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      The long Obama era is over | Osita Nwanevu

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      The ever-splenetic HL Mencken once wrote that “democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard”. He was no liberal, but it’s a line many Democrats today would be taken with. On Tuesday, the first wave of election postmortems have lamented, the American people took the full measure of Donald Trump ⁠– oaf, cheat, bigot and fascist ⁠– and re-elected him under no illusions, in full cognizance of what another Trump term would mean for the country.One can quibble with this just a bit: there’s a lot that emerged over the course of this campaign that most voters probably didn’t know much about, from a plan to invade Mexico that Trump may well have forgotten himself to late breaking news on the depth of his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Still, frustrated Democrats are directionally correct here on the whole. Trump won this election fairly, squarely and soundly as a well-known quantity ⁠– a former president and the most widely discussed man in the world, who will return to the White House in his 10th year at the center of American life.It remains alarmingly unclear how much worse the term we’re in for will be than Trump’s first, but those at the margins of American society may find out sooner than most. Mass deportations, he’s claimed, will begin on day one; according to Stephen Miller, Trump’s plan here includes the construction of “large-scale staging grounds”⁠ – internment camps ⁠– for immigrants along the southern border.It’s plain to all now that the specter of a crackdown and all that Trump has said and done on immigration weren’t a dealbreaker for Hispanic voters, many of whom have drifted towards Trump and the right, polls show, out of a faith that Trump isn’t really talking about them ⁠– that his focus is and will remain on immigrants who are ill-behaved.A tiny but unforgettable data point on this front was offered up on Wednesday by a reporter from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, who posted up outside an Ice field office and encountered undocumented immigrants who told him they would have voted for Trump themselves if they could. “They don’t believe Trump will deport them,” he posted on Twitter, “because they are here to work and are ‘not criminals’.”These are the kind of anecdotes that turn people into Menckens ⁠– that curdle our faith in democracy and society’s possibilities with nagging doubts and stubborn prejudices, none greater than an overarching disdain for humanity itself. The explanation for Trump’s victory likeliest to prevail among those despairing today ⁠– when all the granular analyses are through, as diligently as analysts will peck through polls and precinct data for answers in the weeks, months and years ahead ⁠– is that many or most Americans are stupid or evil. Talk of a national divorce, an idea that gained a remarkable and embarrassing amount of traction in our discourse early in Trump’s first term, is sure to return.Those of us more seriously committed to pulling this country off the road to hell, of course, can’t afford a retreat into nihilism or fantasy. Voters can be maddening, yes. They are motivated by competing and often contradictory thoughts and impulses. But the task of democratic politics, still today as always, is to engage and persuade them. That frustrating, difficult work isn’t for everyone; those not cut out for it should see themselves off of the political scene and leave it to others. Thinking through what to do now will be difficult enough without the interjections of those who’ve convinced themselves that there’s nothing to be done.As far as Democratic professionals are always concerned, the way forward is clear. The party, we’re hearing already, needs to moderate. Never mind the fact, and it is a fact, that the Harris campaign hewed to the political middle with extraordinary discipline. One of the campaign’s most visible surrogates in the last weeks of the campaign was Liz Cheney, who appeared with Harris in an October event at the birthplace of the Republican party. At the lone vice-presidential debate, Tim Walz signaled his agreement with JD Vance so often that their friendliness was lampooned by Saturday Night Live.The two most visible breaks the campaign made from the Biden record were a commitment to a lower capital gains tax hike than the one