Trump wins latest: Details of alleged Iranian plot to kill Donald Trump before election revealed

As anyone who took more than a passing interest in Donald Trump’s previous tenure as president will be familiar, the Republican frequently opts for unconventional approaches to foreign diplomacy.

The first apparent example of this since winning his second presidential election has emerged in a report from Axios, which says he was joined by Elon Musk on his call with Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy on Wednesday.

As noted by the news website, the reported details of the call indicate how much the SpaceX owner could influence the new Trump administration.

In keeping with sentiments noted in our 15.30 post, it also reported that Mr Zelenskyy was “somewhat reassured” by what he heard from the president-elect.

Trump has previously claimed he would end the Ukraine war in his first 24 hours in office, while many have suggested he might end US aid to the country in its conflict with Russia.

 The US Justice Department has revealed criminal charges relating to a thwarted Iranian plot to kill Donald Trump before this week’s presidential election.

A criminal complaint filed in federal court in Manhattan alleges that an unnamed official in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps instructed a contact this past September to put together a plan to surveil and ultimately kill Trump.

If the man, identified as Farjad Shakeri, was unable to create a plan by then, the complaint said, the official told him Iran would pause its plan until after the presidential election because the official believed Trump would lose and it would be easier to assassinate him then, the complaint said.

Shakeri told the FBI he did not plan to propose a plan to murder Trump within the seven days the official had requested, according to the complaint.

The plot reflects what federal officials have described as ongoing efforts by Iran to target US government officials, including Trump, on US soil.

The department described Shakeri as an IRGC asset residing in Tehran. It said he immigrated to the US as a child and was deported around 2008 following a robbery conviction.

The department said it had charged two other individuals in connection with their alleged involvement in a plot to kill a US citizen of Iranian origin in New York.

The crushing nature of Donald Trump’s victory on Tuesday has been well documented, with the Republican securing what many framed as a landslide.

Pollsters had predicted a razor-tight result, with many expecting it to take days before the identity of the new president became clear.

But Trump confounded almost all the opinion polls by racking up what appears certain to be 312 Electoral College votes – and even winning the popular vote.

However, one set up figures reflected the fact that even the clearer triumphs in presidential elections are determined by relatively small margins.

Keiran Pedley shared the numbers from Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, and pointed out that just a 1% swing in each of these crucial battleground states would have seen Kamala Harris take each, and win the presidency in the process.

A central tenet of Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign was tapping into the groundswell of women’s anger and political activism unleashed by the US Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning the federal right to an abortion.

The ruling was made after three conservative justices appointed by Donald Trump voted in its favour.

However, the election result indicates the issue failed to drive the turnout the vice president needed, as other topics proved more important.

Just 14% of voters cited abortion as their top issue in the White House race, while 32% cited the economy, an Edison Research exit poll showed.

Although women voters preferred Harris to Trump, 53% to 45%, she won less than the 57% that President Joe Biden received in 2020, and Trump’s number was 3 percentage points more than he received in 2020.

Harris had 51% of the support from voters under 45, who tended to cite abortion as a more important issue than older voters, compared to Trump, whose 46% support was up 4 points from a 2020 exit poll.

The Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in 2022 to overturn the landmark 1973 Roe v Wade ruling triggered a wave of restrictive abortion laws in Republican-controlled states.

That ruling and the subsequent state bans were widely credited for fuelling a string of Democratic and abortion rights ballot measure wins in the two years that followed.

Harris’s campaign ran on the message that Trump would further erode reproductive healthcare access, including contraception and fertility treatments, but that she would back a federal law to restore abortion rights nationwide.

And activists anticipate more restrictions are coming.

“We think that he and the people around him will seek to restrict reproductive healthcare access across the board,” said Deirdre Schifeling, chief political and advocacy officer at the American Civil Liberties Union.

While Trump has floated interest in a federal 15-week ban, he has more recently insisted he would leave the issue to the states.

“President Trump has long been consistent in supporting the rights of states to make decisions on abortion,” Karoline Leavitt, Trump-Vance spokeswoman, said when asked which reproductive health policies he would pursue.

While a defeat for the Democrats in the presidential election has widely been seen as bad news for Ukraine’s leaders, one report suggests the change of White House resident may be less unpopular in Kyiv than most assumed.

According to an article in The Economist, “many senior officials” in Ukraine were hoping for a Trump victory.

It says they had grown tired of Joe Biden’s frequent proclamations of strong support while refusing to allow them to use long-range missiles to strike deep inside Russia and failing to avoid lengthy delays in military aid. 

