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      ‘No time to pull punches’: is a civil war on the horizon for the Democratic party?

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      Joe Biden stood before the American people, millions of whom were still reeling from the news of Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential race, and reassured them: “We’re going to be OK.”In his first remarks since his vice-president and chosen successor, Kamala Harris, lost the presidential election, Biden delivered a pep talk from the White House Rose Garden on a sunny Thursday that clashed with Democrats’ black mood in the wake of their devastating electoral losses. Biden pledged a smooth transfer of power to Trump and expressed faith in the endurance of the American experiment.“Setbacks are unavoidable, but giving up is unforgivable,” Biden said. “A defeat does not mean we are defeated. We lost this battle. The America of your dreams is calling for you to get back up. That’s the story of America for over 240 years and counting.”The message severely clashed with the dire warnings that many Democrats, including Biden, have issued about the dangers of a second Trump term. They have predicted that Trump’s return to power would jeopardize the very foundation of American democracy. They assured voters that Trump would make good on his promise to deport millions of undocumented people. And they raised serious doubts about Trump’s pledge to veto a nationwide abortion ban.Now as they stare down four more years of Trump’s presidency, Democrats must reckon with the reality that those warnings were for naught. Not only did Trump win the White House, but he is on track to win the popular vote, making him the first Republican to do so since 2004. Senate Republicans have regained their majority, and they appear confident in their chances of holding the House of Representatives, with several key races still too close to call on Friday morning.The bleak outcome has left Democrats bereft, unmoored and furious when they previously thought this week would be the cause of joy and celebration. They are now heading into a brutal political wilderness with its current leaders tarnished by advanced age and a catastrophic defeat and a younger generation that is yet to fully emerge.The party also faces a likely brutal civil war between its leftists and centrists over the best way forward – one that will be fought over the levers of power in the party at every level from the grassroots of all 50 US states to the crowded corridors of Congress in Washington.The stark reality has left Democrats asking themselves the same question over and over again: how did we get here?The hypotheses and accusations rose from whispers to shouts starting on Wednesday. Although a handful of Democrats suggested Harris should have done more to distance herself from Biden, few party members appeared to blame the nominee, who was credited with running the best possible campaign given her roughly 100-day window to close a considerable gap with Trump.Some Democrats blamed Biden, who withdrew from the presidential race in July only after mounting pressure from his party after a disastrous debate performance against Trump. Jim Manley, who served as a senior adviser to the former Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid, said that Biden never should have run for re-election.“This is no time to pull punches or be concerned about anyone’s feelings,” Manley told Politico. “He and his staff have done an enormous amount of damage to this country.”In an even more damning indictment, Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker who was applauded for her role in pressuring Biden to step aside, suggested the party should have held an open primary.“Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Pelosi told the New York Times on Thursday. “We live with what happened. And because the president endorsed Kamala Harris immediately, that really made it almost impossible to have a primary at that time. If it had been much earlier, it would have been different.”View image in fullscreenA number of other senior Democratic aides complained to reporters – on background, without their names attached to the quotes – that Biden had put the party in a terrible position by not reckoning earlier with the widespread concerns over his age and unpopularity. (Biden would have been 86 at the end of his second term, while Trump will be 82 at the end of his.)The White House pushed back against those gripes, framing Democrats’ losses in a much more global context. Incumbents have lost ground around the world in the past year, a trend that experts largely blame on the anger and disillusionment spurred by the coronavirus pandemic and the ensuing high inflation it caused.The White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, cited this explanation during her press briefing on Thursday, while noting that Biden still believes he “made the right decision” in stepping aside.“Despite all of the accomplishments that we were able to get done, there were global headwinds because of the Covid-19 pandemic,” Jean-Pierre said. “And it had a political toll on many incumbents, if you look at what happened in 2024 globally.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDespite those headwinds, Democrats wonder if their communication strategy could have prevented Republicans’ triumph. Leaders of the party are now debating the role of new media and how dominant rightwing influencers, particularly in the so-called “manosphere”, helped propel Trump to victory.Left-leaning Van Jones posited that Democrats had focused too much on traditional media at the expense of cultivating a leftwing media ecosystem, saying in a Substack Live chat: “We built the wrong machine.”Or perhaps Democrats’ failure to connect with the concerns of working-class voters cost them the White House, as progressives such as Senator Bernie Sanders argued.“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,” Sanders said in his post-election statement. “In the coming weeks and months those of us concerned about grassroots democracy and economic justice need to have some very serious political discussions.”But who will lead those discussions? Biden will be 82 when he leaves the White House in January. Chuck Schumer, the Senate Democratic leader who has now been demoted to minority leader, is 73. Pelosi is 84. Sanders, who won re-election on Tuesday, will be 89 by the time his new term ends.The party must now look to a new generation of leaders, a pivot that many argue should have come earlier. Hakeem Jeffries, the House Democratic leader who still holds out a distant hope of becoming speaker in January if his party can win a majority, might lead the way. Progressive Democrats will probably be looking to popular lawmakers like congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to shape the party’s future. Other rank-and-file members have pointed to Gavin Newsom, the California governor who is already trying to “Trump-proof” his state, as an example for resisting the new administration.They will have a foundation to work from, party leaders assert. Although Trump’s victory was devastating to them, Democrats protected at least three and possibly five competitive Senate seats while mitigating Republican gains in the House. Even if House Republicans maintain control of the chamber, they will be forced to govern with a narrow majority that proved disastrous during the last session and could pave the wave for significant Democratic gains in 2026.For now, though, the Democrats who poured their hearts and souls into electing Harris as the first woman, first Black woman and first Asian American woman to serve as president seem exhausted. They have spent most of the past decade warning the country about the dangers of Trump and his political philosophy only for a majority of American voters to send him back to the White House.While Trump’s first electoral victory sparked a wave of outrage and protests among Democrats, his second win seemed met with a mournful sigh from many of his critics. Right now, Democrats are taking the time to grieve. And then, eventually, they will start to pick up the pieces of their party.Lauren Gambino contributed reportingRead more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

