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      Biden must Trump-proof US democracy, activists say: ‘There is a sense of urgency’

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      The skies above the White House were cold and grey. Joe Biden greeted the championship winning Boston Celtics basketball team, quipping about his Irish ancestry and tossing a basketball into the crowd. But the US president could not resist drawing a wider lesson.“When we get knocked down, we get back up,” he said. “As my dad would say, ‘Just get up, Joe. Get up.’ Character to keep going and keep the faith, that’s the Celtic way of life. That’s sports. And that’s America.”Such events continue to be among the ceremonial duties of a “lame duck” president with waning influence. Biden has cut a diminished figure in recent months, first surrendering his chance to seek re-election, then finding himself sidelined by the doomed presidential campaign of his vice-president, Kamala Harris.But with his legacy imperiled by Donald Trump, the president is facing calls to mitigate the oncoming storm. Advocacy groups say Biden, who turned 82 this week, can still take actions during his final two months in office to accelerate spending on climate and healthcare, secure civil liberties, and Trump-proof at least some fundamentals of US democracy.Trump’s signature campaign promise was a draconian crackdown on illegal immigration. He has nominated officials including Tom Homan and Stephen Miller, architects of family separations at the southern border during his first term, and vowed to use the US military to carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.The plans include mandatory detention, potentially trapping immigrants in inhumane conditions for years as they fight deportation. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is leading an opposition effort, urging Biden to halt the current expansion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention facilities, especially those with records of human rights abuses.Eunice Cho, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU national prison project, said Ice detention facilities “characterised by abusive conditions, pervasive neglect and utter disregard for the dignity of people in their custody” are key to Trump’s logistical plan.Dozens of people have died in Ice detention facilities – mostly owned or operated by private prison corporations – over the past four years, according to the ACLU, and 95% were likely preventable if appropriate medical care had been provided. Yet the Biden administration has backed new Ice detention facilities in states where they did not existed before, such as Kansas, Wyoming and Missouri.“We are calling on the Biden administration to take action now, in the final days of the administration, to halt any efforts to expand immigration detention and to shut down specifically abusive facilities once and for all,” Cho told reporters on a Zoom call this week. “We don’t need to put down runway for the Trump administration to put in place these mass detention and deportation machines.”She warned: “We know that the anti-immigrant policies of a second administration are going to be far more aggressive than what we saw in the first term, and mass arrest and detention is going to become perhaps the norm to create and carry out these deportation operations unless we can do all we can to put a halt to them.”View image in fullscreenAnother crucial area for Biden to make a last stand is criminal justice. In his first term, Trump oversaw the execution of more people than the previous 10 presidents combined. Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, then imposed a moratorium on federal executions in 2021.Trump has indicated his intention to resume such executions and even expand the death penalty. His nominee for attorney general, Pam Bondi, issued a public apology in 2013 while serving as Florida’s top law enforcement officer after she sought to delay the execution of a convicted killer because it conflicted with a fundraiser for her re-election campaign.Cassandra Stubbs, director of the ACLU’s capital punishment project, told reporters via Zoom that Trump said “he will work to expand the death penalty. He’s going to try to expand it to people who do not even commit killings. He’s called for expanding the death penalty to his political opponents.“But perhaps most dangerously in Project 2025 [a policy blueprint from the Heritage Foundation thinktank] – and we believe every word of it is this – he promised to try to kill everyone on death row, and the reason why we have to believe this and take it so seriously is the record that Donald Trump left where he, in a span of six months, carried out 13 executions.”The ACLU and other groups are therefore pressing Biden to commute the sentences of all individuals on federal death row to life in prison, fulfilling a campaign promise and preventing potential executions under Trump. Commuting “is really the thing that Biden can do to make it harder for Trump to restart executions”, Stubbs added.Pastor Brandi Slaughter, a board member of the pressure group Death Penalty Action, told reporters this week: “We know what the next president plans to do if any prisoners are left under a sentence of death under the Biden administration. We’ve been there, we’ve done that.”Biden has also received 8,000 petitions for clemency from federal prisoners serving non-death penalty sentences that he could either reduce or pardon. The former senator has long been criticised for his role in drawing up a 1994 crime law that led to the incarceration of thousands of Black men and women for drug offences.This week, members of Congress including Ayanna Pressley and James Clyburn led 64 colleagues in sending a letter to Biden urging him to use his clemency power “to reunite families, address longstanding injustices in our legal system and set our nation on the path toward ending mass incarceration”.They were joined at a press conference on Capitol Hill by Maria Garza, 50, from Illinois, a prison reform advocate who spent 12 years in a state prison. She said in an interview: “There is a sense of urgency because a lot of the people that are sitting waiting for clemency are people that have de facto life sentences that will die in prison if they don’t [receive clemency]. A lot of their unjust sentencing was because of the 1994 crime bill that he was the founding father of.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMitzi Wall, whose 29-year-old son Jonathan is incarcerated on a seven-and-a-half-year federal cannabis charge, called on Biden to keep a campaign promise to grant clemency to more than 4,000 people in federal prison for nonviolent cannabis crimes.“We voted for President Biden,” she said. “He gave us hope and we’re asking him to do nothing more than keep his promise.”Wall, 63, from Maryland, added: “President Biden was partly responsible for writing the 1994 crime bill that thrust families into abject poverty and pain. I know he feels bad about that and he can right that wrong with the power of the pen. I’m appealing to him as a father whose son [Hunter] could very possibly be going to prison.”In other efforts to protect civil liberties, the ACLU is recommending a moratorium on all federal government purchases of Americans’ personal data without a warrant. It is also asking Congress to pass the Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act to prevent potential abuse of surveillance technologies under the Trump administration.Meanwhile, Trump has pledged to rescind unspent funds in Biden’s landmark climate and healthcare law and stop clean-energy development projects. White House officials are working against the clock to dole out billions of dollars in grants for existing programmes to minimise Trump’s ability to rescind or redirect these funds. Earlier this month, the transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, announced more than $3.4bn in grants for infrastructure projects across the country.Wendy Schiller, a political science professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, notes that Trump will have the power of impoundment to stall the money flowing out of the government and can order rescissions to programmes funded by Congress.“The singular thing that Joe Biden can do is expedite the flow of federal dollars in all the programmes,” Schiller said.“Any money that is supposed to leave the treasury to go to schools, food safety, environmental protection – anything that is not yet distributed needs to get distributed. It’s like emptying literally the piggy bank before you go on a trip. President Biden needs to be literally getting as much money out the door in the hands of state, local and community organisations as he can.”Another priority for the White House is getting Senate confirmation of as many federal judges as possible, given the potential impact of the judiciary in challenging Trump administration policies. The Marshall Project, a non-profit news organisation, noted: “Federal judges restricted hundreds of Trump administration policies during his first term, and will likely play a significant role in determining the trajectory of his second.”Senate Republicans forced numerous procedural votes and late-night sessions this week in attempt to stall confirmations. Eventually a deal was struck that will bring Biden within striking distance of the 234 judicial confirmations that occurred in Trump’s first term – but four of Biden’s appellate court nominees will not be considered.The outgoing president could also engage with Democratic-led states and localities to bolster protections and establish “firewalls” against Trump’s agenda, particularly in areas such as immigration. These collaborations could involve reinforcing sanctuary city policies and providing resources to states that are likely to face pressure from the Trump administration.Chris Scott, former coalitions director for Harris, said: “What will be interesting is how or what can President Biden to work with states, especially where we have Democratic leadership in place, to be able to brace themselves and arm themselves with more protection. We already have places like a Michigan or Illinois where you have governors vowing to make sure that they have protections – even in the Trump presidency.”As Barack Obama discovered before handing Trump the keys to the Oval Office in 2017, however, lame duck presidents can only do so much. Trump will come into office with a flurry of executive orders, a supportive Congress and fewer guardrails than the first time around.Bill Galston, a former adviser in the Bill Clinton administration, said: “On January 20 Donald Trump will control all the instruments of government and, at that point, it’ll be up to the courts – and public opinion – to restrain him.” More

