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

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

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

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      Arizona endures tense wait for final election result in last battleground

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

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

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

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

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

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

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      Why has the American center right disappeared from the ballot box? | Jan-Werner Müller

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      The blame game’s in full swing. Armchair campaign strategists just know that Kamala Harris should have thrown Joe Biden under the bus, or gone on Joe Rogan, or – the perennial favorite among self-declared centrists – trashed identity politics. Of course, it matters a great deal to find out why people who voted for Democrats in 2020 failed to turn out; of course, there needs to be an explanation (not freewheeling speculation) about Trump’s gains among Latino men in particular.Yet one larger question deserves at least as much attention: why does anything recognizable to international observers as a center-right option seem to have disappeared from our politics? Why was the only 2024 choice between the far right and a vaguely progressive (not progressive enough for progressives, to be sure) center party?This is another way of asking: why has never-Trumpism been such a failure? After all, among the self-exiled and the ejected, the movement featured creative political minds and, at least for a while, quite a bit of cash.Part of the answer is that such figures never faced up to a proper reckoning with the history of the post-second world war American right (which also made Harris’s embrace of the Cheneys such a politically and morally dubious choice). If in doubt, never-Trumpers would default into Ronald Reagan or John McCain idolatry: such apparent moral icons would seem to provide the maximum contrast with Trump; they also served as shorthand for the ideological mix that the center right think remains their unique political offering: pro-business, strong on defense, conventional family values (such that men, exhausted from competing in the market, would find a nice, but also disciplined, home in which to recover …).What is conveniently left out is the Republicans’ longstanding commitment to the “southern strategy”, which is to say appealing to those alienated (to put it politely) by the Democrats’ turn to civil rights promotion.It is largely forgotten that Reagan opposed both the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. Those people born after the 60s might not have liked Reagan, but probably remember a charming, almost avuncular figure who perpetually radiated optimism. Anyone looking at footage of Reagan as California governor will see a man seething with resentment and spouting rhetoric no different from what the far right says about “liberal institutions” today. Talking about order on campus, Reagan let it be known that: “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with.” Infamously, he kicked off his 1980 election campaign in Mississippi – close to the site where three civil rights activists had been murdered in 1964 – and endorsed “states’ rights”.McCain might be presented in history books as an upright defender of democracy and human rights internationally, as well as the unlikely person who saved the Affordable Care Act during Trump’s first term. But he’s also the man who brought us Sarah Palin, a Trumpista before there was Trump. The conceit has always been that rightwing elites could turn the rightwing populism – and, often enough, sheer racism – up or down as desired; they failed to understand that they eventually created something they couldn’t control. As one observer put it: Trump did not hijack the Republican party – he understood it.Today, seemingly moderate Republicans know that they cannot really win elections without Maga. Glenn Youngkin, former head of the Carlyle Group and apparently as old-style-business Republican as they come, presented conservatism with a human face when he ran for governor of Virginia; it turned out that the dirty work of riling up people with nonsense about critical race theory was just left to operatives on the ground. Admirers of Youngkin seem to think that the very strategy that already failed – give red meat to folks, but control the growth of a radical movement – can work; it’s the same old illusion that elite actors will always stay in charge.New, however, is the emergence of an at least partly anti-authoritarian rightwing youth culture. Why wear khakis and ties as a congressional intern, shoving around papers and pleasing boring old men, when you might be an influencer pushing frat boy-party lifestyles mixed with toxic politics (and get paid for praising products on the side)?The new online anti-authority culture has little to do with the libertarianism that the Reagan coalition could still incorporate. For the longest time, our assumption went that an anti-authority ethos was bound to be progressive; we are learning the hard way that there’s a distinctly rightwing version – one that is not in any sense “conservative” because its core consists of disrespecting institutions and trolling people who pontificate about inherited “norms”.Someone like Nikki Haley would in all likelihood have beaten Harris, given the discontent – justified or not – with incumbents in many countries; the fact that she ended up endorsing Trump was yet further evidence of the defeatism of traditional Republican elites. In the end, the self-declared center right has had no defense against Trump; it seems ultimately unwilling to abandon the double game that enabled Trumpism in the first place.The result is that many American citizens ended up voting for the far right without necessarily wanting to endorse a far-right mandate. To be sure, some are fully on board with the mixture of cruelty and thinly disguised corruption. But plenty are not. Needless to say, Trump will claim a full mandate anyway.

