Inside a museum in Oakland, not far from where Kamala Harris launched her first bid for the presidency back in 2019, Lateefah Simon, a Democrat whom Harris mentored, declared victory in her congressional race on Tuesday night. Early ballot returns showed her with 63 percent of the vote, though results were still coming in Wednesday morning.

Simon is regarded as “a rising star within Bay Area politics and the Democratic Party,” and Oaklanders tried to celebrate her win as a bright spot while television screens around the room showed Donald Trump claiming more and more electoral votes. “We have no idea what our reality will be tomorrow: the threat of mass deportation…of women not having control over their bodies. Let’s keep organizing,” Simon told a crowd of supporters.

“Our fight has always been an enduring fight,” she added. “We have been in this place before of uncertainty.”

Simon’s political career owes much to two mentors: US Rep. Barbara Lee, whose seat Simon now plans to take in the House, and Vice President Kamala Harris. Simon met Harris more than 20 years ago. At the time, Simon was a young mother who’d been running a San Francisco nonprofit helping girls in the criminal justice system and organizing sex workers. Harris was a lawyer at the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office, and they both served on a task force that aimed to stop criminalizing young people who’d been sex trafficked. When Harris became DA in 2004, she asked Simon, who’d started running the nonprofit at age 19, to come over to the prosecutor’s office and try to make the system better.

Simon demurred—she’d spent time in the juvenile justice system herself and “never wanted to work for The Man,” she told my colleague Jamilah King in 2018—but Harris was persistent: “She was like…Do you forever want to be on the stairs yelling and begging for people to support you, your cause? Why can’t you fix it from the inside?” Simon recalled.

Together, Harris and Simon created a program called Back on Track that helped nonviolent offenders earn a diploma and get job training instead of going to prison. Today, Simon describes Harris as a mentor and “auntie”—Harris gifted Simon her first suit and urged her to go to college, even inspecting her report cards. “She saw me before I saw myself, in a lot of ways,” Simon told King.

It was at Mills College where Simon met Lee, who held her House seat for more than a quarter century before running an unsuccessful campaign to replace Dianne Feinstein in the Senate after Feinstein’s death last fall. Over the weekend, Lee and Simon went together to cast their ballots at the former Mills campus. “Congratulations again, my sister!” Lee said from a video at the election night party, calling in from DC, as the polls showed Simon leading handily over her opponent, Jennifer Tran, a political newcomer who campaigned in part on getting tougher on crime.

The party continued, but no one could ignore the presidential results trickling in from outside this progressive enclave. Some people in Oakland had been hopeful that Harris, who was born in the city, would make history. But as the night went on, it was hard for the partygoers to mask their concern. “Shit, he improved his performance from 2020,” a woman said as she waited outside for a ride, looking anxiously at Trump’s results on her phone. A Trump presidency would be “devastating for disabled people, for women, for people of color,” Simon told me earlier in the evening, shortly after California polls closed.

Progressives in Oakland also appeared to be marching toward losses in other important races, including the recall of the Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao and District Attorney Pamela Price, both progressive women of color. Inside, I ran into Pastor B.K. Woodson, who’d opposed the recalls. “I’m very concerned,” for the nation, he told me, “because we have a large part of America that’s okay with retribution, violence, and intolerance.”

“We’re going to push forward, we’re going to organize,” Simon told me, bringing the conversation back to her constituents: “There are literally thousands of people tonight that are sleeping on the streets of Alameda County; they deserve leaders that are going to focus on shifting their material conditions.” During her campaign, Simon pledged to invest more in affordable housing, addiction treatment, and mental health care; close loopholes in federal gun laws; and push for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.

Though Harris’ outcome in this election was not as rosy, Simon’s win is a sign of Harris’ impact, and the impact of other Black leaders before her. On the video at the event, Rep. Lee spoke of Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman to run as a major party presidential candidate, who “opened that door for you and for me.” Months ago, before the primary, Simon told me that Simon’s oldest daughter, who as a kid spent time playing in Harris’ office, recently became a prosecutor in DC. “She saw Kamala do it, and she was like, I can be a Black woman and a prosecutor” who helps people.

Simon, herself, has left a legacy to uphold: After working with Harris, she led an organization focused on racial justice Oakland and was later elected to the Bay Area Rapid Transit Board of Directors. (Simon was born legally blind and depended on BART trains to get to work and take her daughter to school.) She also co-chaired Gov. Gavin Newsom’s task force on police reform in 2020. And the nonprofit she ran in her youth, now called the Young Women’s Freedom Center, remains important to her. Several of the center’s staffers were there at the museum on Tuesday to support her, including Julia Arroyo, its executive director. “It means a lot for a lot of our young people to see her in this position of leadership,” Arroyo said.

“Lateefah was born in the revolution,” Simon’s uncle, Timothy Simon, told the crowd. “She was born of parents who believed in a Black economic agenda. She was born of grandparents who were part of the great migration here to California, seeking opportunity and fleeing those red states that Lateefah is about to take on in the House of Representatives.”

It’s a mandate that Simon seems eager to embrace. “I’m ready to go,” she told me. “Vitriol is poisonous to our democratic process,” she said, referring to Trump’s message, “but I’ve never shied away from any fight, and I’m gonna lead us forward.”

Kamala Harris conceded the presidential election to Donald Trump Wednesday afternoon in a speech at Howard University. Addressing a crowd of sometimes tearful supporters, Harris emphasized the need to accept Trump’s victory but continue “the fight for our country.” “While I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fueled this campaign,” she said.

