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      White noise: why hatred of Donald Trump fuels his success as much as his supporters’ love | Ed Coper

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      Historians will long scratch their heads that a Republican candidate who – despite an inability to string a coherent sentence together, being grossly underqualified and rife with extramarital affairs – would go on to not only win election but become one of the most popular presidents in US history.The first candidate to grasp how to use “new media” in a presidential campaign effectively and who – rather than getting to work in Washington after the election, as expected, immediately took off on vacation to play golf.Despite all this, the candidate’s popularity among his “stonehead” supporters grew and grew – “an audience of small town yokels, of low political serfs, or morons scarcely able to understand a word of more than two syllables, and wholly unable to pursue a logical idea for more than two centimeters.” I’m talking, of course, about Warren G Harding and his presidential victory in 1920.The poetic description of Harding’s pre-Maga fanbase comes from HL Mencken, who like Harding was a newspaper man. Mencken helped found the Baltimore Evening Sun, where the above quotes appeared, while Harding (the first and only career journalist to become US president) had cornered the Ohio newspaper market and used it to propel himself first into state office and eventually the presidency.Then, as now, the media were partisan outlets with a worldview and political agenda to push. Each candidate and party had their papers, and their market was those who shared their ideology. Then, as now, the truth mattered little to these markets and the papers were rife with unfounded gossip and hyperbolic claims about the other side.But the social media era has forced news outlets into a stark choice – publish articles that generate the most clicks, or publish articles that motivate your subscribers to pay for news. Both of these things come together at the very same point: Trump.Trump, with his bombastic headline-generating instincts, is both the most clickable and subscribe-able topic for news-consuming audiences to devour – whether you love or hate him. I sat glued to cable news coverage of the election this week as pundits thundered “Why is he so popular?!” into their 327th straight hour of blanket coverage of him.Behind it all, then as now, sits a network of industrialists fuelling a noise machine that keeps us at odds with each other as we feverishly debate Trump-mania.You may recognise some of its manifestations in your own feed here in Australia. Switch on Sky News After Dark or their YouTube feed and you could be mistaken for thinking you’d stumbled upon a Trump paean bent on reshaping Australia into Alabama.Wade into the comments section of any Facebook post talking about offshore wind in the Illawarra and you will see Maga bots sharing the same content they do in New Jersey.Check through the global membership of fossil fuel-backed Atlas network which drives the Trumpian agenda globally and you will find our homegrown Institute of Public Affairs and Advance Australia, they of the Indigenous voice No campaign. Trump is global, and your passions are part of his plan.These ingredients: partisan media ecosystems; supportive crowds whipped into frenzies; wealthy backers keen to exploit the first two ingredients for their own financial gain – these are what have delivered us Trump.Just ask Fox News, where supporters turned away in droves when the network tried to get off the Trump train, only for them to get back on it even if it meant denying the 2020 election results they knew were legitimate. That ended in a $US787m settlement with Dominion voting machines.Just ask the New York Times, which was on the verge of bankruptcy in the years leading up to 2016 until a shock Trump victory sent all the haters to rush to subscribe in defence of fact-based journalism, whose incentive is now to keep them subscribed with a steady stream of Trump schadenfreude. The Maga movement would call it a Trump Derangement Syndrome-based revenue model.Just ask Elon Musk, who has used his acquisition of a social media platform to become a cult-like figure of adoration for crypto-bros, UFC fans and Andrew Tate acolytes with his misinformation-laden Trump sycophancy.Our hatred is as much the oxygen to his fire as his supporters’ love is the fuel. Brace for another four years of obsession and obeisance, depending on which side of the fence you sit. But the net result is the same, as Mencken warned us when faced with the fact people are driven not by sense but by emotion, “the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost”. So too, it appears, will the media.

      Ed Coper is a political commentator and the author of Facts and Other Lies: Welcome to the Disinformation Age. He is the CEO of communications agency Populares, credited with helping create the ‘teal’ political movement More

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      Military officials reportedly discuss how to handle illegal orders from Trump – live

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      Officials at the Pentagon are having informal discussions about what to do if Donald Trump were to give an illegal order, such as deploying the military domestically, CNN reports.They are also preparing for the possibility that he may change rules to be able to fire scores of career civil servants.On the campaign trail, Trump has mulled sending the military after his political enemies, and also to turn back migrants at the southern border. US law generally prohibits active-duty troops from being deployed for law enforcement purposes. There are also fears he could gut the civil service in the Pentagon, and replace fired staff with employees selected for their loyalty to him.Here’s more, from CNN:
      Trump has suggested he would be open to using active-duty forces for domestic law enforcement and mass deportations and has indicated he wants to stack the federal government with loyalists and “clean out corrupt actors” in the US national security establishment.
      Officials are now gaming out various scenarios as they prepare for an overhaul of the Pentagon.
      “We are all preparing and planning for the worst-case scenario, but the reality is that we don’t know how this is going to play out yet,” one defense official said.
      Trump’s election has also raised questions inside the Pentagon about what would happen if the president issued an unlawful order, particularly if his political appointees inside the department don’t push back.
      “Troops are compelled by law to disobey unlawful orders,” said another defense official. “But the question is what happens then – do we see resignations from senior military leaders? Or would they view that as abandoning their people?”
      Martin Pengelly reports for the Guardian on Nancy Pelosi’s comments that Joe Biden’s delay in withdrawing from the race blew Democrats’ chances of winning: Joe Biden’s slowness in exiting the 2024 presidential election cost the Democrats dearly, the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi said, days after Kamala Harris was beaten by Donald Trump.“We live with what happened,” Pelosi said.Pelosi was speaking to the Interview, a New York Times podcast, in a conversation the newspaper said would be published Saturday in full.“Had the president gotten out sooner,” Pelosi remarked, “there may have been other candidates in the race. The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary.For the full story, click here:Here’s a look at where things stand:

      Speaking to the New York Times, Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic former House speaker who played a major role in the pressuring Joe Biden not to seek re-election, said she believed the president waited too long to exit the race, and erred in immediately endorsing Kamala Harris. “Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Pelosi said.

      Officials at the Pentagon are having informal discussions about what to do if Donald Trump were to give an illegal order, such as deploying the military domestically, CNN reports. They are also preparing for the possibility that he may change rules to be able to fire scores of career civil servants.

      Just hours after Donald Trump’s election win on Tuesday, Black people across the US reported receiving racist text messages telling them that they had been “selected” to pick cotton and needed to report to “the nearest plantation”. While the texts, some of which were signed “a Trump supporter”, varied in detail, they all conveyed the same essential message about being selected to pick cotton. Some of the messages refer to the recipients by name.

      Donald Trump, during a call with Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Wednesday, handed the phone to Elon Musk, the New York Times is also reporting, confirming an earlier Axios story. It is not clear what the three men discussed or whether they touched on any change in US policy toward Ukraine in the wake of Trump’s election victory, the Times said.

      The Biden administration has decided to allow US defense contractors to work in Ukraine to maintain and repair Pentagon-provided weaponry, Reuters is reporting, citing US officials. The contractors would be small in number and located far from the frontlines and will not be engaged in combat, an official told the news agency.

      The judge overseeing Donald Trump’s 2020 election interference case has granted a request from the special counsel’s office to pause proceedings in his trial on charges related to trying to overturn the 2020 election. As we reported earlier, Jack Smith asked judge Tanya Chutkan to pause the case against the president-elect to “assess the unprecedented circumstances” in which the office finds itself.
      Donald Trump yesterday announced that his campaign co-chair Susie Wiles will be his chief of staff in the White House.He’s expected to announce more appointments to prominent administration positions soon. The Guardian’s Lorenzo Tondo took a look at who might be in the running:Officials at the Pentagon are having informal discussions about what to do if Donald Trump were to give an illegal order, such as deploying the military domestically, CNN reports.They are also preparing for the possibility that he may change rules to be able to fire scores of career civil servants.On the campaign trail, Trump has mulled sending the military after his political enemies, and also to turn back migrants at the southern border. US law generally prohibits active-duty troops from being deployed for law enforcement purposes. There are also fears he could gut the civil service in the Pentagon, and replace fired staff with employees selected for their loyalty to him.Here’s more, from CNN:
      Trump has suggested he would be open to using active-duty forces for domestic law enforcement and mass deportations and has indicated he wants to stack the federal government with loyalists and “clean out corrupt actors” in the US national security establishment.
      Officials are now gaming out various scenarios as they prepare for an overhaul of the Pentagon.
      “We are all preparing and planning for the worst-case scenario, but the reality is that we don’t know how this is going to play out yet,” one defense official said.
      Trump’s election has also raised questions inside the Pentagon about what would happen if the president issued an unlawful order, particularly if his political appointees inside the department don’t push back.
      “Troops are compelled by law to disobey unlawful orders,” said another defense official. “But the question is what happens then – do we see resignations from senior military leaders? Or would they view that as abandoning their people?”
      Nancy Pelosi also said she disagreed with Bernie Sanders, the progressive independent senator who said Democrats had “abandoned working-class people” after Kamala Harris’s election loss.“Bernie Sanders has not won,” Pelosi said in her interview with the New York Times.“With all due respect, and I have a great deal of respect for him, for what he stands for, but I don’t respect him saying that the Democratic party has abandoned the working-class families.”The former speaker instead blamed cultural issues for Harris’s loss to Donald Trump. “Guns, God and gays – that’s the way they say it,” Pelosi told the Times.“Guns, that’s an issue; gays, that’s an issue, and now they’re making the trans issue such an important issue in their priorities; and in certain communities, what they call God, what we call a woman’s right to choose.”Speaking to the New York Times, Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic former House speaker who played a major role in the pressuring Joe Biden not to seek re-election, said she believed the president waited too long to exit the race, and erred in immediately endorsing Kamala Harris.“Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Pelosi said. Shortly after announcing in July that he would end his bid for a second term, Biden endorsed Harris, setting the stage for her to become the Democratic nominee. Harris went on to lose the presidential election to Donald Trump on Tuesday, and in the interview conducted two days later, Pelosi said Democrats would have benefited from a primary to choose their candidate.“The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary,” she said.“And as I say, Kamala may have, I think she would have done well in that and been stronger going forward. But we don’t know that. That didn’t happen. We live with what happened. And because the president endorsed Kamala Harris immediately, that really made it almost impossible to have a primary at that time. If it had been much earlier, it would have been different.”Donald Trump has attacked California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, who yesterday called the state legislature into a special session to enact laws intended to counter the Republican president-elect’s agenda.“Governor Gavin Newscum is trying to KILL our Nation’s beautiful California. For the first time ever, more people are leaving than are coming in. He is using the term ‘Trump-Proof’ as a way of stopping all of the GREAT things that can be done to ‘Make California Great Again,’ but I just overwhelmingly won the Election,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.He also restated his support for voting laws that could make it more difficult to cast ballots: “Also, as an ‘AGENT’ for the United States of America on Voting & Elections, I will be DEMANDING THAT VOTER I.D., AND PROOF OF CITIZENSHIP, ARE A NECESSARY PART AND COMPONENT OF THE VOTING PROCESS!”Donald Trump’s transition team could announce additional White House positions as early as today, CNN is reporting.As we reported earlier, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner is not expected to return to a new Trump administration but could advise on Middle East policy.The Financial Times is reporting that the North Dakota governor, Doug Burgum, is being tapped to be Trump’s new “energy tsar”.Burgum is Trump’s preferred candidate for the role, the paper writes, adding that former energy secretary Dan Brouillette is also a contender.Just hours after Donald Trump’s election win on Tuesday, Black people across the US reported receiving racist text messages telling them that they had been “selected” to pick cotton and needed to report to “the nearest plantation”.While the texts, some of which were signed “a Trump supporter”, varied in detail, they all conveyed the same essential message about being selected to pick cotton. Some of the messages refer to the recipients by name.Black people in states including Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia, New York, New Jersey, Nevada, the DC area and elsewhere reported receiving the messages.The messages were sent to Black adults and students, including to high schoolers in Massachusetts and New York, and students at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), such as Alabama State University and other schools, including ones across Ohio, Clemson University, the University of Alabama and Missouri State.At least six middle school students in Pennsylvania received the messages, according to the AP.Authorities including the FBI and attorneys general are investigating the messages.Jim Banks, the Republican Indiana senator-elect, said he hopes that every undocumented immigrant who came to the US illegally under the Biden administration will be deported once Donald Trump is in office.“It’s my hope that we deport every single one of them that we can, and it starts with deporting violent criminals who are in the United States who came here illegally who have committed violent crimes,” Banks told CNN on Friday.“I think once you do that, President Trump is committed to making that his first and top priority when it comes to mass deportation.”Asked how those plans would be carried out, Banks said he didn’t think it would be “that complicated”.He said the American people had given Trump and the Republicans “a mandate to do everything that we can.”“The goal should be to deport every illegal in this country that we can find,” he added. More

