The latest on the 2024 US election

Sen. Tom Cotton is seen during a hearing on Capitol Hill in July 2023.

Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton recently told President-elect Donald Trump’s team that he does not want a role in his next administration and instead plans to remain in the Senate, a source with direct knowledge of the conversation told CNN, despite those close to Trump having floated Cotton’s name for top intelligence or national security roles.

Cotton was among those being considered for Secretary of Defense, sources familiar with the talks said.

Axios first reported on the discussions between Cotton and Trump’s team.

Cotton, a prominent conservative lawmaker and hawk on China and Iran, is planning to run against Sen. Jonie Ernst for Senate GOP conference chair, the source said. He told Trump’s team he plans to be a top defender of the former president while in Congress.

President Donald Trump arrives at an election night watch party in West Palm Beach, Florida, on November 6.

Donald Trump’s allies and some in the private sector have been quietly preparing to detain and deport migrants residing in the United States on a large scale, according to four sources familiar with the discussions.

And with the former president becoming the president-elect, those preparations are now expected to ramp up.

Immigration was a cornerstone of Trump’s 2024 campaign, and while he repeatedly touted promises of mass deportation on the trail — putting increased emphasis on interior enforcement compared to his 2016 fixation on the border wall — members of his orbit and some in the private sector discussed what that plan would look like, according to the sources.

Trump’s day one priority is to reinstate his former administration’s border policies and reverse those of President Joe Biden, senior Trump adviser Jason Miller told CNN.

Early discussions among Trump’s team have focused on removing undocumented immigrants who have committed crimes, a source familiar with the team’s preliminary plans told CNN. A key issue under consideration is how, when and if to deport immigrants who were brought to the United States as children, commonly known as Dreamers.

Targeting Dreamers would be a departure from the historically bipartisan support they’ve enjoyed. Some are temporarily protected by the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that allows recipients to live and work in the US.

Read more on preparations here.

Elon Musk jumps on stage as he joins Donald Trump during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in October.

Wednesday wasn’t just a good day for Donald Trump. The wealth of the world’s 10 richest people also soared by a record amount, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index.

The biggest gainer was Elon Musk, the world’s richest person and one of Trump’s most outspoken and dedicated supporters, whose wealth jumped $26.5 billion to $290 billion Wednesday, according to Bloomberg. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ wealth grew $7.1 billion a week after defending his decision to withhold the Washington Post’s endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris. Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison, another Trump supporter, saw his net worth rose $5.5 billion Wednesday.

Other gainers include former Microsoft executives Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, former Google executives Larry Page and Sergey Brin and Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett. Although none of those billionaires endorsed a candidate this year, they have spoken in favor of Democratic candidates and causes in the past.

Collectively, the top 10 richest people gained $64 billion.

Bloomberg notes it’s the “biggest daily increase” of wealth it’s seen since the index began in 2012,. The market rallied Wednesday as the election concluded swiftly and with expectations that Trump will usher in a new era of deregulation and other pro-business laws and policies investors believe could benefit the stock market overall — especially billionaires who hold much of the world’s wealth.

Truth Social owner Trump Media & Technology Group, Trump’s social media company, also cashed in with shares skyrocketing in value after CNN and other media outlets projected Trump won. The stock rose as much as 35% at one point before fading.

Trump is the dominant shareholder in the conservative social media company, which has scant revenue and is losing money. The president-elect’s 114.75 million shares were worth about $5.3 billion briefly based on those early gains, up from $3.9 billion when trading ended on Election Day.

Republicans on Capitol Hill are laying the groundwork to push through an ambitious agenda with President-elect Donald Trump if they have total control of Washington next January – a rare GOP trifecta that party leaders believe is now within reach.

And this time they’ll be prepared to use it.

Unlike Trump’s surprise win in 2016, House and Senate GOP leaders have been preparing for months for a possible GOP sweep. Their goal is to get to work quickly drafting big pieces of the Trump administration’s agenda, starting with a major economic package centered on taxes, energy policy, border security and deregulation, according to two people familiar with discussions.

With Republicans winning control of the Senate, delivering on Trump’s agenda will come down to whether the GOP retains a majority in the House. CNN has not yet made a projection in the battle for control of the House, with votes still being counted in dozens of races.

GOP leaders have been dreaming of another major tax package, as many tax provisions are set to expire at the end of 2025. Also on the table: potentially rolling back parts of President Joe Biden’s signature Inflation Reduction Act, a sweeping economic and climate bill that Democrats passed when they had unified government earlier in Biden’s first term, one source familiar with the discussions told CNN.