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      The Observer view on US election: lessons for the left in wake of damning defeat

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      Donald Trump’s unexpectedly clearcut victory in last week’s US presidential election is a wake-up call for the progressive left in America and Britain. The hard-right Republican nominee made gains in almost all voter groups, including in swing state cities, middle-class suburbs, working-class manufacturing centres and rural and farming communities. Black, Latino, Native American and younger voters, on whose support his Democratic rival, the vice-president, Kamala Harris, had pinned her hopes, also went for Trump in larger than anticipated numbers. Polling suggesting a dead heat was wrong. Trump scored an undeniable nationwide triumph, winning both the electoral college and the popular vote.The Democratic party’s inquest into what went wrong must honestly confront some uncomfortable truths. One concerns identity. It’s plain, on this showing at least, that membership of racial and ethnic minorities can no longer be blithely assumed to translate into support for a progressive left agenda. Another concerns priorities. Top-down policy agendas pursued by entitled and privileged social “elites” can alienate ordinary voters from all backgrounds. They simply cannot or will not relate to them.Likewise, Harris’s belief that support for abortion rights, while laudable, could be used as a decisive wedge issue to attract female voters was confounded by the 45% of women who backed Trump. For them, bread-and-butter issues mattered more. A CNN exit poll also found Trump’s support among college-educated and first-time voters, who usually favour the Democrats, rose, too. Unsurprisingly, most white men went with the white guy. Again, worries about prices, the economy, jobs and security might have determined their vote. But, sadly, many might have rejected the idea of a woman of colour as president.This was a comprehensive defeat, not only for Harris but for her boss, President Joe Biden, and for the Democratic party, which also lost control of the Senate and has probably failed once again to take the House of Representatives. It’s true that Harris had little more than three months to make her case. It’s possible that had the unpopular president stepped down earlier, as the former speaker Nancy Pelosi suggests, Harris or another candidate might have done better. It’s certain that, as usual, the economy was the top issue, and that most voters blame the Biden-Harris administration for doing a poor job. But if the significance of this debacle is to be fully understood, it is necessary to look beyond such conventional explanations.The heart of the problem is that Democrats have lost touch – and no longer seem to understand where at least half of all Americans are coming from. Harris’s brave show of positivity and her stress on inclusiveness, unity and joy jarred badly with the joyless, negative everyday experience of conflicted and divided voters. They complained that high inflation is ruining living standards, food is unaffordable, secure, well-paid jobs are a rarity amid influxes of cheap migrant labour – and that their current leaders disrespect and ignore them, and simply do not care about them. If this sounds familiar, it’s because similar grievances are fuelling the advance of Reform UK and European rightwing populist parties, which welcomed Trump’s victory.This fundamental disconnect is evident in other areas. One recent poll found that 45% of Americans say democracy does not do a good job protecting ordinary people. Trust in institutions, such as the justice system and the media, is eroding. Long gone are the days when three national TV networks and a clutch of self-important newspapers dictated the news agenda. Trump understood this. He took his campaign to popular podcasters and talk radio. He mostly avoided big set-piece interviews and risky prime-time debates. And, despite attempts on his life, he hosted raucous open-air rallies, defiantly offensive to the end.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionLaced with ever-increasing vulgarity, his speeches offered a deliberately gloomy, dark and angry contrast to Harris’s upbeat vision. He was, Trump said, “mad as hell”. He was going to get even. He would take down the elites. And he would make America great again. This furious narrative of victimhood, unfairness and retribution reflected the nation’s sour mood. Trump said he would fight for them – and enough of them believed him. Most thought the country was heading in the wrong direction anyway. They wanted a change. So, having fired him in 2020, they hired him for a second time – even though, according to the CNN poll, 54% view him unfavourably.“America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate,” Trump claimed – and this prospect is truly daunting. His mandate to “save the country” includes mass migrant deportations, unfunded tax cuts, sweeping import tariffs, expanded oil and gas drilling, abandoning the green agenda, repudiation of Nato, a free hand for Israel, betrayal of Ukraine to Russia, and promised Stalinist purges of political opponents, journalists and anybody else he dislikes. Britain, estranged from the EU, now faces a potential collapse of its US “special relationship” despite Keir Starmer’s awkward schmoozing of the president-elect. What a mess!Right now, Trump is in the pink. He has won a famous victory. But let’s not forget for a moment that he remains a fundamental danger to America and the world. At some point, Britain and the other western democracies may have to draw a line, even do the unthinkable and break with the US. As we have said before, Trump is unfit to hold the office to which he has just been re-elected. Proof of that contention will not be long in coming. More

