If Donald Trump’s previous administration taught us anything, it’s that women’s bodies do not matter. The autonomy of those bodies, the frequent injustices and abuses inflicted on them, are of little consequence to a far-right misogynist administration that is – unbelievably to some – back in power after an all too brief period of reprieve, if not change. Women’s bodies are also of little consequence to the people who voted for Donald Trump.

Shortly after Trump was elected in 2016, I saw Regina Spektor playing at the Royal Festival Hall. She sat down at a piano and sang her song Ballad of a Politician. “A man inside a room is shaking hands with other men,” it opens: “This is how it happens / Our carefully laid plans.” The almost physical weight of sadness in Spektor’s performance, and that of the women in the audience, is something I have never forgotten.

Women across the world are today experiencing the visceral, secondhand body horror of another Trump administration, and that is nothing compared with the all-too-real feeling of peril that many American women will be having as I write. We hold fear, tension and trauma in our bodies, and though that is the kind of idea that strongmen such as Trump and their acolytes would snigger at, it’s well documented that, to quote the psychiatrist and author Bessel van der Kolk, the body keeps the score. It is a complete tragedy that yet more American women are facing the prospect of their reproductive rights being curtailed even further.

This body horror will be felt by the many others on Trump’s hitlist of undesirables: immigrants, gay and transgender people, disabled people, protesters. Anyone capable of empathy. Yet in the context of the assault on reproductive rights, and being a woman myself, it is women I am writing about today.

I am thinking particularly of three women. Candi Miller died at home in bed with her three-year-old daughter next to her after being too afraid to seek medical care because of Georgia’s abortion ban. She had a son as well as a daughter. Amber Nicole Thurman, also in Georgia, died after taking abortion pills at home and being made to wait 20 hours in agony for the dilation and curettage procedure that would have saved her life. She had a six-year-old son. And Josseli Barnica, who died when she was 17 weeks pregnant after doctors in Texas delayed treating her miscarriage for 40 hours. She had a young daughter. There are many more women, children and their families who have suffered profoundly as a result of the Republican-led rollback of women’s reproductive rights.

The outcome of this election is not surprising. After last time, I didn’t believe America’s hatred of women could be overestimated; why should it elect one? The hatred all too evidently runs deep. Increasingly, its currents run separately to the mainstream: on podcasts, in the “manosphere” and on our online news feeds.

Kamala Harris announcing that she was running for president coincided with my social media algorithms bombarding me with Christian “tradwife” content about the importance of serving and obeying one’s husband, and not working outside the home. This alternative reality isn’t a side of America that many Europeans had seen. You might be dimly aware that historically the country was founded by religious fundamentalists deemed too extreme for European sensibilities, but there’s something about seeing quite how unhinged and retrograde the content is that really brings the ideological disconnect home. Naturally, many people living in the US are just as horrified by the rise of these sorts of ideas, not to mention how they intersect with online misogyny and white supremacy, but their prevalence is less of a surprise because they have been exposed to them to some degree their entire lives.

At the same time, “childless cat lady” discourse was dominating the political debate, as if things weren’t already feeling medieval enough. Having researched and written a book, The Year of the Cat, that is partly about childless cat ladies – and where the sexist myths about them come from – I found it as predictable as the “burn the witch” rhetoric deployed against Hillary Clinton. It’s easy to laugh at the ridiculous notion that women who have not given birth are bitter, rageful harpies without a stake in the country they live in, and even easier to spin it into a clever “Cat Ladies for Kamala” campaign, but this fear of childless women is an old, old form of misogyny. That it was being deployed, especially in the context of global panic about the birthrate, did not bode well.

And, of course, there were yet more rape and sexual assault allegations to add to the pile – which barely seemed to make a dent in the election debate, despite the alleged involvement of the convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Many of us have been left wondering what exactly Trump would have to do to a woman that would be deemed sufficiently beyond the pale to prevent his return to power. If women didn’t matter in 2016, we seem to matter even less in 2024.

