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      Sweep of swing states rubs salt in Democrats’ wounds as Trump prepares to meet Biden

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      Donald Trump was declared the winner in Arizona early on Sunday, completing the Republicans’ clean sweep of the so-called swing states and rubbing salt in Democrats’ wounds as it was announced that the president-elect is scheduled to meet with Joe Biden at the White House on Wednesday to discuss the presidential handover.In a national campaign that was projected as being extremely close but he ended up winning handily, the result in Arizona gives Trump 312 electoral college votes, compared with Kamala Harris’s 226. The state joins the other Sun belt swing states – Nevada, Georgia and North Carolina – and the three Rust belt states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania in voting Republican. All were expected to be extremely competitive but all went for Trump, though by fairly close margins.Republicans also regained control of the Senate – they hold 53 seats to the Democrats’ 46 – and look likely to keep control of the House of Representatives, where 21 races remain uncalled but Republicans currently have a 212-202 advantage, giving them a “trifecta” – both houses of Congress as well as the presidency – that will allow them to govern largely unfettered for at least the next two years.The political realignment comes after a bruising election that has set the stage for the Democratic party to re-evaluate a platform that appeared to have been rejected by a majority of US voters. Trump also won the popular vote, the first time a Republican has done so since George W Bush in 2004 following the 9/11 attacks a few years before.At Biden’s request, Trump will visit the Oval Office on Wednesday, a formality that Trump himself did not honor in 2020 when he lost the presidency to Biden but refused to accept the results.In a speech last week, Biden said he would “direct my entire administration to work with his team to ensure a peaceful and orderly transition”.But as president-elect, Trump has reportedly yet to submit a series of transition agreements with the Biden administration, including ethics pledges to avoid conflicts of interest. The agreements are required in order to unlock briefings from the outgoing administration before the handover of power in 72 days’ time.The national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said Biden will brief Trump on foreign policy on Wednesday, telling CBS Face the Nation: “The president will have the chance to explain to President Trump how he sees things.”Asked if Biden will ask legislators to pass additional aid for Ukraine before he leaves office, Sullivan said the president “will make the case that we do need ongoing resources for Ukraine beyond the end of his term”. Trump allies have said the incoming administration’s focus would be on peace not territory.View image in fullscreenSullivan also said that the international community needs “to increase pressure on Hamas to come to the table to do a deal in Gaza, because the Israeli government said it’s prepared to take a temporary step in that direction” because the group had told mediators, he said, it “will not do a cease-fire and hostage deal at this time”.The political fallout from Trump’s win continues to reverberate, not least in the Democratic camp. The Harris-Walz campaign is estimated to have spent $1bn in three months but is now reportedly $20m in debt.The Republican pollster Frank Luntz told ABC News’s This Week that whoever “told” Harris to focus on Trump during her presidential campaign had “committed political malpractice”.“We all know what Trump is,” Luntz said. “We experienced him for four years.”Progressive senator Bernie Sanders, who votes with Democrats, defended Harris’s campaign and refused to be drawn into further analysis on whether Biden should have stepped away from his re-election bid sooner.“I don’t want to get involved,” he told CNN. “We got to look forward and not in the back. Kamala did her very best. She came in, she won the debate with Trump. She worked as hard as she possibly could.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreen“Here is the reality: the working class of this country is angry, and they have reason to be angry,” he added. “We are living in an economy today where people on top are doing phenomenally well while 60% of our people are living paycheck-to-paycheck.”Republicans, meanwhile, have not explained why Trump and many in the party argue last week’s election was free and fair but maintain the 2020 one was somehow rigged, despite every single lawsuit alleging fraud being rejected.Jim Jordan, the Republican chair of the the house judiciary committee, called Trump’s victory last week the “greatest political comeback”.On Friday, Jordan and fellow Republican representative Barry Loudermilk sent a letter to special counsel Jack Smith to demand that his office preserve records of the justice department’s prosecutions of Trump.Asked by CNN whether Trump would go after his political opponents, Jordan said: “He didn’t do it in his first term. The Democrats went after him and everyone understands what they did.”“I don’t think any of that will happen,” Jordan reiterated. “We are the party who is against political prosecution. We’re the party who is against going after your opponents using lawfare.”Byron Donalds, a Republican congressman from Florida, told Fox News that claims of a list were “lies from the Democratic left”.“I will tell you, this is not something that Donald Trump has ever spoken to, or he’s committed to, whatsoever. There’s no enemies list,” Donalds said. Trump has regularly referred to his political opponents as “the enemy within”. More