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      Women and LGBTQ+ people take up guns after Trump’s win: ‘We need to protect ourselves’

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      The misogyny and anti-trans rhetoric that were hallmarks of the 2024 election campaign have seemingly ramped up since Donald Trump’s win, prompting some women, queer and trans people to respond by buying guns – and learning how to defend themselves from potential attackers.The Guardian spoke to various Americans from marginalized groups taking firearms classes, arming themselves with stun guns and pepper spray and taking their friends shooting in an effort to protect themselves from bigots they fear will be emboldened by the president-elect’s return to power. A few left-leaning gun clubs say their numbers are increasing dramatically.“I am thinking about carrying every day,” said Ashley Parten, 38, a Douglasville, Georgia, resident who purchased stun guns for herself, her daughter and three nieces after the election. Parten, who is Black and bisexual, is also eyeing a maroon handgun that she plans on buying after taking a firearms class.“We all feel the need to make sure that we’re aware of our surroundings and protect ourselves in general, but even more so now,” she said.Earlier this week, the Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, in effect targeted Sarah McBride, the first openly trans person elected to Congress, by stating single-sex bathrooms in the Capitol “are reserved for individuals of that biological sex”. Trump, whose campaign released a firehose of anti-trans attack ads, has promised to ban gender-affirming care for minors and “keep men out of women’s sports”.The president-elect and several of his cabinet picks are also facing sexual misconduct allegations; he and his allies have bragged about the overturning of Roe v Wade and denigrated childfree women.“Our identities are politicized every single day,” said Parten.View image in fullscreenA few days after Trump’s first presidential win in November 2016, Parten said she was filling up with gas in Charleston, South Carolina, when a white man in a red Maga hat shoved her against the pump. She says she elbowed the man and then drove off.“He told me that my N-word president couldn’t protect me any more, because it was Trump country,” she recalled.Some firearms sellers and trainers who serve marginalized groups said they had seen an explosion of interest following the election.“It’s been massively overwhelming,” said Tom Nguyen, founder of LA Progressive Shooters, a gun club that caters to Bipoc and LGBTQ+ people.His beginner pistol course is sold out until June 2025 and he says he’s been “getting more bookings on a daily basis, every single day since the election than I ever have in the past four years that I’ve been doing this work”.The nationwide Liberal Gun Club said it had fielded thousands of new membership requests since the election, about half of which have come from women, with queer and trans people also accounting for a bulk of newcomers. One Wisconsin-based instructor has already trained 100 new members, according to the club spokesperson, Lara Smith. The Pink Pistols, a national gun group catering to LGBTQ+ people, said it had opened six new chapters since the election.Politically motivated gun sales aren’t new, nor are they unique to progressive voters.Barack Obama’s 2008 election resulted in a sustained surge in gun sales throughout his tenure.Just a few days before the election, Michael Cargill, who owns Central Texas Gun Works in Austin, said he saw a spike in sales from conservatives stocking up on firearms and ammo because they believed Kamala Harris winning would result in a second amendment crackdown. (The US vice-president has said she owns a Glock.) Cargill, a Black, gay Republican, said his firearms classes have doubled in size since Trump’s win and are now at capacity. The influx is primarily coming from women and LGBTQ+ people worried about their rights and potential “civil unrest”, he said.The manosphere, an anti-feminist online ecosystem, has embraced Trump’s win with posts celebrating male dominance and the loss of bodily autonomy for women and LGBTQ+ people.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAfter the election, the white nationalist podcaster Nick Fuentes wrote on X: “Your body, my choice. Forever.” Smith, the Liberal Gun Club spokesperson, said many new members said the post motivated them to join.“If there’s men out there that really think like that, I want at least a fighting chance if I ever encounter one,” said Kylee Ortega, a 24-year-old Texan who bought a pink stun gun featuring a cartoon Grim Reaper and a strawberry keychain that can be used to stab people.Trans gun enthusiasts and content creators are also hearing from their previously gun-shy friends who want to learn defensive shooting.View image in fullscreenJessie McGrath, 63, a lifelong Republican who is trans, grew up around guns on farms in Colorado and Nebraska. She decided to vote for Harris when Republicans started attacking gender-affirming care and “wanting to basically outlaw my ability to exist”. She ended up being a delegate at the Democratic national convention.“Government getting involved in making healthcare decisions is something that I never thought I would see the Republican party doing,” she said.McGrath, a veteran and prosecutor, now splits her time between Los Angeles and Omaha, and said she plans on taking a group of friends shooting when she’s back in Nebraska next month.“I’ve seen a huge uptick in women who don’t like guns who are thinking about at least getting trained on it,” she said. “It is a real, valid feeling that these people have, because the attacks have gotten larger. They’ve gotten more vitriolic.”While many women and LGBTQ+ folks cite protection as a reason for owning a gun, and may feel comforted having one, Harvard University research shows that it’s relatively rare to use a gun in self-defense. A meta-analysis by the University of California, San Francisco found that women with access to firearms are three times more likely to be killed than women who don’t have access.Tacticool Girlfriend, a trans woman and gun YouTuber with more than 62,000 subscribers, said she was concerned that people were panic-buying guns because of Trump’s win.“Guns are not going to answer most of people’s problems, even in the realm of self-defense. Training to use and carry pepper spray and studying martial arts will always be far more practical and useful in everyday self-defense scenarios,” she said, noting that gun ownership is costly in both time and money.“If you can’t dry-fire at least once a week and go out to the range once a month on average, you’re likely to become more of a liability to yourself and everyone around you in the event that you ever needed a gun.” More

