Democrats across the country were left in disbelief and searching for answers as they confronted the reality of another Donald Trump presidency.

Trump’s victory was announced early on Wednesday morning, marking a significant political comeback that has sent shockwaves around the world.

As Kamala Harris’s chances of winning dwindled, the vice-president decided not to address her supporters gathered at Howard University in Washington DC on Tuesday night, instead scheduling an address for 4pm ET on Wednesday.

In the meantime, Democratic operatives and strategists and others filled the void, expressing their disappointment and already beginning to pick apart what went wrong for Harris and the Democratic party.

The Democratic pollster Paul Maslin argued that Harris did as well as she could have, given the environment and circumstance. Harris “did a really good job”, Maslin told Politico, but ultimately “this race was unwinnable”.

“Trump, rightly or wrongly, his persona and his fundamental attack line against the condition of the country, the Biden-Harris administration and frankly the Democratic party, was in the end unbeatable,” he said.

CNN’s national political correspondent Alex Thompson noted that a former adviser to Joe Biden criticized the Harris campaign, asking: “How do you spend $1bn and not win?”

Others, Thompson said, have suggested that Biden should have exited the race sooner.

He said one longtime Democratic operative told him the party “sleepwalked into disaster” on Tuesday night, adding that “swapping the pitcher in at the sixth inning wasn’t enough, and that Kamala Harris did as good of a job as she could have done”.

Mark Longabaugh, a veteran Democratic strategist who previously advised Senator Bernie Sanders, also said Harris was handed the reins “too late”, adding that it was a “tough environment” according to Politico.

The moderator of NBC’s Meet the Press, Kristen Welker, also mentioned the potential impact of the timing of Biden’s decision to step down after the presidential debate and not before.

“There was so much discussion, even over the summer, about potentially having an open primary and having that fight play out within the Democratic party,” Welker said. “So I think it’s one of the big questions moving forward.”

Others, such as Lindy Li, a senior Democratic official in Pennsylvania, are questioning whether the outcome would have been different if Harris had chosen a different vice-presidential candidate, such as the governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro.

Li argued to Fox News that the moderate Shapiro would have conveyed to American voters that Harris is not the “San Francisco liberal” Trump portrayed her to be. “But she went with someone actually to her left,” Li said, referring to the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, whom Harris chose as her vice-presidential pick.

Li also criticized the Harris campaign for not distinguishing Harris enough from Biden, a point that has been echoed by other operatives and commentators in the last few weeks.

Some pointed to Harris’s appearance on the talkshow The View, when she was asked if there was anything she would have done differently than Biden and responded: “There is not a thing that comes to mind.”

Those comments were quickly seized upon by the Trump campaign and Republicans, who used it as an opportunity to try to tie Harris to Biden’s unpopularity and blame her for the administration’s challenges related to immigration, inflation and more.

On MSNBC on Tuesday night, the commentator Joy Reid expressed disappointment at white women in North Carolina for not coming out to vote for Harris and contributing to the Democrat’s loss in the swing state.

“In the end, they didn’t make their numbers, we have to be blunt about why,” Reid said. “Black voters came through for Harris, white women voters did not. That is what appears happened.”

In the run-up to election day, Van Jones, a CNN contributor and former Barack Obama adviser, had criticized the celebrity appearances at the Harris campaign’s rallies, arguing that they were not the best use of supporters’ time.

“I don’t think people understand, working people sometimes have to choose: am I going to go to the big, cool concert and pay for babysitting for that, or am I going to figure out a way to get to the polls?” Jones said. “I don’t like these big star-studded events.

“I don’t want people going to concerts. I want people out there knocking on doors, I want people out there fighting for this thing,” he added. “I’m just nervous, nervous, nervous.”

David Sirota, who was a senior adviser for Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign, described Tuesday night as a “very bad night”.

“Some of us spent years warning Dems to take working-class politics more seriously & to not tout neocons,” he said. “We did so in hopes of avoiding this & yet we were vilified as traitors by Dem elites & liberal pundits.

“There’s a lesson here.”

Another former Sanders staffer, Jeff Weaver, told Politico that the Democratic party now needed to “re-establish its relationship with the working-class people”.

