US news

Subterms

    More stories

    • 175 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Here’s how the American press can survive four years of Trump | Margaret Sullivan

      by

      Everything we know about the next US president suggests that the press in America will be under siege in the next four years as never before.After all, Donald Trump has portrayed the media as the “enemy of the people”, has suggested that he wouldn’t mind seeing journalists get shot, and, in recent months, has sued CBS News and the Pulitzer prize organization.Now, with what he considers a mandate, he’ll want to push harder.“He’ll use every tool that he has, and there are many available to him,” predicted Marty Baron, the former executive editor of the Washington Post and the author of Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and the Washington Post, published last year.Baron told me on Wednesday that the president-elect had long been on a mission to undermine the mainstream media, and that he would be more empowered in a second term.Every would-be autocrat sees to it, after all, that an independent press doesn’t get in his way. Often, it’s one of the first democratic guardrails to be kicked down as a nation moves in an authoritarian direction.“Trump is salivating at the chance to sue a journalist for a leak of a classified document,” Baron said, perhaps using the century-old Espionage Act to exact a harsh punishment, even a prison term.With an aggressive attorney general – more combative than Jeff Sessions, whom Trump criticized for not being tough enough – that may be doable.And if even more source material is deemed classified, almost any story based on a leak can be depicted as a threat to national security.Another tactic: Trump’s allies will bankroll legal actions against the press, as the tech investor Peter Thiel did in a lawsuit against Gawker in 2016, forcing the media company into bankruptcy while portraying himself as a champion of quality journalism.Baron also sees Trump and friends threatening advertisers whose revenue keeps media companies in business – “and they will run for cover”.Then, if media outlets become sufficiently weakened, his allies may buy them and turn them into propaganda arms.Another likely move is to stonewall the press, making the job of informing the public much harder.Trump’s true believers, installed throughout the government, from the intelligence agencies to the IRS to the defense department, will anticipate what Trump wants and be hostile to reporters, Baron predicted. “Journalists will hit roadblocks constantly.”Toward the same end, legislation that weakens the Freedom of Information Act – which allows the press and the public the right to see much of what their government is doing – would be easy enough to enact with a Trump-friendly Congress.How to defend against all this?Baron hopes that media lawyers are already working on contingency plans to combat these moves, and that the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press will have the resources it needs to help as challenges arise. The non-profit provides pro bono legal representation to news organizations, reporters, documentary film-makers and others; and often contributes court documents to support journalists’ fights to protect their newsgathering.On Wednesday, the Reporters Committee sent out a fundraising email with a dire message beginning: “We won’t mince words – the next Trump administration poses a serious threat to press freedom.”I spoke on Thursday with Bruce Brown, the non-profit’s longtime executive director, who told me it will be important “to separate the daily indignations from the true legal threats” that are likely on their way. But, he said: “We have to prepare and be clear-eyed and get ready to act.”The organization is ready, though, with 20 lawyers on staff, many who worked on these issues during the first Trump administration. “In 2016, we were a third the size we are now, and we have lawyers with vastly more experience.”Major media organizations, he said, “need to stick together and not let him peel them off one by one”.More broadly, Marty Baron believes that the mainstream press needs to work on its trust problem.It needs to improve how it presents itself to the public, given that so many people are willing to believe that today’s journalism is part of the problem rather than a pillar of democracy.Bezos’s decision to quash a Post endorsement of Kamala Harris certainly didn’t help with enhancing trust, though the owner claimed he was motivated by wanting his paper to appear non-partisan; about 250,000 subscribers disagreed, cancelling in anger or disgust.Baron (who was critical of the decision to yank the editorial) urges the press to be “radically transparent” with the public.For example, journalists should provide access to full versions of the audio and video that their stories are based on, and should allow people to examine original documents or data sets.“The message,” he said, “should be ‘check my work’.”Baron also believes “the press has a lot to learn about what people’s genuine concerns are,” and should try harder to reach audiences of all political stripes.Trump’s messages about immigration, he believes, have found such fertile ground partly because of people’s worries, whether evidence-based or not, about jobs and salaries.Rebuilding trust is a long-term project. But the Trump-induced challenges are immediate.To survive them, the press needs to get ready now.

