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      Incoming Trump presidency threatens millions of Americans’ healthcare plans

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      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.Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

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      “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.The American Rescue Plan not only added additional subsidies, but also broadened the eligibility requirements, extending them to many more people in the US middle class.It was announced earlier this year by the Biden-Harris administration that 21.3 million people selected an Affordable Care Act health insurance marketplace plan during the 2024 0pen enrollment period.With Republicans now having won control of the presidency, the Senate and possibly the House, it is highly likely that Congress will not vote to extend the coverage next year.President-elect Trump said during the presidential debate with his Democratic rival, Kamala Harris, that he had “concepts of a plan” to replace the Affordable Care Act but has yet to reveal them. He previously attempted to replace the ACA in favor of the American Health Care Act, a bill to repeal subsidies and regulations, which failed in the Senate in 2017.The subsidies helped Obamacare enrollment nearly double during Biden’s term, a record high. The enrollment was highest in southern Republican-voting states. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reports that the share of people without health insurance reached an all-time low of 7.2% in 2023.“The 2021 boosts [in subsidies] helped millions of people afford health insurance,” Corlette said. “It’s led to the lowest uninsured rate we’ve seen in this country and helped boost financial security for millions of families.”Last month, the Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, took a stance against the ACA at an event in Pennsylvania, telling a crowd there would be “massive” healthcare changes in America if Donald Trump won the election.The CBO estimates nearly 4 million people will lose their coverage in 2026 if the subsidies are not extended because they won’t be able to afford the rising cost of healthcare plans. Lower-income Americans would still receive some federal assistance, while those it the middle class would lose it altogether.Despite the 2021 subsidies having extended coverage to more than 20 million people, the ACA remains a flawed option for healthcare coverage and has been a major factor in driving medical debt.For 2025, the out-of-pocket limit for a marketplace plan cannot be more than $9,200 for an individual and $18,400 for a family, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. These prices represent the legal limit that insurers can have people spend on their plans.But policy experts insist that the ACA’s imperfect system is still preferable to millions of Americans going without health insurance.Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

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      ‘This victory is a mandate’: rightwing groups ready with policy proposals for new Trump administration

