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JUDY WOODRUFF: For more on Donald Trump’s stunning upset and what it means, we are joined by Ellen Fitzpatrick, presidential historian and author of the book “The Highest Glass Ceiling, Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union, J.D. Vance, author of the new book “Hillbilly Elegy,” Betsy McCaughey, former lieutenant governor of New York and an economic adviser to the Trump campaign. Stefanie Brown James, she’s the former director of African-American outreach for President Obama’s 2012 campaign, and Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum.

And we welcome all of you to the “NewsHour.”

I just want to go around the group first and ask you just to give me a sentence, starting with you, Matt Schlapp, on your reaction today. What do you think about these results?

MATT SCHLAPP, Chair, American Conservative Union: Well, I have to say I feel a bit vindicated. It’s been a tough campaign, I think, for both sides. It’s been grueling.

The word I kept using was raw. And I think nobody expected or very few people expected for Trump to just explode in the Electoral College like he did. And it’s a fantastic night for anybody who wanted change in Washington.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Stefanie Brown James?

STEFANIE BROWN JAMES, CEO, Vestige Strategies: I think raw is actually a great question — I mean, a great response that Matt gave.

A lot of people that are in my community are feeling very raw today because the wounds that Donald Trump opened when he had so many disparaging remarks against minorities, against women, we continue to have those wounds really rubbed into today with him now being the president.

And a lot of us are wondering,how do we tell our children that a person who can be, you know, a bully, who can talk badly about women is now the president of our country?

JUDY WOODRUFF: Betsy McCaughey, what are you thinking today?

ELIZABETH MCCAUGHEY, Economic Advisor, Trump Campaign: The results were a repudiation of Hillary Clinton’s class warfare rhetoric.

Americans don’t hate rich people. They would like to be rich. And Donald Trump’s proposals to lift everyone by increasing prosperity, more jobs, more take-home pay really resounded.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Ali Noorani?

ALI NOORANI, Executive Director, National Immigration Forum: I think the Trump victory has tapped an emotional nerve.

So, I would capture this as a very emotional day. When you talk — when we’re talking to people across the Latino community, the Asian community and their allies across the broad American public, there are a lot of raw emotions, some obviously in favor of Trump, the Trump win, and others really wondering where we’re all going.

JUDY WOODRUFF: J.D. Vance, where are you today?

J.D. VANCE, Author, “Hillbilly Elegy”: Well, I think it’s just remarkable how wrong the conventional wisdom was.

It was utterly shocking that Donald Trump won to people who live on the coasts, but to people who live in the areas that I come from, it was utterly predictable. And that suggests something really, really broken about our political culture.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And Ellen Fitzpatrick?

ELLEN FITZPATRICK, Author, “The Highest Glass Ceiling”: Well, I was surprised the polling with you so inaccurate, in some sense, and I was also — I really thought having, as a historian, studied the history of women’s quest for the American presidency over a long period of time, since Victoria Woodhull ran the for presidency first in 1872, that Hillary Clinton was going to break through that glass ceiling this time.

I did have that expectation. So, I was quite stunned, actually.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Matt Schlapp, I wanted to ask you, what’s the message that all these millions of voters who voted for Trump, what are they sending?

MATT SCHLAPP: I just feel like they feel like they’re cut out of what’s happening in Washington. They feel like they’re cut out of the economic opportunities that Americans always felt was a part of the American dream.

You know, when you don’t have your real income, your take-home pay increase for a decade or a decade-and-a-half, it makes you awfully discouraged. And then when you see other things in society changing so rapidly, and you think that government is ineffective and unable to — incapable of taking steps, appropriate steps to make sure that America can lead, lead on the international stage and lead the international economy, I think that was so much of this.

But I think it was also — look, it was a repudiation — I think the voters like President Obama. He has very high approvals. I give him credit for that. But I do think his policies have hurt more people. You can see that by the poverty statistics. And I think this was a bit of repudiation of Obamacare and his policies.

I also think Hillary’s corruption, she just could never get through that. Look at all those exit polls. They’re just astonishing. The voters really made a judgment on Hillary Clinton’s ethics.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Stefanie Brown James, I wanted to ask, that message that those voters are sending, counter that with the message that the Hillary Clinton campaign was sending and which — why didn’t her message, if she had one that was clear, why didn’t that prevail?

STEFANIE BROWN JAMES: Well, I think that’s a major challenge, in that a lot of people, especially in the black community, Latino community, didn’t feel as though Hillary Clinton had a direct enough message for them to explain why she was the right choice, not just based off of experience, but what it was that she was going to do for these communities to continue to uplift them if she became elected president.

One of the challenges that I have been saying for a long time is that, you know, a campaign is won by your infrastructure and your ground game. And, unfortunately, what we didn’t see enough from the Clinton campaign was a strong enough ground game to reach out to voters, to get real-time, real information from people who you were asking for their votes, to be able to determine how best to continue to engage them.

And I think that the Clinton campaign and the Democrats relied too heavily on President Obama to turn out the base of voters they needed to get Hillary Clinton the win. And what we saw was that enough effort wasn’t put in to make sure that those voters who needed to go to the polls in strong numbers, African-American, women, youth, Latinos, it just wasn’t enough.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Betsy McCaughey.

BETSY MCCAUGHEY: I would like to jump in on that issue of the ground game, because I drew the opposite conclusion, that this election really demonstrated that emphasis on the ground game is now obsolete.

Donald Trump had virtually no ground game, although the RNC had something of a ground game. He spent less than half as much winning this presidency as his opponent, Hillary Clinton, did.

And I have to say, the taxpayers are hoping that he will be as effective at getting his money’s worth as president as he was as a candidate.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Ali — go ahead, Stefanie.

STEFANIE BROWN JAMES: But they were reaching two very different audiences with two very different tactics.

If you are drawing upon the emotional concerns of voters, as Matt mentioned, who are very much concerned that the America they know is being taken over by people who don’t look like them — let’s be frank — then that’s an emotional appeal that is not going to be the same as for black voters, for example, who you need to knock on their doors and have conversations to say why they need to vote for Hillary Clinton.

This is not about why they should or shouldn’t vote for Donald Trump. It’s about, why should you vote for Hillary Clinton? And you need that ground game in order to have people understand why she should be your choice. And that, unfortunately, didn’t happen in strong enough numbers.

JUDY WOODRUFF: I want to bring Ali Noorani in here in terms of the message.

Was it a case of Hillary Clinton not getting that message across, or was it that Donald Trump’s appeal was just to powerful, it overwhelmed whatever Hillary Clinton was doing?

ALI NOORANI: Well, when you look at the numbers, I mean, Hillary’s message resonated in urban areas.

But Donald Trump clearly tapped into a nerve across suburban and rural America that we just haven’t seen tapped in such a powerful way before. He overperformed what Romney was able to do in 2012 and he was able to run up those margins. So, I think, at the end of the day, this was an election not just about an emotion, but this emotion of anxiety, and an anxiety that was triggered by economic fears, cultural fears.

So, we have been looking, and as we have been thinking about this over the last day, this is a moment where we…

JUDY WOODRUFF: This is the Immigration Forum.

ALI NOORANI: Right, right, at the forum, looking at this election as one about culture and values and what it means to be an American.

And when you look at over the last few months, a lot of people, yes, they — a lot of Trump voters want to see a solution in terms of immigration. They want to see greater regulation, a greater, a stronger border. But some of their solutions actually are different from what the candidate put forward.

So I think Donald Trump has an incredible challenge to translate his campaign promises into a consensus-building policy.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Betsy McCaughey, do the rest of Americans have something to fear when it comes to this gap between what Donald Trump had said on the campaign trail vs. what he might do as president?

BETSY MCCAUGHEY: I don’t…

HARI SREENIVASAN: I mean, you see the social conversations today, that there’s a huge group of people, whether it’s women, whether it’s minorities, whether it’s immigrants, who are concerned that they don’t know where they stand with the new president.

BETSY MCCAUGHEY: Yes. Well, actually, I found most of his message quite unifying, because the emphasis was on prosperity.

I did want to touch upon something that one of our contributors said a moment ago about women and failing to break the glass ceiling. And here’s how I see this. Hillary Clinton was urging voters to make history, but a lot of voters, particularly women, had trouble with her history.

And she was portraying herself as a feminist, as a glass ceiling breaker, but, in fact, in the eyes of many women, especially women closer to Hillary Clinton’s own age, she had gotten where she was primarily on her husband’s coattails.

She was less a Susan B. Anthony and more an Evita. And so they found this unconvincing. And millennial women who are out there every day competing with men don’t see the issue.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Ellen Fitzpatrick?

ELLEN FITZPATRICK: I think this kind of rhetoric and exaggeration that has really informed this entire campaign does very little to elevate the political process.

And it’s very unfortunate. It was amazing last night to see Donald Trump, who had been describing Hillary Clinton as crooked and corrupt, in a matter of a moment, was describing her as a fine and dedicated public servant, once he had won the election.

So, there was a kind of barbarism all the way around, I think, in this political campaign, in which the issues really were boiled down to very small sound bites. The impact of mass media on presidential elections, a process in television which really began in 1960, is reaching its logical conclusion here. And I think it’s — the public is not well-served by it, frankly.

JUDY WOODRUFF: J.D. Vance, in your book “Hillbilly Elegy,” you deal, of course, with white working-class Americans, many of whom you write about feeling forgotten, disrespected.

What do you think they are now looking for Donald Trump to do, and do you think he can deliver for them? Well, just answer the first part yet. What do you think they’re looking for from him?

J.D. VANCE: Well, the first thing that I think they’re looking for, they have already gotten, which is a sense of vindication that they predicted, they knew that the media was corrupt, that they were lying about the outcome of the election, and Donald Trump really proved them right in some ways.

So, I think that there should be some soul-searching from the press, who predicted that Trump would lose very, very handily. But, of course, that didn’t happen. And I think that corrodes some of the trust that a lot of folks back home have in the mainstream press.

(CROSSTALK)

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, if I could just interrupt for a second, that was based on polls that pretty universally were showing Hillary Clinton ahead, because we don’t do our own polling. But go ahead, please.

J.D. VANCE: Yes. No, of course.

I’m not trying to be hyper-critical of the press, but I think that even the polls suggested a fair amount of volatility. And there was a certain degree of certainty, even though I don’t think that certainty was necessarily supported by the polls that suggested Hillary Clinton was slightly ahead, but not very comfortably ahead, as a lot of folks talked about.

But I think what people want to see from the Trump presidency is, fundamentally, they want to see a more repaired and better path to the middle class. What a lot of folks feel — and some of the other commenters have mentioned this — is that there isn’t a very clear way for somebody who’s working-class, who is middle-income to really get ahead in 21st century America.

That implicates our education system. It also implicates our local and regional economies. And I think that folks will expect Trump to fix a lot of those things. But, of course, it’s a really tall order, and it’s not going to happen overnight.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Matt Schlapp, sometimes, the saying is that campaigning is the easy part, governing is the hard part.

As J.D. Vance just said, there’s a lot of expectations that people have. All those people that put Trump into office, they want to see results. And now, technically speaking, no excuses. Congress, both the House and the Senate, are Republican, as well as the White House. What is the Trump deliverable in the first day, first 100 days, first year?

MATT SCHLAPP: Yes, you know what? It’s going to be time for us to put up or shut up.

You know, it’s hard to reverse all of the problems we have seen in the economy that we have seen with these working-class voters, these blue-collar voters that turned out in just droves for Donald Trump.

But there are actually some easy things we could do. Our tax — our corporate tax structure is a disaster. And many of us who are small business people actually pay at higher rates than corporations do. We have some of the highest corporate taxes in the globe.