      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Rogan, Musk and an emboldened manosphere salute Trump’s win: ‘Let that sink in’

      by

      Late on Tuesday night, when it became clear that Donald Trump would be re-elected as president of the United States, the so-called “heterodoxy” was elated.For years, these male podcasters, influencers and public figures had marketed themselves as free-thinking pundits who evaded the bounds of political classification. “Their political views could once have been described as libertarian,” Anna Merlan wrote for the Guardian in August; the word used to describe them pointed to the same, derived from the Greek heteros, meaning other, and doxa, meaning opinion.However, in 2024, the heterodoxy universally endorsed, supported and celebrated the hyper-masculine promise of Trump. This has created a moment in which the vast majority of online voices who appeal to young men are explicitly pro-Trump. In the wake of his win, those who at least feigned political ambivalence now feel no need to moderate themselves.Joe Rogan reacted to Trump’s win on Tuesday night by yelling a reverential “holy shit” in a video he posted to X that showed him watching Trump’s election party on Fox News. Rogan, whose chart-topping podcast has an estimated 81% male audience, considers himself more of a conversationalist than a pundit but nevertheless endorsed Trump hours before the election, after hosting Trump and JD Vance on The Joe Rogan Experience. (He invited Kamala Harris, but they could not agree on interview terms.)Rogan endorsed Bernie Sanders in the 2020 Democratic primary and then voted libertarian, and initially liked Robert F Kennedy Jr in 2024. He has supported left-leaning policies like drug and marijuana legalization, same-sex marriage and abortion rights, though he vehemently opposes gender-affirming care for transgender youth. Ultimately, he attributed his pivot to Trump to Elon Musk, the last guest to appear on his podcast before the election.“If it wasn’t for him we’d be fucked,” Rogan posted, referring to Musk. “He makes what I think is the most compelling case for Trump you’ll hear, and I agree with him every step of the way.”Musk, who is generally well-liked among heterodox figures and their supporters, was gleeful as it became clear that Trump had won. He posted a picture to X showing him holding a sink in the Oval Office – a reference to his 2022 takeover of Twitter HQ – captioned “let that sink in”, seemingly relishing the business success and policy influence he anticipates having under a second Trump administration, which he helped secure.Musk’s shift to the far right – after voting for Obama and opposing Trump in 2016 – became noticeable during the pandemic, when he became frustrated that lockdown requirements were slowing production at SpaceX and Tesla. Since taking over Twitter, now X, he has re-platformed Trump and conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones as well as racist and sexist provocateurs like the white nationalist Nick Fuentes. “Your body, my choice. Forever,” Fuentes posted on Tuesday night; the phrase has been making rounds on social media since. Musk personally shares an increasingly large volume of far-right content on his own page – especially transphobic content, seemingly in response to his estranged daughter coming out as transgender.While final election data has yet to be released, initial exit polling indicates that men, and particularly young men aged 18-29, were a crucial pillar of support for Trump. Now more than ever, young men are at odds with more liberal young women, supporting Trump over Harris 56% to 42%, while young women preferred Harris 58% to 40%, according to exit polls. These young men, especially those without a college degree, have expressed feeling unfulfilled, dissatisfied with their jobs and lives, and desirous of a society and home life with traditional gender roles. For years, media outlets have documented how more and more young men have been radicalized after consuming content from right-leaning entertainers and commentators, especially on platforms like YouTube and Twitch. Now, as more of those men have reached voting age, this phenomenon appears to be benefiting Trump and the far right.One 2021 study found that a leading predictor of support for Trump – over party affiliation, gender, race and education level – was belief in “hegemonic masculinity”, defined as believing that men should be in positions of power, be “mentally, physically, and emotionally tough”, and reject anything considered feminine or gay. Some heterodox influencers gained a following by embodying or promoting precisely this brand of masculinity, and giving their followers a script for blaming dissatisfaction on women.Jordan Peterson, who has built a career as a pop pseudo-psychologist promoting patriarchy and the revival of the “masculine spirit”, considers himself to be “devoid of ideology”, but has aligned himself with rightwing figures like Tucker Carlson, Andy Ngo and Matt Walsh and frequently decried the media’s coverage of Trump, calling it biased. He was quick to celebrate Trump’s victory – albeit in a backhanded way. “Thank Heaven for working class slobs,” he posted to X at 1.40am.Nico Kenn De Balinthazy, better known by his YouTube moniker Sneako, took to the streets of New York on Tuesday night in a Make America Great Again hat and an American flag draped around his shoulders. Sneako, who supported Bernie Sanders in 2016 before switching his allegiance to Trump, could be seen trying to provoke the people around him, gloating as the results came in. He loudly laughed at one woman who was crying. The day before the election, he had posted on X: “Kamala Harris is proof that women shouldn’t vote.”Not every heterodox figure has been explicitly pro-Trump this year. Dave Portnoy, the founder of Barstool Sports, which is overwhelmingly geared toward men (particularly college-age men), was also quick to react to the election results. In a video posted to his Instagram, Portnoy – who has been accused of consistently misogynistic behavior both at and outside work – didn’t celebrate Trump, who he has never endorsed, but he expressed indignation at liberal voters.“People like myself, independents, moderates – the Democrats gave us no choice,” Portnoy said, at times slurring his words. “That was the worst campaign. And their pure arrogance and their moral superiority have driven people away. If you say you’re voting for Trump, suddenly you’re a Nazi, you’re Hitler, you’re garbage. Enough. Enough.”Lex Fridman never endorsed Trump either. The science and politics podcast host is less brash than the bulk of the heterodoxy, but is still popular among young men and still friendly to rightwing figures like Carlson and the former Trump adviser Stephen Miller when they stop by for interviews. On election night, he replied to Musk’s enthusiasm for Trump with a rocket emoji and “LFG!”He also was sure to acknowledge a perceived win for himself as he celebrated Trump’s. “PS: Long-form podcasts FTW,” he posted. “I hope to see politicians from both sides doing 2-3+ hour genuine, human conversations moving forward.”During this election cycle, Trump’s embrace of the bro-centric podcast scene came as he sidelined (and in some cases, fumbled) traditional campaign tactics like door-knocking and canvassing. This choice appears to have had no negative effect on his election bid. In fact, it may have even helped him. Trump’s victory could very well be an emboldening choice among heterodoxy figures, who now see the possible fruits of openly embracing the right. They certainly aren’t going away. More

