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      ‘No time to pull punches’: is a civil war on the horizon for the Democratic party?

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      Joe Biden stood before the American people, millions of whom were still reeling from the news of Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential race, and reassured them: “We’re going to be OK.”In his first remarks since his vice-president and chosen successor, Kamala Harris, lost the presidential election, Biden delivered a pep talk from the White House Rose Garden on a sunny Thursday that clashed with Democrats’ black mood in the wake of their devastating electoral losses. Biden pledged a smooth transfer of power to Trump and expressed faith in the endurance of the American experiment.“Setbacks are unavoidable, but giving up is unforgivable,” Biden said. “A defeat does not mean we are defeated. We lost this battle. The America of your dreams is calling for you to get back up. That’s the story of America for over 240 years and counting.”The message severely clashed with the dire warnings that many Democrats, including Biden, have issued about the dangers of a second Trump term. They have predicted that Trump’s return to power would jeopardize the very foundation of American democracy. They assured voters that Trump would make good on his promise to deport millions of undocumented people. And they raised serious doubts about Trump’s pledge to veto a nationwide abortion ban.Now as they stare down four more years of Trump’s presidency, Democrats must reckon with the reality that those warnings were for naught. Not only did Trump win the White House, but he is on track to win the popular vote, making him the first Republican to do so since 2004. Senate Republicans have regained their majority, and they appear confident in their chances of holding the House of Representatives, with several key races still too close to call on Friday morning.The bleak outcome has left Democrats bereft, unmoored and furious when they previously thought this week would be the cause of joy and celebration. They are now heading into a brutal political wilderness with its current leaders tarnished by advanced age and a catastrophic defeat and a younger generation that is yet to fully emerge.The party also faces a likely brutal civil war between its leftists and centrists over the best way forward – one that will be fought over the levers of power in the party at every level from the grassroots of all 50 US states to the crowded corridors of Congress in Washington.The stark reality has left Democrats asking themselves the same question over and over again: how did we get here?The hypotheses and accusations rose from whispers to shouts starting on Wednesday. Although a handful of Democrats suggested Harris should have done more to distance herself from Biden, few party members appeared to blame the nominee, who was credited with running the best possible campaign given her roughly 100-day window to close a considerable gap with Trump.Some Democrats blamed Biden, who withdrew from the presidential race in July only after mounting pressure from his party after a disastrous debate performance against Trump. Jim Manley, who served as a senior adviser to the former Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid, said that Biden never should have run for re-election.“This is no time to pull punches or be concerned about anyone’s feelings,” Manley told Politico. “He and his staff have done an enormous amount of damage to this country.”In an even more damning indictment, Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker who was applauded for her role in pressuring Biden to step aside, suggested the party should have held an open primary.“Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Pelosi told the New York Times on Thursday. “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.”View image in fullscreenA number of other senior Democratic aides complained to reporters – on background, without their names attached to the quotes – that Biden had put the party in a terrible position by not reckoning earlier with the widespread concerns over his age and unpopularity. (Biden would have been 86 at the end of his second term, while Trump will be 82 at the end of his.)The White House pushed back against those gripes, framing Democrats’ losses in a much more global context. Incumbents have lost ground around the world in the past year, a trend that experts largely blame on the anger and disillusionment spurred by the coronavirus pandemic and the ensuing high inflation it caused.The White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, cited this explanation during her press briefing on Thursday, while noting that Biden still believes he “made the right decision” in stepping aside.“Despite all of the accomplishments that we were able to get done, there were global headwinds because of the Covid-19 pandemic,” Jean-Pierre said. “And it had a political toll on many incumbents, if you look at what happened in 2024 globally.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDespite those headwinds, Democrats wonder if their communication strategy could have prevented Republicans’ triumph. Leaders of the party are now debating the role of new media and how dominant rightwing influencers, particularly in the so-called “manosphere”, helped propel Trump to victory.Left-leaning Van Jones posited that Democrats had focused too much on traditional media at the expense of cultivating a leftwing media ecosystem, saying in a Substack Live chat: “We built the wrong machine.”Or perhaps Democrats’ failure to connect with the concerns of working-class voters cost them the White House, as progressives such as Senator Bernie Sanders argued.“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic party which has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” Sanders said in his post-election statement. “In the coming weeks and months those of us concerned about grassroots democracy and economic justice need to have some very serious political discussions.”But who will lead those discussions? Biden will be 82 when he leaves the White House in January. Chuck Schumer, the Senate Democratic leader who has now been demoted to minority leader, is 73. Pelosi is 84. Sanders, who won re-election on Tuesday, will be 89 by the time his new term ends.The party must now look to a new generation of leaders, a pivot that many argue should have come earlier. Hakeem Jeffries, the House Democratic leader who still holds out a distant hope of becoming speaker in January if his party can win a majority, might lead the way. Progressive Democrats will probably be looking to popular lawmakers like congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to shape the party’s future. Other rank-and-file members have pointed to Gavin Newsom, the California governor who is already trying to “Trump-proof” his state, as an example for resisting the new administration.They will have a foundation to work from, party leaders assert. Although Trump’s victory was devastating to them, Democrats protected at least three and possibly five competitive Senate seats while mitigating Republican gains in the House. Even if House Republicans maintain control of the chamber, they will be forced to govern with a narrow majority that proved disastrous during the last session and could pave the wave for significant Democratic gains in 2026.For now, though, the Democrats who poured their hearts and souls into electing Harris as the first woman, first Black woman and first Asian American woman to serve as president seem exhausted. They have spent most of the past decade warning the country about the dangers of Trump and his political philosophy only for a majority of American voters to send him back to the White House.While Trump’s first electoral victory sparked a wave of outrage and protests among Democrats, his second win seemed met with a mournful sigh from many of his critics. Right now, Democrats are taking the time to grieve. And then, eventually, they will start to pick up the pieces of their party.Lauren Gambino contributed reportingRead more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

