Vladimir Putin has described Donald Trump as a “bullied” and “brave man” after his monumental political comeback. Meanwhile, three states, including America’s most populous, are making moves to protect liberal policies from the next administration.
Friday 8 November 2024 07:06, UK
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Donald Trump yesterday named Susie Wiles as his White House chief of staff in his first major appointment as president-elect.
She will be the first female in history to take up the role – one of the most important non-elected posts in Washington.
Here’s a little more of what we know about one of Trump’s most trusted political confidantes…
Wiles, 67, a Florida native, is one of the most respected Republican operatives, though she has largely stayed away from the limelight despite being in the political circle for decades.
Wiles is the daughter of the late NFL player Pat Summerall.
She first worked in the Washington office of Republican New York representative Jack Kemp in the 1970s, before stints on Ronald Reagan’s campaign and in his White House as a scheduler.
After that, Wiles moved to Florida where she undertook various roles including adviser to two Jacksonville mayors and helping lead Rick Scott to victory as governor of Florida in 2010. He is now a US senator.
Wiles was also brought in to help save the 2018 campaign of Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who won after initially having floundered. The pair later fell out.
When it comes to her relationship with Trump, Wiles ran Trump’s 2016 effort in Florida, when his win in the state helped him clinch the White House.
Trump said she was also an “integral part” of his 2020 campaign, and served as co-manager of his third bid for the White House this year.
Trump often referenced Wiles on the campaign trail, publicly praising her leadership of what he said he was often told was his “best-run campaign.”
“She’s incredible. Incredible,” he said at a Milwaukee rally earlier this month.
Response to her hiring as chief of staff has been overwhelmingly positive from Republicans.
Some boards erected around buildings in Washington DC in anticipation of possible unrest following the election result are starting to be removed.
Security was beefed up across the city ahead of voting day, with protective fencing and anti-riot barriers also seen near the White House.
In a speech yesterday, Joe Biden promised a peaceful transition of power and urged Americans to “bring down the temperature” following Donald Trump’s win.
Our US partner NBC News projects that Donald Trump will win the state of Nevada.
Victory there is worth six electoral votes, which puts Trump on a total of 301 votes – 31 more than he needed to win.
The battleground state is one of seven seen as crucial to win by either side.
Six have now been called for Trump, with just Arizona left to go. Some three-quarters of the vote has been counted there, and NBC News currently has the result as too close to call.
At the end of the last Trump presidency, the New York Times declared: “The terrible experiment is over – President Donald J Trump: The End.”
That didn’t age well. If Trump 1.0 (2016-2020) was the experiment, then maybe Trump 2.0 (2024-2028) will be the real deal.
In 2016, Donald Trump was a political novice. That was the attraction for those who chose him.
He didn’t know how Washington worked, and he didn’t know how to govern. But he learned on the job as he meandered chaotically through that first term.
Read more here…
The government will try to persuade Donald Trump that harming the UK by hiking tariffs is not in his interest, Foreign Secretary David Lammy has said.
The cabinet minister said he would seek to “get across” to the US that “hurting your closest allies” is not in Trump’s interest.
He also said past critical comments he had made about the president elect are “old news”.
“We will seek to ensure and to get across to the US – and I believe that they would understand this – that hurting your closest allies cannot be in your medium or long-term interests, whatever the pursuit of public policy in relation to some of the problems posed by China,” he told the BBC’s Newscast podcast.
Sir Keir Starmer’s government is making efforts to smooth over tensions with the incoming president, whose pledge to raise tariffs on imports into the US could hit the UK economy.
By Dominic Wahorn, international affairs editor
US allies and enemies are having to adjust rapidly after Donald Trump’s stunning victory in the presidential election.
In the corridors of power the world over, they are working overtime to accommodate a new reality.
Allies are putting a brave face on it but would mostly have preferred a Harris victory and continuity.
There will be despondence at the election of a man who has promised to undo the progress they have made with America on globally important issues like climate change.
And there will be concern.
In his first presidency Donald Trump displayed contempt for the rules based post-war world order built and led by America and the pillars of the Western alliance.
That order has for decades guaranteed US dominance in the world but Donald Trump seems to regard its institutions with suspicion.
America he claims is ripped off by them, NATO in particular.
Closest to home the neighbour most likely to suffer is Mexico.
It is threatened now by swingeing tariffs promised by Trump, mass deportations of immigrants and US military incursions against drugs cartels.
The ally with most to fear is Ukraine.
Both Trump and his vice president elect JD Vance have talked of bringing the war there to an end on what sound like Moscow’s terms.
Russia would be allowed to keep much of the territory it has taken by brute force, Ukraine’s membership of NATO postponed for decades.
That will be satisfying for Vladimir Putin.
He has spoken in glowing terms today of Donald Trump’s courage and resilience and how he was bullied in his first term in office.