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      Kamala Harris had a whirlwind 107-day campaign. What’s next for her?

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      Whatever happened to Kamala Harris? For 107 days she was everywhere, filling TV screens and campaign rallies in her whirlwind bid for the White House. Then, with election defeat by Donald Trump, it all ended as abruptly as it began. The rest is silence.“The vice-president has taken time off to go spend time with her family,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters on Thursday, acknowledging that Harris is holidaying in Hawaii with husband Doug Emhoff. “She has worked very hard for the last four years, and her taking a couple of days to be with her family, good for her.”With Trump’s special brand of chaos already dominating the Washington agenda, Harris’s vice-presidency is clearly in a winding down. When she formally leaves office on 20 January, she will face her first spell as a private citizen since she was elected San Francisco’s district attorney in 2003.Speculation has already begun as to what might come next. While Harris, 60, has not announced any specific plans, supporters suggest that options include a move into the private sector, a return to California politics – or another presidential run in 2028.Bakari Sellers, a close ally of Harris and former representative from South Carolina, said: “She can do anything she wants to do. She’s more than capable. She’s given this country more than enough. She can go to the private sector and make money. She can go to a law school and teach.“She can be governor of California and pretty much clear the field. She can run for president again. Or she can just say to hell with it and go and spend time with Dougie. That decision hasn’t been made yet but her options are plentiful.”The last incumbent vice-president to lose an election was Al Gore in 2000. He went on to make an Oscar-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, and win the Nobel peace prize for his efforts to combat the climate crisis.Election losers since then have included John Kerry, later a secretary of state, and John McCain and Mitt Romney, both of whom served in the Senate. Hillary Clinton wrote a book about her 2016 defeat entitled What Happened, while the 2020 election loser, Trump, bounced back to regain the White House earlier this month.Harris might be tempted by a spell in the private sector. Law firms and lobbying groups would welcome her legal background and political connections. Alternatively she could contribute to the policy debate by joining a thinktank or launching her own advocacy organisation.She could also write a book offering her perspective on her time in Joe Biden’s White House, including its internal tensions, and her hastily improvised campaign against Trump. Its level of candour would probably depend on whether she is planning a return to the political arena.California governor Gavin Newsom is term-limited in 2026, raising the prospect of Harris seeking to make more history by becoming the state’s first female governor. As a former California senator and attorney general, she enjoys high name recognition in the state and would have no problem attracting donors.Harris would be following in the footsteps of Richard Nixon, who lost the 1960 presidential election and ran for California governor two years later. But he lost that race, too. He told reporters: “You don’t have Nixon to kick around any more, because, gentlemen, this is my last news conference.” He roared back to win the presidency in 1968.View image in fullscreenHarris would, however, face competition from fellow Democrats in 2026. Lieutenant governor Eleni Kounalakis, a longtime Harris ally, has already announced her candidacy, potentially setting up a contentious primary contest.Bill Whalen, a political consultant and speechwriter who has worked for California governors Arnold Schwarzenegger and Pete Wilson, said: “There’s a gubernatorial race sitting there waiting for her if she wants it. If you look at the polls, there is no clear frontrunner. If she were to jump in, she would immediately push most Democrats out of the race and, given California’s politics, if it’s her versus a Republican in November, she would be a cinch to win it.”The governorship of California, the most populous state in the US, would offer a high-profile platform that could keep Harris in the national spotlight and potentially position her for a future presidential run. Like Newsom, Harris could style herself as a leader of the Democratic resistance to Trump.But focusing on a gubernatorial race could detract from Harris’s efforts to build national support and momentum for a potential 2028 presidential campaign. Whalen, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in California, said: “The question is, does she want to be a governor or does she want to be a president? If she wants to be president, then governor is not the right path because she would have to run for that office in 2026 and pivot right around and run for president in 2027.”If Harris became governor, she might have to wait until 2032 for another White House bid. Whalen commented: “That’s a long time to wait in politics. If she wants to run for president again, then it’s pretty simple: she and Gavin Newsom and [Illinois governor] JB Pritzker and others have to figure out who is the tip of the spear of the so-called resistance. That would be the card for her to play.”Democrats are still shellshocked by Harris’s 312-to-226 defeat by Trump in the electoral college. But as of Thursday’s count, she was trailing Trump by only 1.7% in the national popular vote. She had a total of 74.3m votes, the third-highest popular vote total in history after Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2024.The idea of Harris making another bid for the White House in 2028 is already being floated. She retains access to the Democratic party’s most extensive donor network.A Morning Consult opinion poll this week found that 43% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents said they would vote for Harris if the party’s 2028 presidential primary were held today. She was well ahead of transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg at 9% and Newsom at 8%.But precedent is against her. Democrats have historically shown little appetite for re-nominating candidates who previously lost presidential elections, as Gore could testify. Moreover, following the defeats of both Clinton and Harris, the party will undoubtedly grapple with whether they want to put forward a woman for the third time. Democrats may also be inclined to move on from the Biden-Harris era and seek fresh faces.Chris Scott, who was coalitions director for Harris during the campaign, said: “I have no idea what she plans on doing next. I have definitely heard the reports, as have a lot of folks around her, of her potentially running for governor. It would be a great thing for California if that was what she decided to do and it also keeps her in the conversation.”Scott pointed to Harris’s strong advocacy for issues such as reproductive rights and economic opportunity. “There is a chance that she could run in 2028 again. Obviously a lot of things have to look different next time around. But a loss here does not negate that she has been an outstanding public servant for her entire career. It is my hope that we have not seen the last of her in politics.” More