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      If I were Captain America, I’d quit | Stewart Lee

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      The presidency of Donald Trump contaminates everything that touches it, like dogshit on the end of a pointed stick. Be careful, politicians of the world, entertainment brands, and commercial properties, that you don’t get any on you. It stinks.On Monday night, one of my lovely rescue cats, having battled the cat flap into submission, disappeared in the stupid firework dark. He’s not back yet and I am very sad. Like me, he was abandoned to his fate as a child, but in a cardboard box outside the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ place rather than in the Children’s Society offices in Lichfield (a town from which I have been banned from performing by the mayor’s office since 1990). Dependent, like me, on the kindness of a chain of strangers, the cat’s arrival and survival felt like a small balancing of the book of life. But maybe, like many millions of us worldwide, he just couldn’t face Wednesday morning.Last week, Robert Jenrick, our new shadow justice secretary, was trying to blame Keir Starmer for the early release of sex offenders from the very prisons his own government had carelessly overcrowded; another mess left for someone else to pick up. The Tories spent 14 years treating the whole country like a teenager’s bedroom. I only went in to gather up all the old coffee cups, and ended up tripping over a series of abandoned infrastructure projects and falling into a vast network of sewage-filled waterways.But, one has to ask, if Jenrick’s so worried about sex offenders being on the loose, why is he so pleased that one is now in the White House? “If I were an American citizen, I would be voting for Donald Trump”, the child-hating sod told GB News’s calcified opinion-vampire Camilla Tominey, Britain’s 49th most influential rightwing figure, in September. It looks like it’s one rule for white working class British rapists and quite another for orange American billionaire sex offenders with their fingers on the nuclear codes. Two-tier Jenrick can do one! Accommodating Donald Trump will invalidate us all.This week, Bob Dylan is at the Royal Albert Hall. I couldn’t buy a ticket, and wasn’t about to pay five times over the odds to one of the Tories’ ticket criminals. But I may go down to Kensington and hang around outside hopefully, like a dog, in case another middle-aged man with an opinion about the relative merits of the five extant takes of She’s Your Lover Now wants to sell a sudden spare to “the world’s greatest living standup comedian” (the Times).I would like to see Bob Dylan one more time, at least, but wonder what it would feel like to watch one of the architects of postwar progressive America performing in a world where the culture he helped create is so obviously in retreat, as a sexual abuser reclines in Washington inflating himself like a bulbous brown toad. One thing you can say about Dylan, who rarely offers the casual fan the opportunity to enjoy any of his back catalogue live without a significant ontological struggle, is that he was never a nostalgia act. Well, he is now. Trump has moved the dial and made him into one. The times they are a-changing. But not in a good way.Since the second world war, America’s most powerful tool has been the soft global diplomacy of its irresistible, and broadly liberal, popular culture – rock’n’ roll, cinema, and latterly the comic-book characters that are now the tentpoles of the international entertainment industry. But how do those American icons make sense in a Trumpian world, where the star-spangled iconography that informs their costumes is now redolent of fascism and climate denialism rather than freedom and the future? Nobody would want their child to be saved from a burning building by Swastika-Chest Man and his kid sidekick Drill Baby.Because working-class Jewish autodidact visionaries, producing the pop art primers of tomorrow on a pittance, drew Captain America punching out Hitler in the early 40s, and because formerly one-dimensional superheroes were made thrillingly two-dimensional by acid-fried college dropout creatives in the 60s and 70s, Marvel Comics, though their roots are obscured, remain broadly liberal, even almost countercultural. That’s how I reverse-engineer my infantilised pseudo-intellectual desire to keep reading them at the age of 56, anyway.Indeed, in September 1963, Jack Kirby, the 12-cent William Blake of the Lower East Side, drew the Fantastic Four fighting the Hate-Monger, a villain whose superpowers were not the ability to control soil or infuriate moles, but the ability to whip up hate. “We must drive all the foreigners back where they came from. We must show no mercy to those we hate,” he cries, in his purple hood, as his followers agree – “Long live the Hate-Monger. He’ll clean up this country for us!” – and the Invisible Girl observes, helpfully: “He seems to have the crowd in a trance. They … they’re agreeing with his un-American sentiments.” Hang on! Was that Fantastic Four Issue 21, 61 years ago, or Sky News last week?skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionScarlett Johansson, Marvel’s Black Widow, pointlessly assembled a squadron of Avengers actors to denounce Trump, arguably emphasising America’s divides, but the real Avengers would oppose Trump. If they existed. In 1974, as Watergate’s curtain fell on Nixon, the comics writer Steve Englehart, a former soldier who became a conscientious objector, had Captain America abandon his costume and take on the identity of Nomad (“the man without a country”) because he couldn’t square the fictional character’s values with his country’s corrupt figurehead. My Captain America would not sling his vibranium shield for Donald Trump. The success of Trump invalidates the shared, if naive, notion of what America is. I’m going to look for my cat.Stewart Lee’s 2025 tour Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulfbegins at London’s Leicester Square theatre this December, with a July Royal Festival Hall run just announced.

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      Will Typhoon Orange wreak havoc on Britain? Keir Starmer has to prepare for the worst | Andrew Rawnsley