    • 175 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Stephen Colbert on Trump’s win: ‘The deep shock and sense of loss is enormous’

      by

      Late-night hosts discussed Donald Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, sending him back to the White House.Stephen ColbertStephen Colbert didn’t mince words on the results of the 2024 election: “Well, fuck. It happened, again,” he said. “After a bizarre and vicious campaign fueled by a desperate need not to go to jail, Donald Trump has won the 2024 election.“The deep shock and sense of loss is enormous,” he continued. “But let’s look at the bright side. This way at least there’ll be a peaceful transfer of power. Mike Pence, olly olly oxen free. All day yesterday, I was walking around proudly wearing my ‘I Voted’ sticker. Today I wore my, ‘I am questioning my fundamental belief in the goodness of humanity’ sticker.“Now as a late-night host, people often say to me, ‘Come on, part of you has gotta want Trump to win because he gives you so much material to work with,’” he added. “No. No one tells the guy who cleans the bathroom, ‘Wow, you must love it when someone has explosive diarrhea, there’s so much material for you to work with!’“I wish, you wish, so many of us wish this hadn’t happened,” he continued, “but that is not for any of us to decide. This is a democracy. That’s Democracy with a capital ‘duh’. And in this democracy, the majority has spoken, and they said they don’t actually care that much about democracy.”The Late Show host congratulated Harris and Tim Walz on running an “extraordinary” 107-day campaign, and looked to the bleak future. “The first time Donald Trump was elected, he started as a joke and ended as a tragedy. This time he starts as a tragedy. Who knows what he’ll end as – a limerick?“Who knows what the next four years are going to be like,” he added. “What we do know is that we are going to be governed by a monstrous child surrounded by cowards and grifters, and my brain keeps pumping out an unlimited supply of ramifications. It’s really hard to see a bright side here.”But “we can take comfort in knowing that we’ve been here before. We know what’s coming,” he concluded. And there would be jokes, “because that’s what we do. And I’ll let you in on a little secret. No one gets into this business because everything in their life worked out great, so were built for rough roads. You guys ready?”Jimmy Kimmel“Let me tell you, that was the worst Taco Tuesday of my whole life,” said Jimmy Kimmel on Wednesday evening. “We had the choice between a prosecutor and a criminal and we chose the criminal to be president of the United States. More than half of this country voted for the criminal who’s planning to pardon himself for his crimes. I guess this election wasn’t rigged.”Fighting back tears, Kimmel listed everyone that Trump’s election will hurt: “It was a terrible night for women, for children, for the hundreds of thousands of hard-working immigrants who make this country go, for healthcare, for our climate, for scientists, for journalists, for justice, for free speech. It was a terrible night for poor people, for the middle class, for seniors who rely on social security, for our allies in Ukraine, for Nato and democracy and decency. It was a terrible night for everyone who voted against him and guess what? It was a bad night for everyone who voted for him, too. You just don’t realize it yet.”It was a good night, however, for Putin, polio and “lovable billionaires like Elon Musk and the bros up in Silicon Valley and all the wriggling brain worms who sold what was left of their souls to bow down to Donald Trump”.“But I’m gonna say something that Trump would never say unless it favored him,” he added. “The people voted and this is the choice we made. In January, Donald Trump becomes president and that’s that, he won. It doesn’t mean we give up, but it also doesn’t mean we storm the Capitol because we don’t like the result.”Despite a lot of people not wanting to hear any silver lining, Kimmel endeavored to end on a positive note. “The best I can come up with is, we’ve been through this once before and yes, this time it is probably going to be worse, maybe a lot worse, but I also think that maybe we will look back and realize that in the long run, this is what we needed to wake us up,” he concluded. “Maybe the people who care so much about him need to find out how little he cares about them.”Seth MeyersAnd on Late Night, Seth Meyers also mourned Trump’s victory, noting that he will be the oldest person to ever take office and the first convicted felon. “When I was in grade school, they always told us anyone could grow up to be president, but they didn’t say ‘literally fucking anyone’,” he joked.“I wish I had some trenchant words of wisdom to impart,” he later added. “I’m sad to say I don’t. We’re about to step over the precipice into truly uncharted territory. You need only look back to Trump’s first term to get a sense of how dangerous his second term will be. And no one can say they didn’t know what they were getting, because Trump made it crystal clear. All I know is that the fight for justice doesn’t end with one election.“In times like this, when everything feels overwhelming and impossible, like all hope is lost, we have no choice but to look back on the broad scope of history,” he continued. “Justice is not automatic, comeuppance is not guaranteed, politics unfortunately is not a Marvel movie, even though Joe Biden does look eerily like old Captain America. That doesn’t mean a struggle toward a more just and compassionate world is futile, it just means it’s hard, and heartbreaking and soul-crushing and agonizing. And it never ends. Democracy does not happen only on election day.”Meyers ended with an exhortation to his viewers to keep fighting back: “If you’re one of the tens of millions of Americans who said no to Trump’s dark, dangerous vision for America last night, now is the time to stand in solidarity with our friends, with our neighbors, with the vulnerable communities, and begin the hard work of making real the world we want to live in. That’s what we will be doing on day one.” More

