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      It's not 'Trump derangement syndrome' to see that the US has to be good before it is great | Nick Bhasin

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      When Joe Biden was declared the winner of the US election over the weekend, I joined millions of my fellow Americans in their relief. The nightmare of the past four years was over. Donald Trump was done. I couldn’t be there in person but I retweeted a couple of things and hugged my family.
      But after an exhausting election week – “North Carolina’s blue, now it’s red, wait only 17 people in the state have voted, what is happening?!” – the question remains …
      How was it this close?
      How did millions of Americans look at four years of lying, spreading disinformation, exacerbating racial tensions, and downplaying and mismanaging a pandemic and say “more”?
      Turns out a quarter of a million dead from Covid just wasn’t that big a deal. Child separation? Not a problem. Democrats chose a compassionate, moderate, old white guy so no one would be scared off by identity politics and spooky “socialist” policies and 71 million people STILL said, “Nope. Give us the rich guy who’s in a lot of debt and pays no taxes and says that caravans of immigrants and thugs and animals will ruin our lives.”
      2016 wasn’t a fluke. It was an entrée. More people voted for Trump this time, and he increased his support among minorities if you believe exit polls, which I don’t because the polls – and the punditry based on them – were useless. They promised a decisive victory for Biden but Trump’s strategy of combining D-grade celebrity charisma and appealing to people’s basest instincts worked.
      As the famous saying goes, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but how your country can entertain you with a dark, ugly spectacle filled with chaos and emptiness.”
      In May of 2008, I met an American woman in Sydney who’d been living in the UK. She was a Harry Potter fan (always suspicious for an adult) and insisted that she’d never move back to the US because “that place is f**ked”.
      I was furious. I had just moved to Sydney and I wasn’t ready to throw my home country under the bus.
      Then in 2016 Donald Trump was elected president.
      Living abroad for the last 13 years has helped me appreciate the great things about my country (I’m also an Australian citizen). They were things I took for granted when I lived there – the energy and diversity of the cities, the geographical beauty, the Mexican food.
      But the flaws seem much, much worse. The mass shootings (that’s not a problem here); the lack of universal healthcare (we’ve got it); the climate change denialism (um … no comment); treating asylum seekers like criminals (no, Australia isn’t perfect). There’s something about American ideology that won’t allow these problems to be fixed or even convincingly addressed.
      The Trump administration wrapped up all of this and more into a bigoted package for its supporters – Trump never tried to be the president for the whole country – and stuck a big middle finger up to the rest of the world, which laughed in return. I’ve been living among the laughers. It’s not a good feeling.
      In four years of low points, one of the most personally wounding came in July of 2019, when Trump suggested that four progressive congresswomen (all women of colour, three US-born) go back to where they came from.
      With this classic battle cry for bigots, Trump and his supporters (including the Republican party – only four of their members joined the Democrats’ official rebuke) made it clear that I, the son of an immigrant from India and a Puerto Rican from New York, was not welcome. My family was not welcome.
      One of those congresswomen, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, was forced to remind the children of America that: “No matter what the president says, this country belongs to you. And it belongs to everyone.”
      For a lot of my country, those hurt feelings made me a snowflake crying lib tears. I had “Trump derangement syndrome”. I was taking him too seriously and literally – the President of the GD United States.
      I know we’re not supposed to focus on identity politics and cultural issues, but it’s episodes like this that make Kamala Harris’s ascension resonate. The first female vice-president. The first black vice-president. The first Indian vice-president. Not only do we belong. We can be in charge.
      Barring some catastrophe before 14 December, when election results are certified, America will try to move forward. Trump will do his best to make sure the transition proceeds with zero dignity for him or the country – he still hasn’t conceded and his 300 desperate lawsuits are still going forward, though many have been dismissed.
      But the damage he’s done will stay with us for some time. Republicans complicit in the degradation of the country’s character who kowtowed to Trump were re-elected. A QAnon believer will join Congress, as well as a certain other representative who relishes owning the libs.
      As most of the rest of world already knew, the myth of America as an incorruptible force for good in the world was due for dismantling. So in that sense, maybe Donald Trump has done the US a favour in showing us just how “normal” America is, no better than other countries that elect authoritarian populists with delusions of grandeur who encourage fear.
      And if we accept that, maybe we can start to make practical changes that help people and convince them that popular policies labelled as socialist by the right aren’t scary. Maybe we can start to dismantle another American myth – that everyone is better off on their own, free to get rich or sink into destitution. Maybe 2021 can be the beginning of a new era, when we acknowledge that we have to be good before we can be great.
      The 2020 election didn’t deliver the enormous repudiation America needed. It showed us how deeply divided we are. But a win is a win. Most of the country made the moral choice not to be represented by selfishness and hatred. And for now, that’s a reason to hope that America is a little less f**ked.
      • Nick Bhasin is a writer and editor. Follow him at @nickbhasin More

