You Are Here. Let’s let a few headlines get things going:
■ “Far-Right Donald Trump Supporters Celebrate His Victory With Violent Memes and Calls for Executions.”
■ “Trump’s return to White House sets stage for far-reaching immigration crackdown.”
■ “Trump’s transition starts now. Here’s how it will work.”
■ “Trump set to go after measures that are doing the most to fight climate change.”
■ But: “Control of the U.S. House hangs in the balance with enormous implications for Trump’s agenda.”
‘Get ready for President Vance.’ Columnist Mehdi Hasan: “Trump is 78 years old, in horrible physical and mental shape, and prohibited by the Constitution from running again in 2028.”
■ Columnist Jonathan V. Last: “At the federal level there will be no power center from which to organize resistance against Trumpism. The White House will not have any Mike Pences or John Kellys in it. The Supreme Court will likely soon have a full majority—five justices—appointed by Trump. And that’s just the floor. He could get to six. The Senate could be controlled by Republicans for the next decade.”
■ PolitiFact surveys the things Trump has promised for a second term.
‘A national embrace of … a possible fascist future.’ Mother Jones’ David Corn reads the election tea leaves. (Cartoon: Jack Ohman—who writes separately, “This time, we handed them the pistol to hold us hostage.”)
■ The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin: “Americans have no one to blame but themselves.”
■ Columnist Steve Chapman: “The nation witnessed a vast and majestic spectacle: The American people participating in a democratic election to strike a blow against democracy.”
■ Author and Chicago radio news veteran Dave Berner: “The country you may have thought we were is an illusion” …
■ … or, as Will Bunch puts it at The Philadelphia Inquirer: “A bitter, broken land.”
■ Esquire’s Charlie Pierce is retiring punctuation he’s long inserted after the word president when referring to Trump: “The asterisk is not coming back because, this time, I am absolutely sure that a majority of my fellow citizens will get exactly what they want.”
■ Journalism professor Jeff Jarvis: “How fucked are we? Very.”
■ The Onion: “America Defeats America.”
‘You need to do a thorough autopsy.’ Columnist Eric Zorn calls on the Democratic Party to take a good look at “the corpse of your 2024 aspirations, identify the causes of death and make necessary shifts” …
■ … and to heed Vice President Harris’ words in her concession speech yesterday: “Fight in the voting booth, in the courts and in the public square.” (See it here.)
■ USA Today’s Rex Huppke: “Harris concedes to Trump with grace. So I guess we don’t get to storm the Capitol?”
■ Semafor’s Dave Weigel: “Democrats ask: Why didn’t anything work?”
■ Sen. Bernie Sanders: “No surprise.”
■ Robert Kuttner at The American Prospect: “In Trump’s three elections, the one Democrat who was able to beat him, just barely, was a white male named Joe Biden. That speaks volumes.”
■ Updating coverage: At Chicago Public Square’s deadline, Biden was to deliver remarks on Trump’s victory
■ Updating coverage: At Chicago Public Square’s deadline, Biden was to deliver remarks on Trump’s victory
■ Correction: Yesterday’s emailed edition linked to the wrong Trump victory speech. Here’s the right one.
‘Resistance starts now.’ Former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich: “Our first responsibility is to protect all those who are in harm’s way.”
■ Brian Beutler at Off Message: “We should brace ourselves for immense depravity, but remain prepared to guide and stiffen the spines of the last bastions of resistance.”
■ Popular Information sees some rays of light through Tuesday’s darkness.
■ Words of encouragement—from 1776 by way of 2016—to people considering abandoning the news and withdrawing from public life: “Don’t. Of all times, not now.”
■ The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols: “Americans who care about democracy have every right to feel appalled and frightened. But then they have work to do.”
■ Law Dork Chris Geidner: “Fear—even justified fear—need not be the end of the story. It might be the beginning of a new story.”
■ Discourse Blog columnist Jack Mirkinson: “We’re in hell. But we have no choice but to maintain the struggle.”
■ The American Civil Liberties Union says it’s ready to play “the long game,” as it has before: “We filed 434 legal actions against the first Trump administration, often winning landmark cases before Trump-appointed judges.”
■ Melissa Ryan at Ctrl-Alt-Right-Delete: “American Democracy, as we know it, is likely over. That creates space for something new to emerge.”
■ Abortion, Every Day columnist Jessica Valenti: “Get up, alongside me, and do what it takes to fight back.”