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      As Donald Trump prepares to move back into the White House, he’ll have a host of rightwing groups trying to influence his staffing choices and policy proposals, including the group behind Project 2025, despite Trump’s insistence they won’t be involved.Democrats repeatedly ran attacks on Trump over Project 2025, the conservative manifesto that its writers want to guide a second Trump administration. Trump tried to distance himself from it and from the group behind it, the Heritage Foundation, one of DC’s biggest thinktanks.The Heritage president, Kevin Roberts, congratulated Trump on his “hard-fought victory” that came despite the “sham” indictments and against a “relentless leftwing machine”.“The entire conservative movement stands united behind him as he prepares to secure our wide-open border, restore the rule of law, put parents back in charge of their children’s education, restore America to its proper place as a leader in manufacturing, put families and children first, and dismantle the deep state,” Roberts said.Other groups, namely the America First Policy Institute, have avoided the limelight that backfired on Project 2025 and instead worked behind the scenes to ally themselves with Trump and seek to influence his administration. Trump named Linda McMahon, the chair of the institute’s board, as a co-chair of his transition team, giving the America First Policy Institute a critical role.The institute, started in 2021 and stacked with Trump allies, said in a tweet that it “stands ready to support bold governance that puts Americans first”. It also shared a video clip with the former acting United States attorney general Matt Whitaker talking about deportations and sanctuary cities, key alignments with Trump’s policy goals.“This victory is a mandate to restore our nation to a place of safety, opportunity, and prosperity rooted in freedom,” the America First Policy Institute said. “Together, we’ll secure borders, strengthen the economy, & uphold the freedoms that define us – for a stronger future.”The institute has held trainings for people that could serve in the Trump White House and has a lengthy agenda published online, complete with plans for immigration, education, energy and elections. The New York Times recently reported that the group has “installed itself as the Trump campaign’s primary partner in making concrete plans to wield power again”.The heads of both the America First Policy Institute and the Heritage Foundation have roots in the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a state-based conservative thinktank. Brooke Rollins, CEO of the America First Policy Institute, ran the Texas foundation for 15 years, and Roberts was the foundation’s CEO before he was tapped by Heritage.Another organization, America First Legal, is headed by former Trump adviser Stephen Miller. It has been filing lawsuits that boost Trump and other conservatives on issues like election fraud, diversity programs, public records disputes and government overreach. Miller could return to the Trump administration, but it’s likely the group will remain an outside rightwing legal monitor to help the incoming president.What could Trump’s policies be?Project 2025’s sprawling “mandate for leadership” details in 900-plus pages how each government agency could be altered under a conservative president. The project includes a database of potential hires and a training program for those who could staff a Trump administration, though Trump’s team has said none of the people associated with Heritage’s staffing suggestions would be hired. That would be a feat, given the extensive reach the project had – it was signed on to by more than 100 conservative groups, and many of those who wrote chapters or otherwise contributed had played some kind of role in the previous Trump administration.The project’s biggest suggestion is to designate exponentially more federal government employees as political appointees rather than non-partisan civil servants. It also wants to downsize the government. Trump’s plan also involves downsizing the federal government, something he tried to start implementing near the end of his first term.The project suggests many ways to restrict immigration, both through beefed-up border security and through limiting legal immigration programs for groups like students and low-skilled workers. That’s another pillar for Trump, who made mass deportations a central theme of his campaign.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOn education, the project wants to get rid of the Department of Education and increase the use of vouchers that use public money for private schools – both of which Trump has suggested as well. Conservatives have sought the dismantling of the department for decades, so far without success.Most chapters of Project 2025 mention discarding any programs that promote LGBTQ+ rights and diversity. Trump has railed against these ideals on the campaign trail, promising to root out trans women from sports and in schools.Abortion access is one area where Trump and the project could differ, though Trump’s plans for abortion have been muddled. The project wants to end federal approval of abortion pills, track abortion data and root out anything that is seen as promoting abortion as healthcare. It doesn’t call for a direct ban on the procedure, and Trump has said he wouldn’t approve of one either, but many of these policies would make access significantly more difficult.The America First Policy Institute suggests many of the same policies, though it wants to go further than Project 2025 with federal employees, the New York Times notes, by making most federal workers at-will employees who would not receive civil service protections.Other ideas the institute has pushed include, according to the Times, “halting federal funding for Planned Parenthood and for mandatory ultrasounds before abortions, including those carried out with medication. It seeks to make concealed weapons permits reciprocal in all 50 states, increase petroleum production, remove the United States from the Paris Agreement, impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients and establish legally only two genders.”A policy agenda pamphlet from the institute starts by discussing the Christian foundations of the US and imploring Christians to get involved in the government “before it’s too late”. The policy agenda for the pamphlet was written “through the lens of their biblical foundations and applications to provide Christians more information on the issues and solutions needed for the restoration of the nation”. More

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      It is galling to see Starmer ingratiate himself with Trump – but it would be horribly negligent if he didn’t | Gaby Hinsliff

