US&nbsp;President-elect Joe Biden&nbsp;on Monday selected former Federal Reserve chair, Janet Yellen, as his choice for Treasury secretary.

Biden's transition team said in a statement "Janet Yellen is nominated to serve as Secretary of the Treasury. If confirmed, she will be the first woman to lead the Treasury Department in its 231-year history."

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In Yellen, Biden will have a battle-tested policymaker who can draw on her nearly two decades at the Fed to help rebuild an economy in dire need of government cash and confidence. Biden has called for trillions of dollars in new stimulus to aid the small and mid-size businesses that are the nation’s jobs engine.

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/joe-biden-to-nominate-indian-american-neera-tanden-as-budget-chief-report-346315" hreflang="en">Joe Biden to nominate Indian-American Neera Tanden as budget chief: Report&nbsp;</a>

Yellen’s expected to champion what she’s called “extraordinary fiscal support” to support the pandemic-ridden economy,&nbsp;deficit spending that she says is affordable given extraordinarily low-interest rates.

The Democrat's picks include Wally Adeyemo as deputy treasury secretary, Neera Tanden as director of the Office of Management and Budget, and Cecilia Rouse to lead the Council of Economic Advisers, the transition team said.

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Biden, a Democrat, also plans to pick Wally Adeyemo, a senior international economic adviser during the Obama administration, to serve as Janet Yellen's top deputy at the Treasury Department, the Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

Economists Jared Bernstein and Heather Boushey will be nominated to serve as members of the Council of Economic Advisers, the report added.

Before taking the reins at the Center for American Progress, a center-left think tank, Tanden was a healthcare adviser in former President Barack Obama's administration. She was also an adviser for Democrat Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign.

Rouse, a labour economist at Princeton University, whose research has focused on the economics of education, previously served as a member of Obama's Council of Economic Advisers.

Adeyemo was a senior White House national security adviser for international economics during the Obama administration, as well as a top aide to former Treasury Secretary Jack Lew. He is currently president of the Obama Foundation

Bernstein, one of Biden's closest aides, served as his chief economic adviser as Biden, then the vice president, and Obama fought to pull the United States out of the Great Recession.

He was tasked with calculating and explaining how many jobs the Obama administration's hard-fought recovery act saved in 2009, and was widely expected to have a similarly prominent role in a Biden administration,

Boushey is known for research focusing on how inequality can hinder economic growth. The chief executive and co-founder of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, a progressive economic think tank, Boushey has been working with the Biden team as an unofficial economic adviser.

Just like Obama did in 2009, Biden will inherit a struggling economy facing serious near-term challenges.

Nearly 14 million Americans, many of who used to be employed in the restaurant and hospitality industries, are receiving unemployment benefits that expire on December&nbsp;26, and the coronavirus'&nbsp;continued surge means there is no telling when they might be able to go back to work.

Biden's economic agenda is likely to focus on getting the country past the coronavirus crisis, both as a health and economic issue. A lot will depend on the passage of a pandemic relief package and the distribution of a vaccine that is expected in early 2021.

US President-elect Joe Biden on Monday selected former Federal Reserve chair, Janet Yellen, as his choice for Treasury secretary. Biden's transition team said in a statement "Janet Yellen is nominated to serve as Secretary of the Treasury.

US President-elect Joe Biden on Monday selected former Federal Reserve chair, Janet Yellen, as his choice for Treasury secretary. Biden's transition team said in a statement "Janet Yellen is nominated to serve as Secretary of the Treasury. If confirmed, she will be the first woman to lead the Treasury Department in its 231-year history." In Yellen, Biden will have a battle-tested policymaker who can draw on her nearly two decades at the Fed to help rebuild an economy in dire need of government cash and confidence. Biden has called for trillions of dollars in new stimulus to aid the small and mid-size businesses that are the nation’s jobs engine. Also read: Joe Biden to nominate Indian-American Neera Tanden as budget chief: Report Yellen’s expected to champion what she’s called “extraordinary fiscal support” to support the pandemic-ridden economy, deficit spending that she says is affordable given extraordinarily low-interest rates. The Democrat's picks include Wally Adeyemo as deputy treasury secretary, Neera Tanden as director of the Office of Management and Budget, and Cecilia Rouse to lead the Council of Economic Advisers, the transition team said. Biden, a Democrat, also plans to pick Wally Adeyemo, a senior international economic adviser during the Obama administration, to serve as Janet Yellen's top deputy at the Treasury Department, the Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter. Economists Jared Bernstein and Heather Boushey will be nominated to serve as members of the Council of Economic Advisers, the report added. Before taking the reins at the Center for American Progress, a center-left think tank, Tanden was a healthcare adviser in former President Barack Obama's administration. She was also an adviser for Democrat Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign. Rouse, a labour economist at Princeton University, whose research has focused on the economics of education, previously served as a member of Obama's Council of Economic Advisers. Adeyemo was a senior White House national security adviser for international economics during the Obama administration, as well as a top aide to former Treasury Secretary Jack Lew. He is currently president of the Obama Foundation Bernstein, one of Biden's closest aides, served as his chief economic adviser as Biden, then the vice president, and Obama fought to pull the United States out of the Great Recession. He was tasked with calculating and explaining how many jobs the Obama administration's hard-fought recovery act saved in 2009, and was widely expected to have a similarly prominent role in a Biden administration, Boushey is known for research focusing on how inequality can hinder economic growth. The chief executive and co-founder of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, a progressive economic think tank, Boushey has been working with the Biden team as an unofficial economic adviser. Just like Obama did in 2009, Biden will inherit a struggling economy facing serious near-term challenges. Nearly 14 million Americans, many of who used to be employed in the restaurant and hospitality industries, are receiving unemployment benefits that expire on December 26, and the coronavirus' continued surge means there is no telling when they might be able to go back to work. Biden's economic agenda is likely to focus on getting the country past the coronavirus crisis, both as a health and economic issue. A lot will depend on the passage of a pandemic relief package and the distribution of a vaccine that is expected in early 2021.

Joe Biden selects Janet Yellen as his choice for Treasury secretary

NATO chief on Monday invited US president-elect Joe Biden for a summit in Brussels after he takes office.&nbsp;

"The specific date is not yet decided. But there will be a NATO summit. And of course, all NATO leaders will be there," said NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.&nbsp;

Watch |&nbsp;

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Stoltenberg in a press conference also said that in the summit, other allied leaders will also be invited.&nbsp;

The secretary general also said that the alliance's meet in the next two days will focus on key issues that include Russia's military build-up and rise of China.&nbsp;

Also read | <a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/leave-nato-russian-duo-posing-as-greta-thunberg-prank-canadian-prime-minister-justin-trudeau-345307">'Leave NATO': Russian duo posing as Greta Thunberg prank Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau</a>

He also said that the meet will also discuss the presence of NATO allies' forces in Afghanistan.&nbsp;

Adding that "no one wants to stay in Afghanistan longer than necessary," he also said that "whatever path we choose, it is important that we do so together, in a coordinated and deliberate way."

He also said that he will present a report prepared by an outside expert group to the foreign ministers, which will argue why NATO should be made as a policy hub.&nbsp;

"I will then develop my proposals for the heads of state and government when they meet next year," he said.

"And I'm looking forward to that because NATO has proven to be a very agile alliance."&nbsp;

 
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NATO chief on Monday invited US president-elect Joe Biden for a summit in Brussels after he takes office. "The specific date is not yet decided. But there will be a NATO summit.

NATO chief on Monday invited US president-elect Joe Biden for a summit in Brussels after he takes office. "The specific date is not yet decided. But there will be a NATO summit. And of course, all NATO leaders will be there," said NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. Watch | Stoltenberg in a press conference also said that in the summit, other allied leaders will also be invited. The secretary general also said that the alliance's meet in the next two days will focus on key issues that include Russia's military build-up and rise of China. Also read | 'Leave NATO': Russian duo posing as Greta Thunberg prank Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau He also said that the meet will also discuss the presence of NATO allies' forces in Afghanistan. Adding that "no one wants to stay in Afghanistan longer than necessary," he also said that "whatever path we choose, it is important that we do so together, in a coordinated and deliberate way." He also said that he will present a report prepared by an outside expert group to the foreign ministers, which will argue why NATO should be made as a policy hub. "I will then develop my proposals for the heads of state and government when they meet next year," he said. "And I'm looking forward to that because NATO has proven to be a very agile alliance."

NATO chief invites Joe Biden for Brussels summit

Showing his true support and friendship towards the US outgoing president <a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/donald-trump">Donald Trump</a>, the Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has alleged that there was "a lot of fraud"&nbsp;in the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/us-election">US elections</a>.&nbsp;

The accusation was made by Bolsonaro on Sunday while he was talking to the reporters after casting a ballot in municipal races.&nbsp;

Also read|&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/dont-be-embarrassing-czech-president-asks-donald-trump-to-step-down-344233">'Don't be embarrassing': Czech President asks Donald Trump to step down</a>

"I have my sources of information that there really was a lot of fraud there," he said. "Nobody talks about that. If it was enough to define (victory) for one or the other, I don't know."

This statement by Bolsonaro has come after Donald Trump has refused to concede to the President-elect&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/joe-biden">Joe Biden</a>'s historic win.&nbsp;The accusation made by Bolsonaro echoes Trump's campaign. The outgoing President has been alleging voter fraud from his opponent for the last few weeks now. Trump has been challenging the election result with various legal cases, the majority of which he lost. However, he has refused to give up and concede. "It's not like you're gonna change my mind. My mind will not change in six months," he recently said in an interview with a local national TV.

Also read|&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/donald-trump-still-refuses-to-budge-from-election-fraud-claims-346310">Donald Trump still refuses to budge from election fraud claims</a>

"This election was rigged. This election was a total fraud," he claimed, without providing any proof. "We won the election easily."

While many world leaders have come ahead and congratulated Biden, Bolsonaro said he will be waiting for a while before reaching out to the Democratic President-elect. "I am holding back a little more," he said.

Bolsonaro expressed his concern for the alleged US election voter fraud simply to support his argument against the electronic voting system that will be used in the 2022 Brazilian presidential elections. He has been urging leaders and people to go back to the paper ballot system for the 2022 elections, and now he has used Trump's allegations to further his own motives.

Donald Trump has not yet reacted to this rare support he has received from a world leader since the election results. He has been keeping off the grid since Biden's win was announced, and leaders flocked to congratulate him and his Vice President-elect Kamala Harris. Trump's lawyers have been busy filing legal challenges against the election result in various states — leading to defeat in those too.

Showing his true support and friendship towards the US outgoing president Donald Trump, the Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has alleged that there was "a lot of fraud" in the US elections.

Showing his true support and friendship towards the US outgoing president Donald Trump, the Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has alleged that there was "a lot of fraud" in the US elections. The accusation was made by Bolsonaro on Sunday while he was talking to the reporters after casting a ballot in municipal races. Also read| 'Don't be embarrassing': Czech President asks Donald Trump to step down "I have my sources of information that there really was a lot of fraud there," he said. "Nobody talks about that. If it was enough to define (victory) for one or the other, I don't know." This statement by Bolsonaro has come after Donald Trump has refused to concede to the President-elect Joe Biden's historic win. The accusation made by Bolsonaro echoes Trump's campaign. The outgoing President has been alleging voter fraud from his opponent for the last few weeks now. Trump has been challenging the election result with various legal cases, the majority of which he lost. However, he has refused to give up and concede. "It's not like you're gonna change my mind. My mind will not change in six months," he recently said in an interview with a local national TV. Also read| Donald Trump still refuses to budge from election fraud claims "This election was rigged. This election was a total fraud," he claimed, without providing any proof. "We won the election easily." While many world leaders have come ahead and congratulated Biden, Bolsonaro said he will be waiting for a while before reaching out to the Democratic President-elect. "I am holding back a little more," he said. Bolsonaro expressed his concern for the alleged US election voter fraud simply to support his argument against the electronic voting system that will be used in the 2022 Brazilian presidential elections. He has been urging leaders and people to go back to the paper ballot system for the 2022 elections, and now he has used Trump's allegations to further his own motives. Donald Trump has not yet reacted to this rare support he has received from a world leader since the election results. He has been keeping off the grid since Biden's win was announced, and leaders flocked to congratulate him and his Vice President-elect Kamala Harris. Trump's lawyers have been busy filing legal challenges against the election result in various states — leading to defeat in those too.

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro alleges 'lot of fraud' in US election 2020

The US&nbsp;President-elect&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/joe-biden">Joe Biden</a>&nbsp;has suffered a foot fracture and will probably have to wear a medical boot after he slipped while playing with one of his pet dogs, his team reported.

Biden and his love for his pets has been in the spotlight recently following the news of pet dogs returning to the <a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/the-white-house">White House</a>&nbsp;after the outgoing President&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/donald-trump">Donald Trump</a>'s four years of Presidency.

Also read|&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/brazilian-president-jair-bolsonaro-alleges-lot-of-fraud-in-us-election-2020-346316">Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro alleges 'lot of fraud' in US election 2020</a>

Upon slipping, the 78-year-old was taken to a doctor. His&nbsp;personal physician Kevin O'Connor had initially recommended an X-ray which had not revealed any&nbsp;obvious fracture. However, an additional CT scan was also recommended to the President-elect which showed "confirmed hairline (small) fractures... in the mid-foot".

His physician also added that Biden "will likely require a walking bot for several weeks". The statement sent fits of laughter among the Trump supporters who recalled the time when Trump had joked about Biden having to retire to a walking bot in future due to his 'old age'.

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However, the attitude of Trump supporters did not reflect in Trump's own behaviour, who took to Twitter to extend wishes to the President-elect.&nbsp;

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Get well soon! <a href="https://t.co/B0seiO84ld">https://t.co/B0seiO84ld</a>
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1333217873758654464?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 30, 2020</a></blockquote>
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In a Twitter video of an American channel, Biden was spotted leaving his&nbsp;orthopedic's office in Delaware. Trump retweeted the tweet with the caption "Get well soon!".

Biden has two dogs. Champ has been living with the incoming President's family since 2008, and Major was fostered and then adopted by the Biden clan in 2018 — making him the first rescue dog in the White House.

The US President-elect Joe Biden has suffered a foot fracture and will probably have to wear a medical boot after he slipped while playing with one of his pet dogs, his team reported.

The US President-elect Joe Biden has suffered a foot fracture and will probably have to wear a medical boot after he slipped while playing with one of his pet dogs, his team reported. Biden and his love for his pets has been in the spotlight recently following the news of pet dogs returning to the White House after the outgoing President Donald Trump's four years of Presidency. Also read| Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro alleges 'lot of fraud' in US election 2020 Upon slipping, the 78-year-old was taken to a doctor. His personal physician Kevin O'Connor had initially recommended an X-ray which had not revealed any obvious fracture. However, an additional CT scan was also recommended to the President-elect which showed "confirmed hairline (small) fractures... in the mid-foot". His physician also added that Biden "will likely require a walking bot for several weeks". The statement sent fits of laughter among the Trump supporters who recalled the time when Trump had joked about Biden having to retire to a walking bot in future due to his 'old age'. × However, the attitude of Trump supporters did not reflect in Trump's own behaviour, who took to Twitter to extend wishes to the President-elect. Get well soon! https://t.co/B0seiO84ld — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 30, 2020 × In a Twitter video of an American channel, Biden was spotted leaving his orthopedic's office in Delaware. Trump retweeted the tweet with the caption "Get well soon!". Biden has two dogs. Champ has been living with the incoming President's family since 2008, and Major was fostered and then adopted by the Biden clan in 2018 — making him the first rescue dog in the White House.

Joe Biden fractures foot after slipping; Donald Trump extends wishes

Pennsylvania's highest court has dismissed another legal challenge to the US election by supporters of President Donald Trump by throwing out a lower court's order.

The said order -- the latest lawsuit filed by Republicans attempting to thwart president-elect Joe Biden's victory in the battleground state -- prevented the state from certifying dozens of contests on its November 3 election ballot.

The lawsuit had sought to invalidate mail-in ballots in the battleground state that Biden won by about 81,000 votes -- or to throw out all votes and allow the state's legislature to decide the winner.

The court dismissed both claims in a unanimous decision, calling the second one an "extraordinary proposition that the court disenfranchise all 6.9 million Pennsylvanians who voted in the general election."

The lawsuit argued that a Pennsylvania law from 2019 allowing universal mail-in voting was unconstitutional.

The judges said that their November 21 challenge to the law was filed too late, coming more than a year after it was enacted and with the election results "becoming seemingly apparent."

Pennsylvania officially certified Biden's victory there on November 24. The lawsuit had also sought to stop certification.

Saturday's decision follows a long line of similar ones, including a ruling the day before in which a federal appeals court flatly dismissed Trump's claim that the election was unfair and refused to freeze Biden's win in Pennsylvania.

Trump has refused to give up on his claims of fraud in the November 3 election despite his repeated court defeats, tweeting bizarre conspiracy theories and vowing to continue his legal fight.

On Thursday, he said for the first time that he would leave the White House if Biden is officially confirmed the winner by the Electoral College on December 14.

But on Friday he tweeted that "Biden can only enter the White House as president if he can prove that his ridiculous '80,000,000 votes' were not fraudulently or illegally obtained."

Biden, who is to be sworn in on January 20, won 306 votes in the Electoral College to Trump's 232.

The president-elect has said that Americans "won't stand" for attempts to derail the vote outcome.

Pennsylvania's highest court has dismissed another legal challenge to the US election by supporters of President Donald Trump by throwing out a lower court's order.

Pennsylvania's highest court has dismissed another legal challenge to the US election by supporters of President Donald Trump by throwing out a lower court's order. The said order -- the latest lawsuit filed by Republicans attempting to thwart president-elect Joe Biden's victory in the battleground state -- prevented the state from certifying dozens of contests on its November 3 election ballot. The lawsuit had sought to invalidate mail-in ballots in the battleground state that Biden won by about 81,000 votes -- or to throw out all votes and allow the state's legislature to decide the winner. The court dismissed both claims in a unanimous decision, calling the second one an "extraordinary proposition that the court disenfranchise all 6.9 million Pennsylvanians who voted in the general election." The lawsuit argued that a Pennsylvania law from 2019 allowing universal mail-in voting was unconstitutional. The judges said that their November 21 challenge to the law was filed too late, coming more than a year after it was enacted and with the election results "becoming seemingly apparent." Pennsylvania officially certified Biden's victory there on November 24. The lawsuit had also sought to stop certification. Saturday's decision follows a long line of similar ones, including a ruling the day before in which a federal appeals court flatly dismissed Trump's claim that the election was unfair and refused to freeze Biden's win in Pennsylvania. Trump has refused to give up on his claims of fraud in the November 3 election despite his repeated court defeats, tweeting bizarre conspiracy theories and vowing to continue his legal fight. On Thursday, he said for the first time that he would leave the White House if Biden is officially confirmed the winner by the Electoral College on December 14. But on Friday he tweeted that "Biden can only enter the White House as president if he can prove that his ridiculous '80,000,000 votes' were not fraudulently or illegally obtained." Biden, who is to be sworn in on January 20, won 306 votes in the Electoral College to Trump's 232. The president-elect has said that Americans "won't stand" for attempts to derail the vote outcome.

Trump loses another election court challenge; legal defeats pile up

President Trump’s disastrous mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic probably cost him re-election. Yet it seems mind-boggling that he still won more votes than any incumbent president in American history despite his dereliction of responsibility at a time of a once-in-a-century health crisis and economic devastation.

Why are President-elect Joe Biden’s margins so thin in the states that clinched his victory? And why did the president’s down-ticket enablers flourish in the turbulent, plague-torn conditions they helped bring about?

Democrats, struggling to make sense of it all, are locked in yet another round of mutual recrimination: They were either too progressive for swing voters — too socialist or aggressive with ambitious policies like the Green New Deal — or not progressive enough to inspire potential Democratic voters to show up or cross over.

But they should understand that there was really no way to avoid disappointment. Three factors — the logic of partisan polarization, which inaccurate polling obscured; the strength of the juiced pre-Covid-19 economy; and the success of Mr. Trump’s denialist, open-everything-up nonresponse to the pandemic — mostly explain why Democrats didn’t fare better.

This shocking strategy worked for Republicans, even if it didn’t pan out for the president himself. Moreover, it laid a trap that Democrats walked into — something they should understand and adjust for, as best they can, as they look ahead.

How could a president responsible for one of the gravest failures of governance in American history nevertheless maintain such rock-solid support? Democracy’s throw-the-bums-out feedback mechanism gets gummed up when the electorate disagrees about the identity of the bums, what did and didn’t occur on their watch and who deserves what share of the credit or blame.

When party affiliation becomes a central source of meaning and self-definition, reality itself becomes contested and verifiable facts turn into hot-button controversies. Elections can’t render an authoritative verdict on the performance of incumbents when partisans in a closely divided electorate tell wildly inconsistent stories about one another and the world they share.

Mr. Trump has a knack for leveraging the animosities of polarized partisanship to cleave his supporters from sources of credible information and inflame them with vilifying lies. This time, it wasn’t enough to save his bacon, which suggests that polarization hasn’t &lt;em&gt;completely&lt;/em&gt; wrecked our democracy’s capacity for self-correction: Sweeping a medium-size city’s worth of dead Americans under the rug turned out to be too tall an order.

However, Mr. Trump’s relentless campaign to goose the economy by cutting taxes, running up enormous deficits and debt, and hectoring the Fed into not raising rates was working for millions of Americans. We tend to notice when we’re personally more prosperous than we were a few years before.

But the president’s catastrophic response to Covid-19 threw the economy into a tailspin. That is where it gets interesting — and Democrats get uncomfortable.

Mr. Trump abdicated responsibility, shifting the burden onto states and municipalities with busted budgets. He then waged a war of words against governors and mayors — especially Democrats — who refused to risk their citizens’ lives by allowing economic and social activity to resume.

He spurred his supporters to make light of the danger of infection, made the churlish refusal to wear masks into an emblem of emancipation from the despotism of experts and turned public health restrictions on businesses, schools and social gatherings into a tyrannical conspiracy to steal power by damaging the economy and his re-election prospects.

He succeeded in putting Democrats on the defensive about economic restrictions and school closures. As months passed and with no new relief coming from Washington, financially straitened Democratic states and cities had little choice but to ease restrictions on businesses just to keep the lights on. That seemed to concede the economic wisdom of the more permissive approach in majority-Republican states and fed into Mr. Trump’s false narrative of victory over the virus and a triumphant return to normalcy.

But Democrats weren’t destined to get quite as tangled in Mr. Trump’s trap as they did. They had no way to avoid it, but they could have been hurt less by it. They allowed Republicans to define the contrast between the parties’ approaches to the pandemic in terms of freedom versus exhausting, indefinite shutdowns.

Democrats needed to present a competing, compelling strategy to counter Republican messaging. Struggling workers and businesses never clearly heard exactly what they’d get if Democrats ran the show, and Democrats never came together to scream bloody murder that Republicans were refusing to give it to them. Democrats needed to underscore the depth of Republican failure by forcefully communicating what other countries had done to successfully control the virus. And they needed to promise to do the same through something like an Operation Warp Speed for testing and P.P.E. to get America safely back in business.

Instead, they whined that Mr. Trump’s negligence and incompetence were to blame for America’s economic woes and complained that Mitch McConnell wouldn’t even consider the House’s big relief bill. They weren’t wrong, but correctly assigning culpability did nothing to help working-class breadwinners who can’t bus tables, process chickens, sell smoothies or clean hotel rooms over Zoom.

The Republican message couldn’t have been clearer: Workers should be able to show up, clock in, earn a normal paycheck, pay the rent and feed their kids. Democrats were telling the same workers that we need to listen to science, reopening is premature, and the economy can’t be fully restored until we beat the virus. Correct! But how does that help when rent was due last week?

Make no mistake, it was unforgivably cruel of Republicans to force blue-collar and service workers to risk death for grocery money. Yet their disinformation campaign persuaded many millions of Americans that the risk was minimal and that Democrats were keeping their workplaces and schools closed, their customers and kids at home, and their wallets empty and cupboards bare for bogus reasons.

The president’s mendacious push to hastily reopen everything was less compelling to college-educated suburbanites, who tend to trust experts and can work from home, watch their kids and spare a laptop for online kindergarten. Mr. Trump lost the election mainly because he lost enough of these voters, including some moderate Republicans who otherwise voted straight Republican tickets.

Democrats need to rethink the idea that these voters would have put Democratic House and Senate candidates over the top if only Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were less radiantly socialist. They need to accept that they took hits on the economy by failing to escape the trap Republicans set by doggedly refusing to do anything about the uncontained contagion destroying it.

And they need to understand how Mr. Trump saved his party by weaponizing polarization. Conservatives needed a way not to get spun by the president’s destabilizing act of disloyalty, so they steadied themselves by reaffirming their loyalty down the remainder of the ballot. They were voting against a personal crisis of identity, not the Green New Deal.

Democrats might have done better had sunny polls and their own biased partisan perceptions not misled them into believing that backlash to indisputably damning Republican failure would deliver an easy Senate majority — but not much better. Until the mind-bending spell of polarization breaks, everything that matters will be fiercely disputed and even the most egregious failures will continue to go unpunished.

(Will Wilkinson is the vice president for research at the Niskanen Center.)

President Trump’s disastrous mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic probably cost him re-election. Yet it seems mind-boggling that he still won more votes than any incumbent president in American history despite his dereliction of responsibility at a time of a once-in-a-century health crisis and economic devastation.

