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Joe Biden's journey to the presidency – in pictures
Joe Biden at 10 years old in 1952
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Ding-dong, the jerk is gone. But read this before you sing the Hallelujah Chorus | Thomas Frank
Ding-dong, the jerk is gone. Finally, we have come to the end of Donald Trump’s season of extreme misrule. Voters have rejected what can only be described as the crassest, vainest, stupidest, most dysfunctional leadership this country has ever suffered.
Congratulations to Joe Biden for doing what Hillary Clinton couldn’t, and for somehow managing to do it without forcefulness, without bounce, without zest, without direction and without a real cause, even.
It is a time for celebrating. Let us praise God for victory, however meagre and under-whelming. But let us also show some humility in our triumph. Before we swing into a national sing-along of the Hallelujah Chorus, I urge you to think for a moment about how we got here and where we must go next.
We know that 2020 has been a year for reckoning with the racist past, for the smashing of icons and the tearing-down of former heroes. Also for confronting the historical delusions that gave us this lousy present.
In the spirit of this modern iconoclasm, let me offer my own suggestion for the reckoning that must come next, hopefully even before Biden chooses his cabinet and packs his bags for Pennsylvania Avenue: Democrats must confront their own past and acknowledge how their own decisions over the years helped make Trumpism possible.
I know: this was a negation election, and what got nixed was Maga madness. The Democrats are the ones who won. Still, it is Joe Biden who must plan our course forward and so it is Biden who must examine our situation coldly and figure out the answer to the burning question of today: how can a recurrence of Trumpism be prevented?
Biden’s instinct, naturally, will be to govern as he always legislated: as a man of the center who works with Republicans to craft small-bore, business-friendly measures. After all, Biden’s name is virtually synonymous with Washington consensus. His years in the US Senate overlap almost precisely with his party’s famous turn to the “third way” right, and Biden personally played a leading role in many of the signature initiatives of the era: Nafta-style trade agreements, lucrative favors for banks, tough-on-crime measures, proposed cuts to social security, even.
What Biden must understand now, however, is that it was precisely this turn, this rightward shift in the 1980s and 90s, that set the stage for Trumpism.
Let us recall for a moment what that turn looked like. No longer were Democrats going to be the party of working people, they told us in those days. They were “new Democrats” now, preaching competence rather than ideology and reaching out to new constituencies: the enlightened suburbanites; the “wired workers”; the “learning class”; the winners in our new post-industrial society.For years this turn was regarded as a great success. Bill Clinton brought us market-friendly reforms to banking rules, trade relations and the welfare system. He and his successor Barack Obama negotiated grand bargains and graceful triangulations; means-tested subsidies and targeted tax credits; tough-minded crime measures and social programs so complex that sometimes not even their designers could explain them to us.
In the place of the Democratic party’s old household god – the “middle class” – these new liberals enshrined the meritocracy, meaning not only the brilliant economists who designed their policies, but also the financiers and technologists that the new liberalism tried to serve, together with the highly educated professionals who were now its most prized constituents. In 2016 Hillary Clinton lost the former manufacturing regions of the country but was able to boast later on that she won “the places that represent two-thirds of America’s gross domestic product … the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward.”
However, there are consequences when the left party in a two-party system chooses to understand itself in this way. As we have learned from the Democrats’ experiment, such a party will show little understanding for the grievances of blue-collar workers, people who – by definition – have not climbed the ladder of meritocracy. And just think of all the shocking data that has flickered across our attention-screens in the last dozen years – how our economy’s winnings are hogged by the 1%; how ordinary people can no longer afford new cars; how young people are taking on huge debt burdens right out of college; and a thousand other points of awful. All of these have been direct or indirect products of the political experiment I am describing.
Biden can’t take us back to the happy assumptions of the centrist era even if he wants to, because so many of its celebrated policy achievements lie in ruins. Not even Paul Krugman enthuses about Nafta-style trade agreements any longer. Bill Clinton’s welfare reform initiative was in fact a capitulation to racist tropes and brought about an explosion in extreme poverty. The great prison crackdown of 1994 was another step in cementing the New Jim Crow. And the biggest shortcoming of Obama’s Affordable Care Act – leaving people’s health insurance tied to their employer – has become painfully obvious in this era of mass unemployment and mass infection.
