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      Wisconsin’s Ben Wikler joins race for Democratic National Committee chair

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      Wisconsin Democratic leader Ben Wikler joined the race to lead the Democratic National Committee on Sunday, promising “to take on Trump, Republican extremists, and move our country forward”, as the party looks to rebuild from its losses in the November election.In a video posted on social networks, Wikler, 43, touted his state party’s success in organizing to flip 14 state legislative seats and send Senator Tammy Baldwin back to Washington DC in November, and in previously campaigns to win control of the state supreme court and re-elect governor Tony Evers. Wikler, a former podcaster, Air America radio producer and headline writer for The Onion, also stressed his new media expertise.Wikler who has been involved in Democratic party politics since age 11, previously served as a producer on comedian-turned-politician Al Franken’s radio show and as Washington director for the progressive action group MoveOn, where he played a role in the successful battle to save the Affordable Care Act.“Our values – the core belief that our economy should work for working people, and that every person has inherent dignity and deserves freedom and respect – are American values,” Willer wrote on Bluesky. “But they’re not MAGA values. The richest and most powerful people want to divide us and enrich themselves.”“We’ve got to make sure that we are reaching people with the message that we are on their side and fighting for them,” Wikler told Reuters in a telephone interview.Wikler, who has served as chair of the Democratic party of Wisconsin since 2019, is among several candidates looking to replace Jaime Harrison, the current chair who is not seeking re-election when the party votes early next year.Former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, Minnesota Democratic chief Ken Martin and New York state senator James Skoufis also are vying to become the new Democratic chair.Democrats are trying to chart the way forward after losing the White House and control of the Senate, as well as failing to retake the House of Representatives.Wikler said the national party could learn from organizing efforts he has overseen in Wisconsin, even though Kamala Harris narrowly lost the state to Trump.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWikler said Democrats also need to focus on the president-elect’s economic agenda, which he claimed will favor wealthy Americans rather than working families.“For Democrats, this is a critical time to unite and fight back against Trump’s plans,” Wikler said.Wikler’s entry into the race was welcomed by the teachers union leader Randi Weingarten, who wrote that he “understands how to organize and communicate”, and journalist Connie Schultz, who knows Wikler from his time as spokesperson for her husband, Senator Sherrod Brown. More

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      Conspiracy theorist Kash Patel, Trump’s pick to lead FBI, faces Senate blowback

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      Donald Trump’s plan to nominate as FBI director the “deep state” conspiracy theorist Kash Patel, a virulent critic of the bureau who has threatened to fire its top echelons and shut down the agency’s headquarters, is facing blowback in Congress as US senators begin to flex their muscles ahead of a contentious confirmation process.Politicians from both main parties took to the Sunday talk shows to express starkly divergent views on Patel, whom Trump announced on Saturday as his pick to lead the most powerful law enforcement agency in the US. The move is dependent on the incumbent FBI chief, Christopher Wray, who Trump himself placed in the job in 2017, either being fired or resigning.It is already clear that confirming Patel through the US Senate is likely to be less than plain sailing. Mike Rounds, a Republican senator from South Dakota, indicated that Patel could face a tough confirmation battle.Rounds pointedly sang the praises of the existing FBI director in an interview with ABC’s This Week. He said that Wray, who still has three more years of his 10-year term to serve, was a “very good man”, adding that he had “no objections about the way that he is doing his job right now”.The senator also emphasised the separation of powers between president and Senate, signaling possible trouble for Patel. Rounds said he gave presidents “the benefit of the doubt”, but also emphasised that “we have a constitutional role to play … that’s the process”.Other Republican senators rallied to Patel’s side. Ted Cruz, the senator from Texas, told CBS’s Face the Nation that he believed Patel would be confirmed.