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      How anti-woke spin hit home for Donald Trump | Letters

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      While Nesrine Malik is right in stating that woke talking points weren’t a key part of Kamala Harris’s campaign, she is incorrect in concluding that progressive stances on social issues were in no way responsible for Donald Trump’s election victory (‘Woke’ didn’t lose the US election: the patrician class who hijacked identity politics did, 25 November). Like Malik, I see structural issues as the primary determining factor, my focus as a Democratic activist being on an economy touted as thriving but in fact failing to benefit a populace struggling with obscenely high grocery prices. But having heard Harris equivocate rather than reject controversial statements that were catnip to Trump, I can assure you that there was palpable cultural antagonism too.Those ads of Trump packed a punch, not least “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you”, which capitalised on Harris’s failure to clarify her 2019 support (based on a reading of constitutional law) for taxpayer-funded gender-affirming surgeries for prisoners. But just as Harris failed in this regard in 2024, the Democratic leadership has mangled election messaging over many years – opening itself to charges of cultural (certainly not economic) extremism.I find it interesting that Malik has to define “defund the police” after claiming that “even a cursory glance shows” it “is not to abolish policing”. No, a cursory glance at this ludicrous slogan implies, however unintentionally, just that. And to refuse to believe that anti-woke propaganda, sometimes false but often made possible by Democrats’ own missteps, played a part in the disastrous 2024 election results is to refuse the obvious.Karen Thatcher-SmithSonoma, California, US Nesrine Malik argues that a “cursory glance” would show that “defunding the police” was never about abolishing the police but rather a call to invest in preventive measures. This rather begs the question: why on earth did progressives campaign with such a slogan? It is hard to imagine populist agent provocateurs coming up with a more effective means of separating well‑meaning progressives from the public at large.Alex CampbellBrighton, East Sussex Nesrine Malik is right that the “common enemy is the way in which society itself is designed”. The economic moguls ruling the patrician class successfully sold to many a self-fulfilling investment in a fearful characterisation of wokeness as an absurd and impertinent intrusion in our lives. It is a compelling, too-easy answer when an underlying fear of loss of privilege or self‑challenging the pain of false beliefs around our rightful place in the social order is at stake. Inertia rules – for the moment.Genuine, universal change is hard. It’s hard for the privileged to give up their luxuries and for the oppressed to imagine deserving and enjoying a better life in a truly egalitarian society.Wokeness itself is not the problem. There is no such thing as woke, there is only waking. It is a never-ending process. It is a journey that we must all undertake – towards a society that fully values and expresses the spirituality, democracy, caring, sharing, learning and joy inherent in a naturally evolving life, and no one must be left behind.Daniel O’SullivanMcLeans Ridges, New South Wales, Australia More

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      ‘We’re still in this fight’: the resistance to Trump considers its options after bruising election defeat

