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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
World
Helen Sullivan (now); with Cecilia Nowell, Maya Yang, Amy Sedghi and Hamish Mackay (earlier)

Thousands protest in New York and Washington – as it happened

Donald Trump Joe Kent United States Gluesenkamp Perez Washington D.C. Joe Biden The Associated Press Jeff Hurd Kamala Harris Marie Gluesenkamp Perez
People pass the Trump International Hotel while marching in protest at the re-election of the former president.
People pass the Trump International Hotel while marching in protest at the re-election of the former president. Photograph: Sarah Yenesel/EPA

Closing summary

Here is a summary of the key recent developments:

  • Republicans on Saturday appeared close to clinching control of the US House of Representatives, a critical element for Donald Trump to advance his agenda when the president-elect returns to the White House in January. With votes still being counted from the 5 November general election, Republicans had won 212 seats in the 435-member House, according to Edison Research, which projected on Friday night that Republican Jeff Hurd had enough votes to keep Republican control of Colorado’s third congressional district.

  • Voter rights groups on Saturday petitioned the Arizona supreme court to extend the deadline for voters to fix problems with their mail-in ballots following delays in vote counting and notifying voters about problems. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Campaign Legal Center asked the state’s high court in an emergency petition that the original 5pm Sunday deadline be extended up to four days after a voter is sent notice of a problem.

  • Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez has won reelection to Washington state’s 3rd Congressional District, the Associated Press reports. Her victory gives the Democrats 201 House seats to Republicans’ 212 as the final votes are tallied to determine which party will control the House with 218 votes. Gluesenkamp Perez was first elected to the Senate two years ago when she won a close race for a seat that hadn’t been held by a Democrat in more than a decade.

  • Joe Biden has invited Donald Trump to the Oval Office on Wednesday at 11am ET. The meeting will be the first between the current and former president after the 2024 election.

  • Trump announced the formation of the Trump Vance Inaugural Committee, which will be chaired by real estate investor Steve Witkoff and former Georgia senator Kelly Loeffler. As the president-elect begins to select his cabinet, he shared on Truth Social today that the administration will not include either former UN ambasssador Nikki Haley or former secretary of state Mike Pompeo.

  • Thousands of New Yorkers gathered for the Protect Our Futures march, protesting Trump’s re-election as president from outside Trump Tower, as more demonstrators gathered outside the offices of the Heritage Foundation (which authored the controversial Project 2025) in Washington DC.

  • A Federal Emergency Management Agency employee has been fired after she instructed her team to avoid dispatching aid to houses with Trump signs following Hurricane Milton.

  • More than two months after the deadline to sign presidential transition paperwork passed, Trump’s incoming administration still has not signed the agreement with the General Services Administration. The agreements coordinating the transition, which were due 1 September, mandate that the incoming president agree to an ethics plan and limit and disclose private donations.

  • A record 13 women will lead their states as governor next year, breaking the previously held record of 12 set after the 2022 election.

Protests against Donald Trump erupted in the US on Saturday as people on both coasts took to the streets in frustration about his re-election.

Thousands of people in major cities including New York City and Seattle demonstrated against the former president and now president-elect amid his threats against reproductive rights and pledges to carry out mass deportations at the start of his upcoming presidency.

In New York City on Saturday, demonstrators from advocacy groups focused on workers’ rights and immigrant justice crowded outside Trump International Hotel and Tower on 5th Avenue holding signs that read: “We protect us” and “Mr President, how long must women wait for liberty?” Others held signs that read: “We won’t back down” while chanting: “Here we are and we’re not leaving!”

Similar protests took place in Washington DC, where Women’s March participants demonstrated outside the Heritage Foundation, the rightwing thinktank behind Project 2025. Pictures posted on social media on Saturday showed demonstrators holding signs that read: “Well-behaved women don’t make history” and “You are never alone”. Demonstrators also chanted: “We believe that we will win!” and held other signs that read: “Where’s my liberty when I have no choice?”

Republicans on Saturday appeared close to clinching control of the US House of Representatives, a critical element for Donald Trump to advance his agenda when the president-elect returns to the White House in January.

With votes still being counted from the 5 November general election, Republicans had won 212 seats in the 435-member House, according to Edison Research, which projected on Friday night that Republican Jeff Hurd had enough votes to keep Republican control of Colorado’s third congressional district.

Democratic Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez won re-election to a US House seat representing Washington state on Saturday, the Associated Press reported, defeating Republican Joe Kent in a rematch of one of the closest races of 2022.

Vice President Kamala Harris’ niece, Meena Harris, shared two photos on social media Saturday of her daughters – Harris’ grandnieces – playing Connect Four, following the vice president’s loss in the 2024 presidential election earlier this week.

She captioned the post, “Back to where it all began only a few months ago. My eternal gratitude to everyone who showed up. We love her so much.”

ACLU asks Arizona Supreme Court to extend 'curing' deadline after vote-count delays

Voter rights groups on Saturday petitioned the Arizona supreme court to extend the deadline for voters to fix problems with their mail-in ballots following delays in vote counting and notifying voters about problems, the Associated Press reports.

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Campaign Legal Center asked the state’s high court in an emergency petition that the original 5 p.m. Sunday deadline be extended up to four days after a voter is sent notice of a problem.

The groups argued in the petition that “tens of thousands of Arizonans stand to be disenfranchised without any notice, let alone an opportunity to take action to ensure their ballots are counted.”

“Because these ballots have not even been processed, Respondents have not identified which ballots are defective and have not notified voters of the need to cure those defects,” the petition stated.

Arizona law says people who vote by mail should receive notice of problems with their ballots, such as a signature that doesn’t match the one on file, and get a chance to correct it in a process known as “curing.”

The groups’ petition noted that as of Friday evening more than 250,000 mail-in ballots had not yet been verified by signature. The bulk of them were in Arizona’s most populous county, Maricopa County.

Just under 200,000 early ballots remained to be processed as of Saturday, according to estimates on the Arizona secretary of state’s Office website.

Election officials in Maricopa did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.

Gluesenkamp Perez has balanced progressive policies with some measures popular with Republicans during her tenure, including securing the US-Mexico border – something she criticises Biden for failing to do – and introducing a constitutional amendment to force presidents to balance the budget.

She supports abortion access and has hammered Kent, who previously has said he supported a national abortion ban, for changing his position after the supreme court overturned Roe v. Wade. Kent now says abortion laws should be left up to the states.

Gluesenkamp Perez supports policies to counter climate change, but also speaks openly about being a gun owner. A top priority is pushing a “right to repair” bill that would help people get equipment fixed without having to pay exorbitant prices to the original manufacturer.

Kent, a former Green Beret who has called for the impeachment of President Joe Biden, cited inflation and illegal immigration as top concerns.

The two disagreed on a major local issue: the replacement of a major bridge across the Columbia River between Portland, Oregon, and Vancouver, Washington. Gluesenkamp Perez supports plans to replace the existing bridge; Kent argued that a separate new bridge should be built while the old one is maintained.

Here is more non Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, who has just won re-election to Washington State’s third Congressional District. Via the Associated Press:

Two years ago, Gluesenkamp Perez, who owns an auto-repair shop with her husband, came out of nowhere to win the seat, which hadn’t been in Democratic hands for over a decade. She beat the Trump-endorsed Kent by fewer than 3,000 votes out of nearly 320,000 cast, making it one of the closest races in the country and setting the stage for a tough election fight this year.

Her predecessor, Republican Jaime Herrera Beutler, held office for six terms but failed to survive the 2022 primary after voting to impeach Trump over the Jan. 6 insurrection. The district narrowly went for Trump in 2020, making it a crucial target for both parties this year.

The race gained additional attention last week when an arson attack struck a ballot box in Vancouver – the district’s biggest city – scorching hundreds of ballots. People who cast their votes in that box were urged to contact the county auditor’s office to receive replacement ballots.

