Featured
Why Does No One Understand the Real Reason Trump Won? By Michael Tomasky / The New Republic
It wasn’t the economy. It wasn’t inflation, or anything else. It was how people perceive those things, which points to one overpowering answer.
These conversations have usually proceeded along lines where people ask incredulously how a majority of voters could have believed this or that. Weren’t they bothered that Trump is a convicted felon? An adjudicated rapist? Didn’t his invocation of violence against Liz Cheney, or 50 other examples of his disgusting imprecations, obviously disqualify him? And couldn’t they see that Harris, whatever her shortcomings, was a fundamentally smart, honest, well-meaning person who would show basic respect for the Constitution and wouldn’t do anything weird as president?
But this line of analysis requires that we ask one more question. And it’s the crucial one: Why didn’t a majority of voters see these things? And understanding the answer to that question is how we start to dig out of this tragic mess.
The answer is the right-wing media. Today, the right-wing media—Fox News (and the entire News Corp.), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeart Media (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more—sets the news agenda in this country. And they fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win. Read more
Political / Social
Let’s Not Lose Sight of Who Trump Is. By Thomas B. Edsall / NYT
In terms of historical perspective, the 2024 election has the potential to challenge the New Deal realignment of 1932 as the most consequential election of the past 100 years.
On Nov. 5, American voters re-empowered Donald Trump, a man who has explicitly declared he will gut civil service protections for the highest-ranked federal employees, prosecute political adversaries and somehow deport 11 million illegal immigrants. On Thursday, he told NBC News that his plans for mass deportation were so precious that there would be “no price tag” on them. The outcome of the election, it almost goes without saying, puts America on a right-wing populist path, inching ever closer toward a form of autocratic rule rarely, if ever, seen in the nation’s history. Read more
Related: There’s No Denying It Anymore: Trump Is Not a Fluke—He’s America. By Elie Mystal / The Nation
What the 2024 election tells us about Trump’s voters. By Scott Clement, Emily Guskin Dan Keating, and Júlia Ledur / Wash Post
Trump made inroads with Hispanic voters, younger voters and voters without a college degree. At the same time, more than 80 percent of Trump’s voters are still White men and women.
The Washington Post analyzed exit polling data since the 2000 presidential election to better understand how support for Republicans has changed among key voting demographics. The data from 2024 is preliminary. Here’s a look at some of the biggest swings in Trump’s support and how these groups have voted since 2000: Read more
Related: What Do Trump Voters Know About the Future He Has Planned for Them? By Jamelle Bouie / NYT
Related: Why Did Latinos Vote for Trump? By Xochitl Gonzalez / The Atlantic
Related: Trump’s Strange Bedfellows: Arab Americans and Right-Leaning Jews. Katie Glueck / NYT
After Kamala Harris’ loss, Black voters ask what went wrong. Phillip M. Bailey and Michael Collins / USA Today
Trump defeated Harris by holding his base and expanding his margins among Black and Latino voters – a confounding statistic for many Black men, who are trying to figure out what went wrong and how they can keep it from happening again.
To win, many said, candidates need to talk from the start about policies and positions that are important to Black voters, especially men. Then they must persuade and mobilize Black communities around those issues, said Khalil Thompson, a political strategist and veteran of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Read more
Elon Musk’s biggest campaign contribution to Trump: weaponizing the First Amendment. By Sabrina Haake / Salon
Elon Musk’s biggest campaign contribution to Trump: weaponizing the First Amendment
While it may feel better to think of Trump supporters as misinformed rather than hateful, the downside is that an un-informed public cannot sustain a freely elected democracy. This is exactly what Musk, Murdoch, Putin, and destabilizing forces from around the world are banking on. Like a snake gorging on its own tail, domestic disrupters are weaponizing America’s First Amendment to get rid of it so that the oligarchs funding them can drill, shoot, pollute, and defraud American consumers with impunity. Read more
Related: Elon Musk joins Trump’s call with Ukraine’s Zelensky. By John Hudson and Siobhán O’Grady / Wash Post
After election, racist texts nationwide threaten Black people with slavery. By Daniel Wu and Joseph Menn / Wash Post
Black people in several states received racist texts, some that claimed to be affiliated with Donald Trump, ordering them to work as slaves on plantations.