President Trump’s disastrous mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic probably cost him re-election. Yet it seems mind-boggling that he still won more votes than any incumbent president in American history despite his dereliction of responsibility at a time of a once-in-a-century health crisis and economic devastation. Why are President-elect Joe Biden’s margins so thin in the states that clinched his victory? And why did the president’s down-ticket enablers flourish in the turbulent, plague-torn conditions they helped bring about? Democrats, struggling to make sense of it all, are locked in yet another round of mutual recrimination: They were either too progressive for swing voters — too socialist or aggressive with ambitious policies like the Green New Deal — or not progressive enough to inspire potential Democratic voters to show up or cross over. But they should understand that there was really no way to avoid disappointment. Three factors — the logic of partisan polarization, which inaccurate polling obscured; the strength of the juiced pre-Covid-19 economy; and the success of Mr. Trump’s denialist, open-everything-up nonresponse to the pandemic — mostly explain why Democrats didn’t fare better. This shocking strategy worked for Republicans, even if it didn’t pan out for the president himself. Moreover, it laid a trap that Democrats walked into — something they should understand and adjust for, as best they can, as they look ahead. How could a president responsible for one of the gravest failures of governance in American history nevertheless maintain such rock-solid support? Democracy’s throw-the-bums-out feedback mechanism gets gummed up when the electorate disagrees about the identity of the bums, what did and didn’t occur on their watch and who deserves what share of the credit or blame. When party affiliation becomes a central source of meaning and self-definition, reality itself becomes contested and verifiable facts turn into hot-button controversies. Elections can’t render an authoritative verdict on the performance of incumbents when partisans in a closely divided electorate tell wildly inconsistent stories about one another and the world they share. Mr. Trump has a knack for leveraging the animosities of polarized partisanship to cleave his supporters from sources of credible information and inflame them with vilifying lies. This time, it wasn’t enough to save his bacon, which suggests that polarization hasn’t completely wrecked our democracy’s capacity for self-correction: Sweeping a medium-size city’s worth of dead Americans under the rug turned out to be too tall an order. However, Mr. Trump’s relentless campaign to goose the economy by cutting taxes, running up enormous deficits and debt, and hectoring the Fed into not raising rates was working for millions of Americans. We tend to notice when we’re personally more prosperous than we were a few years before. But the president’s catastrophic response to Covid-19 threw the economy into a tailspin. That is where it gets interesting — and Democrats get uncomfortable. Mr. Trump abdicated responsibility, shifting the burden onto states and municipalities with busted budgets. He then waged a war of words against governors and mayors — especially Democrats — who refused to risk their citizens’ lives by allowing economic and social activity to resume. He spurred his supporters to make light of the danger of infection, made the churlish refusal to wear masks into an emblem of emancipation from the despotism of experts and turned public health restrictions on businesses, schools and social gatherings into a tyrannical conspiracy to steal power by damaging the economy and his re-election prospects. He succeeded in putting Democrats on the defensive about economic restrictions and school closures. As months passed and with no new relief coming from Washington, financially straitened Democratic states and cities had little choice but to ease restrictions on businesses just to keep the lights on. That seemed to concede the economic wisdom of the more permissive approach in majority-Republican states and fed into Mr. Trump’s false narrative of victory over the virus and a triumphant return to normalcy. But Democrats weren’t destined to get quite as tangled in Mr. Trump’s trap as they did. They had no way to avoid it, but they could have been hurt less by it. They allowed Republicans to define the contrast between the parties’ approaches to the pandemic in terms of freedom versus exhausting, indefinite shutdowns. Democrats needed to present a competing, compelling strategy to counter Republican messaging. Struggling workers and businesses never clearly heard exactly what they’d get if Democrats ran the show, and Democrats never came together to scream bloody murder that Republicans were refusing to give it to them. Democrats needed to underscore the depth of Republican failure by forcefully communicating what other countries had done to successfully control the virus. And they needed to promise to do the same through something like an Operation Warp Speed for testing and P.P.E. to get America safely back in business. Instead, they whined that Mr. Trump’s negligence and incompetence were to blame for America’s economic woes and complained that Mitch McConnell wouldn’t even consider the House’s big relief bill. They weren’t wrong, but correctly assigning culpability did nothing to help working-class breadwinners who can’t bus tables, process chickens, sell smoothies or clean hotel rooms over Zoom. The Republican message couldn’t have been clearer: Workers should be able to show up, clock in, earn a normal paycheck, pay the rent and feed their kids. Democrats were telling the same workers that we need to listen to science, reopening is premature, and the economy can’t be fully restored until we beat the virus. Correct! But how does that help when rent was due last week? Make no mistake, it was unforgivably cruel of Republicans to force blue-collar and service workers to risk death for grocery money. Yet their disinformation campaign persuaded many millions of Americans that the risk was minimal and that Democrats were keeping their workplaces and schools closed, their customers and kids at home, and their wallets empty and cupboards bare for bogus reasons. The president’s mendacious push to hastily reopen everything was less compelling to college-educated suburbanites, who tend to trust experts and can work from home, watch their kids and spare a laptop for online kindergarten. Mr. Trump lost the election mainly because he lost enough of these voters, including some moderate Republicans who otherwise voted straight Republican tickets. Democrats need to rethink the idea that these voters would have put Democratic House and Senate candidates over the top if only Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were less radiantly socialist. They need to accept that they took hits on the economy by failing to escape the trap Republicans set by doggedly refusing to do anything about the uncontained contagion destroying it. And they need to understand how Mr. Trump saved his party by weaponizing polarization. Conservatives needed a way not to get spun by the president’s destabilizing act of disloyalty, so they steadied themselves by reaffirming their loyalty down the remainder of the ballot. They were voting against a personal crisis of identity, not the Green New Deal. Democrats might have done better had sunny polls and their own biased partisan perceptions not misled them into believing that backlash to indisputably damning Republican failure would deliver an easy Senate majority — but not much better. Until the mind-bending spell of polarization breaks, everything that matters will be fiercely disputed and even the most egregious failures will continue to go unpunished. (Will Wilkinson is the vice president for research at the Niskanen Center.)

Why did so many Americans vote for Trump?

The telephone call would have been laugh-out-loud ridiculous if it had not been so serious. When Tina Barton picked up, she found someone from President Donald Trump’s campaign asking her to sign a letter raising doubts about the results of the election.

The election that Barton, as the Republican clerk of the small Michigan city of Rochester Hills, had helped oversee. The election that she knew to be fair and accurate because she had helped make it so. The election that she had publicly defended amid threats that made her upgrade her home security system.

“Do you know who you’re talking to right now?” she asked the campaign official.

Evidently not.

If the president hoped Republicans across the country would fall in line behind his false and farcical claims that the election was somehow rigged on a mammoth scale by a nefarious multinational conspiracy, he was in for a surprise. Republicans in Washington may have indulged Trump’s fantastical assertions, but at the state and local level, Republicans played a critical role in resisting the mounting pressure from their own party to overturn the vote after Trump fell behind Nov. 3.

The three weeks that followed tested American democracy and demonstrated that the two-century-old system is far more vulnerable to subversion than many had imagined, even though the incumbent president lost by 6 million votes nationwide. But in the end, the system stood firm against the most intense assault from an aggrieved president in the nation’s history because of a Republican city clerk in Michigan, a Republican secretary of state in Georgia, a Republican county supervisor in Arizona and Republican-appointed judges in Pennsylvania and elsewhere.

They refuted conspiracy theories, certified results, dismissed lawsuits and repudiated a president of their own party, leaving him to thunder about a supposed plot that would have had to include people who had voted for him, donated to him or even been appointed by him. The desperate effort to hang onto office over the will of the people effectively ended when his own director of the General Services Administration determined that Joe Biden is the president-elect and a judge Trump put on the bench chastised him for ludicrous litigation.

“Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy,” Judge Stephanos Bibas, appointed by Trump in 2017, wrote for a three-judge panel of the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia on Friday as it dismissed the latest of dozens of legal claims filed by Trump and his allies. “Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.”

Unfounded as it is, the president’s campaign against the results may leave lasting scars. With much of the Republican establishment endorsing or staying silent on Trump’s claims, and polls indicating that tens of millions of Republicans believe the election was somehow rigged, faith in American democracy, the fundamental tenet of the social contract established by the framers, has eroded in a dangerous way. And Biden, the incoming president, now faces a country where many of his constituents consider him illegitimate.

Those who defied Trump despite their own partisan backgrounds remain bruised by the experience too, in some cases questioning the political system that they have spent years upholding. They may pay a price if their fellow Republicans see what they did as acts of disloyalty rather than conscience. But those who have spoken out expressed no regrets.

“I’ve got a pretty thick skin, but it’s hard not to feel shook by it all,” Barton reflected the other day. “We take our job so seriously that it’s devastating to us to have something like that happen. I cried every day for a week every time I thought about it. My biggest concern was, we’re already living in a time when so many people have so little confidence in the process, and to give them more reason not to trust the results was absolutely devastating to me.”

‘Numbers Don’t Lie’

The drama began within hours after the polls closed. The initial leads that Trump enjoyed in several battleground states began to dwindle as absentee and mail-in votes that favored Biden were slowly counted and added to the tallies released publicly. Trump portrayed the numbers as fraudulent and headed to court, filing lawsuits in multiple states.

In Arizona, where Trump allies complained that the use of Sharpie pens invalidated ballots because they bled through, Clint Hickman, chair of the Maricopa County board of supervisors and a Republican, sent an open letter with a Democratic colleague saying they were “concerned about the misinformation spreading about the integrity of our elections.”

Mark Brnovich, the state’s Republican attorney general, who is widely expected to run for governor in 2022, announced he would investigate the use of the Sharpies. A day later, he tweeted he was satisfied that the pens did not influence the election in any way.

Passions continued to rise. The Democratic secretary of state received threats to kill her family and pets and burn down her house. Hickman stepped up again, issuing another letter calling on Republicans to “dial back the rhetoric, rumors and false claims.”

Rusty Bowers, the Republican speaker of the state House of Representatives, likewise pushed back against the conspiracies and resisted an “enormous amount of pressure” for lawmakers to choose their own electors to support Trump. “I took an oath to support the Constitution of the United States and the constitution and laws of the state of Arizona,” he said.

In Georgia, Trump and his allies were blocked by Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state. A mild-mannered civil engineer, Raffensperger is a staunch conservative who won his office two years ago with an endorsement from Trump and a platform of Trumpian goals, including a promise to protect the voting system from illegal immigrants.

But he bristled at unfounded claims from Trump’s team and other Republicans, including Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, who called for his resignation. Rep. Doug Collins, a Republican who had just lost a challenge against Loeffler, took over Trump’s efforts in Georgia and accused Raffensperger’s office of setting rules that “seem to be changing as we go.” Raffensperger took to Facebook to push back, calling Collins a “liar.”

The dispute landed before Judge Steven Grimberg, who was nominated to the U.S. District Court by Trump and was a member of the Federalist Society, which has provided lists of conservatives from which the president has drawn his Supreme Court nominees.

But if the Trump camp believed it would find a sympathetic ear, it was disabused in the opening minutes of the hearing when the youthful judge seemed increasingly perturbed by the answers he received to his pointed questions. The suit “would require halting the certification results in a state election in which millions of people have voted,” the judge noted.

The next day, Raffensperger spurned Trump and certified Biden’s victory in Georgia. “Numbers don’t lie,” the secretary of state said. Gov. Brian Kemp, a Trump ally, then certified Georgia’s electors for Biden while twisting himself to say that the decision now “paves the way for the Trump campaign to pursue other legal options.”

In Pennsylvania, the legal efforts found no more traction. The week after the election, Trump and his allies lost seven cases in succession. By the next weekend, they ended up in federal court before Judge Matthew Brann, another Federalist Society member and conservative Republican appointed by President Barack Obama at the behest of a Republican senator.

Brann called the Trump team’s claim nothing more than “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations” and refused to delay certification of the election. “In the United States of America, this cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all the voters of its sixth most populated state,” he wrote. Brann’s ruling was the one upheld Friday.

Mark Aronchick, a lawyer who represented the city of Philadelphia in several cases brought by the Trump campaign, said the past three weeks proved that the judicial system would not simply bend to the president’s will.

“This period of time, with all the things that the Trump campaign were throwing, I viewed as very much a stress test on what I will shout from the rooftops is the best legal system the world has ever seen, in terms of independence of the judiciary and the rule of law,” he said. “And at both the state and federal level, the system has come through with flying colors.”

‘The Real Cost Was in Voter Confidence’

Nowhere was the pressure more sustained than in Michigan, even though Biden’s margin of victory of 154,000 was greater there than in other contested states. At one point, two Republicans on the Wayne County elections board bowed to the president’s wishes and refused to certify the results, only to reverse themselves later that night.

Trump then summoned the Republican leaders of the state legislature, Mike Shirkey and Lee Chatfield, to the White House in a bid to get lawmakers to substitute their own slate of electors. The two men, both rumored to be interested in higher office, were hesitant to go, according to people familiar with their thinking, but felt that if a president called, they had no choice.

Chatfield, 32, a graduate of Liberty University, the Christian school in Virginia founded by the Rev. Jerry Falwell, had been a vocal supporter of the president, even warming up the crowd at a rally in Muskegon before Trump arrived a week before the election. Shirkey, 65, has not been so visible but had spoken at several rallies protesting coronavirus lockdown orders issued by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, including on the same day the FBI announced that it had foiled a right-wing plot to kidnap her.

But they rebuffed Trump nonetheless, issuing a statement shortly after leaving the White House affirming that they had seen no evidence that would change the outcome of the election and would let the winner of the popular vote stand.

But the Trump team seized on any routine mistakes or far-fetched allegations to advance the cause. In Rochester Hills, in Oakland County, votes in one precinct were posted in the absentee tally and then also posted in the in-person total without first being removed from the absentee count.

The mistake was quickly caught and rectified before the results became official, but Ronna McDaniel, chair of the Republican National Committee, claimed that “we found 2,000 ballots that had been given to Democrats, that were Republican ballots, due to a clerical error.”

Barton, who has served as the Rochester Hills clerk for eight years, learned about McDaniel’s comment from a reporter and promptly took to social media to rebut the “categorically false” assertion. “As a Republican, I am disturbed that this is intentionally being mischaracterized to undermine the election process,” Barton said in a video she posted to Twitter, which was viewed more than 1.2 million times.

Barton, 49, is another graduate from Liberty University, where she earned a master’s degree after graduating from Great Lakes University in Michigan. She posts Bible verses online and has said that “God orders my steps.” She served for eight years as the deputy clerk in the Detroit suburb of Bloomfield Township before being appointed to the Rochester Hills post and has earned respect from both Republicans and Democrats.

She was initially reluctant to give McDaniel’s claim any validity by responding but decided she had no choice. “In relaying the truth, I was going to be opening myself up to criticism, and if I ever thought about running for office again, that would be impacted,” she said. “But the real cost was in voter confidence. I told my deputy that all these things have to be put aside, and I have to speak the truth.”

Soon she found herself the target of profane and threatening emails and telephone calls, and while she took comfort that she was safe because her husband is a sheriff’s deputy, they nonetheless upgraded the security system at home. “It’s just devastating to see what the response has been to our profession and how we have come, as a country, to think that violence and threats is the answer,” she said.

As an election official, she spent much of the last four years talking with other officials about cyberthreats to American democracy. Never, she said, did she realize that the real threat this year would come from within.

“But now we have to go back and rebuild voter trust and let people realize that our elections are not rigged,” she said. “We have to step back and say, 'How do we restore public confidence in a system that is completely torn down?'”

The telephone call would have been laugh-out-loud ridiculous if it had not been so serious. When Tina Barton picked up, she found someone from President Donald Trump’s campaign asking her to sign a letter raising doubts about the results of the election.

The telephone call would have been laugh-out-loud ridiculous if it had not been so serious. When Tina Barton picked up, she found someone from President Donald Trump’s campaign asking her to sign a letter raising doubts about the results of the election. The election that Barton, as the Republican clerk of the small Michigan city of Rochester Hills, had helped oversee. The election that she knew to be fair and accurate because she had helped make it so. The election that she had publicly defended amid threats that made her upgrade her home security system. “Do you know who you’re talking to right now?” she asked the campaign official. Evidently not. If the president hoped Republicans across the country would fall in line behind his false and farcical claims that the election was somehow rigged on a mammoth scale by a nefarious multinational conspiracy, he was in for a surprise. Republicans in Washington may have indulged Trump’s fantastical assertions, but at the state and local level, Republicans played a critical role in resisting the mounting pressure from their own party to overturn the vote after Trump fell behind Nov. 3. The three weeks that followed tested American democracy and demonstrated that the two-century-old system is far more vulnerable to subversion than many had imagined, even though the incumbent president lost by 6 million votes nationwide. But in the end, the system stood firm against the most intense assault from an aggrieved president in the nation’s history because of a Republican city clerk in Michigan, a Republican secretary of state in Georgia, a Republican county supervisor in Arizona and Republican-appointed judges in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. They refuted conspiracy theories, certified results, dismissed lawsuits and repudiated a president of their own party, leaving him to thunder about a supposed plot that would have had to include people who had voted for him, donated to him or even been appointed by him. The desperate effort to hang onto office over the will of the people effectively ended when his own director of the General Services Administration determined that Joe Biden is the president-elect and a judge Trump put on the bench chastised him for ludicrous litigation. “Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy,” Judge Stephanos Bibas, appointed by Trump in 2017, wrote for a three-judge panel of the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia on Friday as it dismissed the latest of dozens of legal claims filed by Trump and his allies. “Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.” Unfounded as it is, the president’s campaign against the results may leave lasting scars. With much of the Republican establishment endorsing or staying silent on Trump’s claims, and polls indicating that tens of millions of Republicans believe the election was somehow rigged, faith in American democracy, the fundamental tenet of the social contract established by the framers, has eroded in a dangerous way. And Biden, the incoming president, now faces a country where many of his constituents consider him illegitimate. Those who defied Trump despite their own partisan backgrounds remain bruised by the experience too, in some cases questioning the political system that they have spent years upholding. They may pay a price if their fellow Republicans see what they did as acts of disloyalty rather than conscience. But those who have spoken out expressed no regrets. “I’ve got a pretty thick skin, but it’s hard not to feel shook by it all,” Barton reflected the other day. “We take our job so seriously that it’s devastating to us to have something like that happen. I cried every day for a week every time I thought about it. My biggest concern was, we’re already living in a time when so many people have so little confidence in the process, and to give them more reason not to trust the results was absolutely devastating to me.” ‘Numbers Don’t Lie’ The drama began within hours after the polls closed. The initial leads that Trump enjoyed in several battleground states began to dwindle as absentee and mail-in votes that favored Biden were slowly counted and added to the tallies released publicly. Trump portrayed the numbers as fraudulent and headed to court, filing lawsuits in multiple states. In Arizona, where Trump allies complained that the use of Sharpie pens invalidated ballots because they bled through, Clint Hickman, chair of the Maricopa County board of supervisors and a Republican, sent an open letter with a Democratic colleague saying they were “concerned about the misinformation spreading about the integrity of our elections.” Mark Brnovich, the state’s Republican attorney general, who is widely expected to run for governor in 2022, announced he would investigate the use of the Sharpies. A day later, he tweeted he was satisfied that the pens did not influence the election in any way. Passions continued to rise. The Democratic secretary of state received threats to kill her family and pets and burn down her house. Hickman stepped up again, issuing another letter calling on Republicans to “dial back the rhetoric, rumors and false claims.” Rusty Bowers, the Republican speaker of the state House of Representatives, likewise pushed back against the conspiracies and resisted an “enormous amount of pressure” for lawmakers to choose their own electors to support Trump. “I took an oath to support the Constitution of the United States and the constitution and laws of the state of Arizona,” he said. In Georgia, Trump and his allies were blocked by Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state. A mild-mannered civil engineer, Raffensperger is a staunch conservative who won his office two years ago with an endorsement from Trump and a platform of Trumpian goals, including a promise to protect the voting system from illegal immigrants. But he bristled at unfounded claims from Trump’s team and other Republicans, including Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, who called for his resignation. Rep. Doug Collins, a Republican who had just lost a challenge against Loeffler, took over Trump’s efforts in Georgia and accused Raffensperger’s office of setting rules that “seem to be changing as we go.” Raffensperger took to Facebook to push back, calling Collins a “liar.” The dispute landed before Judge Steven Grimberg, who was nominated to the U.S. District Court by Trump and was a member of the Federalist Society, which has provided lists of conservatives from which the president has drawn his Supreme Court nominees. But if the Trump camp believed it would find a sympathetic ear, it was disabused in the opening minutes of the hearing when the youthful judge seemed increasingly perturbed by the answers he received to his pointed questions. The suit “would require halting the certification results in a state election in which millions of people have voted,” the judge noted. The next day, Raffensperger spurned Trump and certified Biden’s victory in Georgia. “Numbers don’t lie,” the secretary of state said. Gov. Brian Kemp, a Trump ally, then certified Georgia’s electors for Biden while twisting himself to say that the decision now “paves the way for the Trump campaign to pursue other legal options.” In Pennsylvania, the legal efforts found no more traction. The week after the election, Trump and his allies lost seven cases in succession. By the next weekend, they ended up in federal court before Judge Matthew Brann, another Federalist Society member and conservative Republican appointed by President Barack Obama at the behest of a Republican senator. Brann called the Trump team’s claim nothing more than “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations” and refused to delay certification of the election. “In the United States of America, this cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all the voters of its sixth most populated state,” he wrote. Brann’s ruling was the one upheld Friday. Mark Aronchick, a lawyer who represented the city of Philadelphia in several cases brought by the Trump campaign, said the past three weeks proved that the judicial system would not simply bend to the president’s will. “This period of time, with all the things that the Trump campaign were throwing, I viewed as very much a stress test on what I will shout from the rooftops is the best legal system the world has ever seen, in terms of independence of the judiciary and the rule of law,” he said. “And at both the state and federal level, the system has come through with flying colors.” ‘The Real Cost Was in Voter Confidence’ Nowhere was the pressure more sustained than in Michigan, even though Biden’s margin of victory of 154,000 was greater there than in other contested states. At one point, two Republicans on the Wayne County elections board bowed to the president’s wishes and refused to certify the results, only to reverse themselves later that night. Trump then summoned the Republican leaders of the state legislature, Mike Shirkey and Lee Chatfield, to the White House in a bid to get lawmakers to substitute their own slate of electors. The two men, both rumored to be interested in higher office, were hesitant to go, according to people familiar with their thinking, but felt that if a president called, they had no choice. Chatfield, 32, a graduate of Liberty University, the Christian school in Virginia founded by the Rev. Jerry Falwell, had been a vocal supporter of the president, even warming up the crowd at a rally in Muskegon before Trump arrived a week before the election. Shirkey, 65, has not been so visible but had spoken at several rallies protesting coronavirus lockdown orders issued by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, including on the same day the FBI announced that it had foiled a right-wing plot to kidnap her. But they rebuffed Trump nonetheless, issuing a statement shortly after leaving the White House affirming that they had seen no evidence that would change the outcome of the election and would let the winner of the popular vote stand. But the Trump team seized on any routine mistakes or far-fetched allegations to advance the cause. In Rochester Hills, in Oakland County, votes in one precinct were posted in the absentee tally and then also posted in the in-person total without first being removed from the absentee count. The mistake was quickly caught and rectified before the results became official, but Ronna McDaniel, chair of the Republican National Committee, claimed that “we found 2,000 ballots that had been given to Democrats, that were Republican ballots, due to a clerical error.” Barton, who has served as the Rochester Hills clerk for eight years, learned about McDaniel’s comment from a reporter and promptly took to social media to rebut the “categorically false” assertion. “As a Republican, I am disturbed that this is intentionally being mischaracterized to undermine the election process,” Barton said in a video she posted to Twitter, which was viewed more than 1.2 million times. Barton, 49, is another graduate from Liberty University, where she earned a master’s degree after graduating from Great Lakes University in Michigan. She posts Bible verses online and has said that “God orders my steps.” She served for eight years as the deputy clerk in the Detroit suburb of Bloomfield Township before being appointed to the Rochester Hills post and has earned respect from both Republicans and Democrats. She was initially reluctant to give McDaniel’s claim any validity by responding but decided she had no choice. “In relaying the truth, I was going to be opening myself up to criticism, and if I ever thought about running for office again, that would be impacted,” she said. “But the real cost was in voter confidence. I told my deputy that all these things have to be put aside, and I have to speak the truth.” Soon she found herself the target of profane and threatening emails and telephone calls, and while she took comfort that she was safe because her husband is a sheriff’s deputy, they nonetheless upgraded the security system at home. “It’s just devastating to see what the response has been to our profession and how we have come, as a country, to think that violence and threats is the answer,” she said. As an election official, she spent much of the last four years talking with other officials about cyberthreats to American democracy. Never, she said, did she realize that the real threat this year would come from within. “But now we have to go back and rebuild voter trust and let people realize that our elections are not rigged,” she said. “We have to step back and say, 'How do we restore public confidence in a system that is completely torn down?'”

In key states, Republicans were critical in resisting Trump’s election narrative

In the tense days after the presidential election, a team of Facebook employees presented the chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, with an alarming finding: Election-related misinformation was going viral on the site.

President Donald Trump was already casting the election as rigged, and stories from right-wing media outlets with false and misleading claims about discarded ballots, miscounted votes and skewed tallies were among the most popular news stories on the platform.

In response, the employees proposed an emergency change to the site’s news feed algorithm, which helps determine what more than 2 billion people see every day. It involved emphasizing the importance of what Facebook calls “news ecosystem quality” scores, or NEQ, a secret internal ranking it assigns to news publishers based on signals about the quality of their journalism.

Also read|&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/uk-to-curb-google-and-facebooks-dominance-with-tougher-rules-345681">UK to curb Google and Facebook's dominance with tougher rules</a>

Typically, NEQ scores play a minor role in determining what appears on users’ feeds. But several days after the election, Zuckerberg agreed to increase the weight that Facebook’s algorithm gave to NEQ scores to make sure authoritative news appeared more prominently, said three people with knowledge of the decision, who were not authorized to discuss internal deliberations.

The change was part of the “break glass” plans Facebook had spent months developing for the aftermath of a contested election. It resulted in a spike in visibility for big, mainstream publishers like CNN, The New York Times and NPR, while posts from highly engaged hyperpartisan pages, such as Breitbart and Occupy Democrats, became less visible, the employees said.

It was a vision of what a calmer, less divisive Facebook might look like. Some employees argued the change should become permanent, even if it was unclear how that might affect the amount of time people spent on Facebook. In an employee meeting the week after the election, workers asked whether the “nicer news feed” could stay, said two people who attended.

Also read|&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/technology/in-a-first-facebook-offers-estimate-of-hate-speech-prevalence-on-its-platform-344315">In a first, Facebook offers estimate of hate speech prevalence on its platform</a>

Guy Rosen, a Facebook executive who oversees the integrity division that is in charge of cleaning up the platform, said on a call with reporters last week that the changes were always meant to be temporary. “There has never been a plan to make these permanent,” he said. John Hegeman, who oversees the news feed, said in an interview that while Facebook might roll back these experiments, it would study and learn from them.