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      Peas from the same pod they sure ain’t. No one is ever going to think that Keir Starmer and Donald Trump are twins who were separated at birth. In their temperaments, their worldviews and the values of the parties they lead, two human beings could not be less alike than the former prosecutor who heads Britain’s first Labour government in 14 years and the convicted felon whom Americans have returned to the White House for another four. When Trumpites are being polite about the Labour leader they call him a “liberal”; when they are feeling vituperative they brand him “far-left”. The animosity has been mutual. There’s a bulging catalogue of damnatory remarks about the president-elect by members of the Starmer cabinet.Which is why Sir Keir felt compelled to lay on the flattery with a trowel when, according to the account from Number 10, he telephoned the American to extend his “hearty congratulations”. If that left many Labour people gagging on their breakfasts, they retched even harder when the prime minister went on to claim: “We stand shoulder to shoulder in defence of shared values of freedom, democracy and enterprise.” He also employed a well-worn diplomatic cliche that one of our ambassadors to Washington banned his staff from using because he thought it fed delusional thinking about the extent of British influence over the US. “I know the special relationship will continue to prosper on both sides of the Atlantic for years to come,” said the prime minister, even though he can’t be genuinely confident of any such thing. The foundations of transatlantic relations frequently shuddered during the first Trump term. Britain’s defence and foreign policy establishments are seized with a justifiably deep apprehension that the world will become an even more dangerous place during the sequel.Sir Keir’s effusions have been accompanied by a big effort to persuade everyone that he and his team have been working assiduously to cultivate relations with members of the Trump court, including vice-president-elect JD Vance, with whom David Lammy boasts he’s grown friendly. The foreign secretary wins the gold medal for diplomatic gymnastics. Six years ago, when he was a backbencher, he called the then and now future US president “a woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath” and “a profound threat to the international order”. Mr Lammy has never recanted those views, but now feels obliged to assert that the British government “will agree and align on much” with the Trump regime. Operation Ingratiate is controversial within Sir Keir’s party and some are already questioning its wisdom. The vast majority of Labour people, sharing the shock and anguish of their cousins in the Democratic party, are more in sympathy with the Trump-denouncing Mr Lammy of yesteryear than they are with the Trump-clasping Mr Lammy of today. Some Labour MPs mutter that Sir Keir is fooling himself if he really thinks he can win the ear of the other man. The concern is that this will be a fruitless pursuit that will earn only embarrassing rebuffs. Theresa May’s slavish attempts to woo the American were rewarded with insults and humiliations – and she was a Conservative prime minister. The better response to his return to the Oval Office, it is argued by some Labour voices, is to start from the assumption that the US will be an extremely unreliable ally and put more urgency into repairing relations with our European neighbours. Other Labour people think the way to react to the US election result is to drop the pretence that there will still be a lot in common between Britain and America. Sadiq Khan, who has history with Mr Trump, has said that Londoners “will be fearful”.This comeback is distressingly energising for the global hard right. Nigel Farage and other mini-Trump types in the UK are cheering, but they are out of tune with public opinion. The number of British voters who are happy to see the return of King Maga are outnumbered by those who are unhappy by nearly three to one. Tories who think that apeing Trumpism is the way forward should note that a majority of their supporters are among those perturbed by his return.To those critical or anxious about his offer to partner up, the prime minister has a blunt riposte: we have to deal with