When a white whale, mysteriously kitted out with covert surveillance equipment, was first spotted in icy waters around Norway five years ago it seemed like an improbable chapter from a spy thriller. But working out the true identity and secret objectives of this beluga, nicknamed Hvaldimir by the Norwegians, quickly became a real-life puzzle that has continued to fascinate the public and trouble western intelligence analysts.

Now missing clues have surfaced that finally begin to make sense of the underwater enigma. The makers of a new BBC documentary, Secrets of the Spy Whale, believe they have traced the beluga’s probable path and identified its likely mission.

Hvaldimir, whose nickname is a combination of hval, Norwegian for whale, and the first name of Russian president Vladimir Putin, has regularly been described as a Russian “spy whale”. After all, the harness it wore bore the words “Equipment of St Petersburg” and seemed designed to carry a small camera. But the film uncovers new evidence that he might have been trained as a covert “guard whale”, rather than being sent out to sea to conduct maritime espionage.

“Our latest findings about the potential role that Hvaldimir had been trained to do bring us closer to solving the mystery,” said Jennifer Shaw, director of the film, which airs on BBC Two on Wednesday. “But they also prompt many further questions about what Russia might be seeking to guard in the Arctic, and why.”

After 10 months of research into the strange history of marine mammal training, the documentary team met one of the last remaining veterans of an early US Navy programme run from Point Mugu in California. Former dolphin trainer Blair Irvine, now in his 80s, explained how he had developed the programme. “Swimmers create bubbles, bubbles cause noise. The dolphin’s hearing is extremely sensitive and in this context it was unfailing,” he said.

Irvine and his team trained dolphins to swim like sentries, listening out for intruders. They would push a paddle with their rostrum, or snout, to sound an alarm if they detected noises. The Soviet Union soon launched its own programme using similar techniques. A phalanx of dolphins is thought to have guarded the Black Sea fleet in Sevastopol, Crimea. Kept in floating cages, they were trained to warn of the approach of any underwater saboteurs.

The documentary includes evidence given by whale expert Dr Eve Jourdain, who details patterns of behaviour she had observed while watching Hvaldimir in Hammerfest harbour in 2019. She had seen the whale swim right up to touch the cameras being carried by anyone who tried to swim close by. “It was obvious that this particular whale had been conditioned to be putting his nose on anything that looked like a target,” Jourdain told the film-makers.

Shaw told the Observer that the whale found on the Norwegian coast had shown every sign of having been recruited as part of a security patrol. “As we sat interviewing Blair Irvine in America, thousands of miles away from Hammerfest, it dawned on me that I might be sitting opposite the man who had devised the exact training system Hvaldimir had been conditioned by, albeit 50 years later.”

In the 1980s, as the strategic importance of the Arctic grew during the Cold War, a new branch of the programme was launched in the northern Russian city of Murmansk. Here, Shaw suspects, these mammals were used to guard the ballistic missile submarines of the Northern Fleet. A former Soviet dolphin trainer and nuclear submarine commander Volodymyr Belousiuk, who was stationed in Murmansk at this time, reveals in the documentary that instructors turned their attention to whales because dolphins became ill in sub-zero temperatures.

“We knew we wanted to uncover more about the true identity of the whale,” said Shaw. “It’s a mystery that has captivated people around the world. But it also gave us an opportunity to explore the history of marine mammal training within the military – something that few people are aware of as it has been steeped in secrecy for decades and many of those who knew the truth are sadly no longer alive.”

The collapse of the Soviet Union saw funding for marine mammal programmes reduced, but the appearance of the “spy whale” was one of several signs of reinvestment. Imagery of a Russian Navy base at Olenya Guba revealed the presence of two large floating pens containing “white spots” thought to be belugas.

Hvaldimir was found dead earlier this year by two men fishing in Risavika Bay, southern Norway. Police opened an investigation after animal rights groups claimed he had been shot. However, an autopsy showed he had died after a stick became lodged in his mouth.

