We are heading off
Thanks everyone for taking part this week, and for all your comments. We’ll keep the page open for longer but we are heading off. It’s been a long week! Hope everyone enjoys their weekends, and see you next Friday.
About that question from earlier ...
Our in the know colleague seems to have more ...
Guardian staff We were being told today by one of the senior journos who is trust on this that it works that way - world leaders frantically phone him up, and they choose who to put through...
You mean everyone phones the new US president at the same time and he chooses what call to take first and Trump talked to another ten people before talking to Theresa May?
We think so!
People are finding new ways to use Toblerone
Now tae find a substitute for my #Toblerone Susan. pic.twitter.com/Uy3PgadJo6
— Yoor Wullie (@YoorWullie) November 8, 2016
Shocking changes to chocolate are a national obsession
In a week that didn’t feature a great deal of cheer, there was one topic that unified the divided British nation. The outrageous changes to the shape of our beloved Toblerone chocolate. The most read list on the BBC News site was reassuringly British.
#Toblerone travesty, Marks & Spencer, then the US election. The British people know where their priorities lie. pic.twitter.com/yhEcUws772
— Robert Perry (Pez) (@pez_sez) November 8, 2016
I’ve got to be honest – I always thought that Toblerone was something that people only ever bought in a panic at airports if they’d forgotten to get someone a gift when they were abroad.
I always thought they made Toblerone triangular so it fits in the box.
And of course, it didn’t unify us for long. There had to be a Brexit angle, didn’t there?
Brexit just got real.
— John Prescott (@johnprescott) November 8, 2016
Via @markcjgreenwood #toblerone pic.twitter.com/VyFT7KGDvv
Rebecca Nicholson argued that it summed up 2016:
It’s easy to scoff at the fact that it takes food to act as a focal point for what is happening in this country, when there is so much that has been truly awful about this year...Child poverty, hate crime, the immediate retraction of a promise of extra NHS funding – all of these things should be more alarming than a slightly smaller chocolate bar, or a pricier snack. But all of these things have become part of a slow, heavy, ominous collective sigh that has summed up the past few months. Indeed, 2016 has been defined by a creeping sense of dread that all the progress humanity has made over the past few decades – centuries, if you’re feeling particularly doomy – might be about to unravel.
But then she was writing in the golden era before Trump was elected and we found out that Leonard Cohen had died...
Updated
Britain's fear and shame: systematic violations of disabled people's rights
In a week that brought us President-elect Trump, closer to home, Brits had our own reasons to feel that droning mix of fear and shame: a UN inquiry concluded that the UK’s austerity policies amounted to “systematic violations” of disabled people’s rights.
The work and pensions secretary, Damian Green, dismissed the scathing report as “patronising and offensive” to disabled people. Which is ironic, really, because I’d say the Conservatives telling paraplegics and cancer patients that being forced to pay the bedroom tax whilst having their disability benefit cut and social care removed “isn’t really as bad as you think” is the definition of patronising and offensive.
There’s been a lot of talk of a possible future president in Michelle Obama, but this reader doesn’t see it:
I'm astonished to see people quite seriously expressing hope that Michelle Obama will run next time.
All the stuff about writers hoping to tell their daughters that they could be President just like Hillary was undermined by her surname. Dynasties are part of the problem.
And this article suggests it isn’t likely to happen anyway:
What does a Trump win mean for Egypt?
World leaders have begun congratulating Donald Trump on his election win as people around the world anxiously wait to see how their country will engage with the new US president.
Egypt’s president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi was the first global leader to speak to Donald Trump on the phone. He was also one of the first to congratulate him publicly. After a meeting in New York in September, where he met both Trump and Clinton, he described Trump as “a strong leader.” Trump in turn called Sisi “a fantastic guy”.
Trump’s victory has divided Egyptian society. Some are relieved to see Clinton — who they believe supported the Muslim Brotherhood — lose. Others are devastated, and fear the repercussions of his win.
As part of a community project we asked people in Egypt to share their thoughts with us. Here’s what they said.
“Sisi was more than thrilled by his win. Trump, as a fascist leader, won’t be concerned much with the state of human rights. His support will directly result in more bloodshed and more violations of law and human rights in Egypt.
“When the far-right controls the most powerful office in the world, this will give a huge push to all the rightwing in the world. I’m talking about the extremist terrorist movements. Electing an anti-Muslim anti-Arab as a president is going to feed more and more the image those movements are trying to spread about the US as the biggest devil in the world, and will further inflate the violence and terrorism. This will only help increase the instability and the warfare in the region, and maybe the whole world” – Amr, Egypt
“We live in a police state where students, activists and journalists disappear or are jailed. The Obama administration had been putting pressure on our government to improve human rights and freedom of speech, but I doubt Donald Trump’s administration will do the same. This is evident from our current president’s eagerness to connect with Trump.