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      Joe, Jill and the Bidens: who are America's new first family?

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      Joe Biden’s victory in the US presidential election means a new “first family” will be stepping into the White House, and will include a mix of figures who are already household names or upcoming social media stars, as well as relatives who like to keep a lower profile.Besides Biden himself, the person most involved in the president-elect’s political career is his wife, Jill Biden, an educator and “military mom”. The pair have been married since 1977.Jill is expected to break with tradition and keep her day job as a professor, while also immersing herself in education policy. That’s an unusual move, even for a first lady with four degrees.“For American educators, this is a great day for y’all,” Biden said in his victory speech on Saturday. “You’re gonna have one of your own in the White House. And Jill’s gonna make a great first lady. I’m so proud of her.” More

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      James Clyburn: ‘defund the police’ slogan may have hurt Democrats at polls

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      James Clyburn, the House majority whip and Democratic “kingmaker” who played an outsized role in Joe Biden’s successful presidential run, has said the “sloganeering” of the Black Lives Matter protests and other social justice efforts this summer might have hampered them at the polls.Clyburn, a Black South Carolina congressman and prominent figure in the civil rights movement, likened the “defund the police” mantra of certain activists to civil rights efforts in the 1960s, when some public support for the movement’s objectives was eroded by radical messaging.Clyburn invoked memories of John Lewis, the civil rights icon who died this year.“I came out very publicly and very forcibly against sloganeering,” Clyburn said Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union. “John Lewis and I were founders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. John and I sat on the House floor and talked about that defund the police slogan, and both of us concluded that it had the possibilities of doing to the Black Lives Matter movement and current movements across the country what Burn, Baby, Burn did to us back in the 1960s,” Clyburn said.Burn, Baby, Burn became a street slogan during the Watts civil unrest of 1965 in Los Angeles, at the time the largest and costliest uprising of the civil rights era.“We lost that movement over that slogan,” he said.He added: “We saw the same thing happening here. We can’t pick up these things just because it makes a good headline. It sometimes destroys headway.”As an example, Clyburn cited the defeat of South Carolina US Senate hopeful Jaime Harrison, who ended up beaten comprehensively by the incumbent Republican Lindsey Graham in a race many had hoped he would win after he turned a longshot campaign into a real contest. “Jaime Harrison started to plateau when ‘defund the police’ showed up with a caption on TV, ran across his head,” Clyburn said in a separate Sunday appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press.“That stuff hurt Jaime. And that’s why I spoke out against it a long time ago. I’ve always said that these headlines can kill a political effort.”Clyburn also attacked the Democratic party’s “progressive” left wing, members of which have already broken ranks and fired the first shots in a looming battle for the future political direction of the party.“Sometimes I have real problems trying to figure out what progressive means,” he said.Clyburn’s comments followed a salvo by left-wing rising star Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez who has taken the opposite position, reflecting deep rifts in Biden’s victorious party as it prepares to reoccupy the presidency.In a no-holds-barred, post-election interview with the New York Times, she warned that if the Biden administration does not put progressives in top positions, the party would lose badly in the 2022 midterm elections.The leftwing New York congresswoman sharply rejected the notion that progressive messaging around the summer’s anti-racism protests and more radical policies like the Green New Deal had led to the party’s loss of congressional seats. She said the party needed to play to its core base of supporters, not reach out to centrists, or soft Republicans.“If the party believes after 94% of Detroit went to Biden, after Black organisers just doubled and tripled turnout down in Georgia, after so many people organised Philadelphia, the signal from the Democratic party is the John Kasich won us this election? I mean, I can’t even describe how dangerous that is,” she said.Kasich is a former Republican governor of Ohio who campaigned for Biden, endorsing him as a centrist that moderate Republicans could get behind. More

