Nancy Pelosi blames Joe Biden for election defeat as Democrats turn on each other – US politics live | US elections 2024

Peter Walker

Ed Davey has urged Keir Starmer to “Trump-proof” the UK by urgently seeking closer European cooperation over military aid for Ukraine and economic ties, after the US president-elect’s threats about security and trade wars.

The Liberal Democrat leader, whose party is the third biggest in the House of Commons, argued that while the UK government should seek to work with a Donald Trump administration, it should also be as prepared as possible if he were to abandon Ukraine or impose sweeping tariffs.

“Yes, we can work with him,” Davey said. “Of course we should, and it may well be that we can, but it would be irresponsible not to take the measures in a diplomatic way, defensive way, that would make our national security and our economy Trump-proof.

“I think millions of people in the UK and elsewhere are just really worried and quite scared. And they’re particularly scared about what it’s going to mean for our security and our economy.”

Trump’s election should be “a wake-up call for the government on Ukraine”, said Davey, who was spending part of Friday at a charity in Surrey that provides aid packages for Ukrainian families.

He said Starmer should push for an immediate European conference on how the continent could fill the gap in defence assistance if, as Trump and his team have hinted, he pulls US support, or tries to force Ukraine into accepting an end to the conflict that would greatly strengthen Russia.

“We can’t simply abandon Ukraine to Putin just because Trump’s in power,” Davey said. “We’ve been playing a critical role, and I think we could play an even more critical role by working with European friends, bringing together European countries so we can increase the aid to Ukraine, and pay for that by seizing Russian assets properly. We’ve been pushing for that for some time.

“Now is the absolute the moment to do it so Europe can fill the gap. But we have got to do it quickly.”

Millions of Americans are at risk of losing health coverage in 2025 under Donald Trump’s forthcoming administration.

More than 20 million Americans rely on the individual private health insurance market for healthcare, private insurance which is subsidized by the federal government.

These subsidies, programs that help lower the cost of health insurance premiums, increased the amount of assistance available to people who want to buy health insurance through the Affordable Care Act, dubbed Obamacare as a signature piece of legislation during Barack Obama’s administration.

This specific subsidy program resulted from the Biden administration’s 2021 American Rescue Plan and is set to expire at the end of 2025.

“The consequences of more people going uninsured are really significant, not just at an individual level with more medical debt and less healthy outcomes, but also has ripple effects for providers,” Sabrina Corlette, a research professor and co-director of the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University, said.

“Premiums go up for the people who do have health insurance; for the people without health insurance, it’s financially devastating. The result is medical debt, garnished wages and liens on people’s homes because they can’t pay off their bills,” she said.

Helen Sullivan

Officials at the Pentagon are having informal discussions about what to do if Donald Trump were to give an illegal order, such as deploying the military domestically, according to a report from CNN. They are also preparing for the possibility that he may change rules to be able to fire scores of career civil servants.

On the campaign trail, Trump has mulled sending the military after his political enemies, and also to turn back migrants at the southern border.

US law generally prohibits active-duty troops from being deployed for law enforcement purposes. There are also fears he could gut the civil service in the Pentagon, and replace fired staff with employees selected for their loyalty to him.

Just hours after Donald Trump’s election win on Tuesday, Black people across the US reported receiving racist text messages telling them that they had been “selected” to pick cotton and needed to report to “the nearest plantation”. While the texts, some of which were signed “a Trump supporter”, varied in detail, they all conveyed the same essential message about being selected to pick cotton. Some of the messages refer to the recipients by name.

A spokesperson for the president-elect told CNN that his “campaign has absolutely nothing to do with these text messages”. It is not yet clear who is behind the messages, nor is there a comprehensive list of the people to whom the messages were sent, but social media posts indicate that the messages are widespread.

Black people in states including Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia, New York, New Jersey, Nevada, the DC area and elsewhere reported receiving the messages. The messages were sent to Black adults and students, including to high schoolers in Massachusetts and New York, and students at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), such as Alabama State University and other schools, including ones across Ohio, Clemson University, the University of Alabama and Missouri State. At least six middle school students in Pennsylvania received the messages, according to the AP.

Authorities including the FBI and attorneys general are investigating the messages.

Nancy Pelosi says Biden’s delay in exiting race blew Democrats’ chances

Martin Pengelly

Joe Biden’s slowness in exiting the 2024 presidential election cost the Democrats dearly, the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi said, days after Kamala Harris was beaten by Donald Trump.

