Donald Trump wins Arizona as US House moves closer to Republican control – US politics live

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

• Donald Trump won the presidential election in Arizona, the Associated Press (AP) declared on Saturday, completing a clean sweep of all seven battleground states and locking in a decisive electoral college victory over the Democratic vice-president, Kamala Harris. Trump, who had secured the 270 electoral college votes needed to win the White House by early Wednesday, now has what is expected to be a final total of 312 votes to Harris’s 226.

• Republican US representative Eli Crane won reelection to a US House seat representing Arizona’s second congressional district. The freshman lawmaker defeated former Navajo Nation president, Jonathan Nez, who was vying to become the state’s first Native American representative. In a statement late on Saturday, Crane commended Nez for entering the race and thanked voters.

• The AP reported that three other US House races in Arizona were too early to call on Saturday, most notably the first and sixth congressional districts.

• Biden and Trump will meet on Wednesday in the Oval Office, the White House announced on Saturday. “At President Biden’s invitation, President Biden and president-elect Trump will meet in the Oval Office on Wednesday,” the press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said in a statement.

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

• Trump’s second administration has begun to take shape amid fears over extremist appointments and how far right the US will go while Republicans control the White House and probably both chambers of Congress. The range of names being put forward varies from members of Trump’s inner circle to the world’s richest man, tech mogul Elon Musk.

• Trump said on Saturday that former Republican presidential contender Nikki Haley and former secretary of state Mike Pompeo will not be asked to join his administration. “I will not be inviting former ambassador Nikki Haley, or former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, to join the Trump administration, which is currently in formation,” Trump posted on social media. “I very much enjoyed and appreciated working with them previously, and would like to thank them for their service to our country.”

• A New York judge is to decide this week whether Trump’s criminal conviction on charges involving hush money paid to a porn star should be overturned in light of the US supreme court’s July ruling on presidential immunity. Justice Juan Merchan has said he will make his decision by Tuesday. It is the first of two pivotal choices that the judge must make after Trump’s 5 November election victory. Merchan also must decide whether to go ahead with sentencing Trump on 26 November as currently scheduled.

• The Kremlin said on Sunday that it saw “positive signals” from Trump’s position on Ukraine, while warning it was hard to predict how he would behave in office. “The signals are positive. Trump during his election talked about how he perceives everything through deals, that he can make a deal that can lead to peace,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said in an interview with state media published on Sunday.

• Protests against 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.

• Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said on Sunday he had spoken with Trump three times in the past few days aimed at tightening the strong alliance between Israel and the US. “These were good and very important conversations,” Netanyahu said in a statement

• Trump’s former Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, said he will not seek to join the president-elect’s new administration but is ready to offer advice to his successor, including on how to strengthen sanctions on Iran and Russia and contain the growth of US debt. In an interview, Mnuchin told Reuters it was important for the Treasury to work towards strengthening US trade policy. This includes holding Beijing to its US goods purchase commitments in Trump’s January 2020 Phase One deal to rebalance US-China trade, which he said “they’re not living up to.”

• The president-elect has charged Howard Lutnick, a longtime friend, and one of the few high-profile figures in corporate America to vocally endorse his campaign, with recruiting officials who will deliver, rather than dilute, his agenda. The CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, and co-chair of Trump’s transition team, has made no secret of his plan to stack the new White House with loyalists – and keep out anyone who threatens to derail his pledges.

• A senior adviser to Trump said that the incoming US administration’s priority for Ukraine will be achieving peace rather than helping it regain territory captured by Russia in the almost three years of the war. In an interview with the BBC, broadcast on Saturday, Bryan Lanza, who has been a political adviser to Trump since his 2016 presidential campaign, 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.”

• The governor of New Jersey, Phil Murphy, said he thinks Trump may look favourably on the UK choosing to leave the “bureaucratic blob” of the EU. The Democratic politician told the Sky News Sunday Morning With Trevor Phillips program that his “gut” suggested Trump could not pursue tariffs “against allies like the UK”.