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      LA Kauffman remembers the day hundreds of thousands of women, men and children marched in the streets of Washington. “If you’ve never been in a crowd that large, it’s hard to convey how powerful the feeling is of standing together with so many people who share your goals and that feeling of community and connection,” says the political organiser, activist and author.The Women’s March, held the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, was the biggest single-day protest in US history until the demonstrations that erupted after the police murder of George Floyd three years later. Both were among the most spectacular examples of “the resistance” to Trump’s first term as president.Now Trump is heading back to the White House and a People’s March on Washington is scheduled for 18 January, two days before the inauguration. But there are fears that it will be a pale imitation of the historic first protest. The mood feels more muted this time. Some people speak of feeling jaded and disillusioned and turning off the news because they are simply Trumped out.Bill Maher, the comedian and political commentator, argues that there is a “marked difference” between the reactions in 2016 and 2024. “2016 Trump won and there was 3 million people in the streets,” he said on his HBO talkshow. “Remember the pussy hats and all that? I mean, it was the biggest demonstration ever. This year: nothing. What is this, resignation?”Jen Psaki, an MSNBC host and former White House press secretary, commented at the Washington screening of a documentary about Trump’s family separations policy at the border: “People are just exhausted of fighting against policies that they feel are immoral, policies they’re opposed to – people who voted for Kamala Harris and feel disappointed with the outcome. It feels a little bit like the same opposition or calling-out energy is not there in this moment.”The sense of malaise around “Resistance 2.0” may in part be because, whereas Trump’s first victory felt like shocking accident of history, his second was delivered by an electorate that knows exactly what it is getting. Whereas he lost the national popular vote to Hillary Clinton in 2016, he gained more votes nationwide than Harris and claims a mandate. For many liberals, that result was a gut punch that seemed to undermine the work of three election cycles.Teja Smith, the Los Angeles-based founder of Get Social, a social media agency that specialises in political advocacy and social awareness, said: “I got into social justice work almost a decade ago and truly have been working tirelessly to keep Trump out of office, essentially.“The first time it was a lot of people not really being interested in the election; we had Hillary running and she won the popular vote. There was just a lot of like, ‘Ah, well, these things happen.’ This time it was just overwhelmingly people voted for him and that’s where we are. This is what you voted for: how much else can we fight it?”After Trump was declared the winner over Harris, who would have been the first woman of Black and south Asian descent to win the presidency, many politically engaged Black women said they were so dismayed by the outcome that they were reassessing their enthusiasm for electoral politics and prioritising self-care.Smith noted that Black women have consistently shown up and voted at a 92% rate for the Democratic candidate. “At this point, Black women are just tired,” she continued. “The act of resistance right now that we’re calling on is to rest because we can only keep so much sanity. I have a husband, I have a two-year-old, and I spent my entire year campaigning, going all around America to fight this good fight, to fight for our rights, and misinformation won.”But Smith does not doubt that Black women will keep fighting. “Next year we’re going to understand what this presidency is going to mean and what electing him is actually going to do. That’s going to be the time where we’re not going to have a choice but to step up. Do we want to? Yes. But are we tired of having be the ones to be called on? Absolutely.”View image in fullscreenThe sentiment was echoed by LaTosha Brown, cofounder of the voting rights organisation Black Voters Matter. She said: “We going to always fight to protect our communities but I can tell you, for me personally, I’m going to be much more strategic with how I use my time and what fights I take on. I’m going to be much more intentional about protecting myself and my family, which I feel like I have neglected over the last decade, and I’m going to be much more discerning.”Indeed, for all the gloom, it is far too conclude that the second resistance will turn into resignation. There are also signs of resilience and adaptation. Once Trump takes office, and launches policies such as mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, the backlash could be spontaneous and swift.Kauffman, the political organiser and writer who attended the first Women’s March, said: “I don’t know what will be the spark that will bring people out in the streets but I don’t think Americans are so easily cowed. The atmosphere of fear that was carefully cultivated throughout the election campaign works in the short term but people are not going to stay in that kind of fear in the long term.“People are going to respond when they see injustice as they have at other crucial points, as they did not only the week of Trump’s first election but with the announcement of the Muslim ban. At airports all over the country people rushed to speak up for targeted immigrants. We may see that kind of rapid response again.”There is a growing emphasis on “Trump-proofing” blue states, with calls for Democratic governors and legislatures to take proactive measures to protect progressive policies. There are also signs that activists are shifting strategies, moving away from mass protests and focusing on more targeted, localised efforts such as state-level initiatives and issue-specific campaigns.Speaking from the Hudson valley of New York, Kauffman added: “What I’m seeing is that people are looking to find a way to meet those needs for community connection in quieter, more intimate ways. There’s a lot of gatherings that are happening in people’s homes and community centres and neighbourhoods. It’s not a mass coming together that gave us a feeling of enormous collective togetherness. It’s happening in smaller, tighter, face-to-face communities.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFor Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin, there is a sense of deja vu. The former congressional staffers co-founded the progressive group Indivisible in response to Trump’s first win in 2016. Over the weekend after Thanksgiving that year at Levin’s home in Austin, Texas, they started writing the Indivisible Guide to help people organise locally to fight back against the Trump agenda.The guide captured the public imagination and inspired the creation of thousands of Indivisible groups that played a crucial part in saving former president Barack Obama’s signature healthcare law. The Indivisible movement also helped Democrats regain the House of Representatives in the 2018 midterm elections.Since the 2024 election, Greenberg and Levin have released a new guide, Indivisible: A Practical Guide to Democracy on the Brink, focusing on local action and targeted campaigns, and note that about a hundred new Indivisible groups have since formed in red, blue and purple states.Levin said: “I’m encouraged that the general response I’m getting from our folks on the ground is that they’re determined. That was the word that came up in the poll of Georgia Indivisibles when I joined them the weekend after the election. They’re going through a lot of different parts of the stages of grief but they do not show signs of just totally checking out.”A further question mark concerns the media. Some outlets are reaffirming a commitment to accountability journalism but grappling with fatigue, audience disengagement and loss of trust while trying to avoid amplifying every Trump outburst. Ominously, the Washington Post declined to endorse a presidential candidate ahead of election day.The first resistance was not entirely liberal and Democratic. It was a coalition that also included “Never Trump” Republicans. Among the most pugnacious was the Lincoln Project, a political action committee founded in December 2019 by moderate conservative operatives to eviscerate Trump and noted for its eye-catching, hard-hitting adverts.One of its cofounders, Rick Wilson, is determined to keep at it. He said: “People say, we’re done, we’re out, we can’t keep fighting. I’m sorry, I’m just not wired that way as a person or as an activist and neither is our organisation. We’re still in this fight.“We lost an election as part of a big coalition. We were on the wrong side of the electoral fight but we’re not on the wrong side of history so we’re going to keep punching and trying to make sure that both the people and the policies he wants to impose on America aren’t successful.”For all the monument scale of the Women’s March, it did not prevent women losing a fundamental right the following year when the supreme court ended the constitutional right to abortion. Wilson, who worked as a consultant and political ad maker for numerous candidates and state parties, commented: “As excited people were by the whole pussy hat thing, it didn’t work, so if people are taking a beat in the broad movement to decide what messaging they need to do and what’s the smart way to do it, that’s a good outcome.“That’s not a sign of weakness. That’s a sign of strategic caution and posture, taking a moment to figure out what’s going to work. Because, again, pink pussy hats didn’t close the deal. They didn’t change the outcomes that we needed to have.”He added: “I’m results-oriented and win-oriented and even though some people are depressed and down and beat up right now, you got to at some point lick your wounds and get back up, get back in the fight. Because die on your feet or die on your knees, one of the two, and I prefer to go standing if I’m going to have to go.” More

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      ‘Disenfranchised and demobilized’: Native Americans face ballot box barriers in Arizona

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      The calls started coming in to the Arizona Native vote election protection hotline around 6am on election day.Voters in Apache county, where a sizable chunk of the population is Diné, also known as Navajo, were seeing problems at the polls. One location was locked and several others were having trouble printing ballots, according to an affidavit filed in state court. As the day went on, voters reported hours-long waits and observers reported that people were leaving. A local judge would eventually agree to extend voting in nine precincts in the county by two hours.“It was just a mess from what we could tell and from our folks,” said Jaynie Parrish, the executive director of Arizona Native Vote, a nonprofit civic engagement organization focused on Native communities.While delays in opening polling sites and glitches that lead to long lines are not uncommon, they can be particularly acute in Native communities, where voters can travel hours to get to the polls and face other unique barriers, like non-traditional addresses and language access issues. Taken together, those barriers result in a significant gap between turnout among those living on tribal lands and those who live off of them, according to a new study from the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit that studies voting rights and elections.“There are systemic issues that prevent Natives from getting to the ballot box – some intentional,” said Samantha Blencke, a staff attorney with the Native American Rights Fund, which had poll watchers in six states this election. For a voter who travels a far distance to cast a ballot, a polling place not opening on time could make a big difference, she said. “That’s it,” she said. “That’s their one shot to vote.”Native American voters are an influential voting bloc in Arizona, where they comprise 5% of the population. Both Republicans and Democrats courted Native voters this year. Election results analyzed by the New York Times showed that Donald Trump gained in many counties where Native Americans comprise a majority of the population.In addition to long travel times, Native voters also face a litany of unique hurdles. Many lack traditional addresses, making it more difficult to vote by mail. Tribal identification cards can get rejected at the polls. And there can be significant issues in translating ballots into Native languages.Turnout among those living on tribal lands was on average 11 points lower than turnout among people living off them between 2012 and 2022, according to the Brennan Center’s study. In presidential elections, the gap was 15 points.Tribal lands that had the highest share of Native voters also had the lowest turnout rates, the study found. And those who live on tribal lands were also less likely to use mail-in voting than those who lived off them.“These findings demonstrate that Native Americans living on tribal lands are uniquely disenfranchised and demobilized from participating in federal elections,” the report says.This year, after election day, Navajo voters sued Apache county again. Arizona gives voters five days after election day to address any issues with mail-in ballots. But county officials had delayed making public the number of voters who had problems with their ballots until two days before the deadline, the lawsuit said. With just two days left, they notified that there were 182 people who needed to cure their ballots, setting off a scramble to contact them.A judge rejected the request after elections employees said they had made a reasonable effort to contact anyone who was at risk of having their ballot rejected.For years, Leonard Gorman, the executive director of the Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission has been concerned about the way ballots have been translated into Navajo. Translation is required under the Voting Rights Act, and accurately describing things like ballot measures on abortion and fentanyl can be immensely challenging, Votebeat reported earlier this year. Navajo is a historically oral language, and translators come up with audio that those who are not proficient in English can listen to at the polls, according to Votebeat.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOver the years, Gorman said he’s heard glitches and poorly worded audio. And when he showed up at a polling location in Apache county in late October, the machine that offered the audio translation wasn’t working, he said.“It only said in literal translation or interpretation: ‘If you want to listen to the ballot, press any button,’” he said. When he pressed a button, the instruction would simply repeat. “That was the worst experience I’ve ever had.”Apache county election officials did not respond to an interview request.Chelsea Jones, a researcher at the Brennan Center who co-authored the nonprofit’s study, said its findings showed that people who live on tribal lands face unique barriers that haven’t thus far been addressed by federal laws. A piece of legislation, the Native American Voting Rights Act, that would address many of the systemic challenges Native voters face, has stalled in Congress.“Any of these common ways that we participate in elections have really layers of barriers for people who live on tribal lands,” Jones said. “Each of those numbers represent hundreds of thousands of people who are not able to or have a harder time participating. And so that’s what’s the hardest for us to grasp is that this many people are being left out of what is a fundamental right for all Americans.” More