“Patel is a very strong nominee to take on the partisan corruption of the FBI.”Bill Hagerty, a Republican senator from Tennessee, said on NBC’s Meet the Press that he would vote to confirm Patel. “Kash is the best at uncovering what’s happened to the FBI and I look forward to seeing him taking it apart,” he said.Patel is a Trump loyalist who has published children’s books featuring “King Donald”. He has long denigrated the FBI as a pillar of what he calls the “deep state” or the “corrupt ruling class”.In an interview with Shawn Ryan in September, Patel vowed to “shut down” the FBI’s headquarters in Washington DC and reopen the building the following day as a “museum of the deep state”.He has also threatened to use the power of federal law enforcement to go after those he claims are responsible for corrupting the federal government, a list of whom he published in his memoir. Jake Sullivan, Joe Biden’s current national security adviser, was among that list: Patel called him “one of the corrupt actors of the first order”.Sullivan was asked by ABC’s This Week whether he was worried personally about Patel’s potential leadership of the FBI, given the threats against him. He declined to comment, saying he was wholly focused on keeping the country safe in the remaining 50 days of his term in office.But he did highlight that Biden had kept Wray on as FBI chief, despite having inherited the official from Trump. Sullivan said that Wray served “with distinction, entirely insulated from politics or the partisan preferences of the current sitting president. This is a good, deep bipartisan tradition that President Biden has adhered to.”Jamie Raskin, a House Democrat from Maryland, challenged the claim by Trump and Patel that the FBI had been politically weaponised under Biden to go after Republicans. He pointed out on CNN’s State of the Union that over the past four years the FBI had prosecuted the disgraced Democratic senator from New Jersey, Bob Menendez, and the Texas Democrat Henry Cuellar.“I think that’s what they mean when they talk about politicization in the deep state – anybody who doesn’t do the will of Donald Trump,” Raskin said.According to an Axios report on Sunday, Trump had initially planned to appoint Patel as deputy FBI director but changed his mind after his pick to head the agency, the state attorney general of Missouri, Andrew Bailey, failed to impress him. Raising Patel to the number one position makes the move far more politically loaded.Despite the storm he is generating, Trump shows no sign of moderating his leadership choices for his upcoming administration. Over the weekend he tapped Charles Kushner, father of his son-in-law Jared Kushner and a convicted felon whom Trump pardoned in 2020, as US ambassador to France.On Sunday, Trump announced on Truth Social that he had chosen his daughter Tiffany’s father-in-law, Massad Boulos, to be senior adviser on Arab and Middle Eastern affairs. Boulos, a Lebanese billionaire, was active in Trump’s presidential campaign as a liaison with Arab American and Muslim leaders.Trump has also picked a county sheriff, Chad Chronister, from Florida to head the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). The agency will have a key role in attempting to fulfill Trump’s pledge to staunch the cross-border flow of fentanyl and other drugs into the US, which is already causing diplomatic tensions with Canada and Mexico.Chronister’s father-in-law, Edward DeBartolo, was pardoned by Trump three years ago on a 1998 conviction for involvement in a gambling fraud case. DeBartolo, the former owner of the San Francisco 49ers American football team, was fined $1m and suspended by the NFL for a year. More

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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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      Doug Burgum could soon be driving Trump’s ‘drill, baby, drill’ promises on public lands

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      View image in fullscreenOf all Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees so far, Doug Burgum has stood out for appearing to be one of the most conventional.The billionaire governor of North Dakota – like most picks to lead the Department of the Interior, the largest landowner in the US west – comes from a western state. He is not a conspiracy theorist, he hasn’t been investigated for sex trafficking. Unlike the president-elect’s pick to lead the Department of Energy, he is not a fracking CEO.“He’s not a lunatic,” said Patrick Donnelly, the great basin director for the Center for Biological Diversity. “He’s not someone wholly inappropriate for the job. But I fear the way his extractive agenda will play out in public lands.”Over the next four years, Burgum is poised to radically remake the agency that oversees 500m acres (200m hectares) of public lands, including national parks and wildlife refuges. A former software executive and one-time climate pragmatist, Burgum has become closely enmeshed with oil and gas industry executives.Burgum led the Trump campaign’s development of its energy policy. After Trump asked oil executives to steer $1bn toward his campaign, Burgum promised them Trump would halt Joe Biden’s “attack” on fossil fuels. As Trump makes good on his promise to “drill, baby, drill”, Burgum will be overseeing the department that expedites those drilling permits.