• Australia’s economy will not be immune from escalating trade tensions, Jim Chalmers has warned, as the Albanese government prepares itself for an incoming Trump administration. In a speech to be delivered on Monday, the treasurer will outline the risks of an “uncertain world characterised by economic vulnerability and volatility” but will say the Australian government is “well-placed and well-prepared”.

• A British minister said on Sunday that the government is unlikely to ask the Reform party leader Nigel Farage to act as an intermediary to deal with Trump. The UK Treasury minister, Darren Jones, said on Sunday that the government would probably reject that offer. Farage had said at the weekend he would be willing to act as an intermediary for the UK government because it is in the national interest. Jones also said that the UK is examining all possible options when it comes Trump’s approach to Ukraine.

• An 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 Trump, conduct that the agency head on Saturday called “reprehensible”.

• Bitcoin soared to a new record high on Sunday, as the cryptocurrency continues to rise after Trump’s presidential election win. The digital currency passed $80,000 for the first time in its history shortly after 12am GMT, according to AFP.

Joan E Greve

Joe Biden stood before the American people, millions of whom were still reeling from the news of Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential race, and reassured them: “We’re going to be OK.”

In his first remarks since his vice-president and chosen successor, Kamala Harris, lost the presidential election, Biden delivered a pep talk from the White House Rose Garden on a sunny Thursday that clashed with Democrats’ black mood in the wake of their devastating electoral losses. Biden pledged a smooth transfer of power to Trump and expressed faith in the endurance of the American experiment.

“Setbacks are unavoidable, but giving up is unforgivable,” Biden said. “A defeat does not mean we are defeated. We lost this battle. The America of your dreams is calling for you to get back up. That’s the story of America for over 240 years and counting.”

The message severely clashed with the dire warnings that many Democrats, including Biden, have issued about the dangers of a second Trump term. They have predicted that Trump’s return to power would jeopardize the very foundation of American democracy. They assured voters that Trump would make good on his promise to deport millions of undocumented people. And they raised serious doubts about Trump’s pledge to veto a nationwide abortion ban.

Now as they stare down four more years of Trump’s presidency, Democrats must reckon with the reality that those warnings were for naught. Not only did Trump win the White House, but he is on track to win the popular vote, making him the first Republican to do so since 2004. Senate Republicans have regained their majority, and they appear confident in their chances of holding the House of Representatives, with several key races still too close to call on Friday morning.

Donald Trump could have an easier time limiting press freedom in his second term in the White House after a campaign marked by virulent rhetoric towards journalists and calls for punishing television networks and prosecuting journalists and their sources, legal scholars and journalism advocacy groups warn.

Aside from worries about Trump’s demonization of the press inciting violence against journalists, free press advocates appear to be most alarmed by Trump’s call for the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to revoke TV networks’ broadcast licenses and talk of jailing journalists who refuse to reveal anonymous sources.

Still, despite a conservative majority on the supreme court and likely Republican control of the House and Senate, those same people also say that America’s robust first amendment protections and a legislative proposal and technology to protect sources mean that a diminished press under Trump is not a certainty.

“My big-picture concern is that Trump is going to do exactly what he has been telling us that he wants to do, which is that he is going to punish his critics,” said Heidi Kitrosser, a Northwestern University law professor.

Kitrosser added:

He is going to punish people who dissent from his approach to things, people who criticize him and also, perhaps more importantly, investigative journalists and their sources who are not offering opinions but are exposing facts that he finds embarrassing or inconvenient.”

Trump has long said journalists deliver “fake news” and are the “enemy of the people”, but since leaving office in 2021 he has used more violent language. At a 2022 rally in Texas, Trump suggested that the threat of rape in prison could compel a journalist to reveal their sources.

Sarah Basford Canales

Australia’s economy will not be immune from escalating trade tensions, Jim Chalmers has warned, as the Albanese government prepares itself for an incoming Donald Trump administration.

In a speech to be delivered on Monday, the treasurer will outline the risks of an “uncertain world characterised by economic vulnerability and volatility” but will say the Australian government is “well-placed and well-prepared”.

