Election results 2016: Donald Trump wins the presidency, Republicans control House and Senate

PHILADELPHIA — Congressional Republicans are prepared to pay for Donald Trump’s border wall. They don’t question his unsupported claims about “voter fraud.” They express no concerns over reports that he may reopen the CIA’s controversial secret prisons abroad. They see no need to investigate his international business conflicts.

For now, at least, the Capitol Hill branch of the GOP is willing to march to President Trump’s tune — and more than happy to admit it. That is the clear story emerging from the party’s policy retreat here this week: the degree to which Trump has dictated the agenda the party leadership is assembling for the next 200 days.

The most inexperienced president in American history has officially been sworn in.

In the office’s storied 227-year existence — from George Washington to Barack Obama — there has never been a president who has entirely lacked both political and military service. Donald Trump has broken this barrier.

The Electoral College will officially elect Donald Trump as the next president today, but it’s important to remember that he received fewer votes from Americans than Hillary Clinton — something more than half of Republicans don’t know.

An updated count by the Cook Political Report shows Trump lost the popular vote by about 2.1 percentage points. Meanwhile, Trump racked up 306 electoral voters — 14 percent more than Clinton.

For months, evidence has mounted that the Russian government used its hacking prowess to interfere with the US presidential election, stealing emails from Democrats and leaking them via WikiLeaks. The Obama administration formally accused Russia of hacking the Democrats two months ago.

Now the CIA is going even further, according to reports from the Washington Post and the New York Times. In a “closed-door briefing on Capitol Hill last week,” intelligence officials told senators that “it was now ‘quite clear’ that electing Trump was Russia’s goal.”

The standard narrative of Donald Trump’s victory is simple: Trump won in states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania on the back of unprecedentedly strong support from white working-class voters. Those making less than $30,000 swung to Trump by 16 percentage points relative to the 2012 election, narrowing the Democratic lead among low-income voters to a mere 12 points. Very few of the voters were people of color.

The natural upshot of this analysis is that class was a huge reason why Trump won, that poor whites found Trump’s attack on economic elites revitalizing. It was “the revenge of the forgotten class,” as ProPublica’s Alec MacGillis puts it.

By 10 pm on election night, calls were already streaming in to Trans Lifeline, a peer-supported suicide prevention hotline catering to transgender people. Over the following three days, Trans Lifeline saw a 500 percent increase in call volume, said Greta Gustava Martela, the executive director. And that wasn’t a coincidence.

“As a trans person, my gender identity has been politicized in this election,” Martela explained. “And I think we all hoped that this election would have a different result, and we’d be able to have some rest after the election.”

Democrats in Congress appear to be taking the idea of “give Trump a chance” seriously, with Jennifer Steinhauser reporting on a surprisingly wide consensus ranging from Chuck Schumer to Elizabeth Warren that Democrats should try to work with Trump on an infrastructure bill and perhaps other priorities in order to distance him from congressional Republican leaders.

Jonathan Chait says this is political malpractice, and Brad Plumer’s explainer on the actual content of Trump’s infrastructure plan reveals that it actually has nothing in common with liberal ideas on infrastructure. Rather than spend new money on important priorities that only the public sector can execute, Trump is proposing tax cuts for private companies that are already investing in profitable private infrastructure schemes.

I’m hurting, and I’m tired, and I’m not surprised.

And I’m one of the people who will be relatively okay in this new old America. All my papers are in order. I’m a heterosexual man. I’m black, yes, but I’m also privileged. I have a fancy degree and fancy friends and global access to what’s passing for a new economy and a long-held skepticism about America’s greatness, all of which gives me a certain amount of protection. Of course I am on the record, repeatedly, excoriating the new commander of our armed forces, who has, on the record, repeatedly shown a penchant for seeking revenge. But all in all, I’m probably one of the lucky ones even if my name is on Omarosa’s enemies list.

Donald Trump got fewer votes for president than Hillary Clinton, which means that he’s our president-elect purely because of the Electoral College.

And in an interview with 60 Minutes that aired Sunday, even he couldn’t really defend that. Trump said that he would “rather see” the presidential race’s outcome determined by a simple popular vote. “You know, you get 100 million votes and somebody else gets 90 million votes and you win.”

My loving parents taught me how to speak, but they also taught me silence. I only know that my father voted for Trump because my mother — a Clinton supporter — asked on the evening of November 8, hours after they voted. They had not otherwise spoken about politics during the election season.

Nearly everyone I have spoken to has said that at least one of their family members voted for Trump too. Many weren’t even Trump supporters; they were “Never Hillarys.” But that means little now that Trump is president-elect.

In late 2015, Donald Trump proposed banning all Muslims from entering the US after the terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California.

It was a reaction that took advantage of our fears, and a religious test reminiscent of America’s worst mistakes — notably the Japanese internment camps that incarcerated 110,000 innocent Americans during World War II. This picture is haunting. But this wasn’t the driving narrative we told ourselves about Trump.

President-elect Donald Trump ran for president apparently without understanding the job description.

In the five days following his victory at the polls, the Wall Street Journal reported Trump’s team didn’t understand they would have to hire a new West Wing policy staff. Trump, according to the New York Times, apparently hopes to commute from the White House to New York or Mar-a-Lago on weekends. Trump said he expected a quick getting-to-know-you meeting with President Obama on Thursday, even though it was scheduled to last an hour.