In her concession speech, Vice President Kamala Harris urged her supporters to accept her election loss against President-elect Donald Trump. pic.twitter.com/cwr3XjJzwH

— The Associated Press (@AP) November 6, 2024

Harris told the crowd she had spoken to Trump earlier in the day and pledged to “engage in a peaceful transfer of power” and help the next president’s team with the transition. In the speech, Harris urged her supporters to accept the outcome of the election. “A fundamental principle of American democracy is that when we lose an election we accept the results,” Harris said. “That principle, as much as any other, distinguishes democracy from monarchy or tyranny.” She also added, “We owe loyalty not to a president or a party, but to the constitution of the United States.”

Harris struck an energizing note, pointing to the need to continue pushing to protect abortion rights and the right to freedom from gun violence. “I will never give up the fight for a future where Americans can pursue their dreams, ambitions, and aspirations, where the women of America have the freedom to make decisions about their own body,” she said.

The vice president encouraged her supporters “to organize, to mobilize, and to stay engaged.” “On the campaign, I would often say, ‘when we fight, we win,'” she said. “But here’s the thing. Sometimes the fight takes a while. That doesn’t mean we won’t win.”

“Do not despair,” Harris concluded. “This is not a time to throw up our hands. This is a time to roll up our sleeves.”

More than 1,500 people charged with or convicted of crimes related to the January 6, 2021, attack on Congress are now presumably hoping to win pardons and commutations that the now president-elect has repeatedly, if vaguely, promised to give many of them.

And they aren’t alone. Numerous people convicted since 2020 of federal crimes in prosecutions they claim were politically motivated seem to be positioning themselves to seek clemency when Donald Trump takes office in January.

On the campaign trail, Trump—who doled out various pardons to political allies ruing his first term—made frequent, though somewhat qualified, pledges to offer clemency to January 6 attackers. In a July exchange with ABC news anchor Rachel Scott, for instance, Trump said that he would “absolutely” pardon even rioters who were convicted of assaulting police officers. He then said he would do so “if they’re innocent,” but also said they had faced a “tough system.”

These statements have people charged with crimes on January 6 positioning themselves for pardons in the wake of Trump’s victory.

On Wednesday, Christopher Carnell, a man charged with entering the Capitol on January 6, asked a DC judge to postpone his case, citing Trump’s statements about pardoning January 6 attackers.

“Throughout his campaign, President-elect Trump has made multiple clemency promises to the January 6 defendants, particularly to those who were nonviolent participants,” Carnell’s lawyer wrote. “Mr. Carnell, who was an 18 year old nonviolent entrant into the Capitol on January 6, is expecting to be relieved of the criminal prosecution that he is currently facing when the new administration takes office.”

This is one of what will likely be a deluge of similar filings. Judges are under no obligation to postpone proceedings based on such requests.

Trump might pardon not only rank-and-file January 6 rioters but high-profile far-right leaders convicted of helping to organize the attack.

Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the far-right Proud Boys, who is serving a 22-year sentence for seditious conspiracy and other charges related to the January 6 attack, is exploring a pardon, even as he continues to appeal his sentence, Tarrio’s lawyer, Nayib Hassan indicated to HuffPost. “We look forward to what the future holds, both in terms of the judicial process for our client and the broader political landscape under the new administration,” Hassan said.

Stewart Rhodes, the Oath Keepers founder sentenced last year to 18 years in prison for seditious conspiracy due to his role in the attack, could also receive a Trump pardon, a prospect Rhodes’ ex-wife and son have said causes them fear for their safety due to what they allege is his past physical abuse. (Rhodes has denied abusing family members.)

Trump used the pardon process liberally while president to free war criminals, personal allies, campaign donors, people who could have acted as witnesses against him, and others—a use of clemency power that was unprecedented in American history and deeply corrupt.

In a second term, he may continue to pardon allies facing federal charges or seeking help with past convictions.

Former advisers Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon, both of whom already served four-month prison terms for contempt of Congress after ignoring subpoenas from the House January 6 committee, may receive pardons aimed at clearing their names. (Trump pardoned Bannon in 2020 on charges that he defrauded donors to a charity that claimed to be raising private funds to help build Trump’s promised wall along the Mexican border, but he can’t help Bannon with pending New York state charges related to the same alleged scam.)

Bannon could also lobby Trump to pardon his former patron Guo Wengui, a Chinese real estate mogul convicted of stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from Chinese diaspora followers of a movement Guo and Bannon launched in 2019. Guo used that movement and a network of Chinese-language media companies to spread disinformation aimed at helping Trump in 2020.

New York Mayor Eric Adams, facing charges for accepting bribes from Turkish interests, has ludicrously suggested that he was prosecuted by the Justice Department due to criticizing the Biden White House over immigration issues. That sounds like a bid for a pardon. Trump might prove amenable.

Then there is former Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), convicted last year of taking bribes from Egyptian agents in exchange for helping advance Cairo’s interests in the United States. Menendez previously persuaded Trump to pardon Salomon Melgen, a Florida eye doctor accused of bribing Menendez in a case that ended in a mistrial, but who was also convicted of defrauding Medicare. Could Menendez join other corrupt Democrats Trump pardoned, like former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and ex-Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich? Don’t rule it out.