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      The Guardian view on Donald Trump’s plutocrats: money for something | Editorial

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      One person turns up surprisingly often at Donald Trump’s side. Not his No 2, JD Vance, nor his wife, Melania, but another man a quarter-century younger and about $300bn heavier: Elon Musk. The two hunkered down in Mar-a-Lago on the night of the election, celebrating the results. This week they were in Texas, watching Mr Musk’s staff test-launch a spacecraft. During the campaign, Mr Musk personally chipped in $130m, made speeches at rallies and organised campaigns to “get out the vote”. Last week, the world’s richest man was picked by the president-elect to run a new “department of government efficiency”. So close are the pair that Mr Musk dubs himself “First Buddy”.American politics has always been coiled around money, tight as a vine around a trunk. Nearly 25 years ago, George W Bush joked at a swanky white-tie dinner: “Some people call you the elites; I call you my base.” Nor is it confined to the right wing. Of the two main candidates in this month’s election, more billionaires backed Kamala Harris. One result is a highly warped politics that works against the very people it urges to go out and vote.The renowned political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson observe that many rich countries have succumbed to rightwing populism – but Mr Trump is different. He talks populist, but walks plutocratic. According to Prof Hacker and Prof Pierson he is “fixated on helping the wealthiest Americans”. The $1.5tn of tax cuts he made in his first term meant that, for the first time in history, billionaires paid a lower rate than the working class.The Republicans were always the party of big business, but Mr Trump is turning them into a playpen for oligarchs. This autumn, Mr Musk was the only boss of a Fortune 100 business to donate to the Republicans, compared with the 42 company heads who supported Mr Bush in 2004. Mr Trump’s donors do not come from the big institutions of corporate America but are often drawn from casinos, crypto currency, fossil fuels and shadow banking.Business leaders used to argue that their support for politicians was in the hope of securing long-term stability and competent economic stewardship. This time, some appear to have been made very particular promises. In April, Mr Trump convened a dinner for fossil-fuel executives and lobbyists, where he reportedly demanded they donate $1bn. In return, they’d face fewer pesky regulations on where they could drill. “It’s a whole different class,” one longtime handler of Republican donors told the New Yorker last month. Rather than a photo op and a grand dinner, “they want to essentially get their issues in the White House … They want someone to take their calls.”And they probably don’t want too much scrutiny. Mr Musk’s appointment to the “department of government efficiency” is both less and more than it seems. It’s not a Washington job that would burden the tech billionaire with regulations around conflicts of interest; rather he will “provide advice and guidance from outside of government”. This sounds like unparalleled access without much responsibility, which leaves the American public reliant on Mr Trump’s personal ethics to safeguard their democracy. What exactly does Earth’s richest man see in the president-elect of the world’s biggest superpower? It is a question that will keep coming around – not for Mr Musk alone, but for so many wealthy supporters of America’s next leader.

      Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      The Long Wave: Unearthing the real story of Black voters at the US election

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      Hello and welcome to The Long Wave. This week, I had a chat with Lauren N Williams, the deputy editor for race and equity at the Guardian US, about the country’s election results and the role Black voters played. I wanted to discuss the reported swing among Black voters to Donald Trump, which seemed pretty significant. However, talking to her made me see things from a different angle. But first, the weekly roundup.Weekly roundupView image in fullscreenBarbados PM invites Trump for climate talks | At the UN’s Cop29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, Mia Mottley told the Guardian that she would “find common purpose in saving the planet” with the president-elect of the US. Trump’s re-election has aggravated fears about the future of climate action.Malcolm X family sues over assassination | The family of Malcolm X have filed a $100m federal lawsuit against the CIA, FBI and New York police department over his death. The lawsuit alleges that law enforcement agencies knew of the plot to assassinate the civil rights leader in 1965 but did not act to stop it.Kenyans embrace standup comedy | Comedy is booming in Kenya, with new venues and a fresh wave of standups picking up the mic. As our east Africa correspondent, Carlos Mureithi, reports: “Topics encompass daily life and the entire range of challenges that beset the country … as performers tap into the power of standup to make people laugh about their difficulties.”Steve McQueen reveals cancer treatment | The Oscar-winning film director and artist Steve McQueen underwent treatment for prostate cancer in 2022. The Blitz producer, whose father died of the disease in 2006, has helped raise awareness of the higher risk of prostate cancer among Black men, and directed a short campaign film, Embarassed.Evaristos connect at Rio book festival | The British Booker prize-winner Bernardine Evaristo and Brazil’s most celebrated living Black author, Conceição Evaristo, met for the first time at Festa Literária das Periferias in Rio de Janeiro last Wednesday. The two Evaristos, who are unrelated, spoke on a panel discussion about their shared surname and its ties to Brazil and the transatlantic slave trade.In depth: A Black political shift – math or myth?View image in fullscreenThe headlines seemed clear: Trump’s support among Black voters had soared. In the US election this month, some media reported that he doubled his share of the Black male vote and won more Black voters than any other Republican in almost 50 years. This was history! Well, not quite, Lauren N Williams tells me. “The numbers overall are almost identical to how people voted in 2020,” she says. According to exit polls, Black voters turned out for Harris at 85%, and for Joe Biden at 87%. The only real difference is that the number of Black men who voted for Kamala Harris dropped slightly, while Black male Trump support increased slightly from 19% in 2020 to 21% in 2024. But, she says, more than 7 million fewer people voted for Harris than Biden. While Trump picked up more Black male voters than he did back then – a detail heavily emphasised in media coverage before and after the election – the prevailing narrative does not account for the fact that: “It’s not only this switch to Trump,” Lauren says. People stayed home, or people voted third party. If you don’t look at the whole picture, then yes, you arrive at the narrative that Black people are swinging one way.”Why was this contextualisation missing from post-election analysis? Because it doesn’t make for a sexy story. “It’s really interesting to people when you have a character like Trump and he attracts folks who you wouldn’t normally think would be into his policies and persona,” Lauren says. “It’s typical that white male voters vote for him overwhelmingly – but what’s not typical is when people of colour do so. For a lot of news media, that is a really attractive story.”I asked her about the viral clip of Barack Obama scolding Black male voters for seemingly not turning out as strongly for Harris as they did for him when he ran. Even I flinched when I saw it, and thought, wow, the Democrats must really be in trouble. But, according to Lauren, the emergency button on that narrative had so constantly been pressed by poll analysts (a narrative that, if I may, the Guardian avoided), that even the Democrats panicked and fell for it, sending Obama to “finger-wag” at prospective voters.‘Complicating the narrative’View image in fullscreenIt’s still interesting to me that a candidate like Trump, with his record on racism, could win over more Black men, even in context. But Lauren calls my attention to a far bigger and more interesting story that has been reduced to a footnote of the election: Harris won almost the entire Black female vote. “If you had white women voting 90%-plus for a candidate, you would not hear the end of that story. It would be endlessly curious and interesting and fascinating. We lose a lot by not applying that same level of curiosity to the ways that other demographics vote.” I can see that this also applies to Black men, three-quarters of whom still voted Democrat. “This story could have been ‘look at the power that Black voters wield’, but that’s just not the American narrative.”And what we lose is a big deal. By writing off those who voted for Harris as doing so simply out of blind loyalty, the reasons for Trump’s victory risk becoming detached from reality. Another broad headline after the election was that there was actually nothing sinister going on – it was “just” the economy. But the Black people who voted for Harris are disproportionately working class, Lauren says, and have made informed decisions despite their economic status because they are accustomed to making compromises and always thinking about “the greater good”. “In the discussions that a lot of the media has about the working class, the undertone is that they are only talking about the white working class”, because considering Black voters as part of the American working class “complicates the narrative”. People would have to reckon with the fact that “Black Americans who experience disfranchisement and a huge racial wealth gap were not wooed by this idea of economic anxiety”.Anti-racism has fallen out of fashionView image in fullscreen“Complicating the narrative” raises the question: why is it that white people are seemingly more anxious about the economy than Black people who are less well off? There is little interest in the answer to this question, says Lauren. “I think people have decided that race is boring,” she says, even though it’s “at the root of so much. Any time we talk about identity politics, we’re talking about people of colour, even though Trump ran on white male identity.” By only treating white people as rational economic voters, we pay “an undue amount of attention” to factors outside race, even though it’s “right up there”. I have definitely noticed a shift since Trump’s first election victory eight years ago. The myriad “white rage” takes of 2016 are thin on the ground this time, despite Trump’s 2024 campaign being even more explicitly racist.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA growing backlash to Black Lives Matter also played a role. “We shifted so far after George Floyd,” Lauren says, “whether we saw corporations – symbolic or not – changing their behaviour and relationships to racism and people were pissed about that. Not everyone was on the Black Lives Matter bandwagon.”What next for Black Americans?View image in fullscreenIf this is how the election analysis has played out, it does not bode well for the next four years. Perhaps we’ll see wall-to-wall coverage of Trump’s “appeal” to the white working class and continued disregard for the millions of Black people who didn’t vote for him, who now have to live under a regime that “aims to dismantle federal anti-discrimination policies”. Lauren’s approach is to widen the historical lens. “One thing that has helped me is just remembering that we have been here before. Any time there is progress, there is always a backlash to it. One step forward, two steps back. That is peak American history.”As a journalist, Lauren says showing Black lives as fuller than they are often depicted in the mainstream media, insisting on art, culture, and “the Black rodeo down in Mississippi”, is the way to plough ahead. In other words: if you’re a glass-half-full person, which I am, it’s focusing on that one step forward and then the next one. Or, to borrow from Harris, “weeping may endure for a night but joy cometh in the morning”.What we’re intoView image in fullscreen