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      Bernie Sanders says he opposes urging Justice Sonia Sotomayor to step down

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      Bernie Sanders said he opposes any move to force Sonia Sotomayor, the senior liberal justice on the US supreme court, to step down so that Joe Biden could nominate a younger liberal replacement before he finishes his term as president.Sotomayor, 70, is known to suffer from health issues, and some Democrats fear a repeat of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died during Donald Trump’s first term – giving him a third opportunity to nominate a new justice and further shore up the top court’s conservative bent.In his first term, Trump appointed Neil Gorsuch to replace Antonin Scalia, Brett Kavanaugh to succeed Anthony Kennedy, and Amy Coney Barrett to take the place of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died less than two months before the 2020 election – leaving six largely conservative judges to just three liberals.Trump’s first-term appointees to the court were critical to overturning abortion rights and a series of other rulings that delighted conservative activists.In an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, Sanders, a progressive senator who identifies as an independent but usually votes with Democrats, said it would not be “sensible” to ask Sotomayor to step down while Biden is still in office.He added he’d heard “a little bit” of talk from Democratic senators about asking Sotomayor, who is serving a lifetime appointment to the supreme court, to step aside.“I don’t think it’s sensible,” Sanders said, without elaborating further.No elected Democrat has so far publicly called on the justice to resign, but the idea comes amid a feverish effort by Democrats to “Trump-proof” their agenda before the Republican takes office in January.Supreme court justices are nominated by the sitting president but face an often grueling confirmation process in the Senate. With Democrats soon to lose control of the body, the opportunity for Biden to appoint – and for Democratic senators to confirm – a successor to Sotomayor is fast slipping away.Biden appointed Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson to the supreme court. She was confirmed in 2022. However, with just two months left in office, it is unlikely that Biden and a Democrat-controlled Senate would be able to nominate and confirm a new justice to the court in time.Democrats have previous floated the possibility of increasing the number of justices to counter the court’s political make-up. In July, Biden proposed term limits and a code of ethics for court justices, after a series of scandals relating to the conservatives Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito called into question their impartiality.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBiden said the court had “gutted civil rights protections, taken away a woman’s right to choose, and now granted Presidents broad immunity from prosecution for crimes they commit in office”.In a second term, meanwhile, Trump could have the opportunity to further deepen the court’s conservative leaning, as Thomas and Alito are both in their mid-70s.Just as Democrats are considering whether Sotomayor should step down to install a replacement liberal justice, Republicans could do the same after they take power in January. “Alito is gleefully packing up his chambers,” Mike Davis, a conservative legal operative, predicted on social media this week.Although a Republican majority in the Senate refused to take up confirmation hearings in 2016 when Barack Obama nominated Merrick Garland to replace Antonin Scalia, protesting that to do so in an election year would be unfair, they had no such problems when Trump nominated Barrett to replace Ginsburg in 2020, also an election year. More

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      ‘I hate lying to her’: US couples on voting against their partners’ candidates