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      We can rage about Donald Trump. Or we can be curious about why he appealed to so many | Peter Hyman

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      How can anyone vote for someone so… fill in the blank… racist, sexist, unconstitutional, hateful, unhinged? This is the question asked frequently in the UK and here in the States, where I have spent the past three weeks trying to understand the Trump phenomenon.Behind the question is an implied superiority; that we, the clever people, have identified the monster that is Donald Trump, but the deluded masses are too stupid to see it. But what I have found at the Trump rallies I’ve been to is not stupidity, but frustration, pain and a longing for respect.Tucker Carlson at Madison Square Garden captured this sentiment with his usual swagger. “They tell you, the people who can actually change a flat tyre, who pay your taxes and work 40 hours a week, that you are somehow immoral. We have a message for them: you are not better than us, you are not smarter than us.”To dismiss this as the politics of grievance is to dismiss what it feels like to be disrespected, to feel “a stranger in your own land”. To feel as though the college-educated are looking down at the non-college-educated.Even now, after his overwhelming victory, many still fume that Trump has returned to power on the back of a pack of lies, sometimes very big lies (like he won the 2020 election). And of course that’s part of the story. But his supporters have some justification for believing that his win has in fact been forged from a powerful truth. The economy is not being run in their interests, government is not working for them, and mainstream political parties have not been up to the job in recent years.This is what appealed to so many people including lifelong Democrats such as Bill, who was the first person I chatted to at a rally in Latrobe, just outside Pittsburgh. “I was a Democrat all my life, a local organiser. I was invited to a fundraiser, bought a new suit to look smart, turned up and listened to all the speeches. By the end of the evening, there had been a programme aimed at everyone – those on benefits, single mothers, new immigrants – but nothing of any kind at me, a dad of two children, trying to pay the mortgage, working hard to get on. I realised the Democrats were no longer for me.”Yes, there was a cultish feel to the mass of red Maga hats and rhythmic chants of USA, USA, and yes, a full buffet of conspiracy theories was often on the menu. But what motivated so many of them was a lack of order and control in their lives. If you don’t know who is coming across the border, you feel uneasy and at risk. If you can’t predict how much your groceries will cost week to week, you feel the pressure.And to solve this? You need a disruptor. Someone who doesn’t go along with the stale, failed, norms of political discourse, someone from outside politics who can hack through the undergrowth even if in doing so he might offend. If Trump was polite, generous, restrained and conciliatory, his supporters would find it impossible to believe he would give the system the good shake they believe it needs.So, Trump’s appeal is there in plain sight. It is not an aberration. It is not inexplicable. And now we know for certain, it’s not going away. The truth is the Democrats lost people – head and heart. They failed at being good technocrats (the head) with high inflation and open borders. And failed at telling a story in which struggling working families could feel seen and heard (the heart).This is now the challenge for the Democrats in the US fighting to win back power, and Labour in the UK trying to make a success of their victory. Trump’s win could be a moment, like Margaret Thatcher’s victory in 1979, where the old rules of politics are turned on their head and where the buildings blocks of a new progressive project need to be rebuilt from first principles.The outlines of what needs to happen will emerge. A project that is squarely back on the side of working people. Where we do the “heavy lifting” to get better and bolder policies on the cost of living, making work pay, securing our borders, providing for the aspirations of those who don’t go to university.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhere we understand that the way we govern is not working for too many people and needs to change fundamentally if we are to rebuild trust. Where we get to grips with a diffuse and polarised media and communicate far more cleverly. And where we tell a story about the common good, of belonging and respect, that is sufficiently hard-headed to bring people together.Trump won because he was the better candidate with a better message. I believe both his policies and approach will not in the end work, and will probably do a lot of damage on the way. But to millions, whether we admit it or not, he offered real hope – of greater prosperity, more security and fewer wars. Many looked to him as a protector – from a world of change and from patronising elites.We now have a choice: rage at Trump supporters – or curiosity. We can spend the coming months in fruitless intellectual contortions about whether he meets the criteria for being a fascist, or we can properly understand what has just happened and get to work deepening, widening and improving a new progressive agenda with the vim and vitality to mount a serious fightback. Peter Hyman is a former adviser to Keir Starmer and Tony Blair, currently working on a project to rebuild trust in politics and tackle far-right populism

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      Joe Biden to welcome Donald Trump to the White House on Wednesday

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      Joe Biden and Donald Trump will meet on Wednesday in the Oval Office, the White House announced on Saturday.Trump will take office on 20 January to become the 47th president of the United States, winning the position back for the Republicans after soundly defeating his Democratic rival and the current US vice-president, Kamala Harris, in the 5 November election.“At President Biden’s invitation, President Biden and President-elect Trump will meet in the Oval Office on Wednesday,” the press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said in a statement.Such a post-election meeting is traditional between the outgoing and the incoming presidents. It is scheduled for 11am.Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