About 50,000 government officials, policymakers, investors and campaigners will gather in Azerbaijan this week in the hope of answering a trillion-dollar question: how much money should go each year to helping developing countries cope with climate-related costs?

The aim of the UN’s Cop29 climate talks in Baku, which is being called the “climate finance Cop”, is to establish a new annual climate financing target to replace the current $100bn pledge, set in 2009, which expires at the end of this year. There is one clear consensus already: the existing climate finance available to developing countries is nowhere near enough to withstand worsening climate impacts. The ambition is too low, and in 15 years the annual target has been met in full only once, in 2022.

Campaigners have called for the governments of wealthier countries to contribute to a new collective quantified goal (NCQG) on climate finance. Forecasts of how much this will be vary but are typically $500bn to $1tn a year, or less than 1% of global GDP. Some estimates are as high as $5tn.

“Setting a more ambitious goal will be essential to helping vulnerable countries adopt clean energy and other low-carbon solutions and build resilience to worsening climate impacts,” said the World Resources Institute.

But who should pay? To date, the financial contributions that enable developing countries to pursue low-carbon growth and greater climate resilience have come from countries defined by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) as “high income”. The list includes the UK, US, Japan and Germany. But in the 30 years since it was created, countries including China, India and South Korea have dramatically increased their economic might – and their carbon emissions.

It is likely that the talks will include calls to expand the list of countries contributing to climate financing. But even then the sums involved are too large for government spending ­budgets alone, according to delegates from many wealthy nations.

Instead, the talks aim to reform global climate lending to encourage more private capital to play a part. In an open letter last month, Stephanie Pfeifer, the head of the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change, said many global investors were beginning to explore ways to unlock and mobilise capital.

“An ambitious finance goal that includes private capital can encourage greater ambition in developing countries’ targets [for helping to limit global warming] by building confidence in accessible funding for both mitigation and adaptation, with the latter being historically underfunded,” she said.

This approach is not without its critics. Climate and humanitarian NGOs have warned that loans, even on favourable term, place the financial burden of the climate crisis on already indebted developing nations, which bear the lowest responsibility for the climate crisis but face the greatest risks. These groups have called for polluting companies to pay their fair share.

“Climate finance is not about charity or generosity but responsibility and justice,” according to Debbie Hillier, a policy lead at the humanitarian NGO Mercy Corps. “It is based firmly on the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities – those who contributed most to the climate crisis must bear the brunt of the solution.”

To this end, a new Climate Finance Action Fund (CFAF) will be under consideration. It aims to draw on voluntary contributions from fossil-fuel-producing countries and companies to support developing nations’ climate projects.

For polluters who would rather not pay, campaigners are calling for climate taxes. Billionaires and fossil fuel giants are in the crosshairs of environmental NGO 350.org, which plans to hold them accountable for their outsize impact on the planet in a new campaign. The group argues that funds generated through taxing the ultra-rich could be used both for domestic policies and programmes to lower carbon emissions, and for international climate finance to ensure “those most responsible for the climate crisis contribute to its solution”.

This approach is likely to prove popular with the public. Oxfam is scheduled to publish a report suggesting that the majority of the British public support higher taxes on private jets and superyachts to help tackle the climate crisis.

The survey, by YouGov, is also expected to show strong public support for increasing taxes on the wealthiest UK individuals to fund action, and hiking taxes on businesses in sectors that produce the most emissions.

The key to whatever form climate finance takes will be accountability – a meaningful climate finance target will mean nothing if the annual goal is never reached.

Prince William has said he wants the monarchy to evolve and for him to carry out his duties with a “smaller r in the royal”.

Speaking at end of a major visit to South Africa where he mixed the informal with traditional elements of the monarchy, the Prince of Wales said he was trying to do things differently.

While in Cape Town, Prince William had talks with South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, but also took part in informal events and dressed casually.

Asked about whether he was trying to do royal engagements in a different way, he said: “I can only describe what I’m trying to do and that’s trying to do it differently and I’m trying to do it for my generation.