And what we’re seeing is that corporations are leaving America for the sole reason of taxes. Second of all, we could do something about our regulatory structure.

Look, you could look at climate change. The impact of chasing after regulating carbon dioxide has really shed our economy of manufacturing jobs and additional energy jobs. We all know about the war on coal. We can all have our opinions on things like climate change, but we can’t disagree on the fact that it has shed so many jobs in these communities and in these states, states that Donald Trump did very well in.

So, Republicans, of which I’m a proud member of that party, being in control of Congress, although we don’t have 60 votes in the Senate — and it’s always important to say that, which is, there is still going to be bipartisanship and all these things — we really ought to do something on our taxes, and we ought to do something on our regulatory structure. And ought to be more competitive internationally.

And then the investments that are sitting on the sidelines would start to flow into our economy. I really think middle-class America will be well-served by that, and, of course, a fix of Obamacare.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Let me turn to Stefanie Brown James, because you started out, Stefanie, by talking about raw feelings in the African-American community, the communities of people of color in this country.

If this principal focus of a new President Donald Trump is on economic issues like what we just heard Matt Schlapp and Betsy McCaughey describe, does that in some way reassure, assuage some of the concerns that you expressed?

STEFANIE BROWN JAMES: I mean, definitely, you know, there is no doubt about that, you know, communities of color are very much concerned about the economy, being able to make sure that they have enough food to give their families. So, poverty is also a big issue.

But the challenge comes down to respect. And if there is a president who you feel doesn’t fundamentally see you as an equal to other Americans, doesn’t respect you, doesn’t respect your life, then it doesn’t matter what policy position they put forward or what plans they put forward, because the humanity — you feel your humanity is not being seen by your own president or your own government.

But, to be quite frank, you know, I’m excited to see what the Republican Congress is going to do, what this new Republican president is going to do, because I do think that it is time to show up and to prove that the policies that they say they want to put forth that’s going to, you know, help the middle class, that it’s going to actually make a difference.

I think people conveniently like to forget that, you know, President Obama inherited a doomsday economy, so I want to see what this Republican-led government is going to do to get us into a better shape.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Ali Noorani, I just wanted to pick up on something that she just said. How do you get these communities to feel respected?

ALI NOORANI: Well, I think we’re in for an interesting ride.

I should start with, I do not believe that every person that voted for Donald Trump is a xenophobe or a racist. On the other hand, some of the things that Donald Trump said over the course of the campaign gave voice and gave permission to people to do some very, very terrible things.

Just today, I saw news of a swastika being painted on walls in Philadelphia. So we’re going to unfortunately see these kinds of things as we move forward through this administration.

President-elect Trump, when he becomes President Trump, is going to have an incredible opportunity to heal this country and to be able to, in essence, take that permission away.

MATT SCHLAPP: Oh, just very quickly on this respect question, I think that’s so right.

But, remember, I think actually this really boomeranged on Hillary Clinton. We focused so much on Donald Trump’s rhetoric. But when she called Donald Trump supporters a basket of deplorables, you can see it in the exits. It just destroyed her with these voters.

And when called Christians — not her, but her staff in these leaked e-mails — called Catholics and Christians backwards, you can just see Donald Trump did — he actually won Catholic voters. So, you know, this idea of rhetoric out of control is something that really hurt Hillary Clinton in this race.

JUDY WOODRUFF: J.D. Vance, how do you see this playing out?

J.D. VANCE: Well, I think that, first of all, Donald Trump and the Republican Party has to recognize that, though they obviously won this election, if you look at their low numbers among black voters, among Latino voters, this is not a long-term coalition that they can build on.

And so I really do think it comes down to respect. It comes down to being gracious. It comes down to really showing compassion for the problems of the black and Latino communities. And I really hope that Donald Trump takes the ball that’s in his court and tries to go after those voters, tries to show some compassion, and really offers them something substantive to get excited about Republican and conservative policy.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Just a final word from Ellen Fitzpatrick on bringing the country together. Is it possible?

ELLEN FITZPATRICK: Of course it’s possible, Judy.

This was a very close election. And, in fact, I believe Hillary Clinton, at least the latest count, shows that she won the popular vote. There was a lopsided vote in the Electoral College, as there often is.

So, we remain a very divided electorate. And it will be, of course, an imperative of the new president to try to address those divisions and to bring the country together in order to govern.

This is not a — this is not “The Apprentice.” And, in four years, you’re fired if you’re not able to address the concerns of the American citizens. So, it’s a tall order for someone without experience in politics or military service, and it’s a new model. We will get to see how it plays out.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, the conversations are just beginning. This is only the first day after we have learned the results of the election. But we are so glad that you were all able to join us.

Ellen Fitzpatrick, Matt Schlapp, we thank you. J.D. Vance, Stefanie Brown James, Betsy McCaughey, and Ali Noorani, we thank you.

The post What America is thinking the day after the election appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

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JUDY WOODRUFF: So, the presidential race is decided, and Republicans will still control both houses of Congress, with slightly smaller majorities.

In the Senate, Republicans won at least 51 seats, and they’re favored to win a runoff in Louisiana next month. Democrats added two more Senate seats, including New Hampshire. Democrat Maggie Hassan defeated Kelly Ayotte, the Republican incumbent.

Over in the House, Republicans won at least 238 seats. Now, that’s down nine from their current number.

HARI SREENIVASAN: We dig in now on what we learned from the presidential results and what voters said leaving the polls.

We turn to Lisa Desjardins, who is joined once again by Amy Walter of The Cook Political Report.

LISA DESJARDINS: Amy Walter, nine hours we were here together last night. Imagine seeing each other again so soon.

AMY WALTER, The Cook Political Report: I never want to leave here.

LISA DESJARDINS: Thank you for joining us.

AMY WALTER: Of course.

LISA DESJARDINS: So, America is becoming more diverse. And as we look at what happened last night, we had been talking going into this election a lot about race.

That was supposed to help Hillary Clinton, but what actually happened?

AMY WALTER: Yes. And what we saw from the exit polls last night is a couple of things.

The first is, Donald Trump did a little bit better than Mitt Romney did among white voters.

LISA DESJARDINS: I think we have got some data.

AMY WALTER: But not by a whole lot, by one point. You will see Mitt Romney 20 points, Donald Trump 21 points.

But there’s another side of the story is that the African-American and Latino percentage that Clinton got, impressive, winning by 80 and 36 percent, but not the margins that Barack Obama got.

And there is another story in there as well, and I think that we look at white voters. We have been dividing white voters into these different groups. And we have talked a lot about white college-educated voters. These were the voters that the Clinton campaign thought were going to tip the victory to her. She was going to get a combination of the Obama coalition, those younger, more diverse voters, as well as the suburban white women who lived in and around big cities.

She did better than Barack Obama.

LISA DESJARDINS: And this is specifically among white women.

AMY WALTER: White women.

LISA DESJARDINS: OK.

AMY WALTER: But look at — Donald Trump did eight points better among those without a college degree.

Now, she performed 12 points better. He was eight points better. And it showed up on the map.

LISA DESJARDINS: So, what you’re saying here is that she did well with traditional Democratic Obama coalition forces, but just not as well as President Obama.

AMY WALTER: Not as well as President Obama. I think…

LISA DESJARDINS: And did they show up for her as well? You’re saying she didn’t get as high a percentage of those who came to show up, who came to the polls, but did as many blacks, as many Hispanics come out, or did more whites, did they have higher turnout?

AMY WALTER: I was just digging into one state in particular, which was Michigan. And it was clear that Detroit didn’t turn out at the level for her that it did for Barack Obama.

On top of that, she did much worse in some of the exurban or rural parts of the state. Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania all tell the same story.

LISA DESJARDINS: That’s what I wanted to get to. I think that was the biggest surprise last night was this blue wall of Hillary Clinton’s. Maybe there never was a wall this year, or certainly collapsed very quickly.

AMY WALTER: I said this on election night.

If you had told me going into this election that a Democrat was going to win Virginia and Colorado, I would have said, well, that candidate is going to probably win the nomination. Those are two big — they were two of the closest states last time.

And that what I wouldn’t expect, of course, is that Wisconsin and Michigan, two states that have gone for Democrats since 1988, would flip to Republican. And a lot of that is built on this, whichever states that have more women who graduated from college, those who have fewer women who graduated from college.

When you look at the numbers in those states, you can see that, in Wisconsin and Michigan, yes, it was a blue wall. It was a blue wall for Democrats when Democrats were doing better among white voters, and specifically white voters who didn’t live in urban areas, or white voters who didn’t have a college education.

LISA DESJARDINS: So, OK, all of this is about demographics. But I wonder, Amy, is the point that last night was not about demographics, that there is something else going on?

AMY WALTER: That’s absolutely true. And I think a lot of us in the business, we got really wedded to this idea of demographics, especially because we watched Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 with this amazing analytics team that told us that you could actually look at the demographics of an electorate and understand where they were going to vote.

LISA DESJARDINS: It’s mathematical.

AMY WALTER: It’s all about math, but really it’s also about message. Barack Obama had a message. It was hope and change. It was that he had the auto bailout. He was working for people.

Hillary Clinton didn’t have that message. It didn’t address the rising anxiety and frustration and anger that’s been brewing there, the time for change theme. Donald Trump did.

LISA DESJARDINS: Amy Walter of The Cook Political Report, I look forward to what you find out in the next week of reading through and your analysis.

AMY WALTER: Thank you.

LISA DESJARDINS: Thank you.

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JUDY WOODRUFF: Hillary Clinton summed up her crushing loss to Donald Trump today, saying, “This is painful, and it will be for a long time.”

As for the new president-elect, he stayed out of sight after claiming victory in the wee hours. That left the national stage today to Clinton, for perhaps one last time.

The sting of their shocking loss was visible on the faces of Clinton supporters and staffers in New York this morning as she conceded defeat.

HILLARY CLINTON (D), Presidential Nominee: Last night, I congratulated Donald Trump and offered to work with him on behalf of our country.

I hope that he will be a successful president for all Americans. We have seen that our nation is more deeply divided than we thought, but I still believe in America, and I always will. And, if you do, then we must accept this result and then look to the future. Donald Trump is going to be our president. We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead.

JUDY WOODRUFF: The concession came hours after Trump was declared the winner, with more than the 270 electoral votes needed for election, though Clinton led late today in the popular vote. She urged supporters, especially young people and women, not to lose heart.

HILLARY CLINTON: I have had successes and I have had setbacks, sometimes really painful ones.

Many of you are at the beginning of your professional, public and political careers. You will have successes and setbacks too. This loss hurts, but please never stop believing that fighting for what’s right is worth it.

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

HILLARY CLINTON: I know — I know we have still not shattered that highest and hardest glass ceiling, but, someday, someone will, and hopefully sooner than we might think right now.

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

JUDY WOODRUFF: Roughly nine hours earlier, president-elect Trump had declared victory, applauding his opponent and calling for national unity.

DONALD TRUMP (R), President-Elect: Hillary has worked very long and very hard over a long period of time. And we owe her a major debt of gratitude for her service to our country. I mean that very sincerely.

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

DONALD TRUMP: Now it’s time for America to bind the wounds of division. We have to get together. To all Republicans and Democrats and independents across this nation, I say it is time for us to come together as one united people.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Trump also reprised some of the themes of his campaign, hinting at potential priorities for his coming administration.

DONALD TRUMP: I have spent my entire life in business looking at the untapped potential in projects and in people all over the world. That is now what I want to do for our country. The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer.