      Jan-Werner Müller is a professor of politics at Princeton University and a Guardian US columnist More

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

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

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      Nancy Pelosi blames Joe Biden for election defeat as Democrats turn on each other – US politics live

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      Joe Biden’s slowness in exiting the 2024 presidential election cost the Democrats dearly, the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi said, days after Kamala Harris was beaten by Donald Trump.“We live with what happened,” Pelosi said.Pelosi was speaking to The Interview, a New York Times podcast, in a conversation the newspaper said would be published Saturday in full.“Had the president gotten out sooner,” Pelosi remarked, “there may have been other candidates in the race. The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary.“And as I say, Kamala may have, I think she would have done well in that and been stronger going forward. But we don’t know that. That didn’t happen. We live with what happened. And because the president endorsed Kamala Harris immediately, that really made it almost impossible to have a primary at that time. If it had been much earlier, it would have been different.”As Democrats engaged in bitter blame games over Harris’s defeat and a second presidency for Trump, who senior Democrats from Harris down freely called a “fascist”, Pelosi’s words landed like an explosive shell.The Times said Pelosi “went to great lengths to defend the Biden administration’s legislative accomplishments, most of which took place during his first two years, when she was the House speaker”.Pelosi reportedly played a key role in persuading Biden to stand aside. But she has not sought to soothe his feelings. In August, she told the New Yorker she had “never been that impressed with his political operation”.Russia’s foreign ministry sees no grounds for talking about resuming dialogue on strategic stability and arms control with the US at the moment, Interfax news agency reported on Saturday, citing Russia’s deputy foreign minister.Sergei Ryabkov said that Moscow and Washington “are exchanging signals on Ukraine” through closed channels at the military and political levels, according to Interfax. He also said that Russia was ready to listen to US president-elect, Donald Trump’s proposals on resolving the crisis in Ukraine, adding that there could be no simple solution.“We are extremely thorough, responsible and attentive to any ideas that are proposed by countries in this area,” Interfax quoted Ryabkov as saying.According to Reuters, Russian president, Vladimir Putin, on Thursday congratulated Trump on winning the US election, praised him for showing courage when a gunman tried to assassinate him in July, and said Moscow was ready for dialogue with Trump. He said comments that Trump had made about trying to end the war were worthy of attention.Trump told NBC he had not talked to Putin since his election victory but “I think we’ll speak”.Ryabkov said the threat of severing diplomatic relations with the US remained if Russia’s frozen assets were seized or Washington escalated tensions over Ukraine.Ryabkov also commented on Russia’s updated nuclear doctrine, saying it would make it possible “to turn to the nuclear option” if there was an acute crisis in relations with the west and the situation in Ukraine, Interfax reported.The US justice department is bringing criminal charges over an Iranian plot to kill the president-elect, Donald Trump, that was thwarted by the FBI, the government said.The federal government has unsealed criminal charges in what the justice department said was a murder-for-hire plan to take out Trump before this week’s presidential election, which he won decisively over his Democratic rival, Kamala Harris.A criminal complaint filed in federal court in Manhattan alleges that an unnamed official in Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guards instructed a contact this past September to put together a plan to surveil and ultimately kill Trump.Investigators learned of the plot while interviewing Farhad Shakeri, an Afghan national identified by officials as an Iranian government asset who was deported from the US after being imprisoned on robbery charges.He told investigators that a Revolutionary Guard contact in Iran instructed him in September to devise a plan within seven days to surveil and ultimately assassinate Trump, according to the criminal complaint.Two other men who the authorities say were recruited to participate in other assassinations, including a prominent Iranian American journalist, were also arrested on Friday. Shakeri remains in Iran.“There are few actors in the world that pose as grave a threat to the national security of the United States as does Iran,” the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, said in a statement on Friday.Ed Davey has urged Keir Starmer to “Trump-proof” the UK by urgently seeking closer European cooperation over military aid for Ukraine and economic ties, after the US president-elect’s threats about security and trade wars.The Liberal Democrat leader, whose party is the third biggest in the House of Commons, argued that while the UK government should seek to work with a Donald Trump administration, it should also be as prepared as possible if he were to abandon Ukraine or impose sweeping tariffs.