“I’m doing it with maybe a smaller r in the royal, if you like, that’s maybe a better way of saying it.”

Prince William said his approached focused on “impact philanthropy, collaboration, convening and helping people”.

“I’m also going to throw empathy in there as well, because I really care about what I do. It helps impact people’s lives … and I think we could do with some more empathetic leadership around the world.”

The Prince of Wales has long spoken about fighting homelessness, recently starring in a two-part ITV documentary devoted to the subject.

Earlier this week the prince opened up about what had “probably been the hardest year in my life”, having seen his wife and father, King Charles, being treated for cancer.

While in South Africa he sounded optimistic about possible joint overseas engagements with the Princess of Wales, who was declared cancer-free in September.

“I think hopefully Catherine will be doing a bit more next year, so we’ll have some more trips maybe lined up.”

Catherine attended a Remembrance Day event in London with William on Saturday, in her latest public engagement after going through cancer treatment.

Her last public appearance was in October when she met the bereaved families of three young girls who were murdered at a dance class in north-west England.

Republicans on Saturday appeared close to clinching control of the US House of Representatives, a critical element for Donald Trump to advance his agenda when the president-elect returns to the White House in January.

With votes still being counted from the 5 November general election, Republicans had won 212 seats in the 435-member House, according to Edison Research, which projected on Friday night that Republican Jeff Hurd had enough votes to keep Republican control of Colorado’s third congressional district.

Democratic Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez won re-election to a US House seat representing Washington state on Saturday, the Associated Press reported, defeating Republican Joe Kent in a rematch of one of the closest races of 2022.

Gluesenkamp Perez won the seat by just more than 2,600 votes two years ago. Prior to her election, Gluesenkamp Perez ran an auto shop in a rural part of the district, which featured heavily in her campaign.

The Republican-leaning district, which Donald Trump carried in 2020, includes the south-western portion of the state and some Portland, Oregon, suburbs that spill into Washington state.

Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

Republicans need to win six more seats to keep control of the House and they already have enough victories to wrest control of the US Senate from Democrats, though Edison Research projected late on Friday that Democratic US Senator Jacky Rosen had won re-election in Nevada.

A first-term moderate in a presidential battleground state, Rosen was among the GOP’s top targets. She campaigned on lowering costs for the middle class, defending abortion rights and tackling the climate crisis. Over the summer, she introduced legislation that would allow extreme heat to qualify as a disaster under federal law, pointing to heatwaves that have devastated the west.

With Trump’s victory in the presidential election and Republican control of the Senate already decided, keeping hold of the House would give Republicans sweeping powers to potentially ram through a broad agenda of tax and spending cuts, energy deregulation and border security controls.

Results of 19 House races remain unclear, mostly in competitive districts in western states where the pace of vote counting is typically slower than in the rest of the country.

Ten of the seats are currently held by Republicans and nine by Democrats. Fourteen seats had widely been seen as competitive before the election.

Republican senators will decide next week who will serve as the party’s leader in the Senate in 2025, with John Thune, John Cornyn and Rick Scott vying for the job. On Saturday, Senators Bill Hagerty and Rand Paul endorsed Scott over the more senior Thune and Cornyn, who have been viewed as favorites.

Associated Press contributed to this report

Protests against Donald Trump erupted in the US on Saturday as people on both coasts took to the streets in frustration about his re-election.

Thousands of people in major cities including New York City and Seattle demonstrated against the former president and now president-elect amid his threats against reproductive rights and pledges to carry out mass deportations at the start of his upcoming presidency.

In New York City on Saturday, demonstrators from advocacy groups focused on workers’ rights and immigrant justice crowded outside Trump International Hotel and Tower on 5th Avenue holding signs that read: “We protect us” and “Mr President, how long must women wait for liberty?” Others held signs that read: “We won’t back down” while chanting: “Here we are and we’re not leaving!”

Similar protests took place in Washington DC, where Women’s March participants demonstrated outside the Heritage Foundation, the rightwing thinktank behind Project 2025. Pictures posted on social media on Saturday showed demonstrators holding signs that read: “Well-behaved women don’t make history” and “You are never alone”. Demonstrators also chanted: “We believe that we will win!” and held other signs that read: “Where’s my liberty when I have no choice?”

