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

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

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      ‘It gave me a new perspective’: student exchange program attempts to bridge divided US

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      For Baltimore native Jessica Osei-Adjei, a week-long trip to Anchorage, Alaska, last summer was more than just her first time traveling solo.“I went hiking on a glacier, camping and paddleboarding for the first time,” she says. “I’m not really an outdoorsy person but doing that was definitely worth it.”Osei-Adjei’s trip to Alaska was organized through the American Exchange Project (AEP), a non-partisan initiative founded in 2019 to facilitate high school seniors’ traveling to and meeting with youth from differing sociopolitical backgrounds in an attempt to help unite what Tuesday’s elections have made clear is an increasingly divided US.“We saw that emerging adults were perfect because they were malleable – we could put them through a shorter, easier-to-scale experience, and have it go much further than if we worked with adults,” co-founder and CEO of the AEP, David McCullough III, said.“And teenagers were also perfect because they were a very quick way into their parents’ hearts. So we thought: ‘Let’s have an exchange program right here in America.’”Over the past six years, the AEP has organized close to 1,000 student exchange trips, with students traveling to 70 towns in more than 40 states across the US.Funded by organizations such as the MacArthur Foundation, Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw’s Hearthland Foundation, and other groups, students typically spend a week in a host family’s town free of charge, before hosting a student in their own home or community.Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

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      “Most kids haven’t made up their minds politically. They have issues they care about, but they don’t really know the Democratic party or Republican party platform,” McCullough said.McCullough believes that the political divide that’s so entrenched in US politics – and which is likely to be amplified after Donald Trump’s victory on Tuesday – is in part down to Americans not experiencing life or meeting people from a different geographic region or background.A 2022 YouGov poll found that one in five people Americans had visited fewer than six US states. A 2016 study of 2,000 US adults, meanwhile, found that the average American had visited just a quarter of US states and that 10% had never traveled outside their own state.For Olmert Hirwa, a student from Maine, one of the biggest takeaways from his visit to Longview in east Texas centered on the issue of guns. Before visiting Texas, he had never held a gun – but after spending a week in Longview, he found a new understanding for why people carry weapons.“What I learned is that people have guns because everyone has guns, and that guns are not the problem,” he said. “It’s the environment that people are in. It gave me a new perspective.“I also thought [Texas] would be less accepting of people of color – that was probably the biggest misconception I had going over there. For a small town, [Longview] has a lot of things going on.”Hirwa said he was still in touch with several fellow students he met during his time in Longview.Still, the challenges facing initiatives like the AEP are not inconsiderable in today’s polarized society.The rise of smartphones and the internet has further contributed to a sense of isolation among America’s youth, with researchers suggesting in 2020 that “a poisonous cocktail of othering, aversion and moralization poses a threat to democracy”.Divisive rhetoric at the political level has forced many to take sides, creating a sense that the country is more divided now than in the past. In most states, one party or the other controls the governorship and entire legislature.Some reports suggest Americans are increasingly moving to states that better fit their social and political views, further embedding a sense of division within the US. A report published by the real estate company Redfin in February found that one-third of real estate agents had clients who said they moved primarily because of state or local laws or politics.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“We are, at the moment, faced with some really challenging issues and we are talking about them in all of the wrong, most divisive ways,” McCullough said.“I’m wary that our country is doing two things that are really problematic – too often Americans would prefer to be right than to be effective. And [second,] national conversations are so frayed and divisive in a country that is enormous, incredibly diverse and prone to individualism.”He says some of the main challenges the AEP faces surround securing funding, and finding and recruiting more host families.“We have tons of interest across the country, but it’s going to be a lot of work to see all this through,” he said.Still, the program continues to grow.In 2023, about 475 students took part in exchanges. The AEP is planning to recruit 625 for next summer.For Osei-Adjei, the learnings of her 3,000-mile trip to Alaska went both ways.“I think that some people assumed that Baltimore was some extremely dangerous place,” she said. “People [in Alaska] were asking how often do I witness crime.“I told people I pretty much live like a normal citizen; I don’t fear for my life. I think them being here too can make them see that it’s just a normal city.”When other exchange students came to Baltimore, she said they were surprised by the city’s waterfront and the array of activities.Next up for Osei-Adjei? A trip back to Alaska next summer.Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

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      None of the conventional explanations for Trump’s victory stand up to scrutiny | Ben Davis