The news feed debate illustrates a central tension that some inside Facebook are feeling acutely these days: that the company’s aspirations of improving the world are often at odds with its desire for dominance.

In the past several months, as Facebook has come under more scrutiny for its role in amplifying false and divisive information, its employees have clashed over the company’s future. On one side are idealists, including many rank-and-file workers and some executives, who want to do more to limit misinformation and polarizing content. On the other side are pragmatists who fear those measures could hurt Facebook’s growth, or provoke a political backlash that leads to painful regulation.

Also see:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/photos/how-social-media-companies-will-handle-post-us-election-scenarios-337122" hreflang="en">How social media companies will handle post-US election scenarios</a>

“There are tensions in virtually every product decision we make and we’ve developed a companywide framework called ‘Better Decisions’ to ensure we make our decisions accurately, and that our goals are directly connected to delivering the best possible experiences for people,” said Joe Osborne, a Facebook spokesperson.

These battles have taken a toll on morale. In an employee survey this month, Facebook workers reported feeling less pride in the company compared to previous years. About half felt that Facebook was having a positive impact on the world, down from roughly three-quarters earlier this year, according to a copy of the survey, known as Pulse, which was reviewed by The New York Times. Employees’ “intent to stay” also dropped, as did confidence in leadership.

BuzzFeed News previously reported on the survey results.

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/technology/facebook-takes-down-group-stop-the-steal-alleging-voter-fraud-by-democrats-342138" hreflang="en">Facebook takes down group 'Stop The Steal' alleging voter fraud by Democrats</a>

Even as Election Day and its aftermath have passed with few incidents, some disillusioned employees have quit, saying they could no longer stomach working for a company whose products they considered harmful. Others have stayed, reasoning they can make more of a difference on the inside. Still others have made the moral calculation that even with its flaws, Facebook is, on balance, doing more good than harm.

“Facebook salaries are among the highest in tech right now, and when you’re walking home with a giant paycheck every two weeks, you have to tell yourself that it’s for a good cause,” said Gregor Hochmuth, a former engineer with Instagram, which Facebook owns, who left in 2014. “Otherwise, your job is truly no different from other industries that wreck the planet and pay their employees exorbitantly to help them forget.”

With most employees working remotely during the pandemic, much of the soul-searching has taken place on Facebook’s internal Workplace network.

In May, during the heat of the Black Lives Matter protests, Zuckerberg angered many employees when he declined to remove a post by Trump that said “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Lawmakers and civil rights groups said the post threatened violence against protesters and called for it to be taken down. But Zuckerberg said the post did not violate Facebook’s rules.

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/technology/instagram-to-let-users-live-stream-for-up-to-four-hours-338583" hreflang="en">Instagram to let users live stream for up to four hours</a>

To signal their dissatisfaction, several employees formed a new Workplace group called “Take Action.” People in the group, which swelled to more than 1,500 members, pointedly changed their profile photos to an image of a raised “Black Lives Matter” fist.

The group became a home for internal dissent and dark humor about Facebook’s foibles. On several occasions, employees reacted to negative news stories about the company by posting a meme from a British comedy sketch in which two Nazis have a moral epiphany and ask themselves, “Are we the baddies?”

In June, employees staged a virtual walkout to protest Zuckerberg’s decisions regarding Trump’s posts.

In September, Facebook updated its employee policies to discourage workers from holding contentious political debates in open Workplace forums, saying they should confine the conversations to specifically designated spaces. It also required employees to use their real faces or the first initial of their names as their profile photo, a change interpreted by some workers as a crackdown.

Several employees said they were frustrated that to tackle thorny issues like misinformation, they often had to demonstrate that their proposed solutions wouldn’t anger powerful partisans or come at the expense of Facebook’s growth.

The trade-offs came into focus this month, when Facebook engineers and data scientists posted the results of a series of experiments called “P(Bad for the World).”

The company had surveyed users about whether certain posts they had seen were “good for the world” or “bad for the world.” They found that high-reach posts — posts seen by many users — were more likely to be considered “bad for the world,” a finding that some employees said alarmed them.

So the team trained a machine-learning algorithm to predict posts that users would consider “bad for the world” and demote them in news feeds. In early tests, the new algorithm successfully reduced the visibility of objectionable content. But it also lowered the number of times users opened Facebook, an internal metric known as “sessions” that executives monitor closely.

“The results were good except that it led to a decrease in sessions, which motivated us to try a different approach,” according to a summary of the results, which was posted to Facebook’s internal network and reviewed by The Times.

The team then ran a second experiment, tweaking the algorithm so that a larger set of “bad for the world” content would be demoted less strongly. While that left more objectionable posts in users’ feeds, it did not reduce their sessions or time spent.

That change was ultimately approved. But other features employees developed before the election never were.

One, called “correct the record,” would have retroactively notified users that they had shared false news and directed them to an independent fact-check. Facebook employees proposed expanding the product, which is currently used to notify people who have shared COVID-19 misinformation, to apply to other types of misinformation.

But that was vetoed by policy executives who feared it would disproportionately show notifications to people who shared false news from right-wing websites, according to two people familiar with the conversations.

Another product, an algorithm to classify and demote “hate bait” — posts that don’t strictly violate Facebook’s hate speech rules, but that provoke a flood of hateful comments — was limited to being used only on groups, rather than pages, after the policy team determined that it would primarily affect right-wing publishers if it were applied more broadly, said two people with knowledge of the conversations.

Rosen, the Facebook integrity executive, disputed those characterizations in an interview, which was held on the condition that he not be quoted directly.

He said that the “correct the record” tool wasn’t as effective as hoped, and that the company had decided to focus on other ways of curbing misinformation. He also said applying the “hate bait” detector to Facebook pages could unfairly punish publishers for hateful comments left by their followers, or make it possible for bad actors to hurt a page’s reach by spamming it with toxic comments. Neither project was shelved because of political concerns or because it reduced Facebook usage, he said.

“No News Feed product change is ever solely made because of its impact on time spent,” said Osborne, the Facebook spokesperson. He added that the people talking to The Times had no decision-making authority.

Facebook's moves to clean up its platform will be made easier, in some ways, by the end of the Trump administration. For years, Trump and other leading conservatives accused the company of anti-conservative bias each time it took steps to limit misinformation.

But even with an incoming Biden administration, Facebook will need to balance employees’ desire for social responsibility with its business goals.

“The question is, what have they learned from this election that should inform their policies in the future?" said Vanita Gupta, chief executive of the civil rights group Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. “My worry is that they’ll revert all of these changes despite the fact that the conditions that brought them forward are still with us.”

In the tense days after the presidential election, a team of Facebook employees presented the chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, with an alarming finding: Election-related misinformation was going viral on the site.

In the tense days after the presidential election, a team of Facebook employees presented the chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, with an alarming finding: Election-related misinformation was going viral on the site. President Donald Trump was already casting the election as rigged, and stories from right-wing media outlets with false and misleading claims about discarded ballots, miscounted votes and skewed tallies were among the most popular news stories on the platform. In response, the employees proposed an emergency change to the site’s news feed algorithm, which helps determine what more than 2 billion people see every day. It involved emphasizing the importance of what Facebook calls “news ecosystem quality” scores, or NEQ, a secret internal ranking it assigns to news publishers based on signals about the quality of their journalism. Also read| UK to curb Google and Facebook's dominance with tougher rules Typically, NEQ scores play a minor role in determining what appears on users’ feeds. But several days after the election, Zuckerberg agreed to increase the weight that Facebook’s algorithm gave to NEQ scores to make sure authoritative news appeared more prominently, said three people with knowledge of the decision, who were not authorized to discuss internal deliberations. The change was part of the “break glass” plans Facebook had spent months developing for the aftermath of a contested election. It resulted in a spike in visibility for big, mainstream publishers like CNN, The New York Times and NPR, while posts from highly engaged hyperpartisan pages, such as Breitbart and Occupy Democrats, became less visible, the employees said. It was a vision of what a calmer, less divisive Facebook might look like. Some employees argued the change should become permanent, even if it was unclear how that might affect the amount of time people spent on Facebook. In an employee meeting the week after the election, workers asked whether the “nicer news feed” could stay, said two people who attended. Also read| In a first, Facebook offers estimate of hate speech prevalence on its platform Guy Rosen, a Facebook executive who oversees the integrity division that is in charge of cleaning up the platform, said on a call with reporters last week that the changes were always meant to be temporary. “There has never been a plan to make these permanent,” he said. John Hegeman, who oversees the news feed, said in an interview that while Facebook might roll back these experiments, it would study and learn from them. The news feed debate illustrates a central tension that some inside Facebook are feeling acutely these days: that the company’s aspirations of improving the world are often at odds with its desire for dominance. In the past several months, as Facebook has come under more scrutiny for its role in amplifying false and divisive information, its employees have clashed over the company’s future. On one side are idealists, including many rank-and-file workers and some executives, who want to do more to limit misinformation and polarizing content. On the other side are pragmatists who fear those measures could hurt Facebook’s growth, or provoke a political backlash that leads to painful regulation. Also see: How social media companies will handle post-US election scenarios “There are tensions in virtually every product decision we make and we’ve developed a companywide framework called ‘Better Decisions’ to ensure we make our decisions accurately, and that our goals are directly connected to delivering the best possible experiences for people,” said Joe Osborne, a Facebook spokesperson. These battles have taken a toll on morale. In an employee survey this month, Facebook workers reported feeling less pride in the company compared to previous years. About half felt that Facebook was having a positive impact on the world, down from roughly three-quarters earlier this year, according to a copy of the survey, known as Pulse, which was reviewed by The New York Times. Employees’ “intent to stay” also dropped, as did confidence in leadership. BuzzFeed News previously reported on the survey results. Also read: Facebook takes down group 'Stop The Steal' alleging voter fraud by Democrats Even as Election Day and its aftermath have passed with few incidents, some disillusioned employees have quit, saying they could no longer stomach working for a company whose products they considered harmful. Others have stayed, reasoning they can make more of a difference on the inside. Still others have made the moral calculation that even with its flaws, Facebook is, on balance, doing more good than harm. “Facebook salaries are among the highest in tech right now, and when you’re walking home with a giant paycheck every two weeks, you have to tell yourself that it’s for a good cause,” said Gregor Hochmuth, a former engineer with Instagram, which Facebook owns, who left in 2014. “Otherwise, your job is truly no different from other industries that wreck the planet and pay their employees exorbitantly to help them forget.” With most employees working remotely during the pandemic, much of the soul-searching has taken place on Facebook’s internal Workplace network. In May, during the heat of the Black Lives Matter protests, Zuckerberg angered many employees when he declined to remove a post by Trump that said “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Lawmakers and civil rights groups said the post threatened violence against protesters and called for it to be taken down. But Zuckerberg said the post did not violate Facebook’s rules. Also read: Instagram to let users live stream for up to four hours To signal their dissatisfaction, several employees formed a new Workplace group called “Take Action.” People in the group, which swelled to more than 1,500 members, pointedly changed their profile photos to an image of a raised “Black Lives Matter” fist. The group became a home for internal dissent and dark humor about Facebook’s foibles. On several occasions, employees reacted to negative news stories about the company by posting a meme from a British comedy sketch in which two Nazis have a moral epiphany and ask themselves, “Are we the baddies?” In June, employees staged a virtual walkout to protest Zuckerberg’s decisions regarding Trump’s posts. In September, Facebook updated its employee policies to discourage workers from holding contentious political debates in open Workplace forums, saying they should confine the conversations to specifically designated spaces. It also required employees to use their real faces or the first initial of their names as their profile photo, a change interpreted by some workers as a crackdown. Several employees said they were frustrated that to tackle thorny issues like misinformation, they often had to demonstrate that their proposed solutions wouldn’t anger powerful partisans or come at the expense of Facebook’s growth. The trade-offs came into focus this month, when Facebook engineers and data scientists posted the results of a series of experiments called “P(Bad for the World).” The company had surveyed users about whether certain posts they had seen were “good for the world” or “bad for the world.” They found that high-reach posts — posts seen by many users — were more likely to be considered “bad for the world,” a finding that some employees said alarmed them. So the team trained a machine-learning algorithm to predict posts that users would consider “bad for the world” and demote them in news feeds. In early tests, the new algorithm successfully reduced the visibility of objectionable content. But it also lowered the number of times users opened Facebook, an internal metric known as “sessions” that executives monitor closely. “The results were good except that it led to a decrease in sessions, which motivated us to try a different approach,” according to a summary of the results, which was posted to Facebook’s internal network and reviewed by The Times. The team then ran a second experiment, tweaking the algorithm so that a larger set of “bad for the world” content would be demoted less strongly. While that left more objectionable posts in users’ feeds, it did not reduce their sessions or time spent. That change was ultimately approved. But other features employees developed before the election never were. One, called “correct the record,” would have retroactively notified users that they had shared false news and directed them to an independent fact-check. Facebook employees proposed expanding the product, which is currently used to notify people who have shared COVID-19 misinformation, to apply to other types of misinformation. But that was vetoed by policy executives who feared it would disproportionately show notifications to people who shared false news from right-wing websites, according to two people familiar with the conversations. Another product, an algorithm to classify and demote “hate bait” — posts that don’t strictly violate Facebook’s hate speech rules, but that provoke a flood of hateful comments — was limited to being used only on groups, rather than pages, after the policy team determined that it would primarily affect right-wing publishers if it were applied more broadly, said two people with knowledge of the conversations. Rosen, the Facebook integrity executive, disputed those characterizations in an interview, which was held on the condition that he not be quoted directly. He said that the “correct the record” tool wasn’t as effective as hoped, and that the company had decided to focus on other ways of curbing misinformation. He also said applying the “hate bait” detector to Facebook pages could unfairly punish publishers for hateful comments left by their followers, or make it possible for bad actors to hurt a page’s reach by spamming it with toxic comments. Neither project was shelved because of political concerns or because it reduced Facebook usage, he said. “No News Feed product change is ever solely made because of its impact on time spent,” said Osborne, the Facebook spokesperson. He added that the people talking to The Times had no decision-making authority. Facebook's moves to clean up its platform will be made easier, in some ways, by the end of the Trump administration. For years, Trump and other leading conservatives accused the company of anti-conservative bias each time it took steps to limit misinformation. But even with an incoming Biden administration, Facebook will need to balance employees’ desire for social responsibility with its business goals. “The question is, what have they learned from this election that should inform their policies in the future?" said Vanita Gupta, chief executive of the civil rights group Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. “My worry is that they’ll revert all of these changes despite the fact that the conditions that brought them forward are still with us.”

Roiled by election, Facebook struggles to balance civility and growth

The assassination of the scientist who led Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon for the past two decades threatens to cripple President-elect Joe Biden’s effort to revive the Iran nuclear deal before he can even begin his diplomacy with Tehran.

And that may well have been a main goal of the operation.

Intelligence officials say there is little doubt that Israel was behind the killing — it had all the hallmarks of a precisely timed operation by Mossad, the country’s spy agency. And the Israelis have done nothing to dispel that view. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long identified Iran as an existential threat and named the assassinated scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, as national enemy No. 1, capable of building a weapon that could threaten a country of 8 million in a single blast.

Also read|&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/iran-writes-to-un-asserting-right-to-defend-itself-against-israel-after-mohsen-fakhrizadehs-death-346174" hreflang="en">Iran writes to UN asserting 'right to defend' itself against Israel after Mohsen Fakhrizadeh's death</a>

But Netanyahu also has a second agenda.

“There must be no return to the previous nuclear agreement,” he declared shortly after it became clear that Biden — who has proposed exactly that — would be the next president.

Netanyahu believes a covert bomb program is continuing, until Friday under Fakhrizadeh’s leadership, and would be unconstrained after 2030, when the nuclear accord’s restraints on Iran’s ability to produce as much nuclear fuel as it wants expires. To critics of the deal, that is its fatal flaw.

“The reason for assassinating Fakhrizadeh wasn’t to impede Iran’s war potential, it was to impede diplomacy,” Mark Fitzpatrick, a former State Department nonproliferation official, wrote on Twitter on Friday.

It may have been both.

Also read|&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/irans-top-nuclear-scientist-mohsen-fakhrizadeh-assassinated-345915">Iran's top nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh assassinated</a>

Whatever the mix of motives, Biden must pick up the pieces in just seven weeks. The question is whether the deal the president-elect has outlined — dropping the nuclear-related sanctions President Donald Trump has imposed over the past two years if Iran returns strictly to the nuclear limits in the 2015 accord — was shot to pieces along with Fakhrizadeh’s SUV in the mountain town of Absard, Iran, east of Tehran.

The answer lies largely in how Iran reacts in the next few weeks. Three times since the start of the year, Iran has been on the receiving end of highly visible, highly damaging attacks.

First came the killing of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian commander who ran the elite Quds force of the Revolutionary Guard, in a drone strike in Iraq, where the Trump administration said he was planning attacks on U.S. forces.

Then, in early July came the mysterious explosion at a centrifuge research and development center at Natanz, a few hundred yards from the underground fuel-production center that the U.S. and Israel attacked more than a decade ago with a sophisticated cyberweapon.

Also read|<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/iran-accuses-israel-of-killing-nuclear-scientist-vows-revenge-345965">&nbsp;Iran accuses Israel of killing nuclear scientist, vows 'revenge'</a>

And now the killing of Fakhrizadeh, a shadowy figure often described as the Iranian equivalent of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist who oversaw the Manhattan Project more than 75 years ago in the race for the U.S. to develop the world’s first nuclear weapon.

If Iran holds off on significant retaliation, then the bold move to take out the chief of the nuclear program will have paid off, even if the assassination drives the program further underground.

And if the Iranians retaliate, giving Trump a pretext to launch a return strike before he leaves office in January, Biden will be inheriting bigger problems than just the wreckage of a 5-year-old diplomatic document.

Both those options seem fine with Trump’s departing foreign policy team, which is trying to lock in the radical reversal of Iran policy that has taken place over the past four years.

“The Trump administration’s goal seems plain,” said Robert Malley, who leads the International Crisis Group and was a negotiator of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.

Also read|&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/thousands-rally-outside-israel-pm-benjamin-netanyahus-residence-346149" hreflang="en">Thousands rally outside Israel PM Benjamin Netanyahu's residence</a>

The administration’s plan, he said, was “to take advantage of the time remaining before it heads to the exits to solidify its legacy and make it all the more difficult for its successor to resume diplomacy with Iran and rejoin the nuclear deal.”

Malley expressed doubts that “it will in fact succeed in killing diplomacy” or the deal.

“The center of gravity in Iran is still with those who want to wait until Biden is president,’’ said Malley, who has known Biden’s pick for secretary of state, Antony Blinken, since they attended high school together in Paris.

Biden and Blinken have made clear that returning to the deal Trump pulled out of is one of their first objectives in the Middle East.

But as Jake Sullivan, the newly appointed national security adviser, who served as one of the secret emissaries to begin the negotiations that led to the deal, put it Wednesday at an event at the University of Minnesota, “that’s really up to Iran.”

“If Iran returns to compliance, for its obligations that it has been violating, and is prepared to advance good-faith negotiations on these follow-on agreements,” Biden is willing to do the same, he said. (While Biden supported the 2015 deal, he was also in on the decision-making in 2010 as the cyberstrike against Natanz unraveled.)

Before the assassination, there was considerable evidence that the Iranians were lying low, avoiding provocations that might give Trump a pretense to strike before he leaves office. Iran’s leaders have made clear that regime survival is their No. 1 goal, and they have been careful not to take risks that could upend their hopes of lifting sanctions, and restoring the deal, after Trump’s term ends.

After the killing of Soleimani, there was a brief missile attack on a U.S. facility that miraculously killed no U.S. troops (although there were many cases of traumatic concussion injuries that Trump dismissed as “headaches.”) De-escalation followed.

There was no real response to the explosion at Natanz, also attributed to Israel, other than the subsequent installation of some advanced centrifuges to make the point that Iran’s program would move ahead, slowly and methodically. Attacks aimed at U.S. forces in Iraq, many by Iranian proxies, have diminished in recent weeks, and Iran’s feared cyberattacks on the U.S. election system seemed more like amateur hour — emails to some voters purporting to be threats from a far-right group, the Proud Boys.

But the hard-liners are angry, and some experts fear that the combined loss of Iran’s most revered general and its most revered nuclear scientist is too much. Pressure is already mounting for some response — either a calculated one, presumably on the orders of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, or an unscripted lashing out, perhaps by a rogue element of the Iranian military or an Iranian-sponsored militia that does not get the memo to wait for Inauguration Day.

That may be exactly what Netanyahu — and Trump and his advisers — is betting on. Any retaliation could result in U.S. military action, exactly what Trump contemplated, and was argued out of, two weeks ago when news came that Iran was continuing to produce nuclear fuel above the limits of the 2015 accord. (That move, of course, was in response to Trump’s decision in mid-2018 to break out of the agreement himself.)

U.S. military officials said Saturday that they were closely monitoring Iranian security forces after Iran’s vow to retaliate for Fakhrizadeh’s death but that they had not detected any usual Iranian troop or weaponry movements.

The officials declined to comment on any heightened U.S. alert levels or additional measures to protect U.S. forces in the Middle East, noting that the more than 40,000 troops in the region are already at a relatively high level of alert.

A cycle of military action could make it all but impossible to reconstitute the Iran nuclear deal, much less negotiate a bigger, longer-lasting diplomatic arrangement.

If the response to the killing of Fakhrizadeh is a cycle of retaliation and counter-retaliation, the nuclear program will go deeper underground — quite literally — where bombs and saboteurs cannot reach it, and cyberstrikes may be ineffective.

“We should not exclude the use of force, but military strikes won’t bring us a long-term shutdown of the program,” said R. Nicholas Burns, a former undersecretary of state and the Iran nuclear negotiator from 2005 to 2008 under President George W. Bush.

“Our goal is to roll back and shut down its nuclear program for decades to come,’' said Burns, who now teaches diplomacy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and “achieving that through tough-minded diplomacy is still a smarter and more effective option than a military strike that could provoke a wider war in the Middle East.”

The assassination of the scientist who led Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon for the past two decades threatens to cripple President-elect Joe Biden’s effort to revive the Iran nuclear deal before he can even begin his diplomacy with Tehran.

The assassination of the scientist who led Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon for the past two decades threatens to cripple President-elect Joe Biden’s effort to revive the Iran nuclear deal before he can even begin his diplomacy with Tehran. And that may well have been a main goal of the operation. Intelligence officials say there is little doubt that Israel was behind the killing — it had all the hallmarks of a precisely timed operation by Mossad, the country’s spy agency. And the Israelis have done nothing to dispel that view. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long identified Iran as an existential threat and named the assassinated scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, as national enemy No. 1, capable of building a weapon that could threaten a country of 8 million in a single blast. Also read| Iran writes to UN asserting 'right to defend' itself against Israel after Mohsen Fakhrizadeh's death But Netanyahu also has a second agenda. “There must be no return to the previous nuclear agreement,” he declared shortly after it became clear that Biden — who has proposed exactly that — would be the next president. Netanyahu believes a covert bomb program is continuing, until Friday under Fakhrizadeh’s leadership, and would be unconstrained after 2030, when the nuclear accord’s restraints on Iran’s ability to produce as much nuclear fuel as it wants expires. To critics of the deal, that is its fatal flaw. “The reason for assassinating Fakhrizadeh wasn’t to impede Iran’s war potential, it was to impede diplomacy,” Mark Fitzpatrick, a former State Department nonproliferation official, wrote on Twitter on Friday. It may have been both. Also read| Iran's top nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh assassinated Whatever the mix of motives, Biden must pick up the pieces in just seven weeks. The question is whether the deal the president-elect has outlined — dropping the nuclear-related sanctions President Donald Trump has imposed over the past two years if Iran returns strictly to the nuclear limits in the 2015 accord — was shot to pieces along with Fakhrizadeh’s SUV in the mountain town of Absard, Iran, east of Tehran. The answer lies largely in how Iran reacts in the next few weeks. Three times since the start of the year, Iran has been on the receiving end of highly visible, highly damaging attacks. First came the killing of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian commander who ran the elite Quds force of the Revolutionary Guard, in a drone strike in Iraq, where the Trump administration said he was planning attacks on U.S. forces. Then, in early July came the mysterious explosion at a centrifuge research and development center at Natanz, a few hundred yards from the underground fuel-production center that the U.S. and Israel attacked more than a decade ago with a sophisticated cyberweapon. Also read| Iran accuses Israel of killing nuclear scientist, vows 'revenge' And now the killing of Fakhrizadeh, a shadowy figure often described as the Iranian equivalent of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist who oversaw the Manhattan Project more than 75 years ago in the race for the U.S. to develop the world’s first nuclear weapon. If Iran holds off on significant retaliation, then the bold move to take out the chief of the nuclear program will have paid off, even if the assassination drives the program further underground. And if the Iranians retaliate, giving Trump a pretext to launch a return strike before he leaves office in January, Biden will be inheriting bigger problems than just the wreckage of a 5-year-old diplomatic document. Both those options seem fine with Trump’s departing foreign policy team, which is trying to lock in the radical reversal of Iran policy that has taken place over the past four years. “The Trump administration’s goal seems plain,” said Robert Malley, who leads the International Crisis Group and was a negotiator of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Also read| Thousands rally outside Israel PM Benjamin Netanyahu's residence The administration’s plan, he said, was “to take advantage of the time remaining before it heads to the exits to solidify its legacy and make it all the more difficult for its successor to resume diplomacy with Iran and rejoin the nuclear deal.” Malley expressed doubts that “it will in fact succeed in killing diplomacy” or the deal. “The center of gravity in Iran is still with those who want to wait until Biden is president,’’ said Malley, who has known Biden’s pick for secretary of state, Antony Blinken, since they attended high school together in Paris. Biden and Blinken have made clear that returning to the deal Trump pulled out of is one of their first objectives in the Middle East. But as Jake Sullivan, the newly appointed national security adviser, who served as one of the secret emissaries to begin the negotiations that led to the deal, put it Wednesday at an event at the University of Minnesota, “that’s really up to Iran.” “If Iran returns to compliance, for its obligations that it has been violating, and is prepared to advance good-faith negotiations on these follow-on agreements,” Biden is willing to do the same, he said. (While Biden supported the 2015 deal, he was also in on the decision-making in 2010 as the cyberstrike against Natanz unraveled.) Before the assassination, there was considerable evidence that the Iranians were lying low, avoiding provocations that might give Trump a pretense to strike before he leaves office. Iran’s leaders have made clear that regime survival is their No. 1 goal, and they have been careful not to take risks that could upend their hopes of lifting sanctions, and restoring the deal, after Trump’s term ends. After the killing of Soleimani, there was a brief missile attack on a U.S. facility that miraculously killed no U.S. troops (although there were many cases of traumatic concussion injuries that Trump dismissed as “headaches.”) De-escalation followed. There was no real response to the explosion at Natanz, also attributed to Israel, other than the subsequent installation of some advanced centrifuges to make the point that Iran’s program would move ahead, slowly and methodically. Attacks aimed at U.S. forces in Iraq, many by Iranian proxies, have diminished in recent weeks, and Iran’s feared cyberattacks on the U.S. election system seemed more like amateur hour — emails to some voters purporting to be threats from a far-right group, the Proud Boys. But the hard-liners are angry, and some experts fear that the combined loss of Iran’s most revered general and its most revered nuclear scientist is too much. Pressure is already mounting for some response — either a calculated one, presumably on the orders of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, or an unscripted lashing out, perhaps by a rogue element of the Iranian military or an Iranian-sponsored militia that does not get the memo to wait for Inauguration Day. That may be exactly what Netanyahu — and Trump and his advisers — is betting on. Any retaliation could result in U.S. military action, exactly what Trump contemplated, and was argued out of, two weeks ago when news came that Iran was continuing to produce nuclear fuel above the limits of the 2015 accord. (That move, of course, was in response to Trump’s decision in mid-2018 to break out of the agreement himself.) U.S. military officials said Saturday that they were closely monitoring Iranian security forces after Iran’s vow to retaliate for Fakhrizadeh’s death but that they had not detected any usual Iranian troop or weaponry movements. The officials declined to comment on any heightened U.S. alert levels or additional measures to protect U.S. forces in the Middle East, noting that the more than 40,000 troops in the region are already at a relatively high level of alert. A cycle of military action could make it all but impossible to reconstitute the Iran nuclear deal, much less negotiate a bigger, longer-lasting diplomatic arrangement. If the response to the killing of Fakhrizadeh is a cycle of retaliation and counter-retaliation, the nuclear program will go deeper underground — quite literally — where bombs and saboteurs cannot reach it, and cyberstrikes may be ineffective. “We should not exclude the use of force, but military strikes won’t bring us a long-term shutdown of the program,” said R. Nicholas Burns, a former undersecretary of state and the Iran nuclear negotiator from 2005 to 2008 under President George W. Bush. “Our goal is to roll back and shut down its nuclear program for decades to come,’' said Burns, who now teaches diplomacy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and “achieving that through tough-minded diplomacy is still a smarter and more effective option than a military strike that could provoke a wider war in the Middle East.”

