Featured

Trump Won. Now What? The United States is about to become a different kind of country. By David Frum / The Atlantic

Donald Trump has won, and will become president for the second time.

Those who voted for him will now celebrate their victory. The rest of us need to prepare to live in a different America: a country where millions of our fellow citizens voted for a president who knowingly promotes hatred and division; who lies—blatantly, shamelessly—every time he appears in public; who plotted to overturn an election in 2020 and, had he not won, was planning to try again in 2024.

Above all, we must learn to live in an America where an overwhelming number of our fellow citizens have chosen a president who holds the most fundamental values and traditions of our democracy, our Constitution, even our military in contempt. Over the past decade, opinion polls have showed Americans’ faith in their institutions waning. But no opinion poll could make this shift in values any clearer than this vote. As a result of this election, the United States will become a different kind of country. Read more

Political / Social

Trump Just Ran The Most Racist Campaign In Modern History ― And Won. By Nathalie Baptiste

After months of spewing racist remarks about Kamala Harris and ginning up his base about invasions at the border and the promise to harm millions of immigrants, Donald Trump will once again be the president of the United States.

Despite his naked racism and misogyny and attacks on his political opponents, the American people have chosen to send him back to the White House. Read more

America Makes a Perilous Choice. By The Editorial Board / NYT

American voters have made the choice to return Donald Trump to the White House, setting the nation on a precarious course that no one can fully foresee.

The founders of this country recognized the possibility that voters might someday elect an authoritarian leader and wrote safeguards into the Constitution, including powers granted to two other branches of government designed to be a check on a president who would bend and break laws to serve his own ends. And they enacted a set of rights — most crucially the First Amendment — for citizens to assemble, speak and protest against the words and actions of their leader.

Over the next four years, Americans must be cleareyed about the threat to the nation and its laws that will come from its 47th president and be prepared to exercise their rights in defense of the country and the people, laws, institutions and values that have kept it strong. Read more

Americans Didn’t Embrace Trump, They Rejected Biden-Harris. By Jonathan Chait / NY Magazine

That half this country could willingly restore Donald Trump to a position of power is a sickening thought. For most liberals, moderates, or people who closely follow news sources not controlled by the Republican Party, it is almost unfathomable.

The incomprehension often leads either to despair or denial. Because Trump is so abnormal, so grotesquely narcissistic and cruel, his success seems to upend conventional political assumptions and render his triumph into a kind of black magic. Reality is more banal. The American public has not embraced Trump. The decisive bloc of voters always evinced deep misgivings about Trump’s character and rhetoric, even if they didn’t fully recall all his crimes and offenses (who could?). Trump didn’t win by making people love or even accept him. He won because the electorate rejected the Biden-Harris administration. It is important to clearly discern the sources of that rejection. The work of correction is hard but not complicated. Read more

Harris Says She Concedes the Election, but Not Her Fight. By Nicholas Nehamas and Erica L. Green / NYT

Her commitment to a peaceful transfer of power was more than President-elect Trump ever offered to President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris after they defeated him in 2020.

Vice President Kamala Harris formally acknowledged her loss to President-elect Donald J. Trump on Wednesday in a defiant and emotional speech, defending her campaign as a fight for democracy that she would continue, even if not from the Oval Office. “While I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fueled this campaign,” Ms. Harris said. “Hear me when I say, the light of America’s promise will always burn bright,” she added. “As long as we never give up. And as long as we keep fighting.” Read more

Angela Alsobrooks Becomes Maryland’s First Black Female Senator. By Liz Skalka / HuffPost

Alsobrooks beat Republican Larry Hogan, the state’s former governor.