Crowds of demonstrators also gathered outside Seattle’s Space Needle on Saturday. “March and rally to protest Trump and the two-party war machine,” posters for the protests said, adding: “Build the people’s movement and fight war, repression and genocide!” Speaking to a crowd of demonstrators, some of whom dressed in raincoats while others wore keffiyehs in solidarity with Palestinians amid Israel’s deadly war on Gaza, one demonstrator said: “Any president that has come to power has also let workers down.”

On Friday, protesters gathered outside city hall in Portland, Oregon, in a similar demonstration against Trump. Signs carried by demonstrators included messages that read: “Fight fascism” and “Turn fear into fight”.

“We’re here because we’ve been fighting for years for health, housing and education. And whether it was Trump, or [Joe] Biden before this, we have not been getting it and we are wanting to push to actually get that realized,” Cody Urban, a chair for US chapter of the International League of People’s Struggle, said, KGW reported.

Also on Friday, dozens of demonstrators in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, gathered in Point Start park to protest Trump’s election victory. People carried signs reading: “We are not going back” and “My body, my choice”.

“We are afraid of what’s coming, but we are not going to back down,” Steve Capri, an organizer with Socialist Alternative, told WPXI TV. “Trump is an attack on all of us so we need to unite, we need to get organized, join movements, study and learn together.”

Half a century ago, Richard Gun stood on the floor of parliament and became the first known Australian political figure to warn about the “sinister” threat posed by climate breakdown. Todayhis maiden speech is a distant memory.

“I never thought of myself as the first politician to issue a warning about climate change,” he says. “At the time it seemed to me an existential threat to our civilisation and it seemed like a sufficiently important issue to mention.

“Looking back, I’m a bit surprised other people didn’t take it as seriously.”

As Australia prepares to participate in Cop29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, Gun’s largely forgotten warning provides a poignant milestone to help measure the country’s action on the climate emergency.

With greenhouse gas emissions rising, fossil fuel production expanding, and devastating fire and floods becoming more frequent, the scale of these threats underscores the warnings given by political and scientific leaders all those years ago – and the amount of wasted time.

Gun is a retired doctor who remains involved with the University of Adelaide and is still active on the issue of climate breakdown. When he first entered parliament in 1969 as the newly elected Labor member for Kingston in Adelaide’s southern suburbs, he was 33 years old.

He began his March 1970 speech by addressing what he called “the problem of cities” and highlighting “an alarming tendency to put cars first and people last”. Halfway through, he pivoted to another issue he was deeply concerned about – growing concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

“But, whatever these ingenious proposals can do in reducing smog, they still cannot prevent consumption of oxygen and production of carbon dioxide,” he said. “It is the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide which may be the most sinister of all effects.

“The only way that this can be controlled is by reducing the amount of combustion taking place.”

The statements were found by Dr Marc Hudson, a climate and energy transitions academic who says that until Gun there was “no good evidence that Australians were paying close attention” to growing concerns about the greenhouse effect like people were in the US.

“After Gun we start to find other people in federal parliament raising alarm early in the early 1970s,” Hudson says. “This matters because it should make us cautious about the idea that what is lacking is information. It forces us think about [how] this is also about resistance to change – psychologically, economically and financially.”

Senate committee’s air pollution warning

Gun partly attributes his awareness about climate breakdown to the joint Senate select committee on air pollution, which published the results of its investigation in 1969.

Though its focus was air pollution more broadly, the Senate committee directly addressed the risk posed by the climate crisis: “Man has been using the atmosphere as a huge rubbish dump into which is being poured millions of tons of waste products each year,” it said.

The report did not return to the issue again but its warning marks the first known time an arm of the Australian government recognised the impending threat – an insight that appears to originate with remarkable evidence given by the Tasmanian scientist Prof Harry Bloom.