The FBI and authorities in several states are investigating racist text messages sent to Black people nationwide this week saying they would be brought to plantations to work as enslaved people and pick cotton. People in at least a dozen states and D.C. have received the messages, according to authorities and local news media. The texts have spread alarm after a presidential election marked by President-elect Donald Trump and his campaign’s use of inflammatory language against minorities. Read more
Thousands expected for People’s March on Washington ahead of Trump’s inauguration. By Ellie Silverman / Wash Post
Organizers estimate 50,000 will attend as part of an expected surge of protests — and celebrations — from across the political spectrum as the nation’s seat of power transitions to Trump. The Women’s March in Washington on Jan. 21, 2017
Tens of thousands of people are expected in Washington ahead of Inauguration Day in January to protest President-elect Donald Trump and policy priorities that they say will undermine the rights of women, immigrants, the LGBTQ+ community and racial and religious minorities. The demonstration, dubbed the “People’s March on Washington,” is scheduled for Jan. 18, two days before the inauguration. It is being organized by leading civil rights, racial justice and reproductive health organizations, including the Women’s March and Abortion Access Now, a coalition of organizations including the ACLU, Planned Parenthood and the National Women’s Law Center. Read more
Outsized Growth at Nation’s HBCUs Sparks ‘Identity Crisis.’ J. Brian Charles / The Chronicle of Higher Ed.
Overall HBCU enrollment is up almost 6 percent this fall compared to 2023, according to National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. It’s the third consecutive year that enrollment at HBCUs has increased. That’s despite overall enrollment declines across higher ed, especially for Black students and at colleges with high concentrations of Pell Grant recipients.
Experts point to rebranding efforts, innovations in recruitment and retention, and strategic investments in new programs and facilities — paid for with record-breaking philanthropic donations and federal investments — as explanations for the trend. Though HBCUs were once largely regarded as providers of sub-par educations, now, celebrities such as ESPN host Shannon Sharpe, a graduate of Savannah State University, and Vice President Kamala Harris, a graduate of Howard University, regularly tout nostalgia for their alma maters. Read more
World News
Smile, Flatter and Barter: How the World Is Prepping for Trump Part II. Mark Landler, Matina Stevis-Gridneff and Marc Santora / NYT
Foreign leaders have rushed to ingratiate themselves with Donald J. Trump in recent days, nervously recalling the clashes, insults and feuds of his first presidency. President Donald J. Trump in 2017 with leaders from the Group of 7 nations, including President Emmanuel Macron of France, Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and others in Sicily.Credit…
For months leading up to Mr. Trump’s political comeback — and in the heady days since his victory was confirmed — foreign leaders have rushed, once again, to ingratiate themselves with him. Their emissaries have cultivated people in Mr. Trump’s orbit or with think tanks expected to be influential in setting policies for a second Trump administration. Read more
Trump’s Win Ends a Post-World War II Era of U.S. Leadership. David E. Sanger / NYT
For the past four years, President Biden has argued that the first Trump term was a blip in American history. The election has proved that President-elect Donald J. Trump was no aberration.
It was only four months ago that President Biden invited America’s NATO allies to Washington to celebrate the 75th anniversary of their alliance, the symbol of an era of American global leadership that once was celebrated as a cornerstone of democracy and the best way to keep the peace among great powers. President-elect Donald J. Trump has made no secret of his desire to oversee the destruction of that world order. In his first term, he really didn’t know how, and his moves were countered by an entrenched establishment. Now, he has made clear, he has the knowledge, the motivation and a plan. Read more
Related: Trump Should Not Let Putin Claim Victory in Ukraine, Says NATO Official. Lara Jakes / NYT
With Trump’s Victory, Europe’s Populist Right Sees Return of a Fellow Believer. Andrew Higgins / NYT
Viktor Orban of Hungary and other right-wing European politicians hail the return of a U.S. president who shares their tough views on issues like immigration. Shown is Victor Orban.
