—Donald Trump was elected the 45th president of the United States, stunning the American political establishment by defeating Hillary Clinton, the heavy favorite, to win. More here
—Demonstrations broke out across the country Wednesday evening, protesting Trump’s victory. More here
—We’re live-blogging the news stories of the day below. All updates are in Eastern Standard Time (GMT -5).
Demonstrations broke out across the country Wednesday evening, protesting the election of Donald Trump for president.
In Chicago, thousands marched through the downtown area, crossing the Chicago River, and chanting, “Don’t give in to racist fear, Muslims are welcome here,” outside the Wabash Avenue building named after the president-elect.
In New York, thousands more gathered in Midtown, at times chanting, “Not my president,” and carrying signs for gay rights and environmental issues.
In Boston, police say 10,000 protesters marched from the Massachusetts Statehouse to Copley Square, yelling, “We will not be silenced,” and waving signs that said, “He Will Never Be My President.”
Protesters flooded the streets of several other cities nationwide, blocking highways in Austin, crowding the steps of Los Angeles City Hall, and disrupting classes in Des Moines, Iowa. Demonstrators also took to the streets of Oakland, Seattle, and Portland.
Emergency-service workers inspect the damage of a tram collision in Croydon, south London on November 9. (Neil Hall / Reuters)
At least seven people have died and dozens more injured after a tram derailed Wednesday morning in Croydon, south of London.
The tram was traveling from New Addington to Wimbledon via Croydon “at a significantly higher speed than is permitted” when it derailed off a sharp curve, the Rail Accident Investigation Branch (RAIB) said Wednesday in a statement. The driver, a 42-year-old man from Beckenham, was arrested on suspicion of manslaughter, according to British Transport Police.
An estimated 51 people were taken to the hospital, the London Ambulance Service said Wednesday afternoon. Of the tram’s passengers, at least seven people were killed—a number Sadiq Khan, the London mayor, warned “may well increase.”
Though the tram was traveling at higher speeds than usual, transport authorities said it is too early in the investigation to determine exactly what caused the crash. Here’s a photo from the scene:
America's Toughest Sheriff Loses His First Election in 24 Years
Reuters
After 24 years of service marked with controversy, Joe Arpaio is no longer sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona. The 86-year-old came up short in the race for his seventh-consecutive term Tuesday night; he was defeated by Democratic rival Paul Penzone, a former police sergeant who lost to Arpaio in 2012.
Arpaio had once seemed invincible in Arizona. As a local law enforcement leader, he found national fame by pushing the immigration debate to the right. For about a decade, his deputies practiced “crime sweeps,” routinely stopping county residents and asking them to prove their citizenship. In 2013 a federal judge found Arpaio’s office guilty of racial profiling and assigned a federal monitor to ensure the sheriff made changes to his department. Arpaio didn’t comply and landed in civil court, where he was eventually found guilty of contempt. The federal judge then recommended Arpaio be charged with criminal contempt, and he is scheduled to appear in court this December.
Penzone said Tuesday he ran for sheriff because he sought to “restore the respect, the transparency” of the office.
"No longer will we be known by the notoriety of one," he told supporters. "The only division we should see in the community is between those who commit the crime and those [who] are willing to hold them accountable."
Arpaio said he was disappointed about his loss, but he respects the voters’ decision.
'Schindler's List' Factory to Become a Holocaust Memorial
Reuters
The Czech Republic factory where German industrialist Oskar Schindler employed and simultaneously saved more than 1,000 Jews during the Holocaust will become a memorial.
The Czech culture ministry said Tuesday that portions of the factory complex in Brnene, which is near Schindler’s birthplace of Svitavy, will be restored to exhibit Schindler’s life and his work to save the lives of Jews during World War II, a story made famous by the novel Schindler’s Ark in 1982, and later by Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation, Schindler’s List.
Schindler used the factory, as well as one in Nazi-occupied Poland, to manufacture enamelware and munitions. During the war he employed 1,200 Jews to work at his facilities and saved them from execution. The now-dilapidated building will see restorations to its laboratory, mill, chemical depot, watch tower, and more. The memorial is scheduled to open in 2019.
North Dakota Pipeline Owner Will Continue Construction Despite Federal Government's Requests
Reuters
The owners of the Dakota Access Pipeline have vowed to press on with construction, despite months of protests from Native Americans and despite federal requests to delay the project so alternatives routes can be considered.
Energy Transfer Partners made the announcement Tuesday, saying it was readying equipment and would begin drilling within two weeks, Reuters reported. This phase of construction requires the company to drill on federal land and practically under the Missouri river. For months, hundreds of protesters, many of the them Native Americans calling themselves “water protectors,” have protested on private land against the drilling out of fears it may contaminate the only water source for the nearby Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. They have been met by a large police presence—and recently with considerable violence.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had previously permitted Energy Transfer Partners to drill on the land. In September the U.S. government asked the company to temporarily halt work on the pipeline while federal regulators reconsidered its impact on the environment. On Monday, the Army Corp’s told Bloomberg that Energy Transfer had agreed to slow construction. Then as the nation focused on the presidential election, the company said it had made no such promise: "The statement released last night by the Army Corps was a mistake and the Army Corps intends to rescind it," Energy Transfer’s statement read, according to Reuters.