“Both Hillary Clinton and Trump are heavily disliked in the Middle East by Muslims and Arabs. While Trump is openly hostile to Muslims and clueless about the region, Hillary’s policy as secretary of state has been very deliberate and damaging to the region despite her party’s more tolerant and inclusive tone” – Mai, Egypt
Updated
Is it time to take a step back?
When Obama was elected he was practically hailed as the second coming of Jesus.
I remember it well, people crying in joy, people hugging in the street, the world was going to be a better fairer place. What happened? Absolutely the same old same old, the rich got richer the poor poorer.
Now we have the situation in reverse, it looks like the Americans have elected the anti-christ and its going to be the end of the world.
We will have to wait and see, but I think that neither one is so bad or the other one was so good.
Trumpocalypse: in times of trouble turn to foods that heal
Steven W Thrasher’s response to the news this week was one of the most heartfelt, simultaneously heartwarming and heartbreaking: “Hold tight to the ones you love, please ,” he wrote, “ because all we’ve got is each other.” It seems to be a thought that occurred to quite a few of my friends at the same time. “Well, the worst has happened,” texted my friend Alison. “We are terrified here.” And then, “I just wanted to say that I love you dearly.” And if you think about it, that’s a hopeful response to an otherwise hopeless event.
Telling someone you love them in the face of events that negate brotherly love is a small but resolute instance of resistance. Now a year’s worth of reading cookbooks on a daily basis – for my job – has made one thing clear. People who love to cook, love to share. And the one thing they share more than anything is a love of feeding people and the unshakeable belief that cooking a meal for someone is bold and restorative, an act of true love.
Georgina Hayden wrote a book called Stirring Slowly this year, which is full of the kind of warming meals you just want to come home to on a cold night. She talks about food that heals. So you know what, let’s invite each other round to dinner. Let’s make lunchboxes for colleagues. Let’s bring cakes into offices and flapjacks into classrooms. Let’s take care of each other. Let’s eat together.
Updated
Who is Donald Trump? A view through the lens ...
I interviewed photographers who’d taken pictures of Trump throughout his career, and it struck me just how malleable the president-elect is. One of the photographers, Chris Buck, described Trump as being very different in person from his bolshy public persona: gracious, funny, charming.
But another, Nigel Parry, said he was exactly the same as in public, that what you see is what you get. The two photos were admittedly taken a decade apart, but the disparity in their stories seems to suggest that Trump is even more chameleonic that we imagine, to the point of never having a stable version of himself: a man who makes up his life as he goes along, powered by a kind of barrelling narcissism and alpha-male presumptuousness.
What do you think of Trump? Is he a chameleon? What do you make of his change of tone since being elected? Share your views below.
Who were the closet Trump voters?
I went outside to discover a Trump sign on my street, in a window that did not have that sign on Tuesday.
— sarah maclean (@sarahmaclean) November 10, 2016
Who were the closet Trump voters? That’s a question I’ve been hearing again and again in the past few days.
I heard it at an election night party for students of Wharton, Trump’s alma mater. A student there told me that no one had been a vocal Trump supporter among the student body, but as the returns rolled in, she wondered how of them must have be closet Trump fans.
I heard it talking to cultural critic Mikki Kendall, who looked at the strong support for Trump among white women – exit polls suggested 53% of white women voted for Trump – and concluded that it was very difficult to say “that no one who was theoretically on the left voted for Trump.”
Trump’s win came as a shock to many Americans. They’re now wondering who supported him all along--and simply did not talk about it.
For some Americans, that’s a source of anxiety. At a protest in Chicago Thursday night, a young woman told the Washington Post that she was deeply upset by the people who had voted for Trump. “I see people differently now. I don’t smile at people on the street anymore. Because you never know,” she said.
Did British voters feel the same sense of shock that there might be closet Brexit supporters who had been around them all the time? Do you have any advice for Americans who are devastated by this outcome--the stages of mourning a Brexit?
This reader wants to highlight Trump’s approach to the environment:
What does the US election result mean for the planet more like. Sounds like if Trump acts out on his climate-change-denier stance the human race and many other species will be toast considerably sooner than necessary. Let's hope the rest of the world will come together to oppose him on this
And John Harris is below the line in discussion with another:
I think what's missing from John's analysis (of Brexit and of Trump) is the generational aspect. By and large the damage that globalisation has done to industrial communities was done twenty or thirty years ago. The "millennials" overwhelming didn't vote for Trump - they've moved on (at least in statistical aggregate).
The demographic that voted for Trump is one that remembers its parents industrial heyday. They lost out and they never made up the ground. They are not the poorest or most vulnerable people in society but they feel cheated, devalued and overlooked relative to the self-worth the prior generation enjoyed.