But the biggest consequence of the Democrats’ shabby experiment is one we have yet to reckon with: it has coincided with a period of ever more conservative governance. It turns out that when the party of the left abandons its populist traditions for high-minded white-collar rectitude, the road is cleared for a particularly poisonous species of rightwing demagoguery. It is no coincidence that, as Democrats pursued their professional-class “third way”, Republicans became ever bolder in their preposterous claim to be a “workers’ party” representing the aspirations of ordinary people.
When Democrats abandoned their majoritarian tradition, in other words, Republicans hastened to stake their own claim to it. For the last 30 years it has been the right, not the left, that rails against “elites” and that champions our down-home values in the face of the celebrities who mock them. During the 2008 financial crisis conservatives actually launched a hard-times protest movement from the floor of the Chicago board of trade; in the 2016 campaign they described their foul-mouthed champion, Trump, as a “blue-collar billionaire”, kin to and protector of the lowly – the lowly and the white, that is.
Donald Trump’s prodigious bungling of the Covid pandemic has got him kicked out of office and has paused the nation’s long march to the right. Again, let us give thanks. But let us also remember that the Republicans have not been permanently defeated. Their preening leader has gone down, but his toxic brand of workerism will soon be back, enlisting the disinherited and the lowly in the cause of the mighty. So will our fatuous culture wars, with their endless doses of intoxicating self-righteousness, shot into the veins of the nation by social media or Fox News.
I have been narrating our country’s toboggan ride to hell for much of my adult life, and I can attest that Biden’s triumph by itself is not enough to bring it to a stop. It will never stop until a Democratic president faces up to his party’s mistakes and brings to a halt the ignoble experiment of the last four decades.
Should Joe Biden do that, he might be able to see that he has before him a moment of great Democratic possibility. This country has grown sick of plutocracy. We don’t enjoy sluicing everything we earn into the bank accounts of a few dozen billionaires. We want a healthcare system that works and an economy in which ordinary people prosper, even people who didn’t go to a fancy college. Should Biden open his eyes and overcome his past, he may discover that he has it in his power to rebuild our sense of social solidarity, to make the middle-class promise real again, and to beat back the right. All at the same time.
Thomas Frank is the author of The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism. He is also a Guardian US columnist More - in US Politics
Big tech and corporate tax cuts: the targets of Joe Biden's urgent economic plans
When Joe Biden enters the White House on 20 January, he will face arguably the biggest set of challenges a president has had to tackle since the end of the second world war. The coronavirus is raging through the US, millions of Americans are still losing their jobs each month, and the climate crisis – ignored by the Trump administration – is deepening.
Biden has set out his economic and policy plans, but without control of the Senate he may struggle to realise them. Official GDP figures for the third quarter showed the size of the economy was still almost 4% below its previous peak, despite a 7.4% recovery from the spring lockdown.
At present it looks certain that the Democrats will control the House of Representatives, but we will have to wait for the results of special elections in Georgia before we know who controls the Senate. A Republican majority would block many of his proposals.
Like Donald Trump, Biden can use executive orders – basically presidential decrees – to circumnavigate political roadblocks. While those orders would have major consequences, Biden is likely to struggle to pass significant legislation without Democratic control of both branches of Congress.
But here are the some of the key elements of Bidenomics.
Stimulus package More - in US Politics
The vanishing 'red mirage': how Trump's election week soured
For Democrats, the familiar sinking feeling began in the early hours of Wednesday morning when Florida came out for Donald Trump. The state is a critical battleground. Up until that point a Democratic victory in Tuesday’s US presidential election had seemed likely. Joe Biden, the former vice-president, was going to win, the polls said. Probably by a landslide. The only question was the giddy margin.
But the humiliating rout predicted by the pundits wasn’t happening. Trump’s support was holding up remarkably well. This wasn’t just true of diehard fans who had packed into his election rallies in the tumultuous closing days of an extraordinary campaign. Others were backing him as well. This, despite a health pandemic and a divisive presidency like no other.
The Florida results suggested a more complex picture was emerging. For the Biden camp, it was an alarming one. With 96% of ballots counted, Trump was 375,000 votes ahead. Biden, it turned out, had underperformed in the Democratic stronghold of Miami-Dade County. The president had increased his vote among white, working class and Latino people. And among African Americans.