It’s uncertain what will happen next. Protesters have refused to leave; finance companies have also felt pressure to pull out of the deal; and North Dakota regulators are filing a complaint against Energy Transfer that accuses them of failing to disclose findings of Native American artifacts along the pipeline construction route.
Global Markets Fall Sharply on Trump's Win; Gold Surges
(Kai Pfaffenbach / Reuters)
U.S. stock futures are sharply lower this morning following Donald Trump’s stunning victory in the presidential election. You cal follow our live blog of the markets here.
Stocks in Europe and Asia dived before paring some of their earlier declines. Markets in Russia were up.
The price of oil, already battered by years of uneven global economic growth and China’s slowdown, was down about 0.5 percent in early trading. Gold, often seen as a commodity of last refuge, surged.
We should note here that markets often behave erratically during unexpected events—such as the possibility of a Trump presidency. Chances are they will settle down once Trump unveils his economic, domestic, and foreign policies.
Vice President Vance is worried that the U.S. is running low on weapons.
In closed-door meetings, J. D. Vance has repeatedly questioned the Defense Department’s depiction of the war in Iran and whether the Pentagon has understated what appears to be the drastic depletion of U.S. missile stockpiles.
Two senior administration officials told us that the vice president has queried the accuracy of the information the Pentagon has provided about the war. He has also expressed his concerns about the availability of certain missile systems in discussions with President Trump, several people familiar with the situation told us. The consequences of a dramatic drawdown in munitions reserves are potentially dire: U.S. forces would need to draw from these same stockpiles to defend Taiwan against China, South Korea against North Korea, and Europe against Russia.
For a brief moment this weekend, the president appeared introspective.
This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.
For a guy who had just been rushed out of a ballroom at the sound of gunfire, he seemed remarkably calm. For a president who regularly attacks the press, he seemed unusually gracious. For a fleeting period on Saturday night, Donald Trump appeared introspective, or at least as introspective as he’s capable of being in public.
“It’s always shocking when something like this happens,” he told reporters in the White House briefing room, standing in his tux and appearing to speak without notes. He briefly seemed to consider how familiar he was with threats to his life, and how the shock doesn’t fade: “Happened to me a little bit. And that never changes.”
The legal right spent decades empowering the presidency. Now it must reckon with the system it helped create.
Julius Caesar styled himself as a servant of the republic, claiming to speak for the people even as he disregarded laws and norms to govern by caprice. The Roman republic did not survive him.
The second Trump administration has revealed American Caesarism in nearly full bloom. Despite ambitions to fundamentally change the course of the country, this administration has no real legislative agenda. Instead, the president governs by executive orders, emergency decrees, and extortionate transactions, using his power to reward his friends and punish his enemies. He’s launched foreign military adventures and full-blown wars seemingly based on personal whim, and has made the military a political prop and a tool for domestic law enforcement. With Congress sidelined and the courts reluctant to check Donald Trump’s excesses, America has been left with what some legal scholars have described as an “executive unbound”—and with a president who threatens to supplant the republic in all but name.
For the richest men on Earth, everything is free and nothing matters.
At the end of Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 movie, There Will Be Blood, Daniel Day-Lewis’s oil-baron character, old now and richer than Croesus, beats Paul Dano’s preacher to death with a bowling pin. Dano’s Eli Sunday, a nemesis of Day-Lewis’s Daniel Plainview during his seminal, wealth-building years, has come to sell Plainview the oil-rich land that he once coveted. But Plainview doesn’t need the land anymore, because—as he explains in one of the most famous monologues in modern cinema—he has sucked out all the oil hidden beneath it from an adjoining property, like a milkshake.
Desperate for money, Eli begs for a loan. Instead, Plainview chases him around a bowling alley and murders him with great enthusiasm. Once it’s over, a butler comes to see what all the noise was about. “I’m finished,” Plainview yells.
To understand the significance of someone running a marathon in less than two hours, you also need to understand that, until recently, the notion of this actually happening was truly, utterly absurd. Sure, a physiologist named Michael Joyner had floated the idea that such a feat might be humanly possible in a journal paper way back in 1991. But his peers laughed off the idea, and not much changed over the succeeding decades. In Runner’s World in 2014, I predicted that it would happen in 2075. Frankly, even that forecast seemed overly optimistic to me, but I figured I’d be dead by then, so no one would be able to call me on it.