the US as it is, not the country we would prefer it to be. Sir Keir’s inner circle acknowledge that they are bracing for a wild ride, but argue that they have to try to do business with a Trump regime, however nightmarishly difficult that will be. Their problem is that this looks like a seismic change in how America turns up in the world and it is hard to see how that can be comfortably fitted into the traditional template of UK-US relations. This holds that, whoever is in the White House and whether or not they are personally agreeable or ideologically sympatico, a British prime minister has to “hug them close”. One way of contemplating the coming four years from a British perspective is as the ultimate stress test of whether there is any remaining value in thinking about Anglo-American relations in that way.One peril for Sir Keir is that he will be found guilty of wishful thinking when he implies that he can play a role in influencing him for the better once the 45th president becomes the 47th. There are copious reasons to think that Trump Redux will be even harder to constrain than the earlier incarnation. The way he campaigned suggests that his impulses have not mellowed, but sharpened. He is interpreting his victory as “an unprecedented and powerful mandate” to pursue an agenda pregnant with hair-raising risks for the global economy, the western democracies and the architecture of international order. He has won not just in the electoral college, but also the popular vote. The Republicans will control the Senate. It will be a clean sweep if, as seems highly likely, they have a majority in the House of Representatives as well. It will be realistic statecraft to assume that Trump will pursue the nativist, protectionist and unilateralist agenda of “America first” with even more belligerence and even less delicacy towards the opinions and interests of historical allies.When he arrived in office in 2017, he did so without a clear plan; he had little familiarity with how government worked and seasoned operators in the administration managed to contain some of his darkest instincts. This time, he says he knows what to do with his mandate and will pack his government with true believers faithful only to his bidding. For all the attempts by Downing Street to suggest it has anticipated and prepared for this outcome, ministers privately speak of the cabinet’s stomachs being in knots about the risks to Britain’s safety and prosperity. Of the reasons to be fearful that I outlined a fortnight ago, three cause the gravest concern.One is the grievous peril to European security posed by his repeated suggestions that he will undo Nato and sell out Ukraine. Another big anxiety is that he will inflict terrible blows on multilateral bodies and agreements, including those addressing the climate crisis. Spines are further shivered by his desire to impose sweeping tariffs on imports into the US. What’s a “beautiful” idea to him will have ugly consequences for us. A global trade war will be hellish for the Starmer government, especially if it is forced to choose sides between the EU and the US. It has never looked more lonely to be Brexit Britain paddling about in the mid-Atlantic as Typhoon Orange masses on the horizon.From tariffs to defence spending, the best minds the British government can muster are trying to guess which elements of the Trump platform should be treated as deadly serious, which are an opening bargaining position by a man who is hyper-transactional and which were just “campaign talk”. The phlegmatic comfort themselves with the thought that policy bite won’t be as savage as rhetorical bark. The pessimists fear that he means to make good in full on his threats. Ministers privately admit that there will be significant impact on virtually every important aspect of government policy, but none of them can yet be sure exactly how bad the fallout will be.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHope for the best is not a strategy. Prepare for the worst will be prudent. If Donald Trump does only half the things he has said he will do, Sir Keir will find this a very perilous dance. Trying to hug close to the American is like attempting the tango with a crack-smoking rhinoceros. The prime minister will be lucky if he endures the experience without getting gored. More