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      Dawn had barely broken, and nor had Kamala Harris publicly conceded, when Keir Starmer tweeted his congratulations to the not-quite-officially President-elect Donald Trump.Britain would, he said, stand “shoulder to shoulder” with its old ally, as it always does. Though he got the early opportunity he wanted to congratulate the new president-elect even more fulsomely down the phone, those words will have been gut-wrenching for many people. How can it be business as usual, with a president whose own former chief of staff said he met the definition of a fascist? What on earth makes Starmer think he can influence Trump for the better, the usual rationale for engaging with unsavoury leaders, where Trump’s own advisers repeatedly failed? The only people he ever really heeded, the British-born former White House adviser Fiona Hill once told one of Theresa May’s aides, were the now late Queen and the pope.Starmer’s obvious answer, of course, is that it would be an act of breathtaking negligence not to even bother trying; that he can’t be squeamish when there are workers afraid of losing their jobs in a trade war, Ukrainians dying under Russian bombardment, and future generations who would pay a terrible price for the US reneging on its climate commitments. The less obvious one, however, is that if he cannot get Trump’s ear then Trump will get his hot takes on the British national interest elsewhere. Starmer may have got that phone call, but it was Nigel Farage who spent election night at the Trump victory party in Mar-a-Lago.Though this isn’t the result a Labour government wanted, it’s the one it has war-gamed hardest. The charm offensive began months before Starmer and Trump’s relatively cordial dinner in September, with the foreign secretary, David Lammy, making surprisingly deep inroads in Republican circles for a man who once called Trump a woman-hating, neo-Nazi sociopath. But as Lammy’s allies point out, JD Vance once called Trump an idiot who might be the US’s Hitler, which didn’t stop Trump picking Vance as a running mate. The president-elect is both intensely transactional – if anything, he may see British desperation to make up lost ground with him as useful – and wildly unpredictable, a combination offering both opportunity and threat.The lesson Downing Street takes from studying Trump is essentially the one many Republican voters do: that he says a lot of wild stuff but doesn’t always mean it, and if he does he often unexpectedly changes his mind. Already there are hints he might give Ukraine more time to win its war, if only because he hates being associated with losing, while senior Republicans are signalling that “friendly” nations could escape his threatened trade tariffs – a crude signal that there will be rewards for compliance.But there will surely also be a price: Starmer could easily find himself pushed to pick a side in trade negotiations between the US and Brussels, just as he is trying to mend fences with Europe. What if a British government that has staked everything on economic growth finds its business interests pulling one way, and its shared interest in the defence of Europe against Russian aggression pulling the other? At the very least, those budget forecasts – and the money set aside for extra defence spending – may well soon need revisiting.In her memoirs, Theresa May describes the acute anxiety of standing beside then president Trump at a press conference where he was supposed to send a critical signal to Russia by stressing his commitment to Nato, not knowing whether he’d actually say it until he opened his mouth. But at least she could plan for that scenario in advance: harder to deal with was Trump’s tendency to blindside Britain with things nobody saw coming. For her, that meant Trump pulling troops out of Iraq and Syria without warning or concern for British forces fighting alongside them, lobbying her to bring Farage into cabinet, and casually retweeting incendiary social media posts by the British far right. This time, he won’t just be surfing X when he’s bored but actively integrating its owner, Elon Musk – who is already regularly kicking lumps out of Starmer, most recently over cutting inheritance tax relief for farmers – into his administration.The Southport riots, during which Musk tweeted that “civil war is inevitable” and promoted conspiracy theories about white protesters being more harshly treated than ethnic minority ones, convinced many Labour MPs that hate and disinformation online must be tackled. But how brave are ministers prepared to be if that means a direct hit on someone in Trump’s inner circle?Labour MPs in seats where Reform came second in July are, meanwhile, now visibly rattled, and newly fearful of handing Farage further sticks to beat them with. Though Starmer learned his own lesson about the salience of immigration or the risks of alienating white working-class voters way back in 2019, Harris’s defeat is only likely to underline that message for him.There’s no denying that for progressives, the world now looks lonelier than it did; that the choice the US has made will have consequences smaller countries can only do so much to contain. But that doesn’t mean Britain can afford to sit the coming battles out, assuming someone else will do the dirty work. Starmer’s job now is to pull whatever levers he can reach, in alliance with whoever he can persuade to join him; ours, meanwhile, is never to give up hope.

      Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist More

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      Republican Dave McCormick wins Pennsylvania Senate seat in key race

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      The Republican Dave McCormick won the Senate race in the battleground state of Pennsylvania on Thursday, denying the Democratic incumbent, Bob Casey, a fourth term and expanding his party’s majority in the upper chamber.When the Associated Press called the race at 4.09pm ET on Thursday, two days after polls closed in Pennsylvania, McCormick led by 0.4 points. The narrow margin raised the possibility of a recount, although his victory is expected to stand given his lead of roughly 30,000 votes.A spokesperson for Casey insisted that thousands of ballots remained uncounted, refusing to yet concede the race to McCormick.“As the Pennsylvania Secretary of State said this afternoon, there are tens of thousands of ballots across the Commonwealth still to count, which includes provisional ballots, military and overseas ballots, and mail ballots,” Casey spokesperson Maddy McDaniel said in a statement. “This race is within half a point and cannot be called while the votes of thousands of Pennsylvanians are still being counted. We will make sure every Pennsylvanian’s voice is heard.”With McCormick’s victory, Republicans have now secured at least 53 seats in the Senate, erasing Democrats’ previous majority in the chamber. Two Senate races in Nevada and Arizona remained too close to call as of Thursday afternoon.Although he fell short, Casey outperformed Kamala Harris, who lost Pennsylvania to Donald Trump by two points. Trump also won the two other “blue wall” states of Michigan and Wisconsin, but Democrats managed to hold on to both Senate seats that were up for grabs in those states.The call in Pennsylvania brought an end to a contentious and expensive Senate race that saw the two candidates trade barbed attacks on the cost of living, abortion access and McCormick’s recent residency in Connecticut. Casey attacked McCormick, a former hedge fund CEO, as out of touch while McCormick linked Casey to the “reckless” government spending of the Biden administration.At their debate last month, Casey mocked McCormick as “bought and paid for by these billionaires and corporations”. McCormick returned fire, saying: “When you don’t have a record to run on, which Senator Casey does not, you attack your opponent.”The high stakes of the race made it into one of the most expensive Senate elections in the nation, as the dueling campaigns and their allies spent more than $300m on ads. One pro-McCormick organization, the Keystone Renewal Pac, spent at least $54m on the race, making the group the highest-spending single-candidate Pac involved in a Senate race of this election cycle.Most public polls of the race showed Casey leading by several points up until recent weeks, when McCormick narrowed that gap to just a few points. Despite that trend, Casey appeared to be in a slightly stronger position than Harris, who was running neck and neck against Trump in Pennsylvania up until election day. Leaders of both parties had identified Pennsylvania and its 19 electoral votes as the potential tipping point in the presidential race.“I think both races are going to be very close, but I think the people of our state know it’s a very, very clear choice,” Casey told the Guardian in September. “It’s never been clearer.”Before election day, Democrats held a 51-49 majority in the Senate. Republicans’ victories in Montana, Ohio and West Virginia had already guaranteed control of the Senate, but McCormick’s win will give the party even more leverage to enact Trump’s agenda when the new Congress is seated in January.Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

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      Here’s how the American press can survive four years of Trump | Margaret Sullivan