“There’s going to be an effort to get every ounce of fuel out of the ground and burn it,” said Daniel R Patterson, a former environmental protection specialist for the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), a division of interior, who filed a whistleblower complaint during the first Trump administration. “And if we do that, we’re burning ourselves.”Burgum had long had an affinity for Teddy Roosevelt, the US president who established the national parks system and was a champion of the outdoors. Roosevelt was from New York, but had a special connection to the Dakotas, seeking solace in the region’s sweeping badlands.The 26th president was also known for his machiavellian political philosophy. “Teddy Roosevelt encouraged America to speak softly and carry a big stick,” Burgum said at the Republican national convention in Milwaukee. “Energy dominance will be the big stick that President Trump will carry.”In addition to managing the interior department, Trump has also tasked Burgum with serving as an “energy czar”, overseeing energy policy across the federal government at the helm of a new “national energy council”.He will be, in essence, a fox guarding the henhouse – in a position to tear down environmental regulations, and ramp up extraction. “We’re going to see a hard turn, to almost complete hostility to conservation interests,” said Patterson.With Burgum at the head of the department, Patterson added, “the direction from DC is going to be to permit as much resource exploitation as possible. And interior employees are going to be asked to push the boundaries of the law more.”Burgum’s zeal for extraction – and his focus on ramping up oil and gas production – could make him more efficient and effective than Trump’s previous interior secretaries. Trump’s first interior leader, Ryan Zinke, racked up 18 ethics investigations in just under two years. His replacement David Bernhardt was also dogged by allegations of ethics violations – and was investigated for carrying on his work as an oil industry lobbyist even after he joined the administration.Burgum’s relatively short political career has not been without scandal. During his short-lived presidential bid, he drew attention for offering $20 gift cards to people who would donate $1 to his campaign, so he would have enough individual donors to make the Republican primary debate stage. But until quite recently, Burgum was viewed as a relative moderate.Initially, he was known for his bipartisanship and pragmatism. Tribal leaders in North Dakota have credited him with smoothing tenuous relationships between tribal and state governments, and though he urged the federal government to take quicker action to clear out protesters of the Dakota Access Pipeline, he advocated against using force after taking over as governor toward the end of the standoff.He was never a progressive champion of climate action – but he promoted the same “all of the above” approach to energy that Democratic administration have supported, backing North Dakota’s powerful oil and gas industry while also encouraging the development of renewable energy infrastructure. In 2021, he set a goal that North Dakota would stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by 2030, becoming “carbon neutral” – advocating for a plan that retained the state’s fossil fuel industries while investing in carbon capture and storage technologies to offset emissions. At the time, environmental groups supported Burgum’s pledge, but noted the impracticality of relying on unproven carbon capture technology rather than a transition away from fossil fuels.But in the past year and a half, Burgum underwent a Maga conversion, becoming one of Donald Trump’s closest advisers on energy policy, coordinating closely with oil industry executives.At a now infamous meeting between Trump and oil executives were Burgum and Harold Hamm – the head of Oklahoma-based energy company Continental Resources. The two men are close allies in politics and business.Hamm has donated to Burgum’s political campaigns ($250,000 to his presidential bid), and help finance his pet projects (giving $50m to fund the Theodore Roosevelt library in North Carolina). His Continental Resources, which is the largest oil and gas leaseholder in North Dakota, also leases land from Burgum’s family for oil and gas extraction.And their chumminess blossomed as Hamm, who has become one of Trump’s biggest benefactors and advisers, reportedly helped talk up Burgum at Mar-a-Lago. As a profile of Hamm in the industry publication Hart Energy asserts: “When Harold Hamm talks US energy, President-Elect Donald Trump listens.”Burgum and Hamm worked in tandem to shore up support for Trump among industry executives. And a now infamous meeting with executives where Trump asked for $1bn in support, Burgum promised that if elected, Trump would “stop the hostile attack against all American energy” on “day one”, according to a recording obtained by the Washington Post.In his dual role as energy czar and interior secretary, environmentalists are bracing for him to gut regulations and speed-up permitting in ecologically vulnerable regions – further opening up the Arctic national wildlife refuge in Alaska for oil and gas exploration, or welcoming uranium and coal development in areas bordering the Grand Canyon.Trump has given Burgum one diktat: drill. Conservationists fear Burgum is likely to oblige not with sweeping action, but by way of a thousand cuts to environmental rules and regulations, allowing not only oil and gas companies, but also mining companies and other businesses unencumbered access to public lands.“The reality is, BLM approves everything that comes in front of them, and that’s true no matter who is present in the White House,” said Donnelly of the Center for Biological Diversity. Of greater concern, he said, is how that permitting happens.