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      Trump nominates big tech critic Brendan Carr to chair telecommunications regulator

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      President-elect Donald Trump will tap Brendan Carr, a critic of the Biden administration’s telecom policies and big tech, as chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), he has said in a statement.Carr, 45, is the top Republican on the FCC, the independent agency that regulates telecommunications.He has been a harsh critic of the FCC’s decision not to finalize nearly $900m in broadband subsidies for Elon Musk’s SpaceX satellite internet unit Starlink, as well as the commerce department’s $42bn broadband infrastructure program and President Joe Biden’s spectrum policy.Last week, Carr wrote to Meta’s Facebook, Alphabet’s Google, Apple and Microsoft saying they had taken steps to censor Americans. Carr said on Sunday the FCC must “restore free speech rights for everyday Americans.“The president-elect has scorned actions by Disney’s ABC, Comcast’s NBC and Paramount Global’s CBS and suggested they could lose their FCC licenses for various actions. Trump also sued CBS over its 60 Minutes interview with vice-president Kamala Harris.Carr criticized NBC for letting Harris appear on Saturday Night Live just before the election.Trump in his first term called on the FCC to revoke broadcast licenses, prompting then FCC Chair Ajit Pai to reject the idea, saying “the FCC does not have the authority to revoke a licence of a broadcast station based on the content.“The FCC issues eight-year licenses to individual broadcast stations, not to broadcast networks.In 2022, Carr, a strong critic of China, became the first FCC commissioner to visit Taiwan. He has been an advocate of the FCC’s hard line on Chinese telecom companies.Carr was a strong opponent of the FCC’s decision in April to reinstate landmark net neutrality rules that were repealed during the first Trump administration. The Biden FCC rules were put on hold by a federal appeals court.Trump nominated Carr to the FCC during in his first administration in January 2017, after he had served as the FCC’s general counsel.The incoming administration will need to nominate a Republican to fill a seat on the five-member commission before it can take full control of the agency.Carr “is a warrior for Free Speech, and has fought against the regulatory Lawfare that has stifled Americans’ Freedoms, and held back our Economy,” Trump said in a statement on Sunday. More

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      ‘Queen of polling’ J Ann Selzer quits after Iowa survey missed by 16 points

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      J Ann Selzer, the celebrated Iowa election pollster, announced on Sunday that she is moving on “to other ventures and opportunities”, two weeks after her survey in the state wrongly predicted a strong shift to Kamala Harris in the days before the election.That poll, which projected a 47% to 44% lead for the vice-president over Donald Trump on the back of older women breaking for Democrats over the issue of reproductive rights, came three days before the national vote, giving Democrats false hope that Harris could win the White House decisively. When the votes were counted, Selzer was off by 16 points as the former president won the state decisively.Selzer, known as the “queen of polling”, shot to fame in 2008 when she predicted that a virtually unknown senator, Barack Obama, would beat frontrunner Hillary Clinton in the Iowa caucuses.She told MSNBC before the vote that Harris was leading in early voting in Iowa “because of her strength with women generally, even stronger with women aged 65 and older. Her margin is more than 2-to-1 – and this is an age group that shows up to vote, or votes early, in disproportionately large numbers.”Trump disputed the poll in a post on his Truth Social network at the time.“In fact, it’s not even close! All polls, except for one heavily skewed toward the Democrats by a Trump hater who called it totally wrong the last time, have me up, BY A LOT.”According to unofficial results, Trump ultimately won Iowa by 13 points, 56% to 43%.In a column published by the Des Moines Register on Sunday, Selzer wrote that public opinion polling had been her “life’s work” and had made a decision to step back from it a year ago.“Would I have liked to make this announcement after a final poll aligned with Election Day results? Of course,” she wrote. “It’s ironic that it’s just the opposite.”Seltzer ventured that her strong track record had “maybe that history of accuracy made the outlier position too comfortable”.“Polling is a science of estimation, and science has a way of periodically humbling the scientist. So, I’m humbled, yet always willing to learn from unexpected findings,” she added.A review of Selzer’s final 2024 poll hasn’t revealed a clear reason for missing Trump’s runaway victory in the state, the paper said in a column published on Sunday, adding that it is “evaluating the best ways to continue surveys that will provide accurate information and insight about issues that matter to Iowans”.Editor Carol Hunter wrote that the Iowa Poll “has been an important legacy indicator and we recognize the need to evolve and find new ways to accurately take the pulse of Iowans on state and national issues”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut the black eye the polling business has received for failing to predict a strong Trump victory in the electoral college, 312 to 226, and popular vote, taking with him all seven swing states and seeing every state moving Republican, may not be entirely deserved.Most political polls for the 2024 presidential election saw a close race in the electoral college, and a popular-vote victory for Harris. But the election results so far show that Trump added more than 2m votes to his 2020 total, while Harris received millions fewer votes than Joe Biden did four years earlier, in what some are calling the lost “couch vote”.Trump won the electoral college 312 to 226, and currently leads the popular vote by 1.7%. UC Riverside polling expert Andy Crosby wrote that Trump’s margin of victory was within the 2.2% margin of error of most of the final elections polls.After what turned out to be the final Selzer Iowa poll this year, she had offered these words of warning to excited Never Trump podcasters at The Bulwark: “People looked at my methodology … and it’s published in every article in the Des Moines Register, how we do it, but you look at it on paper and you go, It’s too simple, this can’t possibly work. And so far it has, but I’m prepared that one day it will not work and I will blow up into tiny little pieces and be scattered across the city of Des Moines.” More