Assassination in Iran could limit Biden’s options. Was that the goal?

Donald Trump's decision to have a recount in Wisconsin's largest county backfired on him as it ended Friday with Democratic President-elect Joe Biden gaining votes.

President-elect Joe Biden’s lead increased by 132 votes after county election officials recounted over 450,000 votes. Biden, a Democrat, won the state by nearly 20,600 votes, and his margin in Milwaukee and Dane counties was about 2-to-1.

Trump paid to have a recount in both those counties, which have large numbers of Democrat voters. As of Friday morning, Trump had gained 68 votes over Biden in Dane County.

Overall, Biden won the November 3 US presidential election with 306 Electoral College votes - many more than the 270 needed for victory - to Trump's 232. Biden also leads by more than six million in the popular vote tally.

After the recount ended, Milwaukee County Clerk George Christenson said: "The recount demonstrates what we already know: that elections in Milwaukee County are fair, transparent, accurate and secure."

The Trump campaign is still expected to mount a legal challenge to the overall result in Wisconsin, but time is running out. The state is due to certify its presidential result on Tuesday.&nbsp;

The Wisconsin Voters Alliance, a conservative group, has already filed a lawsuit against election officials, seeking to block certification of the results. It echoes many of the claims Trump is expected to make.

Trump’s campaign has already failed elsewhere in court without proof of widespread fraud, which experts widely agree doesn’t exist. Trump legal challenges have failed in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania.

Donald Trump's decision to have a recount in Wisconsin's largest county backfired on him as it ended Friday with Democratic President-elect Joe Biden gaining votes.

Donald Trump's decision to have a recount in Wisconsin's largest county backfired on him as it ended Friday with Democratic President-elect Joe Biden gaining votes. President-elect Joe Biden’s lead increased by 132 votes after county election officials recounted over 450,000 votes. Biden, a Democrat, won the state by nearly 20,600 votes, and his margin in Milwaukee and Dane counties was about 2-to-1. Trump paid to have a recount in both those counties, which have large numbers of Democrat voters. As of Friday morning, Trump had gained 68 votes over Biden in Dane County. Overall, Biden won the November 3 US presidential election with 306 Electoral College votes - many more than the 270 needed for victory - to Trump's 232. Biden also leads by more than six million in the popular vote tally. After the recount ended, Milwaukee County Clerk George Christenson said: "The recount demonstrates what we already know: that elections in Milwaukee County are fair, transparent, accurate and secure." The Trump campaign is still expected to mount a legal challenge to the overall result in Wisconsin, but time is running out. The state is due to certify its presidential result on Tuesday. The Wisconsin Voters Alliance, a conservative group, has already filed a lawsuit against election officials, seeking to block certification of the results. It echoes many of the claims Trump is expected to make. Trump’s campaign has already failed elsewhere in court without proof of widespread fraud, which experts widely agree doesn’t exist. Trump legal challenges have failed in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania.

Wisconsin county vote recount demanded by Trump gives Biden a boost

Just a few seats shy of a majority in the state House of Representatives, Democrats in Pennsylvania this year zeroed in on Republican-held suburban districts, where disdain for President Donald Trump ran hot.

One of their prime targets was in the North Hills suburbs outside Pittsburgh, which are home to big brick houses, excellent public schools and “the fastest-trending Democratic district in the state,” according to Emily Skopov, the Democratic nominee for an open seat there, who gamely knocked on the doors of Republican voters in the days before Nov. 3.

She was half right. Joe Biden carried Pennsylvania’s House District 28, after Trump had won it by 9 percentage points in 2016.

But Skopov, the founder of a nonprofit group who positioned herself as a moderate, was defeated.

Across the country, suburban voters’ disgust with Trump — the key to Biden’s election — did not translate into a wide rebuke of other Republicans, as Democrats had expected after the party made significant gains in suburban areas in the 2018 midterm elections. From the top of the party down to the state level, Democratic officials are awakening to the reality that voters may have delivered a one-time verdict on Trump that does not equal ongoing support for center-left policies.

“There’s a significant difference between a referendum on a clown show, which is what we had at the top of the ticket, and embracing the values of the Democratic ticket,” said Nichole Remmert, Skopov’s campaign manager. “People bought into Joe Biden to stop the insanity in the White House. They did not suddenly become Democrats.”

That dawning truth is evident in the narrower majority that House Democrats will hold in Congress next year and especially in the bloodbath that the party suffered in legislative races in key states around the country, despite directing hundreds of millions of dollars and deploying top party figures like former President Barack Obama to obscure down-ballot elections.

This year, Democrats targeted a dozen state legislative chambers where Republicans held tenuous majorities, including in Pennsylvania, Texas, Arizona, North Carolina and Minnesota. Their goal was to check the power of Republicans to redraw congressional and legislative districts in 2021, and to curb the rightward drift of policies from abortion to gun safety to voting rights.

In all cases, Democrats came up short. None of their targeted legislative chambers flipped, even though Biden carried many of the districts that down-ballot Democrats did not. It could make it harder for Democrats to retain a House majority in 2022.

“In 2018 in the Philadelphia suburbs, you had rage voting against Trump,” said Sen. Bob Casey Jr. of Pennsylvania, a Democrat. But this year, with Trump on the ballot, the president brought out many more supporters who are occasional voters, diluting what Democrats had widely anticipated would be another wave election for them. “It may be suburban voters are still ticket splitters,” Casey said.

In the aftermath, moderate Democrats are feuding with progressives over whether policies that excite the party’s base, such as higher taxes to pay for social programs, policing overhauls and a rapid move away from fossil fuels, are a losing message with swing voters. Progressives have responded that moderate candidates aren’t offering voters an affirmative program to improve their lives.

Skopov echoed a Virginia congresswoman, Abigail Spanberger, who heatedly told House Democrats on a private call after the election that the party must banish the words “socialism” and “defund the police,” after Republicans defeated moderate Democrats tagged with those positions, often inaccurately, in swing House districts across the country.

On Twitter, Skopov wrote that she had been “a casualty/collateral damage of this offensively poor messaging.”

Biden’s winning margin of over 6 million in the popular vote obscured how narrow his Electoral College victory was: He carried three battleground states — Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin — by fewer than 44,000 total votes.

“One of the big questions is whether a Trumpist 2024 candidate can be a little bit milder so as to not alienate the suburbs, yet still inspire the low-propensity Republicans to vote at 2020 levels,” said J.J. Balaban, a Democratic strategist in Pennsylvania. “If they can pull that off, it’s going to be a very hard environment for Democrats.”

In the run-up to Election Day, the major legislative campaign committees for each party, along with independent groups, poured record sums of money into races. For Democrats, the aim was to take electoral districting power away from Republicans, who after a red wave in 2010, drew gerrymandered maps that favored the party’s candidates.

The blue wave of 2018 left Democrats just a few seats away from a majority in a dozen chambers, including Arizona’s House and Senate; statehouses in Iowa, Michigan, Texas and Pennsylvania; and both the North Carolina House and Senate.

Democrats’ failure to flip any of their targeted chambers means that Republicans will have control next year of 20 state governments that will collectively draw 188 congressional districts, according to one analysis. In a bright spot for Democrats, the party is closing in on a supermajority in the New York Senate. That outcome would help give Democrats control of mapmaking in states with a total of 73 House districts.

(An additional 167 districts will be in states with divided governments or where independent commissions draw electoral maps.)

Republican mapmakers will seek to dilute the emerging Democratic strength in the nation’s suburbs by packing some of those voters into urban districts while joining others to conservative rural districts.

“The most important consequence of the elections is that Republicans prevented a decade of liberal gerrymandering and gave Republicans the chance to take back the House in 2022,” said David Abrams, deputy executive director of the Republican Legislative Leadership Committee, which raised money for state races.

Texas was Democrats’ biggest failure. After flipping a dozen seats in the Statehouse two years ago, the party was just nine seats shy of a majority.

Its most likely opportunities were nine Republican-held districts where former Rep. Beto O’Rourke surpassed Sen. Ted Cruz in their 2018 Senate race.

Most of these districts were in the suburbs of Dallas and Houston. Yet Democrats failed in all but one of the nine races, although Biden carried many of the districts. With majorities in both legislative chambers and a Republican governor, Greg Abbott, Republicans will control the drawing of as many as 39 congressional seats next year, when Texas is projected to gain three House seats after the 2020 census, more than any other state.

“I think that there were voters out there who were disgusted with Donald Trump and saw Joe Biden as an alternative,” said state Rep. Chris Turner, chair of the Texas House Democratic Caucus. “They said, ‘You know what, I’m not a Democrat — maybe I’m an independent; maybe I’m a moderate Republican — I’m going to vote for Republicans down ballot.’ ”

Turner said Republicans successfully nationalized the races by accusing down-ballot Democrats of seeking to defund the police, favoring socialism and aiming to ban fossil fuels, even though none backed that agenda.

“I do think the Republican attacks, false as they were, made voters question whether we could be trusted in terms of public safety or the energy industry,” he said.

In Arizona, a state that Biden won by about 10,500 votes in the latest count, the president-elect became only the second Democratic presidential candidate to win the state since 1948, largely by carrying the demographically evolving Phoenix suburbs.

But Democrats hoping to gain majorities in the state Legislature — where they needed just three seats in the Senate and two in the House — came up short. Republicans retained control.

In the Phoenix suburb of Chandler, a Democrat won a Statehouse seat in 2018, in a district no Republican had ever lost.

This year, outside groups spent $1.3 million trying to unseat the Republican state senator from Chandler, J.D. Mesnard. Although Biden carried the district, Mesnard won by an even larger margin than two years ago.

“Those voters, it seems like they registered their protest at the top of the ticket and then reverted back to their typical voting behavior down ballot,” said Charlie Fisher, executive director of the Arizona Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee.

Although the state Democratic Party encouraged candidates to run on local issues, Republican messaging in Arizona, too, succeeded in tarring moderate Democrats with threatening public safety.

But Fisher disagreed that Democrats needed to back off progressive policies.

“I always reject this notion — it’s either we’re all in on progressive policies or on trying to persuade independents and moderates to join us,” he said. “That’s a false choice. What we need to do is both those things. The energy of our party is coming from the progressives. We absolutely need to grow those numbers. But in Arizona we still need to communicate with independent voters.”

Pennsylvania may have been the most frustrating state for Democrats down ballot.

Two years ago, its candidates flipped a net of five Senate seats and 11 in the House. All of the House pickups came in the Philadelphia suburbs, which were also the key to Biden’s victory this month.

But Republicans retained their majorities in both chambers. Skopov, the losing candidate in suburban Pittsburgh, was quick to tell voters while knocking on doors before the election: “I’m a fan of our police. I’m not looking to defund police.”

Still, she was hammered in mailings by Republicans who portrayed her as having an anti-law-enforcement position, which her campaign manager, Remmert, said did great damage.

Remmert cautioned that if Democrats hoped to cement their 2020 suburban gains in a presidential race in which Republicans put up someone less divisive than Trump, they would need to recalibrate their messaging.

“A lot of the suburban districts that you’re trying to flip, you can’t win by just turning out your base,” she said. “We could get every Democratic vote in those districts and you’re still not going to win. You have to be able to turn out independents and Republican voters for your message.”

Just a few seats shy of a majority in the state House of Representatives, Democrats in Pennsylvania this year zeroed in on Republican-held suburban districts, where disdain for President Donald Trump ran hot.

Just a few seats shy of a majority in the state House of Representatives, Democrats in Pennsylvania this year zeroed in on Republican-held suburban districts, where disdain for President Donald Trump ran hot. One of their prime targets was in the North Hills suburbs outside Pittsburgh, which are home to big brick houses, excellent public schools and “the fastest-trending Democratic district in the state,” according to Emily Skopov, the Democratic nominee for an open seat there, who gamely knocked on the doors of Republican voters in the days before Nov. 3. She was half right. Joe Biden carried Pennsylvania’s House District 28, after Trump had won it by 9 percentage points in 2016. But Skopov, the founder of a nonprofit group who positioned herself as a moderate, was defeated. Across the country, suburban voters’ disgust with Trump — the key to Biden’s election — did not translate into a wide rebuke of other Republicans, as Democrats had expected after the party made significant gains in suburban areas in the 2018 midterm elections. From the top of the party down to the state level, Democratic officials are awakening to the reality that voters may have delivered a one-time verdict on Trump that does not equal ongoing support for center-left policies. “There’s a significant difference between a referendum on a clown show, which is what we had at the top of the ticket, and embracing the values of the Democratic ticket,” said Nichole Remmert, Skopov’s campaign manager. “People bought into Joe Biden to stop the insanity in the White House. They did not suddenly become Democrats.” That dawning truth is evident in the narrower majority that House Democrats will hold in Congress next year and especially in the bloodbath that the party suffered in legislative races in key states around the country, despite directing hundreds of millions of dollars and deploying top party figures like former President Barack Obama to obscure down-ballot elections. This year, Democrats targeted a dozen state legislative chambers where Republicans held tenuous majorities, including in Pennsylvania, Texas, Arizona, North Carolina and Minnesota. Their goal was to check the power of Republicans to redraw congressional and legislative districts in 2021, and to curb the rightward drift of policies from abortion to gun safety to voting rights. In all cases, Democrats came up short. None of their targeted legislative chambers flipped, even though Biden carried many of the districts that down-ballot Democrats did not. It could make it harder for Democrats to retain a House majority in 2022. “In 2018 in the Philadelphia suburbs, you had rage voting against Trump,” said Sen. Bob Casey Jr. of Pennsylvania, a Democrat. But this year, with Trump on the ballot, the president brought out many more supporters who are occasional voters, diluting what Democrats had widely anticipated would be another wave election for them. “It may be suburban voters are still ticket splitters,” Casey said. In the aftermath, moderate Democrats are feuding with progressives over whether policies that excite the party’s base, such as higher taxes to pay for social programs, policing overhauls and a rapid move away from fossil fuels, are a losing message with swing voters. Progressives have responded that moderate candidates aren’t offering voters an affirmative program to improve their lives. Skopov echoed a Virginia congresswoman, Abigail Spanberger, who heatedly told House Democrats on a private call after the election that the party must banish the words “socialism” and “defund the police,” after Republicans defeated moderate Democrats tagged with those positions, often inaccurately, in swing House districts across the country. On Twitter, Skopov wrote that she had been “a casualty/collateral damage of this offensively poor messaging.” Biden’s winning margin of over 6 million in the popular vote obscured how narrow his Electoral College victory was: He carried three battleground states — Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin — by fewer than 44,000 total votes. “One of the big questions is whether a Trumpist 2024 candidate can be a little bit milder so as to not alienate the suburbs, yet still inspire the low-propensity Republicans to vote at 2020 levels,” said J.J. Balaban, a Democratic strategist in Pennsylvania. “If they can pull that off, it’s going to be a very hard environment for Democrats.” In the run-up to Election Day, the major legislative campaign committees for each party, along with independent groups, poured record sums of money into races. For Democrats, the aim was to take electoral districting power away from Republicans, who after a red wave in 2010, drew gerrymandered maps that favored the party’s candidates. The blue wave of 2018 left Democrats just a few seats away from a majority in a dozen chambers, including Arizona’s House and Senate; statehouses in Iowa, Michigan, Texas and Pennsylvania; and both the North Carolina House and Senate. Democrats’ failure to flip any of their targeted chambers means that Republicans will have control next year of 20 state governments that will collectively draw 188 congressional districts, according to one analysis. In a bright spot for Democrats, the party is closing in on a supermajority in the New York Senate. That outcome would help give Democrats control of mapmaking in states with a total of 73 House districts. (An additional 167 districts will be in states with divided governments or where independent commissions draw electoral maps.) Republican mapmakers will seek to dilute the emerging Democratic strength in the nation’s suburbs by packing some of those voters into urban districts while joining others to conservative rural districts. “The most important consequence of the elections is that Republicans prevented a decade of liberal gerrymandering and gave Republicans the chance to take back the House in 2022,” said David Abrams, deputy executive director of the Republican Legislative Leadership Committee, which raised money for state races. Texas was Democrats’ biggest failure. After flipping a dozen seats in the Statehouse two years ago, the party was just nine seats shy of a majority. Its most likely opportunities were nine Republican-held districts where former Rep. Beto O’Rourke surpassed Sen. Ted Cruz in their 2018 Senate race. Most of these districts were in the suburbs of Dallas and Houston. Yet Democrats failed in all but one of the nine races, although Biden carried many of the districts. With majorities in both legislative chambers and a Republican governor, Greg Abbott, Republicans will control the drawing of as many as 39 congressional seats next year, when Texas is projected to gain three House seats after the 2020 census, more than any other state. “I think that there were voters out there who were disgusted with Donald Trump and saw Joe Biden as an alternative,” said state Rep. Chris Turner, chair of the Texas House Democratic Caucus. “They said, ‘You know what, I’m not a Democrat — maybe I’m an independent; maybe I’m a moderate Republican — I’m going to vote for Republicans down ballot.’ ” Turner said Republicans successfully nationalized the races by accusing down-ballot Democrats of seeking to defund the police, favoring socialism and aiming to ban fossil fuels, even though none backed that agenda. “I do think the Republican attacks, false as they were, made voters question whether we could be trusted in terms of public safety or the energy industry,” he said. In Arizona, a state that Biden won by about 10,500 votes in the latest count, the president-elect became only the second Democratic presidential candidate to win the state since 1948, largely by carrying the demographically evolving Phoenix suburbs. But Democrats hoping to gain majorities in the state Legislature — where they needed just three seats in the Senate and two in the House — came up short. Republicans retained control. In the Phoenix suburb of Chandler, a Democrat won a Statehouse seat in 2018, in a district no Republican had ever lost. This year, outside groups spent $1.3 million trying to unseat the Republican state senator from Chandler, J.D. Mesnard. Although Biden carried the district, Mesnard won by an even larger margin than two years ago. “Those voters, it seems like they registered their protest at the top of the ticket and then reverted back to their typical voting behavior down ballot,” said Charlie Fisher, executive director of the Arizona Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee. Although the state Democratic Party encouraged candidates to run on local issues, Republican messaging in Arizona, too, succeeded in tarring moderate Democrats with threatening public safety. But Fisher disagreed that Democrats needed to back off progressive policies. “I always reject this notion — it’s either we’re all in on progressive policies or on trying to persuade independents and moderates to join us,” he said. “That’s a false choice. What we need to do is both those things. The energy of our party is coming from the progressives. We absolutely need to grow those numbers. But in Arizona we still need to communicate with independent voters.” Pennsylvania may have been the most frustrating state for Democrats down ballot. Two years ago, its candidates flipped a net of five Senate seats and 11 in the House. All of the House pickups came in the Philadelphia suburbs, which were also the key to Biden’s victory this month. But Republicans retained their majorities in both chambers. Skopov, the losing candidate in suburban Pittsburgh, was quick to tell voters while knocking on doors before the election: “I’m a fan of our police. I’m not looking to defund police.” Still, she was hammered in mailings by Republicans who portrayed her as having an anti-law-enforcement position, which her campaign manager, Remmert, said did great damage. Remmert cautioned that if Democrats hoped to cement their 2020 suburban gains in a presidential race in which Republicans put up someone less divisive than Trump, they would need to recalibrate their messaging. “A lot of the suburban districts that you’re trying to flip, you can’t win by just turning out your base,” she said. “We could get every Democratic vote in those districts and you’re still not going to win. You have to be able to turn out independents and Republican voters for your message.”

How Democrats suffered crushing down-ballot losses across America

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Wisconsin county vote recount demanded by Trump gives Biden a boost Donald Trump's decision to have a recount in Wisconsin's largest county backfired on him as 

Wisconsin county vote recount demanded by Trump gives Biden a boost Donald Trump's decision to have a recount in Wisconsin's largest county backfired on him as it ended Friday with Democratic President-elect Joe Biden gaining votes | READ MORE 'Don't ever talk to the president that way': Donald Trump snaps at reporter Donald Trump once again snapped at a journalist when he was asked question about his defeat in the recently-conducted US elections | READ MORE US court denies Trump's Pennsylvania election challenge A federal appeals court on Friday rejected an attempt by US President Donald Trump's campaign to block President-elect Joe Biden from being declared the winner of Pennsylvania | READ MORE Rockets target Eritrea as Ethiopia leader resists calls for dialogue Eritrea's capital came under fire from Ethiopia's breakaway Tigray region Friday, raising fears that Ethiopia's internal conflict could spread as leader Abiy Ahmed resisted calls for dialogue | READ MORE Video images of police beating Black man are 'shameful', says Macron French President Emmanuel Macron said Friday that images of a Black man being beaten up by Paris police were "shameful" for France | READ MORE US sanctions Chinese, Russian firms that supported Iran missile programme The US has announced economic sanctions on Chinese and Russian companies that it said had supported the development of Iran's missile programme | READ MORE Uzbekistan to repatriate more citizens from crowded Syrian camps Uzbekistan plans to repatriate another group of its citizens, mostly women and children, from Syria where they are staying at crowded camps with other families of Islamic State fighters, an Uzbek government source told Reuters on Friday | READ MORE German troops suspected of running anti-Semitic chat group, report says Several German soldiers have been suspected of organising a chat group relating to anti-Semitism, right-wing extremism and pornography | READ MORE

Morning news brief: Setbacks for Trump, his reprimand to media and more

US&nbsp;President <a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/donald-trump">Donald&nbsp;Trump</a>&nbsp;said on Thursday he will leave the White House if the Electoral College votes for President-elect <a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/joe-biden">Joe Biden</a>, the closest he has come to conceding the November&nbsp;3 election, even as he repeated unfounded claims of massive voter fraud.

Speaking to reporters on the Thanksgiving holiday, Republican&nbsp;Trump&nbsp;said if Democrat Biden - who is due to be sworn in on January&nbsp;20 - is formally declared the winner by the Electoral College, he will depart the White House.

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/trump-says-hell-leave-if-biden-wins-electoral-college-vote-345673" hreflang="en">Trump says he'll leave if Biden wins Electoral College vote</a>

Asked if he would leave the White House if the Electoral College votes for Biden,&nbsp;Trump&nbsp;said: "Certainly I will. Certainly I will. And you know that."

Trump&nbsp;has so far refused to fully acknowledge his defeat, though earlier this week - with mounting pressure from his own Republican ranks - he agreed to let Biden's transition process officially proceed.

Frenzied efforts by&nbsp;Trump&nbsp;and his aides to overturn results in key states, either by lawsuits or by pressuring state legislators, have failed, and he is running out of options.

Showing that he intends to stay in the political fray until the end of his term,&nbsp;Trump&nbsp;said on Thursday he would travel on Dec. 5 to Georgia, a once solidly Republican state he lost narrowly to Biden, to campaign for two Republican US&nbsp;Senate candidates.

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However, according to a report by Washington Post, in private groups and telephone discussions, Trump has been talking about a completely extraordinary next act: another presidential run in 2024.

Donald Trump won 70 million votes in the <a href="https://www.wionews.com/us-election">US election</a>&nbsp;2020, which is more than what he won in 2016 and&nbsp;more than any incumbent president has won in American history.&nbsp;There's a large number of Americans who still believe in him and his story of election fraud.