Today so far

Thanks for joining us today. Here is a summary of the latest developments on today’s US politics blog:

  • Joe Biden has invited Donald Trump to the Oval Office on Wednesday at 11am ET. The meeting will be the first between the current and former president after the 2024 election.

  • Trump announced the formation of the Trump Vance Inaugural Committee, which will be chaired by real estate investor Steve Witkoff and former Georgia senator Kelly Loeffler. As the president-elect begins to select his cabinet, he shared on Truth Social today that the administration will not include either former UN ambassador Nikki Haley or former secretary of state Mike Pompeo.

  • Thousands of New Yorkers gathered for the Protect Our Futures march, protesting Trump’s re-election as president from outside Trump Tower, as more demonstrators gathered outside the offices of the Heritage Foundation (which authored the controversial Project 2025) in Washington DC.

  • A Federal Emergency Management Agency employee was fired after she instructed her team to avoid dispatching aid to houses with Trump signs following Hurricane Milton.

  • More than two months after the deadline to sign presidential transition paperwork passed, Trump’s incoming administration still has not signed the agreement with the General Services Administration. The agreements coordinating the transition, which were due 1 September, mandate that the incoming president agree to an ethics plan and limit and disclose private donations.

  • A record 13 women will lead their states as governor next year, breaking the previously held record of 12 set after the 2022 election.

Updated

Democratic senator re-elected to Washington state House seat

Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez has won reelection to Washington state’s 3rd Congressional District, the Associated Press reports. Her victory gives the Democrats 201 House seats to Republicans’ 212 as the final votes are tallied to determine which party will control the House with 218 votes.

Gluesenkamp Perez was first elected to the Senate two years ago when she won a close race for a seat that hadn’t been held by a Democrat in more than a decade.

Updated

Now that he has been re-elected, Donald Trump has a number of cabinet positions to fill – but his administration won’t include either former UN ambassador Nikki Haley or former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, Trump said on Truth Social.

As Real Clear Politics reports, it’s looking increasingly likely Trump may nominate Richard Grenell as his secretary of state. The former US ambassador to Germany and previous acting director of national intelligence is seen as a Trump loyalist, although Tennessee senator Bill Hagerty and Florida senator Marco Rubio are also reportedly under consideration.

Updated

If you’re curious what Donald Trump’s decisive victory says about the current faultlines in American politics, the Guardian’s Richard Luscombe has reported on Trump’s victory among Latino and Hispanic voters.

Here’s more:

The raucous early morning celebration in Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood was of a magnitude not seen since the Cuban dictator Fidel Castro died eight years previously. In the immigrant-saturated suburb of Westchester, too, Latinos partied beyond daybreak as Donald Trump’s return to the White House was confirmed.

Wednesday morning’s revelry in south Florida reflected a stunning victory for Trump in the previously solid blue, Hispanic-majority county of Miami-Dade that had not been won by a Republican presidential candidate in more than 30 years.

His victory, fueled largely by support from Latino and Hispanic voters, particularly Latino men, was repeated in county after county in swing states as the Democrats’ blue wall crumbled and it became clear Trump would once again be president.

In Pennsylvania, hordes of Puerto Ricans who saw their homeland demeaned as a “floating island of garbage” at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally barely a week before, flocked to give him their vote.

Updated

As it appears increasingly likely that Republicans will control the presidency, the Senate and the House, Democratic governors across the United States are drawing up plans to “Trump-proof” their states.

California governor Gavin Newsom has drawn perhaps the most attention after tweeting a reaction to Donald Trump’s election-night victory. Newsom has already called for the state legislature to hold a special session before Trump’s inauguration.

But Newsom is not the only Democratic governor preparing for Trump’s second administration. Illinois governor JB Pritzker has spent the days since the election combing through Project 2025, and tells the Chicago Sun Times: “You come for my people, you come through me.”

Meanwhile, Massachusetts governor Maura Healey told MSNBC that her state’s law enforcement will not assist in mass deportations if Trump orders them.

Updated

More protesters are gathering in cities across the US to denounce Donald Trump’s re-election. Although widespread, the protests are decidedly smaller than many that occured following the president-elect’s first victory in 2016.

Here’s a sense of where demonstrations are taking place:

Seattle

Portland

Denver

Updated

Thousands of people gathered outside Trump Tower in New York today to protest against Donald Trump’s re-election as president, while more gathered in Washington DC in response to fears that the new administration could further threaten abortion rights after Roe v Wade was overturned in 2022.

Here’s footage of the events:

The Women's March holds DC protest of Project 2025 architect

Protesters from the Women’s March gathered outside the offices of the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC this afternoon to criticize the conservative thinktank that published Project 2025. The rally was organized to advocate for abortion access and “as a chance to build community and power in the wake of the 2024 election”, a Women’s March spokesperson told CNN.

The Women’s March intends to hold another demonstration in Washington DC on 18 January, two days before Donald Trump will be inaugurated for his second term as president.

Updated

Although all the votes are not yet counted in the tally for which party will control the House of Representatives, it’s looking likely that Republicans will have a majority in the chamber. What’s less clear is who will lead the party. Although current speaker Mike Johnson is seeking another term, Politico reports that some conservatives are looking for ways to signal their opposition to the current leader in a secret ballot next week.

In lighter news, New Jersey senator-elect Andy Kim spent election night awaiting the results of his race in the hotel that his family lived in for several weeks after they moved to the state. Kim’s win on Tuesday night will make him the first Korean American to serve in Congress.

Updated

A Federal Emergency Management Agency employee has been fired after she instructed her team to avoid dispatching aid to houses with Donald Trump signs following Hurricane Milton.

The Guardian’s Joanna Walters reports:

A employee at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) has been fired from her job and is being investigated because she told a disaster relief team she was directing in Florida after Hurricane Milton to avoid homes displaying election campaign signs supporting Donald Trump, conduct that the agency head on Saturday called “reprehensible”.

Deanne Criswell, the administrator of the federal agency, posted on X: “More than 22,000 Fema employees every day adhere to Fema’s core values and are dedicated to helping people before, during and after disasters, often sacrificing time with their own families to help disaster survivors.”

She continued: “Recently, a Fema employee departed from these values to advise her survivor assistance team not go to homes with yard signs supporting President-elect Trump. This is a clear violation of Fema’s core values and principles to help people regardless of their political affiliation.”

For the full story, click here:

Here are some images coming through the newswires of Saturday’s protests across New York City led by various advocacy organizations in response to Donald Trump’s re-election:

Updated

Trump campaign announces leaders of inauguration committee

Donald Trump has announced the formation of the Trump Vance Inaugural Committee, an organization that will “plan inaugural events”, the Trump-Vance campaign said in a statement on Saturday.

The co-chairs of the committee have been announced as real estate investor Steve Witkoff and former Georgia senator Kelly Loeffler.

“On election night, we made history and I have the extraordinary honor of having been elected the 47th President of the United States thanks to tens millions of hardworking Americans across the nation who supported our America First agenda. The Trump Vance Inaugural Committee will honor this magnificent victory in a celebration of the American people and our nation,” Trump said in a statement.

“This will be the kick-off to my administration, which will deliver on bold promises to Make America Great Again. Together, we will celebrate this moment, steeped on history and tradition, and then get to work to achieve the most incredible future for our people, restoring strength, success, and common sense to the Oval Office,” he added.

Updated

With Donald Trump’s re-election, the supreme court is once again in play. During Trump’s first administration, the president-elect appointed three justices, which ultimately created the conservative majority that overturned Roe v Wade.

As he returns to office, Trump could appoint new justices – especially if the aging conservative justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito retire. Senate Democrats are also currently debating whether to rush to replace liberal justice Sonia Sotomayor, who is 70, although they may struggle to confirm a replacement before Joe Biden leaves the White House.