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      Republican senator calls for release of Matt Gaetz ethics report to chamber

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      Discussion on Donald Trump’s selection of Matt Gaetz, the former Florida congressman who had been accused of sexual misconduct, for US attorney general continued on Sunday, with Republican senator Markwayne Mullin calling for an unreleased ethics report to be released to the Senate.Mullin told NBC’s Meet the Press that the Senate, which will oversee Gaetz’s confirmation hearings to become attorney general, “should have access to that” but declined to say if it should be released publicly.Gaetz resigned from his seat in Congress on Wednesday soon after the president-elect made his controversial pick, frustrating plans by a congressional ethics panel to release a review of claims against Gaetz, including sexual misconduct and illegal drug use. Gaetz denies any wrongdoing.Republican House speaker Mike Johnson repeated his position on Sunday that the survey should remain out of the public realm. Gaetz had faced a three-year justice department investigation into the same allegations that concluded without criminal charges being brought.Johnson said the principle was that the ethics committee’s jurisdiction did not extend to non-members of the House. “There have been, I understand, I think, two exceptions to the rule over the whole history of Congress and the history of the ethics committee,” Johnson told CNN, adding that while he did not have the authority to stop it “we don’t want to go down that road.”Trump’s selection of Gaetz, while successfully provoking Democrats’ outrage, is also seen as a test for Republicans to bend Trump’s force of will. Mullin has previously noted situations in which Gaetz had allegedly shown colleagues nude photographs of his sexual conquests and described him as “unprincipled”.But the senator said he had not made a decision on whether to support Gaetz in a confirmation vote. “I’m going to give him a fair shot just like any individual,” Mullin said.The pending report seems likely to emerge in some form after other senior Republicans, including senators Susan Collins, John Cornyn and Thom Tillis have all said they believe it should be shown to them.Separately, Pennsylvania Democratic senator John Fetterman repeated his advice to members of his own party to not “freak out” over everything Trump does, pointing out that for at least the next two years, Republicans can “run the table”.Fetterman, who won decisive re-election in the state this month, said he looked forward to reviewing some of Trump’s nominations but others “are just absolute trolls”, including Gaetz.For Democrats, who are still trying to figure out reasons for their devastating loss at the ballot box this month, their outrage at Trump’s nominations “gets the kind of thing that he wanted, like the freak out”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“It’s still not even Thanksgiving yet and if we’re having meltdowns at every tweet or every appointment.”Democrats, Fetterman added, should be “more concerned” about Republicans being able “to run the table for the next two years. Those are the things you really want to be concerned about, not small tweets or, you know, random kinds of appointments.”But Democratic senator-elect Adam Schiff told CNN that Gaetz was “not only unqualified, he is really disqualified” to become the country’s top lawyer.“Are we really going to have an attorney general [with] … credible allegations he was involved in child sex-trafficking, potential illicit drug use, obstruction of an investigation? Who has no experience serving in the justice department, only being investigated by it,” Schiff said. More