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      But after Trump lost his bid for re-election in 2020 and then refused to concede to Biden and accept the result, wrongly claiming he had won but had been defrauded out of his victory, he did not host Biden at the White House during the transition in administrations.Then, on inauguration day, 20 January 2021, Trump also broke with tradition by again not receiving Biden, the 46th president – and his wife, incoming first lady Jill Biden – at the White House for the handover and accompanying them to the swearing-in ceremony outside the US Capitol.The Trumps left the White House that morning and flew to Florida.It was only two weeks after thousands of extremist supporters of Trump had broken into the Capitol to try in vain to stop the certification of Biden’s triumph, which led to Trump’s second impeachment, when he was accused of inciting an insurrection.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPreviously, the Obamas followed tradition in 2017 by welcoming Donald and Melania Trump at the White House before accompanying them to Trump’s inauguration, and Barack Obama hosted Trump, the then incoming 45th president, to the Oval Office in late 2016 after he’d defeated Hillary Clinton.This year, Biden had initially sought re-election but dropped out of the race in July after a disastrous debate against Trump, giving his anointed Democratic successor, Harris, a very short campaign for the presidency.The Associated Press and Reuters contributed reporting More

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      Arizona endures tense wait for final election result in last battleground

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      Arizona remained in a tense waiting game on Saturday for its election results, even as neighboring Nevada declared for Donald Trump overnight, giving the president-elect six out of seven swing states after election day on 5 November.In Arizona, official tallies were 83% complete by mid-morning on Saturday with Trump leading at 52.7% and Harris at 46%, or about 180,000 votes ahead. But enough ballots remain uncounted – 602,000 as of late Friday night – for the state to remain undeclared. The state sensationally flipped to Joe Biden and the Democrats in 2020.In the key US Senate race there between Republican Kari Lake and Democrat Ruben Gallego, Lake, who always denied that Biden won the White House fairly in 2020, was trailing the Democrat 48.5% to 49.5%, or by around 33,000 votes, mid-morning on Saturday.The contested primary for the seat sprang from Kyrsten Sinema, who was elected in 2018 for the Democrats, switched to become an independent and then announced she wasn’t seeking re-election this year.Other Arizona races remain close, including the sixth congressional district battle between incumbent Republican Juan Ciscomani and Democratic challenger Kirsten Engel, as the Democrats nationally wait to see if they can come from behind to flip control of the House of Representatives in Washington DC.The delay in reporting the races falls largely on Maricopa county, the fourth largest in the US, where the state capital, Phoenix, lies. The county on Friday evening reported 351,000 ballots yet to count. Some have not been through the first step of verifying the voter signature on the outside of the envelope. Officials expected ballot counting would continue for 10 to 13 days after election day.The long process for counting ballots is in part explained by the lengthy two-page ballot itself with election workers taking nearly double the usual amount of time to separate the two sheets from the mail-in envelope, lay them flat and check for damage, according to Votebeat.In Cochise county, a mechanical problem with tabulators caused them to work more slowly.According to the Arizona Republic newspaper, part of the state’s problem is “early-late” votes – early voting ballot papers that were filled in don’t get dropped off to be counted until election day itself.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“We have a substantial number of voters who take their early ballot and they kind of keep it on their kitchen counter for, like, three weeks,” state representative Alexander Kolodin told AZ Central.Kolodin, a Republican, is considering a proposal that would require early ballots to be returned in advance of election day, giving time for election officials to go through the process of verification.But amid heightened security in Arizona, with fears of violence, there has so far been no repeat of unrest over counting and long, drawn-out challenges that followed the 2020 election in Maricopa county – and no claims of election worker intimidation there. More

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      The US has lost faith in the American dream. Is this the end of the country as we know it?