“Yes, we can work with him,” Davey said. “Of course we should, and it may well be that we can, but it would be irresponsible not to take the measures in a diplomatic way, defensive way, that would make our national security and our economy Trump-proof.“I think millions of people in the UK and elsewhere are just really worried and quite scared. And they’re particularly scared about what it’s going to mean for our security and our economy.”Trump’s election should be “a wake-up call for the government on Ukraine”, said Davey, who was spending part of Friday at a charity in Surrey that provides aid packages for Ukrainian families.He said Starmer should push for an immediate European conference on how the continent could fill the gap in defence assistance if, as Trump and his team have hinted, he pulls US support, or tries to force Ukraine into accepting an end to the conflict that would greatly strengthen Russia.“We can’t simply abandon Ukraine to Putin just because Trump’s in power,” Davey said. “We’ve been playing a critical role, and I think we could play an even more critical role by working with European friends, bringing together European countries so we can increase the aid to Ukraine, and pay for that by seizing Russian assets properly. We’ve been pushing for that for some time.“Now is the absolute the moment to do it so Europe can fill the gap. But we have got to do it quickly.”Bomb threats were made against several Maryland boards of elections and election offices in at least two California counties on Friday, state authorities said, adding that everyone was safe and law enforcement officials were investigating.According to Reuters, election officials were counting mail-in ballots when the threats came in Maryland. State administrator of elections, Jared DeMarinis, said the threats led to the evacuation of some buildings. He called the threats “cowardly,” adding that local officials will resume counting on Saturday.“Safety is a top concern – but we WILL resume canvassing (counting) tomorrow. Cowardly threats whether from abroad or not shall not deter us,” DeMarinis said on social media platform X.“The Baltimore County Police Department is aware and currently investigating the bomb threat received via email by the Baltimore County Board of Elections Office,” police posted on X, later adding that a probe determined that threat to be unfounded.Reuters reports that in California’s Orange County, the registrar of voters received a bomb threat at an office in Santa Ana after which the office building was evacuated and bomb detection dogs were used to conduct a search. No explosives were located, officials said, adding normal operations will resume on Saturday.The registrar of voters in California’s Riverside County said its central counting building was also evacuated due to a threat and a bomb squad found no explosives.The offices of California governor, Gavin Newsom, and Maryland governor, Wes Moore, said they were monitoring the situation and working with local officials.The FBI said that hoax bomb threats, many of which appeared to originate from Russian email domains, were directed on Tuesday at polling locations in five battleground states – Georgia, Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania – as voting was under way. Russia denies interfering in US elections.Millions of Americans are at risk of losing health coverage in 2025 under Donald Trump’s forthcoming administration.More than 20 million Americans rely on the individual private health insurance market for healthcare, private insurance which is subsidized by the federal government.These subsidies, programs that help lower the cost of health insurance premiums, increased the amount of assistance available to people who want to buy health insurance through the Affordable Care Act, dubbed Obamacare as a signature piece of legislation during Barack Obama’s administration.This specific subsidy program resulted from the Biden administration’s 2021 American Rescue Plan and is set to expire at the end of 2025.“The consequences of more people going uninsured are really significant, not just at an individual level with more medical debt and less healthy outcomes, but also has ripple effects for providers,” Sabrina Corlette, a research professor and co-director of the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University, said.