There is good news for American women to cling to, with Missouri and Arizona voting to expand abortion rights, and Colorado, New York, Maryland, Montana and Nevada all passing measures to protect them. Yet misogyny can be catching: in Europe, governments must take steps to protect our own laws (Labour must urgently decriminalise abortion here in the UK after the legislation fell by the wayside earlier this year).

I know I am not alone in saying that I had never experienced such profound physical revulsion as I did during the Trump years, whenever that man tweeted or went on television. When Trump was last in office, I had not ever been pregnant or given birth. I was, though, a survivor of assault, and found the “grab them by the pussy” rhetoric and the treatment of Christine Blasey Ford particularly sickening. You don’t need to have been assaulted, or raped, to feel that revulsion, just as you didn’t need to have had an IUD fitted to empathise with all the women who were suddenly rushing to get theirs. You don’t need to have had an abortion, to have been pregnant or given birth to understand the trauma of being forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term.

The body keeps the score, and that feeling of horror is back.

A coalition of conservation and animal welfare groups are urging Iceland’s president to step in and stop any plans the prime minister has to issue a whaling licence to Europe’s last whaler before the Icelandic election at the end of the month.

Earlier this year, the country granted a one-year licence to Hvalur to kill more than 100 fin whales this hunting season, despite hopes the practice may have been stopped after concerns about cruelty led to a temporary suspension in 2023.

Hvalur is run by Kristján Loftsson, who is in his 80s and is the last hunter of fin whales in Europe. The company has now applied for an indefinite whaling licence.

International groups including OceanCare, Whale and Dolphin Conservation, Orca, the Captain Paul Watson Foundation and the Environmental Investigation Agency have written to Halla Tómasdóttir, the president, to express deep concern over the issue. Making a decision on whaling during this transition period would run counter to the spirit of democratic governance, particularly when polling shows the majority of Icelanders are against it, they say.

Tómasdóttir has said previously that the role of the temporary government is primarily to maintain stability until an elected government is in place.

Prime minister and Independence party chair Bjarni Benediktsson announced in an interview two weeks ago that Hvalur’s request would be reviewed by Jón Gunarsson, whom he appointed his special representative at the Ministry for Food, Agriculture and Fisheries.

When asked if a whaling licence will be issued, Benediktsson responded: “If there is time, it can happen.”

Gunarsson, an Independence party MP, was one of the most vocal critics of a temporary whaling ban announced in June 2023 by then minister of fisheries Svandís Svavarsdóttir, of the Left-Green party. Svavarsdóttir suspended whaling after a report concluded that the 2022 hunt did not comply with the country’s animal welfare legislation as the whales took too long – up to two hours – to die. The ban was later ruled unlawful by the parliamentary ombudsman.

Iceland has been governed since 2021 by a coalition of the conservative Independence party, led by Benediktsson, the centre-right Progressive party, and the leftwing Left-Green movement. The coalition was dissolved in early October after policy disagreements.

While the granting of a whale licence is technically an administrative task, the issue is highly contentious.

In their letter to Tómasdóttir, the international groups cited the recent decision by Iceland to abstain from key votes at the International Whaling Commission, which it said was seen by international allies as a signal of a re-evaluation of whaling practices.

“We respectfully urge you to consider the potential impact that a hasty decision may have on Iceland’s environmental legacy and its relationship with the global community” it read. “Deferring the decision on any new whaling licences until a fully mandated government is in place would honour Iceland’s democratic processes and uphold the country’s reputation as a responsible steward of marine ecosystems.”

Fin whales, the second-largest mammal in the world, are listed as vulnerable to extinction on the red list of the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Their numbers have recovered after bans on hunting were introduced in many countries since the 1970s.

In May, Japan announced that fin whaling could resume.

It is “virtually certain” that 2024 will be the hottest year on record, the European Union’s space programme has found.

The prognosis comes the week before diplomats meet at the Cop29 climate summit and a day after a majority of voters in the US, the biggest historical polluter of planet-heating gas, chose to make Donald Trump president.