Well, I was wrong. Yesterday morning, the two-hour marathon barrier finally went down. A relatively unheralded 31-year-old Kenyan named Sabastian Sawe won the London Marathon with a time of 1:59:30. That is, for reference, 26.2 miles run at an average of 4:34 a mile—or, put another way, a pace that most recreational runners would struggle to sustain for more than a few seconds, if they could hit it at all. Perhaps even more arresting was the fact that the man who took second place, Ethiopia’s Yomif Kejelcha, also ran under two hours, finishing just 11 seconds behind Sawe.
Instead of a crackdown on his enemies, Trump wants his ballroom.
When an assassin murdered Charlie Kirk in September 2025, the MAGA movement seized the moment to demand a campaign of repression. Vice President Vance called for an ambitious program to “go after the NGO network that foments, facilitates, and engages in violence.” He named the Ford Foundation, Open Society Foundations, and The Nation magazine as examples of candidates for the retaliation he had in mind. The people who faced consequences after the killing almost universally did so for things they had written or said, not for acts of violence. In November, Reuters counted some 600 cases of people who were fired, suspended, or otherwise disciplined for their speech about Kirk’s life and death.
Now another gunman has attacked political targets. At the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, a man discharged a firearm in the vicinity of hundreds of people from the worlds of politics, media, and business—among them, the president and vice president of the United States. Although much about the event remains unclear, the available evidence suggests that the gunman was motivated by an anti-Trump agenda. Yet this time, MAGA’s immediate response to political violence has been much less aggressive. At his press conference after yesterday’s attempted shooting, President Trump cited the attack as proof of the need for his wished-for White House ballroom. Social-media accounts that take their cues from the White House promptly echoed the message.
The pontiff has proved unwilling to subordinate his faith to politics, or to adjust his commitment to the Gospel in exchange for access to power.
American presidents and popes have clashed before, but the battle of words and wills between Donald Trump and Pope Leo XIV is unprecedented.
The distinctiveness of their clash is not due mainly to the fact that Robert Francis Prevost is the first American-born pope, though that is significant. After all, Leo can’t be dismissed as a foreigner who is speaking about a country and culture he doesn’t understand. When he is critical of America, on matters ranging from war to mass deportation to those who “manipulate religions and the very name of God,” it comes from a place of love and devotion.
Nor does it have to do solely with the nature of the disagreements, most specifically the war waged by Trump against Iran. Past popes have criticized past presidents for going to war.
What makes the Trump-Leo collision most unusual is the manner of the disagreement, not on the part of the pope—whose criticisms have been direct but restrained—but on the part of the president.
The people we were died at the exact moment our child did.
This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.
My husband, David, hates Valentine’s Day. He once called it “New Year’s Eve with nuclear weapons.” I pretend not to care. Still, when the day passes entirely unremarked on, a woman can’t help but feel overlooked.
On Valentine’s Day 2024, David found a way out. He booked a speech on February 14 that required traveling from our home in Washington, D.C., to Toronto. I couldn’t object—he was getting paid. Anyway, I had my own plans: an “anti–Valentine’s Day” dinner hosted by one of the foreign embassies.
As I got ready, I called our oldest daughter, Miranda. She answered from her Brooklyn bathroom, getting ready for her own party. She propped her phone up beside her sink and laughed when I told her about her father’s strategic Valentine’s Day escape.
The shooting at the Correspondents’ Dinner made clear who gets saved first.
This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.
On one level, the system worked. The perimeter held. A would-be assassin was tackled in the hallway outside the White House Correspondents’ Association’s annual dinner. The one bullet that found a human target—a U.S. Secret Service agent—was halted, in part, by the officer’s phone and bulletproof vest, according to a law-enforcement summary report that we reviewed. A counterassault team promptly swarmed the stage with assault rifles and night-vision equipment in case the lights were cut. The government’s top leaders—president, vice president, Cabinet officials, speaker of the House—were ushered to secure locations in a matter of minutes. No one died in the attack.
The administration could exert much greater control over the industry—but just how far would it go?
AI companies are beginning to entertain the possibility that they could cease to exist. This notion was, until recently, more theoretical: A couple of years ago, an ex-OpenAI employee named Leopold Aschenbrenner wrote a lengthy memo speculating that the U.S. government might soon take control of the industry. By 2026 or 2027, Aschenbrenner wrote, an “obvious question” will be circling through the Pentagon and Congress: Do we need a government-led program for artificial general intelligence—an AGI Manhattan Project? He predicted that Washington would decide to go all in on such an effort.
Aschenbrenner may have been prescient. Earlier this year, at the height of the Pentagon’s ugly contract dispute with Anthropic, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth warned that he could invoke the Defense Production Act (DPA), a Cold War–era law that he reportedly suggested would allow him to force the AI company to hand over its technology on whatever terms the Pentagon desired. The act is one of numerous levers the Trump administration can pull to direct, or even commandeer, AI companies. And the companies have been giving the administration plenty of reason to consider doing so.