“Faced with the choice of continued bare life-support or a wildcard president who would rip up the rules and almost certainly cut aid, they were prepared to gamble,” the report says.

Trump has previously promised to end the war within 24 hours of becoming president, although many fear that any deal he reaches with Vladimir Putin will involve major Ukrainian concessions – which may do little to deter further aggression from the Russian leader in Europe.

In one of his last rally moments of the campaign ahead of the polls opening, Donald Trump told a cheering crowd: “In a little while you have to stand up and tell Kamala that you’ve had enough, that you can’t take it anymore.”

The now president-elect went on to say she was a “terrible” vice-president, before ending with a quote from his days of hosting the US Apprentice. 

“Kamala you’re fired, get the hell out of here.”

The Democrats looked like a “bunch of hypocrites” over Gaza and may have presumed voters agreed with their stance on Ukraine, a former senior White House official has told us.

Supporting Israel’s bombardment of civilians in Gaza – while backing Ukraine with billions of dollars’ worth of aid on the basis Russia is bombing civilians there – may have cost Kamala Harris votes, according to former deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes.

Speaking to The World with Yalda Hakim, Rhodes, who served under Barack Obama, said: “I think more generally, there’s a bigger problem with Gaza in that it just kind of makes the Democrats seem like a bunch of hypocrites.

“And we walk around talking about a rules-based international order, we justify tens of billions of dollars in support for Ukraine based on Vladimir Putin bombarding civilians.

“And then we turn around and we support an Israeli bombardment of civilians in Gaza.”

That’s the kind of thing Trump has “called out”, he said, even though he is “someone who does that himself”.

But it “sticks to Democrats”, he added, if they “look like hypocrites in that manner”. 

“I also think that there’s this presumption sometimes in the Democratic Party, people must agree with us in Ukraine,” he continued. 

“It’s the obvious thing to do, to support Ukraine. I believe that we need to support Ukraine, but that fails to take seriously the questions that people have about, well, how long are we going to get $50-60bn a year to Ukraine?

“What’s the strategy here? Where does it end? You never heard Joe Biden – or Kamala Harris for that matter – describe where is this going? Where is this ending? How long do we have to be doing this?

“The message is actually the opposite – as much as it takes for as long as it takes.”

Democrats ‘caught in middle’

Trump “spoke to a lot of frustration” among voters around the “entire apparatus of American foreign policy”, he added.

It’s not responsive on Gaza, he said, and it’s “not responsive on forever wars”.

“I think this is an area where Trump kind of totally shuffled the deck,” he said.

“The Republican Party has gone from being the hawkish party to being the America First party, and Democrats have been somewhat caught in the middle.”

A former Republican presidential candidate has called on members of the party to stop “dunking on” Donald Trump’s Democratic opponents.

“My advice to our fellow Republicans is that after we won, and won decisively, we’re done criticising Kamala Harris, or Joe Biden, or the past,” said Vivek Ramaswamy in an interview with CNBC.

“Let’s turn the page to chase the future,” he said.

The businessman also made a plea to Democrats to give Trump and the Republican Party “a chance”.

“Most people favour economic growth, most people want to pay lower taxes, most people want an American dream for their kids and an immigration system that works… that’s the opportunity that we have,” he said.

Ramaswamy dropped out of the 2024 presidential race in January and endorsed Trump after a disappointing showing in the Iowa caucuses – despite efforts to convince voters he’d be better able to push the “America First” agenda he and Trump both championed.

Though we know who’s won the election, a final call is yet to be made for the battleground state of Arizona, which is still counting votes.

With just under three-quarters of the vote counted, Donald Trump currently has 52.5% and Kamala Harris has 46.6%.

However, our US partner NBC News still has the result as being too close to call yet.

In 2020, Joe Biden won Arizona with 49.4% of the vote to Trump’s 49.1%. In 2016, Trump won the state with 50% to Hillary Clinton’s 45%.

Donald Trump goes into his second term as a more experienced politician who will “make better decisions” on who to have in his close circle, the head of a Republican organisation has said.

Trump had a historically high level of turnover among senior staff during his first presidency.

But Greg Swenson, chairman of Republicans Overseas UK, told Sky News he believes the president-elect will be “much more disciplined” on staff appointments this time around.

“I think Trump will be much more disciplined and make better decisions this time,” he said.

“The Trump of the second term will be much better at… surrounding himself with the right people,” he said.

Mr Swenson points to Trump being a political novice when he was first elected in 2016.

“He had not been around Washington or the establishment Republican circles ever. He also didn’t have a political group from New York – he was never governor, he was never a senator… this was a new phenomenon for him,” he said.

“This time around, he’s much better. He’s had much more experience.”