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      Experts sound alarm as Trump mulls pardons for January 6 attackers

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      lf Donald Trump follows through on his promise to pardon people who participated in the January 6 riot at the US Capitol, attorneys and lawmakers who oppose such moves would not be able to stop him, according to legal experts.If Trump does issue the pardons, it could indicate to many of his supporters that there was nothing illegal about the riot to prevent the peaceful transfer of power, and would undermine the US constitution, the experts said.“It gives the message that Trump decides what is and is not actionable under the criminal laws of the United States,” said Kimberly Wehle, a professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law who has studied constitutional law and the separation of powers.Trump, who has not conceded that he lost the 2020 presidential election, described the insurrection as a “day of love” and calls the rioters “unbelievable patriots”. Those people, however, damaged the Capitol; injured about 140 police officers – four officers who responded have also since died by suicide – and the FBI declared it an act of “domestic terrorism”.The federal government has filed criminal charges against more than 1,500 people. More than 1,000 people have pleaded guilty or been found guilty. The FBI is also still searching for people who allegedly participated in the attack.During his campaign, Trump said that issuing “full pardons with an apology to many” would be a top priority.Presidents issuing pardons is nothing new, and they are allowed to do so under the constitution. The long list includes President George Washington, who issued a presidential pardon in 1795 to people engaged in Pennsylvania’s Whiskey Rebellion; President Gerald Ford, who gave his predecessor, Richard Nixon, “a full, free, and absolute pardon” for crimes he committed as president; and President Bill Clinton, who pardoned Marc Rich, a fugitive financier who fled the United States after his indictment.“There are many parties that could be criticized historically by those who think that someone was not deserving of that type of dispensation,” said Mary McCord, a former federal prosecutor who is executive director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection.“The difference here is we are talking about over 1,500 people whose efforts, individually and collectively, were not just violent … [they] also were done with the intent to prevent Congress from certifying the electoral college ballots and thereby override the will of the voters.”Since Trump’s election, people convicted of crimes because of their actions on January 6 have said they look forward to pardons. Attorneys for defendants who have not been sentenced have also asked judges to delay court proceedings because of Trump’s pledges to abandon criminal prosecutions.Among those expressing excitement was Timothy Hale-Cusanelli, a security guard at a naval base who was one of the first people to enter the Capitol. He was convicted of obstructing an official proceeding and was sentenced to four years in prison.Hale-Cusanelli also expressed support for Hitler and spoke at Trump’s golf club in New Jersey as part of a fundraiser for January 6 defendants, National Public Radio reported.Trump delivered a video message to attenders in which he called them “amazing patriots”.“I spent three years behind bars for protesting against Biden’s rigged election,” said Hale-Cusanelli, who had previously expressed remorse for his actions, the Washington Post reported. “I waited patiently for this day … All my dudes from the Gulag are coming home from prison … We were innocent on January 6 and we’re still innocent!”Prosecutors, judges and lawmakers would not be able to prevent Trump from taking such actions because article 2 of the constitution gives presidents the right to pardon all “offenses against the United States”, except cases of impeachment.The supreme court gave the president additional authority in July when it ruled in a case concerning Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election that presidents enjoy substantial immunity for actions that fall within the scope of the office’s “core constitutional powers”.That would probably give the president immunity even if he provided a pardon in exchange for a bribe, Wehle said. The court ruled that “any crime that the president commits using official power is above the law and said very specifically that the pardon power is core, so you can’t look into a reason for the pardon”.Still, there is also the chance that public opinion could influence Trump. While Trump resoundingly defeated Kamala Harris, only a third of Americans support such pardons, according to a recent YouGov and Economist survey. About a quarter of Republicans oppose the pardons.During the campaign, a spokesperson said Trump would consider pardoning January 6 defendants on a “case-by-case basis when he is back in the White House”.McCord argued that most people who voted for Trump did so for economic reasons rather than the January 6 issues.“There is nothing in the polling I have seen to suggest that the majority of those who voted for Trump did so because of his campaign promises of political prosecutions and pardons for the January 6 attackers,” McCord said.If Trump follows through on his promise to pardon the rioters, he could later face consequences, including impeachment by Congress, said Jeffrey Crouch, an American University assistant professor and expert on federal executive clemency.“There may be political consequences for the president or their political party at the ballot box,” Crouch said. “Plus, the president always needs to keep the judgment of history in mind.”Wehle said she was more concerned about some of Trump’s other recent moves, like demanding the Senate allow recess appointments, which would mean he could install officials without the lawmakers’ confirmation, and Elon Musk joining Trump’s call with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky.Wehle said: “With Republican sycophants willing to sell out the entire constitution and democracy, which seems to be Donald Trump’s unabashed, unmitigated, publicly stated plan, we’re in very deep water right now on the question of whether our system of government will survive the next four years.” More