In a gesture to the truth that he is bound to leave office in January, the president is genuinely considering life past the White House, advising counselors that he needs to stay an inescapable power in governmental issues and the media — maybe by running for the White House once more.&nbsp;

Trump has told friends he could report a 2024 mission before the finish of this current year, which would quickly set up a possible rematch with President-elect Joe Biden.&nbsp;

Trump additionally has been investigating approaches to bring in cash for moderately little work, for example, giving paid talks to corporate gatherings or offering passes to assemblies. Furthermore, he may attempt to compose a score-settling diary of his time as president and show up on TV, in a paid or unpaid limit.&nbsp;

In spite of the fact that there has likewise been extensive babble among Trump's partners about his beginning his very own media organization, numerous near the president said they accept that choice is more uncertain, to a limited extent since it would be a burdensome endeavor without ensured achievement. These guides, similar to some others met for this story, talked on the state of namelessness to truly examine delicate themes.&nbsp;

There is likewise tension on Trump to adapt his post-administration considering his own obligation and legitimate difficulties. He has installments due throughout the following four years of more than $400 million in credits and could acquire considerable legitimate charges identified with various examinations and claims.&nbsp;

Trump will "attempt to stay a political and media power," said Christopher Ruddy, a long-lasting companion who has been in contact with the president. "He has all these current organizations. He'll have new connections."&nbsp;

Whatever stage he chooses to utilize, Trump intends to look for retribution against those he accepts have double-crossed him — a gathering that incorporates Fox News Channel, which Trump had since quite a while ago adulated for the slavish inclusion on a portion of its projects yet now tries to rebuff.&nbsp;

Trump has railed secretly about the official discussion directed by Fox's Chris Wallace, the way that the organization was the primary significant news organization to call Arizona for Biden and that one of Fox's journalists affirmed the Atlantic's detailing that Trump had called military assistance individuals "suckers" and "washouts."&nbsp;

"He is truly furious with Fox," said Ruddy, who runs Newsmax, a traditionalist media organization whose link channel the president has advanced as a Fox elective.&nbsp;

After Biden's initiation, Trump is probably going to withdraw first to Florida, where he travels in the colder time of year at his Mar-a-Lago Club, counsels said. While in office, he changed his citizen enrollment from New York to Palm Beach, Fla. Individuals who have examined plans with Trump said he is probably going to promptly get more associated with his organizations where income has plunged.&nbsp;

Trump's daughter&nbsp;Ivanka, child in-law Jared Kushner and other grown-up youngsters have been centered more around their own fates than the president's, despite the fact that their professional alternatives and individual brands are inseparably attached to him, as indicated by a senior organization official who has spoken with relatives.&nbsp;

Indeed, even as Trump and a portion of his lawyers keep on spreading dubious schemes and case he is the legitimate champ of the political race, his political circle has been rising lately to discussing how Trump's post-administration will come to fruition — and how a man fixated on being viewed as a victor would attempt to disinfect the odor of being a political decision failure.&nbsp;

One counsel who as of late talked with the president said that Trump revealed to him he intended to report another mission in three weeks and that he needed to act rapidly to attempt to freeze the huge field of forthcoming 2024 Republican official competitors. That gathering incorporates, in any event, three individuals who have served in the organization: Vice President Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and previous US&nbsp;diplomat to the United Nations Nikki Haley.&nbsp;

In any case, different counselors advised that, as is frequently the situation with the ping-ponging president, Trump's perspectives on the issue are continually advancing and he has made no last assurance.

&nbsp;

US President Donald Trump said on Thursday he will leave the White House if the Electoral College votes for President-elect Joe Biden, the closest he has come to conceding the November 3 election, even as he repeated unfounded claims of massive voter fraud.

US President Donald Trump said on Thursday he will leave the White House if the Electoral College votes for President-elect Joe Biden, the closest he has come to conceding the November 3 election, even as he repeated unfounded claims of massive voter fraud. Speaking to reporters on the Thanksgiving holiday, Republican Trump said if Democrat Biden - who is due to be sworn in on January 20 - is formally declared the winner by the Electoral College, he will depart the White House. Also read: Trump says he'll leave if Biden wins Electoral College vote Asked if he would leave the White House if the Electoral College votes for Biden, Trump said: "Certainly I will. Certainly I will. And you know that." Trump has so far refused to fully acknowledge his defeat, though earlier this week - with mounting pressure from his own Republican ranks - he agreed to let Biden's transition process officially proceed. Frenzied efforts by Trump and his aides to overturn results in key states, either by lawsuits or by pressuring state legislators, have failed, and he is running out of options. Showing that he intends to stay in the political fray until the end of his term, Trump said on Thursday he would travel on Dec. 5 to Georgia, a once solidly Republican state he lost narrowly to Biden, to campaign for two Republican US Senate candidates. × However, according to a report by Washington Post, in private groups and telephone discussions, Trump has been talking about a completely extraordinary next act: another presidential run in 2024. Donald Trump won 70 million votes in the US election 2020, which is more than what he won in 2016 and more than any incumbent president has won in American history. There's a large number of Americans who still believe in him and his story of election fraud. In a gesture to the truth that he is bound to leave office in January, the president is genuinely considering life past the White House, advising counselors that he needs to stay an inescapable power in governmental issues and the media — maybe by running for the White House once more. Trump has told friends he could report a 2024 mission before the finish of this current year, which would quickly set up a possible rematch with President-elect Joe Biden. Trump additionally has been investigating approaches to bring in cash for moderately little work, for example, giving paid talks to corporate gatherings or offering passes to assemblies. Furthermore, he may attempt to compose a score-settling diary of his time as president and show up on TV, in a paid or unpaid limit. In spite of the fact that there has likewise been extensive babble among Trump's partners about his beginning his very own media organization, numerous near the president said they accept that choice is more uncertain, to a limited extent since it would be a burdensome endeavor without ensured achievement. These guides, similar to some others met for this story, talked on the state of namelessness to truly examine delicate themes. There is likewise tension on Trump to adapt his post-administration considering his own obligation and legitimate difficulties. He has installments due throughout the following four years of more than $400 million in credits and could acquire considerable legitimate charges identified with various examinations and claims. Trump will "attempt to stay a political and media power," said Christopher Ruddy, a long-lasting companion who has been in contact with the president. "He has all these current organizations. He'll have new connections." Whatever stage he chooses to utilize, Trump intends to look for retribution against those he accepts have double-crossed him — a gathering that incorporates Fox News Channel, which Trump had since quite a while ago adulated for the slavish inclusion on a portion of its projects yet now tries to rebuff. Trump has railed secretly about the official discussion directed by Fox's Chris Wallace, the way that the organization was the primary significant news organization to call Arizona for Biden and that one of Fox's journalists affirmed the Atlantic's detailing that Trump had called military assistance individuals "suckers" and "washouts." "He is truly furious with Fox," said Ruddy, who runs Newsmax, a traditionalist media organization whose link channel the president has advanced as a Fox elective. After Biden's initiation, Trump is probably going to withdraw first to Florida, where he travels in the colder time of year at his Mar-a-Lago Club, counsels said. While in office, he changed his citizen enrollment from New York to Palm Beach, Fla. Individuals who have examined plans with Trump said he is probably going to promptly get more associated with his organizations where income has plunged. Trump's daughter Ivanka, child in-law Jared Kushner and other grown-up youngsters have been centered more around their own fates than the president's, despite the fact that their professional alternatives and individual brands are inseparably attached to him, as indicated by a senior organization official who has spoken with relatives. Indeed, even as Trump and a portion of his lawyers keep on spreading dubious schemes and case he is the legitimate champ of the political race, his political circle has been rising lately to discussing how Trump's post-administration will come to fruition — and how a man fixated on being viewed as a victor would attempt to disinfect the odor of being a political decision failure. One counsel who as of late talked with the president said that Trump revealed to him he intended to report another mission in three weeks and that he needed to act rapidly to attempt to freeze the huge field of forthcoming 2024 Republican official competitors. That gathering incorporates, in any event, three individuals who have served in the organization: Vice President Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and previous US diplomat to the United Nations Nikki Haley. In any case, different counselors advised that, as is frequently the situation with the ping-ponging president, Trump's perspectives on the issue are continually advancing and he has made no last assurance.

Donald Trump secretly plotting potential 2024 presidential run

As the drama surrounding US elections ebbs and flows and as the democratic ‘blue wave’ has not materialized, pundits and sober commentators are rightly pointing out that there will be governance dysfunction in the United States. This would, as the pundits assert, lead to a legislative hiatus and pause where the only major room for manoeuvre for Joseph Biden, if and when he becomes president, will be in foreign policy. Given this, should the world heave a sigh of relief? Will American power ‘remake’ the world again? And can Biden grow America’s influence?

Fundamentally, the wellsprings of American leadership of the world were predicated on a combination of its military might (hard power), its adherence to and export of capitalism (political economy) and values that it espoused and embedded, albeit sporadically in its foreign policy (human rights).&nbsp;

Admittedly, this is a neat troika where there have been departures from the ‘norm’s and variations on this theme but, in the main, these are what constituted the grist and mill of American foreign policy, earning the country influence, wide and deep latitude in the process.&nbsp;

Complementing this rubric of foreign policy was an international system and structure that, until the closing decade of the 20th century was more or less stable.

But as the 20th century gave way to the 21st, there were world disorders, the sources of which could be traced to both within and without America. It was perhaps in the domain of economics, or more accurately political economy, where the post-war bargain of ‘embedded liberalism’ gave way to unabashed globalism, that the impact was most severe.&nbsp;

Also Read | <a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/we-hope-lesson-has-been-learnt-says-iran-on-nuclear-deal-with-usa-341410">We hope 'lesson' has been learnt, says Iran on nuclear deal with USA</a> &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; 
 
Unadulterated globalism which some associate with market fundamentalism, and where there was a trade-off between efficiency and equity, in favour of the former, bred inequalities and inequities not only within and in the United States but also outside of it.&nbsp;

It was these conditions plus the effects of a proselytizing foreign policy, which under the neocons meant wars, that Trump was born. But Trump was a figure that represented or reflected angst with the existing order of political economy.

This angst called Trumpism called for a changing of the economic order and the political consensus that underpinned it. The implications and consequences were felt in the domains of foreign policy as America under Trump sought to disrupt and remake international relations in the image of Trumpism.&nbsp;

Also Read | <a href="https://www.wionews.com/opinions-blogs/the-people-versus-donald-trump-341373">The people versus Donald Trump</a> 
 
In the meanwhile, the world was also changing – especially in its political makeup. The ‘democratic waves’ that reached an apogee in the 1970s dissipated into a ‘democratic recession’. Complemented by a quasi American retreat from international relations, the tone of international politics became more adversarial. &nbsp;

There was also the rise of China which while did not seek to upend world order and not export its model but certainly was and is seeking to widen its arc of influence.

There was and is more to these developments and trends but the ones delineated here constitute the major ones. So, amidst this change and churn, can America lead again? And what would leading mean?

No easy answers lend themselves here. But for America to lead again, the country first needs balance and equipoise within followed by a consensus of what constitutes its interests and ideals. If the focus would be on a narrow range or narrowly defined interests, then the obvious consequence would be a quasi retreat from international politics.&nbsp;

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This would be the best outcome if, to repeat, interests are defined narrowly. But, if it is ideals, then obviously America needs to re-engage with the world albeit in a different idiom than it did in the past, primarily because the world out there is a different one.&nbsp;

But, this whole hog re-engagement would carry domestic prices and with Trumpism still a potent force in the United States(made more salient with the prospect of Trump himself foraying into the media), it will not only have diminishing returns but also probably lead to more polarization. How then should America craft its foreign policy under Biden?

By synthesizing ideals with interests is the answer. Or, in other words, create a foreign policy paradigm that integrates realism with idealism which may be called realist idealism.&nbsp;

This could constitute the golden mean that the Biden presidency should aim for. Among its core components should be a review and revision of political economy that must occupy the middle ground, so to speak.&nbsp;

Any gyration to either extreme would not only be a disaster in the making but also be as ephemeral as anything- a prospect that would lead to both world disorders and the possible end of an era.

(Disclaimer: The views of the writer do&nbsp;not represent the views of&nbsp;WION or ZMCL. Nor does WION or ZMCL endorse&nbsp;the views of the writer)

As the drama surrounding US elections ebbs and flows and as the democratic ‘blue wave’ has not materialized, pundits and sober commentators are rightly pointing out that there will be governance dysfunction in the United States.

As the drama surrounding US elections ebbs and flows and as the democratic ‘blue wave’ has not materialized, pundits and sober commentators are rightly pointing out that there will be governance dysfunction in the United States. This would, as the pundits assert, lead to a legislative hiatus and pause where the only major room for manoeuvre for Joseph Biden, if and when he becomes president, will be in foreign policy. Given this, should the world heave a sigh of relief? Will American power ‘remake’ the world again? And can Biden grow America’s influence? Fundamentally, the wellsprings of American leadership of the world were predicated on a combination of its military might (hard power), its adherence to and export of capitalism (political economy) and values that it espoused and embedded, albeit sporadically in its foreign policy (human rights). Admittedly, this is a neat troika where there have been departures from the ‘norm’s and variations on this theme but, in the main, these are what constituted the grist and mill of American foreign policy, earning the country influence, wide and deep latitude in the process. Complementing this rubric of foreign policy was an international system and structure that, until the closing decade of the 20th century was more or less stable. But as the 20th century gave way to the 21st, there were world disorders, the sources of which could be traced to both within and without America. It was perhaps in the domain of economics, or more accurately political economy, where the post-war bargain of ‘embedded liberalism’ gave way to unabashed globalism, that the impact was most severe. Also Read | We hope 'lesson' has been learnt, says Iran on nuclear deal with USA Unadulterated globalism which some associate with market fundamentalism, and where there was a trade-off between efficiency and equity, in favour of the former, bred inequalities and inequities not only within and in the United States but also outside of it. It was these conditions plus the effects of a proselytizing foreign policy, which under the neocons meant wars, that Trump was born. But Trump was a figure that represented or reflected angst with the existing order of political economy. This angst called Trumpism called for a changing of the economic order and the political consensus that underpinned it. The implications and consequences were felt in the domains of foreign policy as America under Trump sought to disrupt and remake international relations in the image of Trumpism. Also Read | The people versus Donald Trump In the meanwhile, the world was also changing – especially in its political makeup. The ‘democratic waves’ that reached an apogee in the 1970s dissipated into a ‘democratic recession’. Complemented by a quasi American retreat from international relations, the tone of international politics became more adversarial. There was also the rise of China which while did not seek to upend world order and not export its model but certainly was and is seeking to widen its arc of influence. There was and is more to these developments and trends but the ones delineated here constitute the major ones. So, amidst this change and churn, can America lead again? And what would leading mean? No easy answers lend themselves here. But for America to lead again, the country first needs balance and equipoise within followed by a consensus of what constitutes its interests and ideals. If the focus would be on a narrow range or narrowly defined interests, then the obvious consequence would be a quasi retreat from international politics. × This would be the best outcome if, to repeat, interests are defined narrowly. But, if it is ideals, then obviously America needs to re-engage with the world albeit in a different idiom than it did in the past, primarily because the world out there is a different one. But, this whole hog re-engagement would carry domestic prices and with Trumpism still a potent force in the United States(made more salient with the prospect of Trump himself foraying into the media), it will not only have diminishing returns but also probably lead to more polarization. How then should America craft its foreign policy under Biden? By synthesizing ideals with interests is the answer. Or, in other words, create a foreign policy paradigm that integrates realism with idealism which may be called realist idealism. This could constitute the golden mean that the Biden presidency should aim for. Among its core components should be a review and revision of political economy that must occupy the middle ground, so to speak. Any gyration to either extreme would not only be a disaster in the making but also be as ephemeral as anything- a prospect that would lead to both world disorders and the possible end of an era. (Disclaimer: The views of the writer do not represent the views of WION or ZMCL. Nor does WION or ZMCL endorse the views of the writer)

In a changing world, what should a Biden foreign policy look like?

By all official counts, Democratic Party candidate - Joe Biden is the new President-elect of the United States of America. After a gruelling morning on 4 November, where President Trump took substantial early leads in most swing states, Biden gradually narrowed the gap in the next few days. Even though the Biden- Harris teamwork has begun, this race is far from over. Trump has refused to concede &amp; his legal team has threatened battles in almost all swing states.

In the last couple of decades, this was perhaps the most closely watched American elections internationally. More than the issues, there was a feeling that the future of the American narrative, balance between right-wing and liberal Left and US's foreign policy was at stake. The fact this was held in a pandemic that threw up unique ways of campaigning, voting and counting added to the thrill.&nbsp;&nbsp;Certain key aspects stand out with implications for domestic US policy and its role in the world:

First, about the content of the vote – There was no 'blue wave' as was predicted by some pollsters. Given the polarization in American society and the nature of the electoral system, any appetite for radical change was an extreme prediction. The Democrats managed to secure the Presidency but their showing in the legislative races was far from satisfactory. They lost seats in the House of Representatives (lower house, where they had a majority) &amp; were not able to get enough seats in the Senate (the upper house) to flip from Republican control. Runoff races in Georgia in January 2021 might give them two more seats to get 50:50, in which case the Vice President-elect Harris can cast a tie-breaker in case of a deadlock.

Explanations for these trends have abounded – was it an anti-Trump vote more than an anti-Republican vote? Did the Democrats overestimate their appeal and now need to introspect. The indications are somewhere in the middle – Trump managed to get 70 million popular votes,&nbsp;more than in 2016 but the Democrats were also able to enthuse their traditional supporters with the message of &nbsp;'getting Trump out' and vote in larger numbers.&nbsp;

The voter turnaround in this election was the highest since 1900. For the Presidency, credit has to be given to Biden, who was not even the DNC’s (Democratic National Convention) first choice and was largely selected to build consensus amongst its diverging moderate and progressive sections. Biden built a grassroots campaign, chose a symbolic running mate, star campaigners like Obama and was able to build a narrative around the mismanagement of COVID.&nbsp;

In the end, the election was not as close as it was initially purported to be – Biden has 4 million-plus popular votes’ lead that might increase as the counting continues in many states. He also managed to flip five states – Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennslyvania and Republican states of Arizona and Georgia.&nbsp;

The legislative results, however, have unleashed infighting between the 'moderate' and progressive' wings with the former blaming the latter’s extreme ‘rhetoric’ for Democrat defeats even in states that Biden was able to carry along. The charge is that demands such as 'Medicare for all', 'Defund the police' etc created a condition that many Americans voted for Republican candidates in these races while rejecting Trump for Presidency. This can be true in some cases but does not seem like a general trend.&nbsp;

Some poll trends have shown that there was a nation-wide pro-Democrat swing (though moderate) since 2016 in the election for a President – but a pro-Republican swing since 2018 in elections for the House. The Democrats in the legislature have been held as responsible as the Republicans for the deadlock on passing a stimulus, non compromising attitudes on judicial nominees, etc. Plus the Democrat strategy of putting accomplished candidates, mainly 'women', was aped by the Republicans in these elections with better than expected results.&nbsp;

So what we have in the US now is a recipe for uncertainty. A Biden Presidency, a Republican-controlled Senate (unless Democrats can win Georgia races), a House with a reduced majority for the Democrats and a Supreme Court with a 6-3 majority for conservative judges. Trump's constant allegations about voter fraud and illegal electoral processes are going to cast a shadow on Biden's presidency that will make it hard for him to carry 70 million people on his COVID agenda, for instance.&nbsp;

The Senate Republicans, whose approval Biden requires for passing key legislation, will make it difficult to undertake crucial reforms, including on taxation, reform of the electoral process, etc. A reduced House Democratic majority will make it difficult for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to get the moderate &amp; progressive sections to co-exist. The result will be a legislative deadlock on many issues unless Biden, a long time, a seasoned politician, can build bi-partisan consensus at least on the immediate requirements. &nbsp;

What happens in the US has consequences globally and even more so because Trump broke from years of diplomatic consensus to bestow personal favors/displeasure on international actors. As Biden emerged the likely winner, there was relief in certain quarters – traditional US allies and Iran against which Trump had taken a hard stance; acceptance in others such as Middle East allies and silence from Brazil, Russia and China.&nbsp;

But despite the fears that Biden will undo many aspects of the Trump foreign policy – the truth is that his first few months will be spent in combating US's domestic challenges – containing COVID surge, an ailing economy &amp; polarised race relations. The first few executive orders could focus on reversing Trump measures aimed to reinforce the US's commitment to multilateralism – re-entering the Paris climate accord, the WHO and lifting the travel ban on Muslim nations.&nbsp;

With a bipartisan consensus on the need for a 'hard stance' towards China, Biden will continue the Trumpian stance towards China though his approach is likely to be different. China’s economic ‘espionage’, theft of intellectual property, human rights abuses, interference in Taiwan will be the main issues of contention. Biden is likely to re-cultivate US relations with its traditional allies, including in Europe and Asia. In the Middle East, a calibrated return to the Iran deal of 2015 will be on the books as also a return to a mediator stance in the Israel-Palestine conflict, but these are not high priority goals. &nbsp;

But all of this is still some days away. In the meantime, the US and world will have to grapple with Trump’s legal challenges, a voter base emboldened to use nonconstitutional means to challenge elections results &amp; Trump’s last few unilateral foreign policy moves on Iran, arms treaties and Israel.

(Disclaimer: The views of the writer do&nbsp;not represent the views of&nbsp;WION or ZMCL. Nor does WION or ZMCL endorse&nbsp;the views of the writer)

By all official counts, Democratic Party candidate - Joe Biden is the new President-elect of the United States of America. After a gruelling morning on 4 November, where President Trump took substantial early leads in most swing states, Biden gradually narrowed the gap in the next few days.

By all official counts, Democratic Party candidate - Joe Biden is the new President-elect of the United States of America. After a gruelling morning on 4 November, where President Trump took substantial early leads in most swing states, Biden gradually narrowed the gap in the next few days. Even though the Biden- Harris teamwork has begun, this race is far from over. Trump has refused to concede & his legal team has threatened battles in almost all swing states. In the last couple of decades, this was perhaps the most closely watched American elections internationally. More than the issues, there was a feeling that the future of the American narrative, balance between right-wing and liberal Left and US's foreign policy was at stake. The fact this was held in a pandemic that threw up unique ways of campaigning, voting and counting added to the thrill. Certain key aspects stand out with implications for domestic US policy and its role in the world: First, about the content of the vote – There was no 'blue wave' as was predicted by some pollsters. Given the polarization in American society and the nature of the electoral system, any appetite for radical change was an extreme prediction. The Democrats managed to secure the Presidency but their showing in the legislative races was far from satisfactory. They lost seats in the House of Representatives (lower house, where they had a majority) & were not able to get enough seats in the Senate (the upper house) to flip from Republican control. Runoff races in Georgia in January 2021 might give them two more seats to get 50:50, in which case the Vice President-elect Harris can cast a tie-breaker in case of a deadlock. Explanations for these trends have abounded – was it an anti-Trump vote more than an anti-Republican vote? Did the Democrats overestimate their appeal and now need to introspect. The indications are somewhere in the middle – Trump managed to get 70 million popular votes, more than in 2016 but the Democrats were also able to enthuse their traditional supporters with the message of 'getting Trump out' and vote in larger numbers. The voter turnaround in this election was the highest since 1900. For the Presidency, credit has to be given to Biden, who was not even the DNC’s (Democratic National Convention) first choice and was largely selected to build consensus amongst its diverging moderate and progressive sections. Biden built a grassroots campaign, chose a symbolic running mate, star campaigners like Obama and was able to build a narrative around the mismanagement of COVID. In the end, the election was not as close as it was initially purported to be – Biden has 4 million-plus popular votes’ lead that might increase as the counting continues in many states. He also managed to flip five states – Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennslyvania and Republican states of Arizona and Georgia. The legislative results, however, have unleashed infighting between the 'moderate' and progressive' wings with the former blaming the latter’s extreme ‘rhetoric’ for Democrat defeats even in states that Biden was able to carry along. The charge is that demands such as 'Medicare for all', 'Defund the police' etc created a condition that many Americans voted for Republican candidates in these races while rejecting Trump for Presidency. This can be true in some cases but does not seem like a general trend. Some poll trends have shown that there was a nation-wide pro-Democrat swing (though moderate) since 2016 in the election for a President – but a pro-Republican swing since 2018 in elections for the House. The Democrats in the legislature have been held as responsible as the Republicans for the deadlock on passing a stimulus, non compromising attitudes on judicial nominees, etc. Plus the Democrat strategy of putting accomplished candidates, mainly 'women', was aped by the Republicans in these elections with better than expected results. So what we have in the US now is a recipe for uncertainty. A Biden Presidency, a Republican-controlled Senate (unless Democrats can win Georgia races), a House with a reduced majority for the Democrats and a Supreme Court with a 6-3 majority for conservative judges. Trump's constant allegations about voter fraud and illegal electoral processes are going to cast a shadow on Biden's presidency that will make it hard for him to carry 70 million people on his COVID agenda, for instance. The Senate Republicans, whose approval Biden requires for passing key legislation, will make it difficult to undertake crucial reforms, including on taxation, reform of the electoral process, etc. A reduced House Democratic majority will make it difficult for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to get the moderate & progressive sections to co-exist. The result will be a legislative deadlock on many issues unless Biden, a long time, a seasoned politician, can build bi-partisan consensus at least on the immediate requirements. What happens in the US has consequences globally and even more so because Trump broke from years of diplomatic consensus to bestow personal favors/displeasure on international actors. As Biden emerged the likely winner, there was relief in certain quarters – traditional US allies and Iran against which Trump had taken a hard stance; acceptance in others such as Middle East allies and silence from Brazil, Russia and China. But despite the fears that Biden will undo many aspects of the Trump foreign policy – the truth is that his first few months will be spent in combating US's domestic challenges – containing COVID surge, an ailing economy & polarised race relations. The first few executive orders could focus on reversing Trump measures aimed to reinforce the US's commitment to multilateralism – re-entering the Paris climate accord, the WHO and lifting the travel ban on Muslim nations. With a bipartisan consensus on the need for a 'hard stance' towards China, Biden will continue the Trumpian stance towards China though his approach is likely to be different. China’s economic ‘espionage’, theft of intellectual property, human rights abuses, interference in Taiwan will be the main issues of contention. Biden is likely to re-cultivate US relations with its traditional allies, including in Europe and Asia. In the Middle East, a calibrated return to the Iran deal of 2015 will be on the books as also a return to a mediator stance in the Israel-Palestine conflict, but these are not high priority goals. But all of this is still some days away. In the meantime, the US and world will have to grapple with Trump’s legal challenges, a voter base emboldened to use nonconstitutional means to challenge elections results & Trump’s last few unilateral foreign policy moves on Iran, arms treaties and Israel. (Disclaimer: The views of the writer do not represent the views of WION or ZMCL. Nor does WION or ZMCL endorse the views of the writer)

US Presidential Elections: Reflections of an outside observer

Saudi Arabia has taken multiple steps to polish its tarnished image in advance of this weekend’s hosting of the virtual summit of the G20 that groups the world’s foremost economies and in anticipation of an incoming Biden administration in the United States that is expected to be critical of Riyadh and potentially more conciliatory towards Iran and non-violent Islamists.