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

JUDY WOODRUFF: President Obama had gone all out to make Clinton his successor, but with the question decided, he announced he will meet with Trump tomorrow.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: The presidency and the vice presidency is bigger than any of us. So, I have instructed my team to follow the example that President Bush’s team set eight years ago, and work as hard as we can to make sure that this is a successful transition for the president-elect, because we are now all rooting for his success in uniting and leading the country.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Like Clinton, Mr. Obama had argued Trump was unfit for the White House. Today, he urged Americans to accept the result.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: We try really hard to persuade people that we are right. And then people vote. And then, if we lose, we learn from our mistakes. We do some reflection. We lick our wounds. We brush ourselves off. We get back in the arena. We got at it. We try even harder the next time.

JUDY WOODRUFF: The election outcome brought out strong feelings from both sides overnight, outside Trump Tower in New York.

MAN: We have had eight years of a liberal person telling us that Middle America was nothing. And, tonight, they came and said, you know what, we are — we are America.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And in Washington, outside the White House itself.

MAN: As a gay, black and Latino man, I’m scared. It sucks.

(LAUGHTER)

MAN: This is not the way that I envisioned America in 2016 to be at all.

JUDY WOODRUFF: But Republican leaders in Congress who kept their distance from Trump embraced the result today.

REP. PAUL RYAN, Speaker of the House: Look at what a unified Republican government can get you.

JUDY WOODRUFF: In Wisconsin, House Speaker Paul Ryan lauded the ongoing Republican majorities in Congress, and put supporters of President Obama’s health care law on notice.

REP. PAUL RYAN: This health care law is collapsing under its own weight. And so, to your specific question about repealing and replacing Obamacare, the problem is, President Obama vetoed it. Now we have President Trump coming, who is asking us to do this. So, with unified Republican government, we can fix this. We can fix these problems.

JUDY WOODRUFF: The Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, was also out today, after having little to say about Trump during the campaign.

SEN. MITCH MCCONNELL, Majority Leader: Well, I know he’s really happy we still have a Republican majority. And we look forward to working with him. I think most of the things that he’s likely to advocate, we’re going to be enthusiastically for.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Now the president-elect has 73 days to work on his agenda in Congress and his transition before he takes office on January 20.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Our John Yang and Jeffrey Brown spent the final days on the road following the Trump and Clinton campaigns, and join us now from, where it all came to an end last night, in New York.

Jeff Brown, I want to start with you. You were there at the celebration last night, and today you were outside Trump Tower. What did you see? Who did you talk to?

JEFFREY BROWN: I was at Trump Tower this afternoon, Hari.

Things heard calmed down by this afternoon. You heard last night, it was a little bit more dramatic. This afternoon, it was a classic New York, New York, scene, lots of people gawking across the street. We were all held across the street, some demonstrators, a few demonstrators, anti-Trump. A few Trump supporters were there, cops saying, you know, take your photos and move on, folks, take your photos and move on, folks, that kind of situation.

The most dramatic thing was that, in front of the Trump Tower, where I think I counted seven or eight very large dump trucks filled with sand, those are obviously for protection against explosives. Something about the — tells you about the world we live in today.

And I can’t help but — I couldn’t help but reflect as I was there on the — again going back to thinking about last night, the surreal nature of much of this, to be looking at Trump Tower, the wealth of Fifth Avenue. Gucci is in the bottom floor of wealth tower — of Trump Tower — excuse me — to think about how this wealthy New York businessman somehow managed to connect with so many Americans and is now our president-elect.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Jeff, you were telling us that today you reached out to connect with some of the people, Trump supporters you met when you were following him on the campaign trail. Tell us about that.

JEFFREY BROWN: Well, I did, Judy.

And I was thinking, being there last night, I can’t help, still can’t help but think that so many of the people I was with in that room didn’t think that what happened would happen. They of course wanted to win. Many thought there might be a win. But I don’t think they expected quite what we saw.

So, I went back to talk to some of the people that I had met over the last week, thinking to myself that I was surprised by last night. But when I go back and think about people I talked to and what I saw, I’m much less surprised. I talked to the Zan Bunn, who is the head of the North Carolina Federation of Republican Women, and she went directly to Obamacare.

You just mentioned that in your lead-in tape piece. She said, remember, people were opening their envelopes with their much higher premium at the exact moment when they were opening their ballots, their absentee ballots to vote. And there was that disconnect there for people.

She said people do not want, just decided they didn’t want more of the same.

I talked to Ann Selzer, the pollster in Iowa. She said it was just really clear in Iowa the trade issue was resonating. You drive along the roads in Iowa, you see factories closed, towns dried up. And I had talked to her about Iowa when I was there, but what we saw last night, it was clear that that had connected much further up into parts of the Midwest.

And I talked to Jeff Kaufmann from the Iowa Republican Committee. And he just said it came down to Americans looking at two imperfect candidates, but looking and feeling like the best chance of having real change was through Donald Trump.

HARI SREENIVASAN: All right, thanks, Jeff.

Also want to check in with John Yang.

John, the mood looked almost very much somber, almost like a funeral today, at least from what we could see on TV, where Hillary Clinton and her supporters were.

JOHN YANG: Well, that wasn’t just supporters, Hari. That was senior staff. Those were the staffers from the Hillary for America Organization from the office in Brooklyn.

And it was absolutely shell-shocked in there. No one saw this coming that I could talk to. Everyone — I asked them when they saw — as they were going in, when they first got the senses of trouble, and they all said that it wasn’t until well into the night last night it was that they started to get the sense that things were not going as they anticipated.

I tried to engage them and tried to find out, well, what do you think happened? What do you think if you had done this earlier in Michigan, if you had done that in another state? And they just waved me off. One of them said, “I have never been less interested in talking about this than now.”

JUDY WOODRUFF: John, just quickly, there was some comment today about the fact that Hillary Clinton waited until this morning to give her speech. What about — what was the thinking behind that?

JOHN YANG: Well, I have got a couple of things, one, practical. They had to get out of the Javits Center at 2:00 a.m. this morning. There was another event moving in and they had to tear down that elaborate setup and set up for the National Association of Broadcasters.

The other thing is that they really weren’t ready. They had to look at the races that were still open, look and try to figure out where the votes were, whether they had a shot in any of the states that were still open. And also, quite frankly, I don’t think that they were — that she, that Hillary Clinton was emotionally or psychologically ready to give that speech last night.

HARI SREENIVASAN: All right, John Yang and Jeffrey Brown joining us from New York tonight, thank you so much.

JEFFREY BROWN: You’re welcome.

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A young boy stands with other anti-Trump demonstrators during a candlelight vigil in front of the White House in Washington November 9, 2016. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque – RTX2SWXX

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Across America, many members of minority groups awoke Wednesday to something that had seemed an implausible nightmare just a day earlier: President-elect Donald Trump.

After a race that shattered norms of civility and restraint, Trump’s ascendency to the White House on the power of overwhelming white support left some with the sinking feeling that they now live in a country where they simply don’t matter. Some said they even worry that they are potentially in danger because of the color of their skin, the God they worship or the language they speak.

“I’m like literally an enemy of the state now,” said Black Lives Matter activist Mercutio Southall, 32, who was roughed-up by Trump supporters a year ago after disrupting one of the candidate’s rallies in Birmingham.

Trump received minority votes in his stunning win over Democrat Hillary Clinton, and he made conciliatory comments about unity in his victory speech. But some minority citizens who didn’t support the Republican nominee said they fear what the next four years might bring.

“It looks like we are going back to the back of the bus,” said NAACP member George Rudolph, 65, a black Vietnam veteran whose wife Sarah was seriously injured in the Ku Klux Klan church bombing that killed four black girls in Birmingham in 1963.

Rudolph said Trump’s election evokes a time decades ago when segregationist Alabama Gov. George Wallace stoked crowds with similar rhetoric.

In Los Angeles, just hours after Trump was projected as the next president, Martha Arevalo of the Central American Resource Center said her office already was fielding calls from immigrants who fear they will be targeted for deportation under a Trump presidency.

“This is very, very scary for our families, and they are afraid,” said Arevalo, the center’s executive director. “What we are telling them is we will continue to fight and we will continue to try to protect them as much as possible.”

The nature of the divided vote is behind some of the concern. After promising to “make America great again” — which some heard as a call to return the nation to a time when white men ran almost everything — Trump won the presidency with staggering support from white men. Exit polls and unofficial returns reflected that his backers were older, more male and overwhelmingly white compared to Clinton supporters.

Clinton drew support from a diverse coalition resembling the one that twice elected Barack Obama as president. She carried women, young voters and nonwhites with margins that could leave her actually winning the national popular vote while losing the electoral tally.

At North Carolina Central University in Durham, sophomore Jamon Carlton said he still hadn’t figured out how Trump had won in a country that seemed to embrace hope and the inclusion of everyone eight years ago. He worried Trump’s victory might embolden closet bigots and lead to more dangerous displays of anger.

“It could become confrontational. Man, I hope it doesn’t come to that,” said Carlton, who voted for Clinton.

Bennett McAuley and Derrick Swick, a gay-transgender couple in Durham, said they feel especially vulnerable just weeks away from a Trump presidency. “Hell, I’m a white man and this is a really uncomfortable morning,” Swick said.

Just hours after Trump’ election, the head of Alabama’s largest Islamic congregation said he awakened to messages from female Muslims worried about whether it was safe to wear their religious coverings in public.

“People on social media and otherwise are very concerned about all the talk about banning Muslims and having Muslims to register, so there is a lot of concern,” said Ashfaq Taufique, president of the Birmingham Islamic Society.

Trump has tried to walk back some of his harshest campaign comments, such as calling Mexican immigrants “rapists;” proposing a ban on Muslims entering the United States, and advocating mass deportations. His victory speech struck a gentler tone that some found encouraging, and Clinton noted that Trump had won the right to govern.

“We owe him an open mind and a chance to lead,” she said in her concession speech.

Imelda Salazar, an immigrant rights organizer in Chicago, isn’t there yet. She broke down into tears while discussing Trump’s win.

“I haven’t slept. I’m sad. I’m angry and all that,” she said. “But one thing that stands out the most is I’m not alone.”

Javier Benavidez, executive director of the Southwest Organizing Project in Albuquerque, New Mexico, said activists there likely would hold peaceful demonstrations each time Trump visits the state as president. For now, they plan a Native American healing ceremony in reaction to his election.

“Confronting this new terrain is frightening,” Benavidez said.

___

Associated Press writers Amy Taxin in Santa Ana, California; Russell Contreras in Las Vegas; Jocelyn Gecker in San Francisco; and Jeffrey S. Collins in Durham, North Carolina; Sophia Tareen in Chicago; and Corey Williams in Detroit contributed to this report.

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Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio arrives at a campaign rally for Republican U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump in Phoenix, Arizona, June 18, 2016. REUTERS/Nancy Wiechec

PHOENIX — The federal government had just stripped Sheriff Joe Arpaio of his power to arrest immigrants in the country illegally when the defiant metro Phoenix lawman put his bravado to the test at a 2009 rally.

He stepped to a podium to announce the launch of an immigration crackdown. Protesters howled into megaphones in hopes of drowning out his speech, and federal lawyers investigating him on discrimination allegations milled in the crowd.

“We don’t have to be controlled by Washington,” said the self-proclaimed “America’s Toughest Sheriff,” only months removed from an unopposed re-election victory.

Arpaio’s political invincibility ended Tuesday when a little-known retired Phoenix police sergeant unseated him after 24 years in office. It marked a stunning fall for a lawman whose reputation as an immigration enforcer made him wildly popular among conservatives nationwide.