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      Donald Trump has won, and most shockingly, he won the popular vote. Unlike in 2016, which could be explained as a rejection of Hillary Clinton concentrated in the crucial midwestern states, this year he won convincingly. He has increased his share of the vote, as a percentage of the overall national popular vote, in each of the three elections he has run.Who voted for Trump and why? Many analysts of all political stripes have ready-made explanations for what happened, explanations that usually conveniently reflect the exact beliefs of the analyst. Unfortunately for them, the most common narratives do not stand up to scrutiny. The election results have blown a hole in the worldview of both the center and the left.One explanation for Trump’s victory is an across-the-board collapse in turnout and increased apathy caused by an unpopular presidency, an uninspiring president and an ideologically spent brand of liberalism. There is some merit to this, but on closer inspection, it’s not why Kamala Harris lost.First, it’s important to note that counting votes in the United States takes a very long time. By the time it’s all said and done, it’s quite likely Trump received more votes in 2024 than he did in the record turnout 2020 election, probably millions more votes.The second flaw in this idea is that the turnout change wasn’t uniform, nor was the change in voting behavior. In most swing states, turnout was actually up from 2020, setting records. In the states that decided the election, Democrats got their base voters to the polls and had the electorate they needed to win (and even did win in many cases in the Senate and down the rest of the ballot). The problem was she lost on persuasion: many voters who chose Joe Biden four years ago and even voted for other Democrats this year chose Donald Trump. Even then, where Harris campaigned on the airwaves and on the ground, she held up better than she did nationwide.However, problems with persuasion weren’t the only issue: Democratic turnout did, in fact, collapse in the less competitive states, especially in blue states. This is a unique shift in voting behavior nationally and can’t be explained obviously by most existing theories of the electorate.Another explanation is that Democrats have become the party of college-educated voters exclusively, and shed working-class voters, especially working-class voters of color. There is some truth to this, especially over the long term. But this explanation is also flawed. Trump did better consistently with every demographic almost everywhere in the country, including college-educated white people and women. While these numbers were more pronounced with young voters, Latinos and men, it was only slight. Most highly-educated areas that had swung consistently against Republicans in 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022 moved back toward Trump this year. His victory was not with any one demographic. It was total.As with any massive election loss, recriminations have been swift, and factions inside the Democratic party are jockeying to make their narrative about the election the conventional wisdom that shapes the future of the party, while Republicans are claiming a sweeping mandate for reshaping society in a darker, more authoritarian way. However, conventional ideological explanations also don’t stand up to scrutiny.One of the most common centrist takes has been: Democrats have become too progressive and “woke” on social issues and obsessed with identity politics, and Democratic staffers and consultants live in a bubble and speak in alienating ways that have made them seem radical and off-putting to the median voter. The solution is a relentless focus on bread-and-butter issues and moderating, mostly ignoring culture war issues, besides abortion, and aggressively playing up moderate and bipartisan bona fides.It seems quite likely this narrative will win out among Democrats. It has already been expressed by elected officials and influential Democratic pundits. The key problem with this narrative is that while it may have had merit in 2020 or 2022, Democrats already actually did this. The Democratic party has, over the last few years, aggressively purged “woke”-sounding language from their messaging and policies from their agenda. The Harris campaign was almost monomaniacally focused on projecting moderation and bipartisanship and on basic, kitchen-table economic issues. They relentlessly hunted the median voter with targeted messaging. They ran the campaign the popularists wanted, and lost.This theory is also belied by the fact that the most well-known progressive and radical politicians mostly did better than Harris. Rashida Tlaib performed significantly better, and while this was most pronounced with Arab and Muslim voters who rejected Harris over her stance on Israel and Gaza, it was even true in white working-class communities. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also won more votes than Harris. Understanding why thousands of people might vote for Trump and an avowed democratic socialist and vocal supporter of “woke” causes like trans rights is a key to understanding the election.Progressives see the flaws with the centrist analysis and also have an explanation, typified by Bernie Sanders: Democrats lost by abandoning the working class and unions. Like the centrist narrative, it is an outdated explanation that was once true and may be true on a generational scale but is inadequate to capture what happened in this specific election fully. While Democrats have, over the last 50 years, shifted away from unions and redistributive politics, allowing inequality to grow, and this is the correct explanation for Clinton’s loss in 2016, it doesn’t quite fit here.Joe Biden actually did shift to the left on economic issues after winning the primary in 2020, largely due to the mass movement that formed around the Sanders campaign. And while, in the past, this may have been lip service, the Biden administration, for all its shortcomings, did follow through in real, measurable ways. Income inequality, the central theme of the progressive movement in the 2010s, decreased under Biden. The poorest workers were better off. Biden also pursued aggressive pro-labor and pro-consumer policy through the executive branch. Biden was the first president to walk a picket line, and put political capital on the line to bail out union pension funds.For many years, it was easy to explain why workers would leave the Democrats: they were making less money and losing rights. But, while the Biden administration should have been far more assertive in redistribution and class-war policy on ideological and moral grounds, it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny that workers moved right because of an ideologically neoliberal or austerity-focused policy. Though Democrats have mostly abandoned class as a mode of communication, and struggled to name an enemy and construct a compelling economic narrative, the material explanation for Harris losing votes among the working class and union members doesn’t hold as it may have in the past.The right has its own explanation, seeing a sweeping mandate for the culture war. But Republican candidates who made their campaigns into referenda on culture war issues have uniformly lost or underperformed, in the past, and also this year. Trump is the only candidate who ran aggressively on the persecution of trans people, for example, and also did better than the partisan baseline.And the idea that this is why voters flocked to Trump is just not compelling. Fifty-four percent of voters thought Trump was “too extreme”, 65% were pro-choice, and, even on immigration, 56% of voters supported a pathway to citizenship rather than mass deportations. Millions of voters voted for Trump at the top of the ticket and Democrats down-ballot to check his unpopular agenda. It would be a mistake to think Trump has a mandate to remake society in a hard-right, socially conservative image.So why did people vote for Trump? Most voters still actively dislike him personally (53% of voters had an unfavorable opinion of him) and most of his policies. The obvious explanation is that people trust him more to handle the economy. Although voters didn’t like his presidency, they felt like they were better off four years ago. This is true, but also so obviously true as to be facile. More interesting is why, materially, voters trust him more to handle the economy.The easy answer is inflation, but the case for this as the primary driver, materially rather than rhetorically, also has some holes. The first is that inflation has drastically decreased, and has been decreasing consistently since early in the Biden presidency. For most Americans, wages have risen faster than inflation, again for years in a row. When inflation was high and harming worker’s standard of living, Democrats were winning elections, historically over-performing in 2022 and sweeping special elections from the congressional level down to state legislatures and city councils.Many have proposed the idea of a “vibes recession”, wherein traditional and social media have given people a false idea of their actual economic conditions. But this answer is glib: politics are material and people actually do know their conditions.I propose a different explanation than inflation qua inflation: the Covid welfare state and its collapse. The massive, almost overnight expansion of the social safety net and its rapid, almost overnight rollback are materially one of the biggest policy changes in American history. For a brief period, and for the first time in history, Americans had a robust safety net: strong protections for workers and tenants, extremely generous unemployment benefits, rent control and direct cash transfers from the American government.Despite the trauma and death of Covid and the isolation of lockdowns, from late 2020 to early 2021, Americans briefly experienced the freedom of social democracy. They had enough liquid money to plan long term and make spending decisions for their own pleasure rather than just to survive. They had the labor protections to look for the jobs they wanted rather than feel stuck in the jobs they had. At the end of Trump’s term, the American standard of living and the amount of economic security and freedom Americans had was higher than when it started, and, with the loss of this expanded welfare state, it was worse when Biden left office, despite his real policy wins for workers and unions. This is why voters view Trump as a better shepherd of the economy.It’s important to note that Trump is resolutely not a social democrat, and these policies came into place during an emergency rather than due to ideological conviction. Indeed, he