Donald Trump is headed back to the White House after defeating Vice President Kamala Harris following a campaign where he vowed to retaliate against his critics and to carry out the largest mass deportation of immigrants in U.S. history.
As of this broadcast, Trump had secured at least 277 electoral votes, surpassing the 270 needed to win the presidency. Harris has 224 electoral votes. The race was called for Trump after he won the critical swing states of Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Trump is also leading in Michigan, Nevada and Arizona.

Trump is the first convicted felon — and at 78 years, the oldest candidate — ever elected president. He appears on pace to win the popular vote for the first time after receiving fewer votes than Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020. Trump spoke at his Mar-a-Lago resort early Wednesday morning and said he had won an “unprecedented and powerful mandate.”

President-elect Donald Trump: “Many people have told me that God spared my life for a reason. And that reason was to save our country and to restore America to greatness.”

Trump’s running mate JD Vance described Trump’s victory as the “greatest political comeback in the history of the United States.” Attendees at Trump’s victory party included tech billionaire Elon Musk, who spent at least $119 million to help get Trump elected. Trump is poised to join Grover Cleveland as the only former president to lose reelection and then return to the White House four years later.
Trump won despite warnings from many of his former Cabinet members that he was unfit for office in part for attempting to overturn the 2020 election.
On election night, Kamala Harris did not address supporters who had gathered for a watch party at her alma mater Howard University, the historically Black university.

The Republican Party has clinched control of the United States Senate, shifting the balance of power on Capitol Hill. In West Virginia, Governor Jim Justice won the race to fill the seat vacated by Senator Joe Manchin, who earlier this year quit the Democratic Party and said he would not seek reelection. Justice is a wealthy heir to a coal mining fortune with a net worth estimated at over a half-billion dollars. In 2022, Justice signed a near-total ban on abortion in West Virginia. In Montana, Republican Tim Sheehy is projected to have beaten incumbent Democrat Jon Tester, flipping another Senate seat for Republicans. In Ohio, Republican Bernie Moreno has defeated Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown, who’s held the seat since 2007. Before then, Brown served in the House of Representatives, where he opposed the Iraq War, the USA PATRIOT ACT, and became an early champion of marriage equality. Brown conceded defeat late Tuesday.

Sen. Sherrod Brown: “We believe in the power of people over corporate special interests. We always will. We believe if you love this country, you fight for the people who make it work. We always will. This is a disappointment but is not a failure.”

Senator-elect Bernie Moreno is a multimillionaire luxury car dealer and cryptocurrency entrepreneur who benefited from $40 million in campaign cash from crypto firms. Ohio’s Senate race was the most expensive such contest ever; some estimates put total spending at around a half-billion dollars. In Nebraska, Republican Senator Deb Fischer held off a challenge from independent Dan Osborn. And the Republicans could win several more Senate races. In Pennsylvania, Dave McCormick has a one-point lead over Senator Bob Casey. In Nevada, Republican Sam Brown has a slight lead over Democratic Senator Jacky Rosen. In Michigan, Republican Mike Rogers is leading Elissa Slotkin. In Wisconsin, incumbent Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin declared victory after it appeared her narrow lead over multimillionaire banker Eric Hovde will hold. In Arizona, Democrat Rubén Gallego has a lead over Republican challenger Kari Lake, a far-right election denier and Trump ally. The two are vying for Kyrsten Sinema’s seat after the Democrat turned independent announced she was not seeking reelection.

In other Senate news, for the first time in history, two Black women will serve in the Senate at the same time: Angela Alsobrooks in Maryland and Lisa Blunt Rochester in Delaware, both Democrats.

It remains unclear which party will control the House of Representatives, but Democrats did pick up a pair of seats in New York state. Republican Tom Barrett, meanwhile, flipped a seat in Michigan previously held by Democratic Congressmember Elissa Slotkin. In Delaware, Democrat Sarah McBride has been elected the first openly transgender congressmember in U.S. history, defeating Republican John Whalen. She has vowed to address criminal justice reform, abortion rights and gun violence.