There is speculation Trump’s second term in the White House may drive up inflation in the US again if he moves ahead with plans to raise tariffs on imported goods and slash taxes.

“Of course we expect the incoming US administration to bring a different suite of policies. And we are confident in our ability to navigate that change, as partners,” he will say at the Australian Institute of International Affairs.

Modelling undertaken by the Treasury department on different trade and tariff policy scenarios indicated there would be a “small” reduction in Australia’s output and additional price pressures in the short term.

Bitcoin soared to a new record high on Sunday, as the cryptocurrency continues to rise after Donald Trump’s presidential election win.

According to Agence France-Presse (AFP), The digital currency passed $80,000 for the first time in its history shortly after 12am GMT.

It has been rising since Trump won last Tuesday’s US presidential election over sentiment that he will ease regulations on digital currencies. Bitcoin reached $75,000 on Wednesday, topping its previous all-time peak of $73,797.98 achieved in March, reports AFP.

Trump was seen as the pro-crypto candidate in his battle with the Democratic party’s candidate Kamala Harris.

During his first presidency Trump referred to cryptocurrencies as a scam, but has since radically changed his position, even launching his own platform for the unit.

He has pledged to make the US the “bitcoin and cryptocurrency capital of the world,” and to put tech billionaire and rightwing conspiracy theorist Elon Musk in charge of a wide-ranging audit of governmental waste.

The previous Trump term saw corporate tax cuts that brought more liquidity to markets, encouraging investment into high-growth assets such as cryptocurrency.

According to AFP, in the run-up to the election, Trump apparently became the first former president to use bitcoin in a purchase, as he bought burgers at a New York City restaurant, which hailed it as a “historic transaction”.

From gold-high top sneakers to Women-for-Trump tank tops, iron-on “Fight, Fight, Fight” patches to a poster depicting a 19th-century cowboy outlaw, sales of Trump merchandise at the Trump store in Scranton, Pennsylvania, tripled in sales in the days after the once and future president’s landslide second-term win in the US election last week.

In a hard week for Democrats, the goods flying off the shelves added insult to injury as Scranton has long been intimately linked to Joe Biden, lauded as his home town and symbol of his affinity with America’s working class.

Store manager Thomas Rankin said he never believed polls predicting a tight race. Trump voters, he believed, had simply kept quiet because they didn’t want an argument. “A whole lot of the Democrat party, as soon as they got in the booth, went boom! They could see through the whole Democrat propaganda,” he said.

And then there were the rallies – Rankin, a former deadhead, said he used to go to a lot of concerts – and Trump had held hundreds with his trademark weave of folk tales, policy and political rhetoric.

“People travelled to them like they travelled for the Grateful Dead,” he said, and that’s what I did. He drew people in, just like the Dead. People had fun, but they also had an interest in what he is saying.”

Bitter truths were plentiful in Scranton, last week, as voters in “Scranton Joe” Biden’s home town broadly rejected Democrats’ proposition for a continuation under Kamala Harris.

Lackawanna county, which incorporates Scranton, lies at the top end of the Pennsylvania’s populous Route 222 voter corridor. It was once a Democratic stronghold but last week it swung five points toward Donald Trump compared with 2020.

Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said on Sunday he has spoken with US president-elect Donald Trump three times in the past few days aimed at tightening the strong alliance between Israel and the US.

“These were good and very important conversations,” Netanyahu said in a statement, according to Reuters.

“We see eye to eye on the Iranian threat in all its components, and the danger posed by it. We also see the great opportunities before Israel, in the field of peace and its expansion, and in other fields.”

Trump’s White House circle takes shape amid fears over extremist appointments

Martin Pengelly

Donald Trump’s second administration has begun to take shape amid fears over extremist appointments and how far right the US will go while Republicans control the White House and probably both chambers of Congress.

The range of names being put forward varies from members of Trump’s inner circle to the world’s richest man, tech mogul Elon Musk. Alongside plutocrats and technocrats are hardline ideologues on immigration and foreign policy and the controversial figure of Robert F Kennedy Jr, a leading vaccine conspiracy theorist.