The initiatives target the US and European criticism of the five-year-old war in Yemen that has produced one of the world’s greatest humanitarian crises and concerns the Biden administration may adopt less Saudi and United Arab Emirates-centric policies than its predecessor headed by Donald J. Trump.

The steps further seek to project Saudi Arabia as being helpful in normalizing relations between Israel and the Muslim world even if it is not yet ready to do so itself and build links with Democrats in Washington as they prepare to take office in January.

Like other countries that fear a Biden administration may be less friendly than its predecessor, Saudi Arabia is looking for Washington PR and lobbying firms that can get it access to the president-elect and his entourage.

Saudi officials and Saudis close to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman are counting on the fact that despite criticism US President-elect Joe Biden sees Saudi Arabia in line with long-standing US policy as a crucial partner. “I am very confident that will continue,” said Finance Minister Mohammed Al-Jadaan.

The kingdom, betting that the Biden administration would accept that Saudi Arabia as the custodian of Islam’s two holiest cities, Mecca and Medina, would recognize Israel only once recognition was more widely accepted in the Muslim world, has sought to curry favour by pressuring others to normalize relations with the Jewish state.

Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan charged last week that the United States and another unidentified country were pressing him to establish diplomatic relations. Pakistani and Israeli media named Saudi Arabia as an unidentified country.&nbsp;

Representing the world’s third most populous Muslim nation, Pakistani recognition, following in the footsteps of the UAE and Bahrain, would be significant.

Missing from the Saudi menu is any effort to fend off criticism of the kingdom’s problematic human rights record. In fact, senior Saudi figures signalled that the kingdom was unlikely to bow to demands for the release of detained activists, clerics, and professionals and transparency on the 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in response to Mr. Biden’s insistence that he would restore human rights as an important element of US foreign policy.

Former Saudi intelligence chief and ambassador to London and Washington Prince Turki Al Faisal suggested that the absence of human rights in the kingdom’s efforts was no coincidence.

Addressing an American audience this week, Prince Turki said: “As far as human rights is concerned, we admit that we have issues to improve and we’re working on that. It is a work in progress. But respectfully, your country also has issues of human rights to improve upon. Witness the turmoil during your elections and the police shootings. We did not…invent waterboarding. Your issues are also a work in progress… Your elections are a wonderful spectacle from which we can learn. They also include elements which we will not learn.”

To drive the point home, a Saudi human rights group asserted this week that Khaled al-Oudeh, a brother of prominent cleric Salman al-Oudeh, who has been held in prison since 2017 and potentially faces the death penalty, had been sentenced to five years in prison on charges of "inciting sedition and destabilising security."

The Saudi Council of Senior Scholars last week, in the first official statement from the kingdom since Saudi Arabia and the UAE banned the group in 2014, labelled the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization. The council said the group did not represent Islam, seeks “to grab the reins of power,” wreaks havoc, and commits “violence and terrorism.”

The council’s statement came as France and Austria were cracking down on Islamist groups, including the Brotherhood. The crackdown was in response to several attacks in Europe, including the gruesome murder of a French schoolteacher.

The statement, implicitly calling into question Saudi Arabia’s alliance in the Yemen war with Al-Islah, a Yemeni party aligned with the Brotherhood, came as the kingdom said it would honour a ceasefire if the Houthi rebels accepted a buffer zone along the Saudi-Yemeni border. The offer was designed to show that the kingdom was seeking a way out of the quagmire.

At the same time, Saudi authorities have stopped just short of blaming the Brotherhood for recent attacks on the French consulate in Jeddah, the Saudi embassy in The Hague and a French-sponsored World War One commemoration at a cemetery in the Red Sea port city, the first attack with explosives in years targeting foreigners in the kingdom.

The kingdom and the UAE fear that "Democrats can (re)create an atmosphere that enables the rise of the Brotherhood in the Sunni world like a decade ago. This is, in my view, what they see as a threat similar to the threat from Iran, if not a bigger one," said Eran Segal, a research fellow at the Ezri Center for Iran &amp; Gulf States research at the University of Haifa.

Mr. Segal was referring to former US President Barak Obama’s support for elections in Egypt and Tunisia in 2012 in the wake of the 2011 popular revolt that toppled Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and his Tunisian counterpart, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, longstanding US allies, despite the likelihood of Brotherhood electoral victories.

In Egypt, the victor, Mohammed Morsi, a Brotherhood leader, was removed from the presidency a year later in a UAE and Saudi-backed military coup that brought general-turned-president Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi to power.

Saudi Arabia’s G-20 presidency has sparked discussion on what the best approach to the kingdom would be: criticism and boycott or engagement. It is a debate that also confronts the incoming Biden administration.

The mayors of London, New York, Los Angeles, and Paris boycotted in September a G20 summit of urban leaders. Members of the European Parliament and the US Congress have called on European leaders and Mr Trump to not participate in this weekend’s summit.

It is an approach that David Rundell a US foreign service officer who served half of his 30-year career in the kingdom argues is doomed to failure. "Saudi Arabia needs encouragement for its economic reforms as well as in addressing its human rights record," Mr Rundell said, advocating greater engagement with rather than isolation of the kingdom.

(Disclaimer: The views of the writer do&nbsp;not represent the views of&nbsp;WION or ZMCL. Nor does WION or ZMCL endorse&nbsp;the views of the writer)

Saudi Arabia has taken multiple steps to polish its tarnished image in advance of this weekend’s hosting of the virtual summit of the G20 that groups the world’s foremost economies and in anticipation of an incoming Biden administration in the United States that is expected to be critical of Riyadh and potentially more conciliatory towards Iran and non-violent Islamists.

Saudi Arabia has taken multiple steps to polish its tarnished image in advance of this weekend’s hosting of the virtual summit of the G20 that groups the world’s foremost economies and in anticipation of an incoming Biden administration in the United States that is expected to be critical of Riyadh and potentially more conciliatory towards Iran and non-violent Islamists. The initiatives target the US and European criticism of the five-year-old war in Yemen that has produced one of the world’s greatest humanitarian crises and concerns the Biden administration may adopt less Saudi and United Arab Emirates-centric policies than its predecessor headed by Donald J. Trump. The steps further seek to project Saudi Arabia as being helpful in normalizing relations between Israel and the Muslim world even if it is not yet ready to do so itself and build links with Democrats in Washington as they prepare to take office in January. Like other countries that fear a Biden administration may be less friendly than its predecessor, Saudi Arabia is looking for Washington PR and lobbying firms that can get it access to the president-elect and his entourage. Saudi officials and Saudis close to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman are counting on the fact that despite criticism US President-elect Joe Biden sees Saudi Arabia in line with long-standing US policy as a crucial partner. “I am very confident that will continue,” said Finance Minister Mohammed Al-Jadaan. The kingdom, betting that the Biden administration would accept that Saudi Arabia as the custodian of Islam’s two holiest cities, Mecca and Medina, would recognize Israel only once recognition was more widely accepted in the Muslim world, has sought to curry favour by pressuring others to normalize relations with the Jewish state. Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan charged last week that the United States and another unidentified country were pressing him to establish diplomatic relations. Pakistani and Israeli media named Saudi Arabia as an unidentified country. Representing the world’s third most populous Muslim nation, Pakistani recognition, following in the footsteps of the UAE and Bahrain, would be significant. Missing from the Saudi menu is any effort to fend off criticism of the kingdom’s problematic human rights record. In fact, senior Saudi figures signalled that the kingdom was unlikely to bow to demands for the release of detained activists, clerics, and professionals and transparency on the 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in response to Mr. Biden’s insistence that he would restore human rights as an important element of US foreign policy. Former Saudi intelligence chief and ambassador to London and Washington Prince Turki Al Faisal suggested that the absence of human rights in the kingdom’s efforts was no coincidence. Addressing an American audience this week, Prince Turki said: “As far as human rights is concerned, we admit that we have issues to improve and we’re working on that. It is a work in progress. But respectfully, your country also has issues of human rights to improve upon. Witness the turmoil during your elections and the police shootings. We did not…invent waterboarding. Your issues are also a work in progress… Your elections are a wonderful spectacle from which we can learn. They also include elements which we will not learn.” To drive the point home, a Saudi human rights group asserted this week that Khaled al-Oudeh, a brother of prominent cleric Salman al-Oudeh, who has been held in prison since 2017 and potentially faces the death penalty, had been sentenced to five years in prison on charges of "inciting sedition and destabilising security." The Saudi Council of Senior Scholars last week, in the first official statement from the kingdom since Saudi Arabia and the UAE banned the group in 2014, labelled the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization. The council said the group did not represent Islam, seeks “to grab the reins of power,” wreaks havoc, and commits “violence and terrorism.” The council’s statement came as France and Austria were cracking down on Islamist groups, including the Brotherhood. The crackdown was in response to several attacks in Europe, including the gruesome murder of a French schoolteacher. The statement, implicitly calling into question Saudi Arabia’s alliance in the Yemen war with Al-Islah, a Yemeni party aligned with the Brotherhood, came as the kingdom said it would honour a ceasefire if the Houthi rebels accepted a buffer zone along the Saudi-Yemeni border. The offer was designed to show that the kingdom was seeking a way out of the quagmire. At the same time, Saudi authorities have stopped just short of blaming the Brotherhood for recent attacks on the French consulate in Jeddah, the Saudi embassy in The Hague and a French-sponsored World War One commemoration at a cemetery in the Red Sea port city, the first attack with explosives in years targeting foreigners in the kingdom. The kingdom and the UAE fear that "Democrats can (re)create an atmosphere that enables the rise of the Brotherhood in the Sunni world like a decade ago. This is, in my view, what they see as a threat similar to the threat from Iran, if not a bigger one," said Eran Segal, a research fellow at the Ezri Center for Iran & Gulf States research at the University of Haifa. Mr. Segal was referring to former US President Barak Obama’s support for elections in Egypt and Tunisia in 2012 in the wake of the 2011 popular revolt that toppled Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and his Tunisian counterpart, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, longstanding US allies, despite the likelihood of Brotherhood electoral victories. In Egypt, the victor, Mohammed Morsi, a Brotherhood leader, was removed from the presidency a year later in a UAE and Saudi-backed military coup that brought general-turned-president Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi to power. Saudi Arabia’s G-20 presidency has sparked discussion on what the best approach to the kingdom would be: criticism and boycott or engagement. It is a debate that also confronts the incoming Biden administration. The mayors of London, New York, Los Angeles, and Paris boycotted in September a G20 summit of urban leaders. Members of the European Parliament and the US Congress have called on European leaders and Mr Trump to not participate in this weekend’s summit. It is an approach that David Rundell a US foreign service officer who served half of his 30-year career in the kingdom argues is doomed to failure. "Saudi Arabia needs encouragement for its economic reforms as well as in addressing its human rights record," Mr Rundell said, advocating greater engagement with rather than isolation of the kingdom. (Disclaimer: The views of the writer do not represent the views of WION or ZMCL. Nor does WION or ZMCL endorse the views of the writer)

Saudi rushes to improve its image in advance of G20 and Biden

A federal appeals court on Friday rejected an attempt by US President Donald Trump's campaign to block President-elect Joe Biden from being declared the winner of Pennsylvania.

The state&nbsp;certified Biden as its winner this week. Under the law, the candidate who wins the popular vote in the state gets all of the state's 20 electoral votes.

Trump, a Republican, has refused to concede to his Democratic rival and continues to claim, without evidence, widespread voter fraud.

The Trump campaign and its supporters have tried and failed to convince judges of election irregularities in Michigan, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada, all critical to Biden's victory.

"Voters, not lawyers, choose the President. Ballots, not briefs, decide elections," said the appeals court opinion to this end.

"Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy. Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so," wrote Stephanos Bibas on behalf of a three-judge panel.

"Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here," wrote Bibas, who was nominated by Trump.

Soon after Friday's ruling, Trump posted a video from Newsmax on Twitter about alleged voter fraud in Nevada.

The Trump campaign filed the Pennsylvania case earlier this month, saying that county election officials had treated mail-in ballots inconsistently and asking US District Judge Matthew Brann to halt certification of the results.

Brann dismissed the case on November 21, saying the case was based on "strained legal arguments" and "speculative accusations."

The Trump campaign said it appealed on the “narrow” question of whether Brann improperly refused to let it amend the lawsuit a second time.

The appeals court said many of the claims by Trump campaign are matters of Pennsylvania law but noted the campaign already lost on those issues in state court.

The other judges on the panel, Brooks Smith and Michael Chagares, were nominated by George W Bush, a Republican.

Meanwhile, Trump said on Thursday he would leave the White House if the Electoral College votes for Biden when it meets on Dec. 14, the closest he has come to conceding the election.

On Monday, Trump's administration cleared the way Biden to transition to the White House, giving him access to briefings and funding even as Trump vowed to continue fighting the election results.

Biden won the election 306-232 in electoral votes, including Pennsylvania's 20. Even if Trump overturned the outcome in Pennsylvania, he would still need to reverse the result in at least two other states to remain as president.

States as states have until December 8 to resolve election disputes. 
&nbsp;

A federal appeals court on Friday rejected an attempt by US President Donald Trump's campaign to block President-elect Joe Biden from being declared the winner of Pennsylvania.

A federal appeals court on Friday rejected an attempt by US President Donald Trump's campaign to block President-elect Joe Biden from being declared the winner of Pennsylvania. The state certified Biden as its winner this week. Under the law, the candidate who wins the popular vote in the state gets all of the state's 20 electoral votes. Trump, a Republican, has refused to concede to his Democratic rival and continues to claim, without evidence, widespread voter fraud. The Trump campaign and its supporters have tried and failed to convince judges of election irregularities in Michigan, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada, all critical to Biden's victory. "Voters, not lawyers, choose the President. Ballots, not briefs, decide elections," said the appeals court opinion to this end. "Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy. Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so," wrote Stephanos Bibas on behalf of a three-judge panel. "Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here," wrote Bibas, who was nominated by Trump. Soon after Friday's ruling, Trump posted a video from Newsmax on Twitter about alleged voter fraud in Nevada. The Trump campaign filed the Pennsylvania case earlier this month, saying that county election officials had treated mail-in ballots inconsistently and asking US District Judge Matthew Brann to halt certification of the results. Brann dismissed the case on November 21, saying the case was based on "strained legal arguments" and "speculative accusations." The Trump campaign said it appealed on the “narrow” question of whether Brann improperly refused to let it amend the lawsuit a second time. The appeals court said many of the claims by Trump campaign are matters of Pennsylvania law but noted the campaign already lost on those issues in state court. The other judges on the panel, Brooks Smith and Michael Chagares, were nominated by George W Bush, a Republican. Meanwhile, Trump said on Thursday he would leave the White House if the Electoral College votes for Biden when it meets on Dec. 14, the closest he has come to conceding the election. On Monday, Trump's administration cleared the way Biden to transition to the White House, giving him access to briefings and funding even as Trump vowed to continue fighting the election results. Biden won the election 306-232 in electoral votes, including Pennsylvania's 20. Even if Trump overturned the outcome in Pennsylvania, he would still need to reverse the result in at least two other states to remain as president. States as states have until December 8 to resolve election disputes.

US court denies Trump's Pennsylvania election challenge

As the drama surrounding US elections ebbs and flows and as the democratic ‘blue wave’ has not materialised, pundits and sober commentators are rightly pointing out that there will be governance dysfunction in the United States.&nbsp;

This would, as the pundits aver, lead to a legislative hiatus and pause where the only major room for manoeuvre for Joseph Biden, if and when he becomes president, will be in foreign policy. Given this, should the world heave a sigh of relief? Will American power ‘remake’ the world again? And can Biden grow America’s influence?

Fundamentally, the wellsprings of American leadership of the world were predicated on a combination of its military might (hard power), its adherence to and export of capitalism(political economy) and values that it espoused and embedded, albeit sporadically in its foreign policy (human rights). Admittedly, this is a neat troika where there has been departures from the ‘norm’s and variations on this theme but, in the main, these are what constituted the grist and mill of American foreign policy, earning the country influence, wide and deep latitude in the process. Complementing this rubric of foreign policy was an international system and structure that until the closing decade of the 20th century was more or less stable.

But as the 20th century gave way to the 21st, there were world disorders, the sources of which could be traced to both within and without America. It was perhaps in the domain of economics, or more accurately political economy, where the post war bargain of ‘embedded liberalism’ gave way to unabashed globalism -- that the impact was most severe.

Unadulterated globalism which some associate with market fundamentalism, and where there was a trade-off between efficiency and equity, in favour of the former, bred inequalities and inequities not only within and in the United States but also outside of it. It was these conditions plus the effects of a proselytising foreign policy, which under the neo cons meant wars -- that Trump was born. But Trump was a figure that represented or reflected angst with the existing order of political economy.

This angst called Trumpism called for a the changing of the economic order and the political consensus that underpinned it. The implications and consequences were felt in the domains of foreign policy as America under Trump sought to disrupt and remake international relations in the image of Trumpism.&nbsp;

Meanwhile, the world was also changing -- especially in its political makeup. The ‘democratic waves’ that reached an apogee in the 1970’s dissipated into a ‘democratic recession’. Complemented by a quasi American retreat from international relations, the tone of international politics became more adversarial. &nbsp;

There was also the rise of China which while did not seek to upend world order and not export its model but certainly was and is seeking to widen its arc of influence.

There was and is more to these developments and trends but the ones delineated here constitute the major ones. So, amidst this change and churn, can America lead again? And what would leading mean?

No easy answers lend themselves here. But for America to lead again, the country first needs balance and equipoise within followed by a consensus of what constitutes its interests and ideals. If the focus would be on a narrow range or narrowly defined interests, then the obvious consequence would be quasi retreat from international politics. This would be the best outcome if, to repeat, interests are defined narrowly.&nbsp;

But, if it is ideals, then obviously America needs to re-engage with the world albeit in a different idiom than it did in the past, primarily because the world out there is a different one.&nbsp; 
But this whole hog re-engagement would carry domestic prices and with Trumpism still a potent force in the United States (made more salient with the prospect of Trump himself foraying into the media), it will not only have diminishing returns but also probably lead to more polarization.&nbsp;

How then can should America craft its foreign policy under Biden?

By synthesising ideals with interests is the answer. Or, in other words, create a foreign policy paradigm that integrates realism with idealism which may be called realist idealism.

This could constitute the golden mean that the Biden presidency should aim for. Among its core components should be a review and revision of political economy that must occupy the middle ground, so to speak.&nbsp;

Any gyration to either extreme would not only be a disaster in the making but also be as ephemeral as anything -- a prospect that would lead to both world disorders and the possible end of an era. 
&nbsp;

As the drama surrounding US elections ebbs and flows and as the democratic ‘blue wave’ has not materialised, pundits and sober commentators are rightly pointing out that there will be governance dysfunction in the United States.

As the drama surrounding US elections ebbs and flows and as the democratic ‘blue wave’ has not materialised, pundits and sober commentators are rightly pointing out that there will be governance dysfunction in the United States. This would, as the pundits aver, lead to a legislative hiatus and pause where the only major room for manoeuvre for Joseph Biden, if and when he becomes president, will be in foreign policy. Given this, should the world heave a sigh of relief? Will American power ‘remake’ the world again? And can Biden grow America’s influence? Fundamentally, the wellsprings of American leadership of the world were predicated on a combination of its military might (hard power), its adherence to and export of capitalism(political economy) and values that it espoused and embedded, albeit sporadically in its foreign policy (human rights). Admittedly, this is a neat troika where there has been departures from the ‘norm’s and variations on this theme but, in the main, these are what constituted the grist and mill of American foreign policy, earning the country influence, wide and deep latitude in the process. Complementing this rubric of foreign policy was an international system and structure that until the closing decade of the 20th century was more or less stable. But as the 20th century gave way to the 21st, there were world disorders, the sources of which could be traced to both within and without America. It was perhaps in the domain of economics, or more accurately political economy, where the post war bargain of ‘embedded liberalism’ gave way to unabashed globalism -- that the impact was most severe. Unadulterated globalism which some associate with market fundamentalism, and where there was a trade-off between efficiency and equity, in favour of the former, bred inequalities and inequities not only within and in the United States but also outside of it. It was these conditions plus the effects of a proselytising foreign policy, which under the neo cons meant wars -- that Trump was born. But Trump was a figure that represented or reflected angst with the existing order of political economy. This angst called Trumpism called for a the changing of the economic order and the political consensus that underpinned it. The implications and consequences were felt in the domains of foreign policy as America under Trump sought to disrupt and remake international relations in the image of Trumpism. Meanwhile, the world was also changing -- especially in its political makeup. The ‘democratic waves’ that reached an apogee in the 1970’s dissipated into a ‘democratic recession’. Complemented by a quasi American retreat from international relations, the tone of international politics became more adversarial. There was also the rise of China which while did not seek to upend world order and not export its model but certainly was and is seeking to widen its arc of influence. There was and is more to these developments and trends but the ones delineated here constitute the major ones. So, amidst this change and churn, can America lead again? And what would leading mean? No easy answers lend themselves here. But for America to lead again, the country first needs balance and equipoise within followed by a consensus of what constitutes its interests and ideals. If the focus would be on a narrow range or narrowly defined interests, then the obvious consequence would be quasi retreat from international politics. This would be the best outcome if, to repeat, interests are defined narrowly. But, if it is ideals, then obviously America needs to re-engage with the world albeit in a different idiom than it did in the past, primarily because the world out there is a different one. But this whole hog re-engagement would carry domestic prices and with Trumpism still a potent force in the United States (made more salient with the prospect of Trump himself foraying into the media), it will not only have diminishing returns but also probably lead to more polarization. How then can should America craft its foreign policy under Biden? By synthesising ideals with interests is the answer. Or, in other words, create a foreign policy paradigm that integrates realism with idealism which may be called realist idealism. This could constitute the golden mean that the Biden presidency should aim for. Among its core components should be a review and revision of political economy that must occupy the middle ground, so to speak. Any gyration to either extreme would not only be a disaster in the making but also be as ephemeral as anything -- a prospect that would lead to both world disorders and the possible end of an era.

In a recent Monmouth University survey, 77% of Donald Trump's backers said Joe Biden had won the presidential election because of fraud. Many of these same people think climate change is not real. Many of these same people believe they don’t need to listen to scientific experts on how to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

We live in a country in epistemological crisis, in which much of the Republican Party has become detached from reality. Moreover, this is not just an American problem. All around the world, rising right-wing populist parties are floating on oceans of misinformation and falsehood. What is going on?

Many people point to the internet — the way it funnels people into information silos, the way it abets the spread of misinformation. I mostly reject this view. Why would the internet have corrupted Republicans so much more than Democrats, the global right more than the global left?

My analysis begins with a remarkable essay that Jonathan Rauch wrote for National Affairs in 2018 called “The Constitution of Knowledge.” Rauch pointed out that every society has an epistemic regime, a marketplace of ideas where people collectively hammer out what’s real. In democratic, nontheocratic societies, this regime is a decentralized ecosystem of academics, clergy members, teachers, journalists and others who disagree about a lot but agree on a shared system of rules for weighing evidence and building knowledge.

This ecosystem, Rauch wrote, operates as a funnel. It allows a wide volume of ideas to get floated, but only a narrow group of ideas survives collective scrutiny.

“We let alt-truth talk,” Rauch said, “but we don’t let it write textbooks, receive tenure, bypass peer review, set the research agenda, dominate the front pages, give expert testimony or dictate the flow of public dollars.”

Over the past decades the information age has created a lot more people who make their living working with ideas, who are professional members of this epistemic process. The information economy has increasingly rewarded them with money and status. It has increasingly concentrated them in ever more prosperous metro areas.

While these cities have been prospering, places where fewer people have college degrees have been spiraling down: flatter incomes, decimated families, dissolved communities. In 1972, people without college degrees were nearly as happy as those with college degrees. Now those without a degree are far more unhappy about their lives.

People need a secure order to feel safe. Deprived of that, people legitimately feel cynicism and distrust, alienation and anomie. This precarity has created, in nation after nation, intense populist backlashes against the highly educated folks who have migrated to the cities and accrued significant economic, cultural and political power. Will Wilkinson of the Niskanen Center calls this the “Density Divide.” It is a bitter cultural and political cold war.

In the fervor of this enmity, millions of people have come to detest those who populate the epistemic regime, who are so distant, who appear to have it so easy, who have such different values, who can be so condescending. Millions not only distrust everything the “fake news” people say but also the so-called rules they use to say them.

People in this precarious state are going to demand stories that will both explain their distrust back to them and also enclose them within a safe community of believers. The evangelists of distrust, from Trump to Alex Jones to the followers of QAnon, rose up to give them those stories and provide that community. Paradoxically, conspiracy theories have become the most effective community bonding mechanisms of the 21st century.

For those awash in anxiety and alienation, who feel that everything is spinning out of control, conspiracy theories are extremely effective emotional tools. For those in low status groups, they provide a sense of superiority: I possess important information most people do not have. For those who feel powerless, they provide agency: I have the power to reject “experts” and expose hidden cabals. As Cass Sunstein of Harvard Law School points out, they provide liberation: If I imagine my foes are completely malevolent, then I can use any tactic I want.

Under Trump, the Republican identity is defined not by a set of policy beliefs but by a paranoid mindset. He and his media allies simply ignore the rules of the epistemic regime and have set up a rival trolling regime. The internet is an ideal medium for untested information to get around traditional gatekeepers, but it is an accelerant of the paranoia, not its source. Distrust and precarity, caused by economic, cultural and spiritual threat, are the source.

What to do? You can’t argue people out of paranoia. If you try to point out factual errors, you only entrench false belief. The only solution is to reduce the distrust and anxiety that is the seedbed of this thinking. That can only be done first by contact, reducing the social chasm between the members of the epistemic regime and those who feel so alienated from it. And second, it can be done by policy, by making life more secure for those without a college degree.

Rebuilding trust is, obviously, the work of a generation.