Updated

The US presidential election is already having international reverberations – from the war in Ukraine to global trade. One issue on many voters’ minds: the war in Gaza.

Here’s Jason Burke with more about how the US elections could keep Benjamin Netanyahu in power until 2026:

Benjamin Netanyahu is set to stay in power in Israel until elections due in 2026 and possibly longer, analysts and officials now believe, after a tumultuous week in which the 75-year-old veteran politician successfully fired his defence minister and was boosted by the results of the US election.

Netanyahu’s newly reinforced position could lead to further intensification of Israel’s campaign in Lebanon, and prolong the conflict in Gaza, critics fear – although the incoming US president Donald Trump has said he wants to swiftly end both wars.

Many observers have been surprised by the political resilience of Netanyahu, who is blamed by most Israelis for the failures that allowed Hamas to launch its bloody attacks into Israel last October, killing around 1,200 and taking more than 250 hostages.

Updated

More than two months after the deadline to sign presidential transition paperwork passed, federal transition officials tell Politico that they expect Donald Trump’s incoming administration will sign the agreement with the General Services Administration. The GSA coordinates the transition between incoming and outgoing presidential administrations, including by providing security clearances, briefings, access to federal facilities, documents and personnel. The agreements coordinating the transition, which were due 1 September, mandate that the incoming president agree to an ethics plan and limit and disclose private donations.

As Politico reports, “rejecting help from GSA could have helped shield the federal government’s access to [the Trump team’s] materials. It also would have allowed them to accept unlimited sums of money for the transition without disclosing the identities of its donors.”

Updated

Thousands of New Yorkers march against Trump's re-election

Thousands of New Yorkers have gathered for the Protect Our Futures march, protesting Donald Trump’s re-election as president. Labor unions, immigrant rights groups and LGBTQ+ advocates held aloft a banner reading “We Won’t Back Down” as they marched outside the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Columbus Circle this afternoon.

Here’s some footage from the ground:

Updated

Although the US presidential election has been decided, votes are still being counted across the country – including in Arizona, where the tally will determine which candidate fills the state’s open Senate seat.

Here’s Edward Helmore with more:

Arizona remained in a tense waiting game on Saturday for its election results, even as neighboring Nevada declared for Donald Trump overnight, giving the president-elect six out of seven swing states after election day on 5 November.

In Arizona, official tallies were 83% complete by mid-morning on Saturday with Trump leading at 52.7% and Harris at 46%, or about 180,000 votes ahead. But enough ballots remain uncounted – 602,000 as of late Friday night – for the state to remain undeclared. The state sensationally flipped to Joe Biden and the Democrats in 2020.

In the key US Senate race there between Republican Kari Lake and Democrat Ruben Gallego, the controversial Lake, who always denied that Biden won the White House fairly in 2020, was trailing the Democrat 48.5% to 49.5%, or by around 33,000 votes, mid-morning on Saturday.

A record 13 women will lead their states as governor next year, breaking the previously held record of 12 set after the 2022 election. The news comes as former senator Kelly Ayotte is elected as New Hampshire’s governor – in a race where a win by either her or her opponent, Joyce Craig, would have set the new record.

The victory for women’s leadership comes in the same election where voters chose Donald Trump over a female presidential candidate for the second time. To date, 18 states still have never had a woman hold the role of governor.

Updated

Hundreds of protesters are gathering in New York City this afternoon for the Protect Our Futures march, in response to the outcome of the 2024 presidential election.

The rally, which is gathering in Columbus Circle, was organized by workers’ rights groups like the Working Families Party, the Communications Workers of America and Indivisible – as well as immigrant justice organizations like Make the Road NY.

In an invitation to the march, organizers wrote: “New York has a crucial role to play in setting the tone for the next four years. It is critical to make clear that New Yorkers will continue to stand together, in community, against the danger to come.”

Here’s some footage as protesters begin gathering, including advocates from Make the Road NY chanting: “Estamos en la lucha” (we are in the fight), activists with Jews for Racial and Economic Justice singing a nigun as they march, and members of the City University of New York’s faculty and staff union holding aloft red “Solidarity” signs.

Updated

Donald Trump’s advisers are evaluating methods to carry out the president-elect’s promised “largest deportation” in US history, the Wall Street Journal reports. Currently, the incoming administration is considering issuing a national emergency declaration, which could allow Trump to use Pentagon funds, military facilities for detention and military planes for deportations. The administration is reportedly also assessing ways to encourage immigrants to leave voluntarily, perhaps by waiving a 10-year bar on re-entry.

A recent estimate from the American Immigration Council predicted that mass deportations of the current number of undocumented immigrants in the US could cost $968bn over more than a decade. As Trump decides who to appoint to his new administration, Tom Homan, acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during Trump’s first term, and Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s “Muslim ban”, are likely to play important roles.

Updated

As results continue to roll in from the 2024 elections, data shows that the Republican party picked up seats all across the country – even in the deeply Democratic stronghold of New York City.

Here’s Adam Gabbatt with more on why:

Every single county in the New York City metropolitan area swung towards Trump compared with four years ago, Gothamist reported. It’s a staggering shift for a multicultural, heavily Democratic city, given the divisive and racist nature of Trump’s campaign.

But it shouldn’t have come as a huge surprise to Democrats, said Lawrence Levy, former chief political columnist for Newsday and executive dean of the National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University.

“Something started happening in 2021,” Levy said. “This did not come out of the blue.”

That year, New York City politics started seeing some reactions to “post-pandemic pain”, Levy said, as some voters from demographics including the white, Latino and Asian communities shifted away from Democrats in local elections. In the 2022 midterm elections, New York City retained its Democratic members of the House of Representatives, but some suburban voters to the north and east of the city elected Republicans.

“The question is: what does this all mean?” Levy said.

Trump to visit White House on Wednesday as transition begins

Joe Biden has invited Donald Trump to the Oval Office on Wednesday at 11am ET, according to White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. The meeting will be the first between the current and former president after the 2024 election.

Here’s more on the presidential transition as it gets under way:

Updated

Democratic senator Bob Casey has not yet conceded his race for re-election in Pennsylvania – although the Associated Press called the race for his opponent two days ago. Casey ran against Republican David McCormick, a former hedge fund CEO, in a hotly contested race that ranked as one of the Senate’s most expensive, with the campaigns and their allies spending more than $300m on ads.

As Joan E Greve writes,

When the AP called the race at 4.09pm ET on Thursday, two days after polls closed in Pennsylvania, McCormick led by 0.5 points. The narrow margin raised the possibility of a recount, although Casey faces an uphill climb in overcoming McCormick’s lead of roughly 30,000 votes.

After the AP called the race, the Pennsylvania department of state announced that at least 100,000 ballots remained uncounted, boosting the Casey team’s hopes of a last-minute surge.

Updated

Summary of the day so far

Here is a summary of the latest developments so far on today’s US politics blog:

  • Donald Trump won his sixth battleground state of the 2024 election early on Saturday, beating Kamala Harris in Nevada. The AP declared Trump the winner after concluding there were not enough uncounted ballots in the state’s strongest Democratic areas to overcome the former president’s 46,000-vote lead over the Democratic nominee. Only Arizona remains to be called.

  • Nevada Democratic senator Jacky Rosen has won re-election, beating Republican Sam Brown in a tight but unusually quiet race for the battleground state. “Thank you, Nevada! I’m honored and grateful to continue serving as your United States senator,” Rosen said on Friday on the social platform X.

  • Joe Biden’s slowness in exiting the 2024 presidential election cost the Democrats dearly, the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi said, days after Harris was beaten by Trump. “Had the president gotten out sooner, 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,” Pelosi remarked in The Interview, a New York Times podcast.