I don't think they're right about either the diagnosis or the remedy for their grievances. But they are a substantial block of voters and one that has lost faith in wringing incremental change out of the political establishment. In a democracy, those of us who have a different view - and that seems to within a generous margin of error of half the population - must find a way to talk to them. Democracy starts to fail when there is a fractured demos.
Guardian staff The first bit isn't right. The 90s was a bad time too, and these changes are still ongoing.
Have a look at Richard C Longworth's book Caught In The Middle, and what it says about the Midwest c.2007:
“About a decade ago, globalisation arrived and changed the Midwest for ever,” Longworth wrote. Economic decline had already blighted millions of lives, but this was something else again. “Traditional family farms vanished. Steel mills closed and auto factories shrunk. ‘Downsizing’ and ‘outsourcing’ enriched our vocabularies and frightened our workforce. Some big cities, such as Chicago, coped. Others, like Detroit, rotted. Small industrial cities fought to stay alive. ‘Rural’ became a synonym for ‘poor’. Immigrants, mostly Mexicans but Africans and Asians too, moved into towns and regions that were all European, and northern European at that. Self-sufficient places … became bedroom suburbs if they were lucky enough to lie within commuting distance of bigger cities. Those beyond this range, or too far from the interstate, shrivelled.”
Why listening matters
I’ve noticed a lot of people in comments in the Guardian and on my Facebook feed asking why journalists weren’t out in places in middle America more, so just wanted to promote Gary Younge’s insightful series on Muncie, Indiana, which was the original Middletown. I supported him on this project and it was clear to me after speaking to Muncie voters for a month that Trump could easily take the White House. When you spend time listening to people you realise the reasons why something happened are various and nuanced.
I read a fascinating Washington Post article today, it’s an interview with Kathy Cramer, a political science professor who has spent the last 10 years in Wisconsin listening to voters there. She reached people that have felt forgotten for not years, but decades. In her words: “Look at all the graphs showing how economic inequality has been increasing for decades. Many of the stories that people would tell about the trajectories of their own lives map onto those graphs, which show that since the mid-’70s, something has increasingly been going wrong. It’s just been harder and harder for the vast majority of people to make ends meet. So I think that’s part of this story. It’s been this slow burn.”
The Guardian community team’s job is to represent readers first, so we spend a lot of time listening. We believe it’s important to put across the views of ordinary people from myriad perspectives. My colleague, Carmen Fishwick’s piece on Trump supporters is compelling because collectively, these voices give us a unique insight that traditional forms of journalism sometimes miss. It’s important to hear from those people who we may not agree with because, only by giving them time, respect and trying to understand their point of view are we going to be able to unify what seems to be an increasingly fragmented society. Of course there is plenty of hate out there, but it’s worth remembering that Clinton did actually win the popular vote.
Updated
The Hillary front pages you might have had ...
I was working overnight to cover the US election, which is always a slightly surreal experience. Not least because news people working overnight shifts get food and are treated like heroes, whereas the sport desk are just pretty much expected to cope with evening fixtures pushing them to the deadline wire every single day. While there were dozens of us working on the election, there was one lone soul on the other side of the office faithfully doing the over-by-over live blog for England’s tour of India. We weren’t there the following night. He was.
When you have an event like an election with a binary outcome, of course the sensible editorial thing is to do some preparations. Such preparations can help fuel conspiracy theorists. Newsweek even managed to ship to newsagents some copies of their issue celebrating Hillary Clinton as the first woman to become president of the US.
At the Guardian we had the design team working through the night to prepare the print edition that would hit the streets. They also were preparing for both outcomes, and Chris Clarke, our Deputy Creative Director, published on Instagram a montage of some of the different designs that were tried out during the night. They’ll all end up in the archive – a glimpse of an alternative future.
The US election in graphics
Here are some of the best graphics to help you make sense of it all:
Away from politics, readers have been sharing their memories and tributes to Leonard Cohen after the news he has died aged 82.
The lessons of the US election: this is all about economics
As with Brexit, it seems to me that as far as writers and journalists are concerned there are two broad categories of response to the Trump victory. One is angry, righteous and focused on the idea that the whole phenomenon is basically down to racism, xenophobia, and hatred of the idea of women’s emancipation. Among other places, you could look at the historian Simon Schama’s Twitter feed for details: among his other opinions, he claimed this week that Trump’s win has had “had NOTHING to do with economics.”
This seems a strange view to me, and I tend to go for the second category of response. Most things – including Trump – have a lot do with economics. As I’ve said in a piece The Guardian published yesterday, the fact that he was basically carried to victory in the rustbelt states of the Midwest had everything to do with the malign aspects of globalization, and how they sow insecurity and instability (note also that Hillary Clinton was indelibly associated with all this, thanks chiefly to her husband’s record as President).