“That’s something I really fear, because the ramifications of the first Trump administration are still extremely present in our lives,” he said.During his first administration, Trump oversaw the rollback of more than 125 environmental rules, many with the aid of the interior department, whose secretary will wield vast power over how environmental regulations are interpreted and implemented.For example, the BLM created new rules to roll back restrictions on methane releases from oil and gas wells. A US district court eventually found the rule to be flawed, but then a Wyoming court struck down Obama-era restrictions on methane that preceded the Trump rule. All the while, companies were allowed to release methane unfettered.Burgum could also help Trump gut the interior department, reducing staff at key offices that oversee vast areas of public land – undermining the department’s ability to monitor public lands and enforce regulations. Career interior employees may also choose to retire or leave.“Public employees largely do these jobs because they believe in the public interest,” said Patterson. “If a new political boss comes in and tries to turn the agency into a giant bulldozer to pave the way for moneyed interests, they may not want to be a part of that.”There were 4,900 fewer employees at the interior department at the end of Trump’s first term compared to the beginning. “We know there’s a big emphasis and thrust of the incoming administration on reducing the size of the federal government, and we worry that BLM will once again be in the crosshairs,” said Robert Dewey, vice-president for government relations with the non-profit group Defenders of Wildlife. “If it is targeted, that would have an impact on their ability to balance conservation along with their other objectives. And we worry that wildlife would suffer as a consequence.”The administration faced several complaints and lawsuits over its rushed or inadequate environmental reviews, including over its environmental impact statement (EIS) for an oil and gas leasing program in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge that environmentalists called “slapdash”. In 2020, Patterson filed a whistleblower complaint alleging that the BLM district office ignored requirements in the National Environmental Policy Act, in one case allowing a gold mining operation to create toxic pit lake, rather than requiring it to build a more expensive and less polluting system for wastewater. Patterson also alleged retaliation, and the complaint was eventually dismissed in a legal settlement.“Right now, one of the only things standing in the way between this extractive boom, you know, ruining our public lands and driving species to extinction, are bedrock environmental laws,” said Donnelly. “And groups like ours, who are willing to stop these things.”If Burgum and the incoming Trump administration are able to dismantle those laws, he said, it could have consequences that persist well beyond the next administration. “This could be extremely devastating for the future,” he said. 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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      Democrats ignored pleas to address price of ‘eggs and gas’, campaigners say

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      Saru Jayaraman tried. As far back as January, the president of low-pay campaign group One Fair Wage recalls telling Democratic leaders in Washington DC that voters were worried about the cost of living.“It just went on deaf ears,” she said. “One of the biggest challenges we faced was they kept wanting to talk about the economy. And we kept saying, it’s not about the economy, it’s about our economy: it’s about my economy, my ability to pay for eggs and gas.”“And so, it was no surprise to us that people did not turn out, why people did not feel incredibly motivated – whether they didn’t vote or they voted for Kamala or they voted for Trump,” said Jayaraman, director of the food labor research center at University of California, Berkeley. “There was a universal feeling of ‘you’re not listening to us.’”A single mom working three jobs as a waitress, and struggling to make ends meet on a sub-minimum tipped wage, is “not going to take time out of her three jobs to vote for either person”, she added. “There’s no future for the party unless they really address the needs of working people. And I use the word ‘address’. It isn’t just running on the issue.”Democrats face calls to actSam Taub has worked as a server for the past 10 years in Michigan, one of the key election swing states, which swung from Joe Biden in 2020 to Donald Trump in 2024. Taub was not that surprised by this year’s result.“You see a lot of generalizations of people who live in the midwest, people who are working class and people who are working-class in the midwest,” he said. “And as somebody who is one of those people, it is a little bit frustrating to hear people say that they’re listening to you – and then not actually listen to you.“The message that Democrats really need to understand is that they can’t assume that they already know what people think and what people need.”View image in fullscreenTaub is one of hundreds of service industry workers who backed an open letter, organized by One Fair Wage in the wake of the 2024 election results, urging the Democratic party to do more to address the needs of working people.Democrats at the state level need to fight to protect workers rights even more given the upcoming second Trump administration, he argued, and push back against industry efforts to scale back or prevent policies, such as raising the sub-minimum wage for servers in Michigan, from taking effect.“It’s pretty obvious Donald Trump is not going to protect workers’ rights, so it’s really important for politicians at the state level to do everything that is within their power to protect workers,” said Taub. “By getting rid of the sub-minimum wage, which is something that’s happening gradually, we can help a lot of people.”Juan Carlos Romero, a bartender in New York City, has worked in the restaurant industry for 16 years. “It’s really hard to try to make ends meet” in this economy, he said.Under Trump workers in the service industry aren’t going to see improvements, he suggested, arguing that the incoming administration’s proposals – such as eliminating taxes on tips – overlook the fundamental issue that so many service workers are in precarious economic circumstances because they rely on tips and sub-minimum hourly wages.Democrats must use the final weeks before Trump takes office “to support us”, he added. “I think our desperation comes from the reality that we see, and especially if wages stay like this, [that] they’re going to continue to affect people on a daily basis. So it really is a call to action that is desperately needed by folks in the industry.”Fears of recessionCampaigners and academics fear the Democratic party’s losses of the White House and Senate majority, and its failure to retake the House majority will leave workers on lower incomes – especially immigrants – vulnerable.“One of the consequences of this election is that the government backs away from having people’s back when they want to join a union,” said Sharon Block, executive director of the Center for Labor and a Just Economy at Harvard Law School. “There’s just a cool irony to that that I think is just devastating: this is a time when people need to be in a union more than ever.”Deportation plans targeting undocumented and temporary workers are already inciting fear among these workers. Immigration groups are pushing Biden to solidify protections for immigrants before he leaves office in January.“I think that the anti-immigrant fervor out of Trump and his acolytes is terrifying and defies humanity,” said Judy Conti, director of government affairs at the National Employment Law Project. “And I think immigrant workers everywhere have reason to be worried about discrimination, potential violence, workplace raids.”Trump’s proposed tariffs, and the impact they may have on the costs of basic goods and necessities, are also causing concern.“If they’re not talking about raising wages, which they’re not, but they’re talking about making all of the goods and services that we need for our day-to-day lives 20% more expensive,” warned Conti. “I have fears of recession, and certainly fears that things are going to be less affordable for the people who can’t afford it most.”Democrats who still hold office nationwide are facing calls to help such people when Trump reaches the White House. “Even if you fail,” the One Fair Wage letter said, “at least we’ll see you fighting for once.” More

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      MSNBC faces uncertain future amid Comcast sale and Trump election win

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      For years, the cable news channel MSNBC has been a reliable liberal voice in the US media landscape, but amid the return of Donald Trump to the White House and its own business upheavals the network is now in crisis.The world’s richest man, and close Trump ally, Elon Musk has even – possibly jokingly – repeatedly publicly touted the idea of buying MSNBC after the parent company of the channel, Comcast, recently revealed that it would spin off the cable news network.Audience fatigue with Trump’s re-election and high-profile MSNBC hosts’ potential missteps in reaction to that event could make it difficult for the new company to boost the channel’s ratings, which were already declining before the election, and continue providing a leftwing perspective on global events, US media analysts told the Guardian.The negative reports about the channel over the last month are just the latest examples of an established US media company struggling to find its footing as people continue to drop cable television packages and instead use streaming services.But the particularly sharp recent ratings decline and reports of Musk perhaps buying the network could make it especially difficult for high-profile programming such as Morning Joe and The Rachel Maddow Show to continue providing a progressive alternative to Fox News, the analysts say.During Trump’s first term, “MSNBC really stood as a center for resisting and critiquing Trump,” said Kathryn Cramer Brownell, associate professor of history at Purdue University and author of 24/7 Politics: Cable Television and the Fragmenting of America from Watergate to Fox News.“It remains to be seen if they are able to forge an identity and a political viewership in opposition to Trump or not,” she added.In 2016, an average of 4.2 million people tuned into CNN, Fox News and MSNBC, according to the Pew Research Center. In 2022, that number decreased to 3.8 million.MSNBC briefly saw a significant ratings increase during the 2020 tumult of the Covid-19 pandemic, Black Lives Matter protests and presidential election, but they later again declined.In October, the Comcast president said the company was considering spinning off its cable networks, including CNBC and MSNBC into a separate company. Then last week, the company made an official announcement.Since election day, MSNBC has averaged about 521,000 viewers each day, a 38% decrease from its 2024 average before 5 November, according to data from Nielsen.Then Morning Joe hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough visited Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort to speak with him about “abortion, mass deportation” and his threats of “retribution against political opponents and media outlets”, Scarborough said on air about the meeting.“We didn’t see eye-to-eye on a lot of issues, and we told him so,” Scarborough said, but they agreed to continue a dialogue.Afterwards, the hosts faced a significant backlash and ratings decrease.“They made a fundamental business error,” Jeff Jarvis, a journalism professor and author, said. “There is now a large new ecosystem of independent media, and people left the Washington Post and they are leaving MSNBC, and that worries me.”Brownell said she was not surprised by the morning show hosts meeting with the president-elect.“Media businesses frequently rely on cultivating relationships with political leaders and presidential administrations. It’s part of how they remain relevant,” she said. “But you can see the backlash with a show that kind of leans left and relies on those critics of Trump as their audience members.”The future of such shows is also uncertain because of Comcast’s decision to spin off the cable news networks along with channels such E!, USA and the Golf Channel into a separate company.“When you look at our assets, talented management team and balance-sheet strength, we are able to set these businesses up for future growth,” said Brian L Roberts, chairman and CEO of Comcast.After the announcement, Donald Trump Jr, joked on X that Musk should buy MSNBC, to which Musk replied: “How much does it cost?”A spinoff does not mean the company is for sale. Musk, who owns X, was one of Trump’s biggest backers this election and is now reportedly part of his inner circle, had previously described MSNBC as the “utter scum of the Earth”.CNN reported that billionaires with “liberal bona fides” have also expressed interest in buying MSNBC.“I fear that [Musk] could try to buy MSNBC, and I fear that Comcast could be immoral enough to sell it to him,” Jarvis said.Even if one of the liberal billionaires buys the network, its ability to be profitable in the long-term while providing left-leaning news and commentary is uncertain as people stop subscribing to cable.But after the 2016 election and the victor’s constant attacks on the media, many news organizations, including MSNBC, got a so-called “Trump bump”.Could that happen again once he takes office?“If there is a Trump bump, I suspect it will be delayed,” said Marty Kaplan, who holds the Norman Lear Chair in entertainment, media and society at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. “It may take a few beats for doomscrollers to get past the nausea. On the other hand, a media fast may be a popular new year’s resolution.”Even if the cord-cutting and recent events do lead to MSNBC’s demise, Brownell said she sees podcasts doing great journalism and thinks “the diversifying media landscape opens up a lot of possibilities”.“The challenge is the economic issue. How do you fund and sustain some of these other alternative journalistic projects?” she said. “You can have nonprofit organizations step in, foundations. It’s an opportunity to be creative … [and rethink] economic approaches to funding really good and hard-hitting and necessary journalism.” More

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      Trump maintains hard line on Canada after meeting with Trudeau

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      Donald Trump said he had a “productive” meeting with Justin Trudeau after the Canadian prime minister paid a surprise trip to his Mar-a-Lago estate amid fears about Trump’s promised tariffs.Trudeau became the first G7 leader to meet with Trump before his second term amid widespread fears in Canada and many other parts of the world that Trump’s trade policy will cause widespread economic chaos.But Trump also seemed to double down on the threat, which he has frequently linked to trying to encourage other countries to combat drug smuggling into the US.