For months, Hungary’s media apparatus pumped out stories lionizing Donald J. Trump and deriding Kamala Harris, described in one headline as “extremely unpleasant.” In October, the country’s leader vowed to “open several bottles of Champagne if Trump is back.” And then, as U.S. voters went to the polls, scores of his supporters gathered for a celebratory party in Budapest before the results were even called. No foreign leader gambled so heavily or publicly on a Trump victory as Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary. A fervent fan of the U.S. president-elect, Mr. Orban has greeted the election results with unrestrained glee. Read more
Haitian activists demand halt to deportations as gang violence and poverty soar. By Evens Sanon / AP
Haitian activists on Thursday demanded that other countries temporarily stop deportations to their country due to a surge in gang violence and deepening poverty.
Tens of thousands of people have been deported to Haiti in the past month, mostly from the Dominican Republic, whose president recently pledged to deport some 10,000 migrants a week. The Caribbean country, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, has deported nearly 61,000 migrants to Haiti in the past month, according to the latest government figures. In October, the U.S. deported 258 Haitians, while Turks & Caicos, Jamaica and the Bahamas deported a combined total of 231, according to Sam Guillaume, a spokesperson for Haiti’s Support Group for Returnees and Refugees. He noted that many of those deported to Haiti remain homeless. Read more
Trump’s win boosts chances of Netanyahu remaining in power until Israel’s 2026 elections. By Jason Burke / The Guardian
Benjamin Netanyahu is set to stay in power in Israel until elections due in 2026 and possibly longer, analysts and officials now believe, after a tumultuous week in which the 75-year-old veteran politician successfully fired his defence minister and was boosted by the results of the US election.
Netanyahu’s newly reinforced position could lead to further intensification of Israel’s campaign in Lebanon, and prolong the conflict in Gaza, critics fear – although the incoming US president Donald Trump has said he wants to swiftly end both wars. Read more
Trump in phone call advised Putin not to escalate in Ukraine. By Gram Slattery and Humeyra Pamuk / Reuters
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin and advised him not to escalate the Ukraine war, a source familiar with the conversation told Reuters on Sunday, as President Joe Biden plans to urge Trump not to abandon Kyiv.
Trump and Putin spoke in recent days, said the source. Trump spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Wednesday. Trump has criticised the scale of U.S. military and financial support for Kyiv, vowing to end the war quickly, without saying how. Read more
Ethics / Morality / Religion
Why Americans Are So Awful to One Another. By David Brooks / The Atlantic
In a culture devoid of moral education, generations are growing up in a morally inarticulate, self-referential world.
The most important story about why Americans have become sad and alienated and rude, I believe, is also the simplest: We inhabit a society in which people are no longer trained in how to treat others with kindness and consideration. Our society has become one in which people feel licensed to give their selfishness free rein. The story I’m going to tell is about morals. In a healthy society, a web of institutions—families, schools, religious groups, community organizations, and workplaces—helps form people into kind and responsible citizens, the sort of people who show up for one another. We live in a society that’s terrible at moral formation. Read more
Related: The Heart of the Nation is Good, but our Soul is Rotten. By Brad Thibodeaux / Patheos
What Another Trump Presidency Means To Evangelicals Around the World. By CT Editors
Christian leaders from Nepal to Turkey greet the US election results with joy, grief, and indifference.
As Americans headed to the polls Tuesday, the rest of the world watched to see who would become the 47th president of the United States. The election of Donald Trump affects many evangelical communities around the world in terms of foreign policy, foreign aid, religious freedom, and cultural trends. Nevertheless, Christian leaders in some countries noted that it didn’t make a difference to them who becomes the next president of the US. CT asked 22 evangelical leaders around the world about their reaction to another Trump presidency and its practical impact on the situation of evangelicals in their countries. The responses are broken up by region: Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, North America, the Middle East, and Oceania. CT will add more responses as they come in. Read more
As a Black Catholic, this election devastated me — but didn’t surprise me. By Alessandra Harris / NCR
As a Black Catholic woman, mother and author, I am devastated but not at all surprised by this country electing Donald Trump as president for a second term. In January 2016, at a campaign stop at a Christian college in Sioux Center, Iowa, Trump infamously stated, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? It’s, like, incredible.”