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      Trump victory not a mandate for radical change, top election forecaster says

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      Despite Donald Trump’s decisive victory in the presidential election, a political scientist who developed a model that correctly predicted his sweep of battleground states warns that voters have not necessarily given the president-elect a mandate to make radical changes.In a paper released with little fanfare three weeks before the vote, Cornell University professor of government Peter Enns and his co-authors accurately forecast that Trump would win all seven swing states, based on a model they built that uses state-level presidential approval ratings and indicators of economic health.In an interview with the Guardian, Enns said his model’s conclusions suggest voters chose Trump not because they want to see his divisive policies implemented, but rather because they were frustrated with the state of the economy during Joe Biden’s presidency, an obstacle Kamala Harris was not popular enough to overcome.“If this election can be explained by what voters thought of Biden and Harris and economic conditions, it really goes against the notion of a mandate for major change from Trump,” said Enns.“If Trump was looking to maximize support, being cautious about changes that are massive changes would be what the model suggests is the optimal strategy.”On the campaign trail, Trump promised norm-shattering measures to accomplish his objectives, ranging from deploying the military to carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants to levying trade tariffs against allies that do not cooperate with his administration.On 5 November, voters responded by giving Trump an overwhelming victory in the electoral college, and also by making him the first Republican to win the popular vote in 20 years.Both outcomes were predicted in the paper released on 15 October by Enns, Jonathan Colner of New York University, Anusha Kumar of Yale University School of Medicine and Julius Lagodny of German media firm El Pato. At the time, polls of the seven swing states showed Trump and Harris tied, usually within their margin of error, signaling that the election was either’s to win.Rather than focusing on the candidates’ support nationwide or in the swing states, Enns and his co-authors built a model that combines two types of data: presidential approval ratings from all 50 states using data from Verasight, the survey firm he co-founded, among others, and a Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia index measuring state-level real income, manufacturing and labor market conditions. Both sets of data were compiled more than 100 days before the vote.Enns first deployed the model in the 2020 presidential election, where it correctly predicted the outcome in 49 states, with the exception of Georgia. This year, Enns and his co-authors wrote that Harris, who took over as the Democratic nominee for Biden in late July, was on track to lose both the popular vote and the electoral college, including battleground states Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Georgia.“If Harris wins the election, we will not know exactly why, but we will know her victory surmounted conditions so disadvantageous to the Democratic party that the incumbent president dropped out of the race. She will have added major momentum to the Democratic campaign and/or Trump and the Republican party will have squandered a sizable advantage,” Enns and his co-authors wrote.The forecast wound up being accurate, though, with ballot counting continuing in a few states, Trump seems set for a plurality victory in the popular vote, not the 50.3% majority they predicted.Then there’s the question of whether Biden would have done better if he had stayed in the race. The 82-year-old president has been unpopular through most of his term as Americans weathered the highest inflation rate since the 1980s, even as the labor market recovered strongly from the Covid pandemic. Biden was also dogged by concerns about his age and fitness for office, which culminated in a terrible debate performance against Trump in June that led him to drop out of the race weeks later.“Given Biden’s low approval ratings and economic conditions, our model forecasted less than a one in 10 chance of a Biden victory if he had stayed in the race. Even after accounting for Harris’s approval ratings, which are notably higher than Biden’s, the Democrats face an uphill battle,” the authors wrote.If Harris had a chance to overcome the disadvantages she entered the race with, Enns said it would have required convincing voters she would be a very different president than her boss – which it appears she failed to do.“There’s some economic headwinds, there’s the Biden incumbency headwinds. And what I think that suggests is, given these headwinds that Harris faced, the optimal strategy would have been to differentiate herself more from Biden,” Enns said.But the vice-president’s fate may have been sealed in the years that preceded her bid for the White House, when she failed to build the sort of public profile that would have pushed her approval ratings up to the level that she needed them to be.“If she had been more popular, you can think about what could have happened to make our forecast wrong. So the fact that 100 days out, our forecast was so accurate, that really enhanced the campaign, had minimal effect on the outcome,” Enns said.“The task at hand was to outperform the forecast, and her campaign wasn’t able to do that.” More

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      Democrats criticize Harris for ‘self-congratulatory’ review of election loss