“Premiums go up for the people who do have health insurance; for the people without health insurance, it’s financially devastating. The result is medical debt, garnished wages and liens on people’s homes because they can’t pay off their bills,” she said.Iraqi prime minister, Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, expressed hopes during a phone call with US president-elect, Donald Trump, that he would keep his “promises to work towards ending wars” in the Middle East, reports Agence France-Presse (AFP).In the phone call, the Iraqi premier pointed to Trump’s “campaign statements and promises to work towards ending wars in the region”, a statement from Sudani’s office said late on Friday. “The two sides agreed to coordinate efforts in achieving this goal,” it added.About 2,500 US troops are deployed in Iraq as part of a US-led coalition that was formed to help battle the Islamic State group. Bases hosting the US troops have been the target of dozens of rocket and drone attacks launched by Iran-backed groups in Iraq, which have also claimed attacks against Israel.Baghdad has for years called on Washington to provide a clear timeline for the withdrawal of their remaining coalition troops.The US and Iraq announced in late September that the international coalition would end its decade-long military mission in federal Iraq within a year, and by September 2026 in the autonomous Kurdistan region. But the joint statement and US officials did not say whether any US troops would remain in Iraq.Officials at the Pentagon are having informal discussions about what to do if Donald Trump were to give an illegal order, such as deploying the military domestically, according to a report from CNN. They are also preparing for the possibility that he may change rules to be able to fire scores of career civil servants.On the campaign trail, Trump has mulled sending the military after his political enemies, and also to turn back migrants at the southern border.US law generally prohibits active-duty troops from being deployed for law enforcement purposes. There are also fears he could gut the civil service in the Pentagon, and replace fired staff with employees selected for their loyalty to him.Just hours after Donald Trump’s election win on Tuesday, Black people across the US reported receiving racist text messages telling them that they had been “selected” to pick cotton and needed to report to “the nearest plantation”. While the texts, some of which were signed “a Trump supporter”, varied in detail, they all conveyed the same essential message about being selected to pick cotton. Some of the messages refer to the recipients by name.A spokesperson for the president-elect told CNN that his “campaign has absolutely nothing to do with these text messages”. It is not yet clear who is behind the messages, nor is there a comprehensive list of the people to whom the messages were sent, but social media posts indicate that the messages are widespread.Black people in states including Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia, New York, New Jersey, Nevada, the DC area and elsewhere reported receiving the messages. The messages were sent to Black adults and students, including to high schoolers in Massachusetts and New York, and students at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), such as Alabama State University and other schools, including ones across Ohio, Clemson University, the University of Alabama and Missouri State. At least six middle school students in Pennsylvania received the messages, according to the AP.Authorities including the FBI and attorneys general are investigating the messages.Joe Biden’s slowness in exiting the 2024 presidential election cost the Democrats dearly, the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi said, days after Kamala Harris was beaten by Donald Trump.“We live with what happened,” Pelosi said.Pelosi was speaking to The Interview, a New York Times podcast, in a conversation the newspaper said would be published Saturday in full.“Had the president gotten out sooner,” Pelosi remarked, “there may have been other candidates in the race. The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary.“And as I say, Kamala may have, I think she would have done well in that and been stronger going forward. But we don’t know that. That didn’t happen. We live with what happened. And because the president endorsed Kamala Harris immediately, that really made it almost impossible to have a primary at that time. If it had been much earlier, it would have been different.”As Democrats engaged in bitter blame games over Harris’s defeat and a second presidency for Trump, who senior Democrats from Harris down freely called a “fascist”, Pelosi’s words landed like an explosive shell.The Times said Pelosi “went to great lengths to defend the Biden administration’s legislative accomplishments, most of which took place during his first two years, when she was the House speaker”.Pelosi reportedly played a key role in persuading Biden to stand aside. But she has not sought to soothe his feelings. In August, she told the New Yorker she had “never been that impressed with his political operation”.Hello and welcome back to our rolling coverage of US politics and the fallout from the presidential election.Our top story this morning is that Nancy Pelosi has blamed Joe Biden for the Democrats’ defeat.The former House speaker said the president’s slowness in dropping out of the race left the party without enough time to hold an open primary.More on that shortly. First, though, here is a round up of the latest news:

      The justice department has brought charges against a member of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards paramilitary group for plotting to assassinate Donald Trump prior to Tuesday’s presidential election, the Associated Press reports. On the campaign trail in the lead-up to his election win, Trump survived two assassination attempts, but authorities do not believe either were linked to Iran, a longtime foe of the United States.

      Donald Trump’s incoming presidency is set to threaten millions of Americans’ healthcare plans. More than 20 million Americans rely on the individual private health insurance market for healthcare, private insurance which is subsidized by the federal government.

      Robert F Kennedy Jr, the former independent presidential candidate turned Trump surrogate, is reviewing candidate resumes for the top jobs at the US government’s health agencies in Donald Trump’s new administration, a former Kennedy aide and a source familiar with the matter told Reuters on Friday.

      A Chinese national who had been recently released from a mental hospital was ordered to be held on trespassing charges on Friday after police say he tried to enter president-elect Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, the Associated Press reports. That entrance was in violation of a court order that he stay away from Mar-a-Lago after previous attempts.

      Democratic US Representative Andrea Salinas has won reelection in Oregon’s 6th congressional District, beating Republican Mike Erickson to earn a second term in Congress after outraising him by millions of dollars. Oregon’s newest congressional district was seen as leaning more toward Democrats, according to the Cook Political Report. That gave a slight advantage to the freshman Democratic incumbent, who also defeated Erickson in the 2022 election.

      Women have won 60 seats in the New Mexico Legislature to secure the largest female legislative majority in US history, stirring expressions of vindication and joy among candidates.

      A federal judge on Friday overturned Illinois’ ban on semiautomatic weapons, leaning on recent US supreme court rulings that strictly interpret the second amendment right to keep and bear firearms. Judge Stephen P McGlynn issued the lengthy finding in a decree that he said applied universally, not just to the plaintiffs who brought the lawsuit challenging the ban.

      Just hours after Donald Trump’s election win on Tuesday, Black people across the US reported receiving racist text messages telling them that they had been “selected” to pick cotton and needed to report to “the nearest plantation”. While the texts, some of which were signed “a Trump supporter”, varied in detail, they all conveyed the same essential message about being selected to pick cotton. Some of the messages refer to the recipients by name.

      Donald Trump, during a call with Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Wednesday, handed the phone to Elon Musk, the New York Times reported, confirming an earlier Axios story. It is not clear what the three men discussed or whether they touched on any change in US policy toward Ukraine in the wake of Trump’s election victory, the Times said.

      The Biden administration has decided to allow US defense contractors to work in Ukraine to maintain and repair Pentagon-provided weaponry, Reuters is reporting, citing US officials. The contractors would be small in number and located far from the frontlines and will not be engaged in combat, an official told the news agency.

      The judge overseeing Donald Trump’s 2020 election interference case has granted a request from the special counsel’s office to pause proceedings in his trial on charges related to trying to overturn the 2020 election. Jack Smith asked judge Tanya Chutkan to pause the case against the president-elect to “assess the unprecedented circumstances” in which the office finds itself. More

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      Military officials reportedly discuss how to handle illegal orders from Trump – live

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      Officials at the Pentagon are having informal discussions about what to do if Donald Trump were to give an illegal order, such as deploying the military domestically, CNN reports.They are also preparing for the possibility that he may change rules to be able to fire scores of career civil servants.On the campaign trail, Trump has mulled sending the military after his political enemies, and also to turn back migrants at the southern border. US law generally prohibits active-duty troops from being deployed for law enforcement purposes. There are also fears he could gut the civil service in the Pentagon, and replace fired staff with employees selected for their loyalty to him.Here’s more, from CNN:
      Trump has suggested he would be open to using active-duty forces for domestic law enforcement and mass deportations and has indicated he wants to stack the federal government with loyalists and “clean out corrupt actors” in the US national security establishment.
      Officials are now gaming out various scenarios as they prepare for an overhaul of the Pentagon.
      “We are all preparing and planning for the worst-case scenario, but the reality is that we don’t know how this is going to play out yet,” one defense official said.
      Trump’s election has also raised questions inside the Pentagon about what would happen if the president issued an unlawful order, particularly if his political appointees inside the department don’t push back.
      “Troops are compelled by law to disobey unlawful orders,” said another defense official. “But the question is what happens then – do we see resignations from senior military leaders? Or would they view that as abandoning their people?”
      Martin Pengelly reports for the Guardian on Nancy Pelosi’s comments that Joe Biden’s delay in withdrawing from the race blew Democrats’ chances of winning: Joe Biden’s slowness in exiting the 2024 presidential election cost the Democrats dearly, the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi said, days after Kamala Harris was beaten by Donald Trump.“We live with what happened,” Pelosi said.Pelosi was speaking to the Interview, a New York Times podcast, in a conversation the newspaper said would be published Saturday in full.“Had the president gotten out sooner,” Pelosi remarked, “there may have been other candidates in the race. The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary.For the full story, click here:Here’s a look at where things stand:

      Speaking to the New York Times, Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic former House speaker who played a major role in the pressuring Joe Biden not to seek re-election, said she believed the president waited too long to exit the race, and erred in immediately endorsing Kamala Harris. “Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Pelosi said.

      Officials at the Pentagon are having informal discussions about what to do if Donald Trump were to give an illegal order, such as deploying the military domestically, CNN reports. They are also preparing for the possibility that he may change rules to be able to fire scores of career civil servants.

      Just hours after Donald Trump’s election win on Tuesday, Black people across the US reported receiving racist text messages telling them that they had been “selected” to pick cotton and needed to report to “the nearest plantation”. While the texts, some of which were signed “a Trump supporter”, varied in detail, they all conveyed the same essential message about being selected to pick cotton. Some of the messages refer to the recipients by name.

      Donald Trump, during a call with Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Wednesday, handed the phone to Elon Musk, the New York Times is also reporting, confirming an earlier Axios story. It is not clear what the three men discussed or whether they touched on any change in US policy toward Ukraine in the wake of Trump’s election victory, the Times said.

      The Biden administration has decided to allow US defense contractors to work in Ukraine to maintain and repair Pentagon-provided weaponry, Reuters is reporting, citing US officials. The contractors would be small in number and located far from the frontlines and will not be engaged in combat, an official told the news agency.