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      Republicans back Trump challenge to Biden election victory

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      Donald Trump’s resolve not to accept the result of the presidential election appeared unshaken on Sunday, as he continued to promote conspiracy theories about the vote, with little outward sign that anyone in his inner circle was prepared to talk him into conceding.
      CNN cited White House sources saying that the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, had broached the subject of concession, and that his wife, Melania, was also advising that “the time had come for him to accept the loss”. But other outlets shot down CNN’s reports, even as the first lady tweeted in support of her husband.
      Trump continued to tweet false claims that the election had been stolen, and the only public statements from those close to him were adamantly in favour of staying.
      Top Republicans either amplified Trump’s baseless claims of widespread vote rigging or remained silent, with only a tiny number of moderates following tradition and congratulating Joe Biden.
      “Keep fighting for every legal and live vote,” South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, a close ally of the president, advised him on Fox Business, pointing to a variety of legal challenges Trump’s lawyers were planning to launch on Monday.
      “If we don’t fight back in 2020, we’re never going to win again presidentially. There is a lot at stake here.”
      Legal challenges are routine in the aftermath of an election, as are recounts where margins are small. There will be a recount in Georgia. But there is no modern precedent for such processes leading to major changes in the results. International and US observers, and Republican state officials, have said there is no evidence of widespread irregularities despite the challenges of holding an election at the height of a pandemic.
      Even after congratulations to Biden flooded in from almost every foreign government, Republican loyalists lined up on Fox News – which has called the election for Biden – to portray the result as a media construct.
      “The media is desperately trying to get everyone to coronate Joe Biden as the next president, but that’s not how it works,” Texas senator Ted Cruz said. “The media does not get to select our president. The American people get to elect our president.
      “I believe President Trump still has a path to victory and that path is to count every single legal vote that was cast, but also not to count any votes that were fraudulently cast.”
      A statement from former Republican president George W Bush issued on Sunday said: “I extended my warm congratulations and thanked him for the patriotic message he delivered last night. I also called Kamala Harris to congratulate her on her historic election to the vice-presidency.
      “Though we have political differences, I know Joe Biden to be a good man, who has won his opportunity to lead and unify our country. The president-elect reiterated that while he ran as a Democrat, he will govern for all Americans.”
      Only two Republican senators have so far sent their congratulations to the president elect: former presidential candidate Mitt Romney, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. She said honouring Americans’ choice “in who leads us has always defined us and is the source of our exceptionalism. We must uphold that legacy.”
      Speaking to NBC’s Meet the Press, Romney referred to Biden as “president-elect”, something other Republicans have avoided. But he said he was not even going to try to talk Trump down from his insistence that he won the election.
      “You’re not going to change the nature of President Trump in these last days, apparently, of his presidency. He is who he is and he has a relatively relaxed relationship with the truth, and so he’s going to keep on fighting until the very end.”
      However, Romney acknowledged the harm the president’s obduracy was doing.
      “Look, I know the eyes of the world are on us. The eyes of our own people are on the institutions that we have. The eyes of history are on us,” the Utah senator said.
      Most Republican members of Congress remained silent on the question of the president’s concession, well aware that even after Trump leaves the White House, he and his supporters could unleash their wrath anyone seen as disloyal. More

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      Joe Biden gets to work as president-elect while Trump refuses to concede