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      A dozen years ago – an eternity in American politics – the Republican party was reeling from its fourth presidential election loss in six tries and decided that it needed to be a lot kinder to the people whose votes it was courting.No more demonising of migrants, the party resolved – it was time for comprehensive immigration reform. No more demeaning language that turned off women and minorities – it needed more of them to run for office.“We need to campaign among Hispanic, black, Asian, and gay Americans and demonstrate we care about them too,” the party asserted in a famously self-flagellating autopsy after Barack Obama’s re-election as president in 2012.Even Dick Armey, a veteran Texas conservative, told the authors of the report: “You can’t call someone ugly and expect them to go to the prom with you.”Just one voice on the right begged to differ: Donald Trump. “Does the @RNC [Republican National Committee] have a death wish?” he asked in a tweet.View image in fullscreenHis objection received little attention at the time, but it wasn’t long before he was offering himself as flesh-and-blood proof of how wrong the autopsy was. In announcing his first campaign for president in 2015, Trump called Mexicans rapists and criminals.He demeaned a female TV moderator, Megyn Kelly, at his first Republican candidates’ debate, saying she had “blood coming out of her wherever” and later implied she was a “bimbo”. He also called for migrants to be deported en masse and for Muslims to be banned from entering the US.No serious presidential candidate had ever talked this way, and for several months, mainstream Republicans regarded his approach as electoral suicide. Even once it became apparent Trump might win the party nomination, they still feared his candidacy would go down in flames because swing voters in the presidential election would “flock away from him in droves”, as party stalwart Henry Barbour put it.Then Trump won – and American politics has not been the same since.The country has not been the same since. It’s true, the US has never been quite the shining beacon of its own imagination.On the international stage, it has frequently been belligerent, bullying, chaotic, dysfunctional and indifferent to the suffering of people in faraway nations – traits that bear some passing similarity to Trump’s leadership style.But it has also, for more than a century, been the standard-bearer of a certain lofty vision, a driver of strategic alliances between similarly advanced democratic nations intent on extending their economic, military and cultural footprint across continents.After one Trump presidency and on the eve of another, it is now clear that a once mighty global superpower is allowing its gaze to turn inward, to feed off resentment more than idealism, to think smaller.Public sentiment – not just the political class – feels threatened by the flow of migrants once regarded as the country’s lifeblood. Global trade, once an article of faith for free marketeers and architects of the postwar Pax Americana, is now a cancer eating away at US prosperity – its own foreign invasion.Military alliances and foreign policy no longer command the cross-party consensus of the cold war era, when politics could be relied upon to “stop at the water’s edge”, in the famous formulation of the Truman-era senator Arthur Vandenberg.Now the politics don’t stop at all, for any reason. And alliances are for chumps.View image in fullscreenLast week’s election was a contest between a unifying, consensus vision laid out by Kamala Harris – and by that Republican autopsy document of the pre-Trump era – and Trump’s altogether darker, us-versus-them, zero-sum vision of a world where nobody can win without someone else becoming a loser and payback is a dish best served piping hot. The contest could have gone either way – there has been much talk of a different outcome with a different Democratic candidate, or with a different process for selecting her.Still, the fact that the zero-sum vision proved so seductive says something powerful about the collapse of American ideals, and the pessimism and anger that has overtaken large swaths of the country.In 2016 and 2020, that anger was largely confined to the white working-class staring down a bleak future without the manufacturing jobs that once sustained them.Now it has spread to groups once disgusted by Trump, or whom Trump has openly disparaged – Latinos, young voters, Black men. Kelly, the TV personality memorably insulted by Trump during his first campaign, stumped for him in Pennsylvania in the closing days of the campaign. Even undocumented migrants, ostensibly facing mass deportation once the new administration takes office, have been voicing cautious support for Trump because they believe his economic policies will improve their prospects, risks and all.At first glance, this is a baffling state of affairs. How could so many Americans vote against their own self-interest, when it is plain – both from past experience and from the stated intentions of Trump and his allies – that the chief beneficiaries of the incoming administration are likely to be the billionaire class? When the depressed, disaffected communities of the rust belt can expect little if any of the relief Trump has been promising but failing to deliver for years?View image in fullscreenThe answer has a lot to do with the zero-sum mentality that Trump has sold so successfully.People across the country have lost all faith in the American dream: the notion that hard work and a desire for self-improvement are all it takes to climb up the social ladder, to own a home, to lay the foundations for the success of your children and grandchildren.They have lost their faith because the dream simply does not correspond to their lived experience.As in Britain and other post-industrial societies, too many lives are a constant struggle to get by month to month, with no end in sight to the bills and day-to-day living expenses and crippling levels of personal debt.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe majority of jobs in the US now require some qualification beyond high school, but college is dizzyingly expensive and dropout rates are high enough to deter many people from even starting. Medical debt in a country without a national health service is rampant. Home ownership is simply out of reach.When people think of prosperity and success, what many of them see is an exclusive club of Americans, recipients of generations of wealth who live in increasingly expensive big cities, who have the financial flexibility to get through college, find a high-paying job and come up with a down payment on a house.The fix is in, as Trump likes to say. The game is rigged, and if you’re not a member of the club at birth, your chances of being admitted are slim to none.Under such circumstances, the Democrats’ promise of consensus leadership rings largely hollow. The consensus arguably broke a long time ago, when the bursting of the housing bubble of the early 00s left many would-be homeowners crippled by debt and led to the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression.It broke all over again during the Covid pandemic, when the economy ground to halt, unemployment rocketed and prices of everyday goods spun alarmingly out of control. Democrats have controlled the White House for 12 of the past 16 years, yet their idea of consensus has failed to reach much beyond the big-city limits.More appealing by far to those on the outside looking in are Trump’s promises of retribution, of tearing down the entire system and starting again.Those promises may also prove to be hollow over time, but to people only intermittently focused on politics as they struggle to put food on the table for their families, they feel at least fleetingly empowering. In a zero-sum world, blaming migrants for the country’s woes feels like its own kind of victory. It means some other group is at the bottom of the social heap for a change.Overlaid on this grim picture is the slow implosion of the two main political parties. The coalitions held together by Republicans and Democrats were always complicated affairs: an awkward marriage of big business and Christian fundamentalism on the right; a patchwork of union workers, racial minorities, intellectuals and, for a long time, old-guard southern segregationists on the left.Now, though, what is most apparent is not their intricacy but their weakness. The Republican party was as powerless to stop Trump’s hostile takeover in 2016 as the Democrats were to hold on to their bedrock of support in the “blue wall” states in the upper midwest – Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.What drives American politics now is, rather, the unfettered power of money, much of it managed by groups outside party control who do not have to declare their funding sources and can make or break candidates depending on their willingness to follow a preordained set of policy prescriptions.View image in fullscreenThe sway of special interest groups is a longstanding problem in American politics; think of the pharmaceutical industry lobbying to keep drug prices higher than in any other western country, or the American Israel Public Affairs Committee spending tens of millions to keep critics of the Israeli government out of Congress.But it has grown exponentially worse since the supreme court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which has fuelled an unprecedented growth in “dark money” – untraceable lobbying funds that far outstrip anything candidates are able to raise on their own behalf and tilt the political playing field accordingly.This, too, has given an edge to a demagogue such as Trump, whose vulgarity and bluster serve as useful distractions from a corporate-friendly policy agenda driven largely by tax cuts, deregulation and the dismantling of what Trump’s former political consigliere Steve Bannon calls the “administrative state”.The Democrats, meanwhile, can talk all they want about serving the interests of all Americans, but they too rely on dark money representing the interests of Wall Street, big tech companies and more, and are all but doomed to come off as hypocritical and insincere as a result.Two generations ago, the avatars of the civil rights movement were under no illusions about the brutal nature of the forces driving US society – “the same old stupid plan / Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak”, as Langston Hughes wrote in his famous poem Let America Be America Again.The hope then was this was at least a correctable problem, that the oppressed could push back against their oppressors and create a fairer, more just world.What nobody then envisaged was that the oppressed themselves – the working class, disaffected young Black and Latino men, even undocumented manual labourers – would one day support the rise of an autocratic government willing to overthrow every sacred tenet of American public life, and even the constitution itself, with its promise of creating “a more perfect union”.Yet here we are. In January 2021, at Joe Biden’s inauguration, the young poet Amanda Gorman invoked the spirit of the civil rights era in describing “a nation that isn’t broken but simply unfinished”.It now appears that her faith was misplaced. The US we thought we knew is broken indeed, and may well be finished. More