Arpaio attached himself to Donald Trump, but the alliance could not overshadow what became a repudiation of his mounting legal woes and costs to taxpayers stemming from his patrols targeting immigrants.

The election also provided more evidence that Arizona voters care little about immigration. Exit polls showed that only about 1 in 10 voters named immigration as the most important issue, and three-quarters said they supported a path to legal status for immigrants.

The 84-year-old sheriff didn’t make any public appearances on Election Night, issuing a statement saying he was disappointed by the results but congratulated the winner, Paul Penzone.

“My thanks and appreciation to the people of Maricopa County for the faith and trust they put in me over the years,” Arpaio said.

His downfall proved partly tied to a criminal contempt-of-court charge for his acknowledged defiance of a judge’s order in a racial profiling case stemming from his immigration patrols. He also cost taxpayers $130 million to defend him in lawsuits over his tenure.

Federal prosecutors brought the misdemeanor charge two weeks before Election Day. He is set for a Dec. 6 trial and could face up to six months in jail if convicted.

The sheriff represented the last vestige of a movement started a decade ago by Arizona politicians who advocated for local police to crack down on illegal immigration.

Members of the movement saw Arpaio as the stalwart who could be counted on to vigorously enforce state laws aimed at curbing immigrant smuggling and employers who hire people in the country illegally.

The movement gradually lost steam after immigrant smuggling in Arizona declined and the courts threw out the state’s most stringent immigration laws.

Arpaio didn’t start out as an immigration enforcer.

Shortly after his first election, the retired federal drug agent won high marks from voters for jailing inmates in tents in Phoenix’s summer heat, dressing them in pink underwear and denying them coffee and cigarettes. He served them bologna sandwiches on dry bread.

The sheriff bragged over the years that his tough jail conditions were the source of his popularity.

“I can get elected on pink underwear,” Arpaio told The Associated Press in 2010.

His tactics appealed to voters who believed, as he did, that jail should not be comfortable. But his jail management drew a steady stream of lawsuits.

Arpaio initially was slow to get into the border battle he came to be known for. He said an Army reservist who detained immigrants at gunpoint in 2005 broke the law by taking it into his own hands.

But months later, Arpaio wholeheartedly jumped into immigration enforcement after Arizona passed a law banning immigrant smuggling. He said his officers would target smugglers, not people who come to the country illegally merely to work.

In the end, his officers went after mostly immigrants and few smugglers and employers. They arrested 700 immigrants on charges of using fraudulent IDs to get jobs. He also launched patrols known as “sweeps,” in which deputies flooded part of a city — sometimes heavily Latino areas — to seek out traffic violators and other offenders.

Arpaio harnessed his reputation for fundraising before the courts and federal government forced him out of immigration enforcement two years ago.

Mostly out-of-state donors gave $12.3 million to his last campaign, with many saying they liked that Arpaio arrested immigrants. Candidates nationwide, including GOP presidential hopefuls, sought his endorsement to bolster their immigration credentials.

His image as a crime fighter was tarnished when his office failed to adequately investigate more than 400 sex-crimes cases, including dozens of allegations of child molestation, over a three-year period ending in 2007.

Years later, Arpaio apologized for botching the cases but complained bitterly to news reporters about the lasting negative impressions. Though he managed to win re-election after the scandal, Arpaio was slowly dragged down by the racial profiling case.

Taxpayers who have already paid $48 million in legal costs in the case will be feeling the financial pain for years. The costs are expected to reach $72 million, due in large part to court-ordered changes in the agency.

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President Barack Obama delivers remarks at the White House. Photo by Carlos Barria/Reuters

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama is set to welcome his successor, Donald Trump, to the White House, extending an olive branch to a man he has blasted as unfit to serve as commander in chief and who led the charge to challenge the legitimacy of his own presidency.

Thursday’s Oval Office meeting is the symbolic start of the transition of power from Obama, a Democrat who ushered in a sweeping health care law and brokered a landmark nuclear accord with Iran, and Trump, a Republican who has promised to wipe away those initiatives. Trump takes office on Jan. 20.

First lady Michelle Obama planned to meet privately in the White House residence with Trump’s wife, Melania Trump.

Also on Trump’s schedule was a meeting with House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., to discuss the GOP legislative agenda. Ryan, who holds the most powerful post in Congress, has been a sometime critic of Trump, was slow to endorse him and did not campaign with the nominee. Vice President-elect Mike Pence intended to join them.

The anticipated show of civility at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue contrasted with postelection scenes of protests across a politically divided country. Demonstrators from New England to the heartland and the West Coast vented against the election winner on Wednesday, chanting “Not my president,” burning a papier-mache Trump head, beating a Trump pinata and carrying signs that said “Impeach Trump.”

Republicans were emboldened by Trump’s stunning victory over Hillary Clinton, giving the GOP control of the White House and both chambers of Congress.

“He just earned a mandate,” Ryan said.

In an emotional concession speech, Clinton said her crushing loss was “painful and it will be for a long time” and acknowledged that the nation was “more divided than we thought.”

Still, Clinton was gracious in defeat, declaring: “Donald Trump is going to be our president. We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead.”

Trump was uncharacteristically quiet in the aftermath of his triumph and made no public appearances Wednesday. He huddled with jubilant, sleep-deprived advisers at his eponymous skyscraper in Manhattan, beginning the daunting task of setting up an administration that will take power in just over two months. He also met with Vice President-elect Mike Pence and took calls from supporters, family and friends, according to spokeswoman Hope Hicks.

In Washington, Trump’s scant transition team sprang into action, culling through personnel lists for top jobs and working through handover plans for government agencies. A person familiar with the transition operations said the personnel process was still in its early stages, but Trump’s team was putting a premium on quickly filling key national security posts. The person was not authorized to discuss details by name and spoke on condition of anonymity.

According to an organizational chart for the transition obtained by The Associated Press, Trump was relying on experienced hands to help form his administration. National security planning was being led by former Michigan Rep. Mike Rogers, who previously worked for the FBI. Domestic issues were being handled by Ken Blackwell, a former Cincinnati mayor and Ohio secretary of state.

Trump was expected to consider several loyal supporters for top jobs, including former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani for attorney general or national security adviser and campaign finance chairman Steve Mnuchin for Treasury secretary. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker were also expected to be under consideration for foreign policy posts.

As president-elect, Trump is entitled to get the same daily intelligence briefing as Obama — one that includes information on U.S. covert operations, information gleaned about world leaders and other data gathered by America’s 17 intelligence agencies.

If Trump makes good on his campaign promises, the nation stands on the brink of sweeping change in domestic and foreign policy. He’s pledged to repeal Obama’s health care law and pull out of the landmark nuclear accord with Iran. He’s vowed to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and temporarily ban immigration from nations with terror ties.

It’s unclear whether Trump will embrace many of the traditions of the presidency. He’ll enter the White House owning his own private jet as well as a hotel just blocks away on Pennsylvania Avenue. He never allowed journalists to fly on his plane during the campaign, as is customary for White House nominees.

Issues of transparency bubbled up right from the start. On Wednesday evening, Trump aides said they would not bring the press corps to Washington with the president-elect for his meeting with Obama, breaking long-standing protocol.

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A small group of demonstrators stand outside of a HIlton Hotel prior to a “Defund Obamacare Tour” rally in Indianapolis, on Aug. 26, 2013. President Barack Obama on Friday vetoed legislation to repeal his health care law, the first time such a bill made it all the way to the White House. Photo by Nate Chute/Reuters

The Affordable Care Act transformed the medical system, expanding coverage to millions, injecting billions in tax revenue, changing insurance rules and launching ambitious experiments in quality and efficiency.

Less of that might disappear under President-elect Donald Trump’s pledge to “repeal and replace Obamacare” than many believe, say policy analysts. Republicans promising change might not quickly admit it, but in some respects Obamacare’s replacement may look something like the original.

“It gets into a questions of semantics,” said Mark Rouck, an insurance analyst for Fitch Ratings. “Are they really repealing the act if they replace it with new legislation that has some of the same characteristics?”

Problems that helped give rise to the health law — rising costs, an aging population, mediocre medical results — haven’t gone away. The ACA pushed insurers, hospitals and employers to launch their own reimbursement reforms, which are largely unaffected by who runs Washington.

Even fierce health-law opponents may pause at the political risk of taking benefits from millions who gained coverage since its implementation. Subsidies for the middle class to buy insurance may remain — even if they’re not the Obamacare tax credits applied through online marketplaces, said Joseph Antos, a health economist at the American Enterprise Institute.

“The idea that they’re just going to wipe that money away is pretty unlikely,” he said. “They don’t want to be in a position of saying they’re just kicking millions of people out in the street.”

Others disagree.

“I think they go away,” said Ana Gupte, a health care analyst for Leerink Partners. “The subsidies … are at risk” along with the ACA’s requirement that everybody have health coverage, she said.

Topping the list of ACA provisions likely to survive under Trump is the requirement that employers cover workers’ children up to the age of 26, analysts said. The measure is widely popular and not especially expensive.

A health law crafted by Republicans might also retain the ACA’s protections for people with preexisting illness seeking coverage, said Glenn Melnick, a health economist at the University of Southern California.

That could include relaxing the ACA’s limit on how much insurers can charge and allowing them to adjust premiums based on an individual’s health, he said. However, that might put the price of insurance out of reach for many.

The health law’s payment reforms might also survive in some form. The ACA prompted hundreds of experiments to control costs by rewarding doctors for efficiency and fixing payments for episodes of care or treating entire populations.

“Part of what I would expect to hear from [the new administration] is we want more value out of the entire system,” said Daniel Steingart, a hospital analyst at Moody’s Investors Service. “All of that jibes pretty closely” with ACA payment experiments by the Department of Health and Human Services, he said. “I can foresee a scenario where they gradually expand all those programs.”

Republicans have criticized HHS’s innovation lab, which presides over accountable care organizations and many other payment tests. But they may find it more appealing under their own supervision, said Rodney Whitlock, a strategist and former top Republican health advisor in the Senate.

“You can really want to curtail it — until maybe you’re in charge,” he said. “Then maybe you would like it.”

In any case private insurance companies, employers and hospitals are likely to continue their own payment reforms, analysts said.

“Private industry is really taking that and running with it,” said Gupte. To be sure, health policy and financing are likely to look substantially different in a Trump administration, experts said.

The ACA’s biggest coverage expansion came through the Medicaid program for the poor and disabled, which added more than 15 million people. Trump has suggested giving states fixed federal grants for Medicaid, which could lead to a substantial reduction in coverage or benefits.

Even partial cuts in Medicaid funding and subsidies for private plans would hurt hospitals, which have benefited from the health law’s revenue infusion.

“If you’re running a health system and you now have more insured people through a Medicaid expansion or exchange customers — if even a portion of those go away, that might be your [profit] margin for the year,” said Benjamin Isgur, who heads the Health Research Institute at PwC, a consultancy.

On the other hand, hospitals and insurers represent a powerful lobby seeking to maintain something that looks like the status quo.

“There’s a bigger role [hospitals] can play, a much more cost-effective role we can play if we have a long-term strategy” as part of a consistent health reform program, said Bill Ryan, a spokesman for the Einstein Healthcare Network, a Philadelphia-based hospital system. “And stopping and starting seems to be a crazy way to do this.”

Other aspects of health care will probably stay the same in the near future no matter what Congress does, analysts said.

Health costs continue to grow faster than the economy’s ability to pay for them. Partly as a result, high deductibles — what patients pay before insurance kicks in — have become widespread in employer and individual plans alike. Neither have much to do with the health law, said Don Berwick, who was acting Medicare administrator early in the Obama administration.