Bloom was the chair of chemistry at the University of Tasmania. His initial scientific work concerned molten salts and he briefly had a stint with the storied Truesdail Laboratories in the US.

At a hearing in Hobart on 6 February 1969, Bloom delivered an impassioned speech – described by one senator present as an “address” – which outlined his frustration that no one was talking about the threat posed by growing carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere.

“If carbon dioxide built up to such an extent in the Earth’s atmosphere as to trap radiation from the sun and cause climatic conditions to change all over the world, perhaps heating the whole world and melting the ice caps, nothing could be done about it at that stage,” Bloom said. “At this stage, when we recognise the problem exists we ought to do something about it before it becomes too late.”

When challenged by a senator who suggested he was overreacting, Bloom insisted he had “seen some very highly scientific studies of this matter” but did not name which, even as he insisted there was “no doubt” he was correct.

Bloom was ahead of the curve but his early warning has received little recognition. Graeme Pearman, the renowned Australian scientist who first began investigating the science of climate change at the CSIRO, met Bloom later in his career but said he “had no inkling” the chemist had an interest in the issue.

Bloom passed away suddenly, aged 70, in 1992. His son, Walter, who maintains a collection of his father’s papers, says he was surprised to learn about his father’s early concern over climate breakdown. He also does not know where his father first encountered the issue.

Walter does, however, remember the fierce backlash that followed his father’s fight on environmental issues, an experience that foreshadowed the campaign against climate science.

Bloom later advocated for phasing out leaded petrol but is best known for raising alarm about heavy metal pollution in the Derwent River from heavy industry.

In response, a local paper ran a front-page story labelling him “The Prophet of Doom” and Walter recalls how the wives of fishers organised an “oyster-bake” where they spent a day eating river shellfish to prove there was no issue. At one point, Walter recalls someone scrawled a swastika on the front fence of the family home.

“I remember the police and the efforts to clean this thing off,” Walter says. “You have to realise that we had no Jewish upbringing whatsoever … I think of a line that is often falsely attributed to Albert Einstein that says: ‘Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity.’

“People get emotional about these things. They think that their livelihood is in trouble, or their friend’s livelihood is in trouble, or they won’t be able to eat oysters again, so they react.”

Today the University of Tasmania awards a prize in Bloom’s name for the best honours thesis in chemistry. Prof Anthony Koutoulis, the university’s deputy vice-chancellor of research, says Bloom should be lauded.

“Harry Bloom’s foresight was extraordinary – he anticipated the environmental crises we now grapple with daily,” Koutloulis says.

“His work highlighted the vital role of science as both an early warning system and a call to action. At a time when few were listening, Bloom was sounding the alarm about the planetary costs of inaction.”

When it comes to the “calamitous failure of the political consensus to follow scientific consensus” in Australia, Gun says that he did not anticipate the level of pushback from industry or the level of climate denial that he later witnessed.

“It still astonishes me. To deny the greenhouse effect is to deny the laws of physics. Why otherwise clever people would take such a position is a mystery,” he says.

Though he says Australia is getting “back on track” after the Abbott years, as a much older man, Gun now has a “much more desperate” warning as he watches the country continue to open new coalmines and expand gas production.

“I am not yet convinced the opportunity for change has been totally lost, but overall I’m not optimistic,” he says.

“I’ve only got one great-grandchild, but I don’t want any more because I’m fearful they are going to inherit a planet that will be barely livable.”

The UK must ramp up its efforts on renewable energy to foster national security in an increasingly uncertain world, the energy secretary, Ed Miliband, has warned, on the eve of a fraught global summit on the climate crisis.

He pledged that the UK would lead efforts at Cop29 to secure the global agreement needed to stave off the worst impacts of climate breakdown, in talks that have been thrown into turmoil by the re-election of Donald Trump as US president.

“The only way to keep the British people secure today is by making Britain a clean-energy superpower, and the only way we protect future generations is by working with other countries to deliver climate action,” Miliband told the Observer. “This government is committed to accelerating climate action precisely because it is by doing this that we protect our country, with energy security, lower bills, and good jobs.”