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      ‘They blew it’: Democrats lost 22,000 votes in Michigan’s heavily Arab American cities

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      Kamala Harris received at least 22,000 fewer votes than Joe Biden did four years ago in Michigan’s most heavily Arab American and Muslim cities, a Guardian analysis of raw vote data in the critical swing state finds.The numbers also show Trump made small gains – about 9,000 votes – across those areas, suggesting Harris’s loss there is more attributable to Arab Americans either not voting or casting ballots for third-party candidates.Support for Democrats also fell in seven precincts around the country with significant Arab American or Muslim populations, according to data compiled by the Arab American Institute. It found a combined drop in the seven precincts, from about 4,900 votes in 2020 to just 3,400 this election.Another analysis, based on nationwide exit polling by the Council on American Islamic Relations, found 53% of Muslim Americans voted for Jill Stein. The same poll showed 21% of Muslims cast a ballot for Trump and 20.3% for Harris.The drop in Democratic support in Hamtramck, Dearborn and Dearborn Heights – three Michigan cities with the nation’s largest Arab American and Muslim populations per capita – represent nearly 27% of the 81,000-vote difference between Harris and Donald Trump’s tallies in the state.Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

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      The number of votes Harris lost in Michigan over the White House’s Israel policy is almost certainly higher. The analysis only looked at the three population centers, not the large Arab American population scattered throughout the region. Some estimated before the election that Harris could lose as many as 90,000 votes in the state.In Dearborn, a Detroit suburb that is nearly 60% Arab American, Biden received about 31,000 votes in 2020, while Harris received just over 15,000. Trump, who campaigned in Dearborn in the election’s waning days, received about 18,000 votes, up from 13,000 last election. Meanwhile, Stein picked up about 7,600 Dearborn votes this year.Stein and Cornell West, third-party candidates who made inroads with voters frustrated with Harris but unwilling to vote for Trump, combined for about 50,000 votes statewide.Michigan is virtually a must-win swing state, and frustration here with the Biden administration’s Gaza policy was viewed as a major Harris liability. Though the issue accounts for a significant portion of Harris’s loss in the state, she also underperformed with Michigan voters across multiple demographics, and inflation was a top issue for many.But Arab American and Muslim voters who defected from the Democratic party made a “key difference” across upper midwest swing states, said the Muslims for Trump founder Rabiul Chowdhury. He said Trump and his surrogates worked in heavily Arab American areas to make amends for his past anti-Muslim record, and promised peace in Gaza and the Middle East. Harris did not, he said.“Everyone’s ultimate goal was to punish Harris and the best way to do this was to vote for Trump,” Chowdhury said.Representative Rashida Tlaib, who is Palestinian American and Congress’s most vocal critic of US-Israel policy, received more than 24,000 votes in Dearborn, doubling Harris’s total. However, she only slightly outran Harris in neighboring Dearborn Heights.In Hamtramck, a city neighboring Detroit that is about 60% Muslim or Arab American, Biden received about 6,500 votes in 2020, while Harris dropped to 3,200. Meanwhile, Trump’s vote total in the city increased by about 2,000, while Stein received just over 600 votes.Trump increasing his votes in Hamtramck but not Dearborn may reflect that Yemeni and Bangladeshi American immigrants in Hamtramck are broadly considered to be more conservative than Dearborn’s largely Lebanese population, observers say. Dearborn heavily backed Bernie Sanders in the 2016 and 2020 primaries, and its mayor, Abdullah Hammoud, was once among the most progressive representatives in the statehouse.Hamtramck’s mayor, Amer Ghalib, is deeply socially conservative. He endorsed Trump for the presidential election, and on Monday spoke at Trump’s final campaign rally in the state.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn Dearborn Heights, a city that is about half Arab American, Biden won with more than 12,000 votes in 2020; this election, Trump won the city with 11,000 votes, and Harris received 9,000.Meanwhile, in a Houston precinct with a significant Arab American population, Democratic support fell from 520 votes to 300 votes. Democratic support in a Minneapolis precinct where Muslim or Arab Americans comprise a majority of voters fell from about 2,100 votes to 1,100 votes.Arab American pollster and Democratic National Committee member James Zogby noted the Harris campaign was repeatedly warned of the votes she would lose if she did not change course on Gaza or meet with key community leaders.“They blew it,” Zogby said. “We gave [the Harris campaign] multiple opportunities and ideas as to how to do this, and they finally started with three days out, but it was way too late in the game.”Mohamed Gula, director of Emgage, a Muslim political advocacy group, said “a lot has to change and there’s a lot Democrats would have to do” to win back Arab and Muslim voters.“There wasn’t a full belief that Trump was better than Harris – it was that the situation was not acceptable and there needs to be change, and we will take whatever comes from that and do what we need to,” he said.Chowdury said Muslim voters in 2028 will support the party that most promotes peace.“We don’t know what the future holds,” he said. “Today it’s a matter of ending the war and supporting the guy who is giving us the assurance of ending the war.”Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