Republicans “managed to make the public think Obamacare was causing all the trouble. That is absolutely wrong,” he said. “They could repeal it tomorrow and still have a broken delivery system and costs would continue to go up.”

Now Republicans face the same challenge, said Mark McClellan, who ran Medicare in the George W. Bush administration.

“It’ll be a different path, but the urgency of finding ways to transform health care — to give care that’s more personalized in prevention and less costly and more accessible, especially to people of limited means — the pressure to do that is not going to go away,” he said. “It’s going to increase.”

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Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump arrives for his election night rally at the New York Hilton Midtown in Manhattan, New York. REUTERS/Andrew Kelly

President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team has launched a new website and Twitter account as the Republican prepares to take office.

Visitors to greatagain.gov can find information on Trump’s polices as well as biographical information about the Republican. The website also includes a notice that it’s looking to fill 4,000 slots for presidential appointees, but doesn’t have instructions on how to apply for positions.

The transition team’s Twitter account, @transition2017, posted its first tweet Wednesday night. It reads: “Working together, we will begin the urgent task of rebuilding our nation and renewing the American dream.”

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is leading Trump’s transition team.

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A frog smiles for the camera in Lipetsk Oblast, Russia. Photo by Artyom Krivosheev/The Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards.

A pelican losing its lunch and an elephant falling on its face, both relatable behaviors made made much more humorous by a well-timed camera click.

Judges honored photos of these incidents and nearly 40 others as finalists in this year’s Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards.

As its name suggests, the international competition highlights the humor captured in animal photography. British, Tanzania-based photographers Paul Joynson-Hicks and Tom Sullam created the contest in 2015 in hopes of boosting wildlife conservation efforts.

“The contest celebrates great photography of wildlife, but with the humorous element thrown in,” said Sullam. “We wanted to have a photo competition that was positive and upbeat but with a serious message about wildlife conservation attached to it.”

This year, photographers submitted more than 2,000 unexpectedly funny animal images from 75 different countries. A panel of photography experts and famed comedians chose the winners unveiled in Britain on Wednesday.

Finalist and winning photos alike are already garnering licensing requests for books and calendars, and Joynson-Hicks and Sullam hope the competition’s popularity will help boost support of contest partner the Born Free Foundation, an international wildlife charity.

“Photography can always capture a moment, sometimes unfairly, that portrays the animals exhibiting funny behavior,” said Sullam. “Hopefully, this behavior and humor can be used to create a sense of conservation in all our viewers and entrants, [and provide] an escape from some of the less pleasant images and news that we are bombarded with every day.”

View a selection of the finalists and winners of the 2016 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards below.

A fox dives into the snow in Yellowstone National Park. Photo by Angela Bohlke /The Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards.

A grizzly bear does a bad job of catching a salmon at Brooks Falls in Katmai National Park, Alaska. Photo by Rob Kroenert /The Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards.

Winner in the Air category: A pelican loses its fish near Kerkini Lake, Greece. Photo by Nicolas de Vaulx/The Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards.

A male fan-throated lizard stands at the ready. Photo by Anup Deodhar/The Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards.

(Left) A male zebra shows his teeth in Ngorongoro Crater, Tanzania. Photo by Alison Mees/The Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards. (Right) A pair of King penguins in south Georgia were captured preening themselves simultaneously. Photo by Charles Kinsey/The Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards.

A bear poses in the Great Bear Rainforest, Canada. Photo by Adam Parsons/The Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards.

A burrowing owlet readies for a selfie in Cape Coral, Florida. Photo by Megan Lorenz/The Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards.

An unfortunate portrait of a cape buffalo and cattle egret in Meru National Park, Kenya. Photo by Tom Stables/The Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards.

A baby elephant falls in the sand inside Hwange National Park, Zimbabwe. Photo by Markus Pavlowskys/The Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards.

Burrowing owls near their cave in Santa Rosa, La Pampa, Argentina. Photo by Mario Gustavo Fiorucci/The Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards.

Winner in the Sea category: Two painted frogfish in Taiwan. Photo by Jim Chen/The Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards.

Two white rhinos organised back-to-back in defense formation in Laikipia, Kenya. Photo by George Dian Balan/The Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards.

A meerkat, having a rough day in Little Karoo, South Africa. Photo by Brigitta Moser/The Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards.

A very happy snowy owl in Ontario, Canada. Photo by Edward Kopeschny/The Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards.

An eastern chipmunk in Ontario, Canada stuffing its cheeks with corn. Photo by Barb d’Arpino/The Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards.

A harvest mouse waves at the camera in Cheshire, England. Photo by Michael Erwin/The Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards.

A young white snow monkey in Japan appears to make a snowball.Photo by Nicolas de Vaulx/The Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards.

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View all the results from the 2016 general election.

The post Associated Press Election Results appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Photo by Adobe stock photos

The income gap between black and white households has grown since 2000 and only worsened since the recession.

In 2015, the median income for black households was 59.5 percent of that for whites, or $36,544 to $61,394. That’s a greater gap than at the end of the recession in 2009, when black income was 61.2 percent of white income.

Yet, a tiny number of places exist where black household income is greater than that of whites. Of the 364 large U.S. counties whose populations are at least 5 percent black, there are seven, according to a Stateline analysis of U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey data for 2010-14.

Among them: Stafford County, Virginia, an exurban bedroom community of Washington, D.C., and home to military installations, where many black families find contract work or commute to government jobs in the nation’s capital.

The typical black household there earned an average of $105,628 from 2010 through 2014, the highest income of the seven counties. White households earned an average of $99,533 during that time. Washington, D.C., by contrast, had one of the biggest gaps in the nation — black household income was $40,829, little more than a third of the $115,109 for white households.

In Fayette County and Clayton County, Georgia, suburbs of Atlanta, black households made $83,396 and $41, 292 respectively compared to white household incomes of $80,500 and $40,231. In nearby Fulton County, which includes Atlanta, black households made $35,407 compared to whites’ $88,279 — or just 40 percent of what white households made.

And in Kendall County, Illinois, a Chicago suburb, black households made $96,146 compared to the $89,236 of whites. In Chicago’s Cook County the $34,935 black median household income was less than half that of whites.

Blacks’ higher income compared to whites in these exurban counties is an anomaly in a nation where income disparity has grown. Pay for blacks, relative to whites, has been shrinking since 2000, according to a study earlier this year by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute (EPI). Black men make 22 percent less than similarly qualified whites, and black women make 11.7 percent less than white women, the study found.

Besides higher earning power, white households have 13 times the net worth of black households — a gap that has also grown since the recession, according to a Pew Research Center study this year. (The Pew Charitable Trusts funds both the Pew Research Center and Stateline.)

Similarities but No Lessons
Besides being exurban areas, there are other similarities between some of the counties where black household income is greater than for whites. And the similarities don’t suggest a pathway to narrowing the income gap between blacks and whites across the nation.

In those with the highest black income — Kendall County, Illinois; Stafford County, Virginia; and Fayette County, Georgia — college education rates are high for both blacks and whites. Marriage rates also are high, which results in more two-income families that can afford some of the expensive homes there.

College education creates job opportunities, but doesn’t fully explain or solve the black-white income gap, according to the EPI study. Pay for new black male college graduates, for example, is 18 percent below that for white male grads.

The greatest similarities may be their proximity to core urban areas and high-paying corporate or government jobs, as well as their supply of affordable, albeit expensive, homes and good schools.

Valerie Wilson of EPI said affluent black families may have had to move farther from cities to find the good housing and schools they seek because the black middle class, with less net worth, cannot afford rising housing prices in the cities or private schools.

Andrez Beltran, the economic development coordinator for Kendall County, Illinois, suggests that is the case there.

“Affluent African-American families move out of Chicago or the near suburbs to Kendall County but retain their jobs close to the city,” Beltran said. “Less affluent African-Americans do not have the means.”

It’s hard to draw any lesson for reducing income inequality by looking at affluent Atlanta suburbs like Fayette County and the city of Atlanta, said Jim Skinner, senior planner at the Atlanta Regional Commission, which studies demographic trends.

“We can’t say that one geographic area is doing something right compared to any other,” he said.

Corporate, Government Jobs
Fayette County is reflective of the few counties where there is income parity. It is a draw for black managers at large corporations and government agencies based in Atlanta.

“African-Americans here generally commute into Atlanta for those corporate jobs at companies like Delta Air Lines, Coca-Cola and UPS. These companies place a high value on diversity,” said Charles Rousseau, a Fayette County commissioner and retired government employee in Atlanta.

A reputation for good schools and quiet neighborhoods of homes on 2-acre lots has made Fayette County a magnet for affluent Atlanta workers of all races. But current home prices ranging up to $560,000 also make the area relatively exclusive.

“You have to be of greater means to move to Fayette County because of the housing market there,” Skinner said. “That’s not an answer to the societal problem of economic inequality — rather it helps explain why it exists in the first place.”

Affluent black families often follow the same path to the suburbs traveled by white families earlier.

Commuting to good-paying jobs about 50 miles away in Washington, D.C., combined with government jobs nearby, also helps explain why the population of Stafford County, Virginia, is still growing and the black-white income disparity doesn’t exist. Marine Corps Base Quantico, where the FBI Academy also is located, is partly inside the county.

“I work in D.C., and to me that’s just too busy. Here it’s a little quieter and slower and much safer. It’s a nice town to live in,” said Trimetria Singleton, president of Stafford County’s NAACP and a U.S. Justice Department employee in Washington.

Frank White, a retired Air Force officer and lifelong Stafford County resident, said many children of farmers like him joined the armed forces and came back home to retire, often building wealth by selling family land for development or doing contract work for the nearby military installations.

“You have a lot of [black] people leaving the military brass and then they go into contracting for the military bases in Northern Virginia,” said George Derek Musgrove, a University of Maryland associate professor specializing in African-American history.

Government work can be a great equalizer of racial pay disparity, said Wilson, coauthor of EPI’s study.

“Where the federal government is a major employer, you tend to see [racial] differences in income are not as large,” Wilson said.

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Polls are best guesses, votes are real. Photo by Jim Young/REUTERS

The first words anyone spoke to me once the election results came in were “What went wrong?” To which I replied, “I was tired and had trouble tying my tie. I’ll fix it before I get to class.” Far from being sartorially flippant, the point I was making was this: Nothing went “wrong.” The polls worked like they were supposed to work. If there was a problem, it was in how they were used – and the fact that we all forgot they deal in probabilities and not certainties.

Polling theory dictates the process

In political polls, like those we’ve been subjected to for the past 11 months, pollsters seek to estimate the position of those who will vote in the election. This is a notoriously difficult target to hit; until we vote, we cannot be certain if we will vote. Because the population of “people who’ve cast ballots in the 2016 presidential election” does not yet exist, pollsters must draw their sample from some other – hopefully related – population. They could choose adults, registered voters, or likely voters. None of these sampled populations are identical to the target population.

All these actual voters are the population pollsters are trying to approximate in their efforts. Photo by Saul Martinez/REUTERS

No sample can be exactly the same as the population of interest – and that difference is the source of a poll’s first structural source of uncertainty. However, methods exist to reduce structural bias by increasing the likelihood that our small sample is representative of the larger population.

The gold standard in terms of lowering bias is “simple random sampling.” In SRS, a sample is polled from the target population, wherein each person has the same probability of being selected, and the estimates reported are based solely on those polled. The beauty of a truly random sample is that it will, on average, give great estimates of the population. Its main problem is that it is heavily dependent on who winds up in the sample itself. This creates highly variable polls.