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      Nancy Pelosi says Biden’s delay in exiting race blew Democrats’ chances

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      Joe Biden’s slowness in exiting the 2024 presidential election cost the Democrats dearly, the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi said, days after Kamala Harris was beaten by Donald Trump.“We live with what happened,” Pelosi said.Pelosi was speaking to The Interview, a New York Times podcast, in a conversation the newspaper said would be published Saturday in full.“Had the president gotten out sooner,” Pelosi remarked, “there may have been other candidates in the race. The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary.“And as I say, Kamala may have, I think she would have done well in that and been stronger going forward. But we don’t know that. That didn’t happen. We live with what happened. And because the president endorsed Kamala Harris immediately, that really made it almost impossible to have a primary at that time. If it had been much earlier, it would have been different.”As Democrats engaged in bitter blame games over Harris’s defeat and a second presidency for Trump, who senior Democrats from Harris down freely called a “fascist”, Pelosi’s words landed like an explosive shell.The Times said Pelosi “went to great lengths to defend the Biden administration’s legislative accomplishments, most of which took place during his first two years, when she was the House speaker”.Republicans took the House in 2022. Pelosi, now 84, was re-elected this week to a 20th two-year term.Biden was 78 when elected in 2020 and is now just short of 82. He long rejected doubts about his continued capacity for office, but they exploded into the open after a calamitous first debate against Trump, 78, in June.On 21 July, the president took the historic decision to step aside as the Democratic nominee. Within minutes, he endorsed Harris to replace him.Pelosi reportedly played a key role in persuading Biden to stand aside. But she has not sought to soothe his feelings. In August, she told the New Yorker she had “never been that impressed with his political operation”.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
      skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionShe said: “They won the White House. Bravo. But my concern was: this ain’t happening, and we have to make a decision for this to happen. The president has to make the decision for that to happen.”Biden is widely reported to be furious with the former speaker. This week, reports have said the president and his senior staffers are furious with Barack Obama, under whom Biden served as vice-president but who also helped push Biden to drop out of the re-election race.According to the Times, Pelosi also rejected comments from Bernie Sanders in which the independent senator from Vermont said Trump won because Democrats “abandoned working-class people” – remarks the chair of the Democratic National Committee, Jaime Harrison, called “straight-up BS”.“Bernie Sanders has not won,” Pelosi said. “With all due respect, and I have a great deal of respect for him, for what he stands for, but I don’t respect him saying that the Democratic party has abandoned the working-class families.”According to Pelosi, cultural issues pushed American votes to Trump.“Guns, God and gays – that’s the way they say it,” she said. “Guns, that’s an issue. Gays, that’s an issue. And now they’re making the trans issue such an important issue in their priorities, and in certain communities, what they call God, what we call a woman’s right to choose” regarding abortion and other reproductive care. More