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      In the 2024 election, women turned out for Kamala Harris, while men were instrumental in securing Donald Trump’s win, according to early polling information. In some cases, those women and men were married to each other or otherwise romantically involved. In other relationships, it was the men who voted for Harris, while their female partners voted for Trump.Here, Americans who voted differently from their partners shared with the Guardian how such partisan views have affected their relationship, what it was like to “cancel out” a loved one’s vote, and why some kept their votes secret. Some requested to keep their identities anonymous to discuss personal matters.‘The only thing keeping me in this marriage is my teenagers’I’m voting for Harris, and I fight about it often with my husband. I’m disgusted with him for how he has changed from the man I married to supporting a candidate who is anti-everything in our personal lives. We have a trans child, a female child, a disabled child, mixed-race grandchildren, all of whom are hated by the Maga party. I’ve always been an independent feminist who bases beliefs on logic, facts and empathy. Living with a person who can’t admit to being wrong when facts are presented and no longer supports independent women is its own sort of hell. The only thing keeping me in this marriage is my teenagers. Thankfully, they’re juniors in high school, so I only have one and a half years to be stuck in it. Anonymous, caretaker, indie author and editor, 47, IllinoisView image in fullscreen‘I hate lying to her, but it’s for the best’I’ve been dating my girlfriend for 10 months. We met through a mutual friend at her church, and got along instantly. I love her to death. We celebrated Halloween and dressed up as ghosts.I secretly voted for Kamala Harris. I told my girlfriend that I wasn’t voting, and she doesn’t doubt it. She once said that Trump is America’s last hope, and that he is God’s chosen candidate. It was horrifying. I was internally screaming “WTF”. She has also said that the allegations against him are all lies; part of a “secret plot” to destroy him. But I wasn’t ready to talk about it. I feel dishonest. I hate lying, but it’s for the best. I’d hate to see her go insane over my vote, but I know she would. Not only that, but her father would disapprove of our relationship if he knew. He would disapprove of her just for dating me. I can’t risk that, ever. Anonymous, computer science student, 22, Joplin, MO‘He calls me stupid’It has been hell since the moment Trump announced his candidacy. Hubby, who voted for Clinton and Obama (he says he now regrets doing that), is brainwashed Maga to the core and watches Fox incessantly. It was affecting my physical and emotional health. He uses abusive language, calls me stupid when I explain my main concerns are education, health, climate change, moral standards and so on. He is an old man who has felt disenfranchised and diminished by social change.I met him in a club on a girls’ night, and we’ve been married for 37 years. No children, but he has a daughter and two granddaughters from a previous marriage who I have a great relationship with. And we have a cat! The evil spewed by Trump has made our life bizarre. But at this point, I’m in it for the long haul. Anonymous, retired educator and scientist , Florida‘We will still have sex tonight’It is election night as I write this. I’m sitting in the nursery holding our five-month old baby while he naps. My conservative husband is downstairs with our six-year old, probably listening to live election coverage that leans far right in perspective. He asked me how I was feeling today and I said fine. I know when I’m on my deathbed, I will not be thinking about Donald Trump, I’ll be thinking of my family. I’ll be thinking of my husband who yes, voted for Trump not once but three times but is also smart (yes, very smart), and my favorite person in the world. Now that the poll results are pouring in, I feel upset that my husband can support a misogynistic, racist and manipulative candidate. I also heard my husband’s concerns about another four years of a liberal leadership, and he is not wrong. He is just less right. And we will still have sex tonight. Susie, 39, from Colorado‘My wife expects Trump to stop funding mass slaughter’I voted for Jill Stein. Almost every Democrat we met voted for Jill Stein because she opposes what is happening in the Ukraine and Gaza (and the West Bank), especially Gaza. My wife voted for Donald Trump because she doesn’t believe a word he actually says and she expects him to stop funding mass slaughter. We think similarly about politics, but my wife doesn’t want the Democrats in power because they are warmongers, whereas I will not vote for anyone who endorses a genocide or an unjust war. Voting differently hasn’t affected our relationship in the least. Anonymous, artist, 69, Tucson, ArizonaView image in fullscreen‘I wrote in Jesus Christ, my husband voted Trump’I couldn’t vote for Harris because she is pro-abortion, and strong on that. Although I am strongly pro-life, I do think laws need to be refined to protect women who are miscarrying and to protect the life of the mother. I could not vote for Trump because he is mentally ill and unstable. I think he has turned the immigration issue into racism. My biggest issues are to protect and support Israel, to find a humane way to screen immigrants and help true asylum seekers, while protecting our country from real criminals, not illegals. So I wrote in Jesus Christ. My husband voted Trump. We can agree to disagree. We both have freedom to vote our conscience. Anonymous, retired RN and homeschool teacher, 58, Kingston, Tennessee‘Our love is more important than our disagreements’My wife and I have been together since 2019, married in 2022. I voted for Harris, she didn’t. It’s been a strain on our relationship and we have developed policies – such as when it gets too heated, either of us can say “peace out” – and we are working on listening thoroughly to