that Biden had proposed and a promise to name a Republican to the cabinet. On immigration, Harris castigated Trump repeatedly for torpedoing a restrictive immigration bill authored by the Republican senator James Lankford of Oklahoma. On foreign policy, she rebuffed demands from progressive activists on Gaza, reasserted Israel’s right to defend itself and committed to making our military the most lethal in the world. And the campaign also went out of its way to convince Americans that Harris herself would be willing to use deadly force if threatened ⁠– Americans heard much more from the campaign about her being a gun owner than about the possibility of her becoming our first female president.And although much of the campaign was focused on abortion rights and the status of women under Trump, that’s an issue where Democrats have been in keeping with mainstream opinion, as most Americans opposed the overturning of Roe v Wade. Outside the Harris campaign proper, it’s been reported that Future Forward ⁠– America’s largest single-candidate SuperPac, having raised an estimated $700m ⁠– tested many of its ads through the research firm of David Shor, most well-known in political circles as a proponent of avoiding policies, ideas and language out of step with prevailing public opinion, advice most typically reduced to the idea that candidates should target the political center, as Harris did.That advice is based mostly on the reasonable heuristic that candidates who are perceived as moderate tend to do better in competitive elections than candidates at the extremes, generally speaking. But politics is a complicated business. Harris’s best polls came early in the campaign, when all voters knew about her, if anything, was that she was a non-white woman from liberal California.Even if one doesn’t believe she lost the election because she pivoted to the center ⁠– even if one grants for the sake of argument that she would have done worse had she not made it ⁠– that pivot obviously did not win her the race. In fact, as of Wednesday, there was not a single state in the country where Harris had managed to substantially outperform Biden’s 2020 campaign, which, it should be said, was the only Democratic general election campaign in recent memory to have been run substantially to the left of a candidate’s initial primary platform.There are a few available excuses for this – it could be that Harris was a uniquely bad candidate or that she was unconvincing in her moderation given previous stances she’d taken. But Harris’s loss should be processed within the context of a checkered political record that Democratic moderates should, at some point, be asked to answer for. The path to the political center is not untried and untrodden.Barack Obama came to the White House in 2009 with a governing majority that included moderate Democratic senators from states like Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska and North Dakota. The simple answer to the question of why Democrats failed to codify abortion protections under him, a topic of some discussion in this election, is that 15 years ago, the Democratic party included many more pro-life centrists. In 2007, the House’s centrist Blue Dog caucus ⁠– not to be confused with the also centrist New Democrat Coalition ⁠– had so many potential candidates that it instituted a cap ensuring its ranks could comprise no more than 20% of Democrats in the chamber.That wound up being wholly unnecessary: over the course of Obama’s presidency, the years immediately preceding Trump, moderate Democrats were obliterated in races across the country, both federally and at the state level, for reasons that the party and centrist pundits refuse to grapple with seriously to this day. However reliably tacking to the center might have worked as an electoral prescription in the Clinton era, it clearly offers diminishing returns now. The Democratic party is not being doomed by an unwillingness to run moderate presidential campaigns or because the party is putting forward aspiring Squad members as candidates in Kansas. A growing number of American voters, especially in the places where Trump has done best, are looking at moderate Democratic candidates and moderate Democratic campaigns and choosing to vote for the right.That broad trend aside, the reasons why Trump won over so many voters, including voters who may not have liked his rhetoric or persona, in this particular election, may be comparatively simple