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

  • The US justice department is bringing criminal charges over an Iranian plot to kill Trump that was thwarted by the FBI, the government said. The federal government has unsealed criminal charges in what the justice department said was a murder-for-hire plan to take out Trump before this week’s presidential election.

  • Russia is open to hearing Trump’s proposals on ending the war, an official said on Saturday, as a Russian drone killed one person and injured 13 in the Ukrainian port city of Odesa and the EU foreign policy chief held talks in Kyiv. Sergei Ryabkov, Russia’s deputy foreign minister, said Moscow and Washington were “exchanging signals” on Ukraine via “closed channels”, according to AP. He did not specify whether the communication was with the current administration or Trump and members of his incoming administration.

  • Bryan Lanza, a Republican party strategist and senior adviser to Trump suggested, in an interview with the BBC, that the Trump administration will focus on securing an end to the war in Ukraine – rather than trying to help Kyiv regain territory.

  • Federal transition officials have said they expect Trump’s team to sign an agreement to accept their help with preparations for the new administration, reports Politico, citing three people with knowledge of the discussions. However, it’s unclear if an agreement has been signed yet, says Politico.

  • Iran on Saturday urged Trump to reconsider the “maximum pressure” policy he pursued against Tehran during his first term. “Trump must show that he is not following the wrong policies of the past,” the Iranian vice-president for strategic affairs, Mohammad Javad Zarif, told reporters on Saturday.

  • Just hours after 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.

  • Harris received at least 22,000 fewer votes than Biden did four years ago in Michigan’s most heavily Arab American and Muslim cities, a Guardian analysis of raw vote data in the critical swing state finds. The numbers also show Trump made small gains – about 9,000 votes – across those areas, suggesting Harris’s loss there is more attributable to Arab Americans either not voting or casting ballots for third-party candidates.

  • Barack Obama’s former speechwriter said during an episode of the Pod Save America podcast that Biden’s internal polling showed Trump winning “400 electoral votes”, reports the Hill. Jon Favreau, a host of the podcast, said on Friday’s episode, that Biden’s re-election attempt was a “catastrophic mistake”.

  • Inflation and immigration emerged as the dominant themes in this year’s presidential race. But democracy was also prominent in the minds of voters. Early exit polls on Tuesday night showed democracy as one of the most important issues on voters’ minds after the economy – and both Republican and Democratic voters had concerns. In its VoteCast survey, half of the 120,000 voters polled by the AP said democracy was their single most important motivating factor for how they voted.

  • Anti-abortion advocates say there is still work to be done to further restrict access to abortion when Trump returns to the White House next year. “Now the work begins to dismantle the pro-abortion policies of the Biden-Harris administration,” the Susan B Anthony List, the powerful anti-abortion lobby, said in a statement on Wednesday. The group added: “President Trump’s first-term pro-life accomplishments are the baseline for his second term.” The group declined to release details about what, specifically, they will seek to undo.

  • The Iraqi prime minister, Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, expressed hopes during a phone call with Trump that he would keep his “promises to work towards ending wars” in the Middle East. In the phone call, the Iraqi premier pointed to Trump’s “campaign statements and promises to work towards ending wars in the region”, a statement from Sudani’s office said late on Friday.

  • Millions of Americans are at risk of losing health coverage in 2025 under 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.

  • The judge overseeing Trump’s 2020 election interference case canceled any remaining court deadlines on Friday while prosecutors assess the “the appropriate course going forward” in light of the Republican’s presidential victory, reports the Associated Press.

  • Bomb threats were made against several Maryland boards of elections and election offices in at least two California counties on Friday, state authorities said, adding that everyone was safe and law enforcement officials were investigating.

  • Nigel Farage has said he could be “useful as an interlocutor” between the UK’s Labour government and Trump. The Reform UK leader said he has “got a great relationship” with the president-elect and also knows people he believes will be in Trump’s administration for “quite a long time”. Speaking to the PA news agency at a Reform event in Exeter, Farage described Trump as a “pro-British American president” who gives the UK “potentially huge opportunities if we can overcome the difficulties that the whole of the cabinet have been rude about him”.

  • Ed Davey has urged UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, to “Trump-proof” the UK by urgently seeking closer European cooperation over military aid for Ukraine and economic ties, after the US president-elect’s threats about security and trade wars. The Liberal Democrat leader, whose party is the third biggest in the House of Commons, argued that while the UK government should seek to work with a Trump administration, it should also be as prepared as possible if he were to abandon Ukraine or impose sweeping tariffs.

Updated

Russia open to hearing Trump's Ukraine peace proposals

Russia is open to hearing Donald Trump’s proposals on ending the war, an official said on Saturday, as a Russian drone killed one person and wounded 13 in the Ukrainian port city of Odesa and the European Union foreign policy chief held talks in Kyiv.

Sergei Ryabkov, Russia’s deputy foreign minister, said Moscow and Washington were “exchanging signals” on Ukraine via “closed channels”, according to the AP. He did not specify whether the communication was with the current administration or Trump and members of his incoming administration.

Russia’s readiness depends on whether Trump’s proposals are “ideas on how to move forward in the area of settlement, and not in the area of further pumping the Kyiv regime with all kinds of aid”, Ryabkov said on Saturday in an interview with Russian state news agency Interfax.

In Kyiv, Ukraine’s foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, told reporters that Ukraine is ready to work with the Trump administration.

“Remember that President Zelenskyy was one of the first world leaders … to greet president Trump,” he said. “It was a sincere conversation [and] an exchange of thoughts regarding further cooperation.”

Updated

Donald Trump’s US election victory was fueled largely by the support from Latino and Hispanic voters, particularly Latino men, that was repeated in county after county in swing states elsewhere as the Democratic party’s blue wall crumbled and the former president was elected to also be the next.

In Pennsylvania, Puerto Ricans who saw their homeland demeaned as a “floating island of garbage” at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally, barely a week before the election, flocked to give him their vote.

In Wisconsin, exit polls showed a six-point rise from 2020, to 43%, in Trump’s Hispanic support, despite his condemnation of certain immigrants as “drug dealers”, “murderers” and “rapists”, and promise to conduct the largest deportation effort in US history soon after he takes office.

And among other minority groups, Arab and Muslim Americans in Michigan also seemed able to overlook Trump’s full-throated support of Israel’s military onslaught in Gaza to show up for him in large numbers. In large part, that move was as much an effort to vote against Kamala Harris as many in the Arab and Muslim American communities have expressed anger with the Biden administration – and, by extension, Harris – for its support for Israel.

Analysts, while noting that the election was only a few days ago and a full picture of voting patterns has yet to emerge, suggest a multitude of reasons why a candidate so openly hostile to immigrants would be championed by them in such large numbers.

Fault, they say, can be attributed to Democrats’ failure to understand the nuances of the Hispanic and Latino voting populations. There were clear signs as early as January that then candidate Joe Biden’s support from that demographic had cratered, and Trump’s was rising.

Ultimately, it was Republicans’ economic messaging that broke through most, several experts said. That was then combined with an admiration for Trump’s bombastic and pugnacious style among Latino men who, as much as white men and women who form his base, have no problem with his insults, racism and threats, because they don’t believe he is talking about them.

“There seems to be an attraction to Trump among Latinos, Latino men, that could be a kind of defensive reaction to his aggression and aggressive rhetoric,” said Guillermo Grenier, professor of sociology at Florida International University and the co-author of the book This Land Is Our Land: Newcomers and Established Residents in Miami.

“It could be they’re saying: ‘I’m not one of them, you know? I’m an American citizen, I’m voting for you, I’m not the rapist scum, I’m not with them. That’s the other guys, the other immigrants, not the voting immigrants.’”

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Nigel Farage has said he could be “useful as an interlocutor” between the UK’s Labour government and Donald Trump, reports the Press Association (PA).

The Reform UK leader said he has “got a great relationship” with the president-elect and also knows people he believes will be in Trump’s administration for “quite a long time”.

Speaking to the PA news agency at a Reform event in Exeter, Farage described Trump as a “pro-British American president” who gives the UK “potentially huge opportunities if we can overcome the difficulties that the whole of the cabinet have been rude about him”.

The UK’s prime minister, Keir Starmer, and the government will be keen to build bridges with Trump ahead of him returning to the White House after a row over Labour activists campaigning for Kamala Harris, and controversy over comments previously made by foreign secretary, David Lammy.

Farage told PA:

I’ve got a great relationship with Donald Trump but equally I know many of the other senior figures who will be in this administration and I’ve known them for quite a long time.

It seems to me that with a Labour party and a Republican party who disagree on so many things – who are such fundamentally different people – that I might be useful as an interlocutor. Unofficially, behind the scenes, to try and help mend some of those fences.

If the [UK] government choose to use me, I would do that not because I support the Labour government but because I believe in something called the national interest.”

On Friday, Farage said the UK should “roll out the red carpet” for Trump. He said:

Whether you like Trump or not, this is the important point that in terms of intelligence sharing, in terms of defence, in terms of investment, in terms of trade, America is our most important relationship.

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Federal transition officials have said they expect Donald Trump’s team to sign an agreement to accept their help with preparations for the new administration, reports Politico, citing three people with knowledge of the discussions.

However, it’s unclear if an agreement has been signed yet, says Politico. It comes after reports that the traditional system of seeking support from the General Services Administration (GSA) would be avoided.

“The Trump-Vance transition lawyers continue to constructively engage with the Biden-Harris administration lawyers regarding all agreements contemplated by the Presidential Transition Act,” Trump transition spokesperson Brian Hughes said in a statement, according to Politico. “We will update you once a decision is made.”

Barack Obama’s former speechwriter said during an episode of the Pod Save America podcast that Joe Biden’s internal polling showed president-elect Donald Trump winning “400 electoral votes”, reports the Hill.

According to the US political website, Jon Favreau, a host of the podcast, said on Friday’s episode:

Then we find out when the Biden campaign becomes the Harris campaign, that the Biden campaign’s own internal polling at the time when they were telling us he was the strongest candidate, showed that Donald Trump was going to win 400 electoral votes.

Favreau described Biden’s re-election attempt as a “catastrophic mistake”. He also said Biden’s “inner circle” refused to believe he was “unpopular”, according to the Hill.

“They refuse to acknowledge until very late that anyone could be upset about inflation. And they just kept telling us that his presidency was historic and it was the greatest economy ever,” Favreau was quoted as saying.

The Hill said they had contacted the White House press office for comment.

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The party was buzzing, the confidence was surging and Kenneth Stewart was riding the Trump train. “He’s masculine,” explained Stewart, an African American man from Chicago. “He brings a lot of energy. He talks about things that we can understand. He talks about building. He talks about the auto industry. He talks about a lot of stuff that people in the Rust belt care about.”

Stewart was a guest at Donald Trump’s election watch event in West Palm Beach, Florida, on Tuesday night and celebrated his victory over the Democratic vice-president, Kamala Harris. The result said much about gender, race and the new media landscape. It also represented a populist backlash against America’s perceived elites.

In the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic, millions felt a distrust of authorities who ordered them to wear masks, close schools and go into lockdown. They felt frustrated by post-pandemic inflation that pushed up the prices of groceries and petrol. They felt they would never be able to buy a house, that the American dream was slipping away. They were looking for someone to blame – and for a champion who could fix it.

They believed they found him in Trump and, despite his two impeachments and 34 criminal convictions, returned him to power. He made gains among nearly every demographic group. In part he was riding a wave of anti-incumbency fervour that has swept through major democracies, battering the left and the right in the aftershocks of the pandemic.

That will provide little comfort to Democrats, who raised a billion dollars yet lost the national popular vote. They have come to be seen as the party of the highly educated who earn more than $100,000 a year and live in big cities such as New York and Washington. They are perceived as out of tune with people who work with their hands and shower after work instead of before.

Stewart said on Tuesday night:

The other side, they’re only talking about feelings. They’re talking about Trump’s bad. But come to me with tangibles. A lot of Black men just want tangibles. We just want jobs. We want to see what our fathers had. We want to see what our grandfathers had, especially in the Rust belt.

America is a nation of cavernous inequality with few safety nets. The last populist convulsion came 15 years ago after the Great Recession. On the left it spawned Occupy Wall Street, a response to economic inequality, corporate greed and the influence of money in politics. On the right it gave rise to the Tea Party, fuelled by rage against elites, distrust in government and racial hostility to President Barack Obama.

The Democratic and Republican parties each absorbed these movements into their political DNA. They manifested in the 2016 presidential election when the harmful effects of globalisation, trade and deindustrialisation took centre age. Leftwing senator Bernie Sanders drew huge crowds in Democratic primary but lost, while non-politician Trump drew huge crowds in the Republican primary and won.

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Inflation and immigration emerged as the dominant themes in this year’s presidential race.

But democracy was also prominent in the minds of voters. Early exit polls on Tuesday night showed democracy as one of the most important issues on voters’ minds after the economy – and both Republican and Democratic voters had concerns.

In its VoteCast survey, half of the 120,000 voters polled by AP said democracy was their single most important motivating factor for how they voted.

But supporters of Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump saw the issue from different perspectives. They differed over why they’re worried about democracy and who’s responsible for the threat.

During the campaign, Harris repeatedly warned of the dangers Trump poses to US democracy. Harris denounced Trump as a “fascist” who wants “unchecked power” and a military personally loyal to him after allegations emerged about the former president’s repeatedly voiced admiration for Hitler.

Trump also used his rallies to paint Democrats as a threat to democracy – repeatedly calling Harris and senior Democrats radical leftists and Marxists. It appears that message got through to his base.

About one-third of his supporters said democracy was the most important factor for their vote. About eight in 10 Trump voters felt electing Harris would bring the country closer to authoritarianism. “Democracy voters” who supported Harris and Trump were equally concerned that the opposing candidate’s views were too extreme.

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Trump adviser tells Ukraine 'Crimea is gone' and it should focus on peace

The BBC has published an interview with Bryan Lanza, a Republican party strategist and senior adviser to Donald Trump.

In it, Lanza suggests the Trump administration will focus on securing an end to the war in Ukraine – rather than trying to help Kyiv regain territory.

Lanza said Zelenskyy would be asked to provide a “realistic vision for peace”, adding:

And if president Zelenskyy comes to the table and says, well we can only have peace if we have Crimea, he shows to us that he’s not serious.

Later, he said:

When Zelenskyy says we will only stop this fighting, there will only be peace once Crimea is returned, we’ve got news for president Zelenskyy: Crimea is gone.

And if that is your priority of getting Crimea back and having American soldiers fight to get Crimea back, you’re on your own.

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UK prime minister Keir Starmer is being urged to consider an emergency cash injection into defence and to accelerate Britain’s planned review of its military capabilities before Donald Trump’s return to the White House.

Senior defence figures are now assessing how Trump’s victory will shape a strategic defence review (SDR) that was already under way in Whitehall, whose findings are due to be reported in the spring. The SDR comes alongside a crucial review of public spending.

However, Starmer and chancellor Rachel Reeves are already facing calls to think again about the immediate funding allocated to defence, amid concerns that a clear plan for the military’s future may not be in place until next summer.

Starmer’s commitment to spend 2.5% of GDP on defence when economic conditions allow remains unfunded since the budget. Meanwhile, a £17bn shortfall in the budget for new weapons and equipment over the next 10 years has already been identified by the National Audit Office.