each other. The election won’t affect our relationship. We’ve agreed on that! Our love is more important than our disagreements. Ross R Mason, 62, vice-president at EarthX Media Inc, Dallas, Texasskip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion‘I don’t feel like my best self when I have to defend my values to my spouse’I really don’t understand how my husband can like Trump. We used to make fun of him when he was on The Apprentice. He is a smart man, and he believes these buffoons. I voted for Harris. I support women’s reproductive rights, and that was one of the most important issues for me. I also feel that she is sane and not divisive. My husband and I agreed when Harris got on the ticket that we would not discuss politics. If we do, it sours our relationship. It has worked for the most part. I don’t feel like my best self when I have to defend my values to my spouse. Anonymous, librarian, 47, from Oregon‘I love his determination to do his best’About 27 years ago, I met my husband on a blind date. Two years later, we married. He voted for Trump, I voted for Harris. It’s not a secret; my husband knows what’s important to me. I’m extremely aggravated by his preference for Fox News, which I see as a successful propaganda machine. However, while I don’t care for his political perspectives and practices, I love his intellectual capacity, his sense of humor and his determination to do his best. Anonymous, retired educator, 78, from Tucson, ArizonaView image in fullscreen‘He chose a misogynistic racist over me’We’ve been married 40 too many years and basically canceled each other’s votes. I’ve been involved in politics since my 20s and consider myself as a liberal. There have been many arguments since my husband started to espouse Trump gaslighting. I hate the fact that he would choose a misogynistic racist over me, a woman. Abortion and immigration issues mattered to me this election. Most of our relatives came to the US as illegals and now this immigration rhetoric comes up? We both agreed not to discuss politics, though. We’ll keep on keeping on. Rebeca Guevara, 76, retired nurse from Laredo, Texas‘This makes me question the relationship’My partner knows who I voted for, but we just don’t talk about politics. I’d love to be able to have a discussion with him about the issues, but he usually changes the subject. While I consider myself a moderate (I’d vote for someone like Mitt Romney if he was the Republican candidate), he gets most of his political insights from Fox News. He sees Trump as strong and believes that he’d be worse off financially if Harris had won (he and I are both in a good position financially, but we’re not nearly rich enough to be better off under Trump).We met online almost two years ago and are in a committed relationship, but we both have kids from previous marriages and are not planning to live together anytime soon. The fact we can’t even have a discussion about the election makes me question the relationship. Anonymous, 51, Columbus, Ohio, with a management position in engineeringResponses have been edited for clarity. Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

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      Trump’s wild threats put press freedom in the crosshairs in second term

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      Donald Trump could have an easier time limiting press freedom in his second term in the White House after a campaign marked by virulent rhetoric towards journalists and calls for punishing television networks and prosecuting journalists and their sources, legal scholars and journalism advocacy groups warn.Aside from worries about Trump’s demonization of the press inciting violence against journalists, free press advocates appear to be most alarmed by Trump’s call for the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to revoke TV networks’ broadcast licenses and talk of jailing journalists who refuse to reveal anonymous sources.Still, despite a conservative majority on the supreme court and likely Republican control of the House and Senate, those same people also say that America’s robust first amendment protections and a legislative proposal and technology to protect sources mean that a diminished press under Trump is not a certainty.“My big-picture concern is that Trump is going to do exactly what he has been telling us that he wants to do, which is that he is going to punish his critics,” said Heidi Kitrosser, a Northwestern University law professor.Kitrosser added: “He is going to punish people who dissent from his approach to things, people who criticize him and also, perhaps more importantly, investigative journalists and their sources who are not offering opinions but are exposing facts that he finds embarrassing or inconvenient.”Trump has long said journalists deliver “fake news” and are the “enemy of the people”, but since leaving office in 2021 he has used more violent language. At a 2022 rally in Texas, Trump suggested that the threat of rape in prison could compel a journalist to reveal their sources.