Trump, it seemed, had defied his critics yet again. He comfortably won Texas, crushing Democratic hopes of flipping the state. In the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania – visited repeatedly by both candidates in recent months – Trump was more than half a million votes ahead. There were other notable wins, including Ohio and Iowa. Much of the electoral map was going red. More - in US Politics
US election live updates: Biden edges toward victory with leads over Trump in Nevada and Pennsylvania
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2.20pm EST14:20
Biden is poised for victory with leads in Pennsylvania and NevadaLive feed
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4.43pm EST16:43
Let’s check in with Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former adviser who is now facing fraud charges over allegations he misused money that was meant to help build a wall along the US-Mexican border.
Bannon has now lost his lawyer in the fraud case after suggesting Dr Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, and FBI Director Christopher Wray should be beheaded.
The Guardian’s Peter Beaumont reports:Speaking on his podcast, the War Room, which was distributed in video form on a number of social media outlets, the far-right provocateur appeared to endorse violence against Wray and the US’s most senior infectious diseases expert.
‘Second term kicks off with firing Wray, firing Fauci … no I actually want to go a step farther but the president is a kind-hearted man and a good man,’ Bannon said.
‘I’d actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England. I’d put their heads on pikes, right, I’d put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats, you either get with the programme or you’re gone.’
Twitter banned Bannon’s War Room account permanently, saying it had suspended the podcast account for violating its policy on the glorification of violence.
The same video was on Facebook for about 10 hours before it was also removed.
Later on Friday, William Burck, an attorney for Bannon in a fraud case in New York City, told a federal judge he was withdrawing. Bannon is accused of misappropriating money from a group which raised $2m from thousands of donors to build a wall on the border with Mexico, and has pleaded not guilty. Burck did not give a reason for his withdrawal.4.26pm EST16:26
The Guardian’s Sam Levine reports from Philadelphia:
The corner of 12th and Arch Street has become the epicenter of the political universe over the last few days as demonstrators have gathered to face off. The larger group has urged officials to “count every vote,” while a smaller pro-Trump group has cheered to “stop the steam.”
At times, it’s felt a little tense as protesters have confronted one another and the anti-Trump crowd has drowned out pro-Trump surrogates like Pam Bondi and Corey Lewandowski.
But on Friday the intersection had a notably different tone – the “count every vote” group essentially transformed into a large dance party. The celebration came as Joe Biden took a lead in the count for ballots in this key swing state.Sam Levine
(@srl)
More dancing pic.twitter.com/IQjaalnCELNovember 6, 2020
“It feels great to finally celebrate something,” said Ann Dixon, who said she hasn’t been following the incremental changes in vote totals because she wants “every vote to be counted and it’s not over til its over.” She said she was concerned, however, that Trump would try and drag out the vote count, which would divide the country more and more.
Protesters young and old danced to a mix of music, which included Beyoncé, the Backstreet Boys, and Shakira.
“I sort of debated whether or not I should come out and then I decided I should. It’s important to sort of celebrate despite having a bunch of work to still do moving forward,” said Rachel MacDonald. “I’m not really motivated by anger in the same way and so I decided I should come out and dance with everybody as well and not just yell,”
She was there with her friend Hannah Chervitz, who was attending her first protest.
“It’s nice to come out and channel all of this energy into something positive,” Chervitz said.4.09pm EST16:09
MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki explained why his network, like the AP, has not yet called Pennsylvania for Joe Biden.
MSNBC
(@MSNBC)
WATCH: @SteveKornacki details the outstanding ballots that remain to be counted in Pennsylvania.#TrackingKornacki #MSNBC2020 pic.twitter.com/epjmpGxRLhNovember 6, 2020
Kornacki explained that there are about 200,000 ballots left to be counted in the state. About half of them are mail-in ballots, and half of them are provisional ballots.
Mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania have been very favorable for Biden, as it appears most of Donald Trump’s supporters chose to vote in person. But some of those ballots may still be challenged.
Historically, provisional ballots are also very favorable for Democrats, but so far, they have been a bit better for Trump. One explanation for this is that some of the president’s supporters received mail-in ballots but then chose to vote in person instead, so they received provisional ballots to allow election officials to confirm the vote was valid.