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      Everything we know about the next US president suggests that the press in America will be under siege in the next four years as never before.After all, Donald Trump has portrayed the media as the “enemy of the people”, has suggested that he wouldn’t mind seeing journalists get shot, and, in recent months, has sued CBS News and the Pulitzer prize organization.Now, with what he considers a mandate, he’ll want to push harder.“He’ll use every tool that he has, and there are many available to him,” predicted Marty Baron, the former executive editor of the Washington Post and the author of Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and the Washington Post, published last year.Baron told me on Wednesday that the president-elect had long been on a mission to undermine the mainstream media, and that he would be more empowered in a second term.Every would-be autocrat sees to it, after all, that an independent press doesn’t get in his way. Often, it’s one of the first democratic guardrails to be kicked down as a nation moves in an authoritarian direction.“Trump is salivating at the chance to sue a journalist for a leak of a classified document,” Baron said, perhaps using the century-old Espionage Act to exact a harsh punishment, even a prison term.With an aggressive attorney general – more combative than Jeff Sessions, whom Trump criticized for not being tough enough – that may be doable.And if even more source material is deemed classified, almost any story based on a leak can be depicted as a threat to national security.Another tactic: Trump’s allies will bankroll legal actions against the press, as the tech investor Peter Thiel did in a lawsuit against Gawker in 2016, forcing the media company into bankruptcy while portraying himself as a champion of quality journalism.Baron also sees Trump and friends threatening advertisers whose revenue keeps media companies in business – “and they will run for cover”.Then, if media outlets become sufficiently weakened, his allies may buy them and turn them into propaganda arms.Another likely move is to stonewall the press, making the job of informing the public much harder.Trump’s true believers, installed throughout the government, from the intelligence agencies to the IRS to the defense department, will anticipate what Trump wants and be hostile to reporters, Baron predicted. “Journalists will hit roadblocks constantly.”Toward the same end, legislation that weakens the Freedom of Information Act – which allows the press and the public the right to see much of what their government is doing – would be easy enough to enact with a Trump-friendly Congress.How to defend against all this?Baron hopes that media lawyers are already working on contingency plans to combat these moves, and that the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press will have the resources it needs to help as challenges arise. The non-profit provides pro bono legal representation to news organizations, reporters, documentary film-makers and others; and often contributes court documents to support journalists’ fights to protect their newsgathering.On Wednesday, the Reporters Committee sent out a fundraising email with a dire message beginning: “We won’t mince words – the next Trump administration poses a serious threat to press freedom.”I spoke on Thursday with Bruce Brown, the non-profit’s longtime executive director, who told me it will be important “to separate the daily indignations from the true legal threats” that are likely on their way. But, he said: “We have to prepare and be clear-eyed and get ready to act.”The organization is ready, though, with 20 lawyers on staff, many who worked on these issues during the first Trump administration. “In 2016, we were a third the size we are now, and we have lawyers with vastly more experience.”Major media organizations, he said, “need to stick together and not let him peel them off one by one”.More broadly, Marty Baron believes that the mainstream press needs to work on its trust problem.It needs to improve how it presents itself to the public, given that so many people are willing to believe that today’s journalism is part of the problem rather than a pillar of democracy.Bezos’s decision to quash a Post endorsement of Kamala Harris certainly didn’t help with enhancing trust, though the owner claimed he was motivated by wanting his paper to appear non-partisan; about 250,000 subscribers disagreed, cancelling in anger or disgust.Baron (who was critical of the decision to yank the editorial) urges the press to be “radically transparent” with the public.For example, journalists should provide access to full versions of the audio and video that their stories are based on, and should allow people to examine original documents or data sets.“The message,” he said, “should be ‘check my work’.”Baron also believes “the press has a lot to learn about what people’s genuine concerns are,” and should try harder to reach audiences of all political stripes.Trump’s messages about immigration, he believes, have found such fertile ground partly because of people’s worries, whether evidence-based or not, about jobs and salaries.Rebuilding trust is a long-term project. But the Trump-induced challenges are immediate.To survive them, the press needs to get ready now.

      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      Rogan, Musk and an emboldened manosphere salute Trump’s win: ‘Let that sink in’