to unpack. It’s obvious that Trump retained his appeal among Republicans and voters with deeply reactionary views, but it should also be plain now, given the gains he’s made, including among non-white voters, that he’s become a more broadly compelling figure ⁠– owing partially, it seems, to the perception that he was an alright president.As much as we might fear that his second term will be much worse for more people than the first, the fact remains that most voters, until the coronavirus pandemic, experienced the Trump presidency as a television drama with little material impact on their lives. The attempt to steal the 2020 election ultimately failed, as did the legislative push that would have affected most Americans most seriously – the drive to repeal Obamacare. The single legislative accomplishment of the Trump administration was instead a large tax cut.It seems reasonable now to think that Trump’s mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic and the economic crisis it triggered had more to do with Biden winning in 2020 than Biden’s appeals to American norms, but the lows of that year seem to have faded into memory in the time since and it seems likely that most Americans will go on to remember the pandemic as a rare act of God that was not especially anyone’s fault.The inflation of Biden’s term, on the other hand, has been blamed on Democratic impotence or mismanagement, an impression Harris evidently could not shake. And her efforts to redirect attention to the existential consequences of another Trump term clearly ran into a daunting wall ⁠– the fact that as much as Americans at the margins may have been hurt by his administration, life simply went on for most and the economy, for most of his term, felt better as they remember it than it has under Biden, booming economic figures now notwithstanding.Clearly, to many of the voters who mattered most in this election, Trump is eccentric, uncouth, but not an especially dangerous politician from a party they have long trusted more on the economy – the fully normalized standard-bearer of the only two real options Americans have when they go to the polls.Other voters who also mattered clearly saw Trump just as Democrats do ⁠– a bomb-throwing threat to politics as usual ⁠– and decided to vote for him precisely on that basis. And it’s this constituency that Democrats, moving forward, will probably have the hardest time pulling into the fold. Decrying Trump’s threat to our norms and institutions was a message that resonated primarily with Americans who respect them in the first place ⁠– not disaffected voters convinced, justifiably, that the wealthy and well-connected really run the show in Washington or cynics who figure their politicians should at least be entertaining if they can’t actually do anything to help them.There’s already been much discussion about the extent to which more and more young men, including young men of color, are falling into this category; we’ll have to wait for more reliable sources of data than notoriously bad exit polling for details on that. It should already be crystal clear, though, that the Democratic party has not demonstrated any capacity whatsoever to speak to voters who simply don’t believe in the politics of old and aren’t interested in returning to it.None of this should be taken as a dismissal of the fact that incumbent parties around the world have faltered in this economy; it is again plausible that Harris or any Democrat would have been overwhelmingly likely to lose. But beyond the contours of this particular race, the Democratic party – having lost twice, under different conditions, to a candidate that has fundamentally and fatally confounded so many of the assumptions shaping their approach to politics – is at a point of crisis.The long Obama era is over. The familiar homilies ⁠– about how there are no red states or blue states and Americans share a set of common values and working institutions novelly and externally threatened by agents of chaos like Trump ⁠– never described political reality. They now no longer work reliably even as political messaging. The hunt should be on for alternatives.At the moment, much of the Democratic party is processing their loss in stunned silence. Harris’s concession speech didn’t come until 4.00pm ET on Wednesday. It was reported that neither a victory nor a concession speech had been fully prepared on Tuesday night ⁠– no one had expected things to end so quickly.