“We live with what happened,” Pelosi said.

Pelosi was speaking to The Interview, a New York Times podcast, in a conversation the newspaper said would be published Saturday in full.

“Had the president gotten out sooner,” Pelosi remarked, “there may have been other candidates in the race. The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary.

“And as I say, Kamala may have, I think she would have done well in that and been stronger going forward. But we don’t know that. That didn’t happen. We live with what happened. And because the president endorsed Kamala Harris immediately, that really made it almost impossible to have a primary at that time. If it had been much earlier, it would have been different.”

As Democrats engaged in bitter blame games over Harris’s defeat and a second presidency for Trump, who senior Democrats from Harris down freely called a “fascist”, Pelosi’s words landed like an explosive shell.

The Times said Pelosi “went to great lengths to defend the Biden administration’s legislative accomplishments, most of which took place during his first two years, when she was the House speaker”.

Pelosi reportedly played a key role in persuading Biden to stand aside. But she has not sought to soothe his feelings. In August, she told the New Yorker she had “never been that impressed with his political operation”.

Hello and welcome back to our rolling coverage of US politics and the fallout from the presidential election.

Our top story this morning is that Nancy Pelosi has blamed Joe Biden for the Democrats’ defeat.

The former House speaker said the president’s slowness in dropping out of the race left the party without enough time to hold an open primary.

More on that shortly. First, though, here is a round up of the latest news:

• The justice department has brought charges against a member of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards paramilitary group for plotting to assassinate Donald Trump prior to Tuesday’s presidential election, the Associated Press reports. On the campaign trail in the lead-up to his election win, Trump survived two assassination attempts, but authorities do not believe either were linked to Iran, a longtime foe of the United States.

• Donald Trump’s incoming presidency is set to threaten millions of Americans’ healthcare plans. More than 20 million Americans rely on the individual private health insurance market for healthcare, private insurance which is subsidized by the federal government.

• Robert F Kennedy Jr, the former independent presidential candidate turned Trump surrogate, is reviewing candidate resumes for the top jobs at the US government’s health agencies in Donald Trump’s new administration, a former Kennedy aide and a source familiar with the matter told Reuters on Friday.

• A Chinese national who had been recently released from a mental hospital was ordered to be held on trespassing charges on Friday after police say he tried to enter president-elect Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, the Associated Press reports. That entrance was in violation of a court order that he stay away from Mar-a-Lago after previous attempts.

• Democratic US Representative Andrea Salinas has won reelection in Oregon’s 6th congressional District, beating Republican Mike Erickson to earn a second term in Congress after outraising him by millions of dollars. Oregon’s newest congressional district was seen as leaning more toward Democrats, according to the Cook Political Report. That gave a slight advantage to the freshman Democratic incumbent, who also defeated Erickson in the 2022 election.

• Women have won 60 seats in the New Mexico Legislature to secure the largest female legislative majority in US history, stirring expressions of vindication and joy among candidates.

• A federal judge on Friday overturned Illinois’ ban on semiautomatic weapons, leaning on recent US supreme court rulings that strictly interpret the second amendment right to keep and bear firearms. Judge Stephen P McGlynn issued the lengthy finding in a decree that he said applied universally, not just to the plaintiffs who brought the lawsuit challenging the ban.

• Just hours after Donald Trump’s election win on Tuesday, Black people across the US reported receiving racist text messages telling them that they had been “selected” to pick cotton and needed to report to “the nearest plantation”. While the texts, some of which were signed “a Trump supporter”, varied in detail, they all conveyed the same essential message about being selected to pick cotton. Some of the messages refer to the recipients by name.

• Donald Trump, during a call with Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Wednesday, handed the phone to Elon Musk, the New York Times reported, confirming an earlier Axios story. It is not clear what the three men discussed or whether they touched on any change in US policy toward Ukraine in the wake of Trump’s election victory, the Times said.

• The Biden administration has decided to allow US defense contractors to work in Ukraine to maintain and repair Pentagon-provided weaponry, Reuters is reporting, citing US officials. The contractors would be small in number and located far from the frontlines and will not be engaged in combat, an official told the news agency.

• The judge overseeing Donald Trump’s 2020 election interference case has granted a request from the special counsel’s office to pause proceedings in his trial on charges related to trying to overturn the 2020 election. Jack Smith asked judge Tanya Chutkan to pause the case against the president-elect to “assess the unprecedented circumstances” in which the office finds itself.