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      ‘This victory is a mandate’: rightwing groups ready with policy proposals for new Trump administration

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      As Donald Trump prepares to move back into the White House, he’ll have a host of rightwing groups trying to influence his staffing choices and policy proposals, including the group behind Project 2025, despite Trump’s insistence they won’t be involved.Democrats repeatedly ran attacks on Trump over Project 2025, the conservative manifesto that its writers want to guide a second Trump administration. Trump tried to distance himself from it and from the group behind it, the Heritage Foundation, one of DC’s biggest thinktanks.The Heritage president, Kevin Roberts, congratulated Trump on his “hard-fought victory” that came despite the “sham” indictments and against a “relentless leftwing machine”.“The entire conservative movement stands united behind him as he prepares to secure our wide-open border, restore the rule of law, put parents back in charge of their children’s education, restore America to its proper place as a leader in manufacturing, put families and children first, and dismantle the deep state,” Roberts said.Other groups, namely the America First Policy Institute, have avoided the limelight that backfired on Project 2025 and instead worked behind the scenes to ally themselves with Trump and seek to influence his administration. Trump named Linda McMahon, the chair of the institute’s board, as a co-chair of his transition team, giving the America First Policy Institute a critical role.The institute, started in 2021 and stacked with Trump allies, said in a tweet that it “stands ready to support bold governance that puts Americans first”. It also shared a video clip with the former acting United States attorney general Matt Whitaker talking about deportations and sanctuary cities, key alignments with Trump’s policy goals.“This victory is a mandate to restore our nation to a place of safety, opportunity, and prosperity rooted in freedom,” the America First Policy Institute said. “Together, we’ll secure borders, strengthen the economy, & uphold the freedoms that define us – for a stronger future.”The institute has held trainings for people that could serve in the Trump White House and has a lengthy agenda published online, complete with plans for immigration, education, energy and elections. The New York Times recently reported that the group has “installed itself as the Trump campaign’s primary partner in making concrete plans to wield power again”.The heads of both the America First Policy Institute and the Heritage Foundation have roots in the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a state-based conservative thinktank. Brooke Rollins, CEO of the America First Policy Institute, ran the Texas foundation for 15 years, and Roberts was the foundation’s CEO before he was tapped by Heritage.Another organization, America First Legal, is headed by former Trump adviser Stephen Miller. It has been filing lawsuits that boost Trump and other conservatives on issues like election fraud, diversity programs, public records disputes and government overreach. Miller could return to the Trump administration, but it’s likely the group will remain an outside rightwing legal monitor to help the incoming president.What could Trump’s policies be?Project 2025’s sprawling “mandate for leadership” details in 900-plus pages how each government agency could be altered under a conservative president. The project includes a database of potential hires and a training program for those who could staff a Trump administration, though Trump’s team has said none of the people associated with Heritage’s staffing suggestions would be hired. That would be a feat, given the extensive reach the project had – it was signed on to by more than 100 conservative groups, and many of those who wrote chapters or otherwise contributed had played some kind of role in the previous Trump administration.The project’s biggest suggestion is to designate exponentially more federal government employees as political appointees rather than non-partisan civil servants. It also wants to downsize the government. Trump’s plan also involves downsizing the federal government, something he tried to start implementing near the end of his first term.The project suggests many ways to restrict immigration, both through beefed-up border security and through limiting legal immigration programs for groups like students and low-skilled workers. That’s another pillar for Trump, who made mass deportations a central theme of his campaign.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOn education, the project wants to get rid of the Department of Education and increase the use of vouchers that use public money for private schools – both of which Trump has suggested as well. Conservatives have sought the dismantling of the department for decades, so far without success.Most chapters of Project 2025 mention discarding any programs that promote LGBTQ+ rights and diversity. Trump has railed against these ideals on the campaign trail, promising to root out trans women from sports and in schools.Abortion access is one area where Trump and the project could differ, though Trump’s plans for abortion have been muddled. The project wants to end federal approval of abortion pills, track abortion data and root out anything that is seen as promoting abortion as healthcare. It doesn’t call for a direct ban on the procedure, and Trump has said he wouldn’t approve of one either, but many of these policies would make access significantly more difficult.The America First Policy Institute suggests many of the same policies, though it wants to go further than Project 2025 with federal employees, the New York Times notes, by making most federal workers at-will employees who would not receive civil service protections.Other ideas the institute has pushed include, according to the Times, “halting federal funding for Planned Parenthood and for mandatory ultrasounds before abortions, including those carried out with medication. It seeks to make concealed weapons permits reciprocal in all 50 states, increase petroleum production, remove the United States from the Paris Agreement, impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients and establish legally only two genders.”A policy agenda pamphlet from the institute starts by discussing the Christian foundations of the US and imploring Christians to get involved in the government “before it’s too late”. The policy agenda for the pamphlet was written “through the lens of their biblical foundations and applications to provide Christians more information on the issues and solutions needed for the restoration of the nation”. More