      Osita Nwanevu is a Guardian US columnist More

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      The Democrats lost because they ran a weak and out-of-touch campaign | Bhaskar Sunkara

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      I turned on MSNBC after the election results came in and this, verbatim, was the commentary I heard: “This really was a historic, flawlessly run campaign. She had Queen Latifah [who] never endorses anyone! She had every prominent celebrity voice, she had the Taylor Swifties, she had the Beyhive. You could not run a better campaign in that short period of time.” Democrats, it seems, are already blaming their defeat this week on a host of contingent factors and not on their own shortcomings.It’s, of course, true that inflation has hurt incumbents across the world. But that doesn’t mean that there was nothing that Joe Biden could have done to address the problem. He could have rolled out anti-price-gouging measures early, pushed taxes on corporate super profits and more. Through well-designed legislation and the right messaging, inflation could have been both mitigated and explained. That’s what president Andrés Manuel López Obrador offered his supporters in Mexico and his governing coalition enjoyed commanding support.However, more than policy, Americans craved a villain. An incompetent communicator in old age, Biden couldn’t provide one. He couldn’t grandstand about hauling profiteers in front of Congress or taking on billionaires. He couldn’t use his bully pulpit effectively to tout his successes creating good manufacturing jobs or put America’s inflation (and GDP growth) in global context. He couldn’t do much of anything.As a result, 45% of voters, the highest number in decades, said they were financially worse off than they were four years ago. These people weren’t misled by the media, they were lamenting what’s obvious to everyone who lives in the United States: the soaring costs of groceries, housing, childcare and healthcare are both distributional and supply problems that the government has not tackled with urgency.Donald Trump, for his part, ran a less than impressive campaign. He wasn’t as coherent as he was in 2016 when he more frequently spoke to the economic grievances and personal experiences of ordinary workers. In a less populist mood, Trump felt comfortable enough to openly pander to unpopular billionaires like Elon Musk.As for Kamala Harris, her problem began all the way in 2020 when she was selected on identitarian grounds as a vice-presidential candidate despite performing terribly in the Democratic primaries. At a debate in March 2020, Biden pledged he would nominate a woman as vice-president. A host of influential NGOs then urged him to pick a Black woman. From the beginning, Harris was a choice driven more by optics than merits.Harris had an uphill battle from the start. She was forced to govern alongside an increasingly senile president and given poison-pill assignments like a role as “border czar”. Biden’s belated departure from a race he couldn’t win meant Harris didn’t have the legitimacy afforded by an open primary, a primary that if conducted early enough might have yielded a stronger candidate like the Georgia senator Raphael Warnock.Once given the reins of the party, the vice-president ran a campaign that was in both style and substance – like today’s Democratic party as a whole – driven by the professional class. Weakly populist ads targeted to swing states sat uneasily with attempts to make the race about abortion rights or Trump’s contempt for democracy. There was no unifying economic message that blamed elites for the country’s problems and laid out a credible vision of change. People knew that Harris was not Trump, but they didn’t know what she was going to do to solve their problems. She had the burden of incumbency without its benefits.Harris was smart enough to not overemphasize her own personal story and how historic her victory would have been. But the Democrats as a whole were still associated with the identitarian rhetoric and an emphasis on anti-discrimination over class-based redistribution that drove Harris’s selection as vice-president to begin with. Many of us sounded the alarm early about the prominence of efforts like White Women: Answer the Call and Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders for Kamala that focused on mobilization through skin color and gender instead of shared class interest. But a party increasingly divorced from workers ran with the activist base that it had rather than the voting base it needed to have.The result was a staggering shift in working-class support across demographics. Exit polls suggest that Harris lost 16 points with “voters of color” with no degree compared with Biden, with particularly sharp losses among Latinos. The abortion emphasis didn’t pan out either – Biden led among those who believed that abortion should be “legal in most cases” by 38 points. Harris appears to have tied Trump with those voters.In the lead-up to the 2016 election, Senator Chuck Schumer infamously argued: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” Without a New Deal–sized economic vision with a unified working class at the center, the Democrats have seen that calculation fail for the second time in eight years.

      Bhaskar Sunkara is the president of the Nation, founding editor of Jacobin and author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequalities More

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      Tariffs, tech and Taiwan: how China hopes to Trump-proof its economy