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      Incoming Trump presidency threatens millions of Americans’ healthcare plans

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      Millions of Americans are at risk of losing health coverage in 2025 under Donald Trump’s forthcoming administration.More than 20 million Americans rely on the individual private health insurance market for healthcare, private insurance which is subsidized by the federal government.These subsidies, programs that help lower the cost of health insurance premiums, increased the amount of assistance available to people who want to buy health insurance through the Affordable Care Act, dubbed Obamacare as a signature piece of legislation during Barack Obama’s administration.This specific subsidy program resulted from the Biden administration’s 2021 American Rescue Plan and is set to expire at the end of 2025.“The consequences of more people going uninsured are really significant, not just at an individual level with more medical debt and less healthy outcomes, but also has ripple effects for providers,” Sabrina Corlette, a research professor and co-director of the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University, said.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
      “Premiums go up for the people who do have health insurance; for the people without health insurance, it’s financially devastating. The result is medical debt, garnished wages and liens on people’s homes because they can’t pay off their bills,” she said.The American Rescue Plan not only added additional subsidies, but also broadened the eligibility requirements, extending them to many more people in the US middle class.It was announced earlier this year by the Biden-Harris administration that 21.3 million people selected an Affordable Care Act health insurance marketplace plan during the 2024 0pen enrollment period.With Republicans now having won control of the presidency, the Senate and possibly the House, it is highly likely that Congress will not vote to extend the coverage next year.President-elect Trump said during the presidential debate with his Democratic rival, Kamala Harris, that he had “concepts of a plan” to replace the Affordable Care Act but has yet to reveal them. He previously attempted to replace the ACA in favor of the American Health Care Act, a bill to repeal subsidies and regulations, which failed in the Senate in 2017.The subsidies helped Obamacare enrollment nearly double during Biden’s term, a record high. The enrollment was highest in southern Republican-voting states. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reports that the share of people without health insurance reached an all-time low of 7.2% in 2023.“The 2021 boosts [in subsidies] helped millions of people afford health insurance,” Corlette said. “It’s led to the lowest uninsured rate we’ve seen in this country and helped boost financial security for millions of families.”Last month, the Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, took a stance against the ACA at an event in Pennsylvania, telling a crowd there would be “massive” healthcare changes in America if Donald Trump won the election.The CBO estimates nearly 4 million people will lose their coverage in 2026 if the subsidies are not extended because they won’t be able to afford the rising cost of healthcare plans. Lower-income Americans would still receive some federal assistance, while those it the middle class would lose it altogether.Despite the 2021 subsidies having extended coverage to more than 20 million people, the ACA remains a flawed option for healthcare coverage and has been a major factor in driving medical debt.For 2025, the out-of-pocket limit for a marketplace plan cannot be more than $9,200 for an individual and $18,400 for a family, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. These prices represent the legal limit that insurers can have people spend on their plans.But policy experts insist that the ACA’s imperfect system is still preferable to millions of Americans going without health insurance.Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

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      Trump White House: after Susie Wiles, who else could be in the cabinet