On the day after the election, I reached out to my white friends. Through a series of text messages and posts, I asked them a simple question:

White people: What is your plan?

No matter how the presidential election turned out, Dave Chappelle hosting Saturday Night Live the weekend after was going to provide some guaranteed razor-sharp commentary. As it turned out, Donald Trump’s victory only made Chappelle’s comedy even more cutting.

This held especially true in Chappelle’s 11-minute opening monologue, which broke down to about two-thirds standup comedy and one-third earnest reflection.

When I go home to South Dakota to visit my family, I speak two languages.

One is the language of my new home in California, of my job in the national media, a freewheeling speech that blends irony and academia and weird jokes. You’re probably familiar with this language if you read a lot of left-leaning internet sites.

In the wake of Donald Trump’s presidential win, millions of people are scared. And their fears won’t be eased by reports that, after the election, potentially related racist and anti-Semitic abuse and vandalism is happening across the country.

In Minneapolis, Minnesota, a school is investigating graffiti scrawled on a bathroom door that reads “whites only” and “fuck niggers.” At Wellesley College, Hillary Clinton’s alma mater, two Trump supporters harassed students and were escorted off the campus by security. Two Muslim women — one at San Diego State University and another at the University of Louisiana — say they were victims of pro-Trump, anti-Muslim harassment and robbery (Update: since the article was written, police now say the student at the University of Louisiana has fabricated the story). Pro-Nazi graffiti has been spotted in Philadelphia and at the University of New Mexico.

Update: An earlier version of this article referenced a study by two political scientists, Kyle Kopko and Christopher Devine, on whether Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein’s voters could have swung the election to Hillary Clinton. That study was based on incomplete data: Vote totals for Pennsylvania weren’t yet final, and the final tally showed that Clinton could have won the state if she’d had all of Stein’s votes as well as her own. This article has been updated to reflect the final results in Pennsylvania and elsewhere.

Democrats are searching for a why in how Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election — an extremely close race claimed by small margins in battleground states, a race that defied almost every poll and projection.

The 2016 presidential election was extremely close. Hillary Clinton seems to have narrowly won the popular vote, and according to the current vote count, a shift of just 1.3 percent in three states — Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan — would have given her an Electoral College majority too.

Naturally, when an election is this tight, there are many possible explanations and counterfactuals for what went wrong for the loser, and how the outcome could have been different. And as Ezra Klein writes, with this election and the extreme nature of Trump’s candidacy in particular, there’s a deeper question about not just how he got over the top, but how he became competitive in the first place.

I’m struck, reading the angry and confident columns and tweetstorms as the left reckons with its defeat, how much the conversation among Democrats now mirrors the conversation among Democrats after 2004.

Then, like now, Democrats were shocked by a loss to a Republican they considered obviously unfit to lead, and whose win felt like a fundamental rejection of their worldview. Then, like now, Democrats blamed that loss on losing touch with the white working class. Then, like now, Democrats lamented nominating a charisma-challenged politician who comes off as an out-of-touch elite. The major difference is that the role same-sex marriage played in 2004 — the cultural flashpoint blamed for scaring and repulsing white Midwesterners — is being played by a combination of Black Lives Matter protests, viral comedy videos, and “wokeness” politics now.

When Peter Thiel announced that he would endorse Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention back in July, he got an earful from his fellow technology moguls.

“His friends have generally begged him not to support Trump,” San Francisco journalist Greg Ferenstein told me at the time.

Donald Trump won Tuesday’s presidential election. But many liberals and progressives have begun clinging to one faint hope that he could still be stopped — through the Electoral College.

Tuesday’s vote was technically not to make Trump president, but only to determine who the 538 electors in various states across the country will be. It is those electors who will cast the votes that legally elect the president on December 19.

Before making sweeping statements about what Donald Trump’s Election Day victory says about everyday Americans, you might want to consider one fact: Only about one-fourth of Americans eligible to vote actually voted for him.

According to the US Elections Project’s count so far, only about 56.9 percent of the voting-eligible population cast a ballot on Election Day. That means 43.1 percent of people eligible to vote just didn’t. (The voter turnout rate will increase over the next few days as the final votes are tallied.)

Perhaps the most puzzling question for millions of American after election day is this: What explains Donald Trump’s stunning victory?

There are of course many different factors that contributed to his success, many of which will be discussed in the coming weeks and months. But an absolutely critical one we shouldn’t downplay is the anxiety felt by many white Americans about the country’s growing diversity, which led them to be attracted to the most racially regressive candidate in decades.

There was a lot of talk about this being the year the Latino vote would sway the election. It didn’t quite happen, but the outcome shouldn’t distract us from the strides made in turnout and democratic engagement in that population.

That turnout has been severely understated by the National Election Pool exit polls, on which many post-election reports are drawing: Those suggest that fully 25 percent of Latinos supported Trump.

President-elect Donald Trump traveled to the White House to meet President Barack Obama today, and the two recapped their meeting in a brief press appearance in the Oval Office afterward.

“I just had the opportunity to have an excellent conversation with President-elect Trump,” Obama said. “It was wide-ranging. We talked about some of the organizational issues in setting up the White House, we talked about foreign policy, we talked about domestic policy. And as I said last night, my number one priority in the coming two months is to facilitate a transition that ensures the president-elect is successful.”