On Thursday, Trump made his first appointment, naming Susie Wiles, a co-campaign chair, White House chief of staff. Hailing Wiles, 67, as “tough, smart, innovative … universally admired and respected”, Trump reveled in naming “the first-ever female chief of staff in United States history”.

The daughter of an NFL legend, Pat Summerall, Wiles has worked on Republican campaigns since the days of Ronald Reagan. But she faces a thankless task. Chief of staff is a hugely demanding role, both gatekeeper and adviser. Trump’s first four-year term featured four: Reince Priebus, John Kelly, Mick Mulvaney and Mark Meadows. None flourished. Before this year’s election, Kelly went so far as to say on record that Trump praised Adolf Hitler and met “the general definition of a fascist”.

Publicly, Wiles is a woman of fewer words. On election night, in his victory speech, Trump called her “the ice baby”.

The Trump transition team is co-chaired by Howard Lutnick, chief executive of the finance giant Cantor Fitzgerald, and Linda McMahon, the World Wrestling Entertainment impresario who led the Small Business Administration in Trump’s first term. As ever, speculation is rife about top jobs. Given campaign promises including mass deportations of undocumented migrants and pardons for January 6 rioters, the role of attorney general is perhaps attracting most attention.

Jessica Elgot

The UK is examining all possible options when it comes to the US president-elect Donald Trump’s approach to Ukraine, the chief secretary to the Treasury has said, as the UK’s chief of the defence staff said approximately 1,500 Russian troops were being killed and injured every day.

Whitehall officials are “considering and planning lots of different scenarios”, Darren Jones told Sky News on Sunday. During the US election campaign, Trump said he would find a solution to end the war “within a day”, but did not explain how he would do so. His vice-president nominee, JD Vance, has been vociferously opposed to providing more funds to support Ukraine.

Jones said the UK would not be stepping back from its own commitments. “We don’t want any countenance of the idea that we’re stepping back from that. That’s why we’re offering them £3bn a year, which you know, in the fiscal context here in the UK, is difficult but the right decision for us,” he said.

“Officials will be considering and planning lots of different scenarios – as they would do under any administration – to make sure that the UK is in the strongest possible position.”

However, Jones said he would not commit to spending 2.5% of GDP on defence by the end of the current parliament, saying that security and defence were a priority but that meant “trade-offs” in other areas.

Jones was also scathing about the Reform UK leader Nigel Farage’s offer to help the Labour government work with Donald Trump, saying:

The counterfactual here is that we do not have influence and we do not have relationships. That’s just not true.

I think [Mr Farage] should focus on working with his constituents in Clacton who deserve a bit of a full-time MP as opposed to a transatlantic commentator.”

Melissa Hellmann

Following Donald Trump’s decisive victory in this week’s presidential election, leaders of the anti-war group Uncommitted National Movement expressed their disappointment over the results, highlighting the Democratic party’s failure to listen to its base and prioritize progressive policies. Since the movement formed last winter, its leaders have urged the Democratic party to heed their demands of a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and to adopt an arms embargo on Israel, or risk losing their votes.

While a full picture of how Arab and Muslim Americans voted in the presidential election is still being captured, this election showed a shift among communities that had long formed the Democratic base. A majority of Muslim Americans voted for the Green party candidate Jill Stein at 53%, according to a nationwide exit poll of more than 1,500 Muslim Americans by the civil rights group Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), followed by 21% for Trump and 20% for vice-president Kamala Harris.

In Michigan, which has one of the nation’s highest Arab American and Muslim populations, 59% of Muslim Americans voted for Stein, according to the CAIR poll, while 22% cast ballots for Trump and 14% supported Harris. While exit poll data on Arab American voters is not yet available, a September poll for the non-profit group Arab American Institute found that they were evenly split between their support of Trump and Harris at 42% and 41% respectively.

Now, Uncommitted’s founders and supporters say that the election results reveal that the Democratic party has lost touch with its working class and anti-war voters. Their message for the Biden-Harris administration and Trump is clear, said Uncommitted leader and Palestinian American activist Lexis Zeidan: the movement is not over. While organizing for Palestinian rights under a Trump presidency will be an uphill battle, leaders said, they plan to continue mobilizing activists to apply pressure on the US government until it ends its support of Israel’s war on Gaza, where more than 43,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks since last October.