      The judge overseeing Donald Trump’s 2020 election interference case has granted a request from the special counsel’s office to pause proceedings in his trial on charges related to trying to overturn the 2020 election. As we reported earlier, Jack Smith asked judge Tanya Chutkan to pause the case against the president-elect to “assess the unprecedented circumstances” in which the office finds itself.
      Donald Trump yesterday announced that his campaign co-chair Susie Wiles will be his chief of staff in the White House.He’s expected to announce more appointments to prominent administration positions soon. The Guardian’s Lorenzo Tondo took a look at who might be in the running:Officials at the Pentagon are having informal discussions about what to do if Donald Trump were to give an illegal order, such as deploying the military domestically, CNN reports.They are also preparing for the possibility that he may change rules to be able to fire scores of career civil servants.On the campaign trail, Trump has mulled sending the military after his political enemies, and also to turn back migrants at the southern border. US law generally prohibits active-duty troops from being deployed for law enforcement purposes. There are also fears he could gut the civil service in the Pentagon, and replace fired staff with employees selected for their loyalty to him.Here’s more, from CNN:
      Trump has suggested he would be open to using active-duty forces for domestic law enforcement and mass deportations and has indicated he wants to stack the federal government with loyalists and “clean out corrupt actors” in the US national security establishment.
      Officials are now gaming out various scenarios as they prepare for an overhaul of the Pentagon.
      “We are all preparing and planning for the worst-case scenario, but the reality is that we don’t know how this is going to play out yet,” one defense official said.
      Trump’s election has also raised questions inside the Pentagon about what would happen if the president issued an unlawful order, particularly if his political appointees inside the department don’t push back.
      “Troops are compelled by law to disobey unlawful orders,” said another defense official. “But the question is what happens then – do we see resignations from senior military leaders? Or would they view that as abandoning their people?”
      Nancy Pelosi also said she disagreed with Bernie Sanders, the progressive independent senator who said Democrats had “abandoned working-class people” after Kamala Harris’s election loss.“Bernie Sanders has not won,” Pelosi said in her interview with the New York Times.“With all due respect, and I have a great deal of respect for him, for what he stands for, but I don’t respect him saying that the Democratic party has abandoned the working-class families.”The former speaker instead blamed cultural issues for Harris’s loss to Donald Trump. “Guns, God and gays – that’s the way they say it,” Pelosi told the Times.“Guns, that’s an issue; gays, that’s an issue, and now they’re making the trans issue such an important issue in their priorities; and in certain communities, what they call God, what we call a woman’s right to choose.”Speaking to the New York Times, Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic former House speaker who played a major role in the pressuring Joe Biden not to seek re-election, said she believed the president waited too long to exit the race, and erred in immediately endorsing Kamala Harris.“Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Pelosi said. Shortly after announcing in July that he would end his bid for a second term, Biden endorsed Harris, setting the stage for her to become the Democratic nominee. Harris went on to lose the presidential election to Donald Trump on Tuesday, and in the interview conducted two days later, Pelosi said Democrats would have benefited from a primary to choose their candidate.“The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary,” she said.“And as I say, Kamala may have, I think she would have done well in that and been stronger going forward. But we don’t know that. That didn’t happen. We live with what happened. And because the president endorsed Kamala Harris immediately, that really made it almost impossible to have a primary at that time. If it had been much earlier, it would have been different.”Donald Trump has attacked California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, who yesterday called the state legislature into a special session to enact laws intended to counter the Republican president-elect’s agenda.“Governor Gavin Newscum is trying to KILL our Nation’s beautiful California. For the first time ever, more people are leaving than are coming in. He is using the term ‘Trump-Proof’ as a way of stopping all of the GREAT things that can be done to ‘Make California Great Again,’ but I just overwhelmingly won the Election,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.He also restated his support for voting laws that could make it more difficult to cast ballots: “Also, as an ‘AGENT’ for the United States of America on Voting & Elections, I will be DEMANDING THAT VOTER I.D., AND PROOF OF CITIZENSHIP, ARE A NECESSARY PART AND COMPONENT OF THE VOTING PROCESS!”Donald Trump’s transition team could announce additional White House positions as early as today, CNN is reporting.As we reported earlier, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner is not expected to return to a new Trump administration but could advise on Middle East policy.The Financial Times is reporting that the North Dakota governor, Doug Burgum, is being tapped to be Trump’s new “energy tsar”.Burgum is Trump’s preferred candidate for the role, the paper writes, adding that former energy secretary Dan Brouillette is also a contender.Just hours after Donald Trump’s election win on Tuesday, Black people across the US reported receiving racist text messages telling them that they had been “selected” to pick cotton and needed to report to “the nearest plantation”.While the texts, some of which were signed “a Trump supporter”, varied in detail, they all conveyed the same essential message about being selected to pick cotton. Some of the messages refer to the recipients by name.Black people in states including Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia, New York, New Jersey, Nevada, the DC area and elsewhere reported receiving the messages.The messages were sent to Black adults and students, including to high schoolers in Massachusetts and New York, and students at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), such as Alabama State University and other schools, including ones across Ohio, Clemson University, the University of Alabama and Missouri State.At least six middle school students in Pennsylvania received the messages, according to the AP.Authorities including the FBI and attorneys general are investigating the messages.Jim Banks, the Republican Indiana senator-elect, said he hopes that every undocumented immigrant who came to the US illegally under the Biden administration will be deported once Donald Trump is in office.“It’s my hope that we deport every single one of them that we can, and it starts with deporting violent criminals who are in the United States who came here illegally who have committed violent crimes,” Banks told CNN on Friday.“I think once you do that, President Trump is committed to making that his first and top priority when it comes to mass deportation.”Asked how those plans would be carried out, Banks said he didn’t think it would be “that complicated”.He said the American people had given Trump and the Republicans “a mandate to do everything that we can.”“The goal should be to deport every illegal in this country that we can find,” he added. More