Republicans also see an opening for other big-ticket items like the House GOP’s hardline immigration proposals that have been stalled since passing their chamber last year as Senate Democrats and the Biden White House had strongly opposed that plan.

Read more about Republicans plans should they reach a governing trifecta here.

The Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, on November 6.

Wednesday morning, my inbox was flooded with notes from analysts eager to talk about the election’s upside for various sectors. Financial stocks, like banks and credit card companies, are poised to thrive. Same goes for private prisons and companies expected to eventually help carry out mass deportations. The crypto folks came on especially strong, cheering the success of the candidate who promised them the moon.

When the stock market opened in New York, the enthusiasm for these so-called Trump trades went into hyperdrive. The three major indexes soared, a sign of investors’ relief at a swift victory. The Dow had one of its best days ever. Bitcoin surged to a new record high above $75,000.

It’s possible to read the market’s reaction as a kind of validation of the president-elect’s authoritarian proposals. (And yeah, it feels like classic Wall Street tone-deafness to see some folks peddle the upsides of a campaign that has threatened violence against political opponents and journalists.)

But traders, on the whole, are just doing what traders do: Sniffing out potential profits they can cash out in the coming days and weeks.

When you step back from the scrum, many of those same traders will tell you the long term outlook for the stock market is murky at best.

“People don’t like missing opportunities to profit, so they’re rushing in and picking some stuff up that they can unload quickly enough before it all comes down,” Daniel Alpert, managing partner at Westwood Capital, told me. “There’s still significant volatility in this market … And I think we’ll still see a significant reversal of these trades as the news begins to dawn.”

Read more about the impact the Trump presidency would have on the markets here.

Press freedom groups sounded the alarm Wednesday on the potential dangers facing journalists under a second Trump administration, denouncing threats from the president-elect and his associates to undermine the news media.

In the hours after Donald Trump’s decisive victory, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Reporters Without Borders, Freedom of the Press Foundation, American Sunlight Project and Columbia Journalism Review called on the president-elect to end his attacks on the news media or altogether curb Trump’s power to prevent a destabilizing onslaught against the press.

“On the campaign trail and during his previous administration, President-elect Donald Trump has frequently deployed violent language and threats against the media. His election to a second term in office marks a dangerous moment for American journalism and global press freedom,” Reporters Without Borders said.

The groups’ fears are not without grounds. In the run-up to Election Day, Trump repeatedly threatened the Fourth Estate, often employing extreme and authoritarian rhetoric. Earlier this week, Trump told a crowd in Pennsylvania that he wouldn’t mind if journalists got shot. He also filed a lawsuit against CBS over its “60 Minutes” interview with Vice President Kamala Harris and repeatedly threatened to strip broadcasters of their licenses, saying on at least 15 occasions that television networks should have their licenses revoked over news coverage he disapproved of.

Between Sept. 1 and Oct. 24, Reporters Without Borders found that Trump insulted, attacked, or threatened the press at least 108 times across public speeches and remarks, a number that does not include Trump’s social media posts or comments made by campaign staff.

Read more about concerns for press freedoms here.

A person shops at a grocery store in Brooklyn, New York on July 11, 2024.

Donald Trump rode a powerful wave of discontent over the cost of living back to the White House.

Voters, fed up with high prices on everything from groceries to car insurance, have ousted Democrats from power in Washington.

Trump reminded voters often that inflation wasn’t a problem when he was calling the shots. And he has promised to attack high prices by shaking things up.

But if he’s not careful, Trump could have an inflation problem of his own.

Some of the very same campaign promises that appealed to voters – mass deportations and sky-high tariffs – would be inflationary if enacted, perhaps very inflationary.

Not only that, but the bond market is already getting nervous about Trump’s plans to add trillions to the national debt. Bond yields have climbed sharply, a situation that will make it more expensive to get a mortgage or home equity loan and finance the purchase of a car.

“The lesson of this election shouldn’t go unnoticed by Republicans – inflation doesn’t sit well with voters, and they won’t forget,” Ryan Sweet, chief US economist at Oxford Economics, told CNN.

Of course, it’s far too early to know which of Trump’s campaign promises will become a reality. For now, Wall Street seems largely unfazed by the inflation warnings.

Read more about how a second Trump administration could respond to inflation here.

Iran's foreign ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei holds a weekly press conference in Tehran on October 28, 2024.

Iran’s foreign ministry said on Thursday that every US election provides “opportunities for revisiting and reconsidering unjust and ill-suited approaches,” according to the state news agency IRNA.

“Our people have very bitter experiences from past consecutive American administrations,” said ministry spokesperson Esmail Baghaei, IRNA reported.