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      Trump’s ‘golden age of America’ could be an unrestrained imperial presidency

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      At 2.25am, Donald Trump gazed out at his jubilant supporters wearing “Make America Great Again” hats. He was surrounded by his wife, Melania, and his children, the Stars and Stripes and giant banners that proclaimed: “Dream big again” and “Trump will fix it!”“We’re going to help our country heal,” Trump vowed. “We have a country that needs help and it needs help very badly. We’re going to fix our borders, we’re going to fix everything about our country and we’ve made history for a reason tonight, and the reason is going to be just that.”Having risen from the political dead, the president-elect was already looking ahead to what he called the “golden age of America” – a country that had just shifted sharply to the right. And at its core was the promise of Trump unleashed: a radical expansion of presidential power.The 45th and 47th commander-in-chief will face fewer limits on his ambition when he is sworn in again in January. He returns as the head of a Republican party remade in his image over the past decade and as the architect of a right-leaning judiciary that helped eliminate his legal perils. Second time around, he has allies across Washington ready to enforce his will.Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist and former Republican congressional aide, said: “What we’re going to have is an imperial presidency. This is going to be probably the most powerful presidency in terms of centralising power and wielding power that we’ve had probably since FDR [Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was president from 1933 until his death in 1945].”Trump won big in this week’s presidential election against Kamala Harris, the Democratic vice-president. He became the first Republican in 20 years to win the national popular vote. He improved on his 2020 performance in every state except two (Washington and Utah) and made gains in nearly every demographic. A third of voters of colour supported him. Whereas Joe Biden won Latino men by 23 percentage points in 2020, Trump won them by 10 points in 2024.Emboldened by this mandate, Trump, who said he would be a “dictator”, but only on “day one”, is promising a second act more sweeping and transformational than the first. He is backed by a Republican party that regained control of the Senate, might retain the House of Representatives and is more acquiescent than ever. The opposition Democratic party is demoralised and lacks an obvious leader.Trump, who arrived in Washington as a political neophyte eight years ago, is less likely this time to be surrounded by establishment figures and steady hands curbing his darkest impulses. His allies have spent the past several months pre-screening candidates for his administration, aiming to ensure key posts will be filled by dependable foot soldiers. His pugnacious son Don Jr intends to have a say.Bardella added: “It’s going to be a more competent version of the first term. This time Donald Trump and his team know how the White House works. They know what type of personnel they need where to achieve what they want to achieve. They have, unlike last time, more of a complete hold of Congress.”Trump sceptics such as the House speaker Paul Ryan or the congresswoman Liz Cheney are gone, he noted, replaced by Maga devotees primed to do his bidding. “There’s going to be more continuity, more synergy, everyone’s going to march to the beat of the same drummer. There is no resistance within the Republican party any more and they are now facing a Democratic party that is leaderless, that is searching for its own identity, that’s going to have to recalibrate.”Trump will also expect compliance from a conservative supreme court that includes three of his own appointees. The court has loosened the legal guardrails that have hemmed past presidents in thanks to a July decision that gives presidents broad immunity from criminal prosecution.The 78-year-old businessman and former reality TV star also hopes to exploit a new universe of rightwing podcasters and influencers who were instrumental in his election and could help him shape the information ecosystem. Chief among these is X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who played a key role in the Trump campaign.Despite the daunting outlook, however, some commentators are optimistic that checks and balances will remain.Elaine Kamarck, a former official in the Bill Clinton administration, said: “For him to expand presidential power, Congress has to give up power and they’re not in the mood to do that. They’ve never done that. There are plenty of institutionalists in Congress.”Kamarck also expressed faith in the federal courts, noting that judges appointed by Trump only constitute 11% of the total placed on the bench by former presidents. A Trump dictatorship is “not going to happen”, she added. “Now, there might be things that the president wants to do that people don’t like that the Republican Congress goes along with him on but that’s politics. That’s not a dictatorship.”Trump will return to power with an aggressive agenda that includes what his ally Steve Bannon called “the deconstruction of the administrative state”. He has proposed a government efficiency commission headed by Musk that would gut the federal bureaucracy. Trump plans to fire federal workers by classifying thousands of them as being outside civil service protections. They could be replaced by what are essentially political appointees loyal to him.On his signature issue, illegal immigration, Trump has vowed to carry out the biggest deportation operation in American history, starting with people who have criminal records or final orders of deportation. He has called for using the national guard and empowering domestic police forces in what he has said will be “a bloody story”.He told Time magazine that he did not rule out building new migrant detention camps but “there wouldn’t be that much of a need for them” because people would be rapidly removed. His running mate, JD Vance, told the New York Times that deporting 1 million immigrants a year would be “reasonable”.During the election campaign Trump played down abortion as a second-term priority, even as he took credit for the supreme court ending a woman’s federal right to terminate a pregnancy and returning abortion regulation to state governments.