Trump, who has repeatedly dismissed climate science as a “hoax”, has vowed to withdraw the US again from the Paris climate agreement, as he did late in his last presidency. Scientists have warned that his policies would put paid to hopes of limiting global temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, regarded as the threshold of safety.

Governments are now scrambling to save vital alliances that were led by the outgoing US president, Joe Biden, who made the climate a top priority of his term. At Cop29, governments are supposed to agree ways to bring global financial muscle to bear on the climate crisis. Though a team from the Biden White House will still attend, the inevitability that Trump will withdraw US support means other countries have to redraw their expectations, given the prospective absence of – and perhaps future hostility from – the world’s biggest economy.

The summit, taking place in Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku, over the next fortnight, has been hit by a flurry of late cancellations. The president of the EU Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, will not attend, and the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, will stay in Berlin following the break-up of his governing coalition. Emmanuel Macron, president of France, is also occupied by a domestic political crisis.

António Guterres, the UN secretary general, will be at the talks, with the leaders of about 100 countries, mostly from the developing world, which is struggling with the increasing economic impacts of climate-driven disaster.

Keir Starmer, who will spend nearly two days at the talks, is one of the few remaining leaders of the world’s biggest industrialised economies who will attend. He is expected to announce tough new targets for the UK to cut greenhouse gases, and a commitment to fulfil a pledge of £11.6bn in climate finance to poor countries, made under the Conservatives but left hanging in the balance by Rishi Sunak.

Miliband, who will take personal charge rather than leaving the negotiating to junior ministers and civil servants as the previous government did, made clear that Britain would step into the leadership vacuum. “We will be going to Cop with the power of our example to call for others to do their fair share because climate breakdown knows no borders. The UK will step up and lead – to protect our people, and play our part in securing a future for our planet,” he said.

Adair Turner, former chair of the UK’s Committee on Climate Change, now chair of the Energy Transitions Commission thinktank, warned that despite “happy talk” from some governments and civil society groups seeking to minimise the impact, the shadow of Trump would weigh heavily. “There is a tendency by some people to try to keep their spirits up by whistling in the dark. But this [Trump’s election] is bad, let’s be clear. We will not get further US action beyond the Inflation Reduction Act [under which hundreds of billions of dollars were supposed to be spent on clean energy] and we needed that.”

Poor countries are hoping for a settlement in Baku that will deliver at least $1tn a year by 2035 for them to cut their greenhouse gas emissions and cope with increasingly extreme weather. Developed-country governments are only likely to agree that a much smaller sum, which could be significantly less than $400m in the absence of the US, should come from public sources, such as overseas aid budgets, the World Bank and other publicly owned finance institutions.

They also want large emerging economies, such as China, and petrostates such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, to contribute to the funds.

Several studies have shown that taxing fossil fuels could provide all of the finance needed, but moves to do so would face fierce objections from petrostates. Some countries are also arguing strongly for a small tax on billionaires, who have seen their wealth boosted to record levels since the Covid-19 pandemic.

Levies on high-carbon activities such as flying and shipping are also possible means of raising cash. There are likely to be disagreements over how much of the $1tn demanded should come from the private sector, and what safeguards can be put in place to ensure that poor countries get access to the money they need without being pushed further into debt.

David Hillman, director of the group Stamp Out Poverty, part of the Make Polluters Pay coalition, said: “The UK government must not use Trump’s election as a justification not to step up at Cop with the scale of ambition on finance required to meet the size of the challenge that confronts us, similarly to how uncertainty around Brexit was once engineered by some countries to halt important progress on taxing the banks.”

The party was buzzing, the confidence was surging and Kenneth Stewart was riding the Trump train. “He’s masculine,” explained Stewart, an African American man from Chicago. “He brings a lot of energy. He talks about things that we can understand. He talks about building. He talks about the auto industry. He talks about a lot of stuff that people in the Rust Belt care about.”

