Donald Trump has hailed his “unprecedented and powerful mandate” after securing a stunning victory in the US election. The 78-year-old is on course to take all seven swing states, and could become the first Republican since 2004 to win the popular vote. The Republicans have also regained control of the Senate; the fight for the House of Representatives is still too close to call. Benjamin Netanyahu has fired Israel’s defence minister Yoav Gallant, saying trust between the two men had “eroded” and that months of public disagreements were aiding the enemy. Gallant, a retired army general, has been one of the most vocal ministers arguing for a ceasefire deal to free the hostages taken by Hamas, which Netanyahu strongly opposes. He will be replaced by the more hardline foreign minister, Israel Katz. A Buckinghamshire farmer was “shell-shocked” on Saturday to find one of his hens had laid a perfectly spherical egg, says The Sun. Round eggs have previously sold on eBay for as much as £480.

Why Donald Trump won

Donald Trump’s victory really is “a political comeback for the ages”, says The Wall Street Journal. Written off by everyone in the wake of the January 6 attack, “including by us”, he has become only the second president in US history after Grover Cleveland to be ousted from the White House and then win a second term. Yet remarkable as this achievement is, it wouldn’t have been possible without the gross failures of the Democrats. Joe Biden beat Trump four years ago by promising unity and prosperity, only to veer wildly to the left in the mistaken belief that he could be “another FDR”. His big spending stoked inflation, and for all the “media lectures” that the economy was booming (see Comment below), many voters were left feeling poorer. It’s no coincidence that the exit polls showed the economy as Trump’s “best issue”.

The Democrats also “dug themselves into a hole” on identity politics, says Matt Bai in The Washington Post. One of Trump’s most effective ads riffed on the battle over trans rights, with the tagline: “She’s for they/them, he’s for you”. That really landed with a lot of traditionally Democratic voters, who felt the party was prioritising cultural issues over fixing the economy. There will be lots of talk about prejudice – will Americans ever vote for a female president? – as there was in 2016. But Kamala Harris, like Hillary Clinton, was a weak candidate who never offered voters a clear reason to elect her. Instead, she geared her campaign entirely around how awful her opponent was. And “there was nothing she could tell voters about Trump that they didn’t already know”.

The truth is that the Democrats were on the back foot from the moment Biden originally decided he was going to run again, says David French in The New York Times. Not only did that end any possibility of a primary contest, which might have yielded a more effective candidate. For him and his team to try to defy the “obvious effects of age” – and then scold anyone with the temerity to raise the issue – also fatally undermined the party’s anti-Trump message that “character matters”. Yes, Biden’s eventual decision to drop out was necessary and selfless. But his selfishness before that may have scuppered Harris’s chances, “and permanently marred his legacy”.

The UK media’s coverage of America’s election night was truly abysmal, says Stuart Heritage in The Guardian. The BBC’s was weirdly bland, a “sort of ChatGPT of a thing”, while ITV’s was classic ITV: “solid, competent, a tad boring”. Channel 4 did at least go for something different: a “bunch of fantastically bad-tempered people” shouting at each other in a very small room. Co-hosts Krishnan Guru-Murthy and Emily Maitlis bristled at everything their guests said; Boris Johnson spent two hours trying to plug his book; and the porn star Stormy Daniels looked on bewildered as everyone yelled at each other “like a dysfunctional family”. Perhaps the best approach was The Rest is Politics, which took a five-hour break between midnight and 5am. Their coverage was as bad as the rest, but it did at least encourage viewers to “get a bit of sleep”.

Working in first class has become much easier for cabin crew since the dawn of the “Ozempic age”, says Paula Gahan in The Spectator. No one wants to eat any more, so there is basically “no meal service”. Passengers occasionally “nibble a rice cracker” or have a few sips of Bollinger before “waving it away with a wisp of a manicured hand”. But that’s it. People used to say, in a rather unkind reference to “the great unwashed”, that the difference between first and economy was hygiene. Now it’s “the Ozempic class and the Nozempic class”.

It’s the economy, stupid

Democrats came into this election confident that the US economy was “unusually strong”, says Ruchir Sharma in the FT. Averaging 3% growth for nine straight quarters, the country is attracting massive flows of foreign money, which have pushed its share of the global stock market well above 60%, “a record high”. Yet millions of ordinary Americans went to the ballot box yesterday deeply pessimistic about their economic and financial prospects, and voted for Donald Trump because of it. Why? Because “US growth is a mirage for most Americans” – driven by rising wealth and spending among the very richest consumers, and distorted by vast profits for the biggest corporations. The overall numbers appear good, but a closer look reveals growth that is “lopsided, brittle and heavily dependent on spending and borrowing by the government”.

More Americans than ever are priced out of homes and falling behind on credit card debt – the poorest 40% account for just 20% of spending, while the richest 20% spend 40% of the total. “That is the widest gap on record and it is likely to widen further.” In the corporate sphere, the top 10 companies make up 36% of the entire stock market. As the big grow bigger, “anxiety haunts the rest”. The share of small businesses expressing uncertainty about the economy and their own future is unusually high, and their confidence is at lows “rarely seen outside recessions”. Meanwhile, government spending has risen to epic levels. Public debt is exploding, up $17trn in a decade – the same as in the previous 240 years put together. The US has a “gilded economy”, with a shiny but thin veneer. It seems Americans have noticed.

📈💸 One sign that America’s stock market may be in funny shape is what Warren Buffett’s up to, says Forbes. The Oracle of Omaha has sold off $166bn worth of stocks in the past two years alone – including gigantic stakes in Apple and Bank of America – and now sits on a pile of cash worth $325.2bn.

Younger drinkers seem to have forgotten how pubs work, says the Daily Mail. Watering holes across the country have reported Gen Z customers forming orderly, single-file queues to get drinks rather than the traditional tactic of standing at the bar and trying to catch someone’s eye. Landlords think the bizarre behaviour may be a hangover from Covid, when drinkers who came of age during lockdown got used to social distancing measures. Many pubs have taken matters into their own hands, putting up signs to discourage overly polite punters. “This is not a Post Office,” reads one in an Exeter brewery. “There is no need to queue like one.”

To The Economist:

As an American who has been reading The Economist for years, I have assembled a growing list of unfamiliar British expressions that leave me scrambling for the dictionary. For instance, I have learned that the term “kit” means “equipment”. That’s nice and succinct. But “stitch-up”? Oh dear. I have to keep checking my list to remind myself it means “a set-up, a trick”. Here are some other doozies that make your American readers scratch their heads: cosh, bolshie, stroppy, damp squib (that expression really takes the cake), wet, take a punt, on the back foot, chuffed, naff, stonking, scunnered, panjandrum.

Dorothy Corner Amsden
Los Alamos, New Mexico

It’s Peanut, says The Washington Post, an internet-famous squirrel (750,000 followers on Instagram) who became an eleventh-hour cause célèbre for Donald Trump supporters after he was seized and euthanised by New York conservation agents. The renowned rodent, who lived loose in his owner’s home, was put down because he was deemed a rabies risk. He managed to bite an over-reaching government bureaucrat during the seizure, becoming an instant symbol of resistance to an interfering state. “RIP Peanut”, the Trump campaign’s official TikTok account posted on Sunday, with an illustration of a ghostly squirrel perched over the Republican candidate and gazing toward the sky, its paws around his shoulders. “We will avenge you at the ballot box.” Well, quite.