      I am broadly not a fan of beauty pageants. But I can’t lie, the variations of African dress during this year’s Miss Universe had me mesmerised. It’s impossible to pick a favourite as each one was more stunning the next. Nesrine

      The Afrikan Alien mixtape by Pa Salieu is going platinum on my phone. I love his musings on family, alienation and freedom (he was released from a 21-month prison stint in September). Jason

      I know we are at a saturation point with social media, but hear me out: Bluesky is like the old, less toxic Twitter, and has a handy way of grouping users so you can follow by theme. I mass followed Blacksky, a selection of interesting Black accounts on the app. Check it out. Nesrine

      I can’t wait to catch Cynthia Erivo’s performance as Elphaba in the film Wicked. She is a generational talent and I can’t stop watching her perform an R&B rendition of The Sound of Music on The Tonight Show. Jason
      Black catalogueView image in fullscreenWhen the prominent Fani-Kayode family fled the civil war in Nigeria, the UK gained a curious and radical artist and photographer in Rotimi Fani-Kayode, famous for his portraits exploring race, culture, sexuality, desire and pain. He had a short career, with much of his work accomplished between 1983 and his death from Aids-related complications in London in 1989. Fani-Kayode was a member of the Brixton Artists Collective and a founding member of the Autograph ABP (Association of Black Photographers), and much of Rotimi’s never-before-seen works are being presented at a new exhibition in London that captures his legacy and impact.Tap inDo you have any thoughts or responses to this week’s newsletter? Share your feedback by replying to this, or emailing us on thelongwave@theguardian.com and we may include your response in a future issue. More

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      With Trump heading for the White House, the Democrats must learn these lessons – and fast | Owen Jones

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      Did the Democrats really lose because they were too “woke”, too obsessed with minorities, too radical? After defeat, there always comes the battle for the narrative about why the party lost. As the US left is rediscovering, the most influential voices tend to be those platformed by corporate media outlets whose siren cry is always to march rightwards. And yet even the New York Times concluded that one of the main problems was in fact Kamala Harris’s “Wall Street-approved economic pitch”, which her brother-in-law – chief legal officer at Uber – reportedly helped craft, and which “fell flat”.The liberal order, always riddled with hypocrisies and illusions, is collapsing, partly because mainstream liberals cannot be trusted to defend liberalism: they are set to conclude that Trumpism must be defeated through imitation. But here’s a polling fact that cannot be ignored. In the past 50 years, the number of Americans who believe the Democrats “represent the working class” has plummeted, while the numbers who believe they “stand up for marginalised groups” has dramatically risen, now exceeding the former.This is what happens if you lack a convincing economic vision to uplift the working class – in all its diversity – as a whole. Even if your commitment to minority rights is superficial and rhetorical, your rightwing opponents will tell Americans that your interest is reserved for “marginalised groups” rather than “the average Joe”. Or as one Republican attack ad put it: “Kamala is for they/them; President Trump is for you.”This is a feature, not a bug, with the Democrats. Since the civil rights era, they have been a coalition including a chunk of corporate America, a shrinking labour movement and minorities. This cross-class alliance stopped them offering European-style social democracy, which would mean hiking taxes on their wealthy backers. In fact, under the Democratic administrations of John F Kennedy and Lyndon B Johnson in the 60s, hefty tax cuts benefited big businesses and affluent Americans the most. While the tax burden of the average US family nearly doubled between the 1950s and the election of Ronald Reagan, corporate taxes as a share of gross federal receipts fell by a third.This means that the big government spending projects of those eras, like the anti-poverty measures of the Great Society, were largely paid for by middle-income Americans. This encouraged a backlash against the beneficiaries of the programmes, demonised as the undeserving Black poor.In this context, white American workers became increasingly associated with conservatism, as converts to Richard Nixon’s Republicans and the segregationist George Wallace. “The typical worker – from construction craftsman to shoe clerk,” wrote New York Times labour correspondent AH Raskin in 1968, “has become probably the most reactionary political force in the country.” But as the working-class writer Andrew Levison wrote a few years later: “There is nothing strange in the fact that workers began deserting liberalism once liberalism so decisively deserted them.”There are obvious differences today. The previous backlash against liberal failures paved the way to Reaganism, which did at least offer a coherent vision for society. Trumpism, on the other hand, is more emblematic of what the American literary critic Lionel Trilling said of US conservatism in 1950, that it was a series of “irritable mental gestures”, defined by fiery opposition to perceived progressive sensibilities rather than a cogent plan for what the US could look like. Policies that favour wealthier Americans – rather than many of the struggling Americans who voted for Trump – piggyback on this emotive backlash.But Kamala Harris made her dividing lines abortion rights and the defence of democracy: crucial questions, no doubt, but not answers to the struggles of workers on stagnating wages. Trumpism, on the other hand, attempted to vocalise the rage many Americans felt about their difficult circumstances, and sought to portray the Democrats as driven by championing demonised minorities instead, such as migrants and transgender people. That Harris did no such thing in her campaign is irrelevant: the lack of a compelling cut-through message on bread-and-butter issues allowed the Republicans to “flood the zone with shit”, as Republican strategist Steve Bannon puts it.The answer, then, is not to throw minorities under the presidential Cadillac. That will alienate progressive Americans, and given Trump won a similar number of votes as 2020 – while Democrats haemorrhaged natural supporters who stayed home – this would be a political as well as a moral failure. It is also true that the majority of citizens in any country will never be driven by a desire to improve the lot of minorities, and nor should the left wish to focus only on the most marginalised.Instead, an economic populism that champions the interests of the American majority – irrespective of gender, race, religion, sexual or gender identity – will drown out claims that the Democrats care only for the marginalised “other”. Instead of the Democrats being drawn into toxic rows about the existence of transgender people, the Republicans would be forced on the defensive instead: as Reagan once wisely put it, in politics, “If you’re explaining, you’re losing”. The Democrats need a plan that unites the shared interests of low- and middle-income Americans in an age of crisis and turmoil.As for the siren voices demanding a corporate-friendly Democratic party which refuses to champion minorities: the voters were just offered that, and it lost.

      Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

      Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      Harris ran from the Biden policies that were actually popular with voters | Daniela Gabor

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      The post-mortems of Kamala Harris’s loss to Donald Trump all agree on one thing: that Harris stuck too close to Biden. It was deliberate, pundits charge, pointing to the now infamous October appearance on ABC’s The View, where Harris said “There is not a thing that comes close to mind” that she would have done differently. But the pundits are wrong.Harris did distance herself from Biden where it hurt her most. She dumped his Rooseveltian transformative ambitions to bring back big government. Instead, she returned to the Obama-Clinton of a small or neoliberal state that highly influential Democrats like Jake Sullivan had already known was an electoral dead end during the first Trump administration.Freshly bruised from his experience as senior adviser to Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential campaign, Sullivan set out a new vision for the Democratic party in his 2018 essay The New Old Democrats. The nutshell: “It’s not the 1990s anymore. People want the government to help solve big problems.”The problem for Democrats, he warned, was not that the party had been hijacked by progressive forces (a familiar lament, now framed in the conservative language of “woke”) but the opposite. The political centre of gravity had shifted, leaving the Democrats behind an American public clamoring for more energised government. To stave off the long-run threat of Trumpism, Democrats had to abandon centrist politics and embrace a new policy playbook, a return of the state guided by Roosevelt’s principles of “bold, persistent experimentation”. The main task was to “embrace the fact that transforming our economy will require substantial public investments”, paid for through progressive taxation of wealth and concentrated corporate power – big government, beating back big business.As Biden hung a portrait of Roosevelt above the Oval Office fireplace after winning the election, his team, with Jake Sullivan as national security adviser, set to work on the return of big, transformative government. Even with congressional politics in the way, the several legislative initiatives together – Chips, IRA, the Infrastructure and Jobs Act – amounted to a $2tn push to reshape the American economy. The conflation of transformative ambitions and China hawkishness, once remarkably absent from Sullivan’s vision, worried some, but most took it as either imperative or the price to pay for bipartisan support.By late 2023, even ideological enemies approved of Bidenomics. The free market evangelists at the Economist applauded Biden’s as the most “energetic American government in nearly half a century”. It helped revive beleaguered unions, and “produced an industrial policy that aims to reshape the American economy”, with immediate results: investment in manufacturing facilities more than doubled, soaring to its highest on recent historical record. Similarly, Lina Khan, chair of the US Federal Trade Commission, was taming concentrated corporate power without destroying corporate profitability or slowing the record number of new businesses created during Biden’s first years.If the Economist expected four more years of Biden to mean even bigger government, Harris backtracked. Where Sullivan called for a Democrat-led economic revolution for America, her “opportunity economy” read like a sad list of bullet points on a crammed slide headed “Smallish Government”: boost child tax credits, increase deductions for new small businesses, help for first-time homebuyers, incentives for new developments.This was not the transformative vision that Biden had championed. Her plans to oppose price gouging framed corporate power as an occasional, rather than structural, threat against American consumers, and said nothing about American workers. Alongside speculation that she would bow to billionaire pressure to oust Khan, Harris dropped union leaders and her early position as a scourge of Big Business to instead court favor with Wall Street, Mark Cuban and the minuscule Liz Cheney fanbase.Under Harris, the Democratic party returned the mantle of change to the Trump campaign, and to a JD Vance prepared to denounce corporate power and voter economic misery often more trenchantly than Harris.What if Harris shifted to the right of Biden because she had no choice? The most energetic government in decades had failed to make it through to voters, who heard inflation when Democrats shouted Bidenomics. But here Sullivan, by now tainted by his unwavering support for Israel’s destruction of Gaza, had already given the answer, or, rather, asked the important question in his 2018 essay: The New Old Democrats, he had insisted, should not ask whether transformative government, but how? How can transformative government both check corporate power and support workers and families?The hard truth about Biden’s transformative project is that it failed its ambitions to roll back the power of capital. There was a brief moment in 2021 when big finance spoke and nobody listened, when investors lamented being excluded from Biden’s old-style “government spending on infrastructure”. But then the “politics of the possible” in Congress curtailed that momentum, in no small part due to conservative Democrats like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, private equity’s best friend.Bidenomics might not have started, but it certainly ended, as a capital-first, trickle-down-to-workers project. Its transformative ambitions morphed into generous subsidies (tax incentives) for private investors. These investors got to opt out of worker-friendly tax credits. Where Roosevelt would have decried the new generation of subsidy-chaser capitalists as class and democracy enemies, Biden invited the biggest of them all – Larry Fink, CEO of the asset manager BlackRock – to join him at the G7 meeting in Rome in June 2024. There, Fink delivered a long sermon on why the privatisation of social and climate infrastructure, with state subsidies for investors, is the only way forward.Biden officials might have waved a copy of Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution on their way to the White House, but distributional politics hasn’t changed that much since the glory days of neoliberalism. The richest 20% by income account for 40% of spending, twice as much as the poorest 40%. This is the widest gap on record, according to Oxford Economics.Rich millennials got virtually all the $51tn gains to US wealth this decade. Having tried and failed to extend the Covid-19 social safety net, the Biden administration instead continued to hand big finance – in its private equity guise – chunks of the state’s social contract with citizens, from housing to healthcare, dentistry, prisons, retirement homes. Voters heard inflation because nowhere does the paycheck rule as it does in a deeply unequal United States.If Sullivan was right this time too, and there is little reason to believe otherwise, the winning strategy for Harris was to revive and even amplify Biden’s Rooseveltian dream of big government. Democrats now choosing to interpret her defeat as “progressive hijacking” would do well to heed Sullivan’s warning against a return to centrist politics, the most accurate prediction of his entire career.