is currently running on the largest upward transfer of wealth in American history and Republicans’ Project 2025 would decimate the social safety net and immiserate millions. Beyond this, Biden wanted to continue many of these policies, but there wasn’t a political pathway. Instead, they quietly expired. To voters, however, the material reality is that when Trump left office, this safety net existed, and by the time of the 2024 election, it had evaporated.How could Democrats have countered this? One way was by making it a central issue, fighting publicly and openly to keep these protections and messaging heavily and constantly that Republicans were taking them away while Biden fought for them. An enormous body of research has established that social programs, when implemented, are difficult and highly unpopular to take away. These were universal programs, beneficial at all income levels.The political miscalculation the Biden administration made was that, lacking the political ability to implement these policies permanently, it was best to have them expire quietly and avoid the public backlash of gutting welfare programs and the black mark of taking a public political loss. This was a grave miscalculation.Why were Democrats unable to counter the idea that Trump was an economic savant? And why did most Americans vote for someone they believe will harm the country but help their own pocketbooks? The answer is the ongoing decimation of working class institutions and civil society, started by neoliberalism, accelerated by the rise of the internet as a medium of interaction and put into overdrive during the isolation of Covid. The vehicles for building solidarity with others and for caring about strangers have been decimated. In crass terms, people have become more selfish.Union membership, for example, still makes voters significantly more Democratic than would otherwise be expected based on demographics alone. Even this year, Harris won union members easily while losing the popular vote overall. Unions and civil society organizations also provide a baseline of political education: members know their interests and which policies will help or harm them. Without this, American’s views are shaped by the algorithm.Perhaps most emblematic of this is at the heart of Trump’s campaign: his embrace of extremely online tech billionaires, crypto currency and online influencers. If the archetype of Trump’s win in 2016 was the left-behind post-industrial Rust belt manufacturing worker – or, perhaps more accurately, the car dealership or McDonald’s franchise owner in a left-behind post-industrial Rust belt town – this year it is the crypto scammer, the dropshipper, the app-based day trader, the online engagement farmer.That embrace was Trump’s message, and at the core of his gains, especially with young men. Without civil society and without strong unions, people believe the only path to success is getting one over on someone else. And who is better at that than Trump?While the core of the resurgent-left generation of Sanders was downwardly mobile college-educated professionals, selling their labor for wages without the prospect of buying a house or retiring on a pension, the second wave of newly aging-in Trump voters entered adulthood without even those prospects, hoping only to grind out a living through scams. But this is fundamentally an anti-social and anti-humanist mode of economic activity that contributes nothing to society and offers nothing but alienation to its victims. The result is people willing to vote for someone they know will cause immense harm to others, hoping it will help them personally.While the new right has made great hay of returning to a communitarian model of politics, economically populist, socially conservative, and focused on family and society, the truth is that the Trumpist movement is the opposite. It is hostile to the very concept of society and community. To combat this, we need an unabashedly pro-society left.The way to win back power for a solidaristic and humanist politics is to rebuild working-class democratic institutions. In 2020, Sanders asked the question: “Are you willing to fight for someone you don’t know?” This is the question we must ask over and over again and the work we must do is making sure the answer becomes yes.It will be hard: the right knows that their kryptonite is organization and community, which is why they plan to launch relentless attacks on leftwing organizations and unions. We will need new forms of organization in an era of hyper-online and state repression. We must be nimble and resilient. But it is the only path forward. The first goal? Answer the United Auto Workers’ call that unions across the country align their contracts for 1 May 2028, maximizing the collective leverage of the working class and giving workers across the country a shared goal and collective solidarity.In the meantime, we must rebuild organizations and unions, for a mass movement for solidaristic politics, for talking to your neighbors and coworkers, for fighting for someone you don’t know and for democracy itself. The story of 2024 was Americans voting for someone they know is a threat to democracy and for millions of people who are not like them because they were left worse off than they were for years before.If that’s the story of 2028, the very fabric of the nation’s democracy might unravel. This must not happen.