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      Haitian immigrants flee Springfield, Ohio, in droves after Trump election win

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      From a tiny office behind a Haitian grocery store on Springfield’s South Limestone Street, Margery Koveleski has spent years helping local Haitians overcome bureaucratic red tape to make their lives in the Ohio city a little bit easier.But Koveleski – whose family is Haitian – has noticed a major change recently.Haitians are now coming to her to figure out how to leave.“Some folks don’t have credit cards or access to the internet, and they want to buy a bus ticket or a plane ticket, so we help them book a flight,” she told the Guardian recently. “People are leaving.”Koveleski, leaders in Springfield’s Haitian community, and others have relayed reports of Haitians fleeing the city of 60,000 people in recent days for fear of being rounded up and deported after Donald Trump’s victory in the 5 November presidential election.“The owner of one store is wondering if he should move back to New York or to Chicago – he says his business is way down,” Koveleski remarked.Trump has repeatedly said he would end immigrants’ temporary protected status (TPS) – the provision through which many Haitians are legally allowed to live and work in the US – and deport Haitians from Springfield once in office.For many, the threats are real.A sheriff in Sidney, a town 40 miles (64km) north-west of Springfield that is home to several dozen Haitian immigrants, allegedly told local police in September to “get a hold of these people and arrest them”.“Bring them – I’ll figure out if they’re legal,” he said, referencing Haitian immigrants in the area.As Jacob Payen, a co-founder of the Haitian Community Alliance who runs a business that includes helping Haitians in Springfield to file tax returns, said: “People are fully aware of the election result, and that is why they are leaving; they are afraid of a mass deportation.“Several of my customers have left. One guy with his family went to New Jersey; others have gone to Boston. I know three families that have gone to Canada.”Some are thought to have moved to nearby cities such as Dayton, where they believe they would be less visible to law enforcement. Others who had temporary asylum in Brazil are pondering going back to the South American country, community leaders say.Springfield’s Haitian community has been in the spotlight since Trump falsely accused immigrants here of eating pets during a presidential debate in September. Since then, the city has seen false bomb threats and marches by neo-Nazi groups after having experienced a revival in recent years in large part because of Haitians who took jobs in local produce packaging and machining factories that many previously there found undesirable.Unofficial results from the presidential election found that Trump beat Harris by fewer than 150 votes in Springfield despite his making false claims about immigrants in the Ohio city a cornerstone of his anti-immigration election campaign.A policy that has been around since 1990, the TPS program currently sees more than 800,000 immigrants who have fled conflict or humanitarian emergencies in 16 countries to live and work legally in the US for a limited time. About 300,000 Haitians fleeing widespread violence in the Caribbean country have been authorized to remain in the US through TPS until at least 3 February 2026.But while it once enjoyed support from both sides of the political aisle, Trump’s first term saw a California court rule in 2020 that his administration could end TPS for citizens of Haiti and three other countries.TPS is granted – and often renewed – by the secretary of homeland security. On Tuesday, reports emerged