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      China is bracing itself for four years of volatile relations with its biggest trading partner and geopolitical rival, as the dust settles on the news that Donald Trump will once again be in the White House.On Thursday China’s president, Xi Jinping, congratulated Trump on his victory and said that the two countries must “get along with each other in the new era”, according to a Chinese government readout.“A stable, healthy and sustainable China-US relationship is in the common interest of both countries and is in line with the expectations of the international community,” Xi said.But the reality is that Trump’s second presidency, which will begin as China grapples with a difficult economic situation and an entrenched, bipartisan hawkishness in Washington, will be a challenge for Beijing.“Trump 2.0 is likely to be more destructive than the 2017 version,” said Wang Dong, a professor of international relations at Peking University, in a pre-election interview with Chinese media.“Compared with his first term in office in 2017, Trump’s views in his second campaign in 2024 have not changed much, but the domestic situation and international environment have changed dramatically … during the Trump 2.0 period, China and the United States are likely to have constant friction and conflict”.The trade war ‘will be worse’Analysts have said Trump’s approach to China will be hard to predict. During his last presidency he swung from praising Xi as a great leader and friend, to presiding over a raft of hawkish policies and waging a trade war that pitted the world’s two biggest economies against each other.Xi, now presiding over a far worse domestic economy, is likely hoping to avoid a repeat of the trade war, but may be out of luck. During the campaign, Trump promised to impose tariffs of 60% on all Chinese imports, which could affect $500bn worth of goods, asset managers PineBridge Investments suggested to Reuters.View image in fullscreenYu Jie, a senior research fellow at Chatham House, said that policymakers in Beijing have been preparing for a Trump victory for months. The trade war “will be worse than the first term of Trump,” Yu said. So the Chinese government is trying to lessen its exposure to the US ahead of time.One approach has been to increase China’s trade volumes with global south countries. In September, at the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation summit in Beijing, Xi announced that China would introduce a regime of zero tariffs for developing countries that have diplomatic relations with Beijing, including 33 in Africa. Such policies stand in stark contrast to the economic barriers between China and the US.And amid restrictions from the US and its allies on China’s ability to purchase the most advanced technology for making semiconductors, Chinese firms have become focused on building their own alternatives.The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology recently revealed that it had built a lithography scanner capable of producing chips as small as 65 nanometers. That is still well behind the most cutting-edge technology made by ASML, the Dutch company that has been blocked from selling certain equipment to China because of a Dutch government agreement with the US, but it is still an improvement on where China’s capabilities were even two years ago.‘A poisoned chalice’When it comes to geopolitics, Trump’s unorthodox approach may be an opportunity for Beijing, some analysts noted. With Trump in the White House, “there will be no violence in Taiwan,” said Shen Dingli, a senior international relations scholar in Shanghai. “He will make a deal”.Whether or not any such deal would be acceptable to either Beijing or Taipei is another matter. Trump’s position on Taiwan, which China regards as part of its territory, has been very unclear. During his first presidential term the US increased arms sales to Taiwan and lifted restrictions on contacts between US and Taiwanese officials.However earlier this year Trump called into question the US’s continued support of Taiwan, accusing it of stealing American semiconductor industry, and suggesting Taiwan should pay for US protection.But in an interview last month, Trump said that that he wouldn’t have to use military force to prevent a blockade on Taiwan – one mooted option for a possible Chinese attempt at annexing it – because Xi “respects me and he knows I’m f— crazy”, he was quoted as saying.View image in fullscreenHe promised tariffs of 150-200% if China tried a blockade. But that too raises complications. There are reportedly hundreds of Taiwanese businesses in China, who would all be vulnerable to China-targeted tariffs. On Thursday, Taipei said it would help Taiwanese businesses to relocate production from China, ahead of Trump tariffs. Economy minister JW Kuo said the impact on the businesses otherwise would be “quite large”.Drew Thompson, senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam school of international studies says Trump would be unlikely to use Taiwan as a bargaining chip in any “deal” with Xi. If only because Xi is unlikely to accept it as one.“The trade itself is a poisoned chalice for Xi because he is conceding [Taiwan] is not already part of China and he needs to trade for it.”Alexander Huang, an associate professor at Tamkang University, told a panel in Taipei on Thursday that while Trump’s behaviour may be unpredictable, his logic was not. “He does not want the US to be taken advantage of,” Huang said, suggesting that if Trump were to commit US forces to defend Taiwan against China, it would be purely to protect US interests.One of the major sticking points in China’s relationship with the west in recent years has been its continued economic and political support for Russia during the invasion of Ukraine. Xi presents himself as a global statesman who can help to broker peace, but western analysts say that China’s deepening economic and political ties have prolonged rather than resolved the crisis.Trump has claimed that he could end the war “in 24 hours”. But many US allies fear the more likely outcome is that Trump reduces the flow of military aid to Ukraine, or pressures Kyiv to accept a deal in which it loses control of some territory to Russia.“If Trump’s support to Ukraine reduces, that gives China a chance to jump to the negotiating table,” Yu said. Along with the ongoing war in Gaza, “Beijing will exploit the line that the US is the single most destructive force in the world, while Beijing brings stability”. More

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      It is galling to see Starmer ingratiate himself with Trump – but it would be horribly negligent if he didn’t | Gaby Hinsliff