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      Some Democratic figures have accused Kamala Harris’s campaign of being self-congratulatory after a series of recent public appearances from the candidate and her senior staff in which they declined to admit making any errors that could have contributed to her defeat.Some of the criticism was aimed at Harris herself, following a video call to thank campaign donors in which the vice-president expressed pride in her failed race for the White House.She appeared to boast that the coalition assembled during her three-and-a-half-month campaign after succeeding Joe Biden as the Democrats’ nominee ranked among the “best political movements”. She insisted it would have “a lasting effect”, despite it ending in a decisive loss to Donald Trump, something she and her supporters warned beforehand would be a catastrophe.“I am proud of the race we ran, and your role in this was critical,” the vice-president said in a 10-minute address. “What we did in 107 days was unprecedented. Think about the coalition that we built, and we were so intentional about that – you would hear me talk about it all the time.”Although she admitted the election “didn’t turn out like we wanted”, she noted that the campaign raised nearly $1.5bn dollars, a record, and praised the success in fundraising from grassroots donors – despite reportedly ending the race $20m in debt and sending post-election fundraising emails to donors.After some of the vice-president’s key staffers also appeared on a podcast billed as dissecting reasons for the defeat, one member of the Democratic National Committee’s finance team called the Harris campaign “self-congratulatory” .Lindy Li told NewsNation she was “stunned that there was no sort of postmortem or analysis of the disastrous campaign”.“It was just patting each other on the back,” she said. “They praised Harris as a visionary leader, and at one moment during the call, she was talking about her Thanksgiving recipe.”Referring to a Pod Save America podcast posted on Tuesday in which Harris’s key aides discussed the $1bn-plus campaign spend, Li said: “They failed to mention that hundreds of millions of dollars went to them and their friends right through these consulting firms.“These consultants were the primary beneficiaries of the Harris campaign, not the American people.”One explanation on the podcast by Stephanie Cutter, a Harris adviser, on why the vice-president had declined to break with Biden despite the president’s persistently low approval ratings drew criticism.“She felt like she was part of the administration. So why should she look back and cherry pick some things that she would have done differently when she was part of it?” Cutter told the podcast. “She had tremendous loyalty to President Biden. So the best we could do, and the most that she felt comfortable with was saying like, look, vice-presidents never break with their presidents.”One X user posted: “If the guys at pod save America don’t have an episode just straight shit talking all these losers who helped us lose im never listening to another episode. [Because] wtf was this nonsense.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAnother podcast guest, David Plouffe, a former adviser to Barack Obama, was criticised after claiming: “It’s really hard for Democrats to win battleground states.” He said the party needed “to dominate the moderate vote” to win future elections.Jeet Heer, a writer for the leftwing Nation magazine responded: “Is it too much to ask for a little humility and self-reflection from the people whose strategies failed badly?”Another social media user posted: “Anybody with more than two brain cells who’s committed to building up the democratic party would be analyzing the depressed voter turnout numbers. But the dudes at pod save America have no goal other than reliving their glory days.”The discussion, which also included Harris’s campaign chair, Jen O’Malley Dillon, and Quentin Fulks, the campaign’s deputy manager, was also ridiculed by some on the right.Bill O’Reilly, a former Fox News host, told NewsNation: “It’s kind of like the New York Jets. You guys follow the football, nobody did anything wrong, and they’re 3-8 … I hope people see the absurdity of this.”James Carville, a veteran Democratic strategist and the architect of Bill Clinton’s 1992 election win, criticised aides who advised Harris not to go on the Joe Rogan podcast before election. Trump, by contrast, granted a three-hour interview to Rogan.“If I were running a 2028 campaign and I had some little snot-nosed 23-year-old saying, ‘I’m going to resign if you don’t do this,’ not only would I fire that motherfucker on the spot, I would find out who hired them and fire that person on the spot,” Carville said in a foul-mouthed video rant posted on social media. “I’m really not interested in your uninformed, stupid, jackass opinion as to whether you go on Joe Rogan or not.” More

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      Canada PM under pressure to stand up to Trump over tariff plan; US motorists could face higher gas prices – live

