US election live: Trump prepares to choose top team as Harris tells supporters ‘do not despair’

Abortion, the issue thought to be the magic bullet that would mortally wound Donald Trump’s chances at a second presidency, instead failed to stop him on Tuesday. Now, two years after a conservative supermajority on the US supreme court ended federal protections for the procedure, the future of American abortion access is facing a new chapter of extraordinary peril.

While seven states passed ballot measures to amend their state constitutions and protect abortion rights, Trump’s return to the White House means those hard-fought efforts may amount to nothing. Despite the gridlock in US Congress, a nationwide abortion ban could soon become a reality: anti-abortion advocates hope that Trump will resurrect a 19th-century anti-vice law to effectively implement a nationwide ban. Access to other forms of reproductive healthcare, such as contraception and in vitro fertilization, are also at risk.

Because he’s barred from a third term Trump can now do whatever he wants without fear of electoral consequences, said Mary Ziegler, a professor at the University of California, Davis who studies the legal history of reproduction.

“He’s playing with house money,” Ziegler said. “He can do whatever he’s going to do without fear of conservative Christian voters, without fear of swing voters, without fear of anybody. And he doesn’t have Roe v Wade and he has a conservative supreme court, so that means he could do really aggressive things to limit abortion or IVF – or not. We don’t know.”

In the two years since the high court overturned Roe, abortion became an issue that seemed to spell electoral promise for the Democrats. Before Tuesday, abortion rights advocates had triumphed in all seven states that held related ballot measures. Public support surged, including in red states.

But the outrage and activism did not translate into enough votes for Kamala Harris, who made defending abortion rights a bedrock of her campaign.

Nor did Tuesday’s abortion-related ballot measures necessarily boost Democratic turnout in critical swing states such as Arizona and Nevada.

Hugo Lowell

Special counsel prosecutors will shut down their criminal cases against Donald Trump before he takes office, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter, after his stunning victory against Kamala Harris meant they would not proceed to trial.

The move reflects the reality that the cases will not be completed before inauguration day. Once the former president returns to the White House, the special counsel’s office would be prohibited from pursuing further criminal actions under justice department policy.

The justice department has long known that if Trump won, the criminal cases – over Trump’s retention of classified documents and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election – would be finished because Trump’s attorney general would likely drop the charges.

But it is also understood to be a preemptive measure to ensure that Trump will not be able to order the dismissal of the special counsel, Jack Smith, as he had vowed to do if he takes office and Smith remained in his role.

That possibility had been relished by Trump’s close aides and advisers, who privately imagined Trump ordering Smith’s removal and his team having to vacate their office space in Washington.

The justice department is still examining how to wind down the cases, which are in different stages and are complicated. In particular, the department does not want the classified documents case, which was dismissed and currently under appeal, to go unchallenged.

Failure to pursue an appeal over the dismissal of the classified documents case on grounds that the special counsel himself was illegally appointed could set a problematic precedent and hamper the department’s ability to use special counsels in the future.

After Donald Trump’s US election victory, here’s what will happen next:

• US president, Joe Biden, spoke to Trump on Wednesday and invited him to the White House. Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said Trump “looks forward to the meeting, which will take place shortly, and very much appreciated the call”. It would be the first time they had met since Biden’s disastrous debate performance against Trump in June that forced him out of the race.

• Biden will make an address to the nation on Thursday, vowing a peaceful transfer of power to Trump after his crushing election win over Kamala Harris. In what promises to be an agonising moment for Biden, he will speak in the Rose Garden of the White House at 11am (4pm GMT) to “discuss the election results and the transition” to Trump’s second term.

• Despite Trump’s election success being apparent pretty early on election night, the full US election results are still not in. Out of 51 states (including DC), results for 49 have been called so far. Donald Trump currently has 295 electoral votes and Harris has 226. For context, Joe Biden was declared the winner offcially four days after the election in 2020.

• Harris will preside over a joint session of Congress in January to certify the results of the election. Harris delivered a speech conceding defeat in the presidential election to Trump on Wednesday afternoon.

• Trump will be sworn in as the 47th US president on 20 January 2025.

Andrew Roth

Analysts say it is hard to separate the president-elect’s bluster from his actual plans but it’s clear his priority is to bin many of Joe Biden’s policies, writes Andrew Roth in this analysis piece:

The US foreign policy establishment is set for one of the biggest shake-ups in years as Donald Trump has vowed to both revamp US policy abroad and to root out the so-called “deep state” by firing thousands of government workers – including those among the ranks of America’s diplomatic corps.