But election analyst Nate Silver said he was skeptical of that analysis:Nate Silver
(@NateSilver538)
So, I am open-minded but not super persuaded by this. There are a handful of counties to have counted provisional ballots so far and those ballots indeed went for Trump, but they came from counties where the rest of the vote was *even stronger* for Trump.https://t.co/DXMdQJyfS5 https://t.co/h3gyCwCeNKNovember 6, 2020
3.51pm EST15:51
A Republican congressman is engaging in a Twitter battle with one of his new colleagues, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is a supporter of the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory.
It all started when congressman Dan Crenshaw, a Republican of Texas, sent a tweet this afternoon, saying, “If Trump loses, he loses. It was never an impossible outcome and we must accept the final results when it is over.
“But the unfortunate reality is that there is very little trust in the process, where irregularities have been flagrant and transparency lacking.”Dan Crenshaw
(@DanCrenshawTX)
If Trump loses, he loses. It was never an impossible outcome and we must accept the final results when it is over. But the unfortunate reality is that there is very little trust in the process, where irregularities have been flagrant and transparency lacking.November 6, 2020
That second sentence looks past the fact that Donald Trump has worked diligently to sow distrust in the election results, and the president’s advisers have been allowed to view the vote count in multiple battleground states.
But we’ll set that aside for a second. After Crenshaw sent that tweet, Greene, who is now a congresswoman-elect after winning her congressional race on Tuesday, replied, “The time to STAND UP for @realDonaldTrump is RIGHT NOW! Republicans can’t back down. This loser mindset is how the Democrats win.”Dan Crenshaw
(@DanCrenshawTX)
Did you even read past the first sentence? Or are you just purposely lying so you can talk tough? No one said give up. I literally said investigate every irregularity and use the courts. You’re a member of Congress now, Marjorie. Start acting like one. https://t.co/47a7Gqq4lHNovember 6, 2020
Crenshaw responded by chastising Greene and urging her to live up to the office she has been elected to. “I literally said investigate every irregularity and use the courts,” Crenshaw said. “You’re a member of Congress now, Marjorie. Start acting like one.”
That dust-up could preview some of the contentious conversations to come in the House Republican caucus once Greene is seated in January.3.40pm EST15:40
The Guardian’s Tom Phillips reports from Rio de Janeiro:
It is a US-born slur that was inspired by Honduras and has haunted Latin America for decades – a deprecatory way to describe politically volatile and economically puny backwaters ruled by erratic and venal autocrats.
But on Friday, after Donald Trump’s alarming press conference at the White House yesterday, voices across the region, from Mexico to Uruguay, delighted in lobbing the insult back at their neighbours to the north.
“Who’s the banana republic now?” wondered the frontpage headline of Colombia’s Publimetro, one of many Latin American newspapers whose editors thought the term perfectly captured the electoral turmoil playing out in the US.Tom Phillips
(@tomphillipsin)
“Who’s the banana republic now?” wonders Colombia’s @PublimetroCol 😬 pic.twitter.com/GGUUB1oUsTNovember 6, 2020
Over the border in Venezuela, a columnist from the El Nacional agreed calling Trump’s behaviour “intemperate and foolish” and telling readers the US election seemed to be taking place “in a country at war, or a república bananera”.
Merval Pereira, one of Brazil’s most prominent political commentators, called his daily column “Bananas americanas” and wrote: “This is a singular event in US democratic history which puts the country in the list of banana republics, an expression created by the Americans themselves.”
The Latin American Twittersphere went bananas too, with the Uruguayan human rights defender Javier Palummo asking followers: “How do you say banana republic in American English?”3.29pm EST15:29
The Guardian’s Tom Phillips reports from Rio de Janeiro:
One of Donald Trump’s most devoted international disciples, the Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, now seems to be decoupling from his political idol.
Bolsonaro has been one of Trump’s loudest cheerleaders and revels in being portrayed as South America’s “tropical Trump”. Last year Brazil’s far-right leader was reported to have told his fellow populist: “I love you”.