Stewart was a guest at Donald Trump’s election watch event in West Palm Beach, Florida, on Tuesday night and celebrated his victory over Democratic vice-president Kamala Harris. The result said much about gender, race and the new media landscape. It also represented a populist backlash against America’s perceived elites.

In the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic, millions felt a distrust of authorities that ordered them to wear masks, close schools and go into lockdown. They felt frustrated by post-pandemic inflation that pushed up the prices of groceries and petrol. They felt they would never be able to buy a house, that the American dream was slipping away. They were looking for someone to blame – and for a champion who could fix it.

They believed they found him in Trump and, despite his two impeachments and 34 criminal convictions, returned him to power. He made gains among nearly every demographic group. In part he was riding a wave of anti-incumbency fervour that has swept through major democracies, battering the left and the right in the aftershocks of the pandemic.

That will provide little comfort to Democrats, who raised a billion dollars yet lost the national popular vote. They have come to be seen as the party of the highly educated who earn more than $100,000 a year and live in big cities such as New York and Washington. They are perceived as out of tune with people who work with their hands and shower after work instead of before.

Stewart said on Tuesday night: “The other side, they’re only talking about feelings. They’re talking about Trump’s bad. But come to me with tangibles. A lot of Black men just want tangibles. We just want jobs. We want to see what our fathers had. We want to see what our grandfathers had, especially in the Rust Belt.”

America is a nation of cavernous inequality with few safety nets. The last populist convulsion came 15 years ago after the Great Recession. On the left it spawned Occupy Wall Street, a response to economic inequality, corporate greed and the influence of money in politics. On the right it gave rise to the Tea Party, fuelled by rage against elites, distrust in government and racial hostility to President Barack Obama.

The Democratic and Republican parties each absorbed these movements into their political DNA. They manifested in the 2016 presidential election when the harmful effects of globalisation, trade and deindustrialisation took centre age. Leftwing senator Bernie Sanders drew huge crowds in Democratic primary but lost, while non-politician Trump drew huge crowds in the Republican primary and won.

The pandemic, and subsequent inflation, provided another trigger moment. Trump, a Manhattan billionaire, tapped into anti-establishment sentiment and bad economic vibes to style himself as an unlikely hero of the working class. He promised sweeping tariffs on foreign goods and the protection of manufacturing jobs inside the US.

The pitch was infused with race-baiting, scapegoating and xenophobia: Trump claimed that undocumented migrants were draining resources, causing crime and destroying communities. His demagoguery extended to an entirely fictitious claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating pet cats and dogs.

The former president painted Democrats as an elite out of touch with the affordability and cost of living crises facing those further down the economic ladder. Harris proposed a federal ban on price-gouging but it was too little too late. She did not help her cause during their debate by citing investment bank Goldman Sachs’ support for her financial plans as a reason to vote for her.

Claire McCaskill, a former Democratic senator for Missouri, told MSNBC that Trump “knew our country better than we did”. She recalled: “I grew up in a party where we were for the underdog. We were for the little guy. We are now the elite. We are no longer seen as the party for the little guy.

“He was seen as the party for the little guy. He was seen as the ultimate disrupter and yes, the edges were very rough but in everyone’s own minds they sanded them down to the point of acceptability and, as it turns out, there’s a lot of craving in America for fear and anger – driven by lies.”

America’s political class divide has been growing for years. In the 2016 election Trump won 2,584 counties nationwide while Hillary Clinton carried only 472. But Clinton’s counties accounted for nearly two-thirds of America’s economic output, the Brookings Institution thinktank found.

The split finds expression in the way people dress, the TV shows they watch and the ways they interact (or don’t). In 2016 Trump won 76% of counties that contained a Cracker Barrel, a restaurant offering southern homestyle cooking on interstate highways, and just 22% of counties with Whole Foods, an organic national supermarket chain. The Cook Report noted that the 54% gap compared with a 19% difference in the 1992 election.