“When this person realizes that he is going to be the bride of another prisoner shortly, he will say, ‘I’d very much like to tell you exactly who that was,’” Trump said.At a recent campaign rally, Trump also said that given where the press was located at the event, if someone were to try to assassinate him, the person “would have to shoot through the fake news, and I don’t mind that so much”.Kash Patel, who could be appointed as acting attorney general or head of the CIA, frequently talks of the “deep state” and told the far-right Trump ally Steve Bannon in a podcast interview: “We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media … We’re going to come after you.”Trevor Timm, executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said it was “entirely possible that [Trump] is just bloviating”.In his earlier campaigns and first term in office, Trump “was on the campaign trail calling them names and riling up crowds, but he was not actively saying, ‘I want to throw them in jail,’” Timm said.Trump also posted on Twitter during his first term about revoking broadcasters’ licenses when they put out “fake news”.After the tweets, Ajit Pai, then the FCC chair appointed by Trump, said: “I believe in the first amendment.”View image in fullscreen“Under the law, the FCC does not have the authority to revoke a license of a broadcast station based on a particular newscast,” Pai explained.But Trump and his supporters talked more about revoking the licenses during his second run for the White House. CNN reported in October that Trump had over the last two years said at least 15 times that the government should take such actions.After a 60 Minutes interview in October that contained an answer from Kamala Harris about the war in Gaza that differed from her response in a trailer for the interview, Trump called CBS a “threat to democracy” and said its license should be revoked.An FCC commissioner appointed by Trump recently also said that NBC could lose its license for having Harris appear on Saturday Night Live before the election and not giving equal time to Trump.Another Trump-appointed FCC commissioner said it “would not be inappropriate for the commission” to investigate the complaint about the 60 Minutes interview.“That is even more disturbing, because it means that it’s not just Trump wildly spewing off the cuff. It means that two of the five current FCC chairs might be amenable to this argument,” Timm said.Still, it is unlikely that the FCC would be able to revoke a broadcaster’s license before the end of Trump’s term, according to Andrew Jay Schwartzman, senior counselor for the Benton Institute for Broadband and Society.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe commission only revokes a license when a broadcaster goes off the air, Schwartzman said. The government agency could then take back the spectrum licensed to the station in case someone else would like to use it.The commission could deny a license renewal, but none are up for renewal until June 2028, and the commission would not be able to even decide to hold a hearing on a renewal before the end of Trump’s second term in office, Schwartzman said.As to cracking down on whistleblowers and journalists, Trump could use the Espionage Act, which allows the government to pursue people who share information with journalists related to national security, Kitrosser said.Barack Obama was also aggressive in his use of the law to prosecute whistleblowers during his presidency.Kitrosser said she was “very, very disturbed” by Obama’s crackdown on media sources.But the difference between the Obama administration’s effort and Trump’s call for prosecuting journalists and sources who leak information is that Trump has repeatedly said: “He does not think that criticism of him, criticism of judges that he appoints, criticism of his policies … should be protected,” Kitrosser said. “Not to protect national security, but to protect himself, and I think that is really the fundamental difference between Obama and Trump.”The Trump administration will probably have an easier time pursuing sources than journalists.“I think courts will be more receptive to the argument that the first amendment bars media prosecutions of journalists under the Espionage Act than they have been receptive to those claims by media sources,” Kitrosser said.To protect sources, journalists could also start to rely more on encryption communication tools like Signal in a second Trump term. The Freedom of the Press Foundation has urged journalists to start using such technology.The organization is also lobbying for the passage of the Press Act, which would prohibit the federal government from compelling journalists to disclose certain protected information, except in limited circumstances such as to prevent terrorism or imminent violence, and from spying on journalists through their technology providers.The House passed the bill unanimously. Three Republican senators have also sponsored the legislation, but it has stalled in committee because of a small group of Republicans, including Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who argued the bill would “open a floodgate of leaks damaging to law enforcement and our nation’s security”.“Too many journalists are little more than leftwing activists who are, at best, ambivalent about America and who are cavalier about our security and the truth,” Cotton wrote in a statement explaining his opposition.Timm, of the Press Foundation, said he was unsure whether the Senate would pass the legislation before Joe Biden leaves office.“The Democrats in the lame duck session are really going to have to prioritize it because when the Senate changes hands and the White House changes hands, there is probably little to no chance that this bill would pass,” Timm said. “It’s now or never for protecting journalists’ rights.” More