One person Trump probably won’t have to pardon is himself. The Justice Department “is evaluating how to wind down the two federal criminal cases against Donald Trump before he takes office to comply with longstanding department policy that a sitting president can’t be prosecuted,” NBC News’ Ken Dilanian reported Wednesday. That would relieve Trump of having to take the unprecedented and controversial step of telling DOJ to drop charges into himself.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misidentified one of the politicians Trump pardoned.

Donald Trump’s return to the White House follows one of the most tumultuous election years in modern US history: one that included an incumbent president dropping his reelection bid, Vice President Kamala Harris thrust into contention a few short months before Election Day, and two attempts on Trump’s life.

Harris was unable to build a coalition to defeat Trump, losing both the Electoral College and the popular vote after a campaign that initially energized Democrats around the country. Trump prevailed following a campaign often filled with violent rhetoric, misinformation, and disparaging comments about women, immigrants, and people of color.

“America has never had a Black woman governor,” says Mother Jones editorial director Jamilah King. “So the fact that America’s never had a Black woman president is not surprising. I don’t think we as a country were quite ready for it.”

In this Reveal podcast extra, host Al Letson sits down with King as well as Mother Jones’ David Corn and Ari Berman to break down how Trump won, why Harris’ campaign faltered, and where the nation goes from here. Listen to the podcast in the player below.

Other places to listen: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or wherever you get your podcasts.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Donald Trump’s new term as US president poses a grave threat to the planet if it blows up the international effort to curb dangerous global heating, stunned climate experts have warned in the wake of his decisive election victory.

Trump’s return to the White House is widely expected to result in the US, yet again, exiting the Paris climate agreement and may even remove American involvement in the underpinning United Nations framework to deal with the climate crisis.

While campaigning for president, Trump has called climate change “a big hoax,” scorned wind energy and electric cars, and vowed to gut environmental rules and the “green new scam” of the Inflation Reduction Act, a major bill passed by Democrats to support clean energy projects.

Trump’s agenda, analysts have found, risks adding several billion metric tons of extra heat-trapping gases to the atmosphere, further imperiling goals to stave off disastrous global heating that governments are already failing to meet. Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, said that the US is now a “failed democracy” and that “we now pose a major threat to the planet.”

The election result will send shockwaves through annual UN climate talks that start in Azerbaijan on Monday. “The election of a climate denier to the US presidency is extremely dangerous for the world,” said Bill Hare, a senior scientist at Climate Analytics, who warned a Trump administration would likely “damage efforts” to keep the world from heating by more than 2.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels, a Paris target that now appears even further out of reach.

While President Joe Biden’s administration will send a delegation to the COP29 summit next week, this will be overshadowed by an incoming Trump government that threatens to disengage with other major carbon emitters, such as China, to address the climate crisis. “The nation and world can expect the incoming Trump administration to take a wrecking ball to global climate diplomacy,” said Rachel Cleetus, policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Across Europe, climate activists and politicians who support stronger action to cut pollution reacted with despair to the news of Trump’s win. “This is a dark day in the US and globally,” said Thomas Waitz, an Austrian member of the European Parliament and co-chair of the European Green Party.

Luisa Neubauer, a German climate activist from the Fridays for Future movement, who went door-knocking for Kamala Harris, compared the feeling to a bad breakup. “A decision over parts of the near future has been made and most of us didn’t have a say in it,” she said. “And for a moment, it feels like the world is going to end. It’s not. But the heartbreak is real.”

But they also urged supporters of climate action to not give up.

Areeba Hamid, joint executive director of Greenpeace UK, said it was “an election won with corporate cash, big polluter backers, and disinformation,” but a global movement was already fighting to rein in the damage.

“We simply don’t have any more time to waste,” she added. “Whatever a Trump presidency chooses to do on global climate action, we know that damage can be contained if the grown-ups in the room speak up.”

When he was last president, Trump took several months to decide to remove the US from the Paris deal, raising fears the agreement would collapse. Countries did manage to avoid such a fate prior to Biden reentering the pact, and there is some optimism that the transition to cleaner energy isn’t something that Trump—despite his demands that the US “drill, baby, drill” for oil and gas—can reverse.

“The US election result is a setback for global climate action, but the Paris agreement has proven resilient and is stronger than any single country’s policies,” said Laurence Tubiana, chief executive of the European Climate Foundation and a key architect of the Paris deal.

“The context today is very different to 2016,” she said. “There is powerful economic momentum behind the global transition, which the US has led and gained from, but now risks forfeiting. The devastating toll of recent hurricanes was a grim reminder that all Americans are affected by worsening climate change.”

Much like after the previous withdrawal, cities and state within the US committed to climate action will try to fill the void of federal indifference, acting as de facto representatives at global summits and even engaging with other countries on how to cut emissions.

“No matter what Trump may say, the shift to clean energy is unstoppable and our country is not turning back,” said Gina McCarthy, former climate adviser to Biden and co-chair of the America Is All In coalition of climate-concerned states and cities.

“Our coalition is bigger, more bipartisan, better organized, and fully prepared to deliver climate solutions, boost local economies, and drive climate ambition,” she said. “We cannot and will not let Trump stand in the way of giving our kids and grandkids the freedom to grow up in safer and healthier communities.”