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      Republicans on the verge of clinching control of the US House

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      Republicans on Saturday appeared close to clinching control of the US House of Representatives, a critical element for Donald Trump to advance his agenda when the president-elect returns to the White House in January.With votes still being counted from the 5 November general election, Republicans had won 212 seats in the 435-member House, according to Edison Research, which projected on Friday night that Republican Jeff Hurd had enough votes to keep Republican control of Colorado’s third congressional district.Democratic Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez won re-election to a US House seat representing Washington state on Saturday, the Associated Press reported, defeating Republican Joe Kent in a rematch of one of the closest races of 2022.Gluesenkamp Perez won the seat by just more than 2,600 votes two years ago. Prior to her election, Gluesenkamp Perez ran an auto shop in a rural part of the district, which featured heavily in her campaign.The Republican-leaning district, which Donald Trump carried in 2020, includes the south-western portion of the state and some Portland, Oregon, suburbs that spill into Washington state.Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

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      Republicans need to win six more seats to keep control of the House and they already have enough victories to wrest control of the US Senate from Democrats, though Edison Research projected late on Friday that Democratic US Senator Jacky Rosen had won re-election in Nevada.A first-term moderate in a presidential battleground state, Rosen was among the GOP’s top targets. She campaigned on lowering costs for the middle class, defending abortion rights and tackling the climate crisis. Over the summer, she introduced legislation that would allow extreme heat to qualify as a disaster under federal law, pointing to heatwaves that have devastated the west.With Trump’s victory in the presidential election and Republican control of the Senate already decided, keeping hold of the House would give Republicans sweeping powers to potentially ram through a broad agenda of tax and spending cuts, energy deregulation and border security controls.Results of 19 House races remain unclear, mostly in competitive districts in western states where the pace of vote counting is typically slower than in the rest of the country.Ten of the seats are currently held by Republicans and nine by Democrats. Fourteen seats had widely been seen as competitive before the election.Republican senators will decide next week who will serve as the party’s leader in the Senate in 2025, with John Thune, John Cornyn and Rick Scott vying for the job. On Saturday, Senators Bill Hagerty and Rand Paul endorsed Scott over the more senior Thune and Cornyn, who have been viewed as favorites.Associated Press contributed to this report More

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      Anti-Trump protests erupt across US from New York City to Seattle