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      A new era dawns. America’s tech bros now strut their stuff in the corridors of power | Carole Cadwalladr

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      In hindsight, 2016 was the beginning of the beginning. And 2024 is the end of that beginning and the start of something much, much worse.It began as a tear in the information space, a dawning realisation that the world as we knew it – stable, fixed by facts, balustraded by evidence – was now a rip in the fabric of reality. And the turbulence that Trump is about to unleash – alongside pain and cruelty and hardship – is possible because that’s where we already live: in information chaos.It’s exactly eight years since we realised there were invisible undercurrents flowing beneath the surface of our world. Or perhaps I should talk for myself here. It was when I realised. A week before the 2016 US presidential election, I spotted a weird constellation of events and googled “tech disruption” + “democracy”, found not a single hit and pitched a piece to my editor.It was published on 6 November 2016. In it, I quoted the “technology mudslide hypothesis” a concept invented by Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School, who coined the term “disruption” – a process endlessly fetishised in tech circles, in which a scrappy upstart such as Microsoft could overthrow a colossus like IBM.Whoever wins, I wrote, this election represented “the Great Disruption. With Trump the Great Disruptor.” And, for good measure, I chucked in some questions: “Will democracy survive? Will Nato? Is a free and fair election possible in a post-truth world?”View image in fullscreenThat article was the beginning of my own Alice in Wonderland tumble down the rabbit hole. and I reread it with the sinking knowledge that this next presidential term may yet provide those answers. If it seems like I’m crowing, I wish. This isn’t a valedictory “I told you so”: it’s an eight-year anniversary reminder for us to wake up. And a serving of notice: the first stage of this process is now complete. And we have to understand what that means.We’ve spent those eight years learning a new lexicon: “misinformation”, “disinformation”, “microtargeting”. We’ve learned about information warfare. As journalists, we, like FBI investigators, used evidence to show how social media was a vulnerable “threat surface” that bad actors such as Cambridge Analytica and the Kremlin could exploit. PhDs have been written on the weaponisation of social media. But none of this helps us now.There’s already a judiciary subcommittee on the “weaponisation of the federal government” in Congress to investigate the “censorship industrial complex” – the idea that big tech is “censoring” Republican voices. For the past 18 months, it’s been subpoena-ing academics. Last week, Elon Musk tweeted that the next stage would be “prosecutions”. A friend of mine, an Ivy League professor on the list, texts to say the day will shortly come “where I will have to decide whether to stay or go”.View image in fullscreenTrump’s list of enemies is not theoretical. It already exists. My friend is on it. In 2022, Trump announced a “day one” executive order instructing “the Department of Justice to investigate all parties involved in the new online censorship regime … and to aggressively prosecute any and all crimes identified”. And my friends in other countries know exactly where this leads.View image in fullscreenAnother message arrives from Maria Ressa, the Nobel prize-winning Filipino journalist. In the Philippines, the government is modelled on the US one and she writes about what happened when President Duterte controlled all three branches of it. “It took six months after he took office for our institutions to crumble.” And then she was arrested.What we did during the first wave of disruption, 2016-24, won’t work now. Can you “weaponise” social media when social media is the weapon? Remember the philosopher Marshall McLuhan – “the medium is the message”? Well the medium now is Musk. The world’s richest man bought a global communication platform and is now the shadow head of state of what was the world’s greatest superpower. That’s the message. Have you got it yet?Does the technology mudslide hypothesis now make sense? Of how a small innovation can eventually disrupt a legacy brand? That brand is truth. It’s evidence. It’s journalism. It’s science. It’s the Enlightenment. A niche concept you’ll find behind a paywall at the New York Times.You have a subscription? Enjoy your clean, hygienic, fact-checked news. Then come with me into the information sewers, where we will wade through the shit everyone else consumes. Trump is cholera. His hate, his lies – it’s an infection that’s in the drinking water now. Our information system is London’s stinking streets before the Victorian miracle of sanitation. We fixed that through engineering. But we haven’t fixed