WASHINGTON (AP) — Republicans have taken control of the U.S. Senate and are fighting to keep their majority in the U.S. House, which would produce a full sweep of GOP power in Congress alongside President-elect Donald Trump in the White House.

A unified Republican grip on Washington would set the course for Trump’s agenda. Or if Democrats wrest control of the House, it would provide an almost certain backstop, with veto power over the White House.

Trump, speaking early Wednesday at his election night party in Florida, said the results delivered an “unprecedented and powerful mandate” for Republicans.

He called the Senate rout “incredible.” And he praised House Speaker Mike Johnson, who dashed from his own party in Louisiana to join Trump. “He’s doing a terrific job,” Trump said.

From the U.S. Capitol, Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell, privately a harsh Trump critic, called it a “hell of a good day.”

Vote counting in some races could go on for days, and control of the House is too early to call.

Where do the House races stand?

House races are focused in New York and California, where Democrats are trying to claw back some of the 10 or so seats where Republicans have made surprising gains in recent years.

Other House races are scattered around the country, with some of the most contentious in Maine, the “blue dot” around Omaha, Nebraska, and in Alaska.

Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said the House “remains very much in play.”

To gain control of the House, Democrats need to flip four seats from Republicans, while holding all of their own, a tall task especially in congressional districts where Trump has won.

It could come down to just a handful of seats, or as little as one, to determine House control.

Johnson voiced confidence, posting on X: “Republicans are poised to have unified government in the White House, Senate, and House.”

Johnson: Republicans working on ‘ambitious’ agenda

Harris ignited enthusiasm for her party when Biden dropped out of the race, and she stepped in atop the ticket, a head-spinning development barely 100 days from the election. But Democrats watched their own hopes for a sweep of Washington fizzle.

Voters said the economy and immigration were the top issues facing the country, but the future of democracy was also a leading motivator for many Americans casting ballots in the presidential election.

AP VoteCast, an expansive survey of more than 120,000 voters nationwide, found a country mired in negativity and desperate for change as Americans faced a stark choice between Trump and Harris.

This is the first presidential election since the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, when Trump sent a mob of his supporters to “fight like hell” against the 2020 election. Many Republicans in Congress voted against President Joe Biden’s victory. Congress will again be called on next year to certify the 2024 election.

Even still, the election followed one of the most chaotic congressional sessions in modern times as the Republican-led House kicked out its speaker, Kevin McCarthy, threatened government shutdowns and had difficulty conducting the basic operations of governance.

Johnson has said Republicans in the House and Senate have been working on an “ambitious” 100 day-agenda — cutting taxes, securing the U.S. border and taking a ”blowtorch” to federal regulations — if they sweep the White House and Congress.

Trump himself has promised mass deportations and retribution on his perceived enemies. Republicans want to push federal agencies out of Washington and restaff the government workforce, Johnson said, to bring the federal government “to heel.”

Trump is “thinking big” about his legacy, Johnson said.

History makers in Congress

Several states will send history-makers to the new Congress.

Voters elected two Black women to the Senate, Democrat Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware and Democrat Angela Alsobrooks, who defeated Republican Larry Hogan, the former governor, in Maryland. Just three Black women have served in the Senate, and never before have two served at the same time.

And in New Jersey, Andy Kim became the first Korean American elected to the Senate. The seat opened when Bob Menendez resigned this year after his federal conviction on bribery charges.

In the House, candidate Sarah McBride, a Democratic state lawmaker from Delaware who is close to the Biden family, became the first openly transgender person elected to Congress.

What’s still unclear is who will lead the new Republican Senate, as longtime leader McConnell prepares to step down from the post.

South Dakota Sen. John Thune, the No. 2 Republican, and Texas Sen. John Cornyn, who previously held that post, are the front-runners to replace McConnell in a secret-ballot election scheduled for when senators arrive in Washington next week.

Billions of dollars have been spent by the parties, and outside groups, on the narrow battleground for both the 435-member House and 100-member Senate.

If the two chambers do in fact flip party control, as is possible, it would be rare.

Records show that if Democrats take the House and Republicans take the Senate, it would be the first time that the chambers of Congress have both flipped to opposing political parties.

Reporting by the Associated Press was used to compile this report.

By Joshua Green, Bloomberg News (TNS)

Steve Bannon had been sprung from federal prison only 12 hours earlier, but he had a message to deliver: “MAGA is back.”

It was a week before Election Day and Bannon, the right-wing podcaster, culture warrior and former chief strategist for Donald Trump, was sitting in a palatial Park Avenue hotel suite, describing how the next Trump presidency would surpass the last one.

The entire scene seemed bizarrely improbable. Bannon had just delivered a hardscrabble populist attack to a roomful of reporters in a suite costing thousands of dollars per night. He’d been incarcerated for four months for defying a congressional subpoena, yet emerged tanned and trim (he credits a regimen of prison-yard calisthenics). And he’d made it back just in time to witness what he correctly predicted would be a Trump victory over Vice President Kamala Harris — or, as Bannon prefers to call it, “The greatest political comeback in the history of American politics.”

It’s difficult to dispute that characterization. By many measures, Trump’s recapturing the White House is an even more remarkable feat than his surprise upset of Hillary Clinton was in 2016. This time, he beat Harris despite his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden; the collapse of his approval rating to 29% after the U.S. Capitol insurrection; the Republican party’s attempt to blame him for its 2022 midterm losses and anoint Florida governor Ron DeSantis the GOP successor; his 34 felony convictions for falsifying business records, not to mention two indictments over his alleged attempts to interfere with and overturn the 2020 election result and one on mishandling classified documents; and a slew of new accusations from women accusing him of sexual misconduct. He’d also run a campaign nearly devoid of serious policy discussion, one that was instead, as Harris put it in her closing address on the National Mall, “obsessed with revenge, consumed with grievance … he’s out for unchecked power.”

Yet Trump won anyway, storming to victory and reclaiming multiple Sun Belt and “blue wall” states that Biden had swept four years earlier. The claim Bannon was making, with the excitement of a kid on Christmas morning, was that Trump’s resurrection will deliver a MAGA renaissance that he believes will utterly transform the country — because nothing, and no one, has been able to halt the inexorable political advancement of Donald J. Trump.

What, exactly, will it mean for Trump to “Make America Great Again” a second time? Washington has fixated on this question since at least mid-summer, when Trump’s widening lead in the polls over Biden made the former president’s prospective return seem ever more plausible. It’s a question that can’t fully be answered until it’s clear which party will control the U.S. House of Representatives. But even if Democrats can hold onto this last bastion of power, the consensus in both parties is that Trump will go much further than last time, and be far more effective in achieving his goals. “A lot of the impact he’ll have is the incredibly expansive use of unilateral power,” said Liam Donovan, a Republican lobbyist. “That’s the stuff that’ll shock the system. He’s not going to want to have another situation where lawyers are telling him no.”

To that end, Trump will surround himself with loyalists. During his first term, Trump relied on seasoned military leaders and establishment Republicans to staff his administration, mostly out of necessity because he was so new to politics. Many of those staffers saw their primary duty as being to the Constitution, not to Trump, and thwarted his most extreme proposals — much to the new president’s displeasure. “I had some people that I would not have chosen for a second time,” Trump griped to Bloomberg Businessweek in July.

This time around, Trump will assume office backed by an army of experienced staffers and policy specialists drawn from think tanks such as the Center for Renewing America and the America First Policy Institute whose explicit purpose is to run a future Trump administration in accordance with his wishes. “There will be two types of people around Trump — ideologues and grifters — but there won’t be any RINOs,” said Stephen Myrow, managing partner of Beacon Policy Advisors, an independent Washington research firm, referencing the conservative term for so-called “Republicans in Name Only.”

Trump isn’t likely to have many Republican critics outside the White House, either. The military officers, former cabinet officials and Republican lawmakers such as Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger who publicly stood up to him have either retired or been driven from the party. No lawmaker with any ambition will dare emulate their example. “There’s no flavor of Republicanism that can exist in explicit and deliberate contrast to Trump,” said Donovan. “It has to be implicit, subtle and unspoken for anyone hoping to make it through a primary as a winner.”

A resurgent MAGA movement can be expected to ratchet up its attacks on the press, especially if Trump commences the three major policy changes that most animated him at rallies: enlisting U.S. law enforcement to conduct large-scale raids and deport upwards of 11 million unauthorized immigrants; imposing sweeping tariffs around the globe on enemies and allies alike; and withdrawing U.S. support for Ukraine in its war with Russia.

Trump’s threats of retribution have registered with everyone from media owners to officials in Biden’s Justice Department to veterans of Trump’s own administration. Retired General Mark Milley, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump and later a vocal critic, fears he’ll be court-martialed if Trump returns to power, according to journalist Bob Woodward in War, his latest book on the presidency. “He is a walking, talking advertisement of what he’s going to try to do,” Milley told colleagues, according to the book. “And it’s not just him, it’s the people around him.”

But for all the talk of score-settling and grievance, Trump’s second presidency won’t simply be a rehash of his first. It will also reflect an evolution already apparent in the MAGA movement. Anyone who attended Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden on Oct. 27, for instance, would have been struck by the relative youthfulness of the crowd. Political rallies — especially Republican ones — are usually filled with older folks. The supporters who propelled Trump to the White House the first time, especially in key Midwestern states, were often displaced factory workers, victims of globalization pining for the values and economy of mid-century America. The newer wave of MAGA activists tends to be younger, brasher, steeped in social media, oriented less around economics and more toward waging culture-war battles over race, gender and sexual identity. Besides Trump, the figures who generated the most excitement at Madison Square Garden were a new vanguard of right-wing provocateurs and media personalities, including Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson and Vivek Ramaswamy.

Trump has always been sharply attuned to the attitudes and desires of his supporters and what resonates with them. In 2016, his infatuation with building a border wall at the U.S.-Mexico border grew out of the crowd response that the idea evoked when, pushed by his advisers, he began mentioning it at early campaign rallies. By the same token, the MAGA movement’s evolving fixation with topics such as vaccine skepticism, transgender care and hostility to diversity, equity and inclusion programs are likely to shape Trump’s second-term priorities. After all, Trump has always been a political chameleon, quick to align his policies with the desires of his biggest supporters — especially financial ones. Would it really be a surprise if Trump were to suddenly embrace electric vehicles or decide to emulate President John F. Kennedy, Jr., and throw the weight of the U.S. government behind a Musk-led mission to Mars?

Yet even if Republicans hold on to the U.S. House and secure a governing trifecta, a resurgent MAGA movement won’t have unchecked power. Trump is bound to have trouble getting a conspiracy theorist such as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. confirmed to a government position that gives him “control of the public health agencies,” as Kennedy has said he’s been promised, even with a GOP Senate. Trump can appoint Musk to slash the federal budget, but Republican lawmakers who vote on his proposals will recoil the minute those cuts jeopardize their reelection prospects, which means that despite all his bluster, Musk has little prayer of cutting the $2 trillion he’s suggested.

Public opinion will ultimately limit Trump’s hand, too. Most economists agree his regime of tax cuts and tariffs would curb U.S. growth and spike inflation — the latter of which proved deadly for Biden and Harris. Mass deportations would also exact a steep toll. A Bloomberg Economics study found that deporting immigrants in the numbers Trump’s campaign suggests would shrink the U.S. gross domestic product, perhaps significantly.

But none of these limitations will necessarily stop Trump from putting his indelible stamp on the country in ways that could resonate for decades. “Certain things are endemic with Trump: drama, infighting, leaks, and the revolving orbit of people coming in and out,” said Myrow. “But even so, this time is sure to be more assertive, much more thought out, and less ham-handed. These guys have had four years to prepare.”

The Republican Party has already been remade in Trump’s image, all but guaranteeing that his influence and his movement will shape American politics long into the future — despite his attacks on the foundations of the U.S. political and judicial systems, the dozens of state and federal crimes he’s been charged with, and the furious contempt with which half the country regards him.

Trump’s return and his party’s transformation also once seemed improbable. But his victory makes it all but inevitable that history will remember the former television reality star, product pitchman and convicted felon as one of our most consequential presidents, and one whose movement radically reshaped the country.

©2024 Bloomberg L.P. Visit bloomberg.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By ALI SWENSON

WASHINGTON (AP) — President-elect Donald Trump and his Republican allies had spent months seeding doubt in the integrity of American voting systems and priming supporters to expect a 2024 election riddled with massive and inevitable fraud.

The former president continued laying that groundwork even during a mostly smooth day of voting Tuesday, making unsubstantiated claims related to Philadelphia and Detroit and highlighting concerns about election operations in Milwaukee. Shortly before polls began closing, he took to his social media platform to announce, without providing details, “A lot of talk about massive CHEATING in Philadelphia.” The declaration produced immediate denials from city leaders who said there was zero evidence of any wrongdoing.

Yet Trump’s grim warnings abruptly ended in the later hours of the evening as early returns began tipping in his favor. During his election night speech, the president-elect touted a “magnificent victory” as he claimed ownership for the favorable results and expressed love for the same states he’d questioned hours earlier.

The messaging pivot was part of a Trump playbook that many in his party have adopted: To preemptively defy a loss with claims of widespread cheating but be ready to quickly disregard them in the event of a win.

In 2020, when he lost to Joe Biden, Trump carried out the other side of that strategy — spending the following four years doubling down on the false notion that the election was stolen, straining to convince supporters he was the rightful winner. The campaign was successful in changing minds: Polls show that more than half of Republicans still believe Biden was not legitimately elected in 2020.

In the weeks and months leading up to Tuesday’s election, many Trump supporters propped up supposed evidence of fraud that they abandoned when it became clear Trump was in the lead.

Several Republicans in Congress had also fought to require proof of citizenship for voter registration and argued there was no way the election could be fair without that extra layer of security. Yet the biggest proponents of the legislation congratulated Trump overnight without repeating those concerns.

It’s become a common trope to see candidates only focus on claims of potential fraud if they’ve lost or believe they will lose, said David Becker, a former U.S. Justice Department lawyer who serves as executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research.

“I think it’s somewhat telling that we’ve seen fewer fraud claims in the aftermath of an election in which former President and future President Trump won,” Becker said Wednesday.

The strategy sets a problematic precedent that “if your preferred candidate doesn’t win, it must mean that the entire system is illegitimate,” said Leah Wright Rigueur, a history professor at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University.

As Republicans have often pointed out, it’s not only their party that has refused to accept races they’ve lost. They often highlight the example of Democratic activist and former Georgia state Rep. Stacey Abrams, who ended her 2018 campaign for governor without explicitly conceding defeat to her Republican opponent, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp.

Still, Trump is the only American president who has taken steps to try to overturn the results of an election he squarely lost. The part he played in the violent Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, after he urged his supporters to “fight like hell,” has been condemned by democracy advocates in both political parties.

Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris called Trump on Wednesday to congratulate him on his election victory. Some widely shared left-leaning posts on the social platform X had encouraged her not to concede or called for a 2024 recount, raising unsubstantiated suspicion in the results.

And for some right-leaning election skeptics, even their candidate’s decisive win didn’t prove that the election was aboveboard.

“They rigged 2020. We weren’t ready. They tried to rig 2024. We were ready,” David Clements, a former public prosecutor and conservative public speaker, wrote in a social media post.

It remains to be seen exactly how the next Trump administration might seek to reform U.S. elections. MyPillow founder and election denier Mike Lindell sent an email to supporters Wednesday saying he had discussed with Trump plans to discard machines and go “back to paper ballots, hand-counted.”

Nearly every ballot cast in American elections already has a paper record, and election officials warn that hand-counting all ballots would be costlier, more prone to error and far more time-intensive than machine counting.

Becker said even though the absence of fraud allegations in Trump’s victory speech showed his hand, it was a positive development.

“If we can get to the point now where President Trump and his supporters believe in the integrity of our elections … I will take it,” Becker said. “We wake up this morning with less likelihood that election officials around the country are going to be targeted – by name in many cases – for potential violence, and that’s a good thing.”

Associated Press writer Gary Fields in Washington contributed to this report.

The Associated Press receives support from several private foundations to enhance its explanatory coverage of elections and democracy. See more about AP’s democracy initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

By MARYCLAIRE DALE and JOCELYN NOVECK, Associated Press

Voters had the chance this election to break the highest glass ceiling in American politics by electing Kamala Harris the nation’s first female president. Instead, they returned Donald Trump to the White House, a comeback that relied on significant — even somewhat improved – support among women.

Some female voters on Wednesday mourned the missed opportunity to send a woman to the Oval Office and wondered when, if ever, it might happen.

“I am just aghast,” said Precious Brady-Davis, a Black transgender woman who’d just won a two-year term on a Chicago-area water management board — but her joy in that was tempered. “I am disappointed in my fellow Americans that, once again, we did not elect a qualified woman to the presidency.”

Those who supported Trump — like Katherine Mickelson, a 20-year-old college student from Sioux Falls, South Dakota — said the race came down to values and to issues like the economy, not gender. Even Harris herself sought her place in history without dwelling on her gender.

“While I think a lot of women would like to see a female president, myself included,” Mickelson said, “we aren’t just going to blindly vote for a woman.”

Despite the history-making potential of Harris’ campaign, she wasn’t able to expand on President Joe Biden’s 2020 support among women to cement a win, according to AP VoteCast, a sweeping survey of more than 120,000 voters nationwide. Fifty-three percent of women supported Harris, compared with 46% for Trump — slightly narrower than Biden’s advantage among them in 2020.

The prospect of electing the first female president didn’t rank high as a motivator for voters. Only about 1 in 10 voters said the fact that Harris would be the first woman was the single most important factor for their vote, while about one-quarter said it was an important driver, but not the most important.

Denise Martin in Georgia had a grim view: “I really feel like the majority of Americans still aren’t ready for a woman. They are so short-sighted.” That included, she said, some fellow female voters.

Women were more likely than men to say electing the first female president was at least a factor in their vote, VoteCast showed, though few said it was the main driver and about 4 in 10 women said it wasn’t a factor.

Black women were especially motivated by the potential for the first female president — about a third said it was the most important factor.

Maya Davis theorized that Harris’ identity as a Black and South Asian woman “absolutely” played a role in her defeat. As a Black woman herself, the 27-year-old North Carolina attorney said she’s constantly forced to prove herself.

“I don’t think there’s anything she could have done differently unfortunately,” she said of Harris. “Maybe not be a woman.”

Female supporters of Trump, 78 — who adopted a hypermasculine campaign style, used sexist tropes and vowed to protect women “whether they like it or not” — said they found his rhetoric perhaps unfortunate or hyperbolic, but less troubling than concerns about the economy, immigration and abortion.

Krissy Bunner of Greenville, South Carolina, called Trump a “promoter of women” and said the future is “so much brighter” for them because Trump was elected.

“He does so much, you know, for us,” the 56-year-old said. She described women who favored Harris as misled by the media, and said Trump’s stringent border policies and stance on barring transgender athletes from women’s sports would benefit all women.

Virginia King, 19, of Dallas, spoke about Trump’s unscripted nature. “He’s just kind of outspoken about what he thinks and what he does, whereas other people hide it,” she said. “It’s probably not ideal, but it doesn’t make me not support him.”

Other women found the former president’s bombast ominous and feared a second Trump term would further threaten their rights two years after his Supreme Court appointees helped overturn the right to abortion.

“All of women’s protections are going to go away if you don’t protect the basic fundamental issue of democracy to begin with,” said retired teacher Mary Ellen Brown, 66, of Newtown, Pennsylvania. Brown said she dressed in black Wednesday and feared her family was losing faith in their country.

After Harris stepped into the race in July, Trump doubled down on banter that many found paternalistic – and worse — as he tried to close the gender gap. He also offended many by calling Harris “stupid” or “lazy.” His running mate, JD Vance, called the vice president “trash.”

The discourse didn’t bother Nina Christina, a North Carolina nurse more worried about feeding her children. Christina, 35, voted for Trump and said she just hopes to avoid being “underwater.”

“It shouldn’t be this difficult to survive in everyday life,” said Christina, adding that Harris already had a chance to fix the economy.

Harris, 60, bypassed the suffragist white worn by Hillary Clinton in 2016 and rarely spoke about the glass ceiling during a frenzy of energetic campaign stops since becoming the Democratic nominee in July.

Her supporters welcomed the upbeat mood after what they saw as a series of setbacks for women’s progress in recent years: a workload surge during the pandemic, when children were sent home from school in 2020; the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022; and the steady drumbeat of #MeToo cases, some lodged against Trump.

In Minneapolis, 90-year-old Audrey Wesley — who’s voted in more presidential elections than she can count off the top of her head — said she’d been hoping a Harris victory would usher in a bipartisan resurgence.

“I can’t believe a man that has done this much against the law can even be running for president,” Wesley said, referring to the litany of legal battles, including sexual assault allegations, Trump brings to the office. “Our system is broken.”

Relatively few voters said Trump’s legal cases were a major factor in their decision-making this election, according to AP VoteCast. Only about a quarter of Trump voters said the legal cases involving Trump were at least an important factor, but about 8 in 10 Harris voters did.

Some women voters experienced the gender gap within their own homes or families — women like Dee Bertino, 55, of Moorestown, New Jersey, who spent her first date with her husband arguing about trickle-down economics. Twenty-five years and two sons later, she mailed in a ballot for Harris while her husband voted for Trump.

Bertino said her top concern was women’s rights, but she also bemoaned the lack of civility she felt Trump had unleashed. Her husband, Bob, 58, with whom she runs a sexual health company, also supported abortion rights, she said, but felt the economy, immigration and other issues were more important.

Having a woman president is “not that big” for me, Bertino said. “But I truly believe that our democracy is facing its largest threat in history, and Trump must be stopped.”

Bertino and her husband hotly debate politics and the election. That’s not true for Martin, in Peachtree City, Georgia,

Martin, 61, is a flight attendant. Her partner is a pilot. He voted for Trump, for the third time. She voted for Harris. Speaking about politics is fraught and painful, and they know to avoid it.

When Clinton lost in 2016, Martin said, she was beside herself and couldn’t talk to her partner for days. This year, Martin had hoped to privately celebrate the ascension of the first female president, a woman she supported not because she was a woman, but because she was the right candidate: “so thoughtful, so smart, so well-spoken.”

But the news did not seem good, so she went to bed. She awoke to see the race called for Trump, and grew tearful. Among her chief concerns: the future of democracy; health care, especially reproductive care for young women; respect for science; climate policy; and the United States’ standing in the world.

As Clinton herself has said, Harris didn’t need to emphasize the gender issue, because the public has grown more accustomed to seeing female candidates. Seven women, representing three political parties, ran for president in 2020.

”We now don’t just have one image of a person who happens to be a woman who ran for president – namely me,” she told the AP in September. “Now we have a much better opportunity for women candidates, starting with Kamala, to be viewed in a way that just takes for granted the fact that, yes, guess what? She’s a woman.”

Trump voter Elizabeth Herbert, a retired homeschool teacher from Wake Forest, North Carolina, saw Trump as a strong leader and family man. She would still like to see a woman president. She just didn’t embrace Harris.

“I think a woman could do a great job as president,” she said. “I don’t think she is the right woman.”

Some women who’d voted for Harris told AP they were too stunned to speak about the news. “I’m devastated,” texted one; “I’ll need a little time,” another wrote. Others said they were forcing themselves to move forward.

“We’ll get through today and then get some rest,” Martin said, looking forward to playing trivia with her friends later.

“The world is going to change, but we have to find our way in it. We can’t let this ruin us.”

Associated Press reporters Hannah Schoenbaum in Salt Lake City; Makiya Seminera in Raleigh, North Carolina; Sophia Tareen in Chicago; Leah Willingham in Charleston, West Virginia; and Michael Goldberg in Minneapolis contributed.

By ERIC TUCKER and ALANNA DURKIN RICHER

WASHINGTON (AP) — Special counsel Jack Smith is evaluating how to wind down the two federal cases against Donald Trump before the president-elect takes office in light of longstanding Justice Department policy that says sitting presidents cannot be prosecuted, a person familiar with the matter said Wednesday.

Smith charged Trump last year with plotting to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and illegally hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate. But Trump’s election defeat of Kamala Harris means that the Justice Department believes he can no longer face prosecution in accordance with department legal opinions meant to shield presidents from criminal charges while in office.

The person familiar with Smith’s plans was not authorized to discuss the matter by name and spoke on condition of anonymity to The Associated Press.

By moving to wind down the cases before the inauguration in January, Smith and the Justice Department would be averting a potential showdown with Trump, who said as recently as last month that he would fire Smith “within two seconds” of taking office. It would also mean Trump would enter the White House without the legal cloud of federal criminal prosecutions that once carried the potential for felony convictions and prison sentences.

NBC News first reported Smith’s plans.

Smith’s two cases charge Trump in a conspiracy to undo the election results in the run-up to the Capitol riot, and with retaining top secret records at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida and obstructing FBI efforts to recover them. He was appointed to the position in November 2022 by Attorney General Merrick Garland.

The classified documents case has been stalled since July when a Trump-appointed judge, Aileen Cannon, dismissed it on grounds that Smith was illegally appointed. Smith has appealed to the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, where the request to revive the case is pending. Even as Smith looks to withdraw the documents case against Trump, he would seem likely to continue to challenge Cannon’s ruling on the legality of his appointment given the precedent such a ruling would create.

In the 2020 election interference case, Trump was scheduled to stand trial in March in Washington, where more than 1,000 of his supporters have been convicted of charges for their roles in the Capitol riot. But the case was halted as Trump pursued his sweeping claims of immunity from prosecution that ultimately landed before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Trump could be emboldened by the Supreme Court’s ruling in July, which granted former presidents expansive immunity from prosecution for acts taken in the White House and explicitly put off-limits any alleged conduct involving Trump’s discussions with the Justice Department. That included his efforts to use the Justice Department to conduct sham election fraud investigations as part of his bid to stay in power.

The conservative-majority Supreme Court sent the case back to U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan to determine which of the other allegations in the indictment, if any, could move forward to trial.

In response, Smith’s team last month filed a 165-page brief laying out new evidence to persuade the judge that the actions alleged in the indictment were taken in Trump’s private capacity as a candidate — not as commander-in-chief — and therefore can remain part of the case. Trump’s lawyers are scheduled to file their response later this month.

In New York, meanwhile, Trump is fighting to overturn his felony conviction and stave off a potential prison sentence for falsifying business records related to a $130,000 hush money payment to porn actor Stormy Daniels just before the 2016 election. It is the only one of his criminal cases to go to trial.

A judge is expected to rule next week on whether to uphold or toss the verdict in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s July ruling that presidents have broad protections from prosecution.

Judge Juan M. Merchan has said he will issue a ruling on Trump’s dismissal request on Nov. 12, one week after Election Day. The judge has penciled in Nov. 26 for sentencing, “if necessary.” Punishments range from a fine or probation to up to four years in prison.

Though Trump technically has no authority as president to shut down a state-level prosecution like the one in New York, his victory nonetheless calls into question that case as well as a separate pending case in Fulton County, Georgia charging him with plotting to subvert that state’s election in 2020.

Amara Omeokwe | (TNS) Bloomberg News

Donald Trump’s victory in Tuesday’s presidential contest injects deep uncertainties into the U.S. economic outlook that could alter the Federal Reserve’s policy calculus in the months ahead, while renewing questions about how fiercely he might pressure the central bank during his second term in the White House.

In his campaign, Trump promised to wield tariffs more aggressively against U.S. trading partners, deport millions of undocumented immigrants and extend his 2017 tax cuts. Those policies, if enacted, could put upward pressure on prices, wages and the federal deficit, according to many estimates.

That would complicate the Fed’s job as officials seek to lower inflation to their 2% objective while protecting the labor market. Amid that delicate task, the central bank could fall under an uncomfortable political spotlight should Trump follow his previous pattern of publicly attacking Fed Chair Jerome Powell.

Fed officials on Thursday are widely expected to lower their benchmark interest rate by a quarter percentage point, a move that will come on the heels of a half-point cut in September. They have projected one more quarter-point cut this year, in December, and an additional full point of reductions in 2025, according to the median estimate released in September.

Policymakers, however, may now approach the question of when and how much to cut more cautiously as they assess how Trump’s economic proposals will be turned into actual policies, said Derek Tang, an economist at LH Meyer/Monetary Policy Analytics.

“On the margin, they might think we might get higher inflation risk over the next few years with tariffs or lower immigration,” Tang said. “Their psychology might be, ‘By cutting a little bit more slowly, that gives us a little bit more time to observe what’s actually happening with inflation expectations and the labor market.’”

Powell will almost certainly face questions about how the election affects the Fed’s outlook when he holds a press conference at 2:30 p.m. Thursday following this week’s meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee.

The Fed chair frequently drew Trump’s ire during his first presidential term. Those barbs have continued, with Trump saying as recently as August that Powell had been “a little bit too early and little bit too late” on policy decisions.

Having a ‘Say’

Trump has also said he believes presidents should have “say” on the Fed’s interest-rate policy, and suggested policymakers acted for political reasons when they lowered rates by a larger-than-usual half percentage point in September.

In an October interview with Bloomberg News Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait, Trump subsequently said he doesn’t think he should be able to order the Fed what to do, but has the right to comment on the direction of interest rates.

The totality of his rhetoric has nonetheless stoked speculation he could seek to curb the Fed’s autonomy and upend a decades-long practice of allowing the central bank to conduct monetary policy independently of the executive branch. During Trump’s first term, he explored firing Powell, a move that would have been unprecedented and legally questionable, according to legal scholars.

The Fed has guardrails surrounding it that could protect it against presidential interference. A president’s appointees to the Fed’s Board of Governors must be confirmed by the Senate, and Congressional committees maintain oversight of the central bank, for example. Powell and other officials have repeatedly assured the public they aim to stay out of partisan politics and don’t take political considerations into account when setting monetary policy.

Sowing Doubt

Still, a president’s public and vocal criticisms of the Fed can sow doubt, said Sarah Binder, a professor of political science at George Washington University.

“There’s certainly that structural independence,” Binder said. But “no degree of structural insulation can protect it if people begin to doubt that it’s going to do what it says it’s going to do.”

Some of Trump’s advisers have pushed back against concerns he could seek to meddle with the Fed.

“My impression: He doesn’t want to be in the room. He just wants to be a voice that’s heard,” said Scott Bessent, a top Trump economic adviser and chief executive at the hedge fund Key Square Group. “He understands that central bank independence anchors long-term inflation expectations, which anchors long-term rates,” he said in an October interview with Bloomberg News.

Kevin Hassett, who served as the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers during Trump’s first term, said in an interview with Goldman Sachs released in October that suspicions of coordination between the Fed and the executive branch “should be taken seriously, and the next administration should choose a neutral Fed leadership.”

Trump’s most direct way to influence the Fed will come through appointments of key personnel in coming years. He has already said he won’t reappoint Powell, whose term as chair ends in May 2026. Fed Governor Adriana Kugler’s term expires in January 2026, while Powell’s governor slot opens up in January 2028. Trump will have the opportunity to name appointees for each of those positions.

Multiple sources close to the Trump campaign, including Bessent, have said Hassett could be Trump’s eventual choice for chair.

The president-elect will also be able to nominate a vice chair for supervision — a powerful regulatory role that oversees the nation’s largest banks. President Joe Biden filled the post with Michael Barr, whose term ends in July 2026. Barr has drawn sharp criticism from the banking industry and Republicans over an initial proposal to boost the capital banks must hold. The Fed and other regulators are now revising the plan.

Recent holders of Barr’s position have resigned shortly after the election of a president from the opposite party, Michael Feroli, chief U.S. economist at JPMorgan Chase & Co., wrote in an October research note.

If Barr “follows this precedent after a Trump victory then the new president could quickly influence regulatory policy, even if his influence over monetary policy is less immediate,” Feroli said.

With assistance from Reade Pickert.

©2024 Bloomberg L.P. Visit bloomberg.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Dana Hull | (TNS) Bloomberg News

No billionaire did more to help Donald Trump win the U.S. presidential election than Elon Musk. The Tesla Inc. and SpaceX boss will now find out whether it pays off or he ends up getting burned.

Musk, whose growing political apparatus has already proved its mettle, will gain more than just an ally in the White House. Trump has floated giving him an official role cutting government spending — and with it the power to influence policy and the federal agencies that oversee his vast empire of companies.

“He’s a character. He’s a special guy. He’s a super genius,” Trump said of Musk while addressing his supporters overnight. “We have to protect our geniuses. We don’t have that many of them.”

Already, shares in Tesla are surging. The stock climbed as much as 15% in early U.S. trading as investors look to cash in on a Trump return to the White House. Musk also posted a chart early Wednesday morning the he said showed record usage of X, his social network.

“Let that sink in,” he said on X, posting a fake photo of himself carrying a sink into the White House’s Oval Office — a nod to when he brought a sink to Twitter headquarters after taking over the social media company.

In the last few months, Musk was Trump’s most aggressive surrogate. The world’s richest man propped up Trump on X, hosted town halls in the critical state of Pennsylvania and appeared at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally with even higher billing than the Republican’s own running mate, JD Vance.

Musk spent more than $130 million on Trump and down-ballot Republicans in competitive House races, vaulting him to the highest echelons of donors this election cycle. On Election Day, Musk voted in Texas and then flew on his private jet to Florida to watch returns with Trump and his family at Mar-a-Lago. His PAC posted a photo of him sitting shoulder to shoulder with Trump and Dana White, the chief executive officer of UFC, at the festivities.

“Musk is new to politics, but it means a lot for a billionaire and a tech mogul to go all in for President Trump,” said Jondavid Longo, the Pennsylvania state director of Early Vote Action, an organization dedicated to registering Republican voters. Trump’s win in Pennsylvania was key to his victory, helping him flip battleground states he had lost in 2020 but won in his first run for president in 2016. Musk donated $1 million to the group.

Musk has much to gain financially from the incoming administration. He oversees an empire of six companies, several of which are highly entangled with the U.S. federal government. SpaceX has become an increasingly vital partner to NASA and the U.S. Defense Department, with contracts worth billions. Tesla has staked its financial future on a pivot to autonomous robotaxis, a risky pursuit facing serious regulatory hurdles. X remains hugely influential.

Musk’s personal fortune swung wildly during Joe Biden’s four years in office, reaching as high as $340 billion and as low as $124 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Still, it has largely trended upward. As of Election Day, his net worth was $263.8 billion.

During the campaign, Musk pitched a job for himself running an agency in charge of cutting government bureaucracy and waste. Trump heartily embraced the idea and regularly mentioned it on the campaign trail.

“I’m going to get Elon. And he’s great at this. He’s going to be our cost cutter,” said Trump at a campaign rally in Michigan in late September. Trump calls the new position the “Secretary of Cost Cutting,” while Musk has joked that he’ll lead a DOGE, what he calls the Department of Government Efficiency, in a nod to the cryptocurrency he’s long promoted.

In that role, Musk has vowed to help cut an unprecedented $2 trillion from the federal budget. He hasn’t specified the agencies he’d go after, but regularly rails against the regulators with oversight of his own companies. In a long diatribe on the Joe Rogan podcast this week, he described a SpaceX rocket that sat on a launchpad for two months waiting for regulatory approval.

“We could build the rocket faster than they could approve the paperwork,” he said. “It’s like Gulliver being tied down by a million little strings. It’s not like any one string is the problem but you’ve got a million of them.”

A broad remit would give the Tesla, SpaceX and X boss leverage to reshape federal agencies that both regulate — and have the power to investigate — his many companies. He has already said he would use whatever power he gets to push for a federal approval process of fully autonomous vehicles. Current rules prevent manufacturers from putting more than a couple thousand cars on the road per year without steering wheels or other controls.

It’s not uncommon for U.S. presidents to tap executives and business leaders to fill their administrations, but none quite like Musk. During his first term, Trump appointed Steve Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. executive who had been his campaign’s finance chair, to be Treasury Secretary. The role cutting government spending is not expected to be a Cabinet level position, meaning Musk wouldn’t be required to step away from his CEO duties.

Already Musk’s support has influenced the president elect. After the billionaire’s endorsement in July, Trump changed his tune on electric vehicles. Trump went from entirely railing against what he called “crooked Joe’s insane electric vehicle mandate” to, at times, praising EVs.

“I’m for electric cars. I have to be, you know, because Elon endorsed me very strongly, Elon. So I have no choice,” Trump said during an August rally.

Trump also embraced Musk’s ambitions of reaching Mars — using SpaceX rockets — by 2028, or by the end of the Republican’s term. “We will land an American astronaut on Mars. Thank you, Elon. Thank you. Get going, Elon,” Trump said at an October rally.

Musk’s policy interests go beyond those that benefit his companies. Like Trump, he has pushed conspiracy theories and misinformation about immigrants to his more than 200 million followers on X.

But it’s one thing to campaign together. It’s another to work together. The president-elect is known for turning on even his most loyal friends and colleagues. Musk and Trump may be aligned for now, but tension points could arise between two men known for their egos.

On EVs, for example, Tesla has received billions from President Biden’s policies, which Trump has vowed to dismantle. The two own rival social media companies and not too long ago, Musk was calling for Trump to “hang up his hat and sail into the sunset.”

Whatever happens between the two men, Musk will leave this election cycle with a robust political machine that he can use to not only bolster his businesses but his pet policy desires.

“America PAC is going to keep going after this election,” Musk said on an X Spaces Tuesday. Musk said the group is “preparing for the midterms and any intermediate elections at the district attorney and sort of judicial levels.”

Musk’s America PAC, which spent $153 million on behalf of Trump, now has contact information from scores of voters, which it can use going forward.

Democrats are painting Musk as their billionaire foil, echoing a Harris campaign warning that Trump’s “buddy Elon Musk is spending huge sums of money on his own ads hammering the Vice President.” They had pleaded with voters not to let the richest person on the planet buy the election.

But, in many ways, he did.

©2024 Bloomberg L.P. Visit bloomberg.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Donald Trump’s election victory was history-making in several respects, even as his defeat of Vice President Kamala Harris prevented other firsts. She would have been the nation’s first Black and South Asian woman to be president.

He’s the oldest to be elected

At 78, Trump is the oldest person elected to the U.S. presidency. When sworn in on Jan. 20, 2025, he will be a few months older than Joe Biden was at his inauguration in 2020. Trump’s running mate, 40-year-old JD Vance, will be the third-youngest vice president.

It’s the second time someone has won two non-consecutive terms

Several U.S. presidents have served more than one term, and Trump joins the group. He was the 45th president and now will be the 47th. But only one other president did it the way Trump will — with a gap between terms. That was Grover Cleveland, who served as the 22nd president after the 1884 election, and as the 24th president after the campaign of 1892.

He’s been convicted of felony crimes

Trump is in line to become the first U.S. president with a felony conviction. In May, New York jury found him guilty of all 34 charges in a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election through a hush money payment to a porn actor who said the two had sex.

He’s been impeached (twice)

Trump already is the only president in U.S. history to face impeachment proceedings twice while in office. In each case, he was acquitted by the Senate on all counts.

By COLLEEN LONG

WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump’s presidential win is going to be certified in Congress in January by the candidate he beat, Vice President Kamala Harris.

Under the Constitution, the vice president is the head of the Senate, and it’s the role of the Senate president to declare the result of a White House election.

That happens Jan. 6.

Under normal circumstances, the vote-tallying procedure performed by the vice president is a mere formality and it’s the final step in the complicated technical process of electing a new administration.

For example, in 2000, after the grueling 36-day Florida recount battle, Democrat Al Gore conceded the presidency on Dec. 13 to Republican George W. Bush.

Gore, too, was the vice president, and he certified Bush’s win.

“The whole number of the electors appointed to vote for president of the United States is 538,” Gore said from the rostrum, going on to read off his own loss to Congress. “George W. Bush of the state of Texas has received for president of the United States 271 votes. Al Gore of the state of Tennessee has received 266 votes.”

But this nearly didn’t happen four years ago.

Trump refused to accept defeat and sparked a violent insurrection at the Capitol, when then-Vice President Mike Pence was to certify Democrat Joe Biden’s win. Trump’s supporters chanted “Hang Mike Pence” as they ransacked Capitol offices.

Trump had wanted Pence to “do the right thing” and declare Trump the winner. Trump and his allies spent days in a futile bid trying to convince Pence that the vice president had the power to reject electors from battleground states that voted for Biden, even though the Constitution makes clear the vice president’s role in the joint session is largely ceremonial, much like a master of ceremonies.

Pence acknowledged that reality in a lengthy statement to Congress. He laid out his conclusion that a vice president cannot claim “unilateral authority” to reject states’ electoral votes. He gaveled in the joint session of Congress on Jan. 7, 2021, to certify for Biden.

By WILL WEISSERT, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump ‘s impending return to the White House means he’ll want to stand up an entirely new administration from the one that served under President Joe Biden. His team is also pledging that the second won’t look much like the first one Trump established after his 2016 victory.

The president-elect now has a 75-day transition period to build out his team before Inauguration Day arrives on Jan. 20. One top item on the to-do list: filling around 4,000 government positions with political appointees, people who are specifically tapped for their jobs by Trump’s team.

That includes everyone from the secretary of state and other heads of Cabinet departments to those selected to serve part time on boards and commissions. Around 1,200 of those presidential appointments require Senate confirmation, which should be easier with the Senate now shifting to Republican control.

Here’s what to expect:

What will the transition look like?

Though the turnover in the new administration will be total, Trump will be familiar with what he needs to accomplish. He built an entirely new administration for his first term and has definite ideas on what to do differently this time.

He’s already floated some names.

Trump said at his victory party early Wednesday that former presidential hopeful and anti-vaccination activist Robert Kennedy Jr. will be tapped to “help make America healthy again,” adding that “we’re going to let him go to it.” Ahead of the election, Trump didn’t reject Kennedy’s calls to end fluoridated water. Trump has also pledged to make South African-born Elon Musk, a vocal supporter of the Trump campaign, a secretary of federal “cost-cutting,” and the Tesla CEO has suggested he can find trillions of dollars in government spending to wipe out.

The transition is not just about filling jobs. Most presidents-elect also receive daily or near-daily intelligence briefings during the transition.

In 2008, outgoing President George W. Bush personally briefed President-elect Barack Obama on U.S. covert operations. When Trump was preparing to take office in 2016, Obama’s national security adviser, Susan Rice, briefed Michael Flynn, her designated successor in the new administration. In 2020, Trump’s legal challenges of the election’s results delayed the start of the transition process for weeks, though, and presidential briefings with Biden didn’t begin until Nov. 30.

Who is helping Trump through the process?

Trump’s transition is being led primarily by friends and family, including Kennedy Jr. and former Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard, as well as the president-elect’s adult sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, and his running mate, JD Vance. Transition co-chairs are Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Lutnick and Linda McMahon, the former wrestling executive who previously led the Small Business Administration during Trump’s first term.

Lutnick said this year’s operation is “about as different as possible” from the 2016 effort, which was first led by Chris Christie. After he won eight years ago, Trump fired Christie, tossed out plans the former New Jersey governor had made and gave the job of running the transition to then-Vice President-elect Mike Pence.

At the start of his first term, Trump assembled an original Cabinet that featured some more mainstream Republicans and business leaders who ultimately disappointed, or broke publicly with him, or both. This time, Trump has promised to value loyalty as much as possible — a philosophy that may ensure he makes picks that are more closely aligned to his ideological beliefs and bombastic professional style.

Unlike the campaign of Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump’s team didn’t sign any pre-Election Day transition agreements with the General Services Administration, which essentially acts as the federal government’s landlord. He has therefore already missed deadlines to agree with GSA on logistical matters like office space and tech support and with the White House on access to agencies, including documents, employees and facilities.

New transition rules

In 2020, Trump argued that widespread voter fraud — which hadn’t actually occurred — cost him the election, delaying the start of the transition from his outgoing administration to Biden’s incoming one for weeks.

Four years ago, the Trump-appointed head of the GSA, Emily Murphy, determined that she had no legal standing to determine a winner in the presidential race because Trump was still challenging the results in court. That held up funding and cooperation for the transition.

It wasn’t until Trump’s efforts to subvert election results had collapsed across key states that Murphy agreed to formally “ ascertain a president-elect ” and begin the transition process. Trump eventually posted on social media that his administration would cooperate.

To prevent that kind of holdup in future transitions, the Presidential Transition Improvement Act of 2022 mandates that the transition process begin five days after the election — even if the winner is still in dispute. That is designed to avoid long delays and means that “an ‘affirmative ascertainment’ by the GSA is no longer a prerequisite for gaining transition support services,” according to agency guidelines on the new rules.

The uncertainty stretched even longer after the 2000 election, when five weeks elapsed before the Supreme Court settled the contested election between Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore. That left Bush with about half the usual amount of time to manage transitioning the government from the outgoing Clinton administration. That ultimately led to questions about national security gaps that may have contributed to the U.S. being underprepared for the Sept. 11 attacks the following year.

By TIA GOLDENBERG

TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — Donald Trump will return to the U.S. presidency at a time of unprecedented conflict and uncertainty in the Middle East. He has vowed to fix it.

But Trump’s history of strong support for Israel coupled with his insistence during the campaign that the war in Gaza should end quickly, the isolationist forces in the Republican party and his penchant for unpredictability raise a mountain of questions over how his second presidency will affect the region at this pivotal moment.

Barring the achievement of elusive cease-fires before the inauguration, Trump will ascend to the highest office in the country as a brutal war in Gaza still rages and Israel presses its offensive against the Lebanese Hezbollah militant group. A conflagration between Iran and Israel shows no signs of abating — nor do Israel’s conflicts with Iranian proxies in Iraq and Yemen — and Iran’s nuclear program remains a top concern for Israel.

Trump says he wants peace, but how?

Throughout his campaign, Trump has vowed to bring peace to the region.

“Get it over with and let’s get back to peace and stop killing people,” Trump said of the conflict in Gaza in an interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt in April.

Israel launched the war in response to Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, when terrorists killed 1,200 people in Israel and kidnapped 250, with dozens still in Gaza. Israel’s offensive has killed more than 43,000 people, according to Gaza health officials, whose count does not distinguish between civilians and fighters, though they say more than half of the dead are women and children. Hamas has been designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, Canada and the European Union.

The war has ignited a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, driven Israel into increasing international isolation, with two world courts examining charges of war crimes, and has sparked a wave of protests on American campuses that have fueled debate over the U.S. role as Israel’s key military and diplomatic supporter.

International mediators from the U.S., Egypt and Qatar have tried unsuccessfully to bring about a lasting cease-fire.

Yet Trump has repeatedly urged to Israel “finish the job” and destroy Hamas — but hasn’t said how.

“Does finish the job mean you have a free hand to act in dealing with the remnants of Hamas? Or does finish the job mean the war has to come to an end now?” asked David Makovsky, director of the program on Arab-Israel Relations at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “That’s part of the enigmas here.”

Netanyahu is pinning his hopes on a pro-Israel Trump administration

Uncertainty also shrouds how Trump will engage with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. During his first term, Trump offered broad support for the Israeli leader’s hard-line policies, including unilaterally withdrawing from a deal meant to rein in Iran’s nuclear program that Netanyahu long opposed.

Trump also recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, bolstering its claim over the disputed city, and Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights, captured from Syria in the 1967 Mideast war. He presented a peace plan with the Palestinians widely seen as favoring Israel. Settlement-building in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, seen as an obstacle to Palestinian statehood, surged under his presidency.

Trump also helped secure agreements between Israel and four Arab countries to normalize ties that were not contingent on progress toward Palestinian statehood — a major victory for Netanyahu. The Israeli leader hopes to replicate those successes with a deal with Saudi Arabia.

The leaders had a falling out after Netanyahu congratulated President Joe Biden following the 2020 elections — a move Trump viewed as a slight from his loyal ally, though Netanyahu visited Trump in Florida this year.

Under Biden, the U.S. has been critical at times and slowed some weapons deliveries in response to Israel’s conduct in Gaza. Netanyahu is likely hoping that Trump’s return will loosen any restraints on Israel to pursue its war goals. The American leader could also work to challenge a potential international war crimes arrest warrant for Netanyahu. And a smoother relationship with Washington could help improve the Israeli leader’s own popular support.

“He has the most pro-Israel record of any president,” said Michael Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to Washington. “The hope is here that there’ll be more of the same.”

Neither Netanyahu nor Trump has a clear vision for postwar Gaza

Netanyahu leads a far-right government whose key members have vowed to topple his rule if the war in Gaza ends with anything short of Hamas’ destruction. They support resettling Gaza and are enthusiastic about a Trump presidency — and their influence will only grow now that Netanyahu has fired his defense minister over his more pragmatic approach to the conflict.

Their grip on the government and over Netanyahu’s political future helps explain why Netanyahu has not spelled out a clear vision for a postwar Gaza.

The Biden administration has favored having the war-ravaged territory governed by the Western-backed Palestinian Authority, which administers parts of the West Bank. Netanyahu has rejected that idea and insists on the right for the Israeli military to operate there.

Trump has not outlined a clear vision, although he has said developers could make Gaza “better than Monaco” because it has “the best location in the Middle East, the best water, the best everything.”

Diana Buttu, a former adviser to Palestinian leaders, said a lack of a firm U.S. vision for Gaza, coupled with a politically powerful Israeli far right, made the future for people in Gaza and for Palestinians in general grim.

“I don’t see this as a president who is going to care about Palestinians,” she said.

Will Trump help defend Israel against Iran or choose America first?

In Lebanon, Israel is battling the Iranian-backed Hezbollah with both a ground invasion and strikes on Hezbollah targets. The militant group has fired thousands of rockets and drones at Israeli communities, killing dozens and displacing 60,000. Israel’s offensive, meanwhile, has displaced over 1 million people in Lebanon and killed more than 3,000.

U.S. mediation efforts there too have been fruitless. Trump, who has a Lebanese-American son-in-law, recently posted on the social platform X that as president he would “stop the suffering and destruction in Lebanon.”

But a key question is how much Trump will be swayed by his America First instincts.

The U.S. has played a central role in diplomatic efforts throughout the war, and an even more robust role in helping Israel defend itself against Iran and its allies.

The U.S. has sent military assets to the region, helped Israel thwart two missile attacks by Iran and even has U.S. soldiers in Israel to operate a sophisticated air defense system. But any effective Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, a target it avoided in its strike last month, will likely need greater U.S. military involvement.

Accusations that Iran has hacked campaign associates and concerns about the potential for Tehran to carry out violence against Trump or members of his administration could deepen his antipathy toward the country.

While Trump has indicated he will focus on domestic affairs, the Mideast could be an outlier.

He enjoys a wide base of support from evangelical Christians, who are staunchly pro-Israel, and his son-in-law and former adviser Jared Kushner was a prominent voice in support of the country in his first administration.

“As Trump is likely to navigate between those forces mostly based on his intuition,” said Udi Sommer, an expert on U.S.-Israel relations at Tel Aviv University, “uncertainty will likely define his approach.”