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      Protests against Donald Trump erupted in the US on Saturday as people on both coasts took to the streets in frustration about his re-election.Thousands of people in major cities including New York City and Seattle demonstrated against the former president and now president-elect amid his threats against reproductive rights and pledges to carry out mass deportations at the start of his upcoming presidency.View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreenIn New York City on Saturday, demonstrators from advocacy groups focused on workers’ rights and immigrant justice crowded outside Trump International Hotel and Tower on 5th Avenue holding signs that read: “We protect us” and “Mr President, how long must women wait for liberty?” Others held signs that read: “We won’t back down” while chanting: “Here we are and we’re not leaving!”Similar protests took place in Washington DC, where Women’s March participants demonstrated outside the Heritage Foundation, the rightwing thinktank behind Project 2025. Pictures posted on social media on Saturday showed demonstrators holding signs that read: “Well-behaved women don’t make history” and “You are never alone”. Demonstrators also chanted: “We believe that we will win!” and held other signs that read: “Where’s my liberty when I have no choice?”View image in fullscreenCrowds of demonstrators also gathered outside Seattle’s Space Needle on Saturday. “March and rally to protest Trump and the two-party war machine,” posters for the protests said, adding: “Build the people’s movement and fight war, repression and genocide!” Speaking to a crowd of demonstrators, some of whom dressed in raincoats while others wore keffiyehs in solidarity with Palestinians amid Israel’s deadly war on Gaza, one demonstrator said: “Any president that has come to power has also let workers down.”On Friday, protesters gathered outside city hall in Portland, Oregon, in a similar demonstration against Trump. Signs carried by demonstrators included messages that read: “Fight fascism” and “Turn fear into fight”.View image in fullscreen“We’re here because we’ve been fighting for years for health, housing and education. And whether it was Trump, or [Joe] Biden before this, we have not been getting it and we are wanting to push to actually get that realized,” Cody Urban, a chair for US chapter of the International League of People’s Struggle, said, KGW reported.Also on Friday, dozens of demonstrators in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, gathered in Point Start park to protest Trump’s election victory. People carried signs reading: “We are not going back” and “My body, my choice”.“We are afraid of what’s coming, but we are not going to back down,” Steve Capri, an organizer with Socialist Alternative, told WPXI TV. “Trump is an attack on all of us so we need to unite, we need to get organized, join movements, study and learn together.” More

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      Fema worker fired for telling Milton relief team to skip homes with Trump signs

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      A employee at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) has been fired from her job and is being investigated because she told a disaster relief team she was directing in Florida after Hurricane Milton to avoid homes displaying election campaign signs supporting Donald Trump, conduct that the agency head on Saturday called “reprehensible”.Deanne Criswell, the administrator of the federal agency, posted on X: “More than 22,000 Fema employees every day adhere to Fema’s core values and are dedicated to helping people before, during and after disasters, often sacrificing time with their own families to help disaster survivors.”She continued: “Recently, a Fema employee departed from these values to advise her survivor assistance team not go to homes with yard signs supporting President-elect Trump. This is a clear violation of Fema’s core values and principles to help people regardless of their political affiliation.”Hurricane Milton roared across the Gulf of Mexico and hit Florida last month, crossing the state before reaching the Atlantic Ocean, just two weeks after Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida and then curved inland on a lethal path through Georgia and the Carolinas before dissipating in Tennessee. It killed 35 people.The Fema employee has not yet been officially identified, but Criswell said of the actions: “This was reprehensible. I want to be clear to all of my employees and the American people, this type of behavior and action will not be tolerated at Fema and we will hold people accountable if they violate these standards of conduct.”The agency has said it understood the conduct to be an isolated incident. The Daily Wire was the first to report on the actions of the employee, a supervisor, which it said it uncovered from internal correspondence.The employee reportedly sent a message to workers who were going door to door in Lake Placid, Florida, to plan federal assistance, telling them to “avoid homes advertising Trump”.Creswell further posted on Saturday: “We take our mission to help everyone before, during and after disasters seriously. This employee has been terminated and we have referred the matter to the Office of Special Counsel. I will continue to do everything I can to make sure this never happens again.”During the aftermath of the highly destructive Hurricane Helene, which affected 10 states and killed more than 230 people, Trump went campaigning in North Carolina and accused the Biden administration of holding aid back from Republican-voting areas, even though the government and prominent Republican leaders on the ground disputed that.But after the report of the Fema employee emerged, Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, posted on X: “The blatant weaponization of government by partisan activists in the federal bureaucracy is yet another reason why the Biden-Harris administration is in its final days.”He said he was launching his own investigation into what happened. More

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      The Observer view on US election: lessons for the left in wake of damning defeat