During his first term as president, Donald Trump significantly intensified pressure on Tehran, withdrawing from a 2015 agreement to curb Iran’s nuclear activity and re-imposing sanctions on the country.

Baghaei added that the American people have “made their choice” by electing Trump, adding that what matters to Iranians is Washington’s behavior moving forward.

Other leaders: A number of other foreign representatives and heads of states responded to Trump’s win on Wednesday, many offering congratulations.

Among them was Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who expressed his congratulations in a phone call Thursday. During his last presidency, Trump declared himself a “big fan” of Turkey’s strongman leader.

Turkey is a strategically important NATO member due to its geographical location in both the Middle East and Europe, and is the alliance’s second-largest military power.

On Wednesday, the NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte also said he looked forward to working with President-elect Donald Trump to face threats from North Korea and Russia.

Rutte praised Trump’s success in encouraging other NATO member states to invest at least 2% of their gross domestic product (GDP) in defense.

Rutte said European leaders would on Wednesday discuss the “dangerous new developments” of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea working together, and that he looked forward to talking about those threats with Trump.

Donald Trump is headed back to the White House. CNN’s Vanessa Yurkevich explains how his tariff plan could affect Americans:

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Analysts: Trump's tariffs likely to raise costs for U.S. consumers

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President-elect Donald Trump speaks during an election night event in West Palm Beach, Florida, on November 06, 2024.

Donald Trump believes presidents have almost absolute power. In his second term, there will be few political or legal restraints to check him.

The president-elect’s sweeping victory over Vice President Kamala Harris suddenly turned the theoretical notion that he will indulge his autocratic instincts into a genuine possibility.

When Trump returns to the White House in January as one of the most powerful presidents in history, he’ll be able to take advantage of his own filleting of guardrails during his first presidency, which he continued through legal maneuverings out of office.

It’s not guaranteed that just because Trump has massive power he will spurn constitutional checks and balances. But the lesson of Trump’s business and political careers is that he seeks to obliterate all constraints.

He has, for instance, crushed opposition in the Republican Party and driven out political heretics who oppose his “Make America Great Again” creed. This will be increasingly significant since the GOP has already flipped the Senate and still hopes to complete a monopoly on Washington power by keeping the House, which CNN has not yet projected.

No other president has come into office armed with a Supreme Court ruling that grants significant immunity to presidents for official acts. The decision, a direct result of Trump’s effort to challenge his federal indictment for 2020 election meddling, is limited — but he is certain to take an expansive view of its meaning. The ruling emerged from a conservative court majority fashioned by Trump in his first term and that many legal observers now see as a rubber stamp on future power grabs.

Perhaps most significantly, Trump can claim democratic legitimacy for what is already shaping up as the most intemperate presidency of the modern era, after increasing his vote share across multiple demographics.

Read the full analysis.

Donald Trump arrives on stage during a town hall campaign event in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, on October 20, 2024.

Toward the end of Donald Trump’s last presidency, he issued an executive order reclassifying civil service workers — whose jobs are nonpartisan and protected — as political appointees who could be fired at will.

It had little effect as President Joe Biden rescinded the order as soon as he took office a few months later.

Now, that order could be restored in Trump’s second term — with his campaign website vowing to “remove rogue bureaucrats,” sweeping away protections that have been in place for more than 140 years.

“We’re talking about people who work on anything from national security to national parks,” said Jessica Levinson, a professor at Loyola Law School.

“In the first Trump term, civil servants did act in some instances as a resistance against Trump’s impulses to overreach,” she told CNN’s Rosemary Church on Wednesday. But the second time around, he might try to “replace them with loyalists,” she said.

Policy experts have warned that Trump’s plans would hollow out and politicize the federal workforce, force out many of the most experienced and knowledgeable employees, and open the door to corruption and a spoils system of political patronage.

A Ukrainian soldier in a trench 100 meters from Russian positions in the Serebryansky forest of Ukraine on November 6, 2024.

Bets were hedged, upsides conjured and insurance policies crafted. But ultimately, most hoped it would not happen.

Ukraine and its NATO allies have had for months to entertain the idea of a Donald Trump victory, juggling conceits of a strongman US president who might be a yet tougher ally, a dealmaker who might bring a favorable peace, or fresh eyes who might see a new end to a fatiguing war.

This was but a comforting fiction: The road ahead for Kyiv is extremely stark. There should be no enduring mystery about what a Trump presidency means for Ukraine. Trump has said he would end the war “in 24 hours,” but not how. He also said that “Zelensky should never have let that war start,” and dubbed him “one of the greatest salesmen I have ever seen” who gets $100 billion on every visit to Congress.