But on Friday morning, with a Trump defeat looking increasingly likely, Bolsonaro appeared to jump ship. “I’m not the most important person in Brazil just as Trump isn’t the most important person in the world, as he’s said himself,” he told an event in southern Brazil. “The most important person is God.”
To hammer his point home Bolsonaro later posted a video of those comments to his Twitter feed, where he has 6.6 million followers. Despite Bolsonaro’s admiration for Trump, the US president is reportedly not one of them.3.16pm EST15:16
Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, held another press conference as the margin in the race for his state’s 16 electoral votes remains razor-thin.
“We will get it right, and we will defend the integrity of our elections,” Raffensperger said, promising an “open and transparent” vote-counting process.
Raffensperger once again acknowledged that, with a margin this small, a recount was all but certain in the state.
The Republican official defended the integrity of the vote-count, saying he was committed to ensuring trust in the process.
As of now, Joe Biden leads Donald Trump by 1,603 votes in Georgia, out of nearly 5 million ballots cast in the state.3.07pm EST15:07
The Guardian’s Sam Levin reports from Los Angeles:
Jackie Lacey, the Los Angeles district attorney, was ousted by her progressive challenger, in one of the most closely watched criminal justice races in the US this year.
George Gascón, the former police chief and district attorney of San Francisco, won the race to lead the Los Angeles prosecutors’ office with more than 53% of the vote. Black Lives Matter LA and other activist groups played a major role in the heated contest, having protested Lacey’s policies for years. More - in US Politics
Steve Bannon banned by Twitter for calling for Fauci beheading
Twitter has banned the account of the former Donald Trump adviser and surrogate Steve Bannon after he called for the beheading of Dr Anthony Fauci and the FBI director, Christopher Wray, and the posting of their heads outside the White House as a “warning”.
Speaking on his podcast, the War Room, which was distributed in video form on a number of social media outlets, the far-right provocateur appeared to endorse violence against Wray and the US’s most senior infectious diseases expert.
“Second term kicks off with firing Wray, firing Fauci … no I actually want to go a step farther but the president is a kind-hearted man and a good man,” Bannon said.
“I’d actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England. I’d put their heads on pikes, right, I’d put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats, you either get with the programme or you’re gone.”
Twitter banned Bannon’s War Room account permanently, saying it had suspended the podcast account for violating its policy on the glorification of violence.
The same video was on Facebook for about 10 hours before it was also removed.
Later on Friday, William Burck, an attorney for Bannon in a fraud case in New York City, told a federal judge he was withdrawing. Bannon is accused of misappropriating money from a group which raised $2m from thousands of donors to build a wall on the border with Mexico, and has pleaded not guilty. Burck did not give a reason for his withdrawal.
There has been mounting concern over the risk of violence following this week’s US elections, amid highly inflammatory rhetoric from Trump and his allies, who have falsely said Democrats are trying to “steal the election”.
Philadelphia police arrested two men allegedly involved in a plot to attack the Pennsylvania Convention Center on Thursday night. Police were tipped off, possibly from a concerned family member of one of the men, who had driven 300 miles from Virginia.
The moves against Bannon came hours after Facebook banned “Stop the Steal”, a group involved in organising protests this weekend throughout the US against the presidential vote count.
One post, shared by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, declared: “Neither side is going to concede. Time to clean the guns, time to hit the streets.”
The increasingly heated language around the election has also included interventions from more mainstream figures, including the former Republican House speaker Newt Gingrich, who appeared to call for election workers in Pennsylvania to be arrested.
[embedded content]
Speaking to Sean Hannity on Fox News, Gingrich amplified Trump’s false complaints of election rigging and mused about what he believed was the solution.
“My hope is that President Trump will lead the millions of Americans who understand exactly what’s going on,” Gingrich said. “The Philadelphia machine is corrupt. The Atlanta machine is corrupt. The machine in Detroit is corrupt. And they are trying to steal the presidency. And we should not allow them to do that.”
“First of all, under federal law, we should lock up the people who are breaking the law,” he continued. “You stop somebody from being an observer, you just broke federal law. Do you hide and put up papers so nobody can see what you’re doing? You just broke federal law. You bring in ballots that aren’t real? You just broke federal law.” More - in US Politics
Georgia announces recount after presidential race too close to call
Election officials in Georgia announced a recount on Friday after the presidential race was deemed “too close to call” in that state.
Joe Biden overtook Donald Trump in Georgia, historically a Republican stronghold, at around 4.30am ET to secure a lead of 1,579 votes.
Trump and Biden were locked in a tight contest on Friday, with the Democrat edging ahead, to get the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency. For Trump, Georgia is a state he must win.
But with such a razor-thin margin, Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, said ballots will undergo a recount.
“Right now, Georgia remains too close to call. Of approximately 5m votes cast, we’ll have a margin of a few thousand,” he said in a press conference. He added: “With a margin that small, there will be a recount in Georgia.”
If Biden goes on to win Georgia, it would mark a major victory for the Democrats – and a huge upset for the Republicans – in a state that has been reliably Republican for decades.
The last time a Democratic presidential nominee won in the state was Bill Clinton in 1992. In 2016, Trump beat Hillary Clinton in Georgia by five percentage points.
Raffensperger acknowledged that Georgia’s result has “huge implications for the entire country” and officials said the unofficial tally could be completed by the end of the weekend.He added: “The stakes are high and emotions are high on all sides. We will not let those debates distract us from our work. We will get it right, and we will defend the integrity of our elections.”
Georgia does not run automatic recounts, but candidates can request them if the margin is within 0.5%.
The announcement of a recount came after a judge dismissed a lawsuit from the Trump campaign over the state’s handling of absentee ballots in Chatham county.
The Trump campaign has launched a swath of legal cases across the country, which are largely intended as a distraction and are founded on weak legal arguments, experts say.
Matt Morgan, general counsel for the Trump campaign, said on Friday: “Georgia is headed for a recount, where we are confident we will find ballots improperly harvested, and where President Trump will ultimately prevail.”
Gabriel Sterling, Georgia’s voting system implementation manager, dismissed allegations of fraud, saying: “We’re not seeing any widespread irregularities.”Sterling said that 4,169 ballots, most of which were absentee, were left to be counted from four counties, including Gwinnett county, which includes Atlanta suburbs and in recent years has shifted towards Democrats. The state also has an unknown quantity of military and overseas ballots and an unknown number of provisional ballots to be “cured”.
Biden’s strength in Georgia is the result of strong turnout among Black voters in the Atlanta suburbs, which have become younger and increasingly diverse.
The Black Voters Matter Fund, a non-profit that advocates for increasing voter registration and access, hailed the impact of Black voters in Georgia, who they said “saved the election”.
They said more than a million Black voters cast their ballots early in the state – exceeding 2016 numbers – and reported a “surge” in registration and turnout among young Black voters.
Co-founders LaTosha Brown and Cliff Albright said: “A new south is rising, and Georgia is the beacon … Georgia is at the epicenter of this country right now and we are claiming victory.”
It is also a product of the work of figures such Stacey Abrams, who since losing the state’s 2018 race for governor has thrown her efforts into Fair Fight, an organization she founded that focuses on combating voter suppression.
The recount could also have significant implications for the fight for control of the US Senate, with one – possibly two – Senate races heading for a runoff.
According to electoral research by the Associated Press, there have been at least 31 statewide recounts since 2000, of which three changed the outcome of an election. But in those the initial margins were even slimmer – in the low hundreds rather than thousands.
Many analysts believe Georgia’s shift to becoming a swing state is almost inevitable – an assessment that is reflected in the energies invested into the state by the Biden campaign.
In the final weeks before the election, Biden, his running mate Senator Kamala Harris and former president Barack Obama have all paid visits. Trump has also rallied there.
“Can you believe it? Two days from now, we’re going to win this state again and we’re going to win four more great years in the White House,” Trump told supporters in the Georgia city of Rome on Sunday. More - in US Politics
Philadelphia mayor tells Trump to accept he lost – video
Jim Kenney tells a press conference that Donald Trump should ‘put his big boy pants on’, acknowledge his defeat and congratulate Joe Biden as the winner of the US presidential election. It could take several days to complete the count in Philadelphia, but Biden has so far won 81% of the votes. Around 40,000 are still to be counted. Trump has continued to tweet baseless allegations of voter fraud
US election live: Biden on brink of beating Trump with growing lead in Nevada and Pennsylvania
Trump v Biden – full results as they come in More