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      Late on Tuesday night, when it became clear that Donald Trump would be re-elected as president of the United States, the so-called “heterodoxy” was elated.For years, these male podcasters, influencers and public figures had marketed themselves as free-thinking pundits who evaded the bounds of political classification. “Their political views could once have been described as libertarian,” Anna Merlan wrote for the Guardian in August; the word used to describe them pointed to the same, derived from the Greek heteros, meaning other, and doxa, meaning opinion.However, in 2024, the heterodoxy universally endorsed, supported and celebrated the hyper-masculine promise of Trump. This has created a moment in which the vast majority of online voices who appeal to young men are explicitly pro-Trump. In the wake of his win, those who at least feigned political ambivalence now feel no need to moderate themselves.Joe Rogan reacted to Trump’s win on Tuesday night by yelling a reverential “holy shit” in a video he posted to X that showed him watching Trump’s election party on Fox News. Rogan, whose chart-topping podcast has an estimated 81% male audience, considers himself more of a conversationalist than a pundit but nevertheless endorsed Trump hours before the election, after hosting Trump and JD Vance on The Joe Rogan Experience. (He invited Kamala Harris, but they could not agree on interview terms.)Rogan endorsed Bernie Sanders in the 2020 Democratic primary and then voted libertarian, and initially liked Robert F Kennedy Jr in 2024. He has supported left-leaning policies like drug and marijuana legalization, same-sex marriage and abortion rights, though he vehemently opposes gender-affirming care for transgender youth. Ultimately, he attributed his pivot to Trump to Elon Musk, the last guest to appear on his podcast before the election.“If it wasn’t for him we’d be fucked,” Rogan posted, referring to Musk. “He makes what I think is the most compelling case for Trump you’ll hear, and I agree with him every step of the way.”Musk, who is generally well-liked among heterodox figures and their supporters, was gleeful as it became clear that Trump had won. He posted a picture to X showing him holding a sink in the Oval Office – a reference to his 2022 takeover of Twitter HQ – captioned “let that sink in”, seemingly relishing the business success and policy influence he anticipates having under a second Trump administration, which he helped secure.Musk’s shift to the far right – after voting for Obama and opposing Trump in 2016 – became noticeable during the pandemic, when he became frustrated that lockdown requirements were slowing production at SpaceX and Tesla. Since taking over Twitter, now X, he has re-platformed Trump and conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones as well as racist and sexist provocateurs like the white nationalist Nick Fuentes. “Your body, my choice. Forever,” Fuentes posted on Tuesday night; the phrase has been making rounds on social media since. Musk personally shares an increasingly large volume of far-right content on his own page – especially transphobic content, seemingly in response to his estranged daughter coming out as transgender.While final election data has yet to be released, initial exit polling indicates that men, and particularly young men aged 18-29, were a crucial pillar of support for Trump. Now more than ever, young men are at odds with more liberal young women, supporting Trump over Harris 56% to 42%, while young women preferred Harris 58% to 40%, according to exit polls. These young men, especially those without a college degree, have expressed feeling unfulfilled, dissatisfied with their jobs and lives, and desirous of a society and home life with traditional gender roles. For years, media outlets have documented how more and more young men have been radicalized after consuming content from right-leaning entertainers and commentators, especially on platforms like YouTube and Twitch. Now, as more of those men have reached voting age, this phenomenon appears to be benefiting Trump and the far right.One 2021 study found that a leading predictor of support for Trump – over party affiliation, gender, race and education level – was belief in “hegemonic masculinity”, defined as believing that men should be in positions of power, be “mentally, physically, and emotionally tough”, and reject anything considered feminine or gay. Some heterodox influencers gained a following by embodying or promoting precisely this brand of masculinity, and giving their followers a script for blaming dissatisfaction on women.Jordan Peterson, who has built a career as a pop pseudo-psychologist promoting patriarchy and the revival of the “masculine spirit”, considers himself to be “devoid of ideology”, but has aligned himself with rightwing figures like Tucker Carlson, Andy Ngo and Matt Walsh and frequently decried the media’s coverage of Trump, calling it biased. He was quick to celebrate Trump’s victory – albeit in a backhanded way. “Thank Heaven for working class slobs,” he posted to X at 1.40am.Nico Kenn De Balinthazy, better known by his YouTube moniker Sneako, took to the streets of New York on Tuesday night in a Make America Great Again hat and an American flag draped around his shoulders. Sneako, who supported Bernie Sanders in 2016 before switching his allegiance to Trump, could be seen trying to provoke the people around him, gloating as the results came in. He loudly laughed at one woman who was crying. The day before the election, he had posted on X: “Kamala Harris is proof that women shouldn’t vote.”Not every heterodox figure has been explicitly pro-Trump this year. Dave Portnoy, the founder of Barstool Sports, which is overwhelmingly geared toward men (particularly college-age men), was also quick to react to the election results. In a video posted to his Instagram, Portnoy – who has been accused of consistently misogynistic behavior both at and outside work – didn’t celebrate Trump, who he has never endorsed, but he expressed indignation at liberal voters.“People like myself, independents, moderates – the Democrats gave us no choice,” Portnoy said, at times slurring his words. “That was the worst campaign. And their pure arrogance and their moral superiority have driven people away. If you say you’re voting for Trump, suddenly you’re a Nazi, you’re Hitler, you’re garbage. Enough. Enough.”Lex Fridman never endorsed Trump either. The science and politics podcast host is less brash than the bulk of the heterodoxy, but is still popular among young men and still friendly to rightwing figures like Carlson and the former Trump adviser Stephen Miller when they stop by for interviews. On election night, he replied to Musk’s enthusiasm for Trump with a rocket emoji and “LFG!”He also was sure to acknowledge a perceived win for himself as he celebrated Trump’s. “PS: Long-form podcasts FTW,” he posted. “I hope to see politicians from both sides doing 2-3+ hour genuine, human conversations moving forward.”During this election cycle, Trump’s embrace of the bro-centric podcast scene came as he sidelined (and in some cases, fumbled) traditional campaign tactics like door-knocking and canvassing. This choice appears to have had no negative effect on his election bid. In fact, it may have even helped him. Trump’s victory could very well be an emboldening choice among heterodoxy figures, who now see the possible fruits of openly embracing the right. They certainly aren’t going away. More