Angela Alsobrooks, the top elected official in Prince George’s County, Maryland, is projected to beat Republican former Gov. Larry Hogan, becoming the state’s first Black female senator. Maryland’s U.S. Senate race turned unexpectedly competitive in the general election after Hogan, the last Republican to win statewide in one of the country’s bluest states, entered the GOP primary at the last minute in February. Read more

Mark Robinson is now free to ‘perv’ out on porn sites after likely massive loss. By Emily Singer / Daily Kos

Republican Mark Robinson, a reportedly self-described “Black Nazi” and “perv,” handily lost his bid for governor of North Carolina on Tuesday night, giving him ample time to go back to doing what he allegedly loves: posting racist and creepy stuff on a forum for a porn site.

Robinson lost to North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein, 58.1% to 37.8%, with 11% of precincts reporting, according to NBC News, which called the race less than an hour after polls closed. Read more

Republicans Clinch Control of the Senate. By Carl Hulse / NYT

Republicans seized control of the Senate in Tuesday’s voting, picking up at least three Democratic seats and protecting their own embattled lawmakers to end four years of Democratic control.

Senator Sherrod Brown, the Ohio Democrat who party leaders hoped could overcome the Republican tide in his solidly red state, was defeated in his bid for a fourth term by the luxury car dealer Bernie Moreno. Mr. Brown’s loss came after Gov. Jim Justice of West Virginia easily won the slot opened up by the retirement of Senator Joe Manchin III, who served most of his career in the Senate as a Democrat before becoming an independent this year. Read more

Trump’s Deportation Model. By Ana Raquel Minian / Dissent

Trump has invoked a 1950s mass deportation campaign as a blueprint for his nativist agenda. Its history shows that abuse and dehumanization are intrinsic to immigrant detention.

In 2016, Donald Trump’s signature campaign promise was to build a wall between the United States and Mexico. During the current election cycle, Trump has escalated his xenophobic rhetoric and pledged to deport tens of millions of migrants already in the United States if elected to a second term. At an event in Iowa in 2023, he cited a historical precedent for his plan: “Following the Eisenhower model, we will carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” Read more

X Is a White-Supremacist Site. By Charlie Warzel / The Atlantic

Elon Musk has made one of Twitter’s most glaring problems into a core feature on X.

X has always had a Nazi problem. I’ve covered the site, formerly known as Twitter, for more than a decade and reported extensively on its harassment problems, its verification (and then de-verification) of a white nationalist, and the glut of anti-Semitic hatred that roiled the platform in 2016. But something is different today. Heaps of unfiltered posts that plainly celebrate racism, anti-Semitism, and outright Nazism are easily accessible and possibly even promoted by the site’s algorithms. All the while, Elon Musk—a far-right activist and the site’s owner, who is campaigning for and giving away millions to help elect Donald Trump—amplifies horrendous conspiracy theories about voter fraud, migrants run amok, and the idea that Jewish people hate white people. Twitter was always bad if you knew where to look, but because of Musk, X is far worse. (X and Musk did not respond to requests for comment for this article.) Read more

In Louisville, Relief and Regret After Ex-Officer’s Conviction in Breonna Taylor Case.

After a jury found that a former police detective used excessive force in the 2020 raid that killed Ms. Taylor, residents expressed both hope for police reform and reservations about the verdict.

On Saturday, less than 24 hours after a jury convicted a former Louisville police officer of excessive force in the botched raid that killed Ms. Taylor, the park was empty. But one woman sitting across the street had not forgotten about her. “I’m glad the family finally got justice,” said Rocqual Pickett, a lifelong resident of Louisville who was waiting for a bus. “It was a long time coming.” Read more

World News

Trump’s effect on world politics, explained. By Ellen Loanes / Vox

Trump has won the election, and the world might never be the same.

When Donald Trump assumes the presidency again in January 2025, he will radically reshape international politics if he keeps his campaign promises. Trump has made very clear on the campaign trail that he believes major changes to US foreign policy are necessary. “We have been treated so badly, mostly by allies … our allies treat us actually worse than our so-called enemies,” Trump told the audience in September at a Wisconsin campaign event. “In the military, we protect them, and then they screw us on trade. We’re not going to let it happen anymore.” Those aren’t empty promises. Presidents have wide latitude on foreign policy and can enter or nix many international agreements unilaterally. Read more

North Korean troops fighting Ukraine marks a dangerous new escalation. By the Editorial Board / Wash Post

Mr. Putin has succeeded in internationalizing the war; the U.S. and the West must be ready to respond.