that Trump had chosen to give the post to the South Dakota governor, Kristi Noem, who has deployed state national guard troops to the US-Mexico border several times in recent years.Trump’s deportation threats are happening at a time when Haiti is experiencing renewed violence from politically connected gangs. The country’s main airport in Port-au-Prince has been closed periodically and was shuttered again on Tuesday after gunfire hit a commercial passenger airplane flying in from the US. That was the second time since October that gunfire had hit an aircraft over Haiti.Though Trump may ultimately succeed in ending TPS for some immigrants, some legal experts believe that is unlikely to happen during the early days of his administration after his second presidency begins on 20 January.“There’s a fear among the Haitian community that TPS is going to end on 20 January, and I don’t think that is very likely for a number of reasons,” said Katie Kersh, a senior attorney at the non-profit law firm Advocates for Basic Legal Equality.“The strain any deportation effort would place on an already stretched immigration court system would be significant.”Even if the program was ended, Kersh says, current law allows for a court hearing that could take months or years to take place. Similarly, immigrants who have asylum applications filed also have an opportunity to have that application heard.By ending TPS, Trump could in fact make the issue of undocumented immigration even worse.“TPS provides employment authorization and a right to reside in the US, so when a TPS grant ends, the people who have it immediately lose employment authorization unless another status which provides it is available to them,” said Ahilan Arulanantham of UCLA’s School of Law, who was among several lawyers to successfully challenge an earlier attempt by Trump to end TPS for Haitians as well as others in 2018.“That effect occurs regardless of whether they later face deportation.”For companies in Springfield and in nearby communities that depend on Haitian labor, Trump’s comments could prove damaging. The Haitians who filled thousands of jobs at area packaging and auto plants have helped rejuvenate once-blighted neighborhoods and contributed to the local economy in myriad ways.While many food products lining the shelves of Springfield’s Caribbean stores are imported, many items – bread from Florida and pinto beans from Nebraska – are American. Chicken, beef and eggs served at Haitian restaurants are regularly sourced from local farms.Recently, a Haitian community organization bought a former fire station it hopes to turn into a facility for English language classes, drivers’ education and a meeting spot.“I pay thousands of dollars in income and property taxes every year,” said Payen, “and – because I work with Haitians to file their taxes – I see their W-2s and so on. If these people leave, that money is gone from the city and the local economy.”Curiously, some Haitians, who do not have the right to vote unless they are citizens, have blamed prominent Democrats such as Bill and Hillary Clinton for destroying their country after a devastating 2010 earthquake killed about a quarter of a million people – and displaced in excess of a million more.Their Clinton Foundation, which ran dozens of projects in the country, had helped raise billions of dollars to assist with reconstruction efforts. But many Haitians believe the funds were siphoned off, which the Clintons deny.Huge numbers of US guns have been trafficked to Haiti in recent years – a fact that is not lost on some in the Springfield community, according to Koveleski.“They don’t have any faith in the Democratic party,” she said. “Some believe that if Donald Trump says, ‘leave Haiti alone,’ he’s going to leave us alone.” More