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAt Trump’s insistence the Republican platform, for the first time in decades, did not call for a national ban on abortion. Even so, Trump has not explicitly said he would veto a national ban if it reached his desk. He has also indicated that he would let Robert F Kennedy Jr, the anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist, “go wild” on public health matters, including women’s health. Trump has promised to extend his 2017 tax cut, reversing Joe Biden’s income tax hikes on the wealthiest Americans and scrapping levies that fund energy measures to combat the climate crisis. Trump also has proposals aimed at working- and middle-class Americans: exempting tips and overtime wages from income taxes.Steve Schmidt, a political strategist and former campaign operative for George W Bush and John McCain, said: “He’s going to have a Republican Congress go through a deregulatory frenzy; they’re going to propose brutal spending cuts that will affect the people primarily that voted for them but also a lot of other poor people in the country.”Trump has vowed to eliminate the Department of Education and slash federal funding “for any school or program pushing critical race theory, gender ideology, or other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children”. The Trump campaign made opposition to transgender rights a central part of its closing argument, with the president-elect vowing to “keep men out of women’s sports”. He plans to end Biden’s policy of extending Title IX civil rights protections to transgender students and ask Congress to require that only two genders can be recognised at birth.On the world stage, Trump touts an “America first” ideology that would make the US more isolationist, non-interventionist and protectionist than at any time since the second world war. He has proposed tariffs of 10% to 20% on foreign goods despite economists’ warnings that this would drive up inflation.Trump has repeatedly praised authoritarians such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Russia’s Vladimir Putin and not ruled out withdrawing from Nato. He has said he would end Russia’s war on Ukraine within a day, prompting fears of a a deal that compels Ukraine to surrender territory, and reportedly told Israel’s president, Benjamin Netanyahu, that he wants the war in Gaza to be finished by January.Schmidt commented: “They will act very quickly in Ukraine to end the war while escalating the situation with Iran and you’ll see very quickly a tremendous amount of instability with Mexico. It’s going to be horrendous. It’s going to be shocking.”Trump, who falsely claims that the climate crisis is a “hoax”, has said he will again remove the US from the Paris climate accords and dismantle Biden’s climate agenda. He has promised to increase oil production and burn more fossil fuels – “Drill, baby, drill!” was a regular chant at Trump rallies – and weaken regulatory powers or eliminate bodies such as the Environmental Protection Agency.The ascent of Trump, the first convicted criminal to be elected president, is also a crisis for the rule of law. The justice department is moving to wind down the two federal cases against him after he vowed to fire the special counsel Jack Smith “within two seconds” of becoming president. Trump has vowed to bend the department to his will, pardon January 6 rioters and target journalists, election workers and other perceived political enemies.Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center thinktank in Washington, said: “Will people who he believes broke the law in trying to persecute him and his friends be investigated? Yes. Will they be subject to all of the defense mechanisms and the fair trials that he was afforded? Absolutely.“I’m sure he looks at it and says, ‘I could have gone after Hillary, there’s a lot of reason to; I showed you an open hand and what did you do? You persecuted me for eight years. The gloves are off.’ That doesn’t mean anything other than, ‘OK, you decided to use these weapons, I now own the weapons. I’m going to use the weapons too.’ It’s not the end of American democracy.”Others, however, are less sanguine. Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman who campaigned for Harris this year, said: “It’s going to be a revenge tour on steroids. I don’t think people realise what’s coming. He is emboldened. He didn’t think he’d win in 2016. He lied about 2020 but oh my God, he thought he was going to win now, he did, and now he believes, ‘Man, they want me and they want what I’ve been promising and I’ve been promising this enemies list.“‘I’m going to put my enemies in jail, I’m going to fuck Nato, I’m going to do what Putin wants me to do.’ If I were the rest of the world and the country, I’d be scared to death because we just put an absolutely out-of-control authoritarian in the White House. That’s scary shit.”Trump’s strongman tendencies will receive defiance and pushback, however. Along with Congress and the courts, America has a robust civil society and rambunctious media. The Women’s March of 2017 set the tone for four years of resistance by progressive activists and pressure groups, an energy that converted into electoral gains in 2018, 2020 and 2022.Now, as Trump prepares for his once unthinkable return to the White House, these weary foot soldiers are preparing to do it all over again. That, in turn, raises the prospect of a fierce backlash from the would-be American Caesar who once asked authorities if they could just shoot protesters in the legs.“What am I worried about most?” pondered Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington. “The answer is that in response either to demonstrations in the streets or the exigencies of rounding up and deporting millions of immigrants here illegally, Mr Trump will invoke the Insurrection Act, which is the closest thing in American law to the declaration of martial law.“That prospect terrifies me. There’s very little else about the administration that terrifies me but the mass deployment of the US military in domestic affairs put us, I’m afraid, on a very slippery slope.” More