Washington State Takes First Steps Towards Raising Taxes

John Harris: “Democrats warned that Trump and his supporters are prepared to hijack democracy. Now they must ruefully acknowledge another reality: The Trump movement, no matter how much this appalls opponents, is a powerful expression of democracy.” “Vice President Kamala Harris may have been an imperfect candidate — the postmortems are vigorously underway on Wednesday morning — but she delivered the essential Democratic argument perfectly well: The Trump Era was something to be scraped off the national shoe.” “Instead, there will be another helping placed on the national plate.

“Donald Trump will be the next president of the United States, and the same far-right extremists emboldened by his first administration are celebrating his win with violent memes and threats,” Wired reports. “Many of the social media posts reviewed by Wired reveled in fantasies of Trump locking up and even executing his political opponents in revenge.”

“Despondent Biden administration officials are mulling how to protect their national security priorities before president-elect Donald Trump returns to the Oval Office in January. Whether it’s sending funds to Ukraine or imposing new sanctions on extremist Israeli settlers, an array of options are on the table,” Politico reports. “But there’s no formal plan yet for how to lock in President Joe Biden’s big-ticket policies against a Trump effort to dismantle them.”

Justice Department officials have been evaluating how to wind down the two federal criminal cases against President-elect Donald Trump before he takes office to comply with long-standing department policy that a sitting president can’t be prosecuted, NBC News reports.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who may play a key role overseeing public health issues in a second Trump administration, said Wednesday that he won’t take away people’s vaccines, NBC News reports. He also said he will meet with senior Trump aides on Wednesday to discuss his role going forward.

Vice President Kamala Harris was preparing to concede the presidential race to Donald Trump in what her campaign said would be a speech at 4 p.m. ET, the New York Times reports. Harris was scheduled to call Trump soon to formally concede.