Domestically, environmental groups have said they will attempt to rally Democrats, as well as some Republicans, to oppose Trump’s tearing down of climate policies, which is anticipated to include major cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency and weakened pollution rules for coal plants, cars, and fossil fuel drilling. “President Trump will face a bipartisan wall of opposition if he attempts to rip away clean energy incentives now,” said Dan Lashof, director of the World Resources Institute.

However, Trump’s election victory has been a deeply sobering one for those concerned about the climate crisis. The issue was barely championed by Harris, the Democratic nominee, with polling showing that voters considered it a minor priority despite scientists’ warnings of record-breaking temperatures and two devastating, heat-fueled hurricanes that smashed into the Southeast just a few weeks before Election Day.

“This should be a wake-up call—the climate movement urgently needs more political power because the climate crisis is moving infinitely faster than our politics right now,” said Nathaniel Stinnett, founder of the Environmental Voter Project, which sought to turn out the vote among environmentalists in the US.

“We must work every day to build an unstoppable bloc of climate voters, because we’re running out of time.”

In January, former President Donald Trump will reclaim the White House after years of vowing to unleash an unprecedented overhaul of the immigration system in the United States. With mass deportation as a central promise of his campaign, Trump will undoubtedly build on the sweeping crackdown that marked his first term.

He already has promised to restore the travel prohibition on foreigners from Muslim-majority countries (often called the “Muslim ban”). He wants to revive “Remain in Mexico”—which left thousands of vulnerable migrants and asylum seekers awaiting court hearings stranded in dangerous border towns. Trump has also taken his anti-immigrant rhetoric and proposals to new heights, notably by pledging to carry out the “largest domestic deportation operation in American history” and attacking legal immigration. 

Trump’s efforts to reshape the immigration landscape are likely to start immediately. Appearing on Fox News the morning after the election, the president-elect’s spokesperson Karoline Leavitt celebrated a “resounding victory” and a “mandate to govern as he campaigned to deliver on the promises that he made, which include, on day one, launching the largest mass deportation operation of illegal immigrants.”

Immigrant rights groups and lawyers have been diligently preparing for the possibility of a Trump comeback. Not unlike the first time around, they will inevitably pursue strategic litigation to stop some of the next administration’s harshest, and possibly unlawful, policies. “I’ve sued every president since George W. Bush, including Presidents Obama and Biden,” Karen Tumlin, founder and director of Justice Action Center, said in a statement. “We have a simple message for President-elect Trump or his deputies if they decide to make good on their despicable plans: We will see you in court.”

Still, the breadth and depth of Trump’s agenda will have lasting impact, not only on immigrants who will directly bear the brunt of a heightened militarized immigration enforcement environment, but also on all Americans.

Here’s how.

Launch Mass Deportation

Indiscriminate workplace raids, massive detention camps, and around-the-clock deportation flights. That’s the radical vision to remove millions of undocumented immigrants put forward by Trump and Stephen Miller, his senior adviser on immigration. They would attempt to accomplish it by invoking a 18th-century wartime law known as the Alien Enemies Act—last used during World War II for the internment of Japanese, Italian, and German nationals—and deploying the full force of law enforcement agencies and the US military in violation of due process rights and the law.

A mass deportation campaign would permanently change the United States. It could lead to racial profiling, the potential separation of families, and the wrongful deportation of Americans and lawful residents. It would also ruin the economy.

The logistical and practical challenges of purging even 1 million people a year are considerable, not to mention the moral and human devastation. But, if realized, a recent analysis by the American Immigration Council found that such a project would cost $967.9 billion over more than a decade. The deportation of immigrant workers who are the backbone of so many critical industries would also break the economy, resulting in an estimated drop of up to 6.8 percent in gross domestic product.

End Birthright Citizenship

Trump promised to sign an executive order on day one to end the long-standing constitutional guarantee of citizenship for those born in the United States, regardless of their parents’ immigration status. The order would instruct federal agencies to require that at least one parent be a US citizen or lawful permanent resident for a child to be granted automatic citizenship.

“This current policy is based on a historical myth and a willful misinterpretation of the law by the open borders advocate,” Trump has said. Birthright citizenship is enshrined in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution—and reaffirmed in Supreme Court decisions—which states that, with very few exceptions, “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.”

Revive the “Muslim Ban”

During his first term, Trump took 472 executive actions in his bid to reshape the immigration system. One of them was the infamous “Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States” order, which permanently suspended the resettlement of refugees from Syria and barred the entry of travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries—Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. The policy created instant chaos, sparked international repudiation, and galvanized Americans all over the country.

Trump has vowed to restore the so-called Muslim ban. The original iterations faced repeated legal challenges. Federal appeals courts ruled against the Trump administration, concluding that the executive order’s “stated national security interest was provided in bad faith” and “drips with religious intolerance, animus, and discrimination.” But in a 5–4 decision in June 2018, the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to carry out a version of the ban. On his first day in office, President Joe Biden issue a proclamation reversing it.

End Immigration Programs

Hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world who currently benefit from Temporary Protected Status (TPS)—granted to those fleeing wars, natural disasters, and other country-specific circumstances—are at risk of losing protection against deportation.

That includes nationals of Haiti, Yemen, Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Venezuela. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 playbook, crafted by a number of administration-in-waiting former officials, specifically calls for the repeal of TPS designations.