I admit that I do not know what the next four years of a Trump presidency will hold. I do not feel safe or welcome in a country that would elect someone so blatantly racist, misogynistic and fascist. But that’s the point. It has always been an inconvenient truth that Native people, Black people, immigrants and women are the backbone of this country even while being unapologetically unwelcome in it. White men reap the reward. Read more
Anxious, grieving, elated: Clergy prepare to preach into the post-election whirlwind. By Adelle M. Banks / RNS
As they mount their pulpits this weekend (Nov. 8-10), clergy of several faiths said that they expect emotions to be swirling still from President-elect Donald Trump’s victory over Vice President Kamala Harris. Often facing a constellation of feelings in the pews, many are working on strategies if not for healing, then at least not ignoring the subject. Shown is Pastor Moss.
Now, said Moss, members of his predominantly Black congregation are mostly saddened by the outcome at the top of the ballot. “I’m going to be sharing with people the necessity to hold your grief, to be able to grieve prophetically but not pathetically,” he said, drawing on the New Testament’s Letter to the Hebrews, which says “let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.” “Prophetic grief holds pain but refuses to fall into despair or cynicism,” said Moss. “Pathetic grief falls into despair, cynicism and pessimism and lives a narrative of ‘I can do nothing.’”
Historical / Cultural
How pioneering Black liberals battled Thomas Jefferson’s “Dark Age.” By Paul Rosenberg / Salon
Scholar Keidrick Roy on the lessons of 19th-century Black thinkers who resisted racist notions of “liberty”
“All men are created equal,” wrote slaveholder Thomas Jefferson, in words that have been a source of consternation ever since. That was less true, perhaps, for a significant group of Black abolitionist writers who clearly understood Jefferson’s vision as limited by his belief in a natural hierarchy of color, even as he sought to break with the feudal hierarchies of England and the Old World. Those writers’ vision blossomed in the early 19th century even as the popularity of artificial hierarchies rebounded among American white people, particularly in the South. A new book from Harvard scholar Keidrick Roy, “American Dark Age: Racial Feudalism and the Rise of Black Liberalism,” lays out their pioneering critique of the enduring power of feudalism on American thought, along with a coherent framework of liberal ideas shaped by their individual and collective lived experiences. Read more
Related: Times When Black People Were Resilient Throughout History. By Phenix S. Halley / The Root
When a Multi-Racial Democracy Was Violently Overthrown in America. By Ed. Rampell / The Progressive
A review of the new film ‘American Coup: Wilmington 1898,’ which premieres November 12 on PBS. A mob outside burned office of The Daily Record newspaper after it was set on fire in November 1898.
In 1935, when fascism was rising globally, Sinclair Lewis wrote It Can’t Happen Here, a novel warning Americans against homegrown threats of dictatorship. Now, on the heels of a presidential race billed as an existential struggle between freedom and authoritarianism, PBS is premiering a new documentary film that reminds viewers that not only could autocracy happen here, but that it once did. American Coup: Wilmington 1898, by award-winning filmmakers Brad Lichtenstein and Yoruba Richen, chronicles the overthrow of a democratically elected government in the land of the free. Read more
Revisiting the Harlem Renaissance. Veronica Chambers / NYT
This year, a team of Times journalists marked the 100th anniversary of the Harlem Renaissance with a series examining its vibrant history.
