Kamala Harris has officially conceded the US election and congratulated Donald Trump on his victory. Votes are still being counted, but the 78-year-old is on course to win the electoral college by a larger margin than any Republican since George HW Bush in 1988, having improved his vote share in 90% of America’s 3,000-plus counties. Keir Starmer offered Trump his “hearty” congratulations in a call, saying he was “looking forward to working closely” with the president-elect. The PM also confirmed that David Lammy would remain foreign secretary, despite having called Trump a “woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath” in 2018. North Korean soldiers deployed to Russia are “gorging on pornography” after being given unfettered access to the internet for the first time, says the FT’s Gideon Rachman on X. As his colleague Edward Luce commented: “So they’re wankers twice over.”

A wake-up call for pompous podcasters

Britain’s lefty pundits are having a bad week, says Tim Stanley in The Daily Telegraph. Ian Dunt, host of the Remainiacs podcast, called Donald Trump’s victory “America’s darkest dawn”; for Paul Mason, it was “a fascist process”. Sadiq Khan, “not a pundit but then not really a mayor either”, said the result was “an important reminder for Londoners: our city is – and always will be – for everyone”. It’s a classic of the genre: portentous and self-involving, as if US elections have any effect on Barnes Pond. Best of all was Rory Stewart on The Rest is Politics. There was the bad prediction: “Harris will win comfortably.” The jargon: “Ignore polls – they’re herding.” The snub to lesser mortals: “Journalists would like the US election to seem as close as possible – it suits their appetite for suspense.” Then, on the night, the scholarly U-turn (“it’s completely fascinating”) dipped in unreality (“she barely put a foot wrong”).

The mistake such centrist “pun-dads” make is believing their cause is so obviously moral that victory is inevitable, whatever the data says. “Trump is evil,” they say, and analysis flows from the assumption that all good people “must agree”. The tone is “super-serious”, which is why Trump upsets them so much. The problem with this type of punditry is that it creates a “wall of misunderstanding” between Britain and America. Comedians and ex-politician podcasters are many people’s first take on what’s happening in Washington, so their subjective interpretation is received as truth. Orange man bad. “How could he win?” The reality is that food prices spiked, Americans were worried about the economy and a slim majority thought Trump was best placed to fix it. Only someone as clever-clever as Rory Stewart could so confidently have predicted the opposite outcome. “He remains the most eloquently, intelligently wrong man on the planet.”

Kemi Badenoch’s chances of winning the next general election have surely “increased considerably” with Donald Trump’s victory, says Stephen Bush in the FT. The president-elect is promising to impose a tariff of up to 20% on all US imports and a 60% penalty on goods from China, which the International Monetary Fund thinks could wipe 0.8% from global economic output next year and 1.3% in 2026. The UK’s economic growth could be hit particularly hard, falling by as much as 0.7% in Trump’s first year. If that bears out, Keir Starmer’s re-election prospects look “pretty thin”.

No one has been more scathing about Netflix’s new documentary on Martha Stewart than Martha Stewart, says Brooks Barnes in The New York Times. When I phoned her, the 83-year-old domestic goddess subjected me to “30 almost uninterrupted minutes of sharp critique”. The music was “lousy”, the camera angles “unflattering”. “Those last scenes with me looking like a lonely old lady walking hunched over in the garden?” she said. “I hate those last scenes.” And it spent “way too much time” on her 2004 trial and five-month prison sentence. “I considered it a vacation, to tell you the truth,” she said. “The trial itself was extremely boring. Even the judge fell asleep.”

Europe’s last true defenders

Seven years ago, says Sylvie Kauffmann in Le Monde, Angela Merkel came out of a “particularly harrowing” first summit with brand-new president Donald Trump and declared: “We Europeans truly have to take our fate into our own hands.” And then what? “And then nothing.” Germany’s military spending rose from 1.15% of GDP to… 1.33% in 2021. War is raging in Ukraine, 10,000 North Korean troops are heading to the European frontier, Trump is back after a long and highly visible campaign, and somehow “Europe is still not ready”. Merkel’s successor, Olaf Scholz, has just seen his governing coalition collapse. And in France, Emmanuel Macron is too busy fighting his political enemies to think about Europe’s strategic autonomy.

It seems the last true defenders of Europe are the Poles. In the final days of a US election that the rest of the continent waited for “like a stunned deer in the headlights”, Polish president Donald Tusk called on the Old World to “pull itself together”. It’s time “Europe finally grows up and believes in its own strength”, he wrote on X. “Whatever the outcome, the era of geopolitical outsourcing is over.” Why does it take a Pole to point this out? Because if Ukraine collapses, his country is next on Vladimir Putin’s chopping block. In a “remarkable budgetary effort”, Poland is spending 4.1% of its 2024 GDP on arms procurement, rising to 4.7% in 2025. The rest of Europe, distracted or in denial, want to go on relying on their American ally as if nothing has changed. They are in for a “rude awakening”.

🇮🇹🤝🇺🇸 One European who will be delighted with the US election result is Giorgia Meloni, says Allan Kaval, also in Le Monde. The Italian prime minister has in recent months publicly bonded with Elon Musk over their shared loathing for “enemies” of Western civilisation: the “woke mind virus”, the environmentalists responsible for a “loss of hope” in the future, illegal immigration, the tyranny of political correctness and excessive bureaucracy in Europe. With Musk on her side, the Italian prime minister hopes to become the “privileged representative in Europe” for the second Trump administration.

More girls in the UK now play football than netball, says Matilda Davies in The Sunday Times. Just 15.4% of schoolgirls know their goal shooters from their wing attacks, whereas footie has nudged ahead on 16%. Running, gymnastics and hockey have also declined in popularity, while swimming, cricket and skateboarding are on the rise.

The new Indonesian president Prabowo Subianto prepared a bizarre initiation ritual for his new cabinet, says The Economist: he took them all to boot camp. Over a hundred newly sworn-in ministers were flown to Indonesia’s military academy in a cargo plane, stuffed into green army fatigues, patrol caps and combat boots, and sent out to take part in various drills. Subianto, who himself graduated from the academy in 1974, said the camp was about teaching his new recruits discipline. “We must work in the same rhythm for the same goals,” he told reporters. “The government doesn’t work alone but as a team.” Yes, sir.

It’s the world’s first wooden satellite, which was launched into space this week, says The Guardian. Boffins at Kyoto University who developed the launchable lumber expect the wood to burn up when the device re-enters the atmosphere – potentially providing a way to avoid generating metal space junk when a retired satellite returns to Earth. Each side of the spruce sputnik, named LignoSat, measures just 10cm (4in). It was flown to the ISS by a Space X rocket and should be ready to be released into orbit in about a month’s time.