While in office, Trump tried to rescind the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program that shields from deportation the undocumented youth brought to the United States as children. There were as many as 535,030 active DACA recipients as of June 2024. Miller has said a second Trump administration would again attack the program, whose fate already lies with the courts. “It would be absolutely catastrophic,” Michelle Ming, political director at United We Dream, says of the prospect of tens of thousands of young people losing status. “It would destroy families. It would destroy entire communities.”

Roll Back Refugee Resettlement

In a September social media post in which he introduced to concept of remigration, Trump said he would “suspend refugee resettlement.” The first Trump administration dealt a massive blow to the US refugee resettlement program, and it likely wouldn’t be different this time. In September, Trump said he would “ban refugee resettlement from terror-infested areas like the Gaza Strip.”

As president, he set an annual cap of 15,000 refugee admissions. The number of admissions went from 84,994 during President Barack Obama’s last year in office to a record low of 11,814 in 2020. Ultimately, the Trump administration resettled fewer refugees than any other going back at least to the Carter administration. Upon taking the White House, Joe Biden worked to restore the program, resettling 100,034 refugees in fiscal year 2024—the most in decades.

Restrict Legal Immigration

While Trump has tried to signal that he’s in favor of legal immigration pathways, his allies have been preparing the terrain to severely restrict them. “Decades of ‘we’re not against legal immigration’ will culminate in the largest cut to legal immigration in US history,” David J. Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, posted on X.

Their plans include severely curbing asylum, ending diversity lottery visas, and doing away with temporary legal programs like parole that have allowed immigrants from countries such as Haiti, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba to come to the United States after being vetted and securing a sponsor. They could even resuscitate the public charge rule making it harder for low-income immigrants to qualify for visas and green cards.

Immigration lawyers have additionally warned that, in a second Trump administration, visa processing might be subject to delays and increased denial rates. “If Donald Trump is elected president in November 2024,” the National Foundation for American Policy stated, “he should be expected to restrict legal immigration, including green cards and [high-skilled] H-1B visas.”

The Project 2025 agenda contemplates undermining T and U visas for undocumented immigrant victims of trafficking and certain crimes who cooperate with law enforcement. (These temporary protections serve as a powerful tool to encourage victims to report crimes and keep their communities safe.) It also envisions winding down crucial temporary agricultural worker programs.

Projecting a scenario in which Trump’s policies result in less immigration and even more people leaving the United States than entering, a preelection Brookings Institution analysis concluded the GDP in 2025 would be $130 billion lower than under a Harris administration.

In the coming days, you will hear every imaginable take on why Americans voted to put Donald Trump back in office.

Pundits will say toxic masculinity was to blame—and men feeling usurped by women. They’ll say it was the Christian nationalism movement. A surprising shift in Latino voting patterns. Sexism. Racism. Transphobia. Elon Musk. Crypto bros. “Theo bros.” Housing prices. Gaza! Propaganda from Fox News and Newsmax. Misinformation on X.

Perhaps it was the cowardice of powerful men like Jeff Bezos and Jamie Dimon. The anti-immigrant frenzy—Trump’s incessant false claims about vicious murderers and rapists and mental patients swarming across the border like locusts. Property crime. Inflation. Interest rates. Lingering malaise from the pandemic. The Democrats’ failure to sell their economic wins. Kamala Harris’ inability to distance herself from an unpopular president.

Or maybe a combination of all these things. Gender and Gaza clearly made a difference. Inflation is a notorious regime killer—it was high inflation that underpinned the rise of fascism in Europe in the last century—and rising wages haven’t kept pace. When the Dems say, “Look, inflation is back to normal,” well, the price of groceries sure ain’t.

But I’m talking here about something even more basic, something that undergirds so much of America’s discontent. The best explanation, after all, is often the simplest:

Wealth inequality.

There is little that leaves people as pissed off and frustrated as the feeling that no matter how hard they work, they can’t ever seem to get ahead. And this feeling has been slowly festering since the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan and his cadre of supply-side economists launched the first salvos in what would become the great fucking-over of the American middle and working classes.

The frustration was evident in something two very different women in two very different states told me on the very same day in 2022 for a story on how America spends hundreds of billions of dollars a year subsidizing retirement plans mostly for rich people: “I’m going to have to work until I die.”

The great fucking-over commenced with President Reagan’s gutting of unions and the wealth-friendly tax cuts he signed into law in 1981 and 1986. The trend continued with George W. Bush’s tax cuts in 2001 and 2003, and culminated with the Trump tax cuts of 2017—which, like all of those other Republican initiatives, failed to generate the degreee of growth and prosperity the supply-siders promised. They did, however, make the rich richer as wages stagnated and the middle class shriveled.

We talk a lot about income inequality, but wealth and income are different beasts. Income is what pays your bills. Wealth is your security—and in that regard, most American families are just not feeling sufficiently secure.

In January 1981, when Reagan took office, the households of the Middle 40—that’s the 50th to 90th wealth percentiles—held a collective 31.5 percent of the nation’s wealth. Fast-forward to January 2022: Their share of the pie had dwindled to 25.7 percent, even as the combined wealth of the richest 0.01 percent of households soared from less than 3 percent of the total to 11 percent.

Put another way, 18,300 US households—a tiny fraction—now control more than a tenth of the nation’s wealth.

And what of the bottom 50 percent? How have they fared over the past four decades or so? When Reagan came in, their average household wealth was a paltry $944. (All figures are in 2023 dollars.) Today they have even less—just $659 on average, according to projections from Real Time Inequality, a site based on data from the Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman. All told, those 92.2 million households now hold less than 0.05 percent of the nation’s wealth—which rounds down to zero. In short, half of the people living in the richest nation on the planet have no wealth at all.