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      The former US president Donald Trump, due to return to the White House in January, has not yet engaged in formal discussions regarding his new cabinet. Nevertheless, amid his plane journeys, television appearances and rallies, speculation and rumours have swirled around several figures who could find roles in his administration.Confirmed offers of a roleSusie WilesView image in fullscreenConfirmed role: Chief of staffTrump has named Susie Wiles as his White House chief of staff, the first woman to hold the influential role. She was previously the campaign manager for his successful bid for re-election. Although her political views remain somewhat ambiguous, she is seen as having led a successful and streamlined presidential race. Supporters believe she could introduce a level of organisation and discipline that was frequently absent throughout Trump’s first term, marked by a series of changes in the chief of staff role.Expected cabinet picksElon MuskView image in fullscreenPotential role: unspecifiedElon Musk, who turned into a fully fledged cheerleader for Trump and who holds billions in federal contracts, has reportedly sought a role in a second Trump administration in charge of the regulators that oversee him. Trump has appeared to rule out a cabinet role for Musk, but has said he wants the tech billionaire to have some sort of an unspecified role in his administration. The world’s wealthiest person has proposed the establishment of a Department of Government Efficiency.Robert F Kennedy JrView image in fullscreenPotential role: unspecifiedRobert F Kennedy Jr, the son of the assassinated Bobby Kennedy and nephew of JFK, whose independent campaign for president has at times reached as high as 10% of the vote, strongly believes he has a shot at a role in Trump’s cabinet after he backed the Republican. While senior members of Trump’s campaign have ruled out Kennedy getting a job in the Department of Health, Trump has said he would let him “do what he wants” with women’s healthcare if he makes it to the White House, citing how Kennedy would be able to “go wild” on food and medicines.Doug BurgumView image in fullscreenPotential role: ‘energy tsar’The Financial Times reports that Doug Burgum, governor of North Dakota, is being considered for an “energy tsar” role. The role and its powers have yet to be finalised. However, Trump has called the climate crisis “one of the great scams of all time” and has promised to “drill, baby, drill”. It’s expected any climate or energy secretary would be tasked with rolling back environmental regulations.In 2023, Burgum ran a short-lived campaign for the Republican nomination for president. He went on to become a highly visible, prolific Trump surrogate and advised Trump on energy policy.Mike PompeoView image in fullscreenPotential role: secretary of defenceMike Pompeo, a former CIA director and secretary of state and devoted ally of Trump, chose not to challenge his ex-boss for the Republican nomination. The staunch supporter of Israel and a sworn enemy of Iran is widely considered a key contender for a top role in the new administration, possible as secretary of defence.Richard GrenellView image in fullscreenPotential role: secretary of stateRichard Grenell, an ex-Fox News contributor who is among Trump’s closest foreign policy advisers, is probably in the running for secretary of state or other top foreign policy and national security posts. A former US ambassador to Germany and vocal backer of Trump’s America First credo on the international stage in his first term, he has advocated for setting up an autonomous zone in eastern Ukraine to end the war there, a position Kyiv considers unacceptable.Tom CottonView image in fullscreenPotential role: secretary of defenceThe far-right Republican senator from Arkansas emerged as a dark-horse contender to be Trump’s running mate in the final weeks of the vice-presidential selection process. In a notorious 2020 New York Times op-ed headlined Send In the Troops, Tom Cotton, likened Black Lives Matter protests to a rebellion and urged the government to deploy the US military against demonstrators by invoking the Insurrection Act. He is well liked among Trump donors and also seen as a contender for secretary of defence.Cotton has said he won’t take a role.Ben CarsonView image in fullscreenPotential role: secretary of housing and urban developmentA retired neurosurgeon and former US housing secretary, Ben Carson has pushed for a national abortion ban – a posture at odds with most Americans and even Donald Trump himself. During his 2016 run he ran into controversy when he likened abortion to slavery and said he wanted to see the end of Roe v Wade. When the supreme court reversed its decision in the Dobbs case, he called it “a crucial correction”. Carson could be nominated by Trump as housing and urban development secretary.Scott BessentView image in fullscreenPotential role: unspecifiedA key economic adviser to Trump and ally of JD Vance, Scott Bessent, the manager of Key Square macro hedge fund, is seen as a possible cabinet contender. The Wall Street investor and a prominent Trump fundraiser has praised Trump’s use of tariffs as a negotiating tool.Mike WaltzView image in fullscreenPotential role: secretary of defence, or secretary of stateA former US army green beret, who now serves as a congressman for Florida, Michael Waltz has solidified his reputation as a leading advocate for a tougher stance on China within the House of Representatives. He played a leading role in sponsoring legislation aimed at reducing the US’s dependence on minerals sourced from China. Waltz is known to have a solid friendship with Trump and has also voiced support for US assistance to Ukraine, while concurrently pushing for greater oversight of American taxpayer funds allocated to support Kyiv’s defence efforts. He has been tipped in the US media as a contender for either defence secretary or secretary of state.Robert LighthizerView image in fullscreenPotential role: trade or commerce secretaryRobert Lighthizer is Donald Trump’s most senior trade official. He is a firm believer in tariffs and was one of the leading figures in Trump’s trade war with China. Described by Trump as “the greatest United States trade representative in American history”, Lighthizer is almost certain to be back in the new cabinet. Though Scott Bessent and the billionaire hedge fund manager John Paulson probably have a better shot at becoming treasury secretary, Lighthizer has a few outside chances: he might be able to reprise his old role as US trade representative or become the new commerce secretary.Brooke RollinsView image in fullscreenPotential role: unspecifiedA former domestic policy adviser in the White House, Brooke Rollins has a close personal relationship with Trump. Considered by many to be one of Trump’s more moderate advisers, she backed the former president’s first-term criminal justice reforms that lessened prison sentences for some relatively minor offences.Donald Trump JrView image in fullscreenPotential role: unspecifiedAlthough he has been less prominent on the campaign trail than in previous election cycles, the 47th president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr, was active behind the scenes and advocated for his friend JD Vance as running mate. He has built a loyal following in the Maga universe via his Triggered podcast and has taken a role along with his brother Eric Trump in the transition process to establish a new administration. The formal co-chairs of the transition are the Cantor Fitzgerald chief executive, Howard Lutnick, and Linda McMahon, the former wrestling executive who led the Small Business Administration during Trump’s first term.Stephen MillerView image in fullscreenPotential role: unspecifiedA senior policy adviser in the early part of Trump’s first term who was the chief architect of the Muslim travel ban, Stephen Miller is expected to be back in the White House for a second Trump term that the president-elect has said will bring the largest mass deportation in US history. The anti-immigration extremist is also the founder of America First Legal, a group described by him as the right’s “long-awaited answer” to the American Civil Liberties Union, and is already helping drive plans for the second Trump term.Includes reporting by Reuters More

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      ‘A big cratering’: an expert on gen Z’s surprise votes – and young women’s growing support for Trump