We began with a little-known dinner party that took place on March 21, 1924, an unprecedented interracial gathering that included such luminaries as W.E.B. Du Bois, Carl Van Doren and Alain Locke, as well as up-and-coming writers like Gwendolyn Bennett and Countee Cullen. Read more
Related: Celebrating Black Intellectual History–Then and Now. By Lois leveen / AAIHS
Maulana Karenga, Operational Unity, and the Black Power Movement. By M. Keith Claybrook, Jr / AAIHS
Maulana Karenga, founder and chair of the Organization Us (Us), developed the concept of operational unity during the Black Power Movement. Maulana Karenga outside a Los Angeles, California courtroom in 1971 (Wikimedia Commons)
Several organizations actively contributed to the Black Power Movement in the United States such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Us, the Black Panther Party, the Congress of African People, The Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA), the Black Women’s Alliance (BWA), as well as Black Student Union’s (BSU) and Black Student Alliance’s (BSA) to name a few. These organizations, their leadership, and their constituents reflect geographical, ideological, and political diversity within the movement. To develop and sustain movement possibilities, Karenga developed the concept and practice of operational unity to create and maintain unity across diversity. Here, the concept of operational unity is revisited and examples of it in practice are discussed, revealing its successes and contributions to the Black Power Movement. Read more
The life of R&B singer Luther Vandross spotlighted in new documentary. By LaShawn Hudson / WABE
Documentarian Dawn Porter says Luther Vandross’ voice was unsuppressed. The Grammy award-winning R&B singer, songwriter and record producer worked hard to perfect his God-given talent, she says. Moreover, Porter adds, he had the ability to collaborate with other artists and had an appreciation for his audience.
Vandross’ life story is now being told through a new documentary, “Luther: Never Too Much.” Porter serves as a co-producer and director of the film. On Friday’s edition of “Closer Look,” Porter talked with show host Rose Scott about creating the film, and she reflected on the life and legacy of the legendary singer. Listen here
Judith Jamison, Alvin Ailey Dancer of ‘Power and Radiance,’ Dies at 81. By Brian Seibert / NYT
She became an international star as a member of the company and later directed it, guiding it out of debt and boosting its popularity.
Her death, at NewYork-Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medical Center, was announced by Christopher Zunner, a spokesman for the Ailey company, who said she died “after a brief illness.” At 5-foot-10, Ms. Jamison was unusually tall for a woman in her profession. “But anyone who’s seen her onstage is convinced she’s six feet five,” the critic Deborah Jowitt wrote in The New York Times in 1976. Read more
Sports
After Trump win, sports will be a cultural battleground…again. By Mike Freeman / USA Today
Sports is again going to be a target of Trump. It’s a certainty because Trump has done this before, both as a former President, and a candidate. He once attacked Colin Kaepernick. He’s attacked the NBA. Most recently, over the past few weeks leading up to the election, his campaign poured millions of dollars into ads attacking trans athletes.
The sports world will be more caustic because Trump, as he’s done before, will enter into the fray. Again, we know this, because he’s long done that and his interventions have led to some ugly moments. In 2017, Trump urged NFL owners to fire players who refused to stand for the national anthem. In that same speech he said football wasn’t violent enough, and he disinvited the then NBA champion Golden State Warriors from the traditional White House visit. Read more
Deion Sanders’s Colorado always had style. Now it also has substance. By Chuck Culpepper / Wash Post
The Buffaloes are 7-2 after beating Texas Tech, and they have an inside track to the Big 12 title game after last season was a high-profile failure.
After this 41-27 win over Texas Tech on Saturday with its early 13-0 deficit and the Buffaloes’ consuming calm, young-adult fans in Jones AT&T Stadium asked for selfies with Colorado quarterback Shedeur Sanders and two-way superman Travis Hunter, and as these famous Buffaloes obliged, and Hunter kept stopping for split-second poses with security dudes, Shedeur Sanders spoke of it almost as if they were some sort of venerable yet aging band. Read more
Coco Gauff wins WTA Finals for the first time by rallying to beat Zheng Qinwen / CBS News
Coco Gauff won the WTA Finals for the first time by rallying to beat Olympic champion Zheng Qinwen 3-6, 6-4, 7-6 (2) in the final on Saturday.
The 20-year-old American came from 2-0 and 5-3 down in the final set and was two points from defeat at one stage. Yet she took the set to a tiebreaker and won the first six points. Zheng threatened a comeback but Gauff took the victory off her third match point with a forehand winner as she came into the net. Gauff beat the world’s top two players – Aryna Sabalenka and Iga Swiatek – on her run to the final at the season-ending event in Riyadh. Read more
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