US election 2024 updates: Donald Trump wins presidency, beats Kamala Harris

Thanks for following along with us as we covered the results of the 2024 US election.

As the US – and the world – comes to grips with what a second Trump presidency will look like, our coverage will continue here.

Stay with us for news updates and analysis as we continue to cover Trump’s victory and the remainder of the results of yesterday’s vote.

Here’s a recap of the latest developments:

• Congratulations are pouring in from around the world for US President-elect Donald Trump, who claimed a decisive victory in the November election.
• Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris is expected to formally concede the race to Trump in a speech later today, reports Reuters.
• Trump’s Republican Party also flipped several Senate seats held by the Democratic Party to take control of the powerful chamber. Control of the House of Representatives is still uncertain, with 55 seats uncalled.
• Trump’s 2024 campaign spokesperson, Adolfo Franco, told Al Jazeera the Republican “will be a much stronger president than he was in 2016 because of the popular vote and the shift in the Senate”.
• In a rare bright spot for Democrats, abortion rights measures passed in seven out of 10 states holding referendums on the issue.

I’m at Howard University, Kamala Harris’s alma mater. That means the university that she attended in her formative years. She is expected to speak here, we are being told, about 23:00 GMT [6pm local time].

She was supposed to speak here on Election Day, but she pushed that off as those polls came in.

We expect that this is where she will make her concession speech.

We understand that the Democratic Party is holding a meeting before that, and there’s a lot of soul-searching going on right now about what went wrong for the Democratic Party.

A lot of finger-pointing. Some are pointing at Joe Biden for not stepping aside sooner to allow Kamala Harris to get to the top of the ticket.

She only had 107 days to put together her campaign, and despite having an enormous war chest of millions upon millions of dollars, it just didn’t seem enough.

Many are arguing that it is too simplistic, that the problem is bigger and that the Democratic Party and its brand are essentially dead, that it has alienated voters for the last eight years, that it is out of touch, that it has become too elitist and doesn’t understand the core issues of working-class and middle-class Americans.

Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, was one of Trump’s most influential supporters in the 2024 race.

The billionaire donated about $119m to a pro-Trump political action committee, spoke at numerous Trump campaign rallies and blasted pro-Trump messages on his account on the X social media platform, which he owns.

Trump, in turn, sung the praises of Musk, even floating the idea of appointing him as “secretary of cost-cutting” in his administration.

Here’s more about Musk’s role in Trump’s presidential victory:

American billionaire Jeff Bezos has congratulated Trump on his win.

“Big congratulations to our 45th and now 47th President on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory,” Bezos wrote on X. “No nation has bigger opportunities. Wishing @realDonaldTrump all success in leading and uniting the America we all love.”

Bezos, the founder of Amazon and owner of The Washington Post, faced intense criticism after he decided the newspaper would not make an endorsement in the presidential election, which critics saw as a sign he feared alienating Trump, should he be re-elected.

The former Republican president also has thanked “President Biden and Vice President Harris for their service to our country”.

Bush, who did not endorse Trump despite belonging to his Republican Party, said in a statement the election’s “strong turnout” shows “the health of our republic and the strength of our democratic institutions”.

“We join our fellow citizens in praying for the success of our new leaders at all levels of government. May God continue to bless our great country,” Bush said.

Moroccan King Mohammed VI has expressed “sincere congratulations” and “best wishes” to President-elect Donald Trump, referencing the latter’s 2020 decision to back Morocco’s stance in the disputed Western Sahara.

“Mr. Trump’s resounding success in these elections is a tribute to his patriotism and rewards his commitment to upholding the best interests of the United States,” the king wrote in a letter published by the state press agency.

Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico also welcomed Trump’s win.

“We respect the choice of the American people,” Fico said at a news conference.

Fico, who is known for his pro-Russian views, said, “Everybody is waiting for the first steps in regards to the war in Ukraine.” He added that Trump might reduce or halt US military aid for Ukraine or propose an immediate ceasefire to open the way for negotiations between Ukraine and Russia.

The most popular opinion expressed here is that relations between Russia and the US will remain tense.

According to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, the US constantly throws kerosene into this conflict and is directly involved in a war against Russia.

But still, Moscow positively reacted to Trump’s words earlier today that he intended not to start wars but end them.

The Kremlin believes the US can help end the Russia-Ukraine conflict under the new president. Trump once promised to end it within 24 hours.

Many in Kyiv fear, though, that he will order the reduction of US weapons supplies to Ukraine or be persuaded to make territorial concessions or freeze the conflict.

Ukraine completely rejects all that, but still, many hope the negotiations between the two warring sides can resume under Trump’s presidency.

There are no illusions about Donald Trump being nice to Russia.

Just recently, he revealed that he had been the one who stopped the Nord Stream pipeline.

Moscow remembers that during Donald Trump’s previous presidential term, despite seeming to be nice to President Putin, he continued to impose anti-Russian sanctions and regularly expelled diplomats.

Washington withdrew from several arms control agreements, including the INF [Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty], which [former US President Ronald] Reagan and [Soviet leader Mikhail] Gorbachev signed, and the multilateral open skies treaty.

Trump has 75 days before his presidential inauguration to assemble a new administration. That includes filling some 4,000 government positions – from major Cabinet roles to part-time commission members.