To control this variability, polling firms may use stratification – a process that attempts to weight the polls to match the demographics of the overall population. For instance, if 30 percent of voters are Republican and only 10 percent of your sample is, you’d increase the weight given to your Republicans’ responses to account for your poll having too few of them.

When done well, stratification reduces the inherent variability of poll results by exchanging some of that variability for bias. You’re swapping random error for systematic error. If your estimates of the proportion of voters who are Republican is wrong, your estimates are incorrectly weighted.

To make this concrete, simple random sampling estimates are like a pattern from a well-aimed shotgun. The average of the pattern is the center of the target, even if none of the shot actually hit it. Stratified sampling is like the pattern of a rifle: tight, but perhaps not centered on the target.

Pollsters have to figure out how to reach the people they’re targeting. Photo by brat82/via Adobe

Getting the answers

A second issue arises in contacting the sample.

The 2012 election showed that relying solely on landline telephones produces estimates that tend to overestimate Republican support. On the other hand, calling cellphones is much more expensive.

Some polling organizations – including Emerson College – stayed with calling only landlines. Others called a set proportion of cellphones. Public Policy Polling stuck with calling 80 percent landline and 20 percent cellphone throughout the election cycle. Monmouth University tended closer to a 50-50 split.

Other firms gave up on the telephone altogether. Survey Monkey relied on their large database of online users. The University of Southern California created a panel of approximately 3,000 people and polled the same group online throughout the cycle.

Be assured that in the weeks ahead, polling analysts will be looking at these different methods to determine which gave estimates closest to the eventual result. We can already draw some preliminary conclusions. One is that the LA Times/USC poll, which polled the same panel of people online over time, seems to have overestimated Trump support. Their final estimates were 48.2 percent Clinton and 51.8 percent Trump (as proportion of the two-party vote). The current popular vote is split 50.1 percent Clinton to 49.9 percent Trump.

A second takeaway is that the polls from Marist University, which contacted a blend of landline and cellphone users, may have come closest at the national level. Their last estimates on November 3 had the national race at 50.6 percent Clinton and 49.4 percent Trump, as proportion of the two-party vote.

The interpretation

Once the polling firms produce their estimates, interpretation is in the hands of the various users.

From the standpoint of researchers, the polls gave what we wanted: data from which to gauge public opinion. After an excellent 2012 season, analyst Nate Silver put his reputation on the line with some decisions he made about his estimation process: he adjusted a smoothing parameter late in the election cycle. The effect made his polls more responsive to changes in the polls. Statistically speaking, this means Silver is assuming that people are less likely to change position early in the election cycle, but may change more easily later.

Among others, the Huffington Post accused him of “putting his thumb on the scales” in favor of Trump. However, Silver made his adjustments to reflect observed human nature and action. The results support him. Where the Huffington Post had predicted a Clinton victory with 98 percent confidence, Silver’s FiveThirtyEight gave her only a 71 percent chance of winning.

Using the various polls, most major sites had the probability of a Clinton victory around 90 percent. My own model put the probability at 80 percent.

Estimated electoral vote count at each point in the election cycle. Blue and red represent Clinton and Trump, respectively. Dark colors indicate a strong likelihood of that electoral vote belonging to the candidate, light colors indicate a lower probability. Gray indicates tossup electoral votes. Photo by Ole J. Forsberg

From the standpoint of the media, the polls provided a great narrative, a story to tell and motivate their readers. Most major news organizations included standard boilerplate about the polls being estimates, that they have a margin of error and that the margin of error holds 95 percent of the time.

However, in many cases, journalists didn’t seem to understand what those words meant. If the margin of error is +/- 2.5 and the support for Clinton drops 2 percent, that’s not a statistically significant change. There is no evidence that it is anything more than background noise. If the margin of error is +/- 2.5 and the support for Trump rises 3 percent, that is a statistically significant change. However, as this margin of error is measured at the 95 percent level of confidence, even those “significant changes” are wrong 5 percent of the time.

To help solve these problems, I think journalists covering elections should take a statistics course or a polling course. There is information in the numbers, and it behooves us all to understand what it does and does not say.

Finally, as with the media, the polls gave the public a great story, one that could support their views – as long as they chose the “right” polls and ignored the “wrong” ones. In 2012, many on the right claimed the polls were skewed. Once the election was over and the postmortems done, we found out they actually were, just not in the direction Republicans had claimed.

The story line of skewed polls was never rebutted in the minds of the general population. As a result, confidence in polls remains very low. It’s becoming more common for people to see polling as unethical and as a tool that advances a particular narrative.

A supporter of U.S. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump watches results at his election night rally in Manhattan, New York, U.S., November 8, 2016. Photo by Carlo Allegri/REUTERS

And in fact, many polls are performed to push a political view. The push polling in South Carolina by Bush supporters in 2000 is the most notorious example of this. In the days leading up to the South Carolina primary, a group supporting George W. Bush “polled” residents, asking inflammatory questions about his opponent John McCain. The responses of those contacted were never recorded and analyzed. The sole purpose of a push poll like this is to disseminate information and influence respondents. Is it any wonder many do not trust polls?

Is polling dead?

Today, many people are talking about the death of polling. Apparently, we seem to forget that probabilities attach themselves to polling at every step in the process. The sample is a random sample from a sampled population. The target population does not exist until election day. People change their minds about voting. Everywhere in polling, there is probability.

Nate Silver’s model gave Trump a 29 percent chance of winning the presidency. My model gave him a 20 percent chance. What do those probabilities actually mean? Flip a coin twice. If it comes up heads both times, you just elected President Trump – two coin tosses in a row coming up heads has the same probability of happening that many of these polls gave for Trump moving into the White House.

And yet, polling is a science; we can always learn more. As we move forward, there are many things to learn from this election. Which polling organization was best in terms of its weighting formula? How can we best contact people? What proportion should be cellphones? How can we use online polls to get good estimates?

Those will be the questions at the forefront of polling research over the next couple years as we grapple with the causes of several recent high-profile polling “failures.”

Ole J. Forsberg is an assistant professor of mathematics at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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U.S. President Barack Obama meets with President-elect Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump on Thursday refused to let a group of journalists travel with him to cover his historic first meeting with President Barack Obama, breaking a long-standing practice intended to ensure the public has a watchful eye on the nation’s leader.

Trump flew from New York to Washington on his private jet without that “pool” of reporters, photographers and television cameras that have traveled with presidents and presidents-elect.

Trump’s flouting of press access was one of his first public decisions since his election Tuesday.

Trump’s meeting with Obama on Thursday will be recorded by the pool of White House reporters, photographers and TV cameras who cover the president.

News organizations had for weeks tried to coordinate a pool of journalists who could begin to travel with Trump immediately after Election Day if he won election. But his campaign did not cooperate with those requests and his senior advisers refused Wednesday, the day after the election, to discuss any such press arrangements.

Trump also broke from tradition as a candidate, refusing to allow a pool of campaign reporters, photographers or cameras to fly on his plane as he traveled to events.

Every president in recent memory has traveled with a pool of journalists when they leave the White House grounds. A pool of reporters and photographers were in the motorcade when President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas.

The pool was just steps away from President Ronald Reagan when he was shot outside a hotel in the District of Columbia, and was stationed outside his hospital room as he recovered. The pool also travels on vacation and foreign trips and at times captures personal, historic moments of the presidency.

News organizations take turns serving in the small group, paying their way and sharing the material collected in the pool with the larger press corps. The pool also covers official events at the White House when space doesn’t allow for the full press corps.

The Associated Press is among those reaching out to Trump advisers about press access.

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Photo of Iraqi special forces by Goran Tomasevic/Reuters

The election is finally over. It has resulted in the most stunning political upset in the modern era.

But that is really just the end of the beginning. The country will require a large amount of healing. That the electorate has expressed record high levels of disgust with the political process, and few believe that the country can be united, does not augur well for the new administration.

And, unlike in the past, America appears as divided over key aspects of foreign policy as it is over domestic policy. So how does President-elect Trump hope that to handle that divide, and what will be the major issues facing him?

Foreign policy was once bipartisan

At the outset of the Cold War, Republican Sen. Arthur Vandenberg uttered what became a common mantra. Faced with the Soviet threat, he suggested that “politics stopped at the water’s edge.” The American approach to foreign policy was to be bipartisan.

The protests against the Vietnam War dealt a blow to that assumption. But Americans were united in initially supporting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, even if Democrats and Republicans were divided on this too a decade later. Indeed, Americans today are as polarized about foreign affairs as they are about domestic matters – and regard them as very important.

In pre-election polls, the economy and job security were ranked the number one issue. But, in fact, this was a foreign policy issue masquerading as a domestic one because it was a debate about the merits of globalization and whether the new president should pursue a free trade agenda.

It’s significant that in these same polls, terrorism ranked second, and foreign policy in general ranked third, in front of health care.

Old and new style

Hillary Clinton campaigned on a promise, largely, of extending Barack Obama’s legacy. Donald Trump campaigned to reverse domestic reforms and repeatedly signaled a disdain for Obama’s preference for multilateralism and “strategic patience.” Instead he offered Americans a return to a more muscular foreign policy – crushing ISIS, rebuffing China and engaging Russia.

Scholars, unlike the media, often argue about whether individual leadership really matters when it comes to foreign policy. Many argue that American foreign policy is dictated by consistent factors such as the size of its military and its importance to the global economy.

So is it the personality of the leadership, or are broader factors at play in the formulation and implementation of U.S. foreign policy? In a grand experiment, we are about to find out.

And what is likely to preoccupy the new president when it comes to foreign policy over the next four years? I’d identify five challenges – in order of their public visibility, if not their importance – plus a bonus that nobody is yet discussing.

Challenge No. 1: The Middle East

Americans regard IS as the greatest foreign threat. But clearly, IS’ position in both Iraq and Syria is waning.

By the time Trump gets into office in January, IS will probably represent a negligible threat in Iraq. And there will be no need for American intervention in Syria if, as anticipated, Trump signals a willingness to let Bashar al-Assad and Putin finish the job of pulverizing the opposition. So, ironically, it is likely that Trump will maintain Obama’s policy of “no boots on the ground” in Syria, although in reality American forces are already there, assuming a variety of advisory and training functions.

Still, the abiding question is what the U.S. will do after IS disintegrates as a coherent fighting force in Iraq and Syria. American Special Forces are now operating in Libya, where IS has a powerful affiliate. That may become the next large-scale venue for American operations in the vortex of the Middle East.

But it is just as possible that Trump will tell the Europeans that Libya is their problem, not America’s, and they should invade the country to stop the flow of both migrants and terrorists into Europe.

Unlike Obama, however, there will be no JV comments about IS coming from Trump.

Challenge No. 2: Russia

Trump, of course, has spoken admiringly of Putin. His views of the Russian leader are more reminiscent of George Bush’s comment that he famously “looked Russian President Vladi­mir Putin in the eye and peered into his soul.”

So there is some superficial evidence that Trump and Putin can reach some rapprochement, a kind of reset. This view is further fueled by Trump’s avowed preference to treat every negotiation as “transactional” – pragmatically treating any foreign policy like a business deal.

So, in the short term, Trump’s election boosts Putin’s ambitions to regenerate Russia as a global power. Nonetheless, a shrinking economy,declining military spending, a host of domestic problems and no sign of a major rise in oil and gas prices to bring Putin more revenues will limit Russia’s options.

But then again, if personality plays a role when it comes to foreign policy, then there are grounds for concern that Trump’s and Putin’s honeymoon won’t last long. The president-elect likes to play second fiddle to no one. The same is true for Putin.