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      Donald Trump’s unexpectedly clearcut victory in last week’s US presidential election is a wake-up call for the progressive left in America and Britain. The hard-right Republican nominee made gains in almost all voter groups, including in swing state cities, middle-class suburbs, working-class manufacturing centres and rural and farming communities. Black, Latino, Native American and younger voters, on whose support his Democratic rival, the vice-president, Kamala Harris, had pinned her hopes, also went for Trump in larger than anticipated numbers. Polling suggesting a dead heat was wrong. Trump scored an undeniable nationwide triumph, winning both the electoral college and the popular vote.The Democratic party’s inquest into what went wrong must honestly confront some uncomfortable truths. One concerns identity. It’s plain, on this showing at least, that membership of racial and ethnic minorities can no longer be blithely assumed to translate into support for a progressive left agenda. Another concerns priorities. Top-down policy agendas pursued by entitled and privileged social “elites” can alienate ordinary voters from all backgrounds. They simply cannot or will not relate to them.Likewise, Harris’s belief that support for abortion rights, while laudable, could be used as a decisive wedge issue to attract female voters was confounded by the 45% of women who backed Trump. For them, bread-and-butter issues mattered more. A CNN exit poll also found Trump’s support among college-educated and first-time voters, who usually favour the Democrats, rose, too. Unsurprisingly, most white men went with the white guy. Again, worries about prices, the economy, jobs and security might have determined their vote. But, sadly, many might have rejected the idea of a woman of colour as president.This was a comprehensive defeat, not only for Harris but for her boss, President Joe Biden, and for the Democratic party, which also lost control of the Senate and has probably failed once again to take the House of Representatives. It’s true that Harris had little more than three months to make her case. It’s possible that had the unpopular president stepped down earlier, as the former speaker Nancy Pelosi suggests, Harris or another candidate might have done better. It’s certain that, as usual, the economy was the top issue, and that most voters blame the Biden-Harris administration for doing a poor job. But if the significance of this debacle is to be fully understood, it is necessary to look beyond such conventional explanations.The heart of the problem is that Democrats have lost touch – and no longer seem to understand where at least half of all Americans are coming from. Harris’s brave show of positivity and her stress on inclusiveness, unity and joy jarred badly with the joyless, negative everyday experience of conflicted and divided voters. They complained that high inflation is ruining living standards, food is unaffordable, secure, well-paid jobs are a rarity amid influxes of cheap migrant labour – and that their current leaders disrespect and ignore them, and simply do not care about them. If this sounds familiar, it’s because similar grievances are fuelling the advance of Reform UK and European rightwing populist parties, which welcomed Trump’s victory.This fundamental disconnect is evident in other areas. One recent poll found that 45% of Americans say democracy does not do a good job protecting ordinary people. Trust in institutions, such as the justice system and the media, is eroding. Long gone are the days when three national TV networks and a clutch of self-important newspapers dictated the news agenda. Trump understood this. He took his campaign to popular podcasters and talk radio. He mostly avoided big set-piece interviews and risky prime-time debates. And, despite attempts on his life, he hosted raucous open-air rallies, defiantly offensive to the end.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionLaced with ever-increasing vulgarity, his speeches offered a deliberately gloomy, dark and angry contrast to Harris’s upbeat vision. He was, Trump said, “mad as hell”. He was going to get even. He would take down the elites. And he would make America great again. This furious narrative of victimhood, unfairness and retribution reflected the nation’s sour mood. Trump said he would fight for them – and enough of them believed him. Most thought the country was heading in the wrong direction anyway. They wanted a change. So, having fired him in 2020, they hired him for a second time – even though, according to the CNN poll, 54% view him unfavourably.“America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate,” Trump claimed – and this prospect is truly daunting. His mandate to “save the country” includes mass migrant deportations, unfunded tax cuts, sweeping import tariffs, expanded oil and gas drilling, abandoning the green agenda, repudiation of Nato, a free hand for Israel, betrayal of Ukraine to Russia, and promised Stalinist purges of political opponents, journalists and anybody else he dislikes. Britain, estranged from the EU, now faces a potential collapse of its US “special relationship” despite Keir Starmer’s awkward schmoozing of the president-elect. What a mess!Right now, Trump is in the pink. He has won a famous victory. But let’s not forget for a moment that he remains a fundamental danger to America and the world. At some point, Britain and the other western democracies may have to draw a line, even do the unthinkable and break with the US. As we have said before, Trump is unfit to hold the office to which he has just been re-elected. Proof of that contention will not be long in coming. More