      Ben Davis works in political data in Washington DC More

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

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

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

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      ‘Fascism comes not with goose-steps but dance moves’: European writers react to Trump’s win

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      Ece Temelkuran: ‘Some, who you assume to be your people, will normalise Trump’Dear American friend,By the time my letter reaches you, you’ll have heard all the clever ways of saying, “We are fucked!” Thousands of soundbites will have told you, “Get up and fight.” Others will have shared tips on mourning and healing. The strange thing is that even though you’ll be in the same dark circus of emotions, everything you hear from your political side will add to your anger. That is what defeat the second time around does: the shame of losing morphs into self-hatred. You begin to be enraged by your ilk more than the opponent. That is why I am writing directly to you. Because in the coming months, your emotional state will impact domestic and global politics.View image in fullscreenSure, you remember. In 2016, when you were in a similar state of rage and depression, the collective consolation was political humour and the idea that Trump would quickly crash and burn. This time around, whenever he comes up with an outrageous idea or promises some other lunacy, you’ll again see people saying, “No, he wouldn’t do that.” Because when people feel helpless, they soothe themselves with wishful thinking. This was what we witnessed in my home country of Turkey, as well as Italy, India, and all the other countries that have been down the same road.Yet, the new chapter will come with an additional surprise: you will experience the magnetic magic of power. Some, who you assume to be your people, will decide tonormalise Trump and find ways to make themselves at home with the insanity. Hopefully, it won’t happen, but just in case, prepare yourself for the most painful bit. The absolute desperation when you witness some friends, first hesitantly murmuring, then confidently saying, “It is not as bad as we imagined.” You will watch in horror as they fall in line without being forced.Then, you’ll notice that the new morality created in the White House trickles down to the people. The fundamental moral values you assumed were non-negotiable will be debated shamelessly. They will not right away cancel women’s rights, but they will begin to float questions about those rights. They will not destroy the rule of law tomorrow afternoon, but you’ll hear Trump’s pundits say how courts are slowing down the process of “making America great again”. Trump will not walk into the White House with military boots, but here and there, you’ll see more police violence on campuses and hear people saying, “Well, the protesters were crossing the line anyway.” The political debate will be turned into such a mess that you’ll forget that in the 21st century, fascism comes to power not with goose steps but through elaborate dance moves.Meanwhile, in about one or two years, you will have shouted “No” so often and against so many things that you will be exhausted. Many will ask again, “So, where is hope?” However, you’ll realise that this time, it is not hope but something more essential that is lost: faith – in politics and your people. And that is the loss that will turn you into a neutral element, a zero in the political equation.So, this is a friendly warning to stop the emotional spiralling in its early stages. Try to put self-sabotaging emotions in the freezer for four years. Your job is not to have quarrels with Trump supporters now or get pissed off with your side. If I may, your job is to replace your anger with attention. Trump surely will drive you crazy every day with new outlandish stuff, but that is only showmanship. The dangerous bit happens through the change in the institutions. Keep your eye on the institutions.It is not as thrilling as the blame game on your own side, but it is essential to keep it together so you can tell the Democratic party to get serious. Tell them that Trump is the strange fruit of the political system, not a deviation. To change the broken system, Democrats must consider how to achieve equality, dignity and justice for all. They must restore trust in politics and cure the nihilism and cynicism that had taken overlong before Trump came on to the scene.And please, this time around, don’t assume that what happened in all those “crazy countries” won’t happen to you. Because, for us, it started just like this. How To Lose A Country: The Seven Steps From Democracy to Fascism by Ece Temelkuran is out now published by Canongate.Joseph O’Connor: ‘He might see it as a badge of honour to be dissed by liberal countries’View image in fullscreenCaptain Punchdown returns. The man who once publicly mocked a disabled reporter. And it’s no more Mister Nice Guy. Political thugs all over the world will be emboldened. The anniversary of the January 6 attack on the Capitol will be memorable. He’ll probably make it a national holiday.I think it will mean the end of the Democratic party in its current demonstrably unelectable form, and that will be no bad thing, although the splits will be painful. It will also pour concrete on the grave of the McCain-era Republican party. Far from making America great, Trump Redux will see the United States become a further-divided nation that is increasingly misunderstood and disliked around the world. Probably he doesn’t care; he might see it as a badge of honour to be dissed by countries where they have liberal fripperies like a social welfare system. But the isolationism