On the eve of the 2024 election Trump held a campaign rally in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where some supporters wore miners’ helmets. Among the speakers was rightwing media personality Megyn Kelly, who told the crowd that Trump will look out for “our forgotten boys and our forgotten men, guys like you, guys like these guys who’ve got the calluses on their hands, who work for a living, the beards and the tats, maybe have a beer after work, and don’t want to be judged by people like Oprah and Beyoncé, who will never have to face the consequences of her disastrous economic policies. These guys will. He gets it. President Trump gets it. He will not look at our boys like they are second-class citizens.”

An exit poll on Tuesday showed Trump winning voters whose household incomes are between $30,000 and $100,000. His sense of grievance struck a chord with people who feel left behind and sneered at as “deplorables” or “garbage” by Democratic leaders, journalists and Hollywood celebrities.

Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman and Tea Party activist who campaigned for Harris, says by phone: “The perception is that these people are elites. That’s what these folks have told me for the last five years. Many of them acknowledge Trump’s an asshole but they say, look, the Democrats are looking down on me. I heard that all the time.”

Walsh always believed that the election would be about Trump’s demagoguery and its appeal to working class Americans. “It’s been crystal clear for the last four, five, six years, certainly ever since Covid, regular everyday people have been concerned about immigration, a broken border, crime on the streets and the price of bread and the price of butter.

“They’re pissed off and angry about that stuff and Democrats have ignored it, especially the issue of immigration. Biden and Harris made it worse when they came in. Trump feeds these people bullshit like they’re eating cats and dogs but we have way too many migrants in America. It’s created real problems and Democrats have decided to ignore it. It bit them in the ass.”

Democrats are now engaged in long and painful soul-searching. Sanders argued in a scathing statement a party that had forsaken the working class should not be surprised to “find that the working class has abandoned them”. He added: “First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well.”

That prompted an angry rebuke from Democratic National Committee chairman Jaime Harrison, who dismissed Sanders’s thesis as “straight up BS” and posted a long list of Joe Biden’s achievements for low income families. “Biden was the most pro-worker president of my lifetime,” he wrote.

Research shows that one of Trump’s most effective ads was focused on keeping boys out of girls’ sports with the the tag line “Kamala Harris is for they/them. Donald Trump is for you”. New York congressman Ritchie Torres condemned what he sees as smug political correctness on the left, insisting that Trump had “no greater friend” than activists alienating voters with “absurdities like ‘Defund the Police’ … or ‘Latinx.’”

Trump had always performed strongly among white men without a college degree. But this time he won the votes of one fifth of Black men and nearly half of Latino men. He also made inroads among young voters.

Bill Galston, a former policy adviser to President Bill Clinton, observes: “We are witnessing the slow eclipse of race in favour of class. The question that I posed publicly in the week before the election was: would Donald Trump be able to continue the movement of the Republican party towards a multi-ethnic working class? And, if he did, not only would he win but he would be transforming the axis of American politics.

“The answer to that question is clearly yes, he has succeeded in moving the Republican party further down that road. What that means is that the contrast between the Republican party and the Democratic party, particularly on cultural issues, will continue to widen unless the Democrats start paying attention to the message they’re receiving but, until very recently, were not hearing.”

The Democratic left rallied around Harris and projected unity in the fight against Trump but to no avail. It might be harder to pull together such a coalition next time. While Trump’s rightwing populism has thrived over the past decade, some regret how leftwing populism has stalled.

Joseph Geevarghese, executive director of the progressive group Our Revolution, says: “At the end of the day there was a fundamental failure by the Harris campaign to acknowledge people’s economic pain. They focused on issues of democracy and reproductive rights versus adopting Bernie Sanders-style populism, which I would argue showed where the energy was within the Democratic party in 2016 and 2020.”

He adds: “It’s unfortunate because we need a populist economic left that is willing to challenge corporate power and articulate that wealthy corporations are suppressing wages. They’re sacrificing Americans in the name of corporate greed – everything from climate to our educational systems to our healthcare system. I feel like she held up Trump as a villain, but a villain who was a threat to democracy, not a villain who represented corporate oligarchic rule.”