They’re not doing so hot income-wise, either. In September, the Congressional Budget Office reported that average income of the highest-earning 1 percent of taxpayers in 2021 was more than $3.1 million, or 42 times the average income of households in the bottom 90 percent, according to the nonprofit Americans for Tax Fairness. That’s the most skewed income distribution since CBO began reporting this data in 1979, the group noted. Back then, the disparity was only 12 to 1.

And the billionaires? I’m glad you asked. Based on Forbes data, from January 1, 2018, when the Trump cuts took effect, to April 1 of this year, the nation’s 806 billionaires saw a 57 percent gain in their collective wealth—after adjusting for the inflation that has plagued working families.

“It’s a class and inequality story for sure,” Richard Reeves, the author of 2017’s Dream Hoarders, concurred when I ran my premise by him. “But it’s also a gendered class story.” (His latest book, Of Boys and Men, examines how “the social and economic world of men has been turned upside down.”) And he’s right.

But are you starting to see why the broader electorate, race and gender notwithstanding, might be just a little fed up?

I suppose, having also written a book about wealth in America, that I know enough to assert that wealth insecurity is fundamental.

But why, you might ask, would someone living on the edge vote for Republicans, whose wage-suppressing, union-busting, benefit-denying policies have only tended to make the poor and the middle class more miserable?

And why in the name of Heaven would they vote for Trump, a billionaire born with a silver spoon in his mouth who has lied and cheated his way through life? A man whose latest tax-cut plans—though some, like eliminating taxes on tips and Social Security income, can sound progressive—will be deeply regressive, giving ever more to the rich and rationalizing cuts that will hurt the poor and middle class and accelerate global climate chaos.

The reason, my friends, may well be that those on the losing end of our thriving economy don’t see it as thriving. Historically, every election cycle, when reporters fan out to ask low-income voters in swing states what they are thinking, the message has been roughly the same: Presidential candidates, Democrats and Republicans, come around here every four years and talk their talk, and then they leave and forget about us when it comes to policy.

Now that’s not entirely fair, because the Biden administration actually has done a good bit for working people and families of color, and has proposed all sorts of measures to make the tax code fairer and reduce the wealth gap (both the racial one and the general one)—including increasing taxes and IRS enforcement for the super-rich. But one can only get so far with a split Senate, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema on your team, and a rival party that would just as soon throw you into a lake of fire as support your initiatives.

And nuance is a hard sell when you’re pitching yourself to families worried about whether they can make it to the end of the month. Roughly half of the population barely gets by, has no stocks, no wealth, no retirement savings, and can’t imagine how they’ll ever afford a house—certainly not at current interest rates. Meanwhile, the billionaire techno-dicks are strutting around, publicly flexing their wealth and power with Democrats and Republicans alike.

In courting Americans who, fairly or not, feel like the system has never done them a bit of good, Team Trump has the rhetorical advantage, because he says he’ll destroy that system—even if that really just means he’ll subvert it to further enrich his buddies. “Populist Revolt Against Elite’s Vision of the U.S.” was one of the New York Times’ headlines after the race was called on Wednesday morning. And that’s absolutely right.

Because when the Republicans say, “The economy is a nightmare under Biden and Harris, and illegal immigrants are committing heinous crimes and taking your jobs and we’re gonna cut your taxes,” and the Dems counter, “Hey, none of that is really true and we actually did a lot and we feel your pain and the economy is going gangbusters and Trump’s tariffs will destroy it,” well, whom do you think a person struggling from paycheck to paycheck might be more inclined to believe?

Sure, the economy is doing great—if you own stock. If you have a well-paying job and a retirement plan. If you are in the top fifth of the wealth and income spectrums.

If not, even if you rightly suspect that the Republicans won’t do a damn thing to improve your lot, you might just be tempted to say, “Fuck it.”

And watch the system burn.

Since Donald Trump won reelection, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have both done what the now-president-elect and his fellow Republicans refused to do in 2020: publicly accept loss and advocate for a peaceful transition of power.

In a Thursday morning speech outside the White House, Biden told Americans, “We accept the choice the country made.”

“I’ve said many times,” he continued, “you can’t love your country only when you win. You can’t love your neighbor only when you agree.” He added, “Something I hope we can do, no matter who you voted for, is to see each other not as adversaries, but as fellow Americans. Bring down the temperature.”

The remarks, both unifying and a call for calm, sharply contrasted with the Trump campaign’s rhetoric in the final stretch of the election, which included Trump just this weekend saying he would be “ok” with journalists being shot at. Biden’s speech was also radically different from the near-constant conspiracy theories Trump and his allies promoted after Trump lost the 2020 election—which, as recently as today, he has continued to insist he won.

President Biden: "Setbacks are unavoidable, but giving up is unforgivable … The American experiment endures. We're going to be okay, but we need to stay engaged. We need to keep going." https://t.co/627FiKv7Sz pic.twitter.com/hZoGsFc7yl

— NBC News (@NBCNews) November 7, 2024

Seemingly alluding to Trump’s attacks on the voting system, Biden on Thursday also added that he hoped “we can lay to rest a question about the integrity of the American electoral system. It is honest, it is fair, and it is transparent, and it can be trusted, win or lose,” he said. Of course, now that Trump has won, the GOP suddenly appears to agree with this, despite the fact that they and their candidate spent years sowing doubt in the electoral system—including up until election night.