will isolate. It’s sad.The return of the wall-builder-in-chief is extraordinarily damaging to the valuable and honourable idea that electoral politics is a profession best begun with an apprenticeship of service. The victory of a four-times criminally indicted, twice impeached felon will encourage a particular type of newcoming extremist. That’s what’s most worrying. His cabinet will look like the cantina in Star Wars.It will set back the progress on climate change by a decade we don’t have to spare. Women will be looked after, ‘whether they like it or not’. The suffering of the Palestinian people will worsen, if such a thing may be imagined. Immigrants and asylum seekers will be targets for even viler abuse. It is hard to see how his promise to deport 15 million people could be carried out, but it seems likely that mass expulsion at gunpoint will become an everyday reality in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Families will be separated. More children will spend time in cages.Here in Dublin, where I live, the news has been greeted with gloomy resignation in government circles and with much practice of the ancient art of putting on a brave face. The relationship between Ireland and the United States is old and close, but there are concerns that Trump’s planned tariff war and tax changes will rock the Irish economy. Irish membership of the EU is valued deeply by most of our people; there’s a sense that pro-European sentiment will be regarded as a shootable offence in the White House and that the affection of recent American presidents for Irish culture will, for a variety of reasons, not be continuing. Seamus Heaney may not be quoted quite so often, let us say.In essence, Putting America First means seeing everywhere else as an inconvenience. The Irish know a bit about what that feels like. His rhetoric about immigrants could come straight from the ugly pages of Punch magazine in the 1850s, in which refugees to England from the Irish famine are portrayed as apes and murderers, bringers of terrorism and disease.Once, during the campaign, he made me laugh. Onstage at a rally, wearing a truck driver’s fluorescent safety vest, he quipped that it made him look thin. But most things he said ranged from disconcerting to truly terrifying. Presumably, that’s what they wanted, the millions of decent, betrayed Americans who voted for him: a guy who doesn’t play by the rules. Be careful what you wish for. The Ghosts of Rome by Joseph O’Connor will be published by Penguin in January.Andrey Kurkov: ‘Without American aid, Ukraine may find itself in a hopeless situation’View image in fullscreenTrump’s victory in the US presidential election initially silenced Ukraine. Only weapons – all along the more than 500 miles of the front line – continued to roar, while Russian missiles and drones made ever fiercer attacks against Ukrainian cities and villages.In silence, Ukrainians mourned the loss of one more shield of hope. Pre-election commentaries from journalists and political scientists, and the speeches of Trump himself, had made it very clear that Trump in the White House would mean greatly reduced military aid to Ukraine and that this would force President Zelenskyy to sit down at the negotiating table with Vladimir Putin.The outcome of such negotiations is easy to predict. Russia continues to demand that the Ukrainian leadership “recognise reality”. This is shorthand for saying that Ukraine must give up to Russia the territories which have been captured and occupied, and also the areas of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions which are currently free. These free territories are huge and include two major cities: Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.But today the shock wave has passed. People are beginning to share their dark visions of the future. In his video address about the US election, Zelenskyy tried to calm Ukrainians, assuring them that he and Donald Trump had established cordial relations and that, during a personal meeting in September, Donald Trump heard everything that Volodymyr Zelenskyy wished to tell him.Ukrainians are waiting for Trump himself to address them, as Biden did on his visit to Ukraine. Ukrainians need to hear Trump promise not to abandon them to their fate. Few believe the president-elect will make any such promise. It is not in his character or on his agenda. Neither will Zelenskyy be pushed into unfavourable, not to say dangerous, negotiations with Putin. There will most likely be a reduction in military and financial aid.The “Ukrainian problem” will be handed over to the European Union as the leaders, and some of them have already taken up the baton. Trump’s victory in the presidential election will force the EU to focus on its own military doctrine and a common defence policy. European military aid to Ukraine will continue, but, as before, it will be delivered haltingly, preventing Ukraine from planning ahead in general, let alone planning for a counteroffensive.Ultimately, without American aid, Ukraine may find itself in a hopeless situation, and then unfavourable negotiations with Russia may become inevitable. This in turn will lead to more migration from Ukraine, especially of young people.The silence has been broken, but Ukrainians are still only murmuring their disappointment. The discussions on social media are muted. In the US, the majorityof the older generation of the Ukrainian diaspora voted for Donald Trump, but this is not discussed here either. Ukrainians who know about it keep quiet, understanding that this sector of the US population, just like most post-Soviet US citizens, want a “firm hand” in politics and in the economy. And in this they are somewhat similar to today’s citizens of the Russian federation. More