Admiral Lord West, a former chief of the naval staff who served as Labour’s security minister under Gordon Brown, told the Observer that Trump’s election created a chance to demonstrate Britain’s willingness to step up on defence, amid the incoming US president’s criticism that European nations have failed to prioritise it.

“I see it as an opportunity,” he said. “It is understandable, given the politics, to do a strategic defence review. But if you’re going to match what’s required for the security of this nation, it will inevitably mean a need for more money. So why don’t we now bite the bullet and go down that road?

“Historically, we’ve done better than most European countries and Trump knows that. We can set an example. We could show we’re going to move straight towards 3% [of GDP spent on defence] because we want to show everyone the way. This would be a big tick in the box, Trump would be on side, and there will be lots of benefits.”

Updated

Donald Trump wins Nevada - his sixth battleground victory

Donald Trump won his sixth battleground state of the 2024 election early on Saturday, beating Kamala Harris in Nevada.

The AP declared Trump the winner after concluding there were not enough uncounted ballots in the state’s strongest Democratic areas to overcome the former president’s 46,000-vote lead over the Democratic nominee.

Trump clinched a second term early on Wednesday when Wisconsin pushed him past the 270 electoral votes needed to win, so Nevada’s six electoral votes only added to the size of his victory.

He now has 301 electoral votes and has won six of the seven battleground states. Only Arizona remains to be called.

The AP only declares a winner once it can determine that a trailing candidate can’t close the gap and overtake the vote leader.

Kamala Harris received at least 22,000 fewer votes than Joe Biden did four years ago in Michigan’s most heavily Arab American and Muslim cities, a Guardian analysis of raw vote data in the critical swing state finds.

The numbers also show Trump made small gains – about 9,000 votes – across those areas, suggesting Harris’s loss there is more attributable to Arab Americans either not voting or casting ballots for third-party candidates.

Support for Democrats also fell in seven precincts around the country with significant Arab American or Muslim populations, according to data compiled by the Arab American Institute. It found a combined drop in the seven precincts, from about 4,900 votes in 2020 to just 3,400 this election.

Another analysis, based on nationwide exit polling by the Council on American Islamic Relations, found 53% of Muslim Americans voted for Jill Stein. The same poll showed 21% of Muslims cast a ballot for Trump and 20.3% for Harris.

The drop in Democratic support in Hamtramck, Dearborn and Dearborn Heights – three Michigan cities with the nation’s largest Arab American and Muslim populations per capita – represent nearly 27% of the 81,000-vote difference between Harris and Donald Trump’s tallies in the state.

Read on here:

Iran urges Trump to change 'maximum pressure' policy

Iran on Saturday urged US president-elect Donald Trump to reconsider the “maximum pressure” policy he pursued against Tehran during his first term, reports Agence France-Presse (AFP).

“Trump must show that he is not following the wrong policies of the past,” Iranian vice-president for strategic affairs, Mohammad Javad Zarif, told reporters on Saturday.

Zarif, a veteran diplomat who previously served as Iran’s foreign minister, helped seal the 2015 nuclear accord between Tehran and western powers, including the US. The deal however was torpedoed in 2018 after the US unilaterally withdrew from it under Trump, who later reimposed sanctions on Tehran.

In response, Iran rolled back its obligations under the deal and has since enriched uranium up to 60%, just 30% lower than nuclear-grade. Tehran has repeatedly denied western countries’ accusations that it is seeking to develop a nuclear weapon.

AFP reports that Zarif also said on Saturday that Trump’s political approach towards Iran led to the increase in enrichment levels. “He must have realised that the maximum pressure policy that he initiated caused Iran’s enrichment to reach 60% from 3.5%,” he said. “As a man of calculation, he should do the math and see what the advantages and disadvantages of this policy have been and whether he wants to continue or change this harmful policy,” Zarif added.

Iranian foreign ministry spokesperson, Esmaeil Baghaei, on Thursday said he hoped the president-elect’s return to the White House would allow Washington to “revise the wrong approaches of the past” – however stopping short of mentioning Trump’s name.

On Tuesday, Trump told reporters he was “not looking to do damage to Iran”. “My terms are very easy. They can’t have a nuclear weapon. I’d like them to be a very successful country,” he said after he cast his ballot.

As Donald Trump watched election results roll in from a party at his Mar-a-Lago compound, Elon Musk sat arm’s length away, basking in the impending victory he had helped secure. In less than five months, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO had gone from not endorsing a candidate to becoming a fixture of the president-elect’s inner circle.

“The future is gonna be so 🔥 🇺🇸🇺🇸,” Musk posted to his social media platform, X, just after midnight, along with a photo of himself leaning over to talk with Trump at the Mar-a-Lago dinner.

Musk’s place at the head table was the result of months of political efforts by the world’s richest man, and an injection of at least $130m of his own money. Musk campaigned for Trump both online and offline, funded advertising and get-out-the-vote operations for a campaign at a severe financial disadvantage to its opponent. He even temporarily decamped from his home in Texas to the swing state of Pennsylvania, where he appeared at town hall events and held a $1m daily giveaway for voters.

Musk wasn’t the only billionaire rooting for Trump. But unlike some of his peers, who preferred operating in the shadows, shielded by Super Pacs and meetings behind closed doors, he became Trump’s most visible surrogate. As so often with his endeavors, Musk was all in. And now, gambling on becoming one of Trump’s most vocal and deep-pocketed supporters has won Musk direct influence and access to the nation’s highest office, making him not only the world’s richest man but also one of its most politically powerful.

Musk’s exact role in the coming administration is still unclear. Trump has previously said that the CEO would lead a full audit of the federal government, and make drastic reforms as “secretary of cost-cutting”. Any such position would create immense conflicts of interest, as Musk’s companies hold billions in contracts with the government and are also facing investigations from federal agencies. Under Trump, who has long opposed regulators and ignored ethical conflicts, that may not matter. Musk’s fortune soared by $26bn just two days after the election.

Beyond any potential formal government role, Musk has also ingratiated himself as a close ally of the president-elect – who adopted some of Musk’s policy suggestions during the campaign and praised him as a “super genius” during his victory speech. He reportedly joined Trump’s call with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, on Wednesday, signaling broad influence.

At 2.25am, Donald Trump gazed out at his jubilant supporters wearing “Make America Great Again” hats. He was surrounded by his wife, Melania, and his children, the Stars and Stripes and giant banners that proclaimed: “Dream big again” and “Trump will fix it!”

“We’re going to help our country heal,” Trump vowed. “We have a country that needs help and it needs help very badly. We’re going to fix our borders, we’re going to fix everything about our country and we’ve made history for a reason tonight, and the reason is going to be just that.”

Having risen from the political dead, the president-elect was already looking ahead to what he called the “golden age of America” – a country that had just shifted sharply to the right. And at its core was the promise of Trump unleashed: a radical expansion of presidential power.

The 45th and 47th commander-in-chief will face fewer limits on his ambition when he is sworn in again in January. He returns as the head of a Republican party remade in his image over the past decade and as the architect of a right-leaning judiciary that helped eliminate his legal perils. Second time around, he has allies across Washington ready to enforce his will.

Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist and former Republican congressional aide, said:

What we’re going to have is an imperial presidency. This is going to be probably the most powerful presidency in terms of centralising power and wielding power that we’ve had probably since FDR [Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was president from 1933 until his death in 1945].”

Judge cancels court deadlines in Trump‘s 2020 election case after his presidential win

The judge overseeing Donald Trump’s 2020 election interference case canceled any remaining court deadlines on Friday while prosecutors assess the “the appropriate course going forward” in light of the Republican’s presidential victory, reports the Associated Press (AP).