Trump has described climate change as a “hoax” and promised to roll back policies to clean up the economy.

The report found 2024 is likely to be the first year more than 1.5C (2.7F) hotter than before the Industrial Revolution, a level of warming that has alarmed scientists.

“This marks a new milestone in global temperature records and should serve as a catalyst to raise ambition for the upcoming climate change conference,” said Dr Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service.

The scientists found global temperatures for the past 12 months were 1.62C greater than the 1850-1900 average, when humanity started to burn vast volumes of coal, oil and gas.

In their monthly climate bulletin, they said October 2024 was the second-warmest October on record, behind only October 2023, with temperatures 1.65C greater than preindustrial levels. It was the 15th month in the past 16 to be higher than the 1.5C mark.

World leaders promised to stop the planet from heating 1.5C by the end of the century but are on track to heat it by roughly double that.

Scientists say a single year above the threshold does not mean they have missed the target, as temperature rise is measured over decades rather than years, but warn that it will force more people and ecosystems to the brink of survival.

“Our civilisation never had to cope with a climate as warm as the current one,” said Carlo Buontempo, the director of Copernicus. “This inevitably pushes our ability to respond to extreme events – and adapt to a warmer world – to the absolute limit.”

The Copernicus findings are based on billions of weather measurements from satellites, ships, aircraft and weather stations. The temperature analyses in the ERA5 dataset on which the bulletin relies differ slightly from other prominent datasets used by climate scientists in the US and Japan.

The scientists also found that Arctic sea ice had reached its fourth-lowest monthly level for October, at 19% below average, while Antarctic sea ice extent hit its second-lowest for October, at 8% below average.

They pointed to heavier-than-normal rains that hit large parts of Europe, including Spain, where flash floods killed more than 200 people as they ripped through villages and swamped homes with mud.

Last week, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) found the concentration of planet-heating pollutants clogging the atmosphere had hit record levels in 2023. It found carbon dioxide was accumulating faster than at any time in human history, with concentrations having risen by more than 10% in just two decades, heating the planet and making extreme weather more violent.

“The most effective solution to address the climate challenges is a global commitment on emissions,” said Buontempo.

The New South Wales police has won its legal challenge against a protest planned to blockade coal exports in Newcastle, with the judge citing the interruption to the port as an “imposition”.

Organised by a group called Rising Tide, the protest would have involved activists paddling into the Port of Newcastle on kayaks and rafts to stop coal exports from leaving Newcastle for 30 hours.

The group called the protest the “People’s Blockade of the World’s Largest Coal Port” and was planned to take place in late November. The four-day “protestival” was expected to attract 5,500 demonstrators and was scheduled to take place alongside the blockade, and include music performances from John Butler and Angie McMahon.

Police launched a challenge against the organiser’s Form1 application – which would protect them from prosecution while blocking the waterway – in the supreme court last week. They cited safety concerns, the interference with other members of the public’s right to use the space, and the disruption to the coal industry.

Last year, the organiser’s held the same protest for the same amount of time. The police accepted the organiser’s Form1 application to blockade the port for 30 hours.

However, during this protest, the group continued to blockade the port beyond the agreed deadline, leading to 109 arrests. This drew international media attention, with a 97-year-old church minister among those charged.

Justice Desmond Fagan sided with police and issued a prohibition order, saying the evidence showed it was “highly likely, to the point of near certainty” that the protesters had planned to stay beyond the agreed deadline again to draw maximum attention to their cause.

In his judgement, he also expressed safety concerns for the participants and said the impact on others was “excessive”.

“A 30-hour interruption to the operations of a busy port is an imposition on the lawful activities of others that goes far beyond what the people affected should be expected to tolerate in order to facilitate public expression of protest and opinion…,” Desmond said.

If the activists decide to still carry out the blockade despite the prohibition order, they will not be protected from prosecution.

Police assistant commissioner Dave Waddell told the court during the proceedings that if this happened the police would arrest the protesters as soon as they entered the channel.

