trump, which will cause disquiet in Kyiv and other European capitals. Hours beforehand, Russia had carried out a massive drone attack on Kyiv, and killed four people in a strike on a hospital in Zaporizhzhia.

Republicans have expanded their control of the US Senate, after Dave McCormick defeated the Democratic incumbent in Pennsylvania. Control of the House remained unclear on Thursday, with Republicans closing in on the 218 seats required for a majority.

Healthcare providers have reported unprecedented surges in demand for reproductive and gender-affirming medications in the wake of Trump’s victory, even greater than the day after Roe v Wadefell.

California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, announced a special session of the state’s legislature to ensure the attorney general’s office and other state agencies have the funding they need. California has been setting up guardrails to protect its residents’ rights under an adversarial federal government.

Trump as president may give Israel a “blank cheque” for all-out war against Iran, a former CIA director and US defence secretary has predicted. Palestinians in Ramallah argue things cannot get any worse for them than it has been under Biden.

Elon Musk has said Trump’s podcast appearances made “a big difference” in the election, as the manosphere and so-called “heterodoxy” celebrate the result. Meanwhile, searches for the 4B movement have spiked on Google and TikTok as women discuss cutting off heterosexual dating with men.

A Texas judge has ruled against Biden’s programme offering a path to citizenship for certain immigrant spouses of US citizens, a blow that could keep the scheme blocked through the president’s final months in office. Fear has risen in undocumented communities and families face being torn apart at the prospect of Trump’s promised mass deportation programme.

Americans see immigration as the most pressing issue for Trump to address, and a large majority believe he will order mass deportations of people living in the US illegally, a Reuters/Ipsos poll has found.

The US Federal Reserve has cut interest rates by a quarter of a percentage point. Its chair, Jerome Powell, said the election result would have no “near-term” impact on rates and insisted he would not resign if Trump asked him to leave early, adding that firing a Fed governor was “not permitted under the law”.

The British government will ask its ambassador to Washington, Dame Karen Pierce, to stay in post as Trump takes power, ahead of a complex shuffle of UK security and diplomatic jobs in the new year.

Sales have surged for dystopian books, with The Handmaid’s Tale jumping more than 400 places on bestseller charts since Wednesday and On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder enjoying a similar rush.
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