Special counsel Jack Smith charged Trump last year with plotting to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and illegally hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate. But Smith’s team has been evaluating how to wind down the two federal cases before the president-elect takes office because of longstanding Justice Department policy that says sitting presidents cannot be prosecuted, a person familiar with the matter told the AP.

Trump’s victory over vice-president Kamala Harris means that the Justice Department believes he can no longer face prosecution in accordance with department legal opinions meant to shield presidents from criminal charges while in office.

Trump has criticized both cases as politically motivated, and has said he would fire Smith “within two seconds” of taking office.

The AP reports that in a court filing on Friday in the 2020 election case, Smith’s team asked to cancel any upcoming court deadlines, saying it needs “time to assess this unprecedented circumstance and determine the appropriate course going forward consistent with Department of Justice policy.”

Anti-abortion advocates press Trump for more restrictions as abortion pill sales spike

Anti-abortion advocates say there is still work to be done to further restrict access to abortion when Republican Donald Trump returns to the White House next year, reports Associated Press (AP).

They point to the federal guidance that the administration of Democratic president Joe Biden released around emergency abortions, requiring that hospitals provide them for women whose health or life is at risk, and its easing of prescribing restrictions for abortion pills that have allowed women to order the medication online with the click of a button.

“Now the work begins to dismantle the pro-abortion policies of the Biden-Harris administration,” the Susan B Anthony List, the powerful anti-abortion lobby, said in a statement on Wednesday. The group added: “President Trump’s first-term pro-life accomplishments are the baseline for his second term.”

The group declined to release details about what, specifically, they will seek to undo, reports the AP. But abortion rights advocates are bracing for further abortion restrictions once Trump takes office. And some women are, too, with online abortion pill orders spiking in the days after election day.

Trump has said abortion is an issue for the states, not the federal government. Yet, during the campaign, he pointedly noted that he appointed justices to the supreme court who were in the majority when striking down the national right to abortion. There are also things his administration can do, from picking judges to issuing regulations, to further an anti-abortion agenda.

In the first Trump term Richard Moore, then the political director of the UK Foreign Office and now the head of MI6, admitted half of Britain’s diplomats woke up each morning dreading what they might read on the president’s Twitter feed.

The sheer unpredictability of Trump’s caprice, and his faith in his quixotic charisma, made it hard for diplomats to operate. It would often taken feverish consultations with Trump’s senior aides, including some in the Pentagon, before a plan – such as a premature withdrawal of 2,500 US troops from Afghanistan – could be finessed.

Now, for all the pro-forma congratulations, that sense of foreboding is back. Although only 4% of the American electorate said foreign policy was the most important issue to them in the election, for those watching from abroad it was the all-consuming preoccupation.

That is hardly surprising, as Trump represents an injection of highly combustible material into an already explosive world. Two wars are raging, one now including North Korean troops fighting alongside Russia, and the other still capable of pitting Iran against Israel. And a third with China is looming. In the eyes of Republican foreign policy thinkers, that is at least two wars too many.

Yet, extraordinarily, Trump’s campaign left few clues as to how he would conduct foreign policy. Often the proposals he referenced were mere headlines – such as ending the war in Ukraine in 24 hours; outlandish, such as deporting 10 million migrants; or contradictory, concerning committing to Nato and suggesting Russia does whatever it wants to European freeloaders.

Apart from that, there is a broad intent to make tariffs as much as sanctions the central part of the US foreign policy armoury.

Donald is not the only Trump back in the picture after his election win.

On Tuesday night, members of the former and future president’s family posed with him at his Florida estate in celebration of his re-election. “Dad, we are so proud of you,” wrote Tiffany, Trump’s younger daughter, posting the photo on X. It was also shared by his 17-year-old granddaughter, Kai, captioned: “The whole squad.”

Notably absent was the former first lady, Melania. However, the happy family shot did include Elon Musk – not a blood relative but surely now loved by the president-elect like a son – who was holding X-AE-AXii, the most absurdly named of his own 12 children.

Given the prominent roles, official and unofficial, held by Trump’s children and their spouses in his first administration, it is a safe bet that family members will be front and centre in his second. Here is a reminder of the characters likely to feature in the Trump dynasty, season two:

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Jacky Rosen, a former Las Vegas-area synagogue president and computer programmer, ran ads touting herself as an independent who doesn’t listen to “party leaders”, reports the AP.

Sam Brown had Donald Trump’s support in the Republican primary and won easily, but he was significantly outspent during the campaign, leaving Rosen to dominate the airwaves for months.

Analysts note that Nevada has a history of backing no-nonsense senators who deliver funding from Washington.

According to the AP, Rosen also spotlighted her work on expanding broadband internet access and helping to connect Las Vegas with Southern California via light rail. And she hammered Brown for his opposition to abortion rights, saying he would support a national abortion ban despite Brown’s statements that he respects Nevada voters’ choice decades ago to legalize abortions.

A ballot measure this year that would enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution passed. Voters must again approve it in 2026 in order to amend the constitution.

The Senate contest drew relatively little national interest for most of the campaign, a striking contrast with the presidential race as both Trump and vice-president, Kamala Harris, targeted the state and its six electoral votes. Conservative money flowed in during the final days as the GOP posted a strong showing in early period, but Brown was unable to fully fight back.

Brown previously made an unsuccessful bid in 2022 for the Republican nomination to face Cortez Masto.

All four of Nevada’s US House incumbents – three Democrats and one Republican – also won reelection this year.

Democratic US senator Jacky Rosen reelected in Nevada, securing battleground seat

Nevada Democratic senator Jacky Rosen has won reelection, beating Republican Sam Brown in a tight but unusually quiet race for the battleground state, reports the Associated Press (AP).

According to the AP, the first-term senator had campaigned on abortion rights and positioned herself as a nonideological politician, a formula that also worked for the state’s senior senator, Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto, in her own reelection bid two years ago.

“Thank you, Nevada! I’m honored and grateful to continue serving as your United States senator,” Rosen said Friday on the social platform X.

Brown, a retired army captain who moved to Nevada from Texas in 2018 and has never held elected office, unsuccessfully tried to ride president-elect Donald Trump’s strong showing in the working-class state. Trump won Nevada on Friday.

The Associated Press left phone and emailed messages seeking comment on Friday from Brown’s campaign. Just before Rosen won, Brown said on X that it was unacceptable that votes were still being counted in Nevada days after the election.

“We deserve to know election results within hours, not a week later,” he said.

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.

My colleagues have taken a look at those who have been and could be offered roles in the cabinet and wider administration when Trump takes office, in this explainer piece:

Russia’s foreign ministry sees no grounds for talking about resuming dialogue on strategic stability and arms control with the US at the moment, Interfax news agency reported on Saturday, citing Russia’s deputy foreign minister.

Sergei Ryabkov said that Moscow and Washington “are exchanging signals on Ukraine” through closed channels at the military and political levels, according to Interfax. He also said that Russia was ready to listen to US president-elect, Donald Trump’s proposals on resolving the crisis in Ukraine, adding that there could be no simple solution.

“We are extremely thorough, responsible and attentive to any ideas that are proposed by countries in this area,” Interfax quoted Ryabkov as saying.

According to Reuters, Russian president, Vladimir Putin, on Thursday congratulated Trump on winning the US election, praised him for showing courage when a gunman tried to assassinate him in July, and said Moscow was ready for dialogue with Trump. He said comments that Trump had made about trying to end the war were worthy of attention.

Trump told NBC he had not talked to Putin since his election victory but “I think we’ll speak”.

Ryabkov said the threat of severing diplomatic relations with the US remained if Russia’s frozen assets were seized or Washington escalated tensions over Ukraine.

Ryabkov also commented on Russia’s updated nuclear doctrine, saying it would make it possible “to turn to the nuclear option” if there was an acute crisis in relations with the west and the situation in Ukraine, Interfax reported.