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      Joe Biden spent his first full day as US president-elect determined to hit the ground running, as he faces one of the most daunting challenges of any new occupant of the White House.
      The Democrat, who defeated Donald Trump to win election as the 46th president, immediately began work on what is likely to be a turbulent transition as he confronts the fast-spreading coronavirus, high unemployment, systemic racism, the climate crisis and a bitterly divided nation.
      Yet even as the silent machinery of a transfer of power kicked inexorably into gear, Trump still refused to concede defeat, insisting he would press ahead with legal challenges from Monday. There is no evidence of widespread election irregularities. On Sunday, former president George W Bush joined those recognising Biden as the winner.
      Biden, a 77-year-old former US senator from Delaware who was vice-president to Barack Obama, was declared the victor of a closely fought and divisive pandemic-era election on Saturday morning, triggering euphoria in major cities as people honked car horns, danced in the streets and turned Trump’s TV catchphrase against him: “You’re fired!”
      It was also hailed by observers around the world as a return to political orthodoxy after the disruptive experiment represented by aggressive “America first” nationalism and administrative chaos during Trump’s four-year presidency.
      In an outdoor victory speech to hundreds of supporters in Wilmington, Delaware, Biden struck a starkly different note, stating: “I pledge to be a president who seeks not to divide, but to unify.”
      He added: “This is the time to heal in America.”
      The vice-president-elect, the California senator Kamala Harris, wore a white suit and blouse, symbolising the women’s suffrage movement, and praised Biden’s “audacity” for choosing a woman as running mate.
      “While I may be the first woman in this office, I will not be the last,” she said.
      Biden listed goals including building prosperity, securing healthcare, achieving racial justice and saving the climate. But he said his first priority would be controlling Covid-19 with a plan “built on a bedrock of science … to turn this pandemic around”.
      Even as the nation was gripped by the election, the virus soared to record highs with an average of more than 100,000 cases per day. On Monday Biden will announce his own Covid-19 task force. His transition effort has a website, BuildBackBetter.com, and a Twitter account, @Transition46. But it is unclear what, if any, cooperation he can expect from the outgoing Trump administration. More

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      The rotten state of American politics made Trump smell fresh | Nesrine Malik