So a clash could eventually ensue. There is now an arc that spreads from the Arctic down to the Black Sea that constitutes a zone of potential conflict. And there has already been a small movement of NATO’s troops into the Baltics and Poland.

Trump may make greater demands of NATO. But troop deployment won’t change in the short term. So their presence may eventually reinforce hostilities once the honeymoon is over.

Challenge No. 3: Europe

Trump is unpopular to an unprecedented degree in Europe. Only 15 percent of the public expressed confidence in his leadership, in contrast to the 85 percent that said the same about Obama.

That said, the one thing that Obama, Clinton and Trump all have agreed on – albeit using different language – is that European countries should pay more toward the cost of their own defense. Last year, only five of NATO’s 28 members fulfilled their commitment to pay the two percent of GNP for defense. It is the United States that pays 73 percent of NATO’s defense.

But now a new reality is taking shape. Poll after poll reveals that Americans may like NATO but many are tired of paying for Europe’s defense.

Expect Trump to reinforce Obama’s warning, even as Trump’s prior comments about Japan and South Korea paying for their own defense suggest that the U.S. might militarily “re-pivot” to Europe and the Middle East, in contrast to Obama’s focus on Asia.

Challenge No. 4: China

Speaking of which, every American president since Richard Nixon has tried a combination of three strategies when it comes to the China.

First, engage the Chinese diplomatically, mostly to draw them away from Russia. Second, do all that the U.S. can to encourage the growth of a large Chinese middle class in the hope that they will demand democratic reforms. And third, constrain China’s growth as a regional military power by locating forces in Asia and reinforcing alliances with other Asian powers.

Obama did all three. Trump will likely represent a notable contrast.

Contrary to what he has said about Russia, Trump has sounded an avowedly confrontational tone about China. He has called it a currency manipulator and discussed introducing new trade barriers against Chinese imports.

Photo of China’s President Xi Jinping by Lintao Zhang/Pool via Reuters

It is easy to dismiss some of this as electoral hyperbole. But, in the absence of a track record, we have to believe what he says. And the early responses from China are not comforting, despite Xi Jingping’s conciliatory expression of congratulations.

Obama had championed the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade agreement that does not include China as a means to deal with China’s rising power. But the TPP is extremely unpopular at home, and that deal is now probably dead in the water.

So the policy toward Asia will likely tilt from a military presence coupled with multilateral economic engagement to a bilateral focus on trade and finance between the U.S. and China. Still, Trump will need China’s help in dealing with a bellicose North Korea to avoid war on the Korean peninsula.

Challenge No. 5: Free trade agreements

Since 2008, many Americans have abandoned the notion that globalization benefits the U.S. They think it is the source of job insecurity, not the solution to it.

Even the Democrats recognized this problem. Clinton was forced to incorporate Bernie Sanders’ criticism of free trade into her electoral platform.

Trump was far more hostile, criticizing NAFTA and any possible trade agreements that did not explicitly put America’s interests first. So, while he might try to renegotiate existing agreements, the proposed new ones are all off the table for now.

Clinton made it undiplomatically clear that there is no saving those mining jobs in Appalachia. Her vision of a 21st-century American economy is built on technology, finance and a few high-value added manufacturing jobs – and that requires free access to global markets. Trump’s vision is of a 19th-century economy, with revitalized production of steel and fossil fuels to appeal to his electoral base. That will be hard to pull off. So it is no surprise that he immediately announced a new infrastructure program to create new jobs for those former miners.

Finally, the black swan challenge from the Arctic

Foreign policy is always full of “unforeseen” problems that are often described as “black swans.”

My best guess is that Trump’s will be the Arctic. The accelerating effects of climate change are creating a series of challenges that the new president will have to face, even if he thinks it is a hoax.

These include Russian claims of sovereignty as it builds up its military forces, new waves of environmental refugees as its waters rise and questions about access in keeping the new waterways open for global shipping, energy and even tourism. America has no long-term plan to deal with these issues.

New presidents quickly discover that being the most powerful figure in the world does not mean that your orders will be carried out as you wish, that others respond as you expect or that you can achieve your policy outcomes. The environment is far more complex. New actors, new threats and new forms of warfare pose significant challenges for any American president. Even the largest military does not ensure an effective foreign policy.

Having a president with no foreign policy experience isn’t helpful in that environment. America and the world are inevitably in for a rocky ride – at odds with the simple solutions espoused by politicians on the campaign trail.

The Conversation is a journalism nonprofit. View the original column on its website.

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Protesters march against Republican Donald Trump’s victory in Tuesday’s U.S. presidential election in Philadelphia. Photo by Mark Makela/Reuters

Thousands of protesters declared that President-elect Donald Trump did not represent them in rallies staged in Washington, New York City, Chicago, Seattle, Oakland, California, and other cities nationwide late Wednesday.

A woman cries while taking part in an anti-Trump candlelight vigil in front of the White House in Washington. Photo by Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

Protesters burned flags, beat piñatas, blocked traffic, raised signs and chanted slogans that displayed dismay and outrage at targets spanning from systemic racism to the Electoral College, as well as with fear of what awaits the country after Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration, according to the Associated Press.

People gather in protest to the election in Seattle. Photo by Jason Redmond/Reuters

On social media, the hashtag #NotMyPresident trended on Twitter. There, people began to share anxious and angry messages, challenging the legitimacy of Trump’s election. While Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton won the nation’s popular vote, Trump won the most electoral votes, NPR reported.

Krystina Robinson of Las Vegas carries a placard in protest. Photo by David Becker/Reuters

Both on social media and in the streets, people expressed concern about the nation’s direction after Trump’s election. Outside the White House, protesters in Washington chanted “Donald Trump is not my president” late Wednesday, local media reported. During a candlelight vigil nearby, people cried just blocks from the site of Trump’s new hotel near 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Protesters against President-elect Donald Trump march peacefully through Oakland, California. A separate group earlier in the night set fire to garbage bins and smashed multiple windows. Photo by Noah Berger/Reuters

Protesters march against Donald Trump in Philadelphia. Photo by Mark Makela/Reuters

Demonstrators gather near Trump Tower in New York. Photo by Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

Berkeley High student Ariana Melton, 16, holds a sign during a protest in response to the election of in Berkeley, California. Photo by Elijah Nouvelage/Reuters

Protesters demonstrate across the street from Trump Tower in New York. Photo by Carlo Allegri/Reuters

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HARI SREENIVASAN: In the day’s other news: The Trump rally carried Wall Street to a new record. Investors bid up bank shares, amid hopes for an easing of financial regulations. That sent the Dow Jones industrials to close to a new record, gaining 218 points to finish near 18808. The Nasdaq fell 42 points as money shifted out of tech stocks, and the S&P 500 added four.

JUDY WOODRUFF: The president-elect still faces legal troubles over his now-defunct Trump University. It’s the subject of a civil fraud lawsuit, and, today, a federal judge in San Diego refused to issue a blanket ban on using campaign statements as evidence. The case goes to trial on November 28, but the judge urged both sides to settle, given, as he said, all else that’s involved.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Tuesday’s election has sparked a wave of protests against the outcome. At least 10 cities saw demonstrations last night, with more to come tonight.

PROTESTERS: Not my president! Not my president!

HARI SREENIVASAN: That refrain echoed across cities throughout the country overnight, from New York, to Kansas City, to Seattle, Washington. Thousands of protesters, mostly young people, condemned the election of Donald Trump.

In Los Angeles, they blocked major highways, slowing traffic to a crawl. And, elsewhere, they burned a papier-mache effigy of the president-elect.

WOMAN: We cannot tolerate that man as a president of this country. I will not. I will never accept this.

WOMAN: This is a protest advocating love and that there are good people out here in this world that want to fight for equality.

HARI SREENIVASAN: There was some scattered violence. Crowds in Oakland, California, set fires in roads and broke windows of businesses. Police responded with tear gas.

All told, more than 100 people were arrested nationwide. The Trump camp dismissed the protesters. Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani spoke on FOX News this morning.

FORMER MAYOR RUDY GIULIANI (R), New York City: The reality is, they’re a bunch of spoiled crybabies. He should find a way to listen and talk about it and then say to them, look, you’re overdoing it. Take a while and evaluate my presidency a year from now.

HARI SREENIVASAN: White House spokesman Josh Earnest said President Obama believes in nonviolent protest, but also that, in his words — quote — “We’re Americans and patriots first.”

Demonstrations carried into the day, including walkouts by high school students in some places. More protests are set in several cities tonight as well.

NATALIA ARISTIZABAL, Make the Road New York: We are not going to stay quiet. We’re not going to go back to closets. We are going to go out on the streets and continue to fight for our rights.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Natalia Aristizabal is with the immigration rights group Make the road new York, which claims about 20,000 members.

NATALIA ARISTIZABAL: This is actually for our communities and for us to be able to have a space that is safe, but that allows us to yell and to shed our anger and tears, but do it together, because that’s the only way that we’re going to get through this.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Her group plans to march Sunday in Manhattan.

JUDY WOODRUFF: There’s also more reaction overseas to the Trump victory. The president of the European Commission called for clarity today from the president-elect on trade, climate change and NATO. Jean-Claude Juncker spoke in Berlin, and noted that Mr. Trump has voiced doubts or criticism on all three issues.

JEAN-CLAUDE JUNCKER, President, European Commission (through translator): We expect the designated U.S. president to be clear on what his intentions are. We would like to know how things will proceed with the global trade policy. We would like to know what intentions Mr. Trump has regarding the alliance. We must know what climate policies he intends to pursue, and all this must be cleared up in the next few months.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Meanwhile, British Prime Minister Theresa May spoke with president-elect Trump by phone. Her office says that he invited her to visit him soon.

And South Korea’s President Park Geun-hye had her own phone chat. Candidate Trump had talked of withdrawing some U.S. forces from the South. Today, Park’s office quoted him as saying, “We are going to be with you 100 percent.”

HARI SREENIVASAN: A top adviser to the president-elect caused a stir over Israeli settlements today. Jason Greenblatt told Israeli Army Radio — quote — “West Bank settlements are no obstacle to peace.” That would be a marked departure from longstanding U.S. policy.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Back in this country, a man accused of exploding bombs in New York City and New Jersey had his first appearance in federal court. Ahmed Khan Rahimi is facing terrorism charges for the September attacks that injured 30 people. He didn’t enter a plea today. Rahimi was born in Afghanistan, but is now a U.S. citizen.

HARI SREENIVASAN: And the man who bills himself America’s toughest sheriff has been turned out of office. Longtime Arizona lawman Joe Arpaio lost his reelection bid on Tuesday after 24 years in office. He’d gained prominence for his aggressive stance on illegal immigration. But he also sparked federal investigations of alleged racial profiling.

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JUDY WOODRUFF: President-elect Donald Trump is back in New York City tonight, after a day of first meetings in Washington. It was the formal launch of the transition of power, and there was no sign of the bitter broadsides that marked the campaign.

John Yang begins our coverage.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Well, I just had the opportunity to have an excellent conversation with president-elect Trump.

JOHN YANG: President Obama welcomed Donald Trump to the Oval Office today, just days after he called the Republican dangerous and unqualified, and after Mr. Trump called the Obama record a disaster. So, how did their first face-to-face meeting go?

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: I have been very encouraged by the, I think, interest in president-elect Trump’s wanting to work with my team around many of the issues that this great country faces.

We now are going to want to do everything we can to help you succeed, because, if you succeed, then the country succeeds.

DONALD TRUMP (R), President-Elect: I have great respect.