In a recent Monmouth University survey, 77% of Donald Trump's backers said Joe Biden had won the presidential election because of fraud. Many of these same people think climate change is not real.

In a recent Monmouth University survey, 77% of Donald Trump's backers said Joe Biden had won the presidential election because of fraud. Many of these same people think climate change is not real. Many of these same people believe they don’t need to listen to scientific experts on how to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. We live in a country in epistemological crisis, in which much of the Republican Party has become detached from reality. Moreover, this is not just an American problem. All around the world, rising right-wing populist parties are floating on oceans of misinformation and falsehood. What is going on? Many people point to the internet — the way it funnels people into information silos, the way it abets the spread of misinformation. I mostly reject this view. Why would the internet have corrupted Republicans so much more than Democrats, the global right more than the global left? My analysis begins with a remarkable essay that Jonathan Rauch wrote for National Affairs in 2018 called “The Constitution of Knowledge.” Rauch pointed out that every society has an epistemic regime, a marketplace of ideas where people collectively hammer out what’s real. In democratic, nontheocratic societies, this regime is a decentralized ecosystem of academics, clergy members, teachers, journalists and others who disagree about a lot but agree on a shared system of rules for weighing evidence and building knowledge. This ecosystem, Rauch wrote, operates as a funnel. It allows a wide volume of ideas to get floated, but only a narrow group of ideas survives collective scrutiny. “We let alt-truth talk,” Rauch said, “but we don’t let it write textbooks, receive tenure, bypass peer review, set the research agenda, dominate the front pages, give expert testimony or dictate the flow of public dollars.” Over the past decades the information age has created a lot more people who make their living working with ideas, who are professional members of this epistemic process. The information economy has increasingly rewarded them with money and status. It has increasingly concentrated them in ever more prosperous metro areas. While these cities have been prospering, places where fewer people have college degrees have been spiraling down: flatter incomes, decimated families, dissolved communities. In 1972, people without college degrees were nearly as happy as those with college degrees. Now those without a degree are far more unhappy about their lives. People need a secure order to feel safe. Deprived of that, people legitimately feel cynicism and distrust, alienation and anomie. This precarity has created, in nation after nation, intense populist backlashes against the highly educated folks who have migrated to the cities and accrued significant economic, cultural and political power. Will Wilkinson of the Niskanen Center calls this the “Density Divide.” It is a bitter cultural and political cold war. In the fervor of this enmity, millions of people have come to detest those who populate the epistemic regime, who are so distant, who appear to have it so easy, who have such different values, who can be so condescending. Millions not only distrust everything the “fake news” people say but also the so-called rules they use to say them. People in this precarious state are going to demand stories that will both explain their distrust back to them and also enclose them within a safe community of believers. The evangelists of distrust, from Trump to Alex Jones to the followers of QAnon, rose up to give them those stories and provide that community. Paradoxically, conspiracy theories have become the most effective community bonding mechanisms of the 21st century. For those awash in anxiety and alienation, who feel that everything is spinning out of control, conspiracy theories are extremely effective emotional tools. For those in low status groups, they provide a sense of superiority: I possess important information most people do not have. For those who feel powerless, they provide agency: I have the power to reject “experts” and expose hidden cabals. As Cass Sunstein of Harvard Law School points out, they provide liberation: If I imagine my foes are completely malevolent, then I can use any tactic I want. Under Trump, the Republican identity is defined not by a set of policy beliefs but by a paranoid mindset. He and his media allies simply ignore the rules of the epistemic regime and have set up a rival trolling regime. The internet is an ideal medium for untested information to get around traditional gatekeepers, but it is an accelerant of the paranoia, not its source. Distrust and precarity, caused by economic, cultural and spiritual threat, are the source. What to do? You can’t argue people out of paranoia. If you try to point out factual errors, you only entrench false belief. The only solution is to reduce the distrust and anxiety that is the seedbed of this thinking. That can only be done first by contact, reducing the social chasm between the members of the epistemic regime and those who feel so alienated from it. And second, it can be done by policy, by making life more secure for those without a college degree. Rebuilding trust is, obviously, the work of a generation.

The rotting of the Republican mind

President-elect Joe Biden has no shortage of ideas about how to transform caregiving. One striking feature of his team’s plan: It does not address elder care separately from child care, or divide plans to support family caregivers from those for paid caregivers. Rather, it takes on Medicaid benefits for older and disabled adults, preschool for toddlers and better jobs for home care workers, all in one ambitious, $775 billion-over-a-decade package.

“It approaches the care economy in a holistic way, across the age spectrum,” said Ai-jen Poo, executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which has long pushed many of those measures. “It’s a big breakthrough.”

Also read|&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/wisconsin-county-vote-recount-demanded-by-trump-gives-biden-a-boost-345980" hreflang="en">Wisconsin county vote recount demanded by Trump gives Biden a boost</a>

The same families who need child care in order to stay employed are often responsible for aging relatives, she pointed out, and many work as paid caregivers themselves.

Elements of the Biden plan, announced last summer, will sound familiar. The campaign for paid family leave, whether for childbirth or for care of older parents, goes back decades. So does the ongoing effort to rebalance Medicaid, making it more able to cover caregiving at home, where most older adults hope to stay, rather than in the nursing homes they dread.

But the coronavirus pandemic and the accompanying economic crisis have spotlighted the halting, fragmented way the United States approaches these issues, compared with other industrialized democracies.

Also read|&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/us-court-denies-trumps-pennsylvania-election-challenge-345967" hreflang="en">US court denies Trump's Pennsylvania election challenge</a>

Advocates see this emergency as both ruinous for families and workers, and as an opportunity to tackle long-deferred needs. Policies like converting the anemic federal Family and Medical Leave Act, which mandates only unpaid leave, into 12 weeks of paid leave, as Biden has proposed, could help propel the nation’s labor force back to work.

“Working adults are buckling under the pressure of addressing child care on one hand and care for elders on the others,” Poo said. “Women are leaving the labor market because they have impossible choices.”

“What was important to people became urgent,” added Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women’s Law Center. “There are periods where acceleration feels possible, and this is one of them.”

Also read|&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/donald-trump-secretly-plotting-potential-2024-presidential-run-345951" hreflang="en">Donald Trump secretly plotting potential 2024 presidential run</a>

Despite its integrated approach, the Biden plan does call for certain programs most likely to benefit older people and their caregivers. For example, it proposes a tax credit for as much as $5,000 to reimburse families for expenses associated with unpaid caregiving.

“It helps the people in the middle, stuck between Medicaid” — which primarily benefits the very low-income — “and those with the resources to pay for long-term care,” said C. Grace Whiting, president and CEO of the National Alliance for Caregiving.

An AARP survey last year found that families spent about $7,400 out of pocket annually, and close to $13,000 if the caregivers lived an hour or more away from the relatives they helped. In another AARP study, about one-quarter of family caregivers reported taking on more debt and depleting their savings.

Also read|&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/biden-to-face-crucial-test-over-access-to-sensitive-information-as-he-transitions-into-power-345698" hreflang="en">Biden to face crucial test over access to sensitive information as he transitions into power</a>

Whiting ticked off some costs the credit might cover: “Household expenses. Paid help. Home modifications. Remote devices to monitor safety. Equipment like hearing aids. Medical expenses not covered by other payers.”

The Biden plan would also give family members Social Security credits for the time they spend out of the workforce caring for loved ones.

An Urban Institute analysis found that this change would most benefit lower-income workers, by crediting them with earnings equal to half the average national monthly wage, in addition to their other earnings, for every month in which they provided 80 or more hours of unpaid care.

One of the Biden plan’s most far-reaching components for seniors concerns Medicaid. This state and federal program underwrites most long-term care, but it has historically spent more on nursing homes than on so-called home and community-based services. About 800,000 people linger on state waiting lists for home care, sometimes for years, the Biden team has said.

Also read|&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/trump-says-hell-leave-if-biden-wins-electoral-college-vote-345673" hreflang="en">Trump says he'll leave if Biden wins Electoral College vote</a>

The shift to home services, which now represents more than half of Medicaid spending on long-term care, has been “vastly inadequate,” Poo said. “It’s still not mandatory for states to offer home and community-based services as an option.”

The Biden plan vows to eliminate the wait list, then enhance federal contributions to allow states to develop more community alternatives, which are generally less expensive than nursing home care.

Finally, it tackles the issues that have led to persistent churn in the mostly female workforce that provides elder care and child care, including low wages, lack of benefits like health insurance and sick leave, and the need for further training.

That effort, the plan notes, will support unionization and collective bargaining. “The solution cannot be caregivers at poverty levels with unfair working conditions,” Goss Graves said.

The Biden team asserts that the nation can pay the tab for this vast undertaking over 10 years, by rolling back tax breaks for real estate investors with incomes over $400,000 and increasing tax compliance for other high earners.

It also argues that the plan will create 3 million new caregiving and education jobs, and increase employment by 5 million by allowing unpaid caregivers (most of them women, again) to reenter the workforce.

Debate is certain to ensue over the price tag nonetheless, given a fragile economy, and over whether these plans represent the best solutions to the nation’s child care and elder care needs.

Of course, the political odds of realizing all these ideas, or any of them, remain highly uncertain, even if the Senate acquires a slender Democratic majority. “The question will be, ‘Do we have the political will to make it happen?’” Whiting said. Some Medicaid changes will also require agreement from state governments.

The plan does not delve into details about how the administration would carry out all these policies, and the Biden transition team did not make a policy adviser available to discuss the president-elect’s goals and strategies. But some aspects of the plan — efforts to pass a caregiver tax credit, for instance — have previously drawn congressional sponsors from both parties.

“There’s growing recognition of the essential help provided by family caregivers, and an emerging consensus among both Democrats and Republicans that they need more support,” Johnson said. “So the time might be right to enact meaningful federal legislation.”

Supporters of the plan see Biden as a president with an unusually personal understanding of caregiving. He has been a single father and a caregiver both to injured children and to a grown son with terminal cancer. In announcing his caregiving plan, he also mentioned caring for his parents, when they were hospice patients, in his home.

Vice-president-elect Kamala Harris was the principal sponsor of the National Domestic Workers Bill of Rights last year. “They’re the right people to lead the conversation,” Whiting said.

But as veterans of the effort to promote a more expansive federal approach to caregiving, advocates like Goss Graves have also developed a well-honed realism. “Things don’t happen on their own,” she said. “I’d feel hopeful, but I’d also be preparing to get to work.”

President-elect Joe Biden has no shortage of ideas about how to transform caregiving. One striking feature of his team’s plan: It does not address elder care separately from child care, or divide plans to support family caregivers from those for paid caregivers.

President-elect Joe Biden has no shortage of ideas about how to transform caregiving. One striking feature of his team’s plan: It does not address elder care separately from child care, or divide plans to support family caregivers from those for paid caregivers. Rather, it takes on Medicaid benefits for older and disabled adults, preschool for toddlers and better jobs for home care workers, all in one ambitious, $775 billion-over-a-decade package. “It approaches the care economy in a holistic way, across the age spectrum,” said Ai-jen Poo, executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which has long pushed many of those measures. “It’s a big breakthrough.” Also read| Wisconsin county vote recount demanded by Trump gives Biden a boost The same families who need child care in order to stay employed are often responsible for aging relatives, she pointed out, and many work as paid caregivers themselves. Elements of the Biden plan, announced last summer, will sound familiar. The campaign for paid family leave, whether for childbirth or for care of older parents, goes back decades. So does the ongoing effort to rebalance Medicaid, making it more able to cover caregiving at home, where most older adults hope to stay, rather than in the nursing homes they dread. But the coronavirus pandemic and the accompanying economic crisis have spotlighted the halting, fragmented way the United States approaches these issues, compared with other industrialized democracies. Also read| US court denies Trump's Pennsylvania election challenge Advocates see this emergency as both ruinous for families and workers, and as an opportunity to tackle long-deferred needs. Policies like converting the anemic federal Family and Medical Leave Act, which mandates only unpaid leave, into 12 weeks of paid leave, as Biden has proposed, could help propel the nation’s labor force back to work. “Working adults are buckling under the pressure of addressing child care on one hand and care for elders on the others,” Poo said. “Women are leaving the labor market because they have impossible choices.” “What was important to people became urgent,” added Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women’s Law Center. “There are periods where acceleration feels possible, and this is one of them.” Also read| Donald Trump secretly plotting potential 2024 presidential run Despite its integrated approach, the Biden plan does call for certain programs most likely to benefit older people and their caregivers. For example, it proposes a tax credit for as much as $5,000 to reimburse families for expenses associated with unpaid caregiving. “It helps the people in the middle, stuck between Medicaid” — which primarily benefits the very low-income — “and those with the resources to pay for long-term care,” said C. Grace Whiting, president and CEO of the National Alliance for Caregiving. An AARP survey last year found that families spent about $7,400 out of pocket annually, and close to $13,000 if the caregivers lived an hour or more away from the relatives they helped. In another AARP study, about one-quarter of family caregivers reported taking on more debt and depleting their savings. Also read| Biden to face crucial test over access to sensitive information as he transitions into power Whiting ticked off some costs the credit might cover: “Household expenses. Paid help. Home modifications. Remote devices to monitor safety. Equipment like hearing aids. Medical expenses not covered by other payers.” The Biden plan would also give family members Social Security credits for the time they spend out of the workforce caring for loved ones. An Urban Institute analysis found that this change would most benefit lower-income workers, by crediting them with earnings equal to half the average national monthly wage, in addition to their other earnings, for every month in which they provided 80 or more hours of unpaid care. One of the Biden plan’s most far-reaching components for seniors concerns Medicaid. This state and federal program underwrites most long-term care, but it has historically spent more on nursing homes than on so-called home and community-based services. About 800,000 people linger on state waiting lists for home care, sometimes for years, the Biden team has said. Also read| Trump says he'll leave if Biden wins Electoral College vote The shift to home services, which now represents more than half of Medicaid spending on long-term care, has been “vastly inadequate,” Poo said. “It’s still not mandatory for states to offer home and community-based services as an option.” The Biden plan vows to eliminate the wait list, then enhance federal contributions to allow states to develop more community alternatives, which are generally less expensive than nursing home care. Finally, it tackles the issues that have led to persistent churn in the mostly female workforce that provides elder care and child care, including low wages, lack of benefits like health insurance and sick leave, and the need for further training. That effort, the plan notes, will support unionization and collective bargaining. “The solution cannot be caregivers at poverty levels with unfair working conditions,” Goss Graves said. The Biden team asserts that the nation can pay the tab for this vast undertaking over 10 years, by rolling back tax breaks for real estate investors with incomes over $400,000 and increasing tax compliance for other high earners. It also argues that the plan will create 3 million new caregiving and education jobs, and increase employment by 5 million by allowing unpaid caregivers (most of them women, again) to reenter the workforce. Debate is certain to ensue over the price tag nonetheless, given a fragile economy, and over whether these plans represent the best solutions to the nation’s child care and elder care needs. Of course, the political odds of realizing all these ideas, or any of them, remain highly uncertain, even if the Senate acquires a slender Democratic majority. “The question will be, ‘Do we have the political will to make it happen?’” Whiting said. Some Medicaid changes will also require agreement from state governments. The plan does not delve into details about how the administration would carry out all these policies, and the Biden transition team did not make a policy adviser available to discuss the president-elect’s goals and strategies. But some aspects of the plan — efforts to pass a caregiver tax credit, for instance — have previously drawn congressional sponsors from both parties. “There’s growing recognition of the essential help provided by family caregivers, and an emerging consensus among both Democrats and Republicans that they need more support,” Johnson said. “So the time might be right to enact meaningful federal legislation.” Supporters of the plan see Biden as a president with an unusually personal understanding of caregiving. He has been a single father and a caregiver both to injured children and to a grown son with terminal cancer. In announcing his caregiving plan, he also mentioned caring for his parents, when they were hospice patients, in his home. Vice-president-elect Kamala Harris was the principal sponsor of the National Domestic Workers Bill of Rights last year. “They’re the right people to lead the conversation,” Whiting said. But as veterans of the effort to promote a more expansive federal approach to caregiving, advocates like Goss Graves have also developed a well-honed realism. “Things don’t happen on their own,” she said. “I’d feel hopeful, but I’d also be preparing to get to work.”

Biden’s plan for seniors is not just a plan for seniors

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Oxford/AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine to undergo new global trials The coronavirus vaccine developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca will undergo a new global trial as questions remain of the claims whether it could protect up to 90 per cent of people | READ MORE Trump says he'll leave if Biden wins Electoral College vote Donald Trump has said he'd leave the White House if the Electoral College votes for President-elect Joe Biden | READ MORE Biden to face crucial test over access to sensitive information as he transitions into power US President-elect Joe Biden and his team will soon face a crucial test as they begin transitioning into power | READ MORE From begger to lawyer, Nisha aspires to become Pakistan's first transgender judge Life has not been easy for Nisha Rao, a lawyer in the southern Pakistani city of Karachi | READ MORE Sudan's last democratically elected PM dies of Covid-19 Sadiq al-Mahdi, Sudan's last democratically elected leader and the great-grandson of the messianic figure who fought the British in the 19th century, has died of Covid-19.

Oxford/AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine to undergo new global trials The coronavirus vaccine developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca will undergo a new global trial as questions remain of the claims whether it could protect up to 90 per cent of people | READ MORE Trump says he'll leave if Biden wins Electoral College vote Donald Trump has said he'd leave the White House if the Electoral College votes for President-elect Joe Biden | READ MORE Biden to face crucial test over access to sensitive information as he transitions into power US President-elect Joe Biden and his team will soon face a crucial test as they begin transitioning into power | READ MORE From begger to lawyer, Nisha aspires to become Pakistan's first transgender judge Life has not been easy for Nisha Rao, a lawyer in the southern Pakistani city of Karachi | READ MORE Sudan's last democratically elected PM dies of Covid-19 Sadiq al-Mahdi, Sudan's last democratically elected leader and the great-grandson of the messianic figure who fought the British in the 19th century, has died of Covid-19. He was being treated in the United Arab Emirates | READ MORE China imposes anti-dumping measures on Australian wine China on Friday said it would impose anti-dumping measures on Australian wine, in a further ramping up of tensions between Beijing and Canberra | READ MORE

Morning news brief: Trump lays down condition to leave office, AstraZeneca's new trial and more

US President-elect Joe Biden and his team will soon face a crucial test as they begin transitioning into power.

They will have to decide whether to share transcripts of presidential calls with foreign leaders to a broad, security clearance-holding audience, or maintain a lockdown on official transcripts of the calls and other highly sensitive information.

The said curbs were imposed by the Trump administration over concerns they might be leaked.

Notably no decisions have been made about how these sensitive material will be handled when the President-elect takes office on January 20.

Biden is set to begin receiving Presidential Daily Briefings on Monday, a courtesy that is traditionally given to the president-elect, which was delayed by nearly four weeks because of Trump's refusal to concede defeat.

The Biden team will be given access to a secret server containing sensitive information related to President Donald Trump's more controversial conversations with foreign leaders on a need-to-know basis.&nbsp;

On their part, the Trump administration is prepared to share any information that they deem to be relevant to their future decision-making process.

According to CNN, the disclosure last year of a complaint by an unidentified whistleblower revealed concerns among White House officials over alleged attempts by the administration to "lock down" access to internal information.

The information included the President's July 2019 discussion with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky -- which triggered the hearings that led to Trump's impeachment by the House of Representatives.

US President-elect Joe Biden and his team will soon face a crucial test as they begin transitioning into power. They will have to decide whether to share transcripts of presidential calls with foreign leaders to a broad, security clearance-holding audience, or maintain a lockdown on official transcripts of the calls and other highly sensitive information.

US President-elect Joe Biden and his team will soon face a crucial test as they begin transitioning into power. They will have to decide whether to share transcripts of presidential calls with foreign leaders to a broad, security clearance-holding audience, or maintain a lockdown on official transcripts of the calls and other highly sensitive information. The said curbs were imposed by the Trump administration over concerns they might be leaked. Notably no decisions have been made about how these sensitive material will be handled when the President-elect takes office on January 20. Biden is set to begin receiving Presidential Daily Briefings on Monday, a courtesy that is traditionally given to the president-elect, which was delayed by nearly four weeks because of Trump's refusal to concede defeat. The Biden team will be given access to a secret server containing sensitive information related to President Donald Trump's more controversial conversations with foreign leaders on a need-to-know basis. On their part, the Trump administration is prepared to share any information that they deem to be relevant to their future decision-making process. According to CNN, the disclosure last year of a complaint by an unidentified whistleblower revealed concerns among White House officials over alleged attempts by the administration to "lock down" access to internal information. The information included the President's July 2019 discussion with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky -- which triggered the hearings that led to Trump's impeachment by the House of Representatives.

Biden to face crucial test over access to sensitive information as he transitions into power

Donald Trump has said he'd leave the White House if the Electoral College votes for President-elect Joe Biden.

This is the closest the incumbent US president has come to conceding defeat in the November 3 vote.

Trump has so far refused to fully acknowledge his defeat, though earlier this week - with mounting pressure from his own Republican ranks - he agreed to let Biden's transition process officially proceed. Frenzied efforts by him and his aides to overturn results in key states, either by lawsuits or by pressuring state legislators, have failed, and he is running out of options.

On the Thanksgiving holiday on Thursday, Trump spoke to reporters and said, "Certainly I will. Certainly I will. And you know that," when asked if he'd leave if the electoral college votes for Biden.

He also added it would be hard for him to concede because "we know there was massive fraud."

"It was a rigged election ... at the highest level," Trump insisted in a sometimes rambling discourse at the White House, while continuing to offer no concrete evidence of widespread voting irregularities.

It was the first time Trump has taken questions from reporters since November 3.

In the United States, a candidate becomes president by securing the most “electoral” votes rather than by winning a majority of the national popular vote. Electors, allotted to the 50 states and the District of Columbia largely based on their population, are party loyalists who pledge to support the candidate who won the popular vote in their state.

Biden won the election with 306 Electoral College votes - many more than the 270 required - to Trump's 232, and the electors are scheduled to meet on Dec. 14 to formalize the outcome. Biden also leads Trump by more than 6 million in the popular vote tally.

Trump said on Thursday he would travel on December 5 to Georgia, a once solidly Republican state he lost narrowly to Biden, to campaign for two Republican US Senate candidates.

The two runoff elections in Georgia on January 5 will determine whether the Republicans keep their majority in the Senate.

"I just want to tell my people: don't be disappointed yet because this race is far from over," Trump said.

Meanwhile, Biden appeared with his wife in a video message posted on his Twitter account on Thanksgiving, and said his family typically holds a large gathering on the island of Nantucket off Massachusetts, but would remain in Delaware this year "with just a small group around our dinner table" because of the pandemic.

In the presidential-style address to a nation that has lost more than 260,000 lives to the coronavirus, the Democratic president-elect said on Wednesday Americans were making a "shared sacrifice for the whole country" and a "statement of common purpose" by staying at home with their immediate families.

Donald Trump has said he'd leave the White House if the Electoral College votes for President-elect Joe Biden. This is the closest the incumbent US president has come to conceding defeat in the November 3 vote.

Donald Trump has said he'd leave the White House if the Electoral College votes for President-elect Joe Biden. This is the closest the incumbent US president has come to conceding defeat in the November 3 vote. Trump has so far refused to fully acknowledge his defeat, though earlier this week - with mounting pressure from his own Republican ranks - he agreed to let Biden's transition process officially proceed. Frenzied efforts by him and his aides to overturn results in key states, either by lawsuits or by pressuring state legislators, have failed, and he is running out of options. On the Thanksgiving holiday on Thursday, Trump spoke to reporters and said, "Certainly I will. Certainly I will. And you know that," when asked if he'd leave if the electoral college votes for Biden. He also added it would be hard for him to concede because "we know there was massive fraud." "It was a rigged election ... at the highest level," Trump insisted in a sometimes rambling discourse at the White House, while continuing to offer no concrete evidence of widespread voting irregularities. It was the first time Trump has taken questions from reporters since November 3. In the United States, a candidate becomes president by securing the most “electoral” votes rather than by winning a majority of the national popular vote. Electors, allotted to the 50 states and the District of Columbia largely based on their population, are party loyalists who pledge to support the candidate who won the popular vote in their state. Biden won the election with 306 Electoral College votes - many more than the 270 required - to Trump's 232, and the electors are scheduled to meet on Dec. 14 to formalize the outcome. Biden also leads Trump by more than 6 million in the popular vote tally. Trump said on Thursday he would travel on December 5 to Georgia, a once solidly Republican state he lost narrowly to Biden, to campaign for two Republican US Senate candidates. The two runoff elections in Georgia on January 5 will determine whether the Republicans keep their majority in the Senate. "I just want to tell my people: don't be disappointed yet because this race is far from over," Trump said. Meanwhile, Biden appeared with his wife in a video message posted on his Twitter account on Thanksgiving, and said his family typically holds a large gathering on the island of Nantucket off Massachusetts, but would remain in Delaware this year "with just a small group around our dinner table" because of the pandemic. In the presidential-style address to a nation that has lost more than 260,000 lives to the coronavirus, the Democratic president-elect said on Wednesday Americans were making a "shared sacrifice for the whole country" and a "statement of common purpose" by staying at home with their immediate families.

Trump says he'll leave if Biden wins Electoral College vote

ROCKVILLE, Md. — The mercurial presidency of Donald Trump apparently is over. Historians, 20 or 30 years hence, will be the impartial arbiters of his accomplishments, but for the nearly 74 million people who voted for him, he already has fulfilled their hopes and justified their trust.

The Democrats call now for unity, but four years ago, they screamed for resistance and upheaval. They encouraged confrontation of Trump officials at their homes and restaurants. They opposed the administration every step of the way. Their hypocrisy is laughable.

Trump gave us a strong economy, achieved the lowest unemployment in 50 years, fortified the border and guaranteed the integrity of the judicial system by appointing over 200 judges, including three Supreme Court justices.

He was labeled a racist but funded historically Black colleges and created opportunity zones with Sen. Tim Scott. He was able to sign meaningful prison reform legislation.

He had foreign policy successes as well, renegotiating NAFTA and abandoning the disastrous Iranian nuclear deal (which took a $400 million cash bribe to close). He aggressively confronted China for its egregious behavior, brokered Middle East peace deals and was the greatest friend in the White House that Israel ever had.