    • 238 Shares139 Views

      in US Politics

      It’s OK to feel despair at Trump’s victory. The important thing is not to give up | Polly Toynbee

      by

      With wailing woe in the small hours, many of you shared that wrenching despair when the US election result extinguished hope. Beyond reason, beyond reckoning, a nation that was once the beacon of the democratic world has knowingly elected a dangerous, racist demagogue, a “pussy-grabbing” criminal who tried to overthrow the government, a wild conspiracy spreader, a squalid, reckless beast of fathomless vanity and corruption. Caligula, Commodus, Nero, Domitian … This is the way a civilisation dies: by suicide not murder.Donald Trump could now command both houses of Congress and the supreme court, with no steadying countervailing instinct for national self-preservation. “America first” means no allies, no “special relationships”, tariffs for all. Encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want”, Nato be damned. He will send in the military to force mass deportations of millions of migrants. He threatens the justice system with revenge, with protesters and opponents branded “the enemy within”. This democratically elected self-described “dictator” can do whatever he wants. And the tides will carry this poison across the Atlantic, invigorating Europe’s hard right from Nigel Farage to Viktor Orbán, Geert Wilders to Marine Le Pen, the Alternative für Deutschland to the Sweden Democrats.On the morning of the result I was speaking to US students visiting the UK from Pennsylvania, Virginia and New Jersey. One had her head bowed, sighing. Another told me she had wept. They were mainly liberals, the sort who might choose a semester in Europe, and were distressed at how many fellow students had not voted. “My Republican uncle lives up the road, but we don’t speak, not since he had Obama toilet paper when we visited at Thanksgiving. He genuinely believes Kamala is a street walker.” They talk of abortion rights and deep dark misogyny: “American men will not vote for a woman,” one said, and others agreed. Trump voters live across a divide for ever unbridgeable to them. How can this be happening, they want to know. How can civilisation be so fragile?But enough of this, before I rant myself to lunacy, fearing a dark future for children and grandchildren. Is it wise or useful to feel a political event as such a visceral, gut-punching personal calamity? Pollsters remind us that most normal people most of the time think little about politics. Asked “How often, if at all, do you discuss government and politics with others”, 30% say never, 19% a few times a month, 19% less often, leaving 32% at a few times a week and 10% nearly every day. Political obsessives (you and me, Guardian readers) are odd. If you live and breathe it, if you see the world and everything that happens through a political and sociological lens, you are unusual. Many others can travel through life thinking only of family, work and friends without much curiosity about who is governing, how and why, beyond perhaps a distant dislike.Out canvassing you find plenty who say they don’t care about “politics”, as if it were a hobby for a few and not a citizen’s duty nor a question of self-interest. I resist the instinct to shake some sense into them. I do say that “politics” is everything: the ambulance or police car that does or doesn’t arrive, the quality of your air and water, safety of your food or medicines, tax you pay, pensions you draw, the streets and parks, the arts, sports stadiums – and the fairness of how we live. I usually expect a laconic shrug.Is that a better way to be for your own sanity? Life on the left is a long and often unhappy journey through dashed hopes and deep disappointments, elections lost and lost again. The people will insist on making the wrong choices at the ballot box – perverse, nonsensical and against their own interests. Once in a while all that losing gets punctuated by a burst of radiant sunlight when the left occasionally wins – in Britain in my lifetime in 1964, 1974, 1997 and this good year. But when they do succeed, watch how many on the left prefer to get their disillusion in early when their government fails to fix everything all at once, veers off course or compromises with the voters.The Brexit referendum result felt like a shutter falling across the country, dividing us as never before, while casting us adrift from the mainland of our home continent. I found it hard enough then to inhabit the mind of Brexit voters who had done this to us, but to think yourself into the impenetrable Trump-voting psyche is 100 times harder. No, this is not just “metropolitan elite” obtuseness: the other side is equally uncomprehending.Not long before he died, I had a long conversation with the economist and psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who said research shows that those on the left are much less happy than those on the right: US Republicans have always outscored Democrats on the happiness scale. I can see why seething outrage at social injustice and indignation at reactionary governments that defend the interests of the rich against the chances of children is not a pathway to contentment. In comparison, look at the easeful life of complacent conservatism, perched like a Cheshire cat beaming down from the high branches of power.Would it be better to give up all this angst and agonising and arguing? Let things be? Do the gardening, try gourmet cooking, re-read classics of yesteryear, forget whatever public realm lies beyond the immediate horizon of your own small sphere. No, of course not. There is no escaping the danger of Trumpism, only escapism. The unexamined life is not worth living, said Socrates, and that applies equally to the unexamined society in which we live. And when you do examine it, action is required. Each time, pick yourself up, dust yourself off and start all over again confronting the forces of conservatism. The more vicious they become now, the greater the duty to resist. “Never give up,” said the vanquished and exhausted Kamala Harris.

      Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

      Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

    • 113 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      How California has been ‘Trump-proofing’ itself against federal reprisal

      by

      California prided itself on its resistance to Donald Trump during his first term as president and will hardly have to scramble to assume the same role a second time around.Indeed, as a bastion of Democratic party strength in a country moving sharply to the right, it has been preparing for this moment for a long time.“California will continue to be at the forefront of progress, the fulcrum of democracy, the champion of innovation, and the protector of our rights and freedoms,” Adam Schiff, the state’s newly elected senator and a frequent target of Trump’s wrath, promised supporters on election night.On Thursday, Gavin Newsom announced a special session of the California legislature to ensure the attorney general’s office and other state agencies have the funding they need. “We won’t sit idle,” the governor said. “California has faced this challenge before, and we know how to respond.”Even with Trump out of power since 2021, California has been setting up guardrails to protect its resident’s rights under an adversarial federal government. The state has enshrined abortion rights in its constitution, passed a ballot initiative explicitly defending the right of same-sex couples to marry and pushed for tougher gun laws that still adhere to the supreme court’s narrow interpretation of the right to bear arms.It has even considered establishing state funding to meet the cost of wildfires, earthquakes and other natural disasters in case the Trump administration decides to withhold emergency funds from states it deems to be politically hostile, as it sometimes did during its 2017-21 term.View image in fullscreen“We’ve been Trump-proofing the place,” said Elizabeth Ashford, a political consultant who has worked for governors on both sides of the aisle and was Kamala Harris’s chief of staff when she was California’s attorney general. “The work … has been to put measures in place that can withstand shifts in Washington and on the supreme court. These projects have been going on for years.”Asked how ready she thought California was for the new administration, Ashford said: “On a scale from one to 100, we’re starting at about 90.”California is both the most populous US state and its most powerful economy, making it an unusual counterweight to the power of the federal government. It has, for example, negotiated directly with car manufacturers over tailpipe emission standards, thus circumventing the avowed desire of Trump’s allies to end a long-established rule that allows the state to set its own standards.Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

      Trump wins the presidency – how did it happen?