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      Long before voting closed in the 2024 elections, pundits predicted that young Americans would be riven by a canyon-wide gender gap. Those predictions turned out to be correct.As a whole, Kamala Harris won voters between the ages of 18 and 29 by six points. But preliminary exit polling indicates that Donald Trump opened up a 16-point gender gap between young men and young women: 56% of men between the ages of 18 and 29 voted for Trump while just 40% of their female peers did so.Even more surprisingly, Trump managed to improve on his 2020 performance among young women, despite that gap. In 2020, 33% of young women voted for him.Earlier in the campaign, polling indicated that abortion was the top issue for women under 30. Other surveys also found that young women have veered to the left, becoming, by some measures, the most progressive cohort ever measured in US history – but many did not vote like it. In fact, many appeared not to vote at all. Early estimates show that only 42% of young people turned out to vote. That’s less than in the 2020 election.The political scientist Melissa Deckman runs the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and recently published The Politics of Gen Z: How the Youngest Voters Will Shape Our Democracy. Although she’s an expert on the youth vote, and in particular on how young women vote, even she was taken aback by Tuesday’s results – and especially by the diminished turnout, as her research has found that young women are more politically engaged than ever.We discussed what we can glean from the youth vote, what it indicates about young people’s lives and what it means for the future of the United States.We’re still waiting for more detailed data on how young men and women prioritized issues in this campaign, but what do we know so far about the issues that were most important to gen Z?By and large, it was the economy. For gen Z voters who care about the economy, they really broke for Donald Trump.Abortion really dropped as being the most salient issue for younger people. I think that was the most surprising to me.If you look at the youth vote in 2022 – and this is all young voters, not just men or women – 44% said abortion was the issue they put at their top priority. Whereas this fall, the issue was only 13% [exit polling shows]. That’s a pretty big cratering.Typically, why do we see gender gaps like this?The gender gap among gen Z voters reflects the larger gender gap we’ve often seen historically in this country. Women have tended to vote for Democrats while men have tended to vote for Republicans, and we saw that same pattern among women more generally and men more generally this election cycle. Historically, that’s been because women have tended to want a larger size and scope of government. They tend to be more supportive of government programs. Men have tended to vote pocketbook issues and want less government.Why do you think we saw such a gender gap between gen Z men and women?A lot of young women came of age politically during the Trump presidency. We often in political science talk about these being “the impressionable years” – that a lot of people often develop their orientations toward government as late teens, early adults. They’re witnessing the election of Trump, who has said openly misogynistic things, who many women have [spoken out] about how they’ve been harassed and even assaulted by him. He bragged about sexual assault on that infamous Access Hollywood tape.You combine that with the #MeToo movement a couple years later, which was a larger, broader conversation about sexual harassment and its prevalence in society. That made a cognitive dissonance for these young women: America’s elected Trump in an era where we’re recognizing that sexual harassment is a problem. It made them far less likely to embrace the GOP.This generation of young women is strongly supportive of abortion legality, and they’re having fewer rights than their mothers and grandmothers. All of those things together have fomented for them a gender consciousness in ways that we don’t see with older generations of American women.What’s notable about gen Z, however, is that unlike perhaps the last several election cycles – where you had a majority of young men voting for Democrats, either for Congress or for Biden in 2020 – we saw a more rightward turn in voting behavior among young men, and that’s probably driven by two things. One: the Democratic party didn’t have a convincing message for a lot of young men, especially on the economy. Secondly: Donald Trump’s decision to meet young men where they are – going on Joe Rogan – it sent the message that he cared about their votes. When you don’t have someone willing to fight for your votes and talk about your interests, you’re less interested in voting for that party.View image in fullscreenThe 2022 midterms took place only months after the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade in the decision Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Since then, we’ve seen more than a dozen states ban almost all abortions and heard reports of at least four women dying as a result of abortion bans. After all that, why has abortion become less important to young women?Dobbs – it was such a political earthquake. It really, really motivated young women to vote at much higher levels in that midterm election. But you also have to remember the electorate in a midterm is different than the electorate in a general election, and midterm elections tend to draw more motivated voters to begin with. To think that that was going to carry over in 2024 maybe was not the most accurate prediction.I’m really struck that gen Z stayed home in ways they didn’t in 2020. It was one of the biggest surprises for me – mainly because we’ve seen, in the last three federal election cycles, gen Z outperforming younger voters in earlier cycles.Gen Z is really mistrustful of institutions – at higher rates than an older Americans. Perhaps they felt like they’ve gone to the ballot box, they’ve tried to make these changes and they haven’t really seen enough action. Maybe this is a reflection of the fact that increasingly younger voters are are less in tune to government and don’t think government can provide them solutions to their problems.So why was the economy so important to gen Z?skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionEconomic anxiety is really palpable among this generation. They’re disproportionately more likely to feel the pain of the economy because they want to move out of their parents’ basement. They can’t afford rent or to buy a house. They have massive student loan debt. There’s a sense among younger people that the American dream isn’t really available for them.Even though you have, on a macro level, some indicators of the economy doing quite well – low unemployment, some growth, there’s even actually been a reduction in inflation – that doesn’t matter. Because you have younger Americans really feeling the pinch of higher prices.In many ways, maybe young voters were just like older Americans, in voting their pocketbook and being unhappy with the status quo politically.Do you think the Harris campaign then erred in centering abortion so much?Public opinion polls show that most Americans are broadly supportive of abortion legality – like more than two-thirds. It’s even higher for young women. We find about seven in 10 say abortion should be legal in all or most cases. So I don’t think it was necessarily a bad strategy.I do think, though, that it’s a strategy that assumes that abortion was the top issue that voters cared about. Perhaps focusing more on the economy and how her policies would help young people – maybe more attention should have been focused there.We expected – and my data has shown – that when gen Z women have been able to vote, they tend to have voted for Democrats, for House or Senate or president. They broke really wide for Biden in 2020.It was still a pretty big gap [in 2024]. Most young women really preferred Harris over Trump, by far.What do you think this portends for the future? Are these younger women a little bit more amenable to Republicans – or are they just amenable to Trump?That’s the million-dollar question.[On the issues] young women are really to the left, and I don’t see any evidence that any of those things will change. They’re far more likely to prioritize climate change than gen Z men are. They want to do more to mitigate gun violence. They want to have more spending on mental health. They are very, very supportive of LGBTQ+ rights and racial justice.If young people find that their economic situation hasn’t improved in four years, I could totally see them going in the other direction. I don’t see a massive switch or any kind of realignment happening necessarily.Notably, young men are more liberal [than conservative] on these same policies. But I think that young men who are disaffected, who feel like women’s gains have come at their expense – this is a common theme you hear on the manosphere – they were receptive to a change.This interview reflects two conversations and has been edited for length and clarity.Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