The meeting lasted for almost an hour-and-a-half. And it could have — as far as I’m concerned, it could have gone on for a lot longer. We really — we discussed a lot of different situations, some wonderful and some difficulties.

And I look forward to being with you many, many more times in the future.

JOHN YANG: As reporters shouted questions, Mr. Obama even offered his successor a bit of advice.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Here’s a good rule. Don’t answer any questions when they just start yelling.

(CROSSTALK)

DONALD TRUMP: It’s always the last one.

JOHN YANG: White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said the meeting was a little less awkward than some had expected.

JOSH EARNEST, White House Press Secretary: I feel confident in telling you that they didn’t resolve all their differences. But I also feel confident in telling you that they didn’t try to resolve all their differences.

What they sought to do was to lay the foundation for an effective transition from the Obama presidency to the Trump presidency.

JOHN YANG: Another part of that foundation? Relations with Congress.

When he becomes president, Mr. Trump will preside over a unified government, Republicans in charge here at the White House and on Capitol Hill. The question is how unified those Republicans will be.

Meeting with the president-elect this afternoon, House Speaker Paul Ryan, whose relationship with candidate Trump was sometimes rocky, pledged to work together.

REP. PAUL RYAN, Speaker of the House: We’re going to turn that victory into progress for the American people. And we are now talking about how we are going to hit the ground running to make sure that we can get this country turned around and make America great again.

JOHN YANG: Mr. Trump made clear that some of the Republican House’s priorities are also his priorities.

DONALD TRUMP: Whether it’s health care or immigration, so many different things, we will be working on them very rapidly. And I think we will be putting things up pretty quickly.

JOHN YANG: He also met with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

The Trump team is also beginning the arduous task of building an administration. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani are being widely mentioned for top positions.

For the “PBS NewsHour,” I’m John Yang at the White House.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Also today, Vice President Biden had his own meeting with the vice president-elect, Mike Pence. And first lady Michelle Obama hosted Melania Trump at the White House for tea, as their husbands talked.

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Canadian folk pop singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen shares a joke and smokes a cigarette on Jan. 8, 1980. Photo by Evening Standard/Getty Images

Leonard Cohen, whose songs on love, spirituality, human connection and mortality marked some of the most important moments in contemporary music, died Thursday at 82, his label Sony Records confirmed.

“My father passed away peacefully at his home in Los Angeles with the knowledge that he had completed what he felt was one of his greatest records. He was writing up until his last moments with his unique brand of humor,” Adam Cohen, his son, said.

A poet who had studied literature and released several books before his recording career, The New York Times called Cohen a “reluctant pop star,” even as he found increasing success with each subsequent album that followed this first in 1967.

“I had the title ‘poet,’ and maybe I was one for a while. Also, the title ‘singer’ was kindly accorded me, even though I could barely carry a tune,” Cohen told the NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown in 2006.

Leonard Cohen was born in 1934 in Montreal and grew up in Westmount, Canada, the son of clothing store owner Nathan Cohen and Masha Klonitzsky, a nurse. He studied English at McGill University, where he released his first poetry collection, “Let Us Compare Mythologies,” in 1956.

Musician Leonard Cohen tips his hat to the audience as he accepts the 2012 Awards for Song Lyrics of Literary Excellence, which was awarded to both he and Chuck Berry at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, in Boston, Massachusetts February 26, 2012. Photo by Jessica Rinaldi/Reuters

But he shied away from the term “poet,” he told Brown. “I never thought of myself as a poet, to tell you the truth. I always thought that poetry is the verdict that others give to a certain kind of writing. So to call yourself a poet is a kind of dangerous description. It’s for others; it’s for others to use.”

After moving to New York City, then back to Montreal and to London, he moved to Hydra, Greece, where he worked on the two novels “The Favorite Game” (1963) and “Beautiful Losers” (1966). With financial difficulties looming, he started writing songs, and his pieces “Suzanne” and “Dress Rehearsal Rag” soon appeared on Judy Collins’ album “In My Life.” He followed that release with songs for James Taylor, Willie Nelson and other successful folk musicians.

READ NEXT: Songwriter Leonard Cohen Discusses Fame, Poetry and Getting Older

In spite of his reluctance to sing his own pieces, in 1967 he released “Songs of Leonard Cohen,” his first album, which included the songs “Sisters of Mercy,” “So Long Marianne” and “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye.”

In the following years, he would release “Songs from a Room” (1969) and “Songs of Love and Hate” (1971), along with three other albums in the 1970s.

His most famous piece, “Hallelujah,” was quietly released on Side 2 of “Various Positions” (1984), where “few people noticed [it]” for years, according to The New York Times. But after Jeff Buckley covered it for his 1994 LP “Grace,” it grew into a cultural force, with approximately 200 artists attempting their own covers — including Bob Dylan, Bon Jovi, Bono and Celine Dion — along with countless appearances of the song on films and TV shows.

The song’s ubiquity grew exhausting for Cohen, he told the Guardian in 2009. “I think it’s a good song, but too many people sing it,” he said.

In the mid-1990s, Cohen became a Buddhist monk at the Mt. Baldy Zen Center in California and stopped releasing music for years. He would start again with “Ten New Songs” (2001).

Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen acknowledges the audience after receiving the 2011 Prince of Asturias award for Letters from Spain’s Crown Prince Felipe during a ceremony at Campoamor theatre in Oviedo, northern Spain, October 21, 2011. Photo by Felix Ordonez/Reuters

In 2005, Cohen sued his former manager Kelley Lynch, alleging that she had stolen more than $5 million from him. A court ordered Lynch the next year to pay him $9.5 million, but he never received that money.

On the heels of that legal battle, he began a massive world tour in 2008, where he performed nearly 250 shows. That same year, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted him as “one of the few artists in the realm of popular music who can truly be called poets.”

He is survived by Adam and Lorca, two children from a relationship with artist Suzanne Elrod.

Cohen’s manager Robert Kory called him a “true visionary” in a statement.

“I was blessed to call him a friend, and for me to serve that bold artistic spirit firsthand, was a privilege and great gift,” Kory wrote. “He leaves behind a legacy of work that will bring insight, inspiration and healing for generations to come.”

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U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, center, disembarks from a U.S. Air Force C-17 near McMurdo Station, in Antarctica, November 11, 2016. Photo by REUTERS/Mark Ralston/Pool

MCMURDO STATION, Antarctica — U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry became the highest-ranking American official to visit Antarctica on Friday when he landed for a two-day trip during which he’ll hear from scientists about the impact of climate change on the frozen continent.

Kerry left from New Zealand after being held up for about a day by bad weather. Kerry and his entourage left the Christchurch airport at 6 a.m. aboard a C-17 Globemaster military cargo plane and landed in Antarctica about 11 a.m.

Kerry, an experienced pilot, spent much of the flight in the cockpit of the huge jet, chatting with the pilots. After a smooth trip of about five hours, the group landed on the Pegasus Ice Runway, the strip of ice that serves McMurdo. The large base is the hub for U.S. operations.

Kerry made no public remarks on the initial leg of the trip. In Christchurch a day earlier, he congratulated President-elect Donald Trump for winning a “momentous election” and said he had reminded State Department staff of the “time-honored tradition of a very peaceful and constructive transfer of power.”

In Antarctica, Kerry’s plans called for his entourage to transfer immediately at the airstrip to a smaller military transport plane for a three-hour flight to the research station the U.S. government operates near the South Pole. Kerry planned to visit that station for about two hours before returning to McMurdo for the night.

Kerry’s aides described the trip as a learning opportunity for the secretary of state. He planned to receive briefings from scientists working to understand the effects of climate change on Antarctica. Kerry has made climate change an intensive focus of American diplomacy during his term, and had previously spent decades working on the issue as a U.S. senator.

He planned to return to New Zealand on Saturday for meetings with Prime Minister John Key. He plans to fly next week to the Middle East for talks, and then onward to a global climate conference in Morocco, where he will give a major speech.

By Associated Press

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U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch testifies before a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee hearing on the Justice Department’s role in implementing new executive actions related to gun control at Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 20, 2016. Photo by Carlos Barria/Reuters

WASHINGTON — A Donald Trump administration could radically reshape the Justice Department, particularly civil rights efforts that became one of its most pressing and high-profile priorities over the past eight years.

But Trump’s election has stirred concern from civil rights advocates that some of that work could be undone, set aside or at least minimized under a Trump administration.

“The Civil Rights Division was just building a head of steam over the last two, three years, and it raises really serious concerns about whether we now lose traction on these issues,” Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said of a section that former Attorney General Eric Holder called the “crown jewel” of the department.

One overt change could come in the department’s approach toward policing and relationships between law enforcement and the communities they serve, an issue that’s moved to the public forefront in the last two years.

Trump’s talk of a “law and order” approach to crime fighting and his praise for stop-and-frisk police tactics are out of step with a Justice Department that has advocated community policing and decried strategies it considers unconstitutional or discriminatory.

“He talked about things like the war on police, that we need more stop and frisk, that the Black Lives Matter movement has placed police officers at risk in ways that are really concerning,” said Jonathan Smith, a former Justice Department civil rights official who oversaw the investigation into discriminatory practices by the Ferguson, Missouri, police force.

“The last law-and-order president was Richard Nixon,” Smith said.

The rhetoric resembles that of Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor who’s expected to be considered for the position of attorney general.

Under the Obama administration the Justice Department has opened wide-ranging investigations of 23 police departments, including those in Baltimore, Chicago and Ferguson. It’s enforcing 19 agreements, including 14 court-enforceable consent decrees.

While those agreements are unlikely to be reversed, new attorneys could be lax in enforcing them or in requiring meaningful change when additional police departments come under scrutiny, Smith said. And different leadership may see less value in some of the community meetings and round-table discussions promoted by Justice Department officials as a way to seek reconciliation between police and minorities.

Also subject to change is the department’s overall approach to the thousands of drug prosecutions it brings each year, embodied in a 2013 policy initiative known that discouraged prosecutors from seeking harsh prison sentences for nonviolent offenders.

A new administration might also seek changes on the national security front, including how terrorism cases are prosecuted and broader surveillance powers — particularly of Muslims.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch acknowledged the prospect for change Thursday, saying in a speech that while “some policies and priorities may shift over the span of time or the turn of the electoral wheel.”

Career attorneys throughout the Justice Department, including at the Civil Rights Division, are intended as a stabilizing and apolitical force across different administrations, but there hasn’t always been a clear line. A 2008 inspector general report identified instances in the Bush administration when the Civil Rights Division considered political and ideological affiliations in hiring career attorneys or assigning cases.

But it’s the department’s political appointees, who routinely change with presidential administrations, that “set the tone and the direction and determine the vigor of civil rights enforcement,” Romero said.

At the Civil Rights Division, that includes its leader, Vanita Gupta, a former ACLU attorney who earlier in her career led an effort to overturn wrongful convictions of drug defendants in Texas.

Under her watch, the federal government has routinely become involved in state and local matters that officials believe brush up against constitutional protections.

That includes a directive to schools that they permit students to use the bathrooms that match their gender identity, and a policy document discouraging municipal courts from jailing citizens for nonpayment of fines and fees. In an Idaho case, the department also argued that local police can’t arrest the homeless for sleeping in public, and worked in Tennessee to get juvenile suspects access to attorneys.

New department leadership could well take different stances on issues like those, or steer clear of federal intervention altogether. And while federal civil rights statutes will surely remain on the books for enforcement, advocates are concerned that their causes won’t have the same commitment they’ve had under President Barack Obama.

“We intend to fight, we intend to ensure that we do not go backwards,” Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, told reporters Thursday. “We believe that we have the Constitution and the laws of our nation on our side.”

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