      With Trump re-elected, this is what’s at stake

      Abortion ballot measure results by state
      Where it cannot work around the federal government, it can seek to challenge any hint of government overreach in the courts, as it did more than 130 times during the first Trump administration. Rob Bonta, the state attorney general, told the policy news outlet CalMatters last week that his team had prepared briefs and tested arguments on a range of issues – everything from limits on abortion medication to gun laws and upholding the civil rights of transgender young people.“The best way to protect California, its values, the rights of our people, is to be prepared,” Bonta told CalMatters. “Unfortunately, it’s a long list.”In a statement on Wednesday, Bonta said California will “continue to move forward driven by our values and the ongoing pursuit of progress”. He added: “I’ll use the full force of the law and the full authority of my office to ensure it.”It is unlikely to take long for California and the new administration to butt heads. Newsom has a long record as a Trump antagonist and spent much of the election campaign traveling the country to promote Democratic candidates – all of which makes him a likely lightning rod for Trump’s ire.View image in fullscreenTrump has called Newsom “one of the worst governors in the country” and nicknamed him “New-scum”. Their rivalry is also personal, since Newsom’s ex-wife, Kimberly Guilfoyle, is engaged to Donald Trump Jr.Trump’s former staffers have made little secret of their wish to disrupt the Democratic party’s stranglehold over California politics and have spelled out their intentions in documents like the Project 2025 blueprint that became a lightning rod during the election campaign. Despite Trump’s attempts to distance himself from it, California officials have studied Project 2025 carefully and are assuming it will form the policy backbone of the new administration. One California congressman, Jared Huffman, has described it as a “dystopian nightmare”.There are several ways in which the state can try to disrupt that nightmare. During Trump’s first presidency, for example, state agencies including the California highway patrol refused to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency tasked with aggressive round-ups of immigrants without papers. Police in so-called “sanctuary cities” were similarly protective of their immigrant populations.For all the preparation, though, state officials fear that the new Trump administration will be more organized and more radical than the old one, and that it will have more of a political mandate since a groundswell of California voters – many more than in 2020 or in 2016 – have indicated they are sympathetic to parts of the Trump agenda.Newsom said last week he was particularly concerned about the prospect of widespread raids on immigrants, which could prove devastating to the immigrant-dependent California economy including the vast agricultural concerns based largely in the inland Central valley.There may be other parts of the Trump agenda which, if enacted, could prove difficult to reverse – a national abortion ban passed by Congress, say, or a repeal of the Obama-era Affordable Care Act. And that has many advocacy groups deeply worried about the vulnerable populations they serve.“Our community is feeling very anxious and uncertain,” said Terra Russell-Slavin, a lawyer with the Los Angeles LGBT Center, “particularly given the number of attacks that Trump has explosively targeted toward the LGBTQ community and specifically the trans community”.In response, Russell-Slavin said her organization was working with state and local governments to find alternative funding streams should the federal government cut back on gender-affirming healthcare or homelessness services or senior services. “We’re very fortunate that our lawmakers are overwhelmingly supportive,” she said. “We are very confident they will fight for protections for us.”Will that be enough? For now, California officials are showing their teeth and vowing to fight. But Newsom, for one, is under no illusions about how much is at stake. “No state,” he said last week, “has more to lose or more to gain in this election.”Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

      Democrats ask: ‘How do you spend $1bn and not win?’

      How Trump won the presidency – in maps

      ‘Goodbye, America’: celebrities react to Trump win

      Jon Stewart: ‘This is not the end’

      With Trump re-elected, this is what’s at stake More

    • 288 Shares139 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump has pledged to wage war on planet Earth – and it will take a progressive revolution to stop him | George Monbiot