Neal Funnell, the lawyer for Rising Tide, had argued during the proceedings that the organiser’s had put adequate safety precautions in place, and that the organisers had planned to advise protesters to leave the water once the 30-hours was up to avoid arrest.

The organiser’s had planned to blockade the port for 50 hours, but revised this down to 30 hours during the police’s legal challenge.

Rising Tide had organised the protest to demand the government immediately cancel all new fossil fuel projects and end all coal exports from Newcastle by 2030.

They were also calling for the government to tax fossil fuel export profits at 78%, and to put that money towards community and industrial transition away from fossil fuels.

The mood was calm and sober on the Howard University campus as people waited to hear vice-president Kamala Harris’s concession speech on Wednesday afternoon. An area that is usually the central hub of campus life, the Yard, was mostly filled with Harris campaign staff, media and members of the public.

Harris appeared about 25 minutes after her scheduled time and opened with a message on unity, building community and coalitions. “My heart is full today,” Harris said. “Full of heart for my country, and full of resolve.

“Hear me when I say that the light of America’s promise will always burn bright. As long as we never give up and as long as we keep fighting.”

Harris encouraged young people to acknowledge their power and to believe in the impossible. “At this time, it’s necessary that people not become complacent,” she added, “but to commit to organizing and mobilizing.” Harris encouraged her supporters to embrace “the light of optimism” and of service.

“Hear me when I say that the light of America’s promise will always burn bright. As long as we never give up and as long as we keep fighting.”

Harris’s supporters expressed shock, grief and disillusionment as they reflected upon the harrowing hours since the election was called for Republican candidate, Donald Trump. Instead of feeling galvanized to build resistance movements, voters said that they needed time to rest and reset before thinking of next steps after the election.

“It revealed to me the heart of us as a nation,” 47-year-old Janeen Davis, a county government employee said. “It’s taking my pride away. Being an Indigenous person, it hits me hard. Our democracy is built upon our Indigenous ancestors … and so much has been torn from the Indigenous community, and so now that that’s at stake, it’s like there’s nothing left.” Davis said that she was in fear of political violence from Trump supporters if his opponents resist his presidency now. “My personal opinion is because of how the transition happened last election,” Davis said. “The best thing that we can do is be still right now.”

Patricia McDougall, a 63-year-old staff member at Howard University, said that she felt sad. She believed that, had she won, Harris would have supported immigrants and helped fight for women’s reproductive rights. “As an immigrant myself [from Belize], I feel bad about the people who are going to be left behind,” McDougall said. “I thought that she was going to move the needle and help people.”

As an ambassador for the United Nations, McDougall expressed anxiety about Trump’s foreign policy moves in the future, adding that his “mouth destroys him.

“We are all on edge to see what he’s going to do and how he’s going to do.”

Davis was similarly concerned that Trump’s presidency may spell disaster for foreign relations. Since exit polls revealed how divided the electorate is, Davis warned: “A divided nation can’t stand, so it’s going to make us more susceptible to outside threats.”

Despite her defeat, voters said that they were proud of Harris and her campaign team for what they accomplished in the months since inheriting Joe Biden’s campaign after he dropped out of the race during the summer. Nadia Brown, a political science professor at Georgetown University and a fellow Howard University alumna, had watched the election results pour in from the campus on election night. Returning to the scene after Harris’s crushing defeat was sobering, but she was in a place of acceptance and didn’t feel sadness.

For Brown, she said that the election results posed “larger questions to ask around what the Democratic party needs to do to maintain the core voting bloc”. She observed that the concerns of young people and progressives who opposed Israel’s war on Gaza where more than 41,000 Palestinians have been killed since last October were not taken seriously. Brown also called into question the Democratic party’s strategy, saying: “The base was not shored up before moving to swing voters, which were the Republicans who were never Trumpers.”

Looking toward the future, Brown said that the Democratic party must reconsider its outreach strategy. “Black women in particular did a great job. I have no regrets or hard feelings about the way that Black women showed up,” she said. “But now it’s how [does the party] reach some of the other folks.”

Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

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.