Historic ballot measures enshrining the right to an abortion passed in seven states: Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Montana, Maryland, New York and Missouri, where voters backed a measure that will overturn one of the strictest abortion bans in the nation that prohibits the procedure even in cases of rape and incest. Missouri was the first state to enact an abortion ban after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. In Arizona, voters approved Prop 139 by a landslide, establishing a fundamental right to abortion and prohibiting state officials from restricting or banning the procedure before 24 weeks of pregnancy. Similar ballot proposals failed in three states: South Dakota, Nebraska and Florida, where a measure that would have rolled back the state’s six-week abortion ban garnered over 57% of the votes, just short of the 60% needed to pass.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fired his Defense Minister Yoav Gallant Tuesday in a surprise move that triggered large-scale protests across Israel. Gallant had publicly disagreed with Netanyahu over a temporary deal to exchange Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners; he also insisted Israel carry out a full investigation into the failures that led to Hamas’s October 7 attack — something Netanyahu rejected. Netanyahu appointed Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz to succeed Gallant. Katz recently led a successful campaign to cancel Israel’s agreements with the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA. Earlier this year, he proposed creating an artificial island off Gaza’s coast where Palestinians could be forcibly relocated. In August, Katz called for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, declaring, “This is a war on all fronts, and we must win it.” On Tuesday, protests erupted in Jerusalem near Netanyahu’s official residence calling for the prime minister to resign. Meanwhile, tens of thousands marched in Tel Aviv, where protesters blocked a major highway.

Itamar Berger: “We believe it has never ever been this urgent. We believe the worst threat on the very existence of the state of Israel is not posed by Iran or Hezbollah or Hamas, but by our own government. Our own government is doing whatever is within its power to destroy us from within.”

In the Gaza Strip, four Palestinians were killed when Israeli troops shelled a home southeast of Khan Younis. Elsewhere, an Israeli airstrike leveled an apartment building in Gaza City, killing five people. On Tuesday, Palestinians in Gaza observed the U.S. election with a mix of dread and resignation. This is Ikram Al Hamm, a Khan Younis resident who spoke to reporters surrounded by the rubble of her home, which was destroyed by Israeli attacks.

Ikram Al Hamm: “Here’s our destruction. The destruction of the Gaza Strip is at the hands of the Americans. All the explosive materials that America sends to Gaza only bring destruction. What can we benefit from America? What will we gain from it, from the U.S. elections? Did the U.S. president encourage us in any way? No, he stood against us, against our kids in the Gaza Strip and against our very lives. He destroyed us and the Gaza Strip.”

In the occupied West Bank, Israeli forces have killed at least eight Palestinians in a series of raids that began on Monday. Two people were killed in the town of Tamoun, where Israeli troops were seen moving a body with an armored bulldozer. Elsewhere, at least four people were killed in the city of Qabatiya near Jenin. During the raid, photojournalist Rabie Al-Munir was shot in the abdomen and rushed to a hospital where he’s in stable condition. Palestinian medics said a 3-year-old child was also hospitalized after being bitten by an Israeli attack dog.

Israel’s military is continuing its assault on towns and villages in southern Lebanon, where on Tuesday at least 20 people were killed and more than a dozen others wounded when an Israeli airstrike tore through a high-rise apartment building in the coastal town of Barja south of Beirut. The attack came without warning. Resident Moussa Zahran showed reporters the twisted wreckage of his home after he narrowly survived the attack, which left his young son and wife hospitalized when their home collapsed around them.

Moussa Zahran: “We were drinking coffee in the living room. These slabs that you see here weigh 100 kilograms. They fell on a 13-kilogram child. And all of these fell on my wife.”

Today, a group of 12 NGOs, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, called on the United Nations Human Rights Council to investigate abuses committed during Israel’s war on Lebanon, which has killed over 3,000 people. Jeremie Smith of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies said in a statement, “There’s a huge risk of the same types of atrocities occurring in Lebanon as in Gaza.”

In the U.K., police arrested Israeli filmmaker, activist and retired academic Haim Bresheeth under the British Terrorism Act after he gave a speech on Friday advocating for Palestinian rights during a protest. Bresheeth is a child of Holocaust survivors and founder of the Jewish Network for Palestine. Police accused him of “making a hate speech” but refused to answer questions from Bresheeth and his supporters when pressed over what specifically triggered the arrest. He was released without charge the next day. It’s the latest in a series of arrests in Britain under the Terrorism Act targeting people who voice criticism of Israel. At least three journalists have been detained and/or raided over their reporting.

A judge in New York has ordered Rudy Giuliani to appear in court tomorrow after he emptied out most of his possessions from his Manhattan apartment before two election workers who won a defamation case against him were able to collect on their $148 million judgment. A judge last year found Giuliani defamed Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, a mother and daughter, when he falsely accused them of committing election fraud in Georgia in 2020. On Tuesday, Giuliani showed up to vote in Palm Beach, Florida, driving up in a Mercedes he had been ordered to surrender. It was the same polling place where Trump cast his ballot.