As of this morning, the fact these statements are wild exaggerations ceased to really matter. They became the warped lens through which the president-elect of the United States will perceive the largest conflict in Europe since the Nazis.

Trump may appoint a cabinet that mildly adjusts the pace or tone of his instincts, but in the end he wants out. It doesn’t matter that strategically Ukraine’s war has so far provided the Pentagon with a comparatively cheap means of degrading its second greatest adversary at no cost to American life.

It is an anathema to two of Trump’s first term dislikes: costly US military engagement abroad, and upsetting Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Read more about what could happen in Ukraine under a Trump presidency.

Donald Trump walks off stage after speaking, during an election night event in West Palm Beach, Florida, on November 06, 2024.

Donald Trump’s election victory will return him to the White House, but both his allies and detractors have made clear his second time around will look nothing like the first.

With the Republican Party now entirely his, its anti-Trump figures banished for good, Trump will enter the Oval Office with both the experience of having done the job before and a wealth of resentments over how he believes the system failed him.

Figures who once hoped to act as stabilizing forces — including a string of chiefs of staff, defense secretaries, a national security adviser, a national intelligence adviser and an attorney general — have abandoned Trump, leaving behind a string of recriminations about his character and abilities.

They’ve been replaced by a cohort of advisers and officials uninterested in keeping Trump in check. Instead of acting as bulwarks against him, those working for Trump this time around share his views and are intent on upholding the extreme pledges he made as a candidate without concern for norms, traditions or law that past aides sought to maintain.

Trump’s axis of influence has shifted greatly since he left office. While his daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, were once prominent campaign surrogates and senior White House staffers, they’ve since stepped away from the daily churn of politics. She has made clear she has no plans to return to the West Wing, and while Kushner has been involved in the transition efforts, sources said he was unlikely to leave his private equity firm.

Instead, Trump has found himself relying on people such as Donald Trump Jr., Elon Musk and Susie Wiles throughout his third run for the White House.

Read more about a reimagined Trump White House.

American voters have spoken, and they decided to rehire Donald Trump as president of the United States.

But he won’t take office until January 20 and there are multiple events between now and then.

Some of the key dates are:

CNN’s Phil Mattingly walks us through the process:

Here’s a full roadmap of the key dates.

Donald Trump attends his hush money trial at Manhattan Criminal Court in New York, on May 30, 2024. He is awaiting sentencing for his convictions in this case.

Donald Trump has been reelected to the White House as a convicted felon who is awaiting sentencing in his hush money case and still working to stave off prosecution in other state and federal cases.

It’s an extraordinarily unique position for him to be in: Never before has a criminal defendant been elected to the nation’s highest office, and an ex-president had never been criminally charged until last year.

Trump has said multiple times he plans to fire special counsel Jack Smith and end the federal cases against him for trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election and mishandling classified documents.

Here’s where things stand:

People react after an abortion rights amendment to the Missouri constitution passed, on November 5, 2024, at a watch party in Kansas City, Missouri.

More than two years after the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and ended the nationwide right to an abortion, voters in 10 states cast ballots on whether to cement reproductive rights in their constitutions.

Measures to protect abortion access will pass in Arizona and Missouri, where citizens effectively voted to overturn their state’s bans. Abortion rights supporters are hopeful this will lead to a widespread increase in access to reproductive care in those states.

Similar measures will pass in Colorado, New York, Maryland, Montana and Nevada, cementing or expanding current abortion access.

Measures to protect abortion failed in Florida, where the procedure is banned six weeks into pregnancy, and South Dakota, where it is banned, except to save the life of the mother.

In Nebraska, an amendment cementing the state’s ban on abortions after 12 weeks will pass, while a competing amendment to codify the right to an abortion will fail, CNN projects.

Learn more about how Americans voted on abortion in these 10 states.

Republicans will win the US Senate majority, CNN projects, shifting the balance of power in Washington and putting the chamber in position to boost Donald Trump’s presidency.

With several races still to be declared, Republicans now have 52 seats in the chamber and will assume control under a yet-to-be chosen Republican leader when the new Congress convenes in January.

The new GOP Senate will be in a position to back Trump’s agenda and to resume the ex-president’s significant reshaping of the judiciary with scores more conservatives.

The Senate takeover was a big success on election night for Republicans, while the destiny of the House of Representatives, where the GOP is trying to defend its narrow majority, remains up in the air.

It could take a week or more before control of the House officially determined. With some races still yet to be called, Republicans have 209 seats and Democrats have 191. Either party needs 218 seats to have a majority.