The US justice department is bringing criminal charges over an Iranian plot to kill the president-elect, Donald Trump, that was thwarted by the FBI, the government said.

The federal government has unsealed criminal charges in what the justice department said was a murder-for-hire plan to take out Trump before this week’s presidential election, which he won decisively over his Democratic rival, Kamala Harris.

A criminal complaint filed in federal court in Manhattan alleges that an unnamed official in Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guards instructed a contact this past September to put together a plan to surveil and ultimately kill Trump.

Investigators learned of the plot while interviewing Farhad Shakeri, an Afghan national identified by officials as an Iranian government asset who was deported from the US after being imprisoned on robbery charges.

He told investigators that a Revolutionary Guard contact in Iran instructed him in September to devise a plan within seven days to surveil and ultimately assassinate Trump, according to the criminal complaint.

Two other men who the authorities say were recruited to participate in other assassinations, including a prominent Iranian American journalist, were also arrested on Friday. Shakeri remains in Iran.

“There are few actors in the world that pose as grave a threat to the national security of the United States as does Iran,” the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, said in a statement on Friday.

Ed Davey has urged Keir Starmer to “Trump-proof” the UK by urgently seeking closer European cooperation over military aid for Ukraine and economic ties, after the US president-elect’s threats about security and trade wars.

The Liberal Democrat leader, whose party is the third biggest in the House of Commons, argued that while the UK government should seek to work with a Donald Trump administration, it should also be as prepared as possible if he were to abandon Ukraine or impose sweeping tariffs.

“Yes, we can work with him,” Davey said. “Of course we should, and it may well be that we can, but it would be irresponsible not to take the measures in a diplomatic way, defensive way, that would make our national security and our economy Trump-proof.

“I think millions of people in the UK and elsewhere are just really worried and quite scared. And they’re particularly scared about what it’s going to mean for our security and our economy.”

Trump’s election should be “a wake-up call for the government on Ukraine”, said Davey, who was spending part of Friday at a charity in Surrey that provides aid packages for Ukrainian families.

He said Starmer should push for an immediate European conference on how the continent could fill the gap in defence assistance if, as Trump and his team have hinted, he pulls US support, or tries to force Ukraine into accepting an end to the conflict that would greatly strengthen Russia.

“We can’t simply abandon Ukraine to Putin just because Trump’s in power,” Davey said. “We’ve been playing a critical role, and I think we could play an even more critical role by working with European friends, bringing together European countries so we can increase the aid to Ukraine, and pay for that by seizing Russian assets properly. We’ve been pushing for that for some time.

“Now is the absolute the moment to do it so Europe can fill the gap. But we have got to do it quickly.”

Bomb threats were made against several Maryland boards of elections and election offices in at least two California counties on Friday, state authorities said, adding that everyone was safe and law enforcement officials were investigating.

According to Reuters, election officials were counting mail-in ballots when the threats came in Maryland. State administrator of elections, Jared DeMarinis, said the threats led to the evacuation of some buildings. He called the threats “cowardly,” adding that local officials will resume counting on Saturday.

“Safety is a top concern – but we WILL resume canvassing (counting) tomorrow. Cowardly threats whether from abroad or not shall not deter us,” DeMarinis said on social media platform X.

“The Baltimore County Police Department is aware and currently investigating the bomb threat received via email by the Baltimore County Board of Elections Office,” police posted on X, later adding that a probe determined that threat to be unfounded.

Reuters reports that in California’s Orange County, the registrar of voters received a bomb threat at an office in Santa Ana after which the office building was evacuated and bomb detection dogs were used to conduct a search. No explosives were located, officials said, adding normal operations will resume on Saturday.

The registrar of voters in California’s Riverside County said its central counting building was also evacuated due to a threat and a bomb squad found no explosives.

The offices of California governor, Gavin Newsom, and Maryland governor, Wes Moore, said they were monitoring the situation and working with local officials.

The FBI said that hoax bomb threats, many of which appeared to originate from Russian email domains, were directed on Tuesday at polling locations in five battleground states – Georgia, Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania – as voting was under way. Russia denies interfering in US elections.

Incoming Trump presidency threatens millions of Americans’ healthcare plans

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.

“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.

Iraqi prime minister, Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, expressed hopes during a phone call with US president-elect, Donald Trump, that he would keep his “promises to work towards ending wars” in the Middle East, reports Agence France-Presse (AFP).

In the phone call, the Iraqi premier pointed to Trump’s “campaign statements and promises to work towards ending wars in the region”, a statement from Sudani’s office said late on Friday. “The two sides agreed to coordinate efforts in achieving this goal,” it added.

About 2,500 US troops are deployed in Iraq as part of a US-led coalition that was formed to help battle the Islamic State group. Bases hosting the US troops have been the target of dozens of rocket and drone attacks launched by Iran-backed groups in Iraq, which have also claimed attacks against Israel.

Baghdad has for years called on Washington to provide a clear timeline for the withdrawal of their remaining coalition troops.

The US and Iraq announced in late September that the international coalition would end its decade-long military mission in federal Iraq within a year, and by September 2026 in the autonomous Kurdistan region. But the joint statement and US officials did not say whether any US troops would remain in Iraq.

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, according to a report from CNN. 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.

Black people across US receive racist text messages after Trump’s win

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.

A spokesperson for the president-elect told CNN that his “campaign has absolutely nothing to do with these text messages”. It is not yet clear who is behind the messages, nor is there a comprehensive list of the people to whom the messages were sent, but social media posts indicate that the messages are widespread.

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.

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

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”.

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”.

Opening summary

Hello and welcome back to our rolling coverage of US politics and the fallout from the presidential election.

Our top story this morning is that Nancy Pelosi has blamed Joe Biden for the Democrats’ defeat.

The former House speaker said the president’s slowness in dropping out of the race left the party without enough time to hold an open primary.

More on that shortly. First, though, here is a round up of the latest news:

  • The justice department has brought charges against a member of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards paramilitary group for plotting to assassinate Donald Trump prior to Tuesday’s presidential election, the Associated Press reports. On the campaign trail in the lead-up to his election win, Trump survived two assassination attempts, but authorities do not believe either were linked to Iran, a longtime foe of the United States.

  • Donald Trump’s incoming presidency is set to threaten millions of Americans’ healthcare plans. More than 20 million Americans rely on the individual private health insurance market for healthcare, private insurance which is subsidized by the federal government.

  • Robert F Kennedy Jr, the former independent presidential candidate turned Trump surrogate, is reviewing candidate resumes for the top jobs at the US government’s health agencies in Donald Trump’s new administration, a former Kennedy aide and a source familiar with the matter told Reuters on Friday.

  • A Chinese national who had been recently released from a mental hospital was ordered to be held on trespassing charges on Friday after police say he tried to enter president-elect Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, the Associated Press reports. That entrance was in violation of a court order that he stay away from Mar-a-Lago after previous attempts.

  • Democratic US Representative Andrea Salinas has won reelection in Oregon’s 6th congressional District, beating Republican Mike Erickson to earn a second term in Congress after outraising him by millions of dollars. Oregon’s newest congressional district was seen as leaning more toward Democrats, according to the Cook Political Report. That gave a slight advantage to the freshman Democratic incumbent, who also defeated Erickson in the 2022 election.

  • Women have won 60 seats in the New Mexico Legislature to secure the largest female legislative majority in US history, stirring expressions of vindication and joy among candidates.

  • A federal judge on Friday overturned Illinois’ ban on semiautomatic weapons, leaning on recent US supreme court rulings that strictly interpret the second amendment right to keep and bear firearms. Judge Stephen P McGlynn issued the lengthy finding in a decree that he said applied universally, not just to the plaintiffs who brought the lawsuit challenging the ban.

  • 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 reported, 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. 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.

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