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      Other members of Canada’s parliament are calling on prime minister Justin Trudeau to ready a “war room” for the coming battle over tariffs with the United States.“The only thing a bully responds to is strength. So where is our plan to fight back?” Jagmeet Singh, leader of the New Democratic Party, asked Trudeau. “Where is the war room?”“I don’t think the idea of going to war with the United States is what anyone wants. What we will do is stand up for Canadian jobs,” Trudeau said. “Stand up for the prosperity we create when we work together.”Meanwhile, members of Canada’s liberal and conservative parties are debating ways Trudeau could promote a “Canada First” policy or work collaboratively with “our US partner.”In an election post-mortem today, top Harris campaign officials said there was little else Kamala Harris could have done to win the 2024 election.Speaking on the podcast “Pod Save America”, David Plouffe, Jen O’Malley Dillon, Quentin Fulks and Stephanie Cutter said Harris couldn’t have distanced herself further from Joe Biden because she was loyal and faced backlash over inflation that’s hurt incumbent politicians across the globe this year.“She had tremendous loyalty to President Biden,” Cutter said. “Imagine if we said, ‘Well, we would have taken this approach on the border.’ Imagine the round of stories coming out after that, of people saying, ‘Well, she never said that in the meeting.’”Plouffe added that the campaign’s internal polling never showed Harris leading president-elect Donald Trump.“We didn’t get the breaks we needed on Election Day,” he said. “I think it surprised people, because there was these public polls that came out in late September, early October, showing us with leads that we never saw.”Fulks noted that Democrats could learn from how Republicans support their own, even amid controversy.“Democrats are eating our own to a very high degree, and until that stops, we’re not going to be able to address a lot of the things that just need to be said,” he said.During a thank-you call today, Kamala Harris told small-dollar donors that they helped to raise $1.4 billion over the course of her 107-day campaign.“The outcome of the election, of this election, obviously, is not what we wanted. It is not what we worked so hard for, but I am proud of the race we ran and your role was critical — what we did in 107 days was unprecedented,” she said. “The fight that fueled our campaign, a fight for freedom and opportunity, did not end on November 5th.”Harris’s running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, joined the call and urged supporters to “find the place in your community to heal both yourselves and your community.” He acknowledged feels of grief that supporters might be feeling and added, “You did everything that was asked.”Donald Trump’s team has announced that it has signed transition paperwork with the White House, which the incoming administration appeared to be dodging after failing to sign the agreement by its 1 October due date. The agreement, which directs $7.2m in federal funding to the transition, requires the incoming presidential administration to agree to an ethics pledge and cap private donations.The announcement that Trump’s team had signed the memorandum of understanding with the White House came in a press release from Trump’s chief-of-staff Susie Wiles.“After completing the selection process of his incoming Cabinet, President-elect Trump is entering the next phase of his administration’s transition by executing a Memorandum of Understanding with President Joe Biden’s White House. This engagement allows our intended Cabinet nominees to begin critical preparations, including the deployment of landing teams to every department and agency, and complete the orderly transition of power,” she said.Speaking from the White House, Joe Biden has announced a ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hezbollah.“Under the deal reached today, effective at 4am tomorrow local time, the fighting across the Lebanese-Israeli border will end,” he said. “This is designed to be a permanent cesation of hostility.”Explaining the terms of the deal, Biden said, the Lebanese army will take control of the region as Israel withdraws its forces over the next 60 days. Hezbollah will not be allowed to rebuild its infrastructure. “There will be no US troops deployed in southern Lebanon,” he said, adding that the US and France would continue to provide support to Lebanon. If Lebanon fails to abide by the terms of the agreement, Biden said, Israeli retains the right to defend itself.“Now Hamas has a choice to make,” Biden said, gesturing to the ongoing war in Gaza. “Over the coming days, the United States will make another push – with Turkey, Egypt, Qatar, Israel and others – to achieve a ceasefire in Gaza.”A day after Elon Musk claimed to have met with “senior military officers,” the Pentagon told reporters it was not aware of any meetings with Trump transition officials, the Washington Post reports.“The president-elect’s transition team has not contacted the department yet to conduct those transitions, so I’m not aware of any official meetings,” Pentagon press secretary Patrick Ryder told reporters. Donald Trump’s transition team has declined to sign paperwork that would require the incoming administration to agree to an ethics pledge and cap private donations, which has slowed the transition.Yesterday, Musk claimed to have met with “senior military officers today” in a social media post responding to a statement from Vivek Ramaswamy about government efficiency.“In a meeting with senior military officers today, they told me that it now takes longer to renovate stairs (24 months) in the Pentagon than it took to build the WHOLE Pentagon (16 months) in the 1940s!!” Musk wrote.Speaking at an emergency gathering of the Canadian parliament today, Justin Trudeau urged unity while leaders of two of the country’s largest industrial and oil-rich provinces raised concerns over US-Canada relations, Reuters reports.The premier of Ontario, the country’s industrial heartland, said Trump had good reason to be worried about border security.“Do we need to do a better job on our borders? 