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      Dawn had barely broken, and nor had Kamala Harris publicly conceded, when Keir Starmer tweeted his congratulations to the not-quite-officially President-elect Donald Trump.Britain would, he said, stand “shoulder to shoulder” with its old ally, as it always does. Though he got the early opportunity he wanted to congratulate the new president-elect even more fulsomely down the phone, those words will have been gut-wrenching for many people. How can it be business as usual, with a president whose own former chief of staff said he met the definition of a fascist? What on earth makes Starmer think he can influence Trump for the better, the usual rationale for engaging with unsavoury leaders, where Trump’s own advisers repeatedly failed? The only people he ever really heeded, the British-born former White House adviser Fiona Hill once told one of Theresa May’s aides, were the now late Queen and the pope.Starmer’s obvious answer, of course, is that it would be an act of breathtaking negligence not to even bother trying; that he can’t be squeamish when there are workers afraid of losing their jobs in a trade war, Ukrainians dying under Russian bombardment, and future generations who would pay a terrible price for the US reneging on its climate commitments. The less obvious one, however, is that if he cannot get Trump’s ear then Trump will get his hot takes on the British national interest elsewhere. Starmer may have got that phone call, but it was Nigel Farage who spent election night at the Trump victory party in Mar-a-Lago.Though this isn’t the result a Labour government wanted, it’s the one it has war-gamed hardest. The charm offensive began months before Starmer and Trump’s relatively cordial dinner in September, with the foreign secretary, David Lammy, making surprisingly deep inroads in Republican circles for a man who once called Trump a woman-hating, neo-Nazi sociopath. But as Lammy’s allies point out, JD Vance once called Trump an idiot who might be the US’s Hitler, which didn’t stop Trump picking Vance as a running mate. The president-elect is both intensely transactional – if anything, he may see British desperation to make up lost ground with him as useful – and wildly unpredictable, a combination offering both opportunity and threat.The lesson Downing Street takes from studying Trump is essentially the one many Republican voters do: that he says a lot of wild stuff but doesn’t always mean it, and if he does he often unexpectedly changes his mind. Already there are hints he might give Ukraine more time to win its war, if only because he hates being associated with losing, while senior Republicans are signalling that “friendly” nations could escape his threatened trade tariffs – a crude signal that there will be rewards for compliance.But there will surely also be a price: Starmer could easily find himself pushed to pick a side in trade negotiations between the US and Brussels, just as he is trying to mend fences with Europe. What if a British government that has staked everything on economic growth finds its business interests pulling one way, and its shared interest in the defence of Europe against Russian aggression pulling the other? At the very least, those budget forecasts – and the money set aside for extra defence spending – may well soon need revisiting.In her memoirs, Theresa May describes the acute anxiety of standing beside then president Trump at a press conference where he was supposed to send a critical signal to Russia by stressing his commitment to Nato, not knowing whether he’d actually say it until he opened his mouth. But at least she could plan for that scenario in advance: harder to deal with was Trump’s tendency to blindside Britain with things nobody saw coming. For her, that meant Trump pulling troops out of Iraq and Syria without warning or concern for British forces fighting alongside them, lobbying her to bring Farage into cabinet, and casually retweeting incendiary social media posts by the British far right. This time, he won’t just be surfing X when he’s bored but actively integrating its owner, Elon Musk – who is already regularly kicking lumps out of Starmer, most recently over cutting inheritance tax relief for farmers – into his administration.The Southport riots, during which Musk tweeted that “civil war is inevitable” and promoted conspiracy theories about white protesters being more harshly treated than ethnic minority ones, convinced many Labour MPs that hate and disinformation online must be tackled. But how brave are ministers prepared to be if that means a direct hit on someone in Trump’s inner circle?Labour MPs in seats where Reform came second in July are, meanwhile, now visibly rattled, and newly fearful of handing Farage further sticks to beat them with. Though Starmer learned his own lesson about the salience of immigration or the risks of alienating white working-class voters way back in 2019, Harris’s defeat is only likely to underline that message for him.There’s no denying that for progressives, the world now looks lonelier than it did; that the choice the US has made will have consequences smaller countries can only do so much to contain. But that doesn’t mean Britain can afford to sit the coming battles out, assuming someone else will do the dirty work. Starmer’s job now is to pull whatever levers he can reach, in alliance with whoever he can persuade to join him; ours, meanwhile, is never to give up hope.

      Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist More

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      US election briefing: Democrats pick through defeat with blame falling on Biden and economy

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      The Democratic party has begun to pick through Kamala Harris’s loss to Donald Trump in the presidential election, with the post-pandemic headwinds, a failure to distance herself from Joe Biden and overestimating abortion access instead of the economy as an election winner, all reported by congressional Democrats as reasons for the decisive loss.Biden struck an optimistic tone in an address to the nation, praising Harris for an “inspiring” campaign. Comments from the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, claiming Democrats had “abandoned working-class people”, earned a rebuke from the Democratic party chair, Jaime Harrison.Biden’s decision to pursue re-election and then his late withdrawal drew criticism from numerous former top Democrat advisers and politicians, including Michael Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor and presidential candidate, who said “it probably wasn’t great to cover up President Joe Biden’s infirmities until they became undeniable on live TV”.Biden’s press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, pushed back on the accusation that it was arrogant for the 81-year-old president to run for a second term: “This is the president who has been the only person [who] has been able to beat Donald Trump.”Here’s what else happened on Thursday:US presidential election news and updates

      Trump has named Susie Wiles, the manager of his victorious campaign, as his White House chief of staff, making her the first woman to hold the influential role. She was seen as the leading contender for the job but has avoided the spotlight, even refusing Trump’s invitation to take the microphone during his victory speech on Wednesday. Learn more about Wiles here.

      Vladimir Putin has congratulated Trump on his victory and expressed admiration for Trump’s response to an assassination attempt. Putin said he was ready for dialogue with Trump, which will cause disquiet in Kyiv and other European capitals. Hours beforehand, Russia had carried out a massive drone attack on Kyiv, and killed four people in a strike on a hospital in Zaporizhzhia.

      Republicans have expanded their control of the US Senate, after Dave McCormick defeated the Democratic incumbent in Pennsylvania. Control of the House remained unclear on Thursday, with Republicans closing in on the 218 seats required for a majority.

      Healthcare providers have reported unprecedented surges in demand for reproductive and gender-affirming medications in the wake of Trump’s victory, even greater than the day after Roe v Wadefell.

      California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, announced a special session of the state’s legislature to ensure the attorney general’s office and other state agencies have the funding they need. California has been setting up guardrails to protect its residents’ rights under an adversarial federal government.

      Trump as president may give Israel a “blank cheque” for all-out war against Iran, a former CIA director and US defence secretary has predicted. Palestinians in Ramallah argue things cannot get any worse for them than it has been under Biden.

      Elon Musk has said Trump’s podcast appearances made “a big difference” in the election, as the manosphere and so-called “heterodoxy” celebrate the result. Meanwhile, searches for the 4B movement have spiked on Google and TikTok as women discuss cutting off heterosexual dating with men.

      A Texas judge has ruled against Biden’s programme offering a path to citizenship for certain immigrant spouses of US citizens, a blow that could keep the scheme blocked through the president’s final months in office. Fear has risen in undocumented communities and families face being torn apart at the prospect of Trump’s promised mass deportation programme.

      Americans see immigration as the most pressing issue for Trump to address, and a large majority believe he will order mass deportations of people living in the US illegally, a Reuters/Ipsos poll has found.

      The US Federal Reserve has cut interest rates by a quarter of a percentage point. Its chair, Jerome Powell, said the election result would have no “near-term” impact on rates and insisted he would not resign if Trump asked him to leave early, adding that firing a Fed governor was “not permitted under the law”.

      The British government will ask its ambassador to Washington, Dame Karen Pierce, to stay in post as Trump takes power, ahead of a complex shuffle of UK security and diplomatic jobs in the new year.

      Sales have surged for dystopian books, with The Handmaid’s Tale jumping more than 400 places on bestseller charts since Wednesday and On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder enjoying a similar rush.
      Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

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      Where do the Democrats go from here? – podcast

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      “This was a pretty sweeping victory for Trump,” Lauren Gambino, political correspondent for Guardian US, tells Michael Safi. “It was decisive, and he may very well end up with full control of Congress, which would really help him implement some of these pretty dramatic proposals he’s laid out throughout the campaign.”Speaking to Democrats processing the result, Gambino says there is a sense of devastation.“Some of them are calling for a full overhaul of their brand. Bernie Sanders has said they’re no longer the party of the working class.”Safi also reports from Kamala Harris’s concession speech at Howard University, Washington DC. He speaks to Harris supporters reflecting on what went wrong, and asking: what next?Support the Guardian today: theguardian.com/todayinfocuspod More