Confirmation that North Korea has deployed combat troops to assist Russian President Vladimir Putin in his full-scale invasion of Ukraine marks a dangerous escalation. In a worst-case scenario, it threatens to expand a European war into a global conflict encompassing the Asia-Pacific region. It is also a reminder of the high stakes of Tuesday’s U.S. presidential election, as candidates wrangle over how the United States responds to such threats. America and its allies, in Asia as well as Europe, must coordinate their response. Read more

Young African Voters Sour on the Parties That Ushered in Liberation. By John Eligon and Yvonne Mooka / NYT

Political parties that have governed for decades since African countries overthrew colonial rulers are now being challenged by frustrated young voters. Supporters of the winning candidate for president in Botswana cheering on Thursday at a counting center in Gaborone, the capital.Credit…

The resounding defeat this past week of the only political party that has governed Botswana since it gained independence 58 years ago sent tremors across the African continent. A spirited young population has over the past year disrupted old-guard liberation parties that had been relying on their credentials from the days of fighting colonialism to stay in power. That strategy seems to be losing its effectiveness as young people become a larger share of the electorate on a continent where the median age is 19, the youngest in the world. Many young Africans say they care less about how much a politician suffered fighting colonizers, and more about whether those politicians are stealing public money, providing jobs and respecting basic freedoms, like free speech. Read more

Ethics /Morality / Religion

White Christians made Donald Trump president — again. By Bob Smietana / RNS

White Christians remain an influential force in American culture and politics. Their support, and the support of Hispanic Christians, helped Donald Trump regain the White House.

While the United States has become more religiously diverse in recent decades, white Christians remain the largest religious segment of the country, making up about 42% of the population, according to data from the Public Religion Research Institute. And for Donald Trump, their support has once again proved key to his victory.

Exit poll data from CNN and other news outlets reported that 72% of white Protestants and 61% of white Catholics said they voted for Trump. Among white voters, 81% of those identified as born-again or evangelical supported Trump, up from 76% in 2020 and similar to the 80% of support Trump received in 2016. Read more

What to Do After the Election. By Bonnie Kristan / Christianity Today

The decision is made, and there will be plenty of time for policy and poll analyses later. Here, I want to speak to fellow Christians from my spot outside each camp but friendly with people in both. I keep returning to two passages from Scripture as I mull this result and consider what has not changed in and for ourselves and our neighbors.

“There is a time for everything,” Ecclesiastes 3:1 says, and this week is a time for Ecclesiastes, especially its eighth chapter, which is brimming with prudence and equanimity in the face of political and social turbulence. “Obey the king’s command,” advises 8:2—but not, apparently, because he is a good king. Act instead out of duty to God (v. 2), refusing to “stand up for a bad cause” while recognizing that, realistically, the king “will do whatever he pleases” (v. 3). Don’t spend too much time on worries and anticipations, whether your concern is the Trump administration or backlash against it: “Since no one knows the future, who can tell someone else what is to come?” (v. 7). Read more

What the Black church can teach us about ‘Black on Black care’ and the election. By Cassandra Gould / RNS

A framework for Black Americans to defeat misinformation and support one another in the wake of a difficult election.

In a recent sermon at Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington, Pastor William Lamar IV introduced the congregation to the concept of “Black on Black care.” The concept, coined by the Rev. Nick Peterson, assistant director of the African American preaching and sacred rhetoric doctoral program at Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis, has lessons for all Americans after an election marked by division, misinformation and dog whistles.

In his sermon, Lamar reflected on his childhood in the South. He spoke vividly of how his grandparents, parents and other members of the close-knit Black community demonstrated their love, particularly their focus on caring for the children not only in their own families but of the Black community at large. The reminiscence, inadvertently or subversively, provided a postelection framework for Black Americans in our fraught time. “They didn’t speak of, study or write about anti-Blackness and white supremacy,” said Lamar of his grandparents and their contemporaries. Their actions, along with care of and from the Black church, were the embodiment of Peterson’s “Black on Black care,” he said. Read more

Historical / Social

A Forgotten Eyewitness to Civil-Rights-Era Mississippi. By Paige Williams / The New Yorker

As resistance to integration mounted, Florence Mars bought a camera and began to photograph thousands of subjects, including the trial of the killers of Emmett Till. Annie Mae Edwards and her children—Helen, Barbara, Johnnie Ruth, and Gene—along with an unidentified woman.Photographs by Florence Mars / Mississippi Department of Archives and History

Florence Mars was born on New Year’s Day, 1923, in Neshoba County, Mississippi, a remote patch in the center of the state, where red clay makes it difficult to farm row crops. The Mars family dealt in timber, cattle, medicine, and the law. They lived in Philadelphia, the county seat, which was chartered near a Choctaw sacred mound not long after the tribe, in 1830, ceded more than ten million acres to white settlers under the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek. Read more

New Haven, Connecticut turned down what would have been the first Black college in 1831. Now, city officials might apologize. By Dawn Sawyer / CNN

Illustration of Yale College and State House in New Haven, Connecticut circa 1850. Kean Collection/Archive Photos/Getty Images

The New Haven Museum in Connecticut displays a collection of libraries in a recreated walkthrough of the city’s 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. But one bookshelf stands empty throughout those 300 years: what would have been the 1831 shelf of publications from the College of Black Youth. New Haven had the opportunity to create what would have been the nation’s first Black college almost 200 years ago, but White residents killed the proposal in a 700-4 vote. Read more

How Native Americans guarded their societies against tyranny. By Kathleen DuVal / The Conversation.

When the founders of the United States designed the Constitution, they were learning from history that democracy was likely to fail – to find someone who would fool the people into giving him complete power and then end the democracy.

They designed checks and balances to guard against the accumulation of power they had found when studying ancient Greece and Rome. But there were others in North America who had also seen the dangers of certain types of government and had designed their own checks and balances to guard against tyranny: the Native Americans. Read more

How the John Birch Society tried to radicalize the American right in the ’60s. By Nellie Gilles / NPR

Robert Welch, the founder and head of the John Birch Society, in his Belmont, Mass., office in 1961.

On a cloudy, frigid day in December 1958, a small group of wealthy businessmen met in Indianapolis and formed a new organization. They called it the John Birch Society. Their mission was to educate the American people about the communist conspiracy that they believed was infiltrating the United States. “The founder, Robert Welch, conveyed a deep sense of grievance and anger,” says Matthew Dallek, professor of political management at George Washington University and author of Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right. “The message was very powerful: you’re losing your country to traitors, and they’re not just any traitors, they’re actually traitors within.” Read more

Today’s Black youths need the kind of inspiration I had growing up. By Alvin C. Bernstine / Wash Post

Alvin C. Bernstine is a retired Baptist pastor living in Richmond, California. Newsprint portrait of Tarea Hall Pittman, circa 1950s. (E.F. Joseph, courtesy of photographs collection, African American Museum and Library at Oakland, Oakland Public Library. Oakland, California)

I’m among the first generation born off the plantations. My youthful, wide-eyed parents were part of the Great Migration of Blacks who moved away from the brutal limitations of the Jim Crow South. They both arrived in California beaming with hopefulness. They fell in love and set out to pursue the often-elusive American Dream. After four children stairstepped their way into my parents’ world, I being the third, they found a way to buy a 1,000-square-foot three-bedroom, one-bath house on the paycheck my father earned as a stevedore at the Naval Weapons Station in Concord, California. Read more

Quincy Jones, musical innovator and impresario, dies at 91.

The prolific music producer and arranger had an incalculable impact on American popular music, from bebop to hip-hop.

From bebop to hip-hop, Quincy Jones exemplified the musical producer and arranger as star. He elevated the voices of dozens of entertainers — most indelibly Michael Jackson, but also Frank Sinatra and Aretha Franklin — with his unsurpassed artistry in combining jazz, rhythm and blues, and classical orchestration. By the time of his death on Nov. 3 at 91 at his home in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles, he had become a renaissance impresario of music, film and television, catapulting the careers of Oprah Winfrey and Will Smith and smashing barriers for other African Americans. Mr. Jones’s death, of undisclosed causes, was announced by his publicist, Arnold Robinson, and in a family statement. Read more

Sports

Vince Carter reaches the Hall of Fame, with grace alongside his jaw-dropping verticality. By David Aldridge / The Athletic

Even watching it live, with his own eyes, in person, it took Shareef Abdur-Rahim a minute to comprehend what he’d just witnessed. “The thing is, you think of any, just, miraculous play, where you’ve never seen someone do that, make a play like that,” Abdur-Rahim said, 24 years later. “(Derek) Jeter diving. It was like one of those plays. I was on the bench, and it was so quick. He just did it, and you were like, ‘Man, did he really do that?’

And that was the miracle of Vince Carter, through two-plus decades on the stage. His level of explosive greatness was so unapproachable that it made otherwise sane men question what they’d just seen, for what they’d just seen was impossible. It is why, though his teams rarely were serious contenders for championships during his NBA-record 22 seasons, Carter was an easy selection to this year’s incoming class for the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, and will be inducted in Springfield, Mass., tonight. Read more

College Football Playoff Bubble Watch: Could Deion Sanders, Colorado sneak into field? By David Ubben / The Athletic

On Saturday, while Deion Sanders and Colorado sat at home and Travis Hunter did a Heisman Trophy media tour of national pregame shows, the Buffaloes were among the biggest winners in the College Football Playoff race.

Iowa State lost at home to Texas Tech and trimmed the list of undefeated Big 12 teams to just one. Not long after, Kansas State tripped up in Houston, suffering its second Big 12 loss and falling behind the Buffaloes in the conference standings after beating Colorado last month. Now Colorado, which won a single conference game a season ago and trailed 28-0 at halftime to Nebraska in Week 2, has a real path to the Playoff. This is the benefit of the current iteration of the Playoff: Every conference race has relevance. And the Buffaloes are right in the thick of the Big 12 race. Read more

76ers center Joel Embiid suspended three games for shoving reporter. By Rohan Nadkarni / NBC News

Embiid got into an altercation with a Philadelphia Inquirer columnist after the 76ers’ loss to the Memphis Grizzlies on Saturday.

Philadelphia 76ers center Joel Embiid has been suspended three games for shoving a member of the media, the NBA announced Tuesday. The suspension will begin when Embiid is medically cleared to play, as he hasn’t appeared in a game yet this season because of injury. Read more

Jayden Daniels is a lock to win rookie of the year. How about MVP? By Sam Fortier / Wash Post

The Washington Commanders quarterback is on track for one of the best debut seasons in NFL history.

This fall, Daniels has captivated the NFL, reenergized a dormant fan base, beaten three other top-six draft picks and emerged as a prohibitive favorite to be named the offensive rookie of the year (if only he didn’t have to cancel that $10,000 bet with Giants wide receiver Malik Nabers). Now Daniels has ascended to discussions about the MVP award. Only one rookie has won it — Cleveland Browns running back Jim Brown in 1957 — and only about a dozen others have even received votes. Sportsbooks rank him behind four elite quarterbacks — Baltimore’s Lamar Jackson, Buffalo’s Josh Allen, Kansas City’s Patrick Mahomes and Detroit’s Jared Goff — in the MVP odds. Read more

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