1,000 percent … we do have to listen to the threat of too many illegals crossing the border,” Doug Ford told reporters. “We have to squash the illegal drugs, the illegal guns.”Ford has called on Trudeau to abandon the U.S.-Canada-Mexico trade deal in favor of a bilateral agreement with the US, and called Trump’s comparison of Canada to Mexico “the most insulting thing I have ever heard”.Likewise, the premier of the oil-rich province of Alberta said yesterday that Trump had valid concerns over border security.“We are calling on the federal government to work with the incoming administration to resolve these issues immediately, thereby avoiding any unnecessary tariffs on Canadian exports to the U.S.,” Danielle Smith said in a social media post. She added, “The vast majority of Alberta’s energy exports to the U.S. are delivered through secure and safe pipelines which do not in any way contribute to these illegal activities at the border.”A federal judge has rejected Rudy Giuliani’s request to reschedule a January trial date for after Donald Trump’s inauguration. The judge has ordered Giuliani to pay two Georgia election workers $148 million for spreading falsehoods after the 2020 election. The 16 January trial had been set to determine whether Giuliani would have to relinquish assets such as a Palm Beach condo and Yankees World Series rings to pay the judgement.“My client regularly consults and deals directly with President-elect Trump on issues that are taking place as the incoming administration is afoot as well as inauguration events,” Giuliani’s attorney Joseph Cammarata said. “My client wants to exercise his political right to be there.”“The defendant’s social calendar does not constitute good cause [to delay the trial],” US District Court Judge Lewis Liman said. He did suggest that he would be open to moving the trial forward a few days.Other members of Canada’s parliament are calling on prime minister Justin Trudeau to ready a “war room” for the coming battle over tariffs with the United States.“The only thing a bully responds to is strength. So where is our plan to fight back?” Jagmeet Singh, leader of the New Democratic Party, asked Trudeau. “Where is the war room?”“I don’t think the idea of going to war with the United States is what anyone wants. What we will do is stand up for Canadian jobs,” Trudeau said. “Stand up for the prosperity we create when we work together.”Meanwhile, members of Canada’s liberal and conservative parties are debating ways Trudeau could promote a “Canada First” policy or work collaboratively with “our US partner.”Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau is discussing the United States’ proposed tariffs with the leader of the opposition, Pierre Poilievre, before the Canadian parliament. Poilievre has criticized Trudeau, calling on him to “put Canada first” in its relations with the United States and do more to fix Canada’s “broken borders” and “liberalization of drugs”.“The prime minister’s disastrous legalization and liberalization of drugs has the Americans worried,” Poilievre said. “Where’s the plan to stop the drugs and keep our border open to trade?”Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau is expected to speak shortly at today’s gathering of the nation’s parliament, just a day after Donald Trump threatened to levy 25% tariffs against the US’s northern neighbor.Trudeau spoke with Trump earlier today, and said “it was a good call,” adding that they “obviously talked about laying out the facts, talking about how the intense and effective connections between our two countries flow back and forth.”Donald Trump’s team is discussing pursuing direct talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, hoping a fresh diplomatic push can lower the risks of armed conflict, according to two people familiar with the matter, Reuters reports.Several in Trump’s team now see a direct approach from Trump, to build on a relationship that already exists, as most likely to break the ice with Kim, years after the two traded insults and what Trump called “beautiful” letters in an unprecedented diplomatic effort during his first term in office, the people said.The policy discussions are fluid and no final decisions have been made by the president-elect, the sources said.Trump’s transition team did not respond to a request for comment.What reciprocation Kim will offer Trump is unclear. The North Koreans ignored four years of outreach by outgoing president Joe Biden to start talks with no pre-conditions, and Kim is emboldened by an expanded missile arsenal and a much closer relationship with Russia.
      We have already gone as far as we can on negotiating with the United States,” Kim said last week in a speech at a Pyongyang military exhibition, according to state media.
      During his 2017-2021 presidency, Trump held three meetings with Kim, in Singapore, Hanoi, and at the Korean border, the first time a sitting US president had set foot in the country.Their diplomacy yielded no concrete results, even as Trump described their talks as falling “in love.” The US called for North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons, while Kim demanded full sanctions relief, then issued new threats.North Korea has sent troops to fight alongside Russia in its war with Ukraine.Donald Trump’s pledge to impose 25% tariffs on Canadian and Mexican imports in his first day in office does not exempt crude oil from the trade penalties, two sources familiar with the plan told Reuters today.Oil producers already warned that tariffs on crude would drive up the price of gas for US motorists, the FT reported earlier.“A 25% tariff on oil and natural gas would likely result in lower production in Canada and higher gasoline and energy costs to American consumers while threatening North American energy security,” Lisa Baiton, head of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, told the business-focussed newspaper.In the vagaries of the markets and geopolitics, oil prices rose earlier on news of Trump’s tariffs pledge, over predictions they would discourage production, thereby raising prices, but now have dropped slightly, Reuters reports, on news of a pending ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, apparently because Wall Streeters, leaping 10 steps ahead, imagine it could lead to a relaxing of sanctions on Iran and therefore a glut of oil supply, suppressing prices…. More