Western diplomats remain mystified at Donald Trump’s open admiration for authoritarian leaders in contrast with the contempt he has shown their democratically elected Western counterparts.
China will be ambivalent about Trump’s return.
Its government is thought to have regarded the chaos of his first term in office as further evidence of the decline of a decadent West, hastening the advent of China as a global hegemon.
But the Chinese like to have the measure of their rivals and are disconcerted by Donald Trump’s unpredictability. Iran doubly so.
In his first term in office President Trump ripped up the Iran nuclear deal and had assassinated the country’s most preeminent military commander, Qassem Soleimani.
His national security team have made it clear we can expect more confrontation against Iran’s regime.
That will delight the Israeli government.
Its prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has had an up and down relationship with Donald Trump but may well be given more latitude to fight his wars in Gaza and Lebanon.
Palestinians have plenty to fear from a president who has never shown sympathy for their cause.
There is of course a limit to how far we can foresee the impact of a Trump presidency abroad.
In his first term in office he promised to build a border wall and have it paid for by Mexico, to bring peace to the Middle East and tame North Korea. None of it happened.
What seems certain is uncertainty. In movies, sequels can be dull and predictable. Trump II may be anything but.
Here is a look at the key moments from the last 24 hours:
As the sun set on Howard University in Washington DC a group of women gathered on a grassy patch in the centre of campus.
They held hands in a wide circle and sang hymns, many wiping tears from their faces.
They had just watched a concession speech given by Kamala Harris. Many had been at the university the night before, hoping to witness America electing its first female president.
“I don’t think she could have done anything differently,” one said, “she ran a good campaign, I just think misogyny and racism is deep rooted in America.”
Another lay the blame at the door of President Biden.
“Unfortunately I think if he’d have gone sooner, she would have had more chance to tell her story and establish herself,” another said.
In Democratic Party circles, the inquest had begun even before Harris spoke. Not only had she been defeated in all seven of the key swing states, the map showed rightward shifts across the country. Questions about what went wrong for the campaign and the Democratic Party are at fever pitch.
David Plouffe, a senior campaign adviser for Harris, posted on X: “It was a privilege to spend the last 100 days with Kamala Harris… We dug out of a deep hole but not enough.”
Many are reading that deep hole as one left by Joe Biden, who some say didn’t leave his vice president enough time to make her pitch to the nation known. Plouffe has since deleted his entire X account.
Others wondered whether President Biden’s ego had led to him to cling to power too long. Had the man who once pledged to be a transition candidate been so intoxicated by the heady heights of the Oval Office that he couldn’t bear to step aside?
Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen told Sky News she didn’t “think this was so personal towards Kamala Harris”.
“The campaign miscalculated the importance of the economy as a central message,” she said.
“I think they thought it was going to be a referendum on Donald Trump and a referendum on abortion. And those two calculations, I think, had them underplay what we know voters’ key issue was, which is the economy.”
President Biden spoke in the Rose Garden, paying tribute to Harris’s campaign and promising a peaceful transition of power to president elect Donald Trump.
But his speech will probably be remembered as much for what he didn’t say. There was no introspection about the loss, no answers offered for why it was such a bruising defeat.
Brett Bruin, former White House director of global engagement who worked under Barack Obama, said: “I can’t help but think back to what President Obama said after his first defeat at the congressional level. He acknowledged it was a shellacking.
“We didn’t hear that from President Biden. This has been part of the problem throughout his presidency, it’s part of the reason why Biden and Harris were so unsuccessful when it came to popularity – they didn’t acknowledge the problems, they didn’t address the problems. I wonder when the Democratic Party are going to say, we have to change.”
This post is written by our US colleague, NBC’s politics reporter Ben Kamisar…
Trump’s victory Tuesday was powered in part by support from men amid a significant gender gap — and the unofficial results of two ballot questions in Florida provide an interesting contrast.
The amendment aiming to create a right to an abortion before fetal viability or to protect the health of the mother received about 55% of the vote. But in a state that requires 60% to pass a constitutional amendment, it fell short.
Meanwhile, an amendment establishing a constitutional amendment to “preserve forever fishing and hunting” secured 67% of the vote, according to an unofficial tally from the Florida secretary of state’s office, leading it to be enshrined into law.
Democrats had been hopeful that energy surrounding the abortion amendment could help them overperform in a state that’s been drifting rightward in recent years. Instead, the measure failed, their statewide candidates lost, and one of the only forthcoming changes to the state constitution after this election will be enshrining the right to fish and hunt.
Susie Wiles is a “huge asset” to Donald Trump, his running mate JD Vance has said.
Congratulating the new White House chief of staff, Vance also said Wiles was a “really good person”.
Wiles is widely credited within and outside Trump’s inner circle for running his well-executed campaign.
Her hire is Trump’s first major decision as president elect and one that could be a defining test of his incoming administration, as he must quickly build the team that will help run the federal government.
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