■ The Onion: “Tireless Civil Rights Crusaders Not So Smug Now.”
■ Minister Nadia Bolz-Weber: “I got nothing for you but this shitty little prayer.”
‘The fascists want us to shut up. Don’t.’ Stop the Presses columnist Mark Jacob issues a rallying cry for journalists.
■ Irv Leavitt at Honest Context: “Journalists … are willing to fight and die for you.”
■ ProPublica vows: “We will be devoting a significant portion of our staff to chronicling the effects of what promises to be a drastic change in the role of the federal government in all of our lives.”
■ ProPublica founder Dick Tofel: The press “must prepare to defend the Constitution that makes its existence as the world’s freest and most powerful press possible.”
■ CNN’s Brian Stelter: “Trump’s return to power raises serious questions about the media’s credibility.”
■ Jon Allsop at the Columbia Journalism Review: “Trump’s impending second term poses a credible and unprecedented threat to press freedom as America has known it.”
■ Columnist Ryan Cooper: “Democrats … need to reconsider their relationship with even nominally liberal mainstream sources.”
■ Broadcast veteran Dan Rather: “A majority of Americans has spoken, and we must accept their choice. But there’s nothing that says … we can’t write about … what’s REALLY going on.”
■ Columbia Journalism School professor Samuel Freedman shares a letter to a young journalist: “We need your generation not to despair, but instead to recommit to the fight for democracy.”
■ Trump’s critical niece, Mary L. Trump: “I’m not going anywhere.”
■ Columnist Neil Steinberg says Tuesday Wednesday morning’s papers provided fresh evidence that “a print newspaper is a relic, immediately outdated. An increasingly unacceptable flaw.”
‘We’ll see how funny that is in six months, when The Great Talk Show Host Roundup begins.’ At times in tears, Jimmy Kimmel joked last night: “My only request to President-elect Trump is that he let me share a prison cell with Taylor Swift.”
■ Seth Meyers: “I don’t think Donald Trump’s a good person. I’d even go so far as to say he’s a bad person. Now, in my defense I’m only basing that on everything I’ve ever been taught about what makes someone good or bad.”
■ Stephen Colbert last night rejected the notion that he prefers Trump to stay in return to office—for the joke material: “No one tells the guy who cleans the bathroom, ‘Wow, you must love it when someone has explosive diarrhea. There’s so much material to work with!’”
■ After the cameras were off, Jon Stewart told his Election Night Daily Show audience: “You just have a temporary anxiety and paralysis that comes with disappointment and just a soupçon of despair. It will pass.”
■ Bruce Springsteen called the opening song for his first post-election concert “a fighting prayer for my country.”
‘A bat-signal for Silicon Valley oligarchs.’ Gizmodo’s Matt Novak says Trump’s victory was a signal for Big Tech to “take ass-kissing to new heights” …
■ … beginning with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who congratulated Trump on “an extraordinary political comeback.”
■ The Lever: “Billionaire Avengers Destroyed Democracy.”
■ The Guardian: “Trump’s ‘new star’ Elon Musk stands to benefit from his presidency.”
■ Journalist Ken Klippenstein: Pollsters “made well over $1.5 billion from the presidential election, advising and advertising Harris to defeat.”
So that big Trump sign probably ain’t goin’ nowhere. WBEZ: “Support for Donald Trump in Chicago has nearly doubled since his first presidential bid” …
■ … the city’s biggest Republican bump since 1992 …
■ … contributing to Illinois’ closest presidential contest since 1988.
■ … and yet: Hundreds rallied downtown last night to oppose Trump.
■ Also from WBEZ: How his victory could affect Illinois reproductive rights, immigrant care, criminal justice and climate initiatives.
■ Noah Berlatsky at Public Notice: “The global anti-incumbent backlash doomed Kamala Harris.”
Who voted how? Block Club: A map breaks down how Chicago neighborhoods cast their presidential ballots.
■ 404 Media: A right-wing website reveals voters’ physical address and party affiliation in most states—but not Illinois.
■ Newser: “7 wild facts about how America voted.”
Still at large. Police continued to search for a gunman who they say shot and killed two of his coworkers at Navy Pier Tuesday.
■ Eric Zorn calls video capturing the killing of a Chicago cop during a traffic stop with a machine gun “a terrifying reminder that even law enforcement is outgunned on our streets.”
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