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      This weekend there have been spontaneous parties on the streets of American cities after TV networks finally called the election for Joe Biden. From New York to Houston, Louisville to Minneapolis, liberals came out to celebrate a moment they had been expecting for four long years: Donald Trump had finally run out of road. The spell was broken. The penny had dropped.The US has certainly earned a moment of relief and celebration, but Trump’s toxic presence has not yet been eliminated. In the end, the result was not as close as it first appeared in those nervy early hours on Wednesday morning, and yet more than 70 million Americans picked the incumbent – more than Hillary Clinton managed while winning the popular vote in 2016.In the week before election day, there was a widespread hope that the result would repudiate both Trump and Trumpism. Nobody expected his hardcore base to defect, but there was reason to believe that voters who picked Trump over Clinton might reconsider their choice after seeing his disastrous mishandling of the pandemic, his innumerable legal and ethical violations, his flagrant disregard for the rituals of high office. Pundits put the spotlight on this hypothetical contingent of disgusted voters, and forecast a mass decamping triggered by Trump’s putrid character. The Republican political strategist Sarah Longwell last month reported that Trump was finally losing suburban white women, because, “what they saw was somebody who was constantly interrupting and yelling and seemed, you know, to be candid, kind of maniacal”.It didn’t happen. Trump added almost 8 million votes to his 2016 tally. According to exit polls and preliminary analyses of the vote, he looks to have improved his showing among Asians, black Americans, Latinos, Muslims, and even those white women we were constantly told were put off by his sexism and aggression. If voting for Trump was truly a test of America’s moral standards, the country has failed.So what can we say about the voters who stuck with Trump? First of all, this was no reluctant nose-holding: it no longer makes sense to say people voted for Trump “in spite of” his worst qualities, those are clearly a major part of the appeal. It may be comforting to imagine that “populism” involves charismatic politicians who promise the world to the desperate and the gullible. It is bracing to realise instead that in a democracy, Trumpish figures – who scandalise the establishment and gleefully violate its norms – will always emerge when the acceptable range of ideas and policies gets too narrow. At that point, it is only a matter of time before an outside challenge to the settled bipartisan consensus starts to look very attractive, even thrillingly subversive. There will always be an opening in the market for politicians who promise to make politics political again.And so as long as the Democrats shy away from the redistributive action needed to tackle glaring inequalities in a country where the gap between richest and poorest has more than doubled in the past two decades, there will be an opening for the Trumpist right to present itself as the solution to a broken system – the alternative to Biden and the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell.Trump’s economic policies overwhelmingly benefited the richest Americans, but until the pandemic took its toll, he continued to lead Biden on the issue; according to preliminary exit polls, voters who named the economy as a top priority went overwhelmingly for Trump. This is a triumph of messaging, not policy. But Americans are still hugely dissatisfied with the state of their country, and Biden’s own message of change needs to be louder and sharper – or another Trump will be along shortly. Last year, Biden got in trouble for reassuring a group of wealthy donors that while America’s obscene income inequality needed mending because it “ferments political discord and basic revolution”, they could rest easy because under his watch, “nobody had to be punished. No one’s standard of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change.”We can celebrate people of colour and women and even “middle-class Joe” riding the Amtrak train all the way to the highest office in the land, and that is not nothing. But if nothing needs to “fundamentally change”, these are just rhetorical ornaments on the same old slick centre ground. And the next big challenge to that racially diverse centre will find plenty of popular support, even if it still comes from Trump and his disciples, who will not go quietly from the US’s noisy cable networks.In fact, it was only the rotting complacency of mainstream American politics that made Trump smell refreshing. In a world without blatant voter suppression and disenfranchisement, there might be more concern for Trump’s criminality. In a world where campaigns didn’t pit millionaires against billionaires, where it was not a risky proposition to speak honestly of the country’s glaring structural inequalities, voters might not have thought Trump’s crude insults made him “straight talking”.These clues were there all along. Longwell, who highlighted Trump’s declining appeal among suburban women, also reported that her research found these same voters losing trust in both the media and political institutions. “They sort of throw their hands up a lot and say, I just don’t know what to believe,” Longwell told NPR. “There’s just this sort of total collapse of faith in anything.”Into that stagnant bog, Trump came to stir the muck. His incoherence was seen as a kind of unpractised honesty; his ignorance as a mark of accessibility; his vileness as a sign of his fighting spirit. He wasn’t nice, but he was going to shake things up.The shock of 2016 and the trauma of the past four years has intensified a belated anxiety about the crumbling state of American democracy; it has raised an alarm that is decades overdue. Too many voters looked at Trump and did not see a wicked man, they saw a man willing to break the rules of a broken system. For as long as that doesn’t fundamentally change, there is more wickedness in store.• Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist More

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      The Guardian view on Joe Biden: cometh the hour, cometh the man | Editorial

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      “This is the time to heal in America”. President-elect Joe Biden’s words were directed at a nation suffering after four years of Donald Trump’s dishonesty and fear-mongering. Mr Biden understands Trumpism is arsenic in the water supply of American political culture. It has sloshed around the country, flowing most freely wherever Republicans were in power. Even after the president had clearly lost the popular vote, his Republican enablers embraced his claims about a stolen election rather than denouncing them.Yet Mr Biden wants America to come together not come apart. There is nothing to gain from trading incivilities with Republican opponents. He seeks to bridge divides. Under Mr Trump, the US has become more polarised between educated and less-educated voters; whites and people of colour; haves and have-nots; and urban and rural areas. Mr Biden is right: politics can’t be conducted in a furnace, it’s time to “lower the temperature”.In his words Americans must “see each other again [and] listen to each other again”. There’s too much at stake to do otherwise. The US faces a triple crisis: a pandemic that is costing hundreds of lives daily; an economic depression with skyrocketing long-term unemployment; and a politics where consensus is sorely lacking but badly needed. These are interrelated emergencies. Covid cannot be solved without a faith in facts, which is why Mr Biden will set up an expert pandemic taskforce ahead of naming his cabinet. His emphasis on science is in contrast to widespread Republican disdain for evidence.The country’s economy can only be revived by federal spending to keep companies and households afloat while upscaling the test-and-trace regime. Thanks to the US’s skewed electoral system Republicans may find themselves in a position to frustrate a president Biden. Some want to bite the hand of friendship that he has extended. This would be a bad idea. Republicans who shrank the government to the size “it can be drowned in the bathtub” can see when you do so people die. Those who pushed profit-driven opinion ahead of scientific fact ought to realise that conservative ideology won’t cure coronavirus.Without a vaccine, what is needed is money from Congress and politicians willing to persuade people to change their behaviour. Super-spreading lies about the economy and the virus has deadly consequences. A public reared in an age of government distrust led to a revolt against mask-wearing and social distancing. Mr Biden is asking Republicans to stop peddling fact-free assertions about liberties being lost for the sake of public health. They should listen to him.The trained cynicism about government needs to be unwound. Mr Biden’s argument is that if Americans cannot share a common narrative about how to handle Covid then the government cannot produce a successful solution. He is right. Republicans must break Mr Trump’s spell over their party. Left unchecked the Grand Old Party risks reducing itself to a cult beholden to an ageing leader’s bizarre conspiracy theories.The American dream does not exist for many people. How to manage this pain is central to Mr Biden’s healing touch. The president-elect seems ready to offer compassion and help to those whose suffering Mr Trump dismissed as fraudulent. Mr Biden wants Americans to feel empowered by believing in something larger than themselves. He would like elected leaders to take, rather than abdicate, responsibility for public duties. If the 2020 election was a referendum on the Trump years, the pandemic provides a test of conservative principles. Mr Biden aims to restore trust in government, and in the US itself. Republicans should do their bit to help. More