As of Wednesday morning most Democratic lawmakers remained silent about the election outcome, perhaps waiting until Harris addresses the nation, which she is expected to do on Wednesday afternoon.

Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

Ursula von der Leyen’s decision to miss the Cop29 climate summit is “a fatal signal” and raises questions about Europe’s commitment to the climate crisis, observers have said.

The European Commission confirmed on Tuesday that its president would not attend the UN climate talks in Baku, which start on Monday. “The commission is in a transition phase and the president will therefore focus on her institutional duties,” a spokesperson said.

Also skipping the “world leaders’ climate action summit” on Tuesday and Wednesday are France’s Emmanuel Macron and the outgoing US president, Joe Biden. The Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, cancelled his participation due to a head injury, Reuters reported. The leaders of China, South Africa, Japan and Australia are expected to miss the talks as well.

Mohammed Chahim, a Dutch socialist and the vice-chair of the European parliament’s delegation to the Baku talks, described von der Leyen’s absence as “regrettable”, but said it did not imply a lack of EU commitment.

He said: “The climate crisis does not wait for ideal conditions to act, and neither can we. After the re-election of [Donald] Trump, the EU must now take a stronger leadership role, both to sustain momentum and to counterbalance the US stance.”

Michael Bloss, a German Green MEP, also in the delegation, said it was “a fatal signal” that Europe’s most powerful woman, along with other leaders, had chosen not to attend.

Referring to Azerbaijan’s strongman president, Ilham Aliyev, Bloss said: “By leaving the stage to autocrats like Aliyev, we risk turning the conference more and more into a greenwashing spectacle for self-promotion rather than genuine climate action.”

Von der Leyen is preparing for her second term in office, expected to begin on 1 December after European parliament hearings with her top team conclude.

The commission will be represented at Cop29 by its climate commissioner, Wopke Hoekstra, and the energy commissioner, Kadri Simson, and a team of negotiators.

WWF said von der Leyen’s non-attendance was disappointing. Shirley Matheson, a climate specialist at the charity, said her absence, along with other world leaders, raised “serious questions” about European and international commitment to fighting the climate crisis. “We cannot afford for climate action to move down on Europe’s agenda,” she added.

Von der Leyen has attended every high-level Cop meeting since she became commission president in 2019. In her successful pitch for re-election by MEPs, she highlighted the importance of Europe’s role in international climate talks: “I want Europe to remain a leader in international climate negotiations.”

The head of the UN environment programme said last month that “huge cuts” in carbon emissions were needed to steer the world off a path of catastrophic temperature rise, in a report urging countries to act at the climate summit in Baku.

Sven Harmeling, head of climate at the Climate Action Network Europe, said he did not see von der Leyen’s non-attendance as “not showing interest”, but added it was important she ensured the EU “is able to speak up and convey its ambition for climate leadership”.

“Stronger EU participation is always important to signal leadership, but for me it really comes down to how they use diplomatic channels,” he said, highlighting the bloc’s role at the G20 summit in Brazil on 18-19 November, where leaders of the world’s largest economies will discuss financing the climate transition.

On Wednesday, the commission said: “Our leadership is demonstrated by our consistent actions domestically and internationally. We are always a leading voice for ambition at Cops and that will not change this year.”

Celebrities have shared their disappointment and anger over Donald Trump’s re-election as president.

The Republican’s Tuesday victory over opponent Kamala Harris sent shock waves throughout Hollywood after the Democratic candidate ran a campaign filled with A-list names including Beyoncé, Jennifer Lopez, Bruce Springsteen and Julia Roberts.

The Don’t Look Up director Adam McKay expressed frustration with how the past year has been handled by the Democratic party. “Who would have guessed lying about Biden’s cognitive health for 2 yrs, refusing to do an open convention for a new nominee, never mentioning public healthcare & embracing fracking, the Cheneys & a yr long slaughter of children in Gaza wouldn’t be a winning strategy?” he wrote. He later added: “It is time to abandon the Dem Party.”

Rapper Cardi B, who had appeared at a rally for Harris, shared an Instagram video of herself watching the results with the caption: “I hate y’all bad.” When asked if she would appear at Trump’s inauguration during an Instagram live, she said: “I’m sick of you! Burn your fucking hats, motherfucker. I’m really sad. I swear to God I’m really sad.”