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      Post-election in Saginaw, Michigan, the swing county in the swing state that swung right

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      Saginaw county’s Democrats were sure that the lessons had been learned and that this time it would be different.The Kamala Harris campaign flooded this bellwether county in the crucial battleground state of Michigan with canvassers and advertising, a reaction to Hillary Clinton’s complacent and, as it turned out, misguided belief that she had the area sewn up in 2016.The vice-president and Tim Walz campaigned in Saginaw. Leftist hero Bernie Sanders rallied the local university’s students. Door-knockers and phone bankers urged people to the polls in the hope and expectation of at least eking out the narrow win Joe Biden enjoyed in Saginaw county four years ago.But through it all, there were warnings from those closest to key groups of Saginaw’s voters – union organisers, Black community leaders, social workers for lower-income families, Latino activists – that denouncing Republican demagogue Donald Trump and making vague promises from Harris of a better future were not enough.They cautioned that Harris was not getting through to large numbers of those who struggled the most in a county marked by large economic disparities because she was failing to directly address their concerns, not least inflation and the cost of living.Others said that Harris looked too much like one of the machine politicians so many voters have come to despise, particularly as she avoided taking a stand on key issues or bent to the prevailing political wind.All of them warned that it could cost her the election in Saginaw county, and beyond.And so it proved.Trump won Saginaw county decisively. The vice-president lost by three times as many votes as Clinton in 2016 and did even worse when compared with Biden four years later.Trump beat Harris by more than 3,400 votes on about the same turnout as 2020. In that election, the then president lost to Biden by 303 votes.This year, Trump won an outright majority in Saginaw county with nearly 51% of the vote, more than 1% up on his 2020 tally.On election night, the leader of the county Democrats, Aileen Pettinger, a retired firefighter, bounced into a watch party at a local union hall confident that female voters angry about the US supreme court ruling on abortion and the broader assault on women’s rights had won it for Harris.Local Democrats worked hard to try to bring female Republican voters on board over access to abortion, even leaving Post-it notes in women’s bathrooms reminding them that no one would know if they secretly voted for Harris.But as the results trickled in, the party began to feel like a wake. People drifted away. Whoever was in charge of the music stopped playing Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now. A silence fell as hope bled away.Across town at the Republican watch party, Trump supporters burst into a rendition of the Christian hymn How Great Thou Art after the former and future president gave his victory speech.The initial election results for Saginaw appear to show that Harris lost Biden voters to Trump in some of the poorer areas of the county, including minority neighbourhoods, as well as mostly white suburbs. Harris also failed to mobilise the large numbers of people who usually do not vote in Saginaw. The turnout in the main city was only about 50%.A month ago, Jeff Bulls, president of the Community Alliance for the People in Saginaw, told the Guardian that many voters in lower-income parts of Saginaw were disenchanted with the political process because they did not see that it improved their lives.Bulls warned that Harris’s failure to address issues such as inflation and the cost of housing in a way that would make a difference to those struggling to get by was undermining her campaign. After Harris’s defeat, Bulls said “it’s not unexpected for me”.“She wasn’t really speaking to real people’s issues. You have a lot of poverty here in this county, whether it’s in the city of Saginaw or whether it’s rural people out there. And if you don’t speak to that, you’re not going to inspire people to vote for you, and I felt like her campaign was mostly about just blaming Trump or saying he’s racist. She wasn’t really inspiring people with her own policies, with her own vision, and I think that cost her,” he said.Similar warnings came from union organisers who saw members going with Trump, even though Biden kept telling them how good the economy was, because rising inflation had hit them hard. As loyal Democrats, some couched their warnings carefully in public, not wanting to give ammunition to the Trump campaign.Others were more forthright, including Carly Hammond, a Saginaw organiser for the US’s largest union confederation, the AFL-CIO. She told the Guardian a month ago that the Harris campaign was failing to address the deep distrust of politicians in general, and the Democratic party in particular, among many working people.“It’s the Donald Trump voters in unions that I see. I think most of them are still in the same place,” she said in October.“The trend that I see with labour people who are Trump supporters is a tendency to be very upset with the status quo, which everyone should be. People are going to stick with Trump until they see and they feel like things are getting better for them.”Hammond, whose grandfather worked at one of the many car factories that were once dotted around Saginaw but have since closed, said the Democratic campaign was the biggest election mobilisation she had seen but that Harris lacked “concrete plans” to motivate voters.After the result, Hammond issued a statement saying she was “angry that neither presidential candidate had real acknowledgement of, or plans to address, the real suffering and struggle so many Americans are going through”.Black and Latino community leader organised get-out-the-vote campaigns in the last days before the election as they warned of disenchantment and lack of enthusiasm for Harris.Dan Soza, whose father was the first Latino elected to the Saginaw city council, is a child welfare officer who is deeply alarmed by Trump’s threat of mass deportations. He said that Harris failed to connect with large numbers of Latino voters in the city on what they cared about most: the economy.“There was never any really specific plans. OK, the $25,000 for new home buyers was specific, but where was the specific plan for inflation? Not that the other side added any better answers, but they just never really came out with any concrete plans on what they were going to do,” he said.Soza said that the rise in Latino men voting for Trump in other parts of the country was replicated in Saginaw. He said a lot of that had to do with “fear of a female leader, machismo”.But he said the Democrats also made a mistake in thinking that opposition to Trump’s stance on immigration would play well with Latino voters in places such as Saginaw, where there is a long established Latino community, mostly of Mexican origin, when many of those crossing the border are from Central and South America.“Immigration isn’t as important to them as we think. They took to heart issues like the economy,” he said.The scale of Harris’s loss was emphasised by the success of other Democrats in Saginaw.Kristen McDonald Rivet decisively beat a Republican former prosecutor, Paul Junge, for the open seat in the US House of Representatives covering Saginaw and neighbouring counties. McDonald Rivet took about 51% of the vote, meaning that some people split their vote to support her and Trump.But Bulls is not alone in thinking that the Democratic party needs a wholesale rethink of what it stands for if it is to win back voters in Saginaw.“The Democratic party has to have a come-to-Jesus moment and really revisit who they represent because they’re not speaking to kitchen-table issues. There’s a lot of rhetoric around the middle class. We largely don’t have a middle class, especially in the Black community. We have working class. We have people that are in poverty, and they’re not speaking to them and their struggle, to real issues that poor people are really, really dealing with,” he said.“I would hope that there’s a reckoning and that they revisit who they actually represent, because right now it’s not us.”Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

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