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      We can rage about Donald Trump. Or we can be curious about why he appealed to so many | Peter Hyman

      by

      How can anyone vote for someone so… fill in the blank… racist, sexist, unconstitutional, hateful, unhinged? This is the question asked frequently in the UK and here in the States, where I have spent the past three weeks trying to understand the Trump phenomenon.Behind the question is an implied superiority; that we, the clever people, have identified the monster that is Donald Trump, but the deluded masses are too stupid to see it. But what I have found at the Trump rallies I’ve been to is not stupidity, but frustration, pain and a longing for respect.Tucker Carlson at Madison Square Garden captured this sentiment with his usual swagger. “They tell you, the people who can actually change a flat tyre, who pay your taxes and work 40 hours a week, that you are somehow immoral. We have a message for them: you are not better than us, you are not smarter than us.”To dismiss this as the politics of grievance is to dismiss what it feels like to be disrespected, to feel “a stranger in your own land”. To feel as though the college-educated are looking down at the non-college-educated.Even now, after his overwhelming victory, many still fume that Trump has returned to power on the back of a pack of lies, sometimes very big lies (like he won the 2020 election). And of course that’s part of the story. But his supporters have some justification for believing that his win has in fact been forged from a powerful truth. The economy is not being run in their interests, government is not working for them, and mainstream political parties have not been up to the job in recent years.This is what appealed to so many people including lifelong Democrats such as Bill, who was the first person I chatted to at a rally in Latrobe, just outside Pittsburgh. “I was a Democrat all my life, a local organiser. I was invited to a fundraiser, bought a new suit to look smart, turned up and listened to all the speeches. By the end of the evening, there had been a programme aimed at everyone – those on benefits, single mothers, new immigrants – but nothing of any kind at me, a dad of two children, trying to pay the mortgage, working hard to get on. I realised the Democrats were no longer for me.”Yes, there was a cultish feel to the mass of red Maga hats and rhythmic chants of USA, USA, and yes, a full buffet of conspiracy theories was often on the menu. But what motivated so many of them was a lack of order and control in their lives. If you don’t know who is coming across the border, you feel uneasy and at risk. If you can’t predict how much your groceries will cost week to week, you feel the pressure.And to solve this? You need a disruptor. Someone who doesn’t go along with the stale, failed, norms of political discourse, someone from outside politics who can hack through the undergrowth even if in doing so he might offend. If Trump was polite, generous, restrained and conciliatory, his supporters would find it impossible to believe he would give the system the good shake they believe it needs.So, Trump’s appeal is there in plain sight. It is not an aberration. It is not inexplicable. And now we know for certain, it’s not going away. The truth is the Democrats lost people – head and heart. They failed at being good technocrats (the head) with high inflation and open borders. And failed at telling a story in which struggling working families could feel seen and heard (the heart).This is now the challenge for the Democrats in the US fighting to win back power, and Labour in the UK trying to make a success of their victory. Trump’s win could be a moment, like Margaret Thatcher’s victory in 1979, where the old rules of politics are turned on their head and where the buildings blocks of a new progressive project need to be rebuilt from first principles.The outlines of what needs to happen will emerge. A project that is squarely back on the side of working people. Where we do the “heavy lifting” to get better and bolder policies on the cost of living, making work pay, securing our borders, providing for the aspirations of those who don’t go to university.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhere we understand that the way we govern is not working for too many people and needs to change fundamentally if we are to rebuild trust. Where we get to grips with a diffuse and polarised media and communicate far more cleverly. And where we tell a story about the common good, of belonging and respect, that is sufficiently hard-headed to bring people together.Trump won because he was the better candidate with a better message. I believe both his policies and approach will not in the end work, and will probably do a lot of damage on the way. But to millions, whether we admit it or not, he offered real hope – of greater prosperity, more security and fewer wars. Many looked to him as a protector – from a world of change and from patronising elites.We now have a choice: rage at Trump supporters – or curiosity. We can spend the coming months in fruitless intellectual contortions about whether he meets the criteria for being a fascist, or we can properly understand what has just happened and get to work deepening, widening and improving a new progressive agenda with the vim and vitality to mount a serious fightback. Peter Hyman is a former adviser to Keir Starmer and Tony Blair, currently working on a project to rebuild trust in politics and tackle far-right populism

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