In a lengthy Instagram post, Oscar winner Jamie Lee Curtis wrote that it would be “a return to a more restrictive, some fear draconian time” and that minority groups will now be more afraid. “But what it really means is that we wake up and fight,” she wrote. “Fight for women and our children and their futures and fight against tyranny, one day at a time. One fight at a time. One protest at a time. That’s what it means to be an American.”

Actor John Cusack, who has long been politically outspoken online, wrote: “The fact that the country would choose to destroy itself by voting in a convicted felon rapist and Nazi is a sign of deep nihilism. To put it mildly.”

Christina Applegate, star of Dead to Me and Married … with Children, conveyed her upset over the effect the result will have on women. “My child is sobbing because her rights as a woman may be taken away,” she wrote. “Why? And if you disagree, please unfollow me.”

The Wire actor Wendell Pierce congratulated Harris for running “a great campaign” and warned of what will now happen under Trump. “Elections have consequences,” he wrote. “The Supreme Court will be changed for a generation. I’ll never see a moderate court again in my lifetime.” He also criticised Trump’s “racism, misogyny, xenophobia”.

Author Stephen King shared the following: “There’s a sign you can see in many shops that sell beautiful but fragile items: LOVELY TO LOOK AT, DELIGHTFUL TO HOLD, BUT ONCE YOU BREAK IT, THEN IT’S SOLD. You can say the same about democracy.”

Duncan Jones, director of Moon and son of David Bowie, posted that he was feeling “very Brexity” while expressing pessimism over the millions who voted for Trump. “I think we may have overestimated the goodness in people,” he wrote.

Singer Ethel Cain called the situation “bleak” and had a strongly worded message for Trump voters. “If you voted for Trump, I hope that peace never finds you,” she wrote. “Instead, I hope clarity strikes you someday like a clap of lightning and you have to live the rest of your life with the knowledge and guilt of what you’ve done and who you are as a person.”

The British author Philip Pullman simply wrote: “Goodbye, America. It was nice knowing you.”

Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

We’ve just witnessed an extraordinary, devastating moment in the history of the United States. In 2016, we promised that our coverage of a Donald Trump administration would meet the moment – and I think it did. Throughout those tumultuous four years we never minimised or normalised the threat of Trump’s authoritarianism, and we treated his lies as a genuine danger to democracy, a threat that found its expression on 6 January 2021.

Now, with Trump months away from taking office again – with dramatic implications for wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, the health of American democracy, reproductive rights, inequality and, perhaps most of all, our collective environmental future – it’s time for us to redouble our efforts to hold the president-elect and those who surround him to account.

It’s going to be an enormous challenge. And we need your help.

Last week, Guardian US media columnist Margaret Sullivan spelled out in black and white the threat to a free press from another Trump presidency.

“Trump,” she wrote, “poses a clear threat to journalists, to news organisations and to press freedom in the US and around the world.” He has, for years, stirred up hatred against reporters, calling them an “enemy of the people” and referred to legitimate journalism as “fake news”.

Kash Patel, a potential Trump pick for FBI director or attorney general, has said, “We’re going to come after people in the media” and Project 2025, the blueprint for a second Trump presidency, includes plans to make it easier to seize journalists’ emails and phone records.

We will stand up to these threats, but it will take brave, well-funded independent journalism. It will take reporting that can’t be leaned upon by a billionaire owner terrified of retribution from a bully in the White House.

If you can afford to help us in this mission, please consider standing up for a free press and supporting the Guardian today from just £1 or $1.

The work starts now.

South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham has sent an ominous message to special counsel Jack Smith as Donald Trump was on the precipice of being announced as the winner of the 2024 election.

Early on Wednesday morning, mere moments before Trump took the stage in West Palm Beach, Florida, to give his victory speech, Graham posted a note on X “to Jack Smith and your team”.

“It is time to look forward to a new chapter in your legal careers as these politically motivated charges against President Trump hit a wall,” Graham wrote.

“The supreme court substantially rejected what you were trying to do, and after tonight, it’s clear the American people are tired of lawfare. Bring these cases to an end. The American people deserve a refund.”