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      Judge strikes down Biden plan to help undocumented spouses of US citizens

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      A federal judge has struck down a Biden administration policy that aimed to ease a path to citizenship for some undocumented immigrants who are married to US citizens.The program, lauded as one of the biggest presidential actions to help immigrant families in years, allowed undocumented spouses and stepchildren of US citizens to apply for a green card, the right to permanent legal residency, without first having to leave the country.About half a million foreign-born spouses of US citizens were estimated to have been eligible for the Biden administration’s initiative that was announced in June under the banner “Keeping Families Together”. Applications opened on 19 August.The temporary relief from deportation brought a brief sense of security to those estimated to benefit from the program before the Texas-based US district judge Campbell Barker put it on hold just days after applicants filed their paperwork.Immigration advocates condemned that ruling as “heartbreaking”, saying it could separate mixed-status families for years – or even permanently while their lengthy green card applications are processed.Then on Thursday, the day after Donald Trump recaptured the White House for the Republicans, Barker ruled that the Biden administration had overstepped its authority by implementing the program and had stretched the legal interpretation of relevant immigration law “past its breaking point”.The short-lived initiative would have been unlikely to remain in place after Trump took office in January anyway. But its early termination creates greater uncertainty for immigrant families as many are bracing for Trump’s return to the White House.He has promised a swift and massive crackdown on undocumented people after running on promises of mass deportation and making the US-Mexico border a top election issue for voters, even many hundreds of miles away from the border states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California.The president-elect energized his supporters on the campaign trail with a litany of anti-immigrant statements, especially about asylum seekers and thousands crossing the southern border from Mexico, Central and South America, and troubled Caribbean nations such as Haiti and Cuba, including that immigrants were “poisoning the blood” of the nation.Trump and his vice-president-elect, JD Vance, repeated racist stories, particularly about Haitian immigrants living in the US legally, and whipped up anxiety among their supporters.Fears of anti-immigration roundups, detention and deportation are now rippling through undocumented communities across the US, with the looming threat of families being torn apart and the expulsion of people who have lived law-abiding lives in the US for years, even though the logistics and costs of doing so have not been grappled with by the Trump team.During his first term, Trump appointed Barker as a judge in Tyler, Texas, which lies in the fifth US circuit court of appeals, a favored venue for advocates pushing conservative arguments.Barker had placed the immigration initiative on hold after Texas and 15 other states, led by their Republican attorneys general, filed a legal challenge accusing the executive branch of bypassing Congress to help immigrant families for “blatant political purposes”.Republicans argued the initiative created costs for their states and could draw more migrants to the US.Non-citizen spouses are already eligible for legal status but often have to apply from their home countries, which can take years.Meanwhile, Mexico will continue pursuing measures to stop migrants from reaching its northern border with the US, its top diplomat said on Friday.The foreign minister, Juan Ramón de la Fuente, stressed that Mexico’s model was working and would stay in place, pointing to data that shows the number of migrants apprehended by US authorities at the border had fallen 76% since last December, after sharp rises and then measures including a crackdown on asylum rights by Joe Biden.“It’s working well and we’re going to continue on this path,” he told a press conference.At the same conference Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s president, confirmed that she had spoken to Trump about the border in their first telephone call a day earlier while also pointing to the sharp fall in migrant crossings.“He raised the issue of the border, and he just said it, and I told him, ‘Yes, there is the issue of the border, but there will be space to talk about it,’” said Sheinbaum, who described the conversation as “very cordial”.Much like he did in his previous term as president, Trump has threatened to slap 25% tariffs on all Mexican exports unless its government stops migrants and drugs from crossing the shared border.Mexico is extraordinarily reliant on the US market, which is the destination of about 80% of its exports.The Associated Press and Reuters contributed reporting More

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      California’s attorney general readies the fight against Trump’s extreme agenda: ‘We’re prepared’