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

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

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

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

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

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      From Barron to Kai: a who’s who of Trump’s family – and the roles they could play

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      Donald is not the only Trump back in the picture after his election win.On Tuesday night, members of the former and future president’s family posed with him at his Florida estate in celebration of his re-election. “Dad, we are so proud of you,” wrote Tiffany, Trump’s younger daughter, posting the photo on X. It was also shared by his 17-year-old granddaughter, Kai, captioned: “The whole squad.”Notably absent was the former first lady, Melania. However, the happy family shot did include Elon Musk – not a blood relative but surely now loved by the president-elect like a son – who was holding X-AE-AXii, the most absurdly named of his own 12 children.Given the prominent roles, official and unofficial, held by Trump’s children and their spouses in his first administration, it is a safe bet that family members will be front and centre in his second. Here is a reminder of the characters likely to feature in the Trump dynasty, season two.Melania TrumpView image in fullscreenWho knows the true nature of the relationship between Trump and his third wife – even the late Queen Elizabeth, according to her biographer Craig Brown, assumed they “must have some sort of arrangement”. Melania was largely absent from the campaign trail, appearing only briefly at the Republican national convention (RNC) in July. The 54-year-old calls New York, where their son Barron is at university, her home, while her husband has been based at Mar-a-Lago in Florida. In recent months, she was arguably more visible in promoting her own memoir, in which she advocated for abortion rights.But while some wondered if the marriage would crumble once Trump was out of office in 2020, she was by his side as he greeted supporters after his win, and is expected to resume her constitutional role as first lady.Donald Trump JrView image in fullscreenTrump’s oldest son has been a significant figure behind the scenes of his father’s campaign, building a close connection to the Maga electoral base.Don Jr, who is the executive vice-president of the Trump Organization and hosts a podcast, Triggered, is credited with helping his friend JD Vance secure the VP nomination, and some argue he could be the power behind the throne of the new administration.He has been closely involved in his father’s transition team and there is inevitable speculation he could be given a prominent role – perhaps with an eye on a political future of his own.Ivanka TrumpView image in fullscreenTrump’s older daughter was highly visible during his first administration, even being given the official title of “first daughter and adviser to the president”. But she has been entirely absent this time – her appearance with the family on Tuesday was her first of the entire campaign.Once described as Trump’s favourite child, Ivanka has testified that she did not believe her father’s false claim that the 2020 election was “stolen”, and in 2022 said in a statement that while she loved her father, “this time around, I am choosing to prioritise my young children and the private life we are creating as a family. I do not plan to be involved in politics.”Jared KushnerView image in fullscreenIvanka’s husband, once a Democrat, was integral to his father-in-law’s 2016 presidential campaign and was appointed a senior adviser during Trump’s first term, helping shape the administration’s Middle East policies.Since 2020 the real estate investor and former publisher of the New York Observer has concentrated on his $3bn investment fund, Affinity Partners. It is heavily backed by the Saudi government’s public investment fund, which has led to questions from the Senate finance committee.He is reported to have ruled out joining the new administration but could advise on foreign affairs.Eric TrumpView image in fullscreenThough he has generally had a lower profile than his older brother, Don Jr, concentrating instead on the family’s business and real estate firm, Trump’s second son supported him in person during his fraud court hearings earlier this year and was a loyal cheerleader on the campaign trail.Lara TrumpView image in fullscreenEric’s wife since 2014 and mother of their two children, the former TV producer has described having a political “awakening” when her father-in-law was first elected in 2016 and has moved increasingly into positions of influence. Earlier this year Trump installed Lara as co-chair of the Republican national committee, reportedly telling her: “I need someone I can trust.”Asked about speculation that she may consider running for office herself one day, she has said: “Never say never with a Trump.”Tiffany TrumpView image in fullscreenTrump’s fourth child, Tiffany, whose mother is his second wife, Marla Maples, has been a loyal if lower-profile family member during his campaign. She recently announced her first pregnancy with her husband, Michael Boulos, a Lebanese-American businessman.Barron TrumpView image in fullscreenTrump’s son with Melania, after spending some of his early teenage years living at the White House, is now 18 and studying business at New York University. Though still young, Barron has been credited as being an important influence on his father’s campaign by urging him to target the “bro vote” through interviews with popular podcasters.Increased visibility has also brought a focus on his 6ft 7in height, which his father has credited to the attentions of his Slovenian maternal grandmother, Amalija Knavs: “Boy, did she take care of Barron … That’s how he got so tall – only ate her food.”Kimberly GuilfoyleView image in fullscreenA former Fox News presenter (and former San Francisco prosecutor alongside Kamala Harris), she has been engaged to Donald Jr since 2020, after his 2018 divorce from his first wife, Vanessa, the mother of his five children.Guilfoyle was previously married to the Democratic mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom, but was an outspoken critic of Harris on the campaign trail, hinting at a highly personal animus.Kai TrumpView image in fullscreenThe eldest of Donald Jr’s five children, Kai, 17, addressed the RNC in July, saying of her grandfather: “To me, he’s just a normal grandpa … He gives us candy and soda when our parents aren’t looking.“When we play golf together, if I’m not on his team, he’ll try to get inside of my head, and he’s always surprised I don’t let him get to me. But I have to remind him, I’m a Trump, too.” More