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      ‘A change from the status quo’: the voters who backed Trump and AOC

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      Politics makes for strange bedfellows. US political minds will be reminding themselves of this fact as the dust settles on America’s election, with some results showing that a few voters were able to simultaneously support Donald Trump and progressive-leaning Democratic candidates.In the Bronx in New York, a strongly Black, Asian and Latino community, Trump’s support jumped 11 points to 33% over 2020, one of the largest margins citywide. At the same time, the leftwing firebrand Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez secured 68.9% of the vote, returning her to Congress for a fourth consecutive term.Welcome to the vote-splitting phenomenon of 2024, another sign of a restive American electorate committed to rejecting business as usual in Washington and voting to shake up a self-serving two-party system they often believe pays only lip service to their concerns.Trump and Ocasio-Cortez, whose politics are poles apart on almost every issue, were seen by at least some voters as sharing one very important thing: an anti-establishment authenticity.“They’re a good counter-balance for each other,” said Mamé, 66, a West African man on his way to a doctor’s appointment in the Bronx. “He’s a bully she doesn’t accept. She’s a fighter, progressive, and she loves democracy.”A Dominican Uber driver called Robin said Trump was better on the economy and security, but Ocasio-Cortez was better on democracy. “The last three years were no good economically: half a million migrants coming to New York, being given a hotel and money, and me working 60 hours a week with three kids.”Last week, Ocasio-Cortez herself prodded her own followers on X – the social media platform formerly known as Twitter – about vote-splitting between her and Trump. “I actually want to learn from you, I want to hear what you were thinking,” she said.Many in response to her appeal said there was no contradiction between supporting Trump and the avowed Democratic socialist.“I feel you are both outsiders compared to the rest of DC, and less ‘establishment’,” said one. Another, “both of you push boundaries and force growth”. And: “It’s real simple … Trump and you care for the working class.”“You are focused on the real issues people care about. Similar to Trump populism in some ways,” said a fourth. Lastly, a respondent said: “You signaled change. Trump signified change. I’ve said lately, Trump sounds more like you.”Ocasio-Cortez told The View on Thursday: “One, there is universal frustration in this country, much of it I actually think justified, that is raging at a political establishment that centers corporate interests [and] billionaires. and puts their needs ahead of the needs of working Americans.”The exchanges on X prompted whoops of joy from Salon, a liberal-leaning outlet, which said there might now be an openness among bruised Democrats to “someone who simply has the sauce … And Ocasio-Cortez has the sauce.”View image in fullscreenTo some extent, the Bronx split-ticket vote phenomenon was repeated across the US. Republicans won the White House and Senate convincingly. But in the House of Representatives, Democrats more or less held their own. (Split-ticket voting had an impact but it still left the House narrowly under Republican control.)“People are looking for people to shake up the system and fight for a bold agenda so they’re voting for candidates who are different and have a clear agenda outside the norms of our political system,” said Jasmine Gripper, co-director of the New York Working Families party.“Trump is not a career politician and challenges the system, and AOC is doing that in a different way. Their approaches and philosophies and values are deeply different, but they both represent a change from the status quo that voters are rejecting.”In 2018, Trump was one of the first to recognize AOC’s rise, warning Joe Crowley, the 10-term Democrat she defeated for the nomination, of her natural political abilities. Crowley later reflected that Trump’s win two years earlier had helped to get Ocasio-Cortez elected.“It lit the fire on to the base of our party, and I think that’s a good thing in many respects,” he said.Trump and Ocasio-Cortez, native New Yorkers and Democrats in their origin stories, have often appeared to be perfect sparring partners, with an innate understanding of how to get under the other’s skin, and clapping back at each other on social media (AOC has 8.1 million Instagram followers).She has called Trump a “racist visionary” and said he is “afraid” of strong Latino women. He has insulted her right back, though mixed with compliments. “Look, she’s a fake, and in all fairness to her, she knows it. But she’s got a good thing going – a good thing for her,” Trump said in August. “She’s got a spark – I will say that. A good spark that’s pretty amazing, actually.”Both know the value of a political stunt. AOC wore a white gown with the message “tax the rich” emblazoned in red to the Met Gala, where tables cost $450,000. “The medium is the message,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Instagram, quoting the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan.But the Democrat’s ultra-progressive group in Congress, known as “the Squad”, did not fare so well under the softer liberalism of the Biden-Harris administration. Two of the group no longer sit in the House. Despite that, Ocasio-Cortez was a good soldier for Harris and before her, Joe Biden, supporting and enthusiastically campaigning for both.But its too soon to say how much progressives are encouraged by the phenomenon of split-ticket voting and whether it will presage a tack away from traditional party elites, as the Democrats try to regroup in the political wilderness of the next four years. Certainly there are those who think the party needs a dose of economic populism and charismatic outsiders to lead it.“What’s clear is we have to compete in a new information environment that Trump understands, the Democrats struggle with, and AOC is a genius at,” said Billy Wimsatt of the Movement Voter Project. “We need candidates and leaders that people believe in and see as authentic and not as a manufactured politicians.”But what might be more worrying for Democrats are people like 30-year-old Bronx resident Carlos Thomas. “I was rooting for Donald because he’s for business, but I liked the girl he was running against [also],” he said.But he – like tens of millions of other Americans in an election that saw turnout drop – simply failed to vote. More