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      California was considered a leader in fighting the most extreme policies of Donald Trump’s first administration, and after the Republican’s decisive win this week, officials in the Golden state say they are more prepared to resist Trump’s expected agenda for his second term.Rob Bonta, California’s attorney general, will be a crucial figure in that effort, tasked with spearheading litigation and defending vulnerable Californians’ rights in the courtroom. It’s a tall order as the president-elect has promised policies that could threaten the state’s immigrant population, LGBTQ+ residents, climate initiatives, gun safety measures, healthcare programs and abortion rights.But Bonta, in an interview with the Guardian on Thursday, said his office was ready on every front.“I know a lot of people are anxious and worried, concerned, fearful, angry, sad,” said the Democrat, who now occupies the seat previously held by Kamala Harris. “I’m not happy with the results, but I’m energized and ready to fight … I’m ready to do my job and lean in hard and punch back and push back and fight back against any attacks from the Trump administration on California’s ongoing progress.”Bonta’s efforts could have a significant impact in the most populous and diverse state in the US, home to the fifth largest economy in the world and considered a leader on progressive policies.In Trump’s first term, Bonta recalled, California successfully fought Trump’s “public charge” rule, which sought to block green cards for immigrants who accessed certain benefits, such as food stamps. The state also sued to prevent Trump from denying funds to sanctuary cities, and helped stop the former president’s effort to end Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca), a program that protects immigrants who entered the US unauthorized as children.“Trump has a very difficult time resisting the temptation to violate the law,” said Bonta, saying he expected the president-elect to once again use executive action to make changes that require congressional action. “If he wanted to take a blowtorch to the Affordable Care Act and end it on day one by executive order … he can’t do it.” Trump recently said he had “concepts of a plan” to replace the popular Obama-era program that expanded healthcare coverage, and his victory has raised alarms among public health advocates.Bonta said he had been in discussion with attorneys general across the US – sharing briefs, memos and knowledge from their fights during Trump’s first term – and they were primed to coordinate lawsuits as needed: “It’s all hands on deck, use every tool that you have. Litigation will certainly be one of the most potent and powerful ones.“We’ve been preparing for months, in some cases years,” he continued. After Roe v Wade was overturned in 2022, his staff wrote a legal brief to challenge a national abortion ban, a draft he has ready, if necessary. His staff has also monitored comments by Trump’s inner circle and reviewed Project 2025, the rightwing blueprint for his second term drafted by Trump’s allies.“We’ve got a lot in our back pocket ready to drop,” he said. “In some [cases], the whole strategy is thought through – the court we file in, when we file it, based on what action the Trump administration takes. We’ve just gotta dot the Is and cross the Ts and press print. But we are very far along, very advanced in our preparation.”Trump has threatened unprecedented mass deportations, an agenda that was partially thwarted in his first term by California and other blue states that passed sanctuary laws limiting local law enforcement cooperation with federal immigration agents. California Democrats will face pressure from immigrant rights’ groups to expand those sanctuary policies, which advocates say are not currently the strongest in the nation. California prisons, for example, continue to coordinate with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), which helps drive deportations, but Gavin Newsom, the state governor, has previously vetoed efforts to prevent cooperation with Ice.Bonta said officials should be exploring ways to “reinforce and strengthen” the existing sanctuary law, though he didn’t offer specifics.Newsom has called a special legislative session in December for lawmakers to discuss ways to “Trump-proof” state laws, and immigration will probably be a priority.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“The federal government can’t conscript or commandeer state or local resources or law enforcement agencies to do their job [of immigration enforcement],” Bonta said, describing the current sanctuary policies. “There could be some additions that could help make that stronger.”He said he would be looking for ways to ensure the sanctuary law is properly followed and implemented across the state. Advocates are also bracing for rightwing pro-Trump sheriffs in conservative counties to potentially violate California’s sanctuary rules. Bonta said he would respond if that happens: “They are law enforcement officers. They need to enforce the law. They can’t pick and choose the laws they want to enforce … if they’re going to politicize it and break the law, then we’ll be there to hold them accountable.”Trump has also promised a major rollback of LGBTQ+ rights and some of his campaign ads have spread significant misinformation about the rights of transgender Americans, particularly around healthcare and sports. He has pledged to revoke funding from hospitals that provide gender-affirming care to youth, punish schools that affirm trans youth and push a law stating the government doesn’t legally recognize trans people.California was the first state in 2022 to establish itself as a sanctuary for trans kids seeking healthcare, and Bonta’s office successfully sued a local school district over its policy that would have required schools to out trans and gender non-conforming students to their parents.“We’ve been fighting on so many fronts against the attacks on our transgender kids, whether fighting for them to be able to play sports … or use the bathroom consistent with their gender identity, or be able to go to a doctor’s office and have gender-affirming care,” he said. “We will continue … The courts are a good place to find relief when you target and single out someone based on their protected class.”Bonta advocated for Harris during the election and was hoping he would not need to stand up to the federal government. “I didn’t want this outcome,” he said. “I was working to have a different outcome, but I couldn’t guarantee [it] … so we needed to be prepared for the possibility of [Trump]. Unfortunately, this outcome is here. Fortunately, though, we’re ready for it, because we prepared.”Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

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