The president also told Americans who voted for Harris they had to keep the faith and keep peacefully fighting for what they believe in. “Setbacks are unavoidable,” Biden said. “Giving up is unforgivable.”

“The American experiment endures, we’re going to be okay, but we need to stay engaged,” the president added. “We need to keep going, and above all, need to keep the faith.”

Harris struck a similar tone during her concession speech at Howard University on Wednesday. “The outcome of this election is not what we wanted, not what we fought for, not what we voted for,” Harris told the crowd. “But hear me when I say, hear me when I say, the light of America’s promise will always burn bright as long as we never give up and as long as we keep fighting.”

Harris also acknowledged that “folks are feeling and experiencing a range of emotions right now,” but urged her supporters to still accept the election results.

“A fundamental principle of American democracy is that when we lose an election, we accept the results,” she continued. “That principle, as much as any other, distinguishes democracy from monarchy or tyranny.”

The dual speeches came at a moment of widespread concerns that American democracy and so many civil liberties hang in the balance with Trump’s return to power. But with a future so unknown—and even frightening—to many, both Harris’ and Biden’s post-election remarks reminded Americans what leadership looks like: recognition of, and respect for, the will of the people, and a reminder that the future of American democracy remains worth peacefully fighting for.

Spokespeople for the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The elites of the anti-vaccine, “medical freedom” world saw the presidential election unfold at a hotel watch party in West Palm Beach, with a giddy, rising sense of what was unfolding.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s most famous anti-vaccine activist turned presidential candidate turned Trump booster, turned up at the event before heading to Mar a Lago; at the hotel, he sat alongside Del Bigtree, his campaign’s communications manager and the founder of Informed Consent Action Network, another major anti-vax group. They were joined by people like Aaron Siri, a prominent litigator who focuses on vaccine injury cases, educators who advocate for “vaccine choice” in schools, and others who have devoted their adult lives to opposing a basic tenet of public health.

The group watched on screen as President-elect Donald Trump praised Kennedy, their longtime friend and fellow traveler. “He’s going to make America healthy again,” a glistening, freshly bronzed Trump promised in his victory remarks. From the crowd, a chorus broke out chanting: “Bobby! Bobby! Bobby!” 

Trump smiled. “Go have fun, Bobby,” he said. 

These are heady times for Kennedy and his anti-vaccine allies. While his own presidential campaign failed spectacularly, his choice to suspend it and endorse Trump’s has resulted in a promise from the soon-to-be-president that Kennedy will serve some role in the second Trump administration relevant to what Kennedy has called his “Make America Healthy Again” movement.

Kennedy is the founder of the anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense (CHD), the largest such group in the nation. While he’s currently described by the organization as its “chairman on leave,” its staff have spent the time since Trump’s win discussing their hopes for what Kennedy will do for the cause in Washington.

The day after the election, in a morning show on CHD’s web-only TV channel, a group of people affiliated with the organization celebrated their surreal good fortune. The show was hosted by Mary Holland, an attorney and CHD’s CEO, and Polly Tommey, a longtime anti-vaccine campaigner from England and the mother of a child she says was injured by a vaccine. 

“One of us is going to be in the White House,” said Tommey. “Or around the White House. And that, for us, is a major breakthrough.” 

The two women beamed as they interviewed John Gilmore, a teacher in New York and the executive director of a smaller, decades-old anti-vaccine group, the Autism Action Network. “This is the biggest thing that’s ever happened in medical freedom in my lifetime,” Gilmore told Tommey and Holland. “Everything is going to be different.” 

Gilmore added that he believes Trump is “sincere” in his support for the so-called medical freedom movement. “There are real incidents of vaccine injury in his own family that I think he wants to address,” he explained, without specifying who he believes to be affected by those injuries. “And this is finally his opportunity to do it.” 

Gilmore recounted how he’d been at the West Palm Beach hotel watch party, and how Kennedy had told the room “how confident he is that his agenda is going to be fully represented in Washington D.C.”

One huge shift, Gilmore added, is that the movement is “no longer on the fringe…Our people will be at the CDC and the NIH and the HHS and all the other alphabet agencies in Washington. Not just being there, but we’re going to be in a policymaking position.” 

Gilmore also expressed a common view in the anti-vaccine world: that the federal government is “sitting on” data showing that vaccine injuries exist, and showing “the connection between vaccines and autism.” With Trump at the helm and Kennedy in place, he said, “that data is going to be unleashed and that will hit the medical establishment like a tsunami. It’s going to be huge.” (Vaccine injuries, while rare, do exist, and a federal compensation program and specialized court system has existed since the late 1980s to pay settlements to people who can document harms. CHD has opposed the program and called for vaccine manufacturers to once again be sued in civil court, which would prove a massive windfall for the many personal injury lawyers involved in the movement. In an omnibus hearing, the vaccine court system, whose judges are experts in vaccine safety law, ruled in 2010 that vaccines definitively cannot be shown to cause autism.)

Holland agreed with Gilmore that their movement was entering a new era, and voiced a hope that what she called “the new press”—“the podcasters, the independent journalists on the internet”—would cover vaccine safety issues the way CHD prefers. “That’s what the zeitgeist is, finally,” she said. 