“I just had a very productive meeting with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada, where we discussed many important topics that will require both Countries to work together to address, like the Fentanyl and Drug Crisis that has decimated so many lives as a result of Illegal Immigration, Fair Trade Deals that do not jeopardize American Workers, and the massive Trade Deficit the US has with Canada,” Trump said in a statement posted to Truth Social, his social media platform.Trudeau and a handful of top advisers flew to Florida amid expectations that Trump will impose a 25% surcharge on Canadian products that could have a devastating impact on Canadian energy, auto and manufacturing exports.The meeting over dinner between Trudeau and Trump, their wives, US cabinet nominees and Canadian officials, lasted over three hours and was described by a senior Canadian official to the Toronto Star as a positive, wide-ranging discussion.Trump added: “I made it very clear that the United States will no longer sit idly by as our Citizens become victims to the scourge of this Drug Epidemic, caused mainly by the Drug Cartels, and Fentanyl pouring in from China. Too much death and hardship! Prime Minister Trudeau has made a commitment to work with us to end this terrible devastation of U.S. Families.”Leaving a Florida hotel in West Palm Beach on Saturday, Trudeau said: “It was an excellent conversation.”The face-to-face meeting came at Trudeau’s suggestion, according to the Canadian official, and had not been disclosed to the Ottawa press corps, which only found out about Trudeau’s trip when flight-tracking software detected the prime minister’s plane was in the air.The two leaders discussed trade; border security; fentanyl; defense matters, including Nato; and Ukraine, along with China, energy issues and pipelines, including those that feed Canadian oil and gas into the US.Over a dinner that reportedly included a dish called “Mary Trump’s Meat Loaf”, the pair also discussed next year’s G7 meeting, which Trudeau will host in Kananaskis, Alberta – seven years after Trump abruptly left the 2018 G7 at Charlevoix, Quebec, amid a US-Canadian dispute over American steel and aluminum tariffs.The Pennsylvania senator-elect Dave McCormick posted a photo to the social media platform X late Friday showing Trudeau sitting beside Trump. Others in the picture included Howard Lutnick, Trump’s nominee for commerce secretary; Governor Doug Burgum of North Dakota, the pick for interior secretary; and the US representative Mike Waltz of Florida, the pick for national security adviser.Canadian officials included the public safety minister, Dominic LeBlanc, responsible for border security, and Trudeau’s chief of staff, Katie Telford. Canada’s ambassador to Washington, Kirsten Hillman, and Trudeau’s deputy chief of staff, Brian Clow, were also at the dinner.LeBlanc said Canada was prepared to beef up border security, with more money for technology, drones and more Mounties and border guards on the 49th parallel.Earlier on Friday, Trudeau told reporters that he looked forward to having “lots of great conversations” with Trump and that the two would “work together to meet some of the concerns and respond to some of the issues”.Trudeau also said that it was “important to understand is that Donald Trump, when he makes statements like that, he plans on carrying them out. There’s no question about it.“Our responsibility is to point out that in this way, he would actually not just be harming Canadians, who work so well with the United States, he would actually be raising prices for American citizens as well, and hurting American industry and businesses.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut some observers were less than impressed.“The symbolism of Trudeau going down to Palm Beach on bended knee to say ‘Please don’t’ is very, very powerful,” Fen Hampson, professor of international affairs at Carleton University in Ottawa, told Bloomberg.“The stakes are enormously high and Trudeau has to deliver on this,” Hampson said. “Otherwise, it’s going to be seen by Canadians as a failed mission, because we all know why he’s going down there and it’s not to baste the turkey for Trump.”The scramble to diffuse Trump’s tariff threats has also pre-occupied the Mexican president, Claudia Sheinbaum, in recent days.On Thursday, Sheinbaum said she had had a “very kind” phone conversation with Trump in which they discussed immigration and fentanyl. She said the conversation meant there “will not be a potential tariff war” between the US and Mexico.But the two leaders differed on Trump’s claim in a post on Truth Social that Sheinbaum had “agreed to stop Migration through Mexico, and into the United States, effectively closing our Southern Border”.The Mexican president later said she had not. “Each person has their own way of communicating, but I can assure you, I guarantee you, that we never – additionally, we would be incapable of doing so – proposed that we would close the border in the north [of Mexico], or in the south of the United States. It has never been our idea and, of course, we are not in agreement with that.”Sheinbaum said the pair had not discussed tariffs but their conversation reassured her that no tit-for-tat tariff battle would be necessary.Trump also expanded on his economic message on tariffs to other global leaders on Saturday, threatening Brics countries – an acronym that includes Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – with 100% tariffs if they acted on discussions to drop the dollar as their reserve currency.“The idea that the BRICS Countries are trying to move away from the Dollar while we stand by and watch is OVER,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.Trump said the US would require “a commitment” from Brics nations – a geopolitical alliance that now also includes Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia and the United Arab Emirates – “that they will neither create a new BRICS Currency, nor back any other Currency to replace the mighty U.S. Dollar or, they will face 100% Tariffs”. More