The US attorney general Merrick Garland appointed Smith in November 2022 to determine whether Trump should face criminal charges stemming from investigations into the former’s president’s alleged mishandling of national security materials and his role in the 6 January attack on the US Capitol.

Smith charged Trump last year in Florida over his retention of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago club, and in Washington over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

With the election mere months away, Trump’s legal team tried to stall the proceedings as much as possible.

Their case was aided in July, when the supreme court conferred broad immunity on former presidents and narrowed the scope of the prosecution.

Smith and his team detailed their case against Trump in a 165-page filing that was unsealed in October, in which they argued that Trump should not be entitled to immunity from prosecution. In the filing, federal prosecutors said that Trump “resorted to crimes” in a failed bid to cling to power after losing the 2020 election and that he is not entitled to immunity from prosecution.

The charges filed by Smith and his team were not the only one vexing Trump since leaving office in 2021. When he takes office in January, Trump will be the first convicted criminal to win the White House and gain access to the nuclear codes.

In May, Trump was found guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records relating to a hush-money payment to the adult film performer Stormy Daniels. Sentencing was originally scheduled on 18 September, but delayed to 26 November after a request from Trump for it to be postponed until after the election. It’s unclear if the date will stand.

Since the unsealing of Smith’s case in October, Trump has spoken publicly about how he would immediately fire Smith if he were re-elected.

In a conversation with the conservative podcast host Hugh Hewitt, who asked whether Trump would pardon himself or fire the special counsel, Trump said: “Oh, it’s so easy. It’s so easy … I would fire him within two seconds.”

Releases of European beavers, Castor fiber, both controlled and unofficial, mean that this aquatic mammal is now again a part of the British landscape, returning 400 years after being wiped out by human hunting. The public is generally enthusiastic and environmental campaigners say there are gains for many forms of river life as a result. The retention of water in the landscape leads to a reduction in flooding and can protect against droughts.

However, not everyone is so impressed – particularly landowners and foresters, who complain of damage to carefully regulated watercourses and tree felling.

In Germany, where beavers made a comeback decades ago, scientists say biodiversity has been dramatically increased by beavers, but the same divide still exists. Only 25% of the general public found beavers annoying, but 75% of farming and forestry folk said beavers made them angry.

And in Britain, too, beavers are feeling this backlash from some of those that live closest to them and manage their river habitat. Government licences to remove them in England are being granted. Some animals are captured and relocated, while a smaller number are killed.

The German scientists believe that the best way to protect beavers is to educate the landowners and the foresters, so that they realise their gains from their activity are greater than the losses.

The UK is falling further behind on sewage pollution regulation as the EU tightens its rules to clean up Europe’s waterways, say critics.

EU member states agreed on Tuesday to update the urban waste water treatment directive to strengthen rules to clean up sewage and chemical pollution from treatment plants. European countries will have to update their sewage systems and treatment plants so that large amounts of human waste and chemicals are removed from rivers by a deadline of 2035. The companies deemed responsible will be required to pay for the infrastructure changes.

Meanwhile, the UK still has the old 1991 UWWT directive legislation, which was brought into EU law when the UK was still a member. UK water companies are charged with rules from this original directive, such as not allowing sewage to spill from storm overflows into rivers except under exceptional circumstances, for example extreme rainfall.

Earlier this year, the Guardian revealed that the UK is falling behind the EU on almost every area of environmental regulation, as the bloc strengthens its legislation while the UK weakens it. In some cases, ministers are removing EU-derived environmental protections from the statute book entirely.

Ben Reynolds, director of green thinktank IEEP UK, commented: “The recently adopted wastewater legislation in the EU increases and expands their standards to include things like a wider range of pollutants such as microplastics. Standards in the UK are no longer keeping track and are falling behind. With the dire state of river pollution in this country, in part due to sewage, the UK should be looking hard at all options to tackle this, and keeping track with these higher standards alongside smarter investment and more resources for enforcement should be on the table.”

UK companies have failed in many cases to update infrastructure to meet the 1991 directive, resulting in record sewage spills, in some cases happening when it is not raining at all. Meanwhile the EU is updating requirements. The new EU directive specifically targets phosphorus and nitrate pollution, which come from human and animal waste and contribute to an excess of nutrients in rivers, causing algae and plants to grow in large volume, and choking out the life in the waterway. This is removed by what is known as “tertiary treatment”, which is a more precise form of removing pollutants from water. In the 1991 directive, only water being discharged into “sensitive areas” such as nature reserves was required to go through tertiary treatment. The new EU rules require that all large wastewater treatment plants put their water through tertiary treatment.