      by

      We were losing slowly. Now we are losing quickly. Democracy, accountability, human rights, social justice – all were rolling backwards as money swarmed our politics. Above all, our life-support systems – the Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, ecosystems, ice and snow – have been hammered and hammered, regardless of who is in power. Donald Trump might strike the killer blows, but he is not the cause of an ecocidal economic system. He is the embodiment of it.Under Joe Biden, the US was missing its own climate goals, and those goals were insufficient to meet the global objective of limiting heating to 1.5C above preindustrial levels. That target in turn might not be tight enough to prevent a tipping of Earth systems. Already, at roughly 1.3C of heating, we see what looks alarmingly like climatic flickering: the ever wilder perturbations that tend to precede the collapse of a complex system.Trump has pledged to wage war on planet Earth, ripping up US climate commitments and reverting to unrestrained fossil fuel extraction and burning. If he follows the Project 2025 agenda, he will leave the UN climate framework altogether, making his assault on Earth systems much harder to reverse.His evangelical base, eager to advance the biblical apocalypse, will love him for it. Most simply deny climate breakdown. Others perceive events such as floods and fires not as warnings, but as joyous portents of the end of times: a great cleansing, in which the righteous will be uplifted to sit at the right hand of God, while their enemies will be cast into the fiery pit. What we will see under a new Trump presidency is a neat alignment of the interests of fossil fuel companies and a constituency gunning for Armageddon (and hoping that Benjamin Netanyahu will assist its delivery).But let’s not forget: the greatest predicament that humanity has ever faced scarcely featured in this election campaign. If Trump mentioned it, it was to denounce climate breakdown as “one of the great scams of all time”, while Kamala Harris was almost silent on the issue. Perhaps that’s unsurprising, when both candidates relied so heavily on billionaire funding. Capital is always hostile to restraint, and effective environmental policy would be the greatest restraint of all.On almost all fronts, decency and humanity have been retreating for years. Genocide, colonial conquest, the seizure of resources from the poor: all are resurgent, even before Trump returns to the White House. The rich have learned how to game our political systems. Capital has found the means of solving its longstanding problem: democracy.Trump’s conquest of the US is widely seen as something new. But it looks to me like a reversion to the default state of centralised, hierarchical societies. For many centuries, these societies were characterised by extreme power vested in the leader. This power was brokered by a favoured caste, which drew on a justifying belief in the inherent superiority of some groups over others. This caste was empowered to treat other people’s lives as disposable, to criminalise dissent and inflict extreme violence and cruelty upon those who challenged the leader or his ideology. Instead of rational argument, it used symbols, slogans, ceremony and pageantry to reinforce power and create social consensus.A centralised democratic system was always a contradiction. However enlightened the founding fathers of the US (or the liberal reformers in the UK) may have seemed, they created systems in which elite power would never fully relinquish control. These systems were highly vulnerable to capture and reversal. Only a far more decentralised, participatory democracy could resist the reversion to autocratic rule.We have laboured for years under a folk theory of democracy: to win power, you must “make the case” for the politics you want to see, using reasoned argument. Voters will assess the competing arguments. On this basis, and considering the records of the candidates, they will decide which of the factions operating from a distant centre they will elect to govern them for the next four or five years. Then they will trust those representatives to act on their behalf until the next election, on the basis of presumed consent. It was always a fairytale.People seek to destroy what they feel excluded from. Centralised “democracies” exclude all but a rarefied circle from genuine power. Disempowered people tend to be profoundly unimpressed by “rational arguments” for this faction or that one: they have an entirely reasonable desire – however unreasonable its expression may be – to kick the system over. There are constructive ways of doing so, and destructive ways. The majority of US voters have now chosen the destructive path. The message of Trump’s victory seems clear: to hell with your reasoned arguments. Give us reassuring homilies and blood sacrifice.Trump could still be reined in by the midterm elections, but his appointments to the supreme court and its reciprocal grant of almost full-spectrum immunity will enable him to rule in some respects without restraint. In some ways, he can exercise greater power than medieval monarchs could have dreamed of, as the inequality of arms between state and citizens has grown massively in the “democratic” era.Sophisticated propaganda on new media channels, surveillance technologies, new means of crowd control, targeted assassination: as we have seen in other countries, these can be used to snuff out dissent with horrifying efficiency. When I saw the mini drones being used by the Russian government to drop grenades on individual citizens in the Ukrainian city of Kherson, I thought: one day, that could be any of us.Monstrous as he is, Trump is no outlier. He is the distillation of capitalist pseudo-democracy. His values, entirely extrinsic – fixated on prestige, status, image, fame, power and wealth – are the dominant values projected for years on to every screen and into every mind. His criminality is the system’s criminality. His abuse of women, of staff, of customers, of Muslims, of immigrants, of disabled people, of ecosystems, is the abuse the majority of the world’s people have suffered for centuries.What do we do? Stop it from happening in our own countries. This, I believe, requires a massive decentralisation, a devolution of politics to the people, the creation of a genuine democracy that cannot so easily be captured, the building of an ecological civilisation that subordinates economics to Earth systems, not the other way round. No one would claim any of this is easy. But right now, we are readily handing our lives to the Donald Trumps that lurk in every country.

      George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist More

    • 175 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Post-election in Saginaw, Michigan, the swing county in the swing state that swung right