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      Biden will put the US back on the world stage, and Britain must stand with him | Keir Starmer

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      Britain’s special relationship with the US was forged on the battlefields of Europe. At this year’s Remembrance Sunday, we remembered how we came together, not just as two nations with shared interests, but as friends, brothers and sisters to liberate Europe, defend freedom and defeat fascism.Like any close relationship, we’ve had our disagreements, tensions and arguments. But the values we fought for 75 years ago – liberty, cooperation, democracy and the rule of law – remain as important today as they did then. The victory of President-elect Biden presents a chance to reset that partnership and to tackle the new challenges the world faces today.The eyes of the world have been on the US in recent days – to see which direction its people would choose. In electing Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the American people have voted for a better, more optimistic future: for unity over division, hope over fear and integrity over dishonesty.The new president has promised to restore the US’s alliances and fill the void in global leadership. Britain should welcome this. The two biggest issues facing us all – defeating coronavirus and tackling the climate crisis – require a joined-up, global effort that has been sorely lacking in recent years.This election also had stark lessons for those of us who want to see progressive values triumph over the forces of division and despair. The Democrats’ path to victory was paved by a broad coalition, including many of the states and communities that four years ago turned away from them.To win back the trust of voters takes time. It takes political leaders who listen, learn and renew. Biden spoke to the soul of the nation, with a focus on who people are and what they value: family, community and security. One election victory does not mean that work is now finished for the Democrats; for us in the Labour party, it is only just beginning.It is crucial that the British government seizes this moment. Britain is forging a new path for its future outside the European Union. I believe we can succeed and thrive, but to do so we must be a part of the change that is coming. That requires hard work and leadership.It means working with other countries to ensure the global success and distribution of a coronavirus vaccine. It means building a more resilient, focused and effective response to the security threats posed by our adversaries. It means leading the global response to tackling climate breakdown, starting with next year’s Cop26 climate summit.I want us to be striking the best possible trade deals for Britain, which help to create jobs, grow our industries and protect our standards. That must start with us getting a trade agreement with the European Union by the end of the year, as was promised. It also means being a country that abides by the rule of the law.We will soon have a president in the Oval Office who has been a passionate advocate for the preservation of the Good Friday agreement. He, like governments across the world, will take a dim view if our prime minister ploughs ahead with proposals to undermine that agreement. If the government is serious about a reset in its relationship with the US, then it should take an early first step and drop these proposals.Equally, when our allies are wrong, Britain should be prepared to speak out and say so. We are at our best when the world knows we have the courage of our convictions and a clear moral purpose. That we are standing up for our beliefs and our shared values. In recent years, this has been absent. For the United States of America and for Britain, this is the time to return to the world stage. This is the time for us to lead.• Keir Starmer is leader of the Labour party and MP for Holborn and St Pancras More