Around 1,200 of those presidential appointments require Senate confirmation, which should be easier with the Senate shifting to Republican control. Names that Trump has floated for key positions include tech billionaire Elon Musk and vaccine sceptic Robert Kennedy Jr.

Trump’s transition is being led primarily by his friends and family, including his adult sons, Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump, and his running mate, JD Vance.

Transition co-chairs are billionaire businessman Howard Lutnick and former wrestling executive Linda McMahon, who previously led the Small Business Administration during Trump’s first term.

Lutnick said this year’s operation is “about as different as possible” from the effort in 2016, after Trump won his first term.

On Trump’s first morning as the winner of the election, Bitcoin jumped nearly 8 percent to a record $75,345.00 in early trading this morning, before falling back and was recently trading at around $73,700.00.

Trump was previously a cryptocurrency sceptic, but changed his mind and embraced it ahead of the election.

In July 2024, Trump laid out his plans to wholeheartedly embrace cryptocurrency if elected for a second term, telling hundreds of cheering supporters of the digital tokens that he wants the US to be a “Bitcoin superpower” under his leadership.

Trump used his keynote address at a Nashville, Tennessee, crypto conference to say he’d create a Bitcoin “strategic reserve” using the currency that the government currently holds.

The world is busy with the results of the [US] election, but there is no respite in the attacks [in Gaza].

People here have mixed feelings about what [Trump] could do to change the conduct of this war across the Gaza Strip by the Israeli military.

Palestinians here, for a whole year, knew that the Biden administration could have done anything to stop the atrocities, but he decided not to do that.

Trump has shown a pro-Israeli stance in the past.

The fear now is that he is going to do that again and will further support Israeli atrocities across the Gaza Strip.

Trump’s running mate J D Vance has thanked the American people for their victory.

In a post on X, Vance said he was grateful to Trump for the opportunity to serve as the next US vice president.

“And to the American people, for their trust. I will never stop fighting for ALL of you,” he said.

One of Trump’s strategies was to drive voter turnout in rural areas. That’s particularly pertinent here in North Carolina, where a third of the state lives in a rural area.

That’s why we saw Donald Trump particularly talking about Hurricane Helene, which decimated parts of the western side of this state. It especially hit rural areas that Trump claimed were being neglected by disaster relief teams.

People really embraced early voting in North Carolina. Before polls even opened yesterday, more than half of the state had voted early. And we were told that the biggest group that cast their early ballots were those from rural areas hit by Hurricane Helene.

It goes to show that even though people were in a situation where they’d lost their homes, their cars, their livelihoods … they really felt they had to get out there and vote.

It’s likely those rural voters helped Trump get not just a small victory, but a pretty big victory here. In 2020, Trump won the state by 1.3 percent over Joe Biden. This time, it was 3.4 percent over Kamala Harris. So more than twice the previous margin.

The US vice president is expected to call Trump to concede defeat in the presidential election, NBC News reports, citing two Harris aides.

President Joe Biden also plans to call Trump and will speak publicly about the election results, the US-based network reported, citing a White House official.

The former Republican lawmaker-turned-Harris backer has taken to X to urge US citizens to accept Donald Trump’s victory “whether we like the outcome or not”.

“We now have a special responsibility, as citizens of the greatest nation on earth, to do everything we can to support and defend our Constitution, preserve the rule of law, and ensure that our institutions hold over these coming four years,” said the daughter of former US Vice President Dick Cheney, a major architect of the Iraq War.

Liz Cheney engaged in a very public war of words with Trump in the days leading up to the election, in which she accused the president-elect of saying she should be killed.

Cheney, a lifelong Republican, threw her support behind Harris and the Democrats in the face of Trump.

The Mexican peso plunged to a two-year low after Trump’s election victory, trading as low as 20.8100 to the US dollar amid concerns about new trade barriers. It recovered some of its losses, landing at 20.6170 to the dollar on Wednesday morning, still down 2.59 percent from its previous close.

“The Mexican peso has been hit hard,” said Chris Turner, global head of markets at ING, adding he would not rule out a move to 22.00 to the dollar over the coming weeks.

But Rodolfo Ramos, head of Mexico research at Brazilian bank Bradesco, said a Trump administration was not an unknown and there is reason to remain hopeful. “We see uncertainty on tariffs in the short term, but we remain positive on nearshoring over the medium and long run,” he said in a note to clients.

Earlier, as we reported, Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum expressed confidence the country would have strong ties with the US under Trump and that “there’s no reason to worry”.

The US-based Institute for Middle East Understanding’s Policy Project says the Democratic leadership “failed to listen to their core voters” after being warned for months that their support for Israel’s war on Gaza would cost them thousands of ballots.

“Democrats failed to turn out the voters who propelled them to victory in 2020,” the group wrote. “For months the polling has shown that Vice President Harris was costing herself votes she needed – from young people, women, people of color, and progressive voters – by not breaking with Biden and by failing to call for an end of weapons to Israel in accordance with US law.”

“The majority of Americans do not want their tax dollars funding Israel’s war crimes,” the group added.

“It is time for Democratic leadership to listen to and align with the people who power the Democratic Party, and who know the principles of human rights and justice for all must include Palestinians.”