Trump’s electoral victory is also likely to push the Biden administration to speed up efforts to support Ukraine before Trump can cut off military aid, hamper the already-modest efforts to restrain Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu in Gaza and Lebanon and lead to a fresh effort to slash and burn through major parts of US bureaucracy including the state department.

Trump backers have said he will be more organised during his second term, often dubbed “Trump 2.0”, and on the day after election day US media reported that Trump had already chosen Brian Hook, a hawkish state department official during the first Trump administration, to lead the transition for America’s diplomats.

And yet analysts, serving and former US diplomats and foreign officials said that it remained difficult to separate Trump’s bluster from his actual plans when he takes power in January. What is clear is that his priority is to bin many of the policies put in place by his predecessor.

“I’m skeptical that the transition process will be super-impactful since the natural instinct of the new team will be to toss all of Biden’s foreign policy in the dumpster,” one former senior diplomat said.

“If you go back to 2016, Mexico didn’t pay for the wall. And, you know, it doesn’t look like there was a secret plan to defeat Isis,” said Richard Fontaine, the CEO of the Center for a New American Security thinktank. “Some of these things didn’t turn out the way that they were talked about on that campaign trail and we go into this without really knowing what the president’s proposal will be for all of this – and what he will do.”

South Korean president, Yoon Suk Yeol, spoke with Donald Trump on Thursday and congratulated him on winning the US presidency on the “Make America Great Again” slogan as officials in Seoul worked to prepare for “significant” economic changes, reports Reuters.

Yoon and Trump held a 12-minute phone call and discussed the close security and economic ties of their two countries across all areas, a senior South Korean official said on Thursday.

South Korea’s ambassador to the US also visited Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida to meet with members of the president-elect’s camp, the foreign ministry said.

Trump’s election has renewed attention in South Korea on his “America First” foreign policy plans and how his unpredictable style will play out in his second term, reports Reuters.

Officials worked past midnight on Wednesday to prepare for changes expected from US policies, with the Bank of Korea and thinktanks seeing a potential hit to exports if the US raises tariffs.

Meetings at the trade ministry that began in the hours after Trump’s victory led to back-to-back discussions early on Thursday as South Korea’s economic leaders weighed the impact on exports of potential tariffs.

“Should policy stance that has been stressed by president-elect Trump become realised, the impact on our economy is expected to be significant,” finance minister Choi Sang-mok said at a 7.30am (10.30pm GMT on Wednesday) meeting with trade and foreign ministers.

South Korea would probably suffer less than China, Mexico and the EU, but Asia’s fourth-largest economy could be forced into another renegotiation of its bilateral free trade agreement with Washington, according to Kim Young-gui, an economist at the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy (KIEP).

Karen Middleton

The Australian prime minister who vowed before the last election to herald a “kinder, gentler parliament” has now hailed Australia’s rowdy, robust and combative style of political debate as proof of a functioning democracy, warning “only dictatorships pretend to be perfect”.

In remarks to a global democracy conference in Sydney a day after the United States returned Donald Trump to the presidency eschewing warnings about his autocratic style, Anthony Albanese suggested the adversarial tendencies of the Westminster political system were “a virtue, not a flaw”.

“A fierce contest can be a good thing, as long as it’s a contest about substance, about things that matter to people and issues that affect the country,” Albanese told the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, in a speech distributed in advance.

Nimo Omer

For today’s First Edition newsletter, my colleague Nimo Omer spoke with Guardian US live news editor Chris Michael about what a Donald Trump presidency might look like. Here’s a snippet:

“Autocrats are rejoicing,” Chris says about Trump’s victory. “That probably tells you all you need to know”. Trump has on many occasions praised Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, and the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-un. His admiration for other strongman leaders such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, China’s Xi Jinping and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is well documented and long held.

Trump has said that he would end Russia’s war in Ukraine “in one day”, though he has not provided specific details on how. Expectations are that Ukraine will see a significant reduction in military aid from the US – the Trump team have made clear they have no intention of indefinitely maintaining commitment to Kyiv as the war continues to drag on.

China warned on Thursday there would be “no winners in a trade war” after the re-election in the US of former president Donald Trump, who has pledged huge new tariffs on Chinese imports.

“As a matter of principle, I would like to reiterate that there will be no winners in a trade war, which is also not conducive to the world,” foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP).