Donald Trump has announced his intention to nominate Matt Gaetz, a hard-right congressman from Florida known for inflaming tensions within the House Republican conference, as attorney general.

Gaetz, a longtime Trump loyalist, gained attention last year after leading the successful charge to oust his fellow Republican Kevin McCarthy as House speaker. Gaetz and seven other House Republicans joined Democrats in voting to remove McCarthy last October, kicking off a weeks-long scramble to find a new speaker.

McCarthy held Gaetz personally responsible for his removal and even funded an unsuccessful primary challenge against his former colleague. McCarthy suggested Gaetz pushed for his ouster because of an ethics committee investigation into allegations that Gaetz paid for and engaged in sexual relations with an underage woman.

In February 2023, the justice department declined to bring charges of sex trafficking against Gaetz, who has denied wrongdoing since the allegations first came to light.

Even before McCarthy’s removal, Gaetz had cultivated a reputation as a rightwing firebrand who did not shy away from conflict with Democrats and fellow Republicans alike.

“Florida Man. Built for the Battle,” reads Gaetz’s bio on X, formerly Twitter.

Gaetz followed his father into politics more than two decades ago. After serving in the Florida statehouse, Gaetz was elected in 2016 to represent a ruby-red chunk of the Florida Panhandle.

Like Trump, to whom he is fiercely loyal, Gaetz is more interested in sparring with political foes than in the dry business of governance, according to his critics. On Capitol Hill, he has repeatedly disrupted House proceedings, including once barging into a secure facility where Democrats were holding a deposition hearing.

In 2018, he was condemned for inviting a Holocaust denier to Trump’s State of the Union address. A year later, he hired a speechwriter who had been fired by the Trump White House after speaking at a conference that attracts white nationalists.

Months after the January 6 attack on the Capitol, Gaetz embarked on an “America First” tour with Marjorie Taylor Greene, the hard-right Georgia congresswoman, in which they amplified the former president’s false claims of fraud in the 2020 election.

After House Republicans’ worse than expected performance in the 2022 midterms, Gaetz capitalized on his conference’s wafer-thin majority to extract promises of rule changes from McCarthy, who had to endure 15 rounds of voting before becoming speaker in January 2023. Nine months later, Gaetz used those rule changes to force McCarthy out of the speaker’s chair.

More recently, Gaetz has served as an adviser to Trump as the former president successfully sought a second term. According to ABC News, Gaetz helped Trump prepare for his September debate against Kamala Harris by peppering him with questions about his potential vulnerabilities, including Trump’s multiple criminal indictments and his shifting stance on abortion access.

As attorney general, Gaetz would have a powerful perch to prosecute Trump’s political enemies, as the president-elect has promised to do. Gaetz may also attempt to purge the justice department of many longtime staffers, after Trump spread baseless claims that the federal government had been “weaponized” against him.

But before Gaetz can take on the role, he will need the approval of the Senate, where he may face a chilly reception. With Senate Republicans’ 53-seat majority, Gaetz could still be confirmed, but some early warning signs appeared immediately after Trump’s announcement.

Susan Collins, a Republican senator of Maine, told reporters on Capitol Hill that she was “shocked” by the news.

“That shows why the advice and consent process [of Senate confirmation] is so important,” Collins said, per Politico. “And I’m sure that there will be a lot of questions raised at his hearing.”

Donald Trump said he will nominate Florida congressman Matt Gaetz to be the US attorney general on Wednesday, tapping a far-right loyalist to one of the most powerful positions in US government.

Gaetz’s nomination is one of the most significant to date. As attorney general, he would be the country’s chief law enforcement officer and oversee the legal positions that the government takes on key issues, including abortion, civil rights laws, and first amendment issues. The president-elect has pledged to use the justice department to prosecute his political enemies and there is little doubt that Gaetz will help him fulfill that pledge.

First elected to Congress in 2016, Gaetz represents a ruby-red district in the Florida panhandle and has become known as one of Congress’s most showboating members. He reportedly sought a pardon from Trump over his efforts to overturn the election, and has embraced conspiracy theories about the attack on the US Capitol. Last year, he led a successful effort to oust fellow Republican Kevin McCarthy from the speakership, throwing his caucus into chaos.

Gaetz’s nomination comes a little over a year after the justice department decided not to charge him as part of a sex trafficking investigation that involved allegations he had sex with a 17-year-old girl. Joel Greenberg, a former friend and ally, pleaded guilty to sex trafficking and was sentenced to 11 years in prison. Gaetz has denied the allegations.

He also faces investigation from the House ethics committee over allegations that he “engaged in sexual misconduct and illicit drug use, accepted improper gifts, dispensed special privileges and favors to individuals with whom he had a personal relationship, and sought to obstruct government investigations of his conduct.” He has denied all wrondoing.

Meanwhile, Trump heaped praise on Gaetz.

“Matt is a deeply gifted and tenacious attorney, trained at the William & Mary College of Law, who has distinguished himself in Congress through his focus on achieving desperately needed reform at the Department of Justice,” Trump said in a statement posted to his Truth Social media account.

He added: “Few issues in America are more important than ending the partisan Weaponization of our Justice System. Matt will end Weaponized Government, protect our Borders, dismantle Criminal Organizations and restore Americans’ badly-shattered Faith and Confidence in the Justice Department.”

The nomination was immediately met with widespread criticism.

“This guy has been on the run from the law for quite some time now, so he’ll think he’s above it. He’ll be corrupt as hell,” said Olivia Troye, a former official in the Department of Homeland Security during the Trump administration who has become an outspoken critic of the former president.

Robert Weissman, the co-president of the watchdog group Public Citizen said it was “hard to imagine a worse and more unqualified candidate” than Gaetz.

“As a member of Congress, Gaetz has demonstrated contempt for the rule of law, truth and decency. He is singularly unqualified to lead an agency that enforces civil rights laws and environmental protection statutes. Under Gaetz, we’d have every reason to expect an America where corporate criminals walk free but immigrants and people of color are harassed or rounded up with minimal pretext,” he said in a statement.

In January, Republicans will take control of the US Senate, which will vote on Gaetz’s confirmation. They appear headed towards holding at least 53 seats, which would give them enough votes to confirm the Florida congressman, even if a few Republican senators vote against him.

Gaetz also has a history of making derogatory and offensive remarks towards women. “Why is it that the women with the least likelihood of getting pregnant are the ones most worried about having abortions? Nobody wants to impregnate you if you look like a thumb,” he said in 2022.

As a Florida lawmaker before he was in Congress, he opposed a revenge porn law, reportedly telling the bill’s sponsor that ex-lovers could do what they pleased with images their partners had shared with them.

“Are you not entertained?” said CNN political analyst and Trump ally Scott Jennings in the wake of the news.

Andrew Gumbel contributed reporting

The Oklahoma City police department is facing criticism following the release of body-camera footage that shows a police officer forcefully throwing an elderly man to the ground last month.

The city’s police department released body-camera footage last week from 27 October that shows a police officer violently arresting 71-year-old Lich Vu after pulling him over during a traffic stop. The officer has been identified as Joseph Gibson, according to USA Today.

Gibson pulled Vu over for an illegal U-turn on the NW 39th Expressway, according to police. In the initial minutes of the video, Vu, who is seated in his car with the door open and accompanied by his wife, can be seen communicating with Gibson amid an English language barrier.

“I didn’t U-turn,” he says.

Gibson then asks Vu to sign a citation for an improper U-turn, saying that it is not an admission of guilt but rather confirmation that Vu will take care of the ticket at a later date.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Vu replies, adding that another driver hit his car. “Me? Citation? She hit me and I got the citation?” he says. Shortly after, Vu gets out of the car and gestures to the road in an attempt to further explain the situation to Gibson. Gibson then says they are “done arguing about this”.

Vu replies, “I want to show you,” to which Gibson says, “We argue in court … If you don’t sign this, you go to jail.”

“I’m ready to go to jail,” Vu says. Gibson then says, “You’re ready to go to jail? Ridiculous.” He proceeds to head over to the other driver involved in the incident and issues her a ticket before returning to Vu.

The two men continue arguing and at one point, Vu appears to tap Gibson’s chest with the back of his hand. Vu then brings his index finger up to his mouth and says, “You shut up.” Gibson then grabs Vu’s arm and twists it before pinning him on to the ground. Separate surveillance footage from nearby businesses shows Vu’s head forcefully hitting the ground as Gibson places handcuffs on him.

KFOR reports that Vu, who has bone cancer, suffered from a brain bleed and had to undergo surgery. He has remained in the hospital since the incident and is “in and out of consciousness, but stable”, according to family members who spoke to the outlet.

Following the incident, Thuan Nguyen, president of the Vietnamese American Community of Oklahoma, called for Gibson to be terminated.

“We don’t want our police department nor our [district attorney] to take it lightly. We want justice to be served,” Nguyen told NBC, adding, “We are always the last to be heard … so no matter whether we’re the person that is at fault or not at fault, our statements are always last … And so in certain cases, that indicates implicit bias.”

In a statement on Facebook, the Oklahoma City police department said that “an investigation was immediately initiated and the officer was placed on administrative leave pending the conclusion of the investigation”.

“The Oklahoma City police department is dedicated to transparency and accountability. We want our community to know that this case is being thoroughly investigated, and the review process will take time to complete,” it added.

Mia Mottley, the climate-championing prime minister of Barbados, has invited Donald Trump to a face-to-face meeting where she would seek “common ground” and persuade him that climate action was in his own interests.

“Let us find a common purpose in saving the planet and saving livelihoods,” she told the Guardian at the UN’s Cop29 climate summit in Azerbaijan. “We are human beings and we have the capacity to meet face-to-face, in spite of our differences. We want humanity to survive. And the evidence [of the climate crisis] we are seeing almost weekly now.”

Only by personal meetings among world leaders can the massive changes needed on climate action be achieved, she believes. “President Trump has been very clear about the importance of that kind of face-to-face conversation in the things that he believes that he can solve as well.”

Mottley, the prime minister who took Barbados out of the Commonwealth realm to be a republic, has been an electrifying presence at recent UN climate summits since she took to the stage at Cop26 in Glasgow in 2021 with an impassioned speech demanding world leaders “try harder” to avoid passing a death sentence on her country. Since then, she has gained a global reputation as a formidable champion of the developing countries most affected by climate breakdown.

She has also led a movement among developing and some developed countries to change the global financial system to generate the funds needed to shift the world to a low-carbon economy.

The re-election of Trump has thrown a deep shadow over Cop29, which kicked off on Monday in Baku. Scores of world leaders flew in for the summit, but the heads of government of most of the world’s biggest economies stayed away.

Delegates fear Trump will withdraw the US from the Paris climate agreement, dismantle regulations and climate targets, and push forward with plans to “drill, baby, drill” for more fossil fuels. Scientists have warned that if he follows through on his campaign promises the world has little hope of limiting global heating to 1.5C above preindustrial temperatures.

Argentinian negotiators representing the government of climate science denier Javier Milei were ordered on Wednesday to withdraw from Cop29 after just three days, adding to concerns about the stability of the Paris agreement.

But Trump had shown a willingness to deal with crises before, Mottley noted. “I think that there are possibilities for discussion. The same warp speed that President Trump addressed the issue of vaccines and the development of a vaccine is the same warp speed that we want to encourage him and others to look at for decarbonising technology,” she said.

She also believes she could show Trump that the US would benefit economically from tackling the climate crisis.

For instance, she pointed to the flaring of methane from oil and gas production sites. Installing relatively simple equipment to catch and use the methane instead would be profitable, according to the International Energy Agency, which should appeal to Trump.

“Why would you want to flare gas and lose money, when you can use gas and earn money?” she asked.

She also pointed to climate migration. “If I can’t live because I can’t farm because I don’t have access to water, or floods are now coming with an intensity and a regularity that makes it impossible for me to sustain my way of life, I’m going to shift where I’m living from.

“Or if I have no ability to access insurance, and insurance is critical to my ability to get a loan, I’m going to have to move from where I’m operating. So the volume of climate migration hopefully will wake up those who have been slow to see that this must be a win-win.”

Mottley argued Trump would also find it hard to fully reverse the Inflation Reduction Act, which incentivises clean energy, because many formerly depressed areas around the US, including traditionally Republican-voting ones, had seen new jobs and industries spring up because of it.

“We’ve had four years of municipalities, states and the private sector all making significant investments [in a low-carbon economy] in the US,” she said. “You are unlikely to see a U-turn on everything in as bald a way as some people fear.”

Cop29 is focused on the issue of climate finance, with the aim of setting out a new global goal that would deliver at least $1tn a year to developing countries, to help them cut greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the impacts of climate-driven extreme weather.

Developed countries, however, are likely to pledge as little as a third of that in public finance from their overseas aid budgets and through the World Bank and similar institutions.

Mottley recognises rich countries will not stump up enough cash from their own budgets, though she argues they ought to do far more than they are now pledging. She has a set of proposals, known as the Bridgetown agenda after the capital of Barbados, that would generate more than $1tn a year in climate finance.

First off are reforms to the World Bank that would help free up hundreds of billions more in cash, and make loans cheaper and easier to access for the poorest and most vulnerable countries. Mottley says these moves are already under way, and have been successful so far.

She also wants new sources of revenue, called “global solidarity levies” – ways of raising money, particularly from polluting activities, that can go towards climate finance. These include a compulsory levy on business and first class flights, with a voluntary charge on economy flights that passengers could choose to pay (“because the agency of individuals matters”); a charge on international shipping; a charge on fossil fuel extraction that could reap $210bn a year; and a 0.1% levy on financial transactions that would raise $480bn a year.

“The reality is that global public goods need dedicated sources of global financing. And if we were to extend the polluter-pays principle, then those who contribute to the problem should help carry some of the burden. And those who make profit egregiously should also leave a little something on the table,” she said. “This is the one issue for sure that binds us all, because without a planet there will be no life that we can sustain.”

Mottley also favours a wealth tax on billionaires, which has been proposed by Brazil. “When you took the [Covid] vaccine injection, you didn’t even feel it. The super wealthy, if asked to leave a little something on the table, will not feel it.”

It is beyond the scope of Cop29, or the UN, to impose such levies, and they do not form part of the formal discussions in Azerbaijan. However, a special taskforce including Barbados, France, Spain, Kenya and others – but not, so far, the UK – is working to bring the proposals to reality.

One vitally important action that she hopes Cop29 will take is to focus on methane. Emissions of this gas – which comes from fossil fuel exploration, agriculture and waste, and is many times more powerful than CO₂ in heating the planet – have been rising, but efforts to control them have so far had little impact.

“There needs to be a global methane agreement,” she said. Scientists have said that controlling methane could prevent 0.5C of heating in the short term. “It seems like it’s a no-brainer,” Mottley said.

A German energy firm has said that Donald Trump’s election victory has increased the risks of investing in offshore wind projects – but his return to the White House could help bolster Britain’s renewables sector, according to UK developer SSE.

Germany’s RWE has cut its spending plans and warned that, as a result of the US election, “the risks for offshore wind projects have increased”.

The company, which is behind a string of wind and solar projects, on Wednesday shaved €3bn from its spending plans for the next financial year to €7bn, down from €10bn in 2024. It will also delay its plans to invest €55bn in renewables before 2030.

Trump’s re-election last week sent a chill through the renewables sector, as investors dumped green energy stocks.

He has vowed to clamp down on Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which stands to inject about $433bn in grants, loans and tax incentives to healthcare, utilities and clean energy companies.

Separately, Alistair Phillips-Davies, the chief executive of Britain’s SSE, said a clean energy slowdown in the US could be “a real positive” for the UK even after Trump’s victory wiped billions from the market value of Europe’s largest renewable energy developers.

But Phillips-Davies told the Guardian that, while doubts surround the future of the US industry, the UK could seize the chance to secure a greater share of global supply chains and manufacturing opportunities.

“It’s not good news for US renewables but it could be helpful because it means the US will not be sucking up the global supply chain,” Phillips-Davies said.

Renewable developers have been forced to compete for supplies of products used for green projects in recent years as demand for new windfarms has taken off, raising concerns over project delays.

Siemens Energy, one of the world’s largest wind turbine makers, on Wednesday reported a net income of €1.3bn for its last financial year as it begins to emerge from a crisis in its wind turbine division which led to a historic loss of €4.6bn.

Phillips-Davies added that the UK could now get “ahead of the game” to secure its supply of materials and components and establish its own manufacturing capabilities. This would help the UK to deliver domestic projects at lower cost and increase exports to the rest of the world, he said.

It could prove to be “a real positive in terms of an industrial strategy story”, he added.

SSE, which is building the world’s biggest offshore windfarm in North Sea, was not directly affected by the sell-off in renewable shares as its focus is on the UK and Europe. It is planning to expand its portfolio into continental Europe.

Phillips-Davies used the company’s half-year financial results to announce his retirement as chief executive next year after 11 years in the role. SSE’s pre-tax profits climbed by 26.4% from last year’s half-year results to £714.5m, he said.

Michael Müller, the chief financial officer of RWE, which has multi-billion euro plans to develop windfarms in the US, said that its investment plans for the rest of the decade would “slip back” following the election result, and due to delays to Europe’s green hydrogen plans. “But we will have to wait and see how things develop in the future,” he added.

RWE reported earnings of €4bn in the first nine months of the year, down from €5.7bn in the same period in 2023 despite its growing renewable energy generation.

Its share price tumbled by more than 4% after the US election result, but its decision to take a more cautious approach to investment combined with a €1.5bn share buyback programme, helped its share price to climb back above pre-election levels on Wednesday.

Tancrede Fulop, senior equity analyst at Morningstar, said: “The buy-back addresses investor demands from the substantial profits during the 2022-23 energy crisis, and management’s decision is supported by potential delays in US offshore wind projects and challenges in Europe’s hydrogen sector.”

• Location Burkina Faso

• Disaster Heatwave, 2024

Mariama, not her real name, is a Burkinabé musician who lives in Ouagadougou. During the heatwaves earlier this year she went into early labour, and lost her baby.

It was my first pregnancy. I had been trying to have a child since I was 26. Ten years now. Some doctors had told me it would be impossible to have children because of an operation on my fallopian tubes in 2018. In fact, I had stopped trying. But, voilà! The first month I thought I had my period, but it wasn’t, and by the second month, my pants didn’t fit anymore. So I went to the pharmacy to take a test. I couldn’t believe it – I was pregnant! I also went to the hospital to confirm it. I was two months along.

At that moment, I stopped everything and started taking care of myself. Everything was going well. My mother always said she wanted seven grandchildren, but since she said I was already too old, we agreed on just four! I followed all the gynaecological and medical visits at the Yalgado hospital. Up until six months, everything was fine. I had no problems, I could sleep, and I wasn’t in pain.

Then the heat came. At night, I’d wake up to get some air because I was so hot. I’d also take showers during the night. I’d wake up two or three times each night. When I woke up, I was exhausted, as if I hadn’t slept at all. Since it was my first pregnancy, I wasn’t sure if this was normal or not, so I assumed it was, even though I couldn’t sleep well due to the heat.

You feel suffocated at night, you can’t breathe well because on top of the heat, this year there was so much humidity. I even thought I had breathing problems, but doctors told me no, it was just the heat.

I was scared, because the doctors told me to stay in a cool place, but they didn’t understand my reality. What if there were power cuts? I had to wet a towel and lay it on my bed to lie down, and when it got warm, I’d go wet it again. So, I wasn’t sleeping well. I thought maybe the heat was because of the pregnancy, but the heat was real; it wasn’t just because I was pregnant.

During the day, it was infernal. My daily activities had to be done from 8-9am at the latest, or at night when the sun was down. But in the sun, it was unbearable– heavy, humid, and with my sinus issues, I couldn’t breathe. When it was heavy and dusty, I preferred to stay home.

It hurt a lot. My chest was swollen, and my back hurt. The heat made my back pain even worse, so it wasn’t good for me. I was always looking for a cool spot. I’d take showers, but it was so hot that when you came out, you felt even hotter because your fan was blowing hot air. The best thing was to aim the fan towards a corner to cool the air a bit. But it really wasn’t good; I felt nauseous, dizzy … mainly dizzy from the heat. That’s what was happening to me.

We’re in the Sahel, so we’re used to heat, but this year, people weren’t used to it anymore. I’ve never seen so many people sleeping outside or sitting by their doors. Before, there were power cuts, but never like this. It used to happen during the day; now it’s at night, too. In your neighbourhood, you feel safe because so many people are outside. Everyone’s out, everyone’s hot, nobody wants to go inside. They wait for the power to come back or to get so exhausted that they would finally go to sleep. Otherwise, it was impossible. Really.

About six months along, when I was at the market one day, I felt dizzy; I was so hot. I was walking, and at some point, I stopped because I felt a liquid running down my leg, and I thought, “Something’s wrong.” The next couple of days were a blur of pain and worry. I saw one doctor who told me that it wasn’t serious, and we’d see what was going on. I waited five hours to see him. He told me to get ultrasounds done. I had the first one, then a second, and they told me things were OK, that I had lost a little fluid, but there were natural ways to recover it.

I was sent to another hospital where they told me not to go home, that someone needed to see me. So I stayed there waiting in the car, lying down in the back. You can’t open the windows because of mosquitoes, so you have to sleep with the air conditioning, which uses up your fuel.

Finally, the next morning, they told me to go to another hospital. By the time I got there and someone saw me, the pain was so bad. They got me to lie down in a room. The pain was so bad that the doctor came, took my temperature, then brought a syringe with something in it. I asked, “What’s this for?” After the injection, I said, “I’m in even more pain, it’s contracting.” They didn’t say anything. Forty minutes later, the doctor came back and asked if I was still having contractions. I said yes, that it hurt. He explained that the drug they gave me was to help deliver the baby. I asked if my baby would survive and he said no.

In those two days of being passed around, nobody could explain to me what was going on. When they induced labour, I didn’t even know who I was. I had the impression that nobody saw me. I couldn’t even ask questions; my mouth wouldn’t react. They had just induced labour without me realising it … I didn’t know what to think. I felt defeated. I asked myself, ‘What did I do? Why is nobody looking at me?’ I thought, ‘Why didn’t anyone tell me I was going to lose my baby?’ And there they were, sitting there, doing nothing. No explanation, no details, nothing.

It was like a slap in the face, a shock. I felt defeated. You go to the hospital to die. The heat, the power cuts, there’s no equipment. The heat – nobody even wants to talk about it. It’s the first thing everyone will tell you. It was extremely hot. And then, there are the specialists. When you go into their office, it’s so cold you start shaking, and when you step back into the hallway, you feel like fainting.

In the room where I had to push and push, there were no mosquito nets. We were six or seven in one room. Here, you learn not to be ashamed. You scream, you push, you scream, you push, you scream, you push. My husband was outside, panicking as he heard my screams without knowing what was happening. It’s a plastic mattress. Either you bring your own sheet, or you give birth where so many women have already done so. When someone has to push, they send out the women’s companions, but we women face each other; the ones in front of you see everything.

There was no air conditioning, and the fans are on either side of the room. The first person who arrives takes the bed under the fan, and others take the second fan. All the others, we get nothing. There are six beds here and six across. It’s packed, and you’re pressed up against other women. It’s so hot. It was unbearable there because of the heat. Everyone was looking for air. When I was screaming, it was my mother who fanned me. But I didn’t even want anyone to touch me anymore. When anyone touched me, I’d scream. I didn’t want anything. It’s true that it’s over now, but I can’t go three nights without thinking about it. It still lingers within me.

It was after six hours of contractions that the baby came out. The nurse asked if I wanted to throw it in the trash or bury it, I swear you. I took the baby home, wrapped in the cloth I had bought for its birth, and we buried it at the father’s house.

How did you start living again? No one pushed me. Afterward, I heard other similar stories. Here, they often link pregnancy problems to something the woman has done or eaten, but I know that it was the effect of the heat and the stress, with 40 to 41 degrees (celsius) of heat, going back and forth between hospitals. This year, the heat was something very unusual. I didn’t know if it was climate change or what, but we experienced a strange kind of heat. Throughout the entire ordeal, I was asking God to help me. Only Him. I felt like I was going crazy. I felt better talking to a deity than to a human being. Most people tend to judge before understanding what’s happening.

A few weeks afterwards, we planted a guava tree. It was important to have a place to go, to gather oneself and be at peace. I threw myself completely into my activities; I looked for work. Working is a way to release it. But every time I watch a movie and see a woman who just gave birth, that feeling returns, and I feel awful: “Imagine, I could have too.”

You can’t say it was a fluke. If in 2016, Donald Trump’s novelty, combined with his loss of the popular vote, allowed liberals to retain a bit of plausible deniability about what his presidential win meant about America, this time, there is no such comfort. Donald Trump is no longer a mystery or an amusing diversion: no one can claim that they do not understand full extent of his malignant corruption, or the seriousness of his movement’s hostility to pluralist democracy. And he won the popular vote.

Many postmortems of last week’s election have tried to preserve the notion that Trump’s voter’s did not endorse him and his vision – that they know not what they do. This is dishonest, and a bit patronizing toward Trump’s supporters. Trump’s voters, for the most part, know exactly what he is, and what voting for him means. They are not ignorant or mistaken about him. They endorse him and what he is.

A large part of what a majority of Americans voted for last week was the Trump campaign’s virulent misogyny. Trump himself, an adjudicated rapist who has bragged about both committing sexual assault and engineering the reversal of Roe v Wade, speaks of women in vulgar, degrading terms. He picked a running mate who has denigrated childless women as “psychotic” “cat ladies”. His adviser and funder Elon Musk, who seems to have designs on becoming something of a shadow president in Trump’s second term, is a techno-fascist pro-natalist who goes around offering women insemination.

The Trump campaign positioned itself as a champion of a hierarchical gender order, aiming to restore men to a place of wrongfully deprived supremacy over women. Many of his voters cast their lot in with Trump hoping that he would do just that.

Now, in the wake of Trump’s victory, some of his supporters have adopted a slogan which neatly joins the movement’s twin projects of forced sex and forced pregnancy: “Your body, my choice.”

“Your body, my choice,” was coined by the far-right, pro-Nazi internet troll and Trump dinner guest Nick Fuentes on the night of the election. “Your body, my choice,” Fuentes tweeted. “Forever.” It’s a taunting inversion of the pro-choice slogan “my body, my choice”, meant to assert women’s autonomy: instead, “your body, my choice” presents women’s full citizenship and freedom as laughable, asserting, in gleeful terms, the male supremacy that will now carry for the force of policy and law under a new Trump administration.

In response to Fuentes’s post, pro-Trump men have adopted the slogan en masse to troll women online. An analysis from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue found that the use of the phrase soared on social media in the days following the election, along with similar misogynist phrases like “get back in the kitchen”, and the use of sexist slurs directed at liberal and progressive women like Kamala Harris and Rachel Maddow. Female TikTok users reported a flood of such comments, with “your body, my choice” chief among them on the platform. And young girls in schools, along with their teachers and parents, reported incidents of the phrase being yelled out by boys in taunting jeers of harassment and intimidation in the days following the election.

“Your body, my choice” is a rejection of women’s rights to control their own bodies in more ways than one. In addition to the phrase’s sneering inversion of a pro-choice phrase, rejecting the abortion right and claiming the overturn of Roe as a victory for men, the phrase has a second, dual meaning: as a rape threat. The men and boys who use it are not merely taunting women with the threat of an unwanted, forced pregnancy. They are taunting them with the threat of forced sex.

It is not always a connection that the misogynist right has made so explicit. In other eras, the anti-choice movement has adopted an overtly religious attitude of sexual repression, aiming to restrict abortion as a means of restricting sexuality across the board. But this preacherly, sexually repressed masculinity is not the masculinity of today’s misogynist rightwing movement. Rather, the Maga right is one that sees sex not as something that must be rendered shameful and pushed out of the public sphere, but as a weapon that can be used to punish, humiliate and dominate women.

This new, avowedly and vulgarly sexual rightwing masculinity is what Fuentes was crystalizing in his snide little coinage of “your body, my choice”: it is one that aims to use physical and sexual force to coerce women into a degraded gendered role, one subject to men’s domination and only partial, limited and conditional in its citizenship and access to the public sphere. In this sense, their projects in joyfully celebrating rape and restricting women’s access to abortion are two sides of the same coin: the right seeks to dominate women and to commandeer the inside of their bodies so as to force them into a gendered role against their will, be that role as sex object or as mother.

This is why it is fitting that Trump, who was found liable for the rape of one woman and accused of sexual assault by two dozen others, was the president to secure the overturning of Roe v Wade; it is why it is fitting that two of the justices who voted to overturn Roe, Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh, have been credibly accused of sexual misconduct, each by more than one woman. It is because the sex politics of the right is not an anti-sex, puritanical politics. It is a politics of sexual domination.

There is no use pretending that this is not what the Trump movement is. And there is no use in pretending that this is not what many of the men who voted for Trump hoped to achieve when they supported him. Much of the pre-election coverage of the gender dynamics of Trump’s campaign has disappeared in the days following the election, and perhaps this unpleasant reality is why: most Americans voted for a man they have every reason to believe is a rapist. For some of them, at least, that was not a liability, but an asset.

I am resisting the temptation to write a lamentation of anger and sorrow about Trump’s second victory. What is more useful is to think about what Europe can do to protect its environment, its people and its economy in a world where the Trump administration may act, in many ways, to undermine and even destroy it.

The EU’s first bold move to lead by example in the new Trump era should be to seize 200bn euros’ worth of frozen Russian central bank assets and transfer them to Ukraine as a form of pre-emptive reparations. The European Parliamentary Research Service and outside experts have proposed ways in which it could be done in full accordance with international law. But this alone won’t obviate the need for the EU to borrow more to boost its common defence and green infrastructure spending, even though it will increase its debt.

Part of the money raised should be earmarked for the European Space Agency to develop a crewed vehicle that can guarantee European astronauts independent access to orbit and beyond without having to turn to Elon Musk and SpaceX (or other US-based companies). Other spending might be used to boost research in ways that help Europe’s economy rebound and stay competitive.

But the real step the EU can take towards protecting its economy (and with it, its citizens’ wellbeing, optimism and faith in democracy) involves things that are less sexy than building a spaceship, such as finishing the capital markets union that could enable more European tech start-ups to borrow money. The EU has spent the better part of a decade wringing its hands over the absence of European substantial tech companies compared with the US and China. A big reason for this is that it’s simply easier to raise funds in the US because private and public pension funds allocate a greater part of their investments towards venture capital than European pension funds do.

As the former Italian prime minister Enrico Letta said on French radio recently, each year European savers send about €300bn to US stock markets, primarily because that’s where their banks focus their activities. This money helps boosts the valuation of US companies, which can result in them being able to finance buying out European firms.

Europe already exports tech-startup founders to the US rather than keeping them at home – which, according to a US-based French investor – has resulted in French tech in the US being worth far more than French tech in France. For instance, Snowcloud and Datadog, both founded by French entrepreneurs in the US, are many times more valuable than France’s largest unicorns or biggest recent stock market flotation. A situation where the continent is exporting founders, their startups, and the capital that is funding them makes absolutely no sense.

This matters because, as Stanford academic and author Mariejte Schaake argues in the FT, we need European tech to embody democratic values. On that front, the EU should feel vindicated that its attempt to regulate disinformation on social media is the correct strategy. Democracy is untenable when voters are subjected to algorithms weaponised to constrict their worldview and flood them with disinformation. In Musk’s hands, X is an extraordinarily dangerous tool for election engineering. Europe was already on the verge of fining X 6% of its global revenue (and potentially including Tesla and SpaceX in its calculation). Musk, who spent at least $130m to help elect Trump, is already seeing the return on his investment, with vice president-elect JD Vance suggesting the US might withdraw from Nato if the EU takes action against him. Whether through enforcement, some new type of regulatory agency or a future ban on X, this is not a fight the EU can back away from because the existence of European democracy itself is at stake.

The EU can also do something unexpected. Trump has made no secret of his desire for vengeance and retribution against his enemies: tens of thousands of civil servants ; universities, professors and students. He has fantasised and encouraged violence against journalists, protesters, judges, immigrants and political opponents, and has promised to set the justice department and even the military on them. It bears repeating: a second Trump administration will not have the guardrails of the first, where Mike Milley and Mike Esper ignored orders to “just shoot” antiracism protesters.

American dissidents abroad might one day be targeted as well. The EU should announce a principle of non-compliance with any US attempt to extradite or harass US citizens being targeted for political reasons or for civil disobedience – such as engaging in tax resistance against a Trump administration, as some Americans did in small numbers during his first time in office and which has its roots in opposition to the Vietnam war.

Finally, Europe has an opportunity to invert the transatlantic brain drain. This time really is different and Americans know it: searches for “move to Europe,” or for individual European countries are on a totally different scale than ever before. There is a unique chance for Europe to roll out a red carpet of special visas and ease the path for highly educated Americans who want to flee Trumpmerica (like climate scientists sure to have their funding slashed). Or perhaps to partner with US universities that might eventually seek to establish satellite campuses for students and staff who can no longer be located in the US.

Underlying all Europe’s failures to solve its collective action problems is the same phenomenon – sometimes it thinks and acts like a continent but too often actually behaves like a group of small, fragmented nations. In 2003, the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas proposed that Europe might surpass this tendency by constructing European identity in opposition to the US. Two decades later, he may inadvertently get his wish.

Record numbers of business representatives and lobbyists had access to the UN’s latest biodiversity talks, analysis shows.

In total 1,261 business and industry delegates registered for Cop16 in Cali, Colombia, which ended in disarray and without significant progress on a number of key issues including nature funding, monitoring biodiversity loss and work on reducing environmentally harmful business subsidies.

The number is more than double the 613 present at the UN’s previous biodiversity conference in 2022.

Overall, the number of attendees increased by 46%, making Cop16 the largest UN nature conference yet, although business and industry increased disproportionately. Industry groups working in pharmaceuticals, oil and gas, agrochemicals, food and beverage processing and tech all had more people registered to attend, according to the analysis by DeSmog.

Some question the influence that these companies might have had on the outcomes of the summit negotiations.

Sectors with the greatest increases included food and beverage processing (up 460%) and tech (up 333%). The presence of agrochemical, pesticide and seed companies increased by 40% and 24% respectively since Cop15. “We certainly saw a stronger lobbying push for policies that favour agricultural productivity, and that clashed with the conservation goals and the position of civil society,” said Oscar Soria, director of the Common Initiative thinktank.

There was also a 25% increase in biotech representatives, who Soria said were “aggressive in pushing back on progress related to digital sequencing information (DSI)”. This was the voluntary agreement to make companies share profits from commercial discoveries derived from nature’s genetics. “Seems all of a sudden the private and business sector woke up and now they’re trying to defend their interests,” he said.

Agrochemical and biotech industry trade group CropLife International sent 17 representatives. There were 10 representatives from Nestlé, and nine from ExxonMobil. This is more than some country delegations, including Belize which had seven delegates, Jamaica with six and the Bahamas with two.

Some groups appeared to have close state-industry relations, with more than a dozen business representatives registered with country delegations, rather than separate business delegations. These included CropLife, which had three members as part of Canada and Brazil’s country delegations. Three representatives from chemical manufacturing company Basf were registered with Mexico and Brazil, while one industry representative from crop company Syngenta entered with Switzerland. Eight representatives of Biotechnology Industry Association of Brazil, a biotech industry lobby group, attended with Brazil’s government delegation.

Country parties determine their own delegations and who is going to represent them, and it is not controlled by the UN, which holds the convention on biological diversity (CBD).

The number of sector-specific business and industry attendees are likely to be underestimates: DeSmog’s analysis counted a delegate as an industry representative if they were part of a top 10-20 market share company in a sector that used nature as a resource, or if they were brought in by a delegation representing the interests of these companies.

Rob Cooke, who is a member of the British Ecological Society and attended Cop16 as part of a team from the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, said he felt torn about the size of industry presence. “On the one hand, I optimistically see it as sign that nature is being taken seriously in terms of business and finance. We need these actors to be involved in discussions if we are to mainstream biodiversity across all sectors, and we need more money for biodiversity,” he said.

“On the other hand, the pessimist in me worries that industry representatives may use their influence to water down regulations or delay the necessary actions to halt biodiversity loss. Could their presence have contributed to the stalling and breakdown of implementation negotiations? It’s hard to tell, as these conversations likely happened behind closed doors.”

The UN says it is important to bring private interests to the negotiating table. “This is the greatest representation of business at a CBD Cop,” said David Ainsworth, head of communications for the UN’s CBD. “The increased presence of any groups to our meeting demonstrates the growing awareness of the importance of the biodiversity agenda. For business, it seems to me that it reflects the recognition that this area is becoming of interest for business.”