Donald Trump was not without his flaws, but he stood like a brick wall against an unfair and openly hostile press and, alarmingly, a deep state aligned against him.

Trump made the Republican Party tougher, teaching it to counterpunch harder than its opponent. The Republicans did well on election night, gaining House seats when Nancy Pelosi predicted they would lose them.

They’re favored to retain control of the Senate, pending two runoffs in Georgia. This is very important as the Senate now will stand as the last line of defense against the radicals who steer the Democratic agenda.

Joe Biden was the best default option the Republicans could hope for. He is a creature of the Senate and hopefully will resist any attempts at major changes, like eliminating the filibuster and packing the Supreme Court. The problem, of course, is that he seems diminished and may not be up to the tidal wave coming from the left.

Mark down the levels of the Dow Jones and your 401(k)s. If Biden reimposes President Barack Obama’s regulations, the economy will shortly be back to where it was under Obama.

The Democrats remain mystified by the loyalty of Trump’s base. It is rock solid because half the country was tired of being patronized and lied to and worse, taken for granted. Trump was unique because he was only interested in results.

Democrats have been quick to dismiss any Trump supporter as a racist, homophobe or redneck, but they all shared a common trait with him, an unapologetic love of America.

The Republican success down-ballot and in state legislatures shows the folly of this condescension and sends a clear message that a majority of Americans are not ready for the socialist agenda favored by the radical left. Not only were there more Trump voters in 2020, there were more Hispanic and African-American voters backing Trump. The supreme irony here is that gradually the Republicans are becoming the party of the working class.

Trump reawakened the base with a populist message disdained by his critics as “Trumpism” but more closely resembling the rise of Huey Long. Trump was adored by his followers, who will remember him kindly.

Now it is time for Republicans to refocus and concentrate on winning the two races in Georgia. I am sure President Trump will do the right thing when the time comes.

A final word to the media: The open bar at the wedding is closed. Your ratings and circulation are about to tank. You may think you ran down the stag, but you will quickly realize that Joe Biden on a daily basis, speaking through his mask, will not generate the same ratings.

A word of caution to Fox News: Your not-so-subtle shift leftward is a mistake. You are one of a kind. Watching the quick abdication of Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum following the election (joining an already hostile Chris Wallace) was like finding out my wife was cheating. No one is tuning in to listen to the musings of Chris Hahn and Marie Harf.

Maybe now is the time for Trump to move on. There should not be a run in 2024. He can start a media empire to replace an increasingly disappointing Fox News. Rush will be leaving, and we will need someone to hold the left accountable.

I would not want to see Donald Trump, four years older, looking like Joe Biden did this year. A star knows when to leave the stage.

And finally, a special congratulations to Sen. Susan Collins, who cruised to reelection despite gloomy forecasts and a ton of dark money spent against her. The people of Maine place high value on integrity.

Happy Thanksgiving.

ROCKVILLE, Md. — The mercurial presidency of Donald Trump apparently is over. Historians, 20 or 30 years hence, will be the impartial arbiters of his accomplishments, but for the nearly 74 million people who voted for him, he already has fulfilled their hopes and justified their trust.

ROCKVILLE, Md. — The mercurial presidency of Donald Trump apparently is over. Historians, 20 or 30 years hence, will be the impartial arbiters of his accomplishments, but for the nearly 74 million people who voted for him, he already has fulfilled their hopes and justified their trust. The Democrats call now for unity, but four years ago, they screamed for resistance and upheaval. They encouraged confrontation of Trump officials at their homes and restaurants. They opposed the administration every step of the way. Their hypocrisy is laughable. Trump gave us a strong economy, achieved the lowest unemployment in 50 years, fortified the border and guaranteed the integrity of the judicial system by appointing over 200 judges, including three Supreme Court justices. He was labeled a racist but funded historically Black colleges and created opportunity zones with Sen. Tim Scott. He was able to sign meaningful prison reform legislation. He had foreign policy successes as well, renegotiating NAFTA and abandoning the disastrous Iranian nuclear deal (which took a $400 million cash bribe to close). He aggressively confronted China for its egregious behavior, brokered Middle East peace deals and was the greatest friend in the White House that Israel ever had. Donald Trump was not without his flaws, but he stood like a brick wall against an unfair and openly hostile press and, alarmingly, a deep state aligned against him. Trump made the Republican Party tougher, teaching it to counterpunch harder than its opponent. The Republicans did well on election night, gaining House seats when Nancy Pelosi predicted they would lose them. They’re favored to retain control of the Senate, pending two runoffs in Georgia. This is very important as the Senate now will stand as the last line of defense against the radicals who steer the Democratic agenda. Joe Biden was the best default option the Republicans could hope for. He is a creature of the Senate and hopefully will resist any attempts at major changes, like eliminating the filibuster and packing the Supreme Court. The problem, of course, is that he seems diminished and may not be up to the tidal wave coming from the left. Mark down the levels of the Dow Jones and your 401(k)s. If Biden reimposes President Barack Obama’s regulations, the economy will shortly be back to where it was under Obama. The Democrats remain mystified by the loyalty of Trump’s base. It is rock solid because half the country was tired of being patronized and lied to and worse, taken for granted. Trump was unique because he was only interested in results. Democrats have been quick to dismiss any Trump supporter as a racist, homophobe or redneck, but they all shared a common trait with him, an unapologetic love of America. The Republican success down-ballot and in state legislatures shows the folly of this condescension and sends a clear message that a majority of Americans are not ready for the socialist agenda favored by the radical left. Not only were there more Trump voters in 2020, there were more Hispanic and African-American voters backing Trump. The supreme irony here is that gradually the Republicans are becoming the party of the working class. Trump reawakened the base with a populist message disdained by his critics as “Trumpism” but more closely resembling the rise of Huey Long. Trump was adored by his followers, who will remember him kindly. Now it is time for Republicans to refocus and concentrate on winning the two races in Georgia. I am sure President Trump will do the right thing when the time comes. A final word to the media: The open bar at the wedding is closed. Your ratings and circulation are about to tank. You may think you ran down the stag, but you will quickly realize that Joe Biden on a daily basis, speaking through his mask, will not generate the same ratings. A word of caution to Fox News: Your not-so-subtle shift leftward is a mistake. You are one of a kind. Watching the quick abdication of Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum following the election (joining an already hostile Chris Wallace) was like finding out my wife was cheating. No one is tuning in to listen to the musings of Chris Hahn and Marie Harf. Maybe now is the time for Trump to move on. There should not be a run in 2024. He can start a media empire to replace an increasingly disappointing Fox News. Rush will be leaving, and we will need someone to hold the left accountable. I would not want to see Donald Trump, four years older, looking like Joe Biden did this year. A star knows when to leave the stage. And finally, a special congratulations to Sen. Susan Collins, who cruised to reelection despite gloomy forecasts and a ton of dark money spent against her. The people of Maine place high value on integrity. Happy Thanksgiving.

Oh, brother! Tears for Trump

Joe Biden has expressed optimism about America’s future in 2021. With COVID-19 cases surging nationwide, Biden has acknowledged the severity of the pandemic.

Joe Biden addresses on thanksgiving-eve

US President-elect Joe Biden pleaded with Americans on Wednesday to take steps to remain safe over the Thanksgiving holiday as COVID-19 cases soar.

Biden gave a presidential-style speech acknowledging people`s fatigue with restrictions amid the coronavirus pandemic, but urged them to exercise caution as caseloads surge.

"I know the country has grown weary of the fight. We need to remember - we`re at war with the virus, not with one another," Biden said as he urged Americans to forgo the type of big family gatherings normally associated with Thursday`s holiday, wear protective masks and maintain social distancing.

He said he would take immediate steps to address the coronavirus pandemic when he takes office on Jan. 20. During the campaign, Biden accused Trump, a Republican, of panicking and surrendering in the face of a public health crisis.

Biden said the United States faced "a long hard winter" but that it was during the most difficult circumstances that "the soul of our nation has been forged."

He said he hoped the recent positive news on vaccine development - the first shots potentially could be made available to some Americans within weeks - would serve as an incentive for people to take simple steps to get the virus under control.

"We have to try to slow the growth of the virus. We owe that to the doctors, the nurses, and the other front-line health care workers who have risked so much and heroically battled this virus for so long," Biden said in his Thanksgiving message to the nation ahead of a long weekend that traditionally features large family gatherings and a burst of cross country travel.

"More testing will find people with cases and get them away from other people, slowing the number of infections. More protective gear for businesses and schools will do the same - reducing the number of cases. Clear guidance will get more businesses and more schools open," he said.

Biden struck an upbeat tone despite the looming crisis of a "dark winter" that medical experts have warned about. "There is real hope, tangible hope. So hang on. Don`t let yourself surrender to the fatigue," Biden urged Americans as daily cases and deaths shattered records.

"I know we can and we will beat this virus. America is not going to lose this war. You will get your lives back. Life is going to return to normal. That will happen. This will not last forever," he said.

Biden noted that in his own family, a big Thanksgiving is off the table because of the pandemic.

More than 261,000 Americans have died from COVID-19, with the daily toll on Tuesday surpassing 2,000 for the first time since May, as infections and hospitalizations surge nationally. The United States leads the world in COVID-19 cases and deaths.

US President-elect Joe Biden pleaded with Americans on Wednesday to take steps to remain safe over the Thanksgiving holiday as COVID-19 cases soar. Biden gave a presidential-style speech acknowledging people`s fatigue with restrictions amid the coronavirus pandemic, but urged them to exercise caution as caseloads surge.

US President-elect Joe Biden pleaded with Americans on Wednesday to take steps to remain safe over the Thanksgiving holiday as COVID-19 cases soar. Biden gave a presidential-style speech acknowledging people`s fatigue with restrictions amid the coronavirus pandemic, but urged them to exercise caution as caseloads surge. "I know the country has grown weary of the fight. We need to remember - we`re at war with the virus, not with one another," Biden said as he urged Americans to forgo the type of big family gatherings normally associated with Thursday`s holiday, wear protective masks and maintain social distancing. He said he would take immediate steps to address the coronavirus pandemic when he takes office on Jan. 20. During the campaign, Biden accused Trump, a Republican, of panicking and surrendering in the face of a public health crisis. Biden said the United States faced "a long hard winter" but that it was during the most difficult circumstances that "the soul of our nation has been forged." He said he hoped the recent positive news on vaccine development - the first shots potentially could be made available to some Americans within weeks - would serve as an incentive for people to take simple steps to get the virus under control. "We have to try to slow the growth of the virus. We owe that to the doctors, the nurses, and the other front-line health care workers who have risked so much and heroically battled this virus for so long," Biden said in his Thanksgiving message to the nation ahead of a long weekend that traditionally features large family gatherings and a burst of cross country travel. "More testing will find people with cases and get them away from other people, slowing the number of infections. More protective gear for businesses and schools will do the same - reducing the number of cases. Clear guidance will get more businesses and more schools open," he said. Biden struck an upbeat tone despite the looming crisis of a "dark winter" that medical experts have warned about. "There is real hope, tangible hope. So hang on. Don`t let yourself surrender to the fatigue," Biden urged Americans as daily cases and deaths shattered records. "I know we can and we will beat this virus. America is not going to lose this war. You will get your lives back. Life is going to return to normal. That will happen. This will not last forever," he said. Biden noted that in his own family, a big Thanksgiving is off the table because of the pandemic. More than 261,000 Americans have died from COVID-19, with the daily toll on Tuesday surpassing 2,000 for the first time since May, as infections and hospitalizations surge nationally. The United States leads the world in COVID-19 cases and deaths.

Biden urges safe Thanksgiving amid coronavirus pandemic

Joe Biden further added that America will put in place a distribution plan to get the entire country immunised.

Joe Biden: Will discuss Corona vaccine distribution plan with task force

From Antony Blinken to John Kerry - many of Biden's future cabinet members have a long history of working with India, and an understanding of Indian affairs. WION's Molly Gambhir brings you the details and also tells you how Biden's transition is finally begun.

Gravitas: Joe Biden's transition begins, finally

Pennsylvania on Tuesday certified Democrat President-elect <a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/us-elections-results-2020-joe-biden-wins-georgia-after-recount-says-state-election-official-344393">Joe Biden's</a> victory in the US election 2020.

Watch:

<div class="videoWrapper trancodeVideo"><iframe allowfullscreen="" autoplay="1" class="includeVideo" frameborder="0" height="350" src="https://www.wionews.com/videos/antony-blinken-joe-bidens-pick-for-us-secretary-of-state-345124/embed" style="width:100%;max-width:560px;" width="560"></iframe></div>

Governor Tom Wolf said that Pennsylvania had "certified" the results of the November 3 vote.

"As required by federal law, I've signed the Certificate of Ascertainment for the slate of electors for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris," Tom Wolf said on Twitter.

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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Today <a href="https://twitter.com/PAStateDept?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@PAStateDept</a> certified the results of the November 3 election in Pennsylvania for president and vice president of the United States. 
 
As required by federal law, I’ve signed the Certificate of Ascertainment for the slate of electors for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
— Governor Tom Wolf (@GovernorTomWolf) <a href="https://twitter.com/GovernorTomWolf/status/1331263684681867266?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 24, 2020</a></blockquote>
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<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/what-donald-trump-liked-about-being-president-345060">Trump </a>had earlier won the state during the 2016 presidential elections when he defeated Hillary Clinton. According to reports, Biden won Pennsylvania by 81,000 votes out of nearly 6.9 million votes cast.&nbsp;

Earlier, Michigan had declared Biden as the winner in the state.

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/after-trump-biden-faces-pressure-to-stand-up-to-china-by-embracing-taiwan-345058">Trump</a> had earlier claimed that was defeated due to fraudulent voting, however, Michigan secretary of state Jocelyn Benson said it "confirms the truth: the election was fair and secure, and the results accurately reflect the will of the voters."

A Pennsylvania judge had earlier rejected a legal challenge by Trump's election campaign which sought to nullify votes.

President Trump had earlier authorised a transition amid growing pressure to concede, although the US president hasn't officially conceded the November 3 elections.&nbsp;

The green signal given by Trump would allow president-elect Biden to have access to office space and to meet with federal officials to ensure a smooth transition.

Meanwhile, the Dow surged past 30,000 points for the first time over Trump's decision on transition and hopes for coronavirus vaccines.

Pennsylvania on Tuesday certified Democrat President-elect Joe Biden's victory in the US election 2020. Watch: Governor Tom Wolf said that Pennsylvania had "certified" the results of the November 3 vote.

Pennsylvania on Tuesday certified Democrat President-elect Joe Biden's victory in the US election 2020. Watch: Governor Tom Wolf said that Pennsylvania had "certified" the results of the November 3 vote. "As required by federal law, I've signed the Certificate of Ascertainment for the slate of electors for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris," Tom Wolf said on Twitter. Today @PAStateDept certified the results of the November 3 election in Pennsylvania for president and vice president of the United States. As required by federal law, I’ve signed the Certificate of Ascertainment for the slate of electors for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. — Governor Tom Wolf (@GovernorTomWolf) November 24, 2020 × Trump had earlier won the state during the 2016 presidential elections when he defeated Hillary Clinton. According to reports, Biden won Pennsylvania by 81,000 votes out of nearly 6.9 million votes cast. Earlier, Michigan had declared Biden as the winner in the state. Trump had earlier claimed that was defeated due to fraudulent voting, however, Michigan secretary of state Jocelyn Benson said it "confirms the truth: the election was fair and secure, and the results accurately reflect the will of the voters." A Pennsylvania judge had earlier rejected a legal challenge by Trump's election campaign which sought to nullify votes. President Trump had earlier authorised a transition amid growing pressure to concede, although the US president hasn't officially conceded the November 3 elections. The green signal given by Trump would allow president-elect Biden to have access to office space and to meet with federal officials to ensure a smooth transition. Meanwhile, the Dow surged past 30,000 points for the first time over Trump's decision on transition and hopes for coronavirus vaccines.

Pennsylvania certifies Joe Biden's victory in US elections as stocks surge

US President-elect Joe Biden has said the United States would be "ready to lead" again on the global stage, turning the page on Republican President Donald Trump's "America First" policies as he pledged to work together with the nation's allies.

Video: Biden introduces cabinet picks

US President-elect Joe Biden has said the United States would be "ready to lead" again on the global stage, turning the page on Republican President Donald Trump's "America First" policies as he pledged to work together with the nation's allies.

Introducing his foreign policy and national security team, the Democratic former vice president Tuesday signalled he intended after taking office on January 20 to steer the United States away from the unilateralist nationalism pursued by Trump.

Biden has moved swiftly to assemble his team and make Cabinet choices after defeating Trump, who has waged a flailing legal battle to try to overturn the results, falsely claiming the election was stolen through widespread voting fraud.

The six women and men he has chosen to be his key diplomats and intelligence advisors said they would implement a return to multilateralism, global cooperation and fighting climate change after four years of Trump's go-it-alone policies.

"It's a team that will keep our country and our people safe and secure," Biden said, introducing his picks for secretary of state, national security advisor, intelligence chief, homeland security and other key cabinet jobs.

"It's a team that reflects the fact that America is back. Ready to lead the world, not retreat from it."

The team would shed what the president-elect described as "old thinking and unchanged habits" in its approach to foreign relations, he added.

Biden said his national security advisor Jake Sullivan is a once in a generation intellect with the experience and temperament for one of the toughest jobs in the world.

"As my National Security Advisor, I choose Jake Sullivan. He's a once-in-a-generation intellect with the experience and temperament for one of the toughest jobs in the world," Biden told reporters on Tuesday at the transition headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware.

At 43, he is the youngest national security advisor in decades. Sullivan was National Security Advisor to Biden when the latter was the vice president. He was a top advisor to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

He helped lead the early negotiations that led to the Iran nuclear deal, helped broker the Gaza ceasefire in 2012, and played a key role in the Asia-Pacific rebalance in our administration, Biden said.

"And in this campaign for the presidency, he served as one of my most trusted advisors on both foreign and domestic policy, including helping me develop our COVID-19 strategy. Jake understands my vision that economic security is national security," he said.

Biden said that Sullivan will help steer a foreign policy for the middle-class, for families like his growing up in Minnesota, where he was raised by parents who were educators and taught him the values of hard work, decency, service, and respect.

Antony Blinken, Biden's choice for secretary of state, vowed to pursue cooperation around the world, saying that the United States cannot solve global problems on its own.

"We have to proceed with equal measures of humility and confidence," Blinken said.

Linda Thomas-Greenfield, Biden's choice to be the next ambassador to the United Nations, echoed those sentiments.

"I want to say to you: America is back. Multilateralism is back. Diplomacy is back," she said.

Former secretary of state John Kerry, who Biden chose as his special envoy on climate change, confirmed the new administration would bring the US back into the Paris climate accord after Trump pulled out of the landmark 2015 deal.

But Kerry also warned that the Paris pact he helped negotiate was not enough to fight global warming, and called Tuesday for a UN conference in Glasgow next year to push for more.

"You're right to rejoin Paris on day one. And you're right to recognize that Paris alone is not enough," he said to Biden.

In his remarks, Sullivan said his national security team will be vigilant in the face of enduring threats from nuclear weapons to terrorism.

During his time in government, Sullivan was a lead negotiator in the initial talks that paved the way for the Iran nuclear deal and played a key role in the US-brokered negotiations that led to a ceasefire in Gaza in 2012. He also played a key role in shaping the Asia-Pacific rebalance strategy at both the State Department and the White House.

Biden also introduced Cuban-born Alejandro Mayorkas, tapped to become Homeland Security secretary; Avril Haines as director of national intelligence, and Jake Sullivan as his White House national security advisor.

All three pledged to maintain an environment of professionalism among the government officials they will oversee, obliquely referring to the politicization of much of government work that left much of the bureaucracy dispirited under Trump.

The world is much changed since Democrats were last in the White House four years ago.

China is on the rise and emboldened, Russia has sought to further assert its clout, US influence has waned as it has pulled out of various accords and American moral authority has been dented by turmoil at home.

Trump over four years unsettled many US allies, in Europe and elsewhere, with an antagonistic approach toward the NATO alliance and trade relations, abandonment of international agreements and warm relationships with authoritarian leaders.

Biden said his team had been able to begin coordinating with the Trump administration on national security, the coronavirus pandemic and vaccine distribution plans since it got the green light on Monday for formal transition efforts.

Biden also signalled that two former, more liberal, rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, were not under consideration for Cabinet appointments, saying he needed their votes in the closely divided Senate.

The White House on Tuesday gave the go-ahead for Biden to start receiving the president's daily intelligence briefing. Biden said he did not get one on Monday but expected it regularly.

During his presentation with his national security team, Biden urged the Senate to give his nominees who require confirmation by the chamber "a prompt hearing" and expressed hope he could work with Republicans "in good faith."

"Let's begin that work ... to heal and unite America as well as the world," Biden added.

Some Republican senators indicated, however, they may be prepared to stand in the way of his Cabinet appointments. Marco Rubio, a Foreign Relations Committee member, wrote on Twitter that Biden's Cabinet picks "will be polite &amp; orderly caretakers of America's decline."

Pennsylvania became the latest pivotal state on Tuesday to certify that Biden had won. The Nevada Supreme Court on Tuesday also confirmed Biden had won the state, sending the results to Nevada`s Democratic governor for final certification.

(with inputs from agencies)

US President-elect Joe Biden has said the United States would be "ready to lead" again on the global stage, turning the page on Republican President Donald Trump's "America First" policies as he pledged to work together with the nation's allies. Introducing his foreign policy and national security team, the Democratic former vice president Tuesday signalled he intended after taking office on January 20 to steer the United States away from the unilateralist nationalism pursued by Trump. Biden has moved swiftly to assemble his team and make Cabinet choices after defeating Trump, who has waged a flailing legal battle to try to overturn the results, falsely claiming the election was stolen through widespread voting fraud. The six women and men he has chosen to be his key diplomats and intelligence advisors said they would implement a return to multilateralism, global cooperation and fighting climate change after four years of Trump's go-it-alone policies. "It's a team that will keep our country and our people safe and secure," Biden said, introducing his picks for secretary of state, national security advisor, intelligence chief, homeland security and other key cabinet jobs. "It's a team that reflects the fact that America is back. Ready to lead the world, not retreat from it." The team would shed what the president-elect described as "old thinking and unchanged habits" in its approach to foreign relations, he added. Biden said his national security advisor Jake Sullivan is a once in a generation intellect with the experience and temperament for one of the toughest jobs in the world. "As my National Security Advisor, I choose Jake Sullivan. He's a once-in-a-generation intellect with the experience and temperament for one of the toughest jobs in the world," Biden told reporters on Tuesday at the transition headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware. At 43, he is the youngest national security advisor in decades. Sullivan was National Security Advisor to Biden when the latter was the vice president. He was a top advisor to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. He helped lead the early negotiations that led to the Iran nuclear deal, helped broker the Gaza ceasefire in 2012, and played a key role in the Asia-Pacific rebalance in our administration, Biden said. "And in this campaign for the presidency, he served as one of my most trusted advisors on both foreign and domestic policy, including helping me develop our COVID-19 strategy. Jake understands my vision that economic security is national security," he said. Biden said that Sullivan will help steer a foreign policy for the middle-class, for families like his growing up in Minnesota, where he was raised by parents who were educators and taught him the values of hard work, decency, service, and respect. Antony Blinken, Biden's choice for secretary of state, vowed to pursue cooperation around the world, saying that the United States cannot solve global problems on its own. "We have to proceed with equal measures of humility and confidence," Blinken said. Linda Thomas-Greenfield, Biden's choice to be the next ambassador to the United Nations, echoed those sentiments. "I want to say to you: America is back. Multilateralism is back. Diplomacy is back," she said. Former secretary of state John Kerry, who Biden chose as his special envoy on climate change, confirmed the new administration would bring the US back into the Paris climate accord after Trump pulled out of the landmark 2015 deal. But Kerry also warned that the Paris pact he helped negotiate was not enough to fight global warming, and called Tuesday for a UN conference in Glasgow next year to push for more. "You're right to rejoin Paris on day one. And you're right to recognize that Paris alone is not enough," he said to Biden. In his remarks, Sullivan said his national security team will be vigilant in the face of enduring threats from nuclear weapons to terrorism. During his time in government, Sullivan was a lead negotiator in the initial talks that paved the way for the Iran nuclear deal and played a key role in the US-brokered negotiations that led to a ceasefire in Gaza in 2012. He also played a key role in shaping the Asia-Pacific rebalance strategy at both the State Department and the White House. Biden also introduced Cuban-born Alejandro Mayorkas, tapped to become Homeland Security secretary; Avril Haines as director of national intelligence, and Jake Sullivan as his White House national security advisor. All three pledged to maintain an environment of professionalism among the government officials they will oversee, obliquely referring to the politicization of much of government work that left much of the bureaucracy dispirited under Trump. The world is much changed since Democrats were last in the White House four years ago. China is on the rise and emboldened, Russia has sought to further assert its clout, US influence has waned as it has pulled out of various accords and American moral authority has been dented by turmoil at home. Trump over four years unsettled many US allies, in Europe and elsewhere, with an antagonistic approach toward the NATO alliance and trade relations, abandonment of international agreements and warm relationships with authoritarian leaders. Biden said his team had been able to begin coordinating with the Trump administration on national security, the coronavirus pandemic and vaccine distribution plans since it got the green light on Monday for formal transition efforts. Biden also signalled that two former, more liberal, rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, were not under consideration for Cabinet appointments, saying he needed their votes in the closely divided Senate. The White House on Tuesday gave the go-ahead for Biden to start receiving the president's daily intelligence briefing. Biden said he did not get one on Monday but expected it regularly. During his presentation with his national security team, Biden urged the Senate to give his nominees who require confirmation by the chamber "a prompt hearing" and expressed hope he could work with Republicans "in good faith." "Let's begin that work ... to heal and unite America as well as the world," Biden added. Some Republican senators indicated, however, they may be prepared to stand in the way of his Cabinet appointments. Marco Rubio, a Foreign Relations Committee member, wrote on Twitter that Biden's Cabinet picks "will be polite & orderly caretakers of America's decline." Pennsylvania became the latest pivotal state on Tuesday to certify that Biden had won. The Nevada Supreme Court on Tuesday also confirmed Biden had won the state, sending the results to Nevada`s Democratic governor for final certification. (with inputs from agencies)

'America is back': Biden introduces his foreign policy and national security team

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