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      The Democrats’ next campaign should appeal to their base, not swing voters | Steve Phillips

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      Many people are drawing the wrong conclusions about what happened in the 2024 election. The conventional wisdom is that large swaths of population groups shifted their political allegiances to Donald Trump, propelling him to victory over Kamala Harris.A more careful reading of the data, however, shows that those conclusions are inaccurate, and the biggest problem for Democrats was a failure to turn out Democratic voters. Coming to terms with the unfounded faith in voter persuasion – at the extent of tried and true voter turnout programs – will have profound implications for the future of the Democratic party and the country.The cause of the confusion is the fact that Trump won dozens of counties across the country that voted for Joe Biden in 2020. Seeing that the Democratic margin had shrunk or evaporated in these places, most in the media rushed to report a massive national shift to the right, replete with graphics showing maps with red arrows pointing rightward.Looking more closely at the results and comparing them to the data from the 2020 election, one can see that while the counties did swing, the voters, for the most part, did not. What leaps out from a careful comparison is the finding that Democratic voter turnout fell through the floor. Trump didn’t win those counties because people switched their votes to him; he won because significant numbers of people who voted for Biden in 2020 did not vote at all in 2024.The decline in voter turnout is first visible from the simple fact that the total number of votes cast in 2024 is smaller than the number cast in 2020 (153m in 2024 versus 155m in 2020). This is despite the fact that the size of the US population has increased by 4.5 million people since the last election.It is when one takes a closer look at the underlying data that the picture comes into sharper focus. In nearly a third of the top 50 counties that flipped from Democrat to Republican, Trump’s vote actually declined from his 2020 numbers. If Democratic voters are coming over to the Republican ranks, their vote total should go up, not down. In Pinellas county, Florida, for example, Trump got nearly 7,000 fewer votes than in 2020, but the Democratic vote total plummeted by 35,000 votes.This pattern is evident in nearly all of the counties that flipped. Even in the counties where Trump’s vote increased marginally over 2020, that increase was generally dwarfed by the Democratic decline. In Erie county in the critical swing state of Pennsylvania, Trump improved on his 2020 showing by 801 votes, but the votes for Harris dropped by 2,618 votes, more than enough to have carried the county had those voters cast ballots.Just as is the case in medicine, an effective treatment requires an accurate diagnosis. The anemic Democratic voter turnout is the result of a cataclysmic failure of theory of change, strategy and spending, most notably by the Democratic Super Pac Future Forward.Super Pacs have great freedom and flexibility in that there are no limits on the size of contributions they can receive and few restrictions on their electoral activities. I helped create one of the country’s first such committees, Vote Hope, in 2007 to help Barack Obama, and our theory of change was that boosting Black voter turnout would help elect the country’s first Black president. Accordingly, we spent our money on hiring canvassers to knock on doors and buses to drive voters to the polls.Future Forward embraced the view that they could devise clever television and digital ads that would persuade Trump-leaning voters to back the Democrats. Accordingly, they poured nearly $700m into an advertising avalanche that was redundant to Harris’s ads and obviously ineffective. In a fawning New York Times profile, their effort was described as “animated by the idea that a blend of data science, political science and testing can usher in a new era of rigor in advertising”.There were seven battleground states where the parties concentrated their time, energy, and resources. Imagine if Future Forward had spent $100m in each state, hiring canvassers, investing in community-based civic engagement organizations, and funding the labor-intensive and expensive yet effective work of getting out the vote. Such a program would have boosted voter turnout, bringing back out the coalition that defeated Trump in 2020.A failure of this magnitude demands soul-searching and brutal re-assessment of prior assumptions and strategies. The work of defending and ultimately taking back the country starts now, and a sober assessment of the election results makes clear that 2024 marks the requiem for the widely held but thinly supported view that it makes more sense to invest in persuasion over the power-building program of getting out the vote.

      Steve Phillips is the founder of Democracy in Color, and author of Brown Is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority and How We Win the Civil War: Securing a Multiracial Democracy and Ending White Supremacy for Good More

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      Biden will attend Trump’s inauguration in January, says White House

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      President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden will attend Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, a White House spokesperson said on Monday.“The president promised that he would attend the inauguration of whomever won the election,” said Andrew Bates, senior deputy press secretary at the White House, Reuters reported.“He and the First Lady are going to honor that promise and attend the inauguration.”The president-elect did not attend Biden’s inauguration in January 2021, which came days after the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.Earlier this month, the US president welcomed Trump back to the White House – another tradition Trump eschewed after losing the 2020 election- with Biden promising a transfer of power that is “as smooth as it can get”.“We’re looking forward to having, like we said, a smooth transition. We’ll do everything we can to make sure you’re accommodated, what you need, and we’re going to get a chance to talk about some of that today,” Biden said earlier this month. “Welcome back.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump’s decision to skip Biden’s inauguration was not without precedent, but he was the first president to skip his successor’s inauguration in more than 150 years and his then outgoing administration was represented by then outgoing vice-president Mike Pence. More