this. We had eight years to hold Silicon Valley to account. And we failed. Utterly.Because this, now, isn’t politics in any sense we understand it. The young men who came out for Trump were voting for protein powder and deadlifting as much as they were for a 78-year-old convicted felon. They were voting for bitcoin and weighted squats. For YouTube shorts and Twitch streams. For podcast bros and crypto bros and tech bros and the bro of bros: Elon Musk.Social media is mainstream media now. It’s where the majority of the world gets its news. Though who even cares about news? It’s where the world gets its memes and jokes and consumes its endlessly mutating trends. Forget “internet culture”. The internet is culture. And this is where this election was fought and won … long before a single person cast a ballot.Steve Bannon was right. Politics is downstream from culture. Chris Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, quoted his old boss to me in my first phone call with him. Elections are downstream from white men talking on platforms that white men built, juiced by invisible algorithms our broligarch overlords control. This is culture now.The Observer’s reporting on Facebook and Cambridge Analytica belongs to the old world order. An order that ended on 6 November 2024. That was the first wave of algorithmic disruption which gave us Brexit and Trump’s first term, when our rule-based norms creaked but still applied.View image in fullscreenThe challenge now is to understand that this world has gone. Mark Zuckerberg has ditched his suit, grown out his Caesar haircut and bought a rapper-style gold chain. He’s said one of his biggest regrets is apologising too much. Because he – like others in Silicon Valley – has read the runes. PayPal’s co-founder Peter Thiel, creeping around in the shadows, ensured his man, JD Vance, got on the presidential ticket. Musk wagered a Silicon Valley-style bet by going all in on Trump. Jeff Bezos, late to the party, jumped on the bandwagon with just days to go, ensuringhis Washington Post didn’t endorse any candidate.These bros know. They don’t fear journalists any more. Journalists will now learn to fear them. Because this is oligarchy now. This is the fusion of state and commercial power in a ruling elite. It’s not a coincidence that Musk spouts the Kremlin’s talking points and chats to Putin on the phone. The chaos of Russia in the 90s is the template; billions will be made, people will die, crimes will be committed.Our challenge is to realise that the first cycle of disruption is complete. We’re through the looking glass. We’re all wading through the information sewers. Trump is a bacillus but the problem is the pipes. We can and must fix this.Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk More

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      From Trump’s victory, a simple, inescapable message: many people despise the left | John Harris

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      There is no need to pick only a few of the many explanations of Donald Trump’s political comeback. Most of the endless reasons we have heard over the past five days ring true: inflation, incumbency, a flimsy Democratic campaign, white Americans’ seemingly eternal issues with race, and what one New York Times essayist recently called “a regressive idea of masculinity in which power over women is a birthright”. But there is another story that has so far been rather more overlooked, to do with how politics now works, and who voters think of when they enter the polling booth.Its most vivid element is about the left, and one inescapable fact: that a lot of people simply do not like us. In the UK, that is part of the reason why Brexit happened, why Nigel Farage is back, and why our new Labour government feels so flimsy and fragile. In the US, it goes some way to explaining why more than 75 million voters just rejected the supposedly progressive option, and chose a convicted criminal and unabashed insurrectionist to oversee their lives.The latter story goes beyond Kamala Harris and her failed pitch for power. When established parties on the progressive and conservative wings of politics go into an election, in the minds of many people, they represent a much larger set of forces, whether their candidates like it or not. After all, what people understand as the left and right operate far beyond the institutions of the state: political battles are fought in the media, on the street, in workplaces, campuses, and more. This has always been the case, but as social media turn the noise such activity makes into a deafening din, seeing most big parties and candidates as the tips of much larger icebergs becomes inevitable.Trump leads the movement that was responsible for the January 6 insurrection, has made less-than-subtle noises about his affinity with the far right, and makes absolutely no bones about any of it. For the Democrats, the lines that connect a centrist figure such as Harris to the wider US left tend to look much fuzzier, but that does not make millions of people’s perceptions of them any less real. Around the world, in fact, the left looks to many voters like a coherent bloc that goes from people who lie in the road and shut down universities to would-be presidents and prime ministers – the only difference between them, as some see it, is that radical activists are honest about their ideas, whereas the people who stand for office try to cover them up.What the US election result shows is that, when told to make a choice, millions of people will draw on those ideas, and ally themselves with the other political side. Many of them, of course, have arrived at that conclusion thanks to outright bigotry. But given the remarkable spread of votes for Trump – into Latino and black parts of the electorate, and states considered loyal Democratic heartlands, from California to New Jersey – that hardly explains the entirety of his win. What it highlights is something that many American, British and European people have known for the past 15 years, at least: that the left is now alienating huge chunks of its old base of support.That story has deep roots, partly bound up with the decline of political loyalties based around class: compared with 2008, 2024’s Democratic coalition was skewed towards the higher end of the income range, whereas Trump’s tilted in the other direction. The same kind of fracturing now seems to be affecting many ethnically based political loyalties: as Trump well knows, there are now large numbers of voters from minorities – and immigrant backgrounds – who largely accept rightwing ideas about immigration. That is partly because modern economies create such a desperate competition for rewards.But there seems to be more to it than that: polling shows the suggestion that “government should increase border security and enforcement” is supported by higher percentages of black and Hispanic voters than among white progressives – but the same applies to “most people can make it if they work hard” and “America is the greatest country in the world”. Growing chunks of the electorate, in other words, are not who the left think they are.Meanwhile, the widening political gap based around people’s education levels – voters without college degrees supported Trump by a 14-point margin, while Harris had a 13-point advantage among college-educated people – creates yet more problems. Some of them are to do with “wokeness” and its drawbacks. Because the cutting edge of left politics is often associated with institutions of higher education, ideas that are meant to be about inclusivity can easily turn into the opposite. The result is an agenda often expressed with a judgmental arrogance, and based around behavioural codes – to do with microaggressions, or the correct use of pronouns – that are very hard for people outside highly educated circles to navigate.At the same time, our online discourse hardens good intentions into an all-or-nothing style of activism that will not tolerate nuance or compromise. A message about the left then travels from one part of society to another: there is a transmission belt between clarion calls that do the rounds on college campuses, the Democratic mainstream, and unsettled voters in, say, suburban and rural Pennsylvania. And the right can therefore make hay, as evidenced by a Trump ad that was crass and cruel, but grimly effective: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”In its own ugly way, that line highlights what might have been Trump and his supporters’ strongest asset: the idea that, because they are so distant and privileged, modern progressives would rather ignore questions about everyday economics. Nearly 40% of all Americans say they have skipped meals in order to meet their housing payments, and more than 70% admit to living with economic anxiety. A second Trump term, of course, is hardly going to make that any better: the point is that he was able to successfully pretend that it would.That then opened the way for something even more jaw-dropping: Trump’s sudden claim to be a great unifier, something implicitly contrasted with progressives’ habit of separating people into demographic islands. It takes an almost evil level of chutzpah to flip from his hate and nastiness to a new message of love for most Americans, but consider what he saidabout his coalition of voters: “They came from all quarters: union, non-union, African American, Hispanic American, Asian American, Arab American, Muslim American. We had everybody. And it was beautiful.” That is the increasingly familiar sound of populist tanks being parked on the left’s lawn.None of this is meant to imply that most progressive causes are mistaken, or to make any argument for leaning into Trumpism. What the state of politics across the west highlights is more about tone, strategy, empathy, and how to take people with you while trying to change society – as well as the platforms that poison democratic debate, and the harm they do to progressive politics. The next time you see someone on the left combusting with self-righteous fury on the hellscape now known as X, it’s worth remembering that its current owner is Elon Musk, who may be about to assist Trump in massively cutting US public spending, while cackling at the weakness of the president’s enemies, and their habit of walking into glaring traps.

      John Harris is a Guardian columnist More

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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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