Donald Trump has been elected United States president for a second term nearly four years after leaving office, with projections showing the Republican comfortably clearing the 270 electoral vote threshold required to win the White House.
His Democratic rival, Kamala Harris, has called him to concede defeat, ahead of delivering remarks at Howard University in Washington, DC later on Wednesday.
This was a very different scenario when Donald Trump lost the election to President Biden [in 2020]. There was not the peaceful transfer of power and there was not a concession and congratulatory telephone call from Donald Trump to Biden.
So what we’re seeing Kamala Harris do is restoring the norms and traditions that have been in place in the United States for hundreds of years.
We expect Kamala Harris to talk about … the importance of the peaceful transfer of power and what this means to democracy. This has been a recurring theme of the Biden-Harris administration: preserving democracy in the United States.
So we expect that she’ll touch on that, and also the importance of bringing the country together. This has been a very divisive US election and Kamala Harris on the campaign trail, in the final days, she pledged to be a president for all Americans should she take the Oval Office.
What is Project 2025?
Now that the election has gone to Trump, and his Republican Party is looking to have made big gains in the Senate and House of Representatives, Project 2025, a conservative plan to reshape American government and society, is more relevant than ever.
The plan, laid out by conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, is a 922-page behemoth, essentially a how-to guide for a right-wing model of governance, proposing plans to expand presidential power and purge the civil service of “liberals”.
While largely focused on dismantling the “Deep State”, the document also offers pointers on foreign policy, striking a hawkish tone on China – “the most significant danger to Americans’ security, freedoms, and prosperity” – prioritising nuclear weapons production and curtailing international aid programmes.
On the domestic front, much of the manifesto bears a strong resemblance to Trump’s policy proclivities with proposals to deport en masse more than 11 million undocumented immigrants and give states more control over education, limiting progressive initiatives on issues such as LGBTQ rights.
But on some issues, it goes further than Trump’s campaign, calling on federal authorities to ban pornography and reverse approval of a pill used in abortions, mifepristone. It also calls for anyone providing or distributing abortion pills by mail to be prosecuted.
Nikki Haley congratulates Trump
Haley, a former United Nations ambassador under Donald Trump who later ran a primary campaign against him for the Republican presidential nomination, congratulated the president-elect on his win.
“The American people have spoken,” Haley wrote on X. “Congratulations to President Trump on a strong win.”
“Now, it’s time for the American people to come together, pray for our country, and start the process of a peaceful transition,” Haley added. “That begins with Kamala Harris conceding. You can’t just talk about unity in a campaign, you have to show it regardless of the outcome.”
Haley was at one point one of Trump’s most vocal Republican critics, raising concerns about his age, mental state and capacity for leadership. But her primary campaign failed to make much progress, and she suspended it in the aftermath of the Super Tuesday votes in March. With 15 states up for grabs, she had only managed to secure one: left-leaning Vermont, earning just 89 party delegates to Trump’s 995.
Haley only endorsed Trump months later, at the Republican National Convention, in July.
What the Democratic Party got wrong
We’ve spoken to John Neffinger, a Democratic strategist and former communications director in the Democratic National Committee, to ask him what the party did wrong.
Here’s what he had to say:
“Kamala Harris had a wonderful introduction after Joe Biden stepped aside. The party united behind her, she had her coming out at the convention, and she also did very well at the debate.
“Through all of that, she was what we might term in the consulting political consulting business, ‘the joyful lawyer’. People saw someone who was going to be upbeat, forward-looking, address their problems and somebody who they would be happy to see.
“People saw her as a fresh face certainly after Joe Biden, and we were relieved to have somebody who wasn’t pushing 80 years old that they might have an opportunity to vote for.
“But as that ‘changed candidate’ and that sort of freshness wore off, that was part of Trump’s campaign’s theory – that there would be a honeymoon period, people would be excited, a fresh new face, and then maybe sort of regress to the mean, if you will.
“And what I think that Harris’s campaign may be rethinking this morning is that in the last several weeks, she had had a lead in the polls and clearly led the polls, and seemed she likely was maybe being a little more cautious. Not going out there and saying ‘Hey, this is gonna be great, here are all the things we are gonna do’.
“In fact, the other thing she introduced down the very home stretch was raising the profile of her attacks on Trump, condemning him for violation of democratic norms, etc. We’ve heard a lot of that from Democrats for a lot of years now, and people I think are tired of hearing that. They know it already and don’t wanna be told that they are a bad person if they are considering voting for Trump.”