Human health while swimming in open water is also addressed in the EU rules. Wastewater from certain treatment centres will have to go through a new and even stricter form of water treatment known as quarternary treatment, which removes micropollutants from water. These come from industrial chemicals, pharmaceuticals, cosmetic products, pesticides, and hormones. Assessments of threats to human health from these pollutants, including specifically to bathing waters, must be made. These rules are not being carried across to the UK.

There are fears the costs of implementing the new provisions will be significant in many EU member states.

“Britain wasn’t the only country struggling to reach the targets set even in the old rules,” said Tiemo Wölken, a German MEP from the centre-left Socialists and Democrats, who sits on the European parliament’s environment committee. “Especially in countries [that have] joined the EU more recently, you can still find many, sometimes a majority of plants, that are not in compliance.”

To ease the burden of ensuring cleaner waters, the new directive pushes most of the infrastructure costs on to industries such as cosmetics and pharmaceuticals, forcing manufacturers to pay for the removal of pollutants their plants spew into the water.

Wölken said: “It is problematic that this practical example of making polluters pay is not implemented in the UK, where the privatisation wave lies at the heart of the problem that exposed British citizens to raw sewage in their beautiful rivers and beaches.”

If EU states manage to implement the changes, sewer systems across Europe will become far more sophisticated than in the UK, leading to healthier waters that are more hospitable to people and wildlife.

Mark Owen, director of the European Anglers Alliance, said there was a lot of public and government awareness in the UK, with sewage and pollution having “made headlines daily for the last two years”, but that the new Labour government had not yet made concrete proposals.

“You must remember we’ve been screaming about this from the rooftops for decades,” he added.

Environmentalists have given the green tick to just one brand of canned tuna as industry heavyweights threaten dwindling fishing populations and other marine life.

For the first time, the Australian Marine Conservation Society has evaluated the nation’s most popular tuna brands and classed them as green, amber or red based on their sustainability credentials.

Safcol’s No Net Tuna is the only fully green-ranked product, with the society ranking it a “better choice” than others.

Most products received amber rankings due to their use of purse seine nets. A purse seine is a large weighted net used near the ocean surface to encircle and catch schools of fish like tuna, sardine and mackerel. Wires, like purse strings, trap the fish inside when pulled by closing the bottom of the net, but nets have been known to catch non-target species too.

Brands have largely stopped using fish aggregating devices (FADs), which are designed to cast a shadow in the water to attract fish with less effort.

The devices, which have a higher chance of entangling sharks and turtles, had been replaced by the purse seine devices, the society’s sustainable seafood program manager, Adrian Meder, said.

“While better than FAD, purse seine can impact endangered marine life such as manta rays,” he said.

“There are still major issues in the tuna industry.”

Safcol’s No Net Tuna only uses fish taken by pole and line methods, while others were given mixed green/red ratings for their sourcing.

Sirena and Aldi’s Ocean Rise tuna received mixed ratings because some of their tuna is sourced from healthy populations, but they also use yellowfin tuna from overfished stocks in the Indian Ocean.

Meder said a number of brands only listed the fishing zones on the cans, meaning little to the consumer.

Cans with FAD57 or FAD51 stamped on top come from the overfished yellowfin tuna populations.

The Check Your Tuna guide was based on scientific evidence from international regulations and monitoring organisations, independent from government, fishing industry or retailer sources, the society said.

The organisation’s imports lead, Kimberly Riskas, said labels on all seafood cans should include specific information about the species contained within, where it was caught and how.

“We were pleased to see that every canned tuna product we examined stated the species in the can, something conspicuously missing from a lot of the seafood sold in Australia,” she said.

“We have a right to know what we’re eating, but instead we’re being left in the dark.”

Riskas said more needed to be done to address issues with other seafood sold in Australia, but the tuna industry was making a good start.

The organisation’s 2025 Check Your Tuna criteria will incorporate an assessment of illegal fishing, including labour abuses on boats.