But here’s the other thing: beyond the usual black-shirted suspects, most racism and xenophobia and misogyny are not sui generis. They take root and spread when people are robbed of the meaning they apply to their lives, scared about the future, and either jealously guarding the tiny amount they’ve got, or suddenly aware that they have nothing at all.
Obligatory Nazi reference: this is what the 1930s taught us. On the current evidence, we may have to learn it all over again.
Updated
A couple of your comments so far
What do I think about the US election result?
It was inevitable.
The inevitable result of the political establishment, as represented in this instance by Hillary Clinton, failing to listen, failing to react, failing to engage, labelling and judging people rather than acknowledging their concerns, and focusing on identity politics, political correctness and the rights of minorities rather than the basics of human existence: the need for a job, a safe neighbourhood, hope for the future.
Trump doesn't have all the answers, or perhaps any answers, but it's clear the establishment doesn't either. Not only that, but the establishment doesn't even think there's a problem.
I think Trump was the candidate of hope and change just as Obama was in 2008.
His positive vision of making America great again, bringing jobs back, cutting regulations, defunding the EPA, slashing taxes, appointing strict constitutionalists to the US supreme court, etc. is what won him the election.
Even if he delivers on 10% of his promises, it can be seen as a success. Given both houses are Republican controlled, this is a great opportunity to seize on and get these laws passed.
Trump has also indicated he will pull the US out of the Paris climate deal - this was a bad deal for America and its economy.
Well for one thing it means the voting machines are not rigged.
Voices from America: why Trump won
Megan Carpentier, former Opinion editor and now writer in our New York office explains with the help of voters on the street.
The results of Tuesday’s election in the United States are going to be the subject of a lot of opinions and a lot of research for years to come. It was, for many people (including probably some with the Trump campaign), an unexpected blow-out.
Explanations abound, and many of them make a certain amount of sense. But I spent a not-inconsiderable amount of time talking to voters in blue collar areas, including some which strongly turned out for Trump, and there were two things that stuck with me, and which I felt revealed the divide in how journalists report on economics, and how people experience it.
When I was outside of Cleveland, Ohio, I spoke to a group of men about how they saw the economy affecting their lives.
Jim Miller, 50, is an attorney in Avon, but like many of his friends and neighbors he has those blue-collar roots, said: “My dad worked 42 years in the steel mill ... Those jobs don’t exist anymore. How many people work in the steel mill now? None.”
Walker added: “Those jobs that you could support a family on without going to college, they’re just not there. They’re gone.”
Florian Paul, 61, who works for Hewlett Packard and lives in Avon Lake, explained that, for his parents, “you get a low paying job then, you could work, get a house , you could survive. But now you’re going to live in a really bad neighborhood to do that ... They don’t make those little houses anymore.”
“Look at all the manufacturing that was actually right there in south Lorain,” said accountant Ed Kilbane, 54. “Today everybody’s talking about their parents, but if their parents were in the same situation today, the reality of it was, no matter how hard they tried, they wouldn’t be able to repeat for us what they did, because the conditions are totally different.”
Those losses aren’t reflected in unemployment or underemployment statistics; they don’t show up in stories about the rise in GDP or how jobs (albeit jobs in retail and at casinos) are returning to former manufacturing communities. The numbers don’t reflect what people see as the realities of their lives, and all the maths in the world won’t make people believe that their children will have it better than they did.
Donald Trump almost certainly doesn’t have all the answers. But he convinced millions of people to, as monologuist Mike Daisey said in his show The Trump Card, to roll the dice and say “Fuck it.”
Americans have never exactly had a fear of the unknown. Now, we’ve got to deal with the uncertainty of both the unknown and the unknowable because, for half of us, that seemed like the better alternative.
Updated
What do you think of the US election result?
It’s the topic of the week and we are keen to hear from our readers on it. So what do you think? Here’s some comment and news articles to get you thinking:
• More anti-Trump action planned after second night of protests across US
• Trump and Obama put differences aside in first White House meeting
• Robert De Niro reacts to Trump’s presidential victory – video
Share your comments/questions/views below the line, and tell us about how you think coverage on this topic could be improved.
Updated
Welcome everyone
So ... lots to talk about this week (to say the least!), and this is the space to do it in. Join us from 12pm-4.30pm (GMT) to discuss a week in politics that shocked much of the world. We’ve got lots of other stuff in store too, including comments on grammar schools in the UK and the power of swearing. Stay tuned.
Updated
This says that it was Theresa May who called Trump ( https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/nov/10/concerns-over-special-relationship-allayed-as-may-speaks-to-trump ):
May talked to Trump earlier on Thursday, a Downing Street statement said. It added that the prime minister called “to congratulate him on his hard-fought election campaign and victory”, and confirmed May had been invited to visit the US “as soon as possible”.
So he didn't call her, but she called him?