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      The long Obama era is over | Osita Nwanevu

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      The ever-splenetic HL Mencken once wrote that “democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard”. He was no liberal, but it’s a line many Democrats today would be taken with. On Tuesday, the first wave of election postmortems have lamented, the American people took the full measure of Donald Trump ⁠– oaf, cheat, bigot and fascist ⁠– and re-elected him under no illusions, in full cognizance of what another Trump term would mean for the country.One can quibble with this just a bit: there’s a lot that emerged over the course of this campaign that most voters probably didn’t know much about, from a plan to invade Mexico that Trump may well have forgotten himself to late breaking news on the depth of his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Still, frustrated Democrats are directionally correct here on the whole. Trump won this election fairly, squarely and soundly as a well-known quantity ⁠– a former president and the most widely discussed man in the world, who will return to the White House in his 10th year at the center of American life.It remains alarmingly unclear how much worse the term we’re in for will be than Trump’s first, but those at the margins of American society may find out sooner than most. Mass deportations, he’s claimed, will begin on day one; according to Stephen Miller, Trump’s plan here includes the construction of “large-scale staging grounds”⁠ – internment camps ⁠– for immigrants along the southern border.It’s plain to all now that the specter of a crackdown and all that Trump has said and done on immigration weren’t a dealbreaker for Hispanic voters, many of whom have drifted towards Trump and the right, polls show, out of a faith that Trump isn’t really talking about them ⁠– that his focus is and will remain on immigrants who are ill-behaved.A tiny but unforgettable data point on this front was offered up on Wednesday by a reporter from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, who posted up outside an Ice field office and encountered undocumented immigrants who told him they would have voted for Trump themselves if they could. “They don’t believe Trump will deport them,” he posted on Twitter, “because they are here to work and are ‘not criminals’.”These are the kind of anecdotes that turn people into Menckens ⁠– that curdle our faith in democracy and society’s possibilities with nagging doubts and stubborn prejudices, none greater than an overarching disdain for humanity itself. The explanation for Trump’s victory likeliest to prevail among those despairing today ⁠– when all the granular analyses are through, as diligently as analysts will peck through polls and precinct data for answers in the weeks, months and years ahead ⁠– is that many or most Americans are stupid or evil. Talk of a national divorce, an idea that gained a remarkable and embarrassing amount of traction in our discourse early in Trump’s first term, is sure to return.Those of us more seriously committed to pulling this country off the road to hell, of course, can’t afford a retreat into nihilism or fantasy. Voters can be maddening, yes. They are motivated by competing and often contradictory thoughts and impulses. But the task of democratic politics, still today as always, is to engage and persuade them. That frustrating, difficult work isn’t for everyone; those not cut out for it should see themselves off of the political scene and leave it to others. Thinking through what to do now will be difficult enough without the interjections of those who’ve convinced themselves that there’s nothing to be done.As far as Democratic professionals are always concerned, the way forward is clear. The party, we’re hearing already, needs to moderate. Never mind the fact, and it is a fact, that the Harris campaign hewed to the political middle with extraordinary discipline. One of the campaign’s most visible surrogates in the last weeks of the campaign was Liz Cheney, who appeared with Harris in an October event at the birthplace of the Republican party. At the lone vice-presidential debate, Tim Walz signaled his agreement with JD Vance so often that their friendliness was lampooned by Saturday Night Live.The two most visible breaks the campaign made from the Biden record were a commitment to a lower capital gains tax hike than the one that Biden had proposed and a promise to name a Republican to the cabinet. On immigration, Harris castigated Trump repeatedly for torpedoing a restrictive immigration bill authored by the Republican senator James Lankford of Oklahoma. On foreign policy, she rebuffed demands from progressive activists on Gaza, reasserted Israel’s right to defend itself and committed to making our military the most lethal in the world. And the campaign also went out of its way to convince Americans that Harris herself would be willing to use deadly force if threatened ⁠– Americans heard much more from the campaign about her being a gun owner than about the possibility of her becoming our first female president.And although much of the campaign was focused on abortion rights and the status of women under Trump, that’s an issue where Democrats have been in keeping with mainstream opinion, as most Americans opposed the overturning of Roe v Wade. Outside the Harris campaign proper, it’s been reported that Future Forward ⁠– America’s largest single-candidate SuperPac, having raised an estimated $700m ⁠– tested many of its ads through the research firm of David Shor, most well-known in political circles as a proponent of avoiding policies, ideas and language out of step with prevailing public opinion, advice most typically reduced to the idea that candidates should target the political center, as Harris did.That advice is based mostly on the reasonable heuristic that candidates who are perceived as moderate tend to do better in competitive elections than candidates at the extremes, generally speaking. But politics is a complicated business. Harris’s best polls came early in the campaign, when all voters knew about her, if anything, was that she was a non-white woman from liberal California.Even if one doesn’t believe she lost the election because she pivoted to the center ⁠– even if one grants for the sake of argument that she would have done worse had she not made it ⁠– that pivot obviously did not win her the race. In fact, as of Wednesday, there was not a single state in the country where Harris had managed to substantially outperform Biden’s 2020 campaign, which, it should be said, was the only Democratic general election campaign in recent memory to have been run substantially to the left of a candidate’s initial primary platform.There are a few available excuses for this – it could be that Harris was a uniquely bad candidate or that she was unconvincing in her moderation given previous stances she’d taken. But Harris’s loss should be processed within the context of a checkered political record that Democratic moderates should, at some point, be asked to answer for. The path to the political center is not untried and untrodden.Barack Obama came to the White House in 2009 with a governing majority that included moderate Democratic senators from states like Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska and North Dakota. The simple answer to the question of why Democrats failed to codify abortion protections under him, a topic of some discussion in this election, is that 15 years ago, the Democratic party included many more pro-life centrists. In 2007, the House’s centrist Blue Dog caucus ⁠– not to be confused with the also centrist New Democrat Coalition ⁠– had so many potential candidates that it instituted a cap ensuring its ranks could comprise no more than 20% of Democrats in the chamber.That wound up being wholly unnecessary: over the course of Obama’s presidency, the years immediately preceding Trump, moderate Democrats were obliterated in races across the country, both federally and at the state level, for reasons that the party and centrist pundits refuse to grapple with seriously to this day. However reliably tacking to the center might have worked as an electoral prescription in the Clinton era, it clearly offers diminishing returns now. The Democratic party is not being doomed by an unwillingness to run moderate presidential campaigns or because the party is putting forward aspiring Squad members as candidates in Kansas. A growing number of American voters, especially in the places where Trump has done best, are looking at moderate Democratic candidates and moderate Democratic campaigns and choosing to vote for the right.That broad trend aside, the reasons why Trump won over so many voters, including voters who may not have liked his rhetoric or persona, in this particular election, may be comparatively simple to unpack. It’s obvious that Trump retained his appeal among Republicans and voters with deeply reactionary views, but it should also be plain now, given the gains he’s made, including among non-white voters, that he’s become a more broadly compelling figure ⁠– owing partially, it seems, to the perception that he was an alright president.As much as we might fear that his second term will be much worse for more people than the first, the fact remains that most voters, until the coronavirus pandemic, experienced the Trump presidency as a television drama with little material impact on their lives. The attempt to steal the 2020 election ultimately failed, as did the legislative push that would have affected most Americans most seriously – the drive to repeal Obamacare. The single legislative accomplishment of the Trump administration was instead a large tax cut.It seems reasonable now to think that Trump’s mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic and the economic crisis it triggered had more to do with Biden winning in 2020 than Biden’s appeals to American norms, but the lows of that year seem to have faded into memory in the time since and it seems likely that most Americans will go on to remember the pandemic as a rare act of God that was not especially anyone’s fault.The inflation of Biden’s term, on the other hand, has been blamed on Democratic impotence or mismanagement, an impression Harris evidently could not shake. And her efforts to redirect attention to the existential consequences of another Trump term clearly ran into a daunting wall ⁠– the fact that as much as Americans at the margins may have been hurt by his administration, life simply went on for most and the economy, for most of his term, felt better as they remember it than it has under Biden, booming economic figures now notwithstanding.Clearly, to many of the voters who mattered most in this election, Trump is eccentric, uncouth, but not an especially dangerous politician from a party they have long trusted more on the economy – the fully normalized standard-bearer of the only two real options Americans have when they go to the polls.Other voters who also mattered clearly saw Trump just as Democrats do ⁠– a bomb-throwing threat to politics as usual ⁠– and decided to vote for him precisely on that basis. And it’s this constituency that Democrats, moving forward, will probably have the hardest time pulling into the fold. Decrying Trump’s threat to our norms and institutions was a message that resonated primarily with Americans who respect them in the first place ⁠– not disaffected voters convinced, justifiably, that the wealthy and well-connected really run the show in Washington or cynics who figure their politicians should at least be entertaining if they can’t actually do anything to help them.There’s already been much discussion about the extent to which more and more young men, including young men of color, are falling into this category; we’ll have to wait for more reliable sources of data than notoriously bad exit polling for details on that. It should already be crystal clear, though, that the Democratic party has not demonstrated any capacity whatsoever to speak to voters who simply don’t believe in the politics of old and aren’t interested in returning to it.None of this should be taken as a dismissal of the fact that incumbent parties around the world have faltered in this economy; it is again plausible that Harris or any Democrat would have been overwhelmingly likely to lose. But beyond the contours of this particular race, the Democratic party – having lost twice, under different conditions, to a candidate that has fundamentally and fatally confounded so many of the assumptions shaping their approach to politics – is at a point of crisis.The long Obama era is over. The familiar homilies ⁠– about how there are no red states or blue states and Americans share a set of common values and working institutions novelly and externally threatened by agents of chaos like Trump ⁠– never described political reality. They now no longer work reliably even as political messaging. The hunt should be on for alternatives.At the moment, much of the Democratic party is processing their loss in stunned silence. Harris’s concession speech didn’t come until 4.00pm ET on Wednesday. It was reported that neither a victory nor a concession speech had been fully prepared on Tuesday night ⁠– no one had expected things to end so quickly.

      Osita Nwanevu is a Guardian US columnist More

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      The Democrats lost because they ran a weak and out-of-touch campaign | Bhaskar Sunkara

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      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

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      If Trump puts RFK Jr in charge of health, get ready for a distorted reality, where global health suffers

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      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

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      Tariffs, tech and Taiwan: how China hopes to Trump-proof its economy

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      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

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      It is galling to see Starmer ingratiate himself with Trump – but it would be horribly negligent if he didn’t | Gaby Hinsliff

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      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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      in US Politics

      Bernie Sanders says the left has lost the working class. Has it forgotten how to speak to them?

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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