      by

      Saginaw county’s Democrats were sure that the lessons had been learned and that this time it would be different.The Kamala Harris campaign flooded this bellwether county in the crucial battleground state of Michigan with canvassers and advertising, a reaction to Hillary Clinton’s complacent and, as it turned out, misguided belief that she had the area sewn up in 2016.The vice-president and Tim Walz campaigned in Saginaw. Leftist hero Bernie Sanders rallied the local university’s students. Door-knockers and phone bankers urged people to the polls in the hope and expectation of at least eking out the narrow win Joe Biden enjoyed in Saginaw county four years ago.But through it all, there were warnings from those closest to key groups of Saginaw’s voters – union organisers, Black community leaders, social workers for lower-income families, Latino activists – that denouncing Republican demagogue Donald Trump and making vague promises from Harris of a better future were not enough.They cautioned that Harris was not getting through to large numbers of those who struggled the most in a county marked by large economic disparities because she was failing to directly address their concerns, not least inflation and the cost of living.Others said that Harris looked too much like one of the machine politicians so many voters have come to despise, particularly as she avoided taking a stand on key issues or bent to the prevailing political wind.All of them warned that it could cost her the election in Saginaw county, and beyond.And so it proved.Trump won Saginaw county decisively. The vice-president lost by three times as many votes as Clinton in 2016 and did even worse when compared with Biden four years later.Trump beat Harris by more than 3,400 votes on about the same turnout as 2020. In that election, the then president lost to Biden by 303 votes.This year, Trump won an outright majority in Saginaw county with nearly 51% of the vote, more than 1% up on his 2020 tally.On election night, the leader of the county Democrats, Aileen Pettinger, a retired firefighter, bounced into a watch party at a local union hall confident that female voters angry about the US supreme court ruling on abortion and the broader assault on women’s rights had won it for Harris.Local Democrats worked hard to try to bring female Republican voters on board over access to abortion, even leaving Post-it notes in women’s bathrooms reminding them that no one would know if they secretly voted for Harris.But as the results trickled in, the party began to feel like a wake. People drifted away. Whoever was in charge of the music stopped playing Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now. A silence fell as hope bled away.Across town at the Republican watch party, Trump supporters burst into a rendition of the Christian hymn How Great Thou Art after the former and future president gave his victory speech.The initial election results for Saginaw appear to show that Harris lost Biden voters to Trump in some of the poorer areas of the county, including minority neighbourhoods, as well as mostly white suburbs. Harris also failed to mobilise the large numbers of people who usually do not vote in Saginaw. The turnout in the main city was only about 50%.A month ago, Jeff Bulls, president of the Community Alliance for the People in Saginaw, told the Guardian that many voters in lower-income parts of Saginaw were disenchanted with the political process because they did not see that it improved their lives.Bulls warned that Harris’s failure to address issues such as inflation and the cost of housing in a way that would make a difference to those struggling to get by was undermining her campaign. After Harris’s defeat, Bulls said “it’s not unexpected for me”.“She wasn’t really speaking to real people’s issues. You have a lot of poverty here in this county, whether it’s in the city of Saginaw or whether it’s rural people out there. And if you don’t speak to that, you’re not going to inspire people to vote for you, and I felt like her campaign was mostly about just blaming Trump or saying he’s racist. She wasn’t really inspiring people with her own policies, with her own vision, and I think that cost her,” he said.Similar warnings came from union organisers who saw members going with Trump, even though Biden kept telling them how good the economy was, because rising inflation had hit them hard. As loyal Democrats, some couched their warnings carefully in public, not wanting to give ammunition to the Trump campaign.Others were more forthright, including Carly Hammond, a Saginaw organiser for the US’s largest union confederation, the AFL-CIO. She told the Guardian a month ago that the Harris campaign was failing to address the deep distrust of politicians in general, and the Democratic party in particular, among many working people.“It’s the Donald Trump voters in unions that I see. I think most of them are still in the same place,” she said in October.“The trend that I see with labour people who are Trump supporters is a tendency to be very upset with the status quo, which everyone should be. People are going to stick with Trump until they see and they feel like things are getting better for them.”Hammond, whose grandfather worked at one of the many car factories that were once dotted around Saginaw but have since closed, said the Democratic campaign was the biggest election mobilisation she had seen but that Harris lacked “concrete plans” to motivate voters.After the result, Hammond issued a statement saying she was “angry that neither presidential candidate had real acknowledgement of, or plans to address, the real suffering and struggle so many Americans are going through”.Black and Latino community leader organised get-out-the-vote campaigns in the last days before the election as they warned of disenchantment and lack of enthusiasm for Harris.Dan Soza, whose father was the first Latino elected to the Saginaw city council, is a child welfare officer who is deeply alarmed by Trump’s threat of mass deportations. He said that Harris failed to connect with large numbers of Latino voters in the city on what they cared about most: the economy.“There was never any really specific plans. OK, the $25,000 for new home buyers was specific, but where was the specific plan for inflation? Not that the other side added any better answers, but they just never really came out with any concrete plans on what they were going to do,” he said.Soza said that the rise in Latino men voting for Trump in other parts of the country was replicated in Saginaw. He said a lot of that had to do with “fear of a female leader, machismo”.But he said the Democrats also made a mistake in thinking that opposition to Trump’s stance on immigration would play well with Latino voters in places such as Saginaw, where there is a long established Latino community, mostly of Mexican origin, when many of those crossing the border are from Central and South America.“Immigration isn’t as important to them as we think. They took to heart issues like the economy,” he said.The scale of Harris’s loss was emphasised by the success of other Democrats in Saginaw.Kristen McDonald Rivet decisively beat a Republican former prosecutor, Paul Junge, for the open seat in the US House of Representatives covering Saginaw and neighbouring counties. McDonald Rivet took about 51% of the vote, meaning that some people split their vote to support her and Trump.But Bulls is not alone in thinking that the Democratic party needs a wholesale rethink of what it stands for if it is to win back voters in Saginaw.“The Democratic party has to have a come-to-Jesus moment and really revisit who they represent because they’re not speaking to kitchen-table issues. There’s a lot of rhetoric around the middle class. We largely don’t have a middle class, especially in the Black community. We have working class. We have people that are in poverty, and they’re not speaking to them and their struggle, to real issues that poor people are really, really dealing with,” he said.“I would hope that there’s a reckoning and that they revisit who they actually represent, because right now it’s not us.”Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

      Harris urges supporters to ‘never give up’ – read the full speech

      Election takeaways: Democratic drubbing and how women voted

      Abortion ballot measure results by state

      How Trump won the presidency – in maps

      With Trump re-elected, this is what’s at stake More