Donald Trump was declared the winner in Arizona early on Sunday, completing the Republicans’ clean sweep of the so-called swing states and rubbing salt in Democrats’ wounds as it was announced that the president-elect is scheduled to meet with Joe Biden at the White House on Wednesday to discuss the presidential handover.
In a national campaign that was projected as being extremely close but he ended up winning handily, the result in Arizona gives Trump 312 electoral college votes, compared with Kamala Harris’s 226. The state joins the other Sun belt swing states – Nevada, Georgia and North Carolina – and the three Rust belt states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania in voting Republican. All were expected to be extremely competitive but all went for Trump, though by fairly close margins.
Republicans also regained control of the Senate – they hold 53 seats to the Democrats’ 46 – and look likely to keep control of the House of Representatives, where 21 races remain uncalled but Republicans currently have a 212-202 advantage, giving them a “trifecta” – both houses of Congress as well as the presidency – that will allow them to govern largely unfettered for at least the next two years.
The political realignment comes after a bruising election that has set the stage for the Democratic party to re-evaluate a platform that appeared to have been rejected by a majority of US voters. Trump also won the popular vote, the first time a Republican has done so since George W Bush in 2004 following the 9/11 attacks a few years before.
At Biden’s request, Trump will visit the Oval Office on Wednesday, a formality that Trump himself did not honor in 2020 when he lost the presidency to Biden but refused to accept the results.
In a speech last week, Biden said he would “direct my entire administration to work with his team to ensure a peaceful and orderly transition”.
But as president-elect, Trump has reportedly yet to submit a series of transition agreements with the Biden administration, including ethics pledges to avoid conflicts of interest. The agreements are required in order to unlock briefings from the outgoing administration before the handover of power in 72 days’ time.
The national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said Biden will brief Trump on foreign policy on Wednesday, telling CBS Face the Nation: “The president will have the chance to explain to President Trump how he sees things.”
Asked if Biden will ask legislators to pass additional aid for Ukraine before he leaves office, Sullivan said the president “will make the case that we do need ongoing resources for Ukraine beyond the end of his term”. Trump allies have said the incoming administration’s focus would be on peace not territory.
Sullivan also said that the international community needs “to increase pressure on Hamas to come to the table to do a deal in Gaza, because the Israeli government said it’s prepared to take a temporary step in that direction” because the group had told mediators, he said, it “will not do a cease-fire and hostage deal at this time”.
The political fallout from Trump’s win continues to reverberate, not least in the Democratic camp. The Harris-Walz campaign is estimated to have spent $1bn in three months but is now reportedly $20m in debt.
The Republican pollster Frank Luntz told ABC News’s This Week that whoever “told” Harris to focus on Trump during her presidential campaign had “committed political malpractice”.
“We all know what Trump is,” Luntz said. “We experienced him for four years.”
Progressive senator Bernie Sanders, who votes with Democrats, defended Harris’s campaign and refused to be drawn into further analysis on whether Biden should have stepped away from his re-election bid sooner.
“I don’t want to get involved,” he told CNN. “We got to look forward and not in the back. Kamala did her very best. She came in, she won the debate with Trump. She worked as hard as she possibly could.”
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“Here is the reality: the working class of this country is angry, and they have reason to be angry,” he added. “We are living in an economy today where people on top are doing phenomenally well while 60% of our people are living paycheck-to-paycheck.”
Republicans, meanwhile, have not explained why Trump and many in the party argue last week’s election was free and fair but maintain the 2020 one was somehow rigged, despite every single lawsuit alleging fraud being rejected.
Jim Jordan, the Republican chair of the the house judiciary committee, called Trump’s victory last week the “greatest political comeback”.
On Friday, Jordan and fellow Republican representative Barry Loudermilk sent a letter to special counsel Jack Smith to demand that his office preserve records of the justice department’s prosecutions of Trump.
Asked by CNN whether Trump would go after his political opponents, Jordan said: “He didn’t do it in his first term. The Democrats went after him and everyone understands what they did.”
“I don’t think any of that will happen,” Jordan reiterated. “We are the party who is against political prosecution. We’re the party who is against going after your opponents using lawfare.”
Byron Donalds, a Republican congressman from Florida, told Fox News that claims of a list were “lies from the Democratic left”.
“I will tell you, this is not something that Donald Trump has ever spoken to, or he’s committed to, whatsoever. There’s no enemies list,” Donalds said. Trump has regularly referred to his political opponents as “the enemy within”.