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      In this age of rage, it’s easy for Trump to keep stoking people’s anger | Henry Porter

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      Donald Trump and the Republican party may have won a decisive victory, but do not expect the anger that has blighted America since Trump announced he was running for office nine years ago to subside. Anger and grievance are the fuel rods of Maga populism, and they must be kept at dangerously high temperatures for the movement and a second Trump term to operate.Watching the last four weeks of the campaign, the uninhibited rage of Trump and his supporting acts at rallies was very striking. There was no attempt at decent norms. As the election neared, speeches became louder and more laced with vitriol, to the degree that commentators believed they had gone too far for the American public.First lesson of the Democrat defeat is that most US voters lapped it up. This is what they want. America is a very angry place, much more so that than its neighbour to the north, Canada. In the US, dissatisfaction with opportunities, the state of the country and the government have risen sharply since the Reagan era, whereas in Canada dissatisfaction has only increased over the government’s failure to protect the most vulnerable in society. That says a lot about the wildly differing tone of the two societies as well as levels of available empathy.Road rage in the US doubled between 2019 and 2022, with 44 people killed or wounded by gunfire on the roads every month, a ­figure that bucks the trends of violent crime and murder that have been generally declining in the US since 1990.There are a lot of people walking around with the bewildering, hair-trigger rage of John Goodman’s character Walter Sobchak in the Coen brothers’ 1998 film The Big Lebowski. Trump echoes the craziness, amplifies it, then uses the energy tha t it returns to him.This is a feedback loop, but the anger doesn’t just circle with the same intensity between Trump and his people; it steadily increases.At a Trump rally you became aware of the exuberant high of the outrage, that this is a fix enjoyed across America both by those who tend towards unreflective negativity, racism and misogyny and by people who have a genuine complaint about their lives. In both cases they have acquired the habit of rage, and it has become a meaningful and gratifying part of their identity.The anger is not simply going to evaporate when Trump takes over in January, not only because it’s too important to people’s sense of political self but also because the communication channel between the president and his supporters works only at this level. There is no exchange of ideas, of course, no sense that he leads with a vision other than the one that meets their anger with a promise of destruction.The early evidence of this political wrecking machine comes with the appointments of Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, Matt Gaetz as attorney general and Fox News anchor Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon, all of whom cannot fail to vandalise and degrade the institutions they take over. Indeed, that appears to be their brief.When he moves back into the White House with the Senate, Congress and supreme court in the control of the Republican party, he will be one of the most powerful presidents ever to have governed and he will be 100% responsible for the fortunes of Americans.How will his supporters, so used to reflexively blaming Washington and the government, confront his responsibility when he fails to improve their lives, as he certainly will because of a suicidal tariff regime, tax cuts to the rich and corporations that will increase national debt, cuts to Medicaid and mass deportations of undocumented immigrants that will severely damage growth as well as cause unbelievable pain to separated families across America?His failure will be a problem for his supporters, who can’t lose faith in their idol, and also for Trump, who must not let their support fall away. The solution for both parties will be to maintain the anger but divert it away from Trump.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAnd this is where we should fear for America. Trump has been lining up scapegoats. He has promised to persecute “the enemies within” and “radical left communists” like Adam Schiff, the new senator for California, and the former speaker Nancy Pelosi. He has made threats to Michelle Obama and Liz Cheney, who endorsed Democrat candidate Kamala Harris, and has demanded that CBS’s broadcast licence be revoked. He has suggested “one really violent day” and “one rough hour” against petty criminals.He will resort to this list whenever he needs to, but it will be America’s undocumented immigrants who will initially suffer, for next to the economy they topped the concerns of Republican voters. Trump will always be able to satisfy Maga anger by promising new and more cruel actions against immigrants, among which measures are likely to be privately run detention camps.There is no telling where this will end, no sense where national resistance will come in a society that is unused to dealing with an authoritarian who exploits dark and violent emotions as expertly as Trump does.The Democrats are plunged in a round of recriminations about the defeat, but they need to find new leadership and a strategy to deal with the anger that now threatens America and its institutions of government. When fuel rods overheat in a nuclear reactor, the result is usually meltdown. More