      Daniela Gabor is professor of economics and macrofinance at SOAS, University of London. She is working on The Wall Street Consensus, a book on the return of the transformative state More

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      Why Kamala Harris couldn’t convince an anti-establishment America | Samuel Hammond

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      Two weeks have passed, and Kamala Harris’s convincing electoral defeat still has Democrats pointing fingers at who – or what – to blame. If only Biden had dropped out sooner. If only Harris had picked a different running mate. If only she went on Joe Rogan’s podcast. If only, if only, if only.There is an obvious reason for the lack of consensus. From failing to defend Biden’s record on inflation and immigration to being perceived as too leftwing, Harris’s loss was in some sense wildly overdetermined. And while Democrats were quick to attribute Trump’s victory in 2016 to white racial resentment, that’s a harder story to tell against the backdrop of Republican’s sizable gains among Black, Hispanic, Asian and Native American voters.Harris was a bad candidate, to be sure. But more than any particular individual, this election was a referendum on America’s incumbent political establishment. Starting with Barack Obama’s victory in 2008, swing voters have repeatedly demonstrated a strong preference for change agents. This trend was only briefly interrupted in the 2020 primary, when the pandemic and chaotic dénouement of Trump’s first term allowed Joe Biden to campaign on a “return to normal”. Voters instead got prolonged school closures, surging inflation and a dramatic expansion of progressive cultural politics, putting change back on the menu.The backlash against the establishment is being driven by two longer-term structural trends. The first is the electorate’s political realignment along educational lines. The historic realignment of white, non-college educated voters toward the Republican party won Trump the election in 2016, and brought him to within a hair of re-election in 2020. With this election, the working-class realignment broke through to non-college-educated Black and Hispanics voters as well. As the Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini explained on the Ezra Klein Show, minority voters finally “shed that sense of … racial group solidarity” and “moved toward the party that shared their basic ideological predispositions”.The second structural trend is simply the growth of the internet and social media. In his book The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, the former CIA media analyst Martin Gurri observed how the tsunami of information unleashed by the internet tends to leave legitimacy crises in its wake, from the Arab spring to Brexit. With social media, corruption has never been more easily exposed, and mass movements never more easily mobilized.This election was a consequence and accelerant of both these trends. Rather than resist education polarization, the Harris campaign leaned in, targeting Liz Cheney Republicans and college-educated suburban women. Mainstream media, meanwhile, took a backseat to alternative media, Twitter and the podcast circuit.Gurri argues that the internet-era rewards politicians with a degree of unfiltered authenticity, from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Instagram Live to Trump’s meandering, marathon speeches. Harris’s authenticity gap, in contrast, was reaffirmed at every turn, from her unwillingness to do interviews, to her stock “as a middle-class kid” non-sequitur in the few interviews she did. Even Harris’s Call Her Daddy podcast appearance was manufactured – literally: the campaign spent six figures building her a bespoke set.Authenticity is ultimately a way to signal one’s independence. In a year when incumbents are losing elections worldwide, Harris had to not just signal her independence from the incumbent political establishment, but to do so credibly. Instead, Harris doubled down on the Democratic party as the defenders of “institutions” – the very institutions that many voters were clearly fed up with.Again, this was less the fault of Harris as a person than reflective of the constraints any candidate in her shoes would have faced. As the party of educated knowledge workers, policy elites and public sector unions, the Democratic party simply is the party of institutional incumbents. And how do you run against the establishment when you are the establishment?Democrats are thus guaranteed to learn all the wrong lessons from this election. They will focus-group economic policies that appeal to the working class and excise wokeness from their political messaging. They will try to engineer their own Joe Rogan and uplift candidates that shoot from the hip. But this will all be a version of treating the symptom rather than the disease. Until the elites in the Democratic party loosen their grip and allow authentic, anti-establishment party factions to arise organically, they will remain the party of control and stasis in a world hungry for change.

      Samuel Hammond is the senior economist at the Foundation for American Innovation More