Dawn Richardson of the National Vaccine Information Center, another anti-vaccine group, also appeared on the program. She said she’d wept while watching Trump’s acceptance speech. “We have to break up the CDC,” she added. “We have to take vaccine safety out of the CDC.” Such a goal seems in line with Project 2025, the Trump-linked policy agenda, which calls for splitting the CDC into two agencies. The American Public Health Association has called the proposal “concerning,” and warned it would “slow down emergency responses and take away the already limited authority for CDC to provide public health guidance.” 

Amid all the excitement, there is precedent that casts doubt whether Kennedy can move the needle on their pet issue. The first time Trump was elected president, the two met, after which Kennedy claimed that he’d been asked to serve on a “vaccine safety and scientific integrity” commission. But that never happened. No particular vaccine “disclosures” or reforms were made during his first administration, despite his promise during one debate to “slow down” the childhood vaccine schedule. Many anti-vaccine activists were also bitterly disappointed in Trump for his Operation Warp Speed program. During his own 2024 presidential run, Kennedy assailed Trump for supporting a Covid vaccine.

“Donald Trump clearly hasn’t learned from his Covid era mistakes,” Kennedy tweeted in March, citing “documented harm being caused by the shot to so many innocent children and adults who are suffering myocarditis, pericarditis and brain inflammation.” (Covid vaccines have exceedingly rare side effects for a small number of people.)

Kennedy’s tune quickly changed when he was drawn into the Trumpverse, but there are signs that CHD is aware that Trump could easily reverse course. In a fundraising email, Holland, CHD’s CEO, cheered that Kennedy is “headed to Washington, D.C. to serve in President Trump’s inner circle.” But, with that, she added, CHD’s work remained more important than ever, “to cheerlead the administration’s efforts to make kids healthy again, and to hold their feet to the fire if they fall down on promises to make children’s health one of their top priorities.”

Donald Trump announced Thursday that Susie Wiles, who as his de facto campaign manager is credited with imposing a measure of discipline that helped him win on Tuesday, will serve as his chief of staff.

Wiles has earned a reputation as a smart, pragmatic, and effective campaign operative. For critics of Trump’s agenda—which includes deporting millions of immigrants, imposing tariffs likely to increase inflation, firing vast swaths of civil servants and using the Justice Department to prosecute critics—her appointment is bad news.

“Susie is tough, smart, innovative, and is universally admired and respected,” Trump said in a statement Thursday. “Susie will continue to work tirelessly to Make America great again,”

Wiles will not be John Kelly, who, along with labeling Trump a fascist, has let it be known that as Trump’s chief of staff from 2017 to 2019, he worked to prevent Trump from indulging his worst instincts.

Wiles is not going to the White House to stop Trump implementing his plans—she will be there to help him more effectively impose them. Wiles may be a reason that Trump, a bumbling, wanna-be authoritarian in his first term, will be a more effective one in his second.

Nor is Wiles likely to go too far in stopping Trump from pursuing some of his worst impulses.

As Tim Alberta reported recently in the Atlantic, Wiles was occasionally willing to push back on Trump’s bad ideas, but not too often. Here is Alberta describing how Wiles handled Trump’s insistence on allowing far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer to travel with Trump in September, a decision that drew embarrassing headlines when Loomer, who has claimed the 9/11 attack was an “inside job,” joined Trump at a 9/11 memorial event.

“Wiles knew that nothing good could come of this. Still, after one more round of gentle pushback, she acquiesced. (Even people like Wiles, who have a track record of talking Trump out of certain reckless ideas, learn that you cannot retain a seat at the table if you tell the man ‘no’ one time too many.) Wiles decided that allowing Loomer on the trip was not a hill to die on. Perhaps, she would later remark to friends, it should have been.”

The daughter of late NFL broadcaster Pat Summerall, Wiles is a longtime GOP operative in Florida with a history of working for rich candidates. She ran Sen. Rick Scott’s 2010 campaign for Florida’s governorship, worked as former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman’s presidential campaign manager in 2012, and ran Trump’s campaign in Florida in 2016 and 2020. She also worked for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis before a falling out with him.

Wiles has also worked as a lobbyist, and held onto a senior lobbying position with the Republican-leaning advocacy firm Mercury Public Affairs during the campaign, according to the New York Times. She was registered as a lobbyist for a tobacco company as recently as this year.

Wiles also worked from 2017 through 2019 as a lobbyist for Ballard Partners, formerly a Florida-based firm that built a thriving DC practice after Trump’s 2016 election—based in part on perceived access to him.

While Wiles worked there, the firm signed up a colorful roster of clients that included a Russian billionaire, a firm run by a man linked to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, and a solar company controlled by a state-owned Chinese firm. Wiles wasn’t a registered lobbyist for all of those clients. But she registered to represent a host of outfits, including General Motors and the Motion Picture Association of America.

Wiles also lobbied on behalf of Globovisión, a Venezuelan firm that was looking to expand into US markets. That plan hit a hitch in 2018, when the Justice Department indicted its founder, Raul Gorrin, on corruption charges. Ballard said it cut ties with the firm after learning of the federal probe. Last month, the Justice Department indicted Gorrin again, alleging that he helped “to launder funds corruptly obtained from Venezuela’s state-owned and state-controlled energy company… in exchange for hundreds of millions in bribe payments to Venezuelan officials.”

A Trump spokesperson didn’t respond immediately to a request for comment on Wiles’ lobbying work.