“The results of the election are really unfortunate because, with Trump taking office, there’s a reality that domestically, policies are going to get worse, and people’s rights are at stake. And we know also for Palestine and the Middle East, it’s not going to get any better. It definitely didn’t have to be this way,” said Zeidan. “Dems could have been much smarter, much more strategic and they chose to stick with the status quo rather than listening to their base of voters.”

A New York judge is set to decide this week whether president-elect Donald Trump’s criminal conviction on charges involving hush money paid to a porn star should be overturned in light of the US supreme court’s July ruling on presidential immunity.

Justice Juan Merchan has said he will make his decision by Tuesday. It is the first of two pivotal choices that the judge must make after Trump’s 5 November election victory. Merchan also must decide whether to go ahead with sentencing Trump on 26 November as currently scheduled. Legal experts have said sentencing now is unlikely to happen ahead of Trump’s 20 January inauguration.

A favourable ruling by Merchan for Trump on the immunity question or a sentencing delay would pave the way for him to return to the White House largely unencumbered by any of the four criminal cases that once appeared to threaten his ambitions.

Fema worker fired for telling Milton relief team to skip homes with Trump signs

Joanna Walters

An 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.”

Hurricane Milton roared across the Gulf of Mexico and hit Florida last month, crossing the state before reaching the Atlantic Ocean, just two weeks after Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida and then curved inland on a lethal path through Georgia and the Carolinas before dissipating in Tennessee. It killed 35 people.

The Fema employee has not yet been officially identified, but Criswell said of the actions:

This was reprehensible. I want to be clear to all of my employees and the American people, this type of behavior and action will not be tolerated at Fema and we will hold people accountable if they violate these standards of conduct.”

The agency has said it understood the conduct to be an isolated incident. The Daily Wire was the first to report on the actions of the employee, a supervisor, which it said it uncovered from internal correspondence.

A senior adviser to Donald Trump said that the incoming US administration’s priority for Ukraine will be achieving peace rather than helping it regain territory captured by Russia in the almost three years of the war.

In an interview with the BBC, broadcast on Saturday, Bryan Lanza, who has been a political adviser to Trump since his 2016 presidential campaign, began to elaborate on the strong signals the now president-elect had been sending to the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, on the campaign trail.

Lanza 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.”

A spokesperson for Trump’s presidential transition effort said later on Saturday that Lanza had not been speaking on behalf of the president-elect.

Trump’s transition effort is currently vetting personnel and drafting the policies that Trump could adopt during his second term.

“Bryan Lanza was a contractor for the campaign. He does not work for President Trump and does not speak for him,” said the spokesperson, who declined to be named.

During the election campaign, Trump said he would find a solution to end the war “within a day”, but did not explain how he would do so.

Russia is open to hearing Donald Trump’s proposals on ending the war, an official said on Saturday. 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.

A British minister said on Sunday that the government is unlikely to ask the Reform party leader Nigel Farage to act as an intermediary to deal with US president-elect Donald Trump.

Farage is a friend of Trump and was at his election victory party in Florida. He has offered to act as an interlocutor between the UK government and the Trump administration, which takes power in January.

The Treasury minister, Darren Jones, said on Sunday that the government would probably reject that offer, reports the PA news agency.

“I think that’s probably unlikely,” he told Sky News, saying Farage, who is a member of the UK parliament, should probably spend his time with his constituents rather than in the US.

Farage said at the weekend he has “a great relationship” with Trump and would be willing to act as an intermediary for the government because it is in the national interest.

Governments around the world are trying to figure out how to deal with Trump, who has promised to increase tariffs and whose first four-year term was characterized by a protectionist trade policy and isolationist rhetoric, including threats to withdraw from Nato.

UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, delayed starting a recruitment process for a new ambassador to Washington until the result of the US election was known. The role will be crucial in the coming years in navigating the UK’s relationship with the Trump administration.