Good morning.
Joe Biden is set to take his first steps as president-elect today, launching his coronavirus taskforce. The 12-member group, led by the former surgeon general Vivek Murthy and the former Food and Drug Administration commissioner David Kessler, will seek to implement Biden’s campaign promises on coronavirus, including increasing testing, boosting contact tracing and ramping up the production of PPE.
It follows a victory speech on Saturday night in which Biden pledged to base his approach to the pandemic on “a bedrock of science”. As the US reached almost 9.9 million recorded cases, the president-elect told Americans he would “spare no effort – or commitment – to turn this pandemic around”.
What happens between now and inauguration day? Quite a lot. This explainer details what’s still to come in the US electoral process.
Meet the Bidens: As a new first family pack up for their move to the White House, the president-elect is expected to usher in his small circle of advisers which has been by his side through five decades in politics. Read more about the first family and their team here.
Trump refuses to accept being trumped
As the wheels begin to turn on a Biden presidency, Trump is still refusing to concede the election, saying he will launch a series of legal challenges to the result from today. According to CNN, both his wife, Melania, and son-in-law cum senior adviser, Jared Kushner, have broached the subject of conceding, apparently with little success.
Since the result was announced, many Republicans have broken with tradition and refused to congratulate Biden, instead blaming the media for “coronating” him and insisting a Trump victory is still possible. However, not all were supportive of the outgoing one-term president. The Utah senator and 2012 GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney described Trump as “the 900lb gorilla when it comes to the Republican party”.
Ivanka Trump has long been tipped as a possible presidential candidate. But as she loses her status as first daughter, and her job as senior adviser to the president, what will she do next?
Analysts warn that this could be ‘the most dangerous period in US history’, with a potentially vengeful president seeking to make last-ditched impressions on US policy and hampering attempts at a smooth transition of power. However, experts think he will eventually accept defeat and depart the White House.
If Trump loses power he’ll spend his last 90 days wrecking the United States like a malicious child with a sledgehammer in a china shop,” said Malcolm Nance, a veteran intelligence analyst and political author, speaking before the result of the election was known.
AOC has ended the Democratic truce
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez launched a searing critique of the Democratic party, signalling that the united front to defeat Trump was over. In a revealing interview with the New York Times, AOC took aim at the party’s campaigning structures and rejected accusations from some Democrats that the Green New Deal and Black Lives Matter movement had cost them seats in the election. She also warned that the party would suffer in the 2022 midterm elections if it did not put progressive candidates in senior positions.
Will the red Senate strangle Democratic policy?
With the Democrats failing to take the Senate, the party is grappling with the challenge of governing alongside the self-styled “grim reaper”, the Republican Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, who could strangle Democratic legislation. However, this could all end in Georgia, where two Senate run-off races are scheduled for 5 January. If Democrats win both, they will scrape a 50-50 tie in the Senate.
Stacey Abrams, who unsuccessfully ran for governor of Georgia against Brian Kemp two years ago and is seen as having been instrumental in the downfall of Trump in the traditionally Republican state, has helped raise more than $3.6m in two days for the races.
In other election news …
Kamala Harris’s ancestral village in India has been celebrating her win. Thulasendrapuram, which has just 350 residents, was the home of the vice-president-elect’s grandfather, and has expressed its pride for the “daughter of our village”.
Global stock markets have boomed following the election result, with the Nikkei index in Tokyo recording a 29-year high.
Russia and China have refused to congratulate Biden since news of his victory broke, perhaps waiting until Trump formally concedes, while other international leaders welcomed him. Pacific nations have heralded his win, optimistic about the impact of a Biden presidency on the climate crisis.
Stat of the day
Youth voter turnout in the 2020 presidential election may have increased by as much as 10%. With especially high engagement in 11 key battleground states, young people are being credited with propelling Joe Biden to victory. The president-elect won the support of 61% of people aged between 18 and 29.
Don’t miss this
Trump has reversed 99 environmental regulations, tweeted 552 times about “fake news” and told more than 20,000 lies in four years as president. Here are the numbers that tell the story of his term.
Last Thing: Trump’s voter fraud hotline gets pranked
A “voter fraud” hotline set up by Trump’s campaign team has turned into a “nightmare”, after being hit by a wave of prank calls, seemingly from TikTok and Twitter users. One call reported “an obese turtle that has rolled on to its back and is flailing in the hot sun”, in reference to the CNN anchor Anderson Cooper’s description of Trump last week. The president’s son Eric Trump blamed the Democrats on Twitter.
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