The rial traded at 703,000 rials to the dollar, traders in Tehran said. The rate could still change throughout the day. Iran’s Central Bank could flood the market with more hard currencies as an attempt to improve the rate, as it has done in the past.
The slide comes as the rial already faces considerable woes over its sharp slide in value — and as the mood on the streets of Tehran among some darkened.
“One-hundred percent he will intensify the sanctions,” said Amir Aghaeian, a 22-year-old student. “Things that are not in our favor will be worse. Our economy and social situation will surely get worse.”
He added: “I feel the country is going to blow up.”
Trump unilaterally withdrew America from the accord in 2018, sparking years of tensions between the countries that persist today.
Iran’s economy has struggled for years under crippling international sanctions over its rapidly advancing nuclear program, which now enriches uranium at near weapons-grade levels.
However, Iran’s government has for weeks been trying to downplay the effect on Tehran of whoever won Tuesday’s election in the United States. That stance continued on Wednesday with a brief comment from Fatemeh Mohajerani, a spokeswoman for Pezeshkian’s administration.
”The election of the U.S. president doesn’t have anything specifically to do with us,” she said. “The major policies of America and the Islamic Republic are fixed, and they won’t heavily change by people replacing others. We have already made necessary preparations in advance.”
Iran remains locked in the Mideast wars roiling the region, with its allies battered — militant groups and fighters of its self-described “Axis of Resistance,” including the militant Palestinian Hamas, lebanon’s Hezbollah and Yemen’s Houthi rebels.
Israel is pressing its war in the Gaza Strip targeting Hamas and its invasion of Lebanon amid devastating attacks against Hezbollah. At the same time, Iran still appears to be assessing damage from Israel’s strikes on the Islamic Republic on Oct. 26 in response to two Iranian ballistic missile attacks.
Iran has threatened to retaliate against Israel — where U.S. troops now man a missile defense battery.
Mahmoud Parvari, a 71-year-old taxi driver in Tehran, did not mince his words when discussing Trump.
“I feel like I’m seeing the devil,” he said. “He looks like Satan, his eyes are like Satan and his behavior is like a mad man.”
But another taxi driver, who only gave his last name as Hosseini, offered a more pragmatic view.
“If it helps my country I would definitely” make a deal with Trump, he said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s Trump or anyone else. After all he is a human being.”
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Associated Press writer Jon Gambrell in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, contributed to this report.
On stage in West Palm Beach in the early hours of Wednesday morning, Donald Trump thanked his supporters, his family and his campaign team as he declared victory in the US presidential race. One group not on the former president’s thank-you cards: the media, whom he referred to as “the enemy camp”.
Introducing his running mate, the Ohio senator JD Vance, Trump said: “I told JD to go into the enemy camp. He just goes: OK. Which one? CNN? MSNBC? He’s like the only guy who looks forward to going on, and then just absolutely obliterates them.”
Trump has had an antagonistic relationship with the US press for years, often labeling them as the “crooked media” and calling them the “enemy of the people”. But as the Republican candidate in recent weeks ramped up his rhetoric against his perceived opponents, he’s intensified his attacks on reporters as well.
The comment during Trump’s victory speech come less than a week after he joked during a campaign rally he would have no concerns about reporters being shot at if there were another assassination attempt against him.
During meandering comments at a rally in Pennsylvania last week, Trump complained about gaps in the bulletproof shields surrounding him after a gunman opened fire on him at a rally in July.
“To get me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news and I don’t mind that so much,” he said.
The press, he added, were “seriously corrupt people”.
Trump’s communications director later claimed in a statement the comments were supposedly an effort to look out for the welfare of the news media.
Trump on Wednesday morning claimed victory over his Democratic opponent in the presidential race, Kamala Harris, and pledged to bring a “golden age” to the United States.
“This was a movement like nobody’s ever seen before, and frankly, this was, I believe, the greatest political movement of all time. There’s never been anything like this in this country, and maybe beyond,” Trump said.
South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham has sent an ominous message to special counsel Jack Smith as Donald Trump was on the precipice of being announced as the winner of the 2024 election.
Early on Wednesday morning, mere moments before Trump took the stage in West Palm Beach, Florida, to give his victory speech, Graham posted a note on X “to Jack Smith and your team”.
“It is time to look forward to a new chapter in your legal careers as these politically motivated charges against President Trump hit a wall,” Graham wrote.
“The supreme court substantially rejected what you were trying to do, and after tonight, it’s clear the American people are tired of lawfare. Bring these cases to an end. The American people deserve a refund.”
The US attorney general Merrick Garland appointed Smith in November 2022 to determine whether Trump should face criminal charges stemming from investigations into the former’s president’s alleged mishandling of national security materials and his role in the 6 January attack on the US Capitol.
Smith charged Trump last year in Florida over his retention of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago club, and in Washington over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
With the election mere months away, Trump’s legal team tried to stall the proceedings as much as possible.
Their case was aided in July, when the supreme court conferred broad immunity on former presidents and narrowed the scope of the prosecution.
Smith and his team detailed their case against Trump in a 165-page filing that was unsealed in October, in which they argued that Trump should not be entitled to immunity from prosecution. In the filing, federal prosecutors said that Trump “resorted to crimes” in a failed bid to cling to power after losing the 2020 election and that he is not entitled to immunity from prosecution.
The charges filed by Smith and his team were not the only one vexing Trump since leaving office in 2021. When he takes office in January, Trump will be the first convicted criminal to win the White House and gain access to the nuclear codes.
In May, Trump was found guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records relating to a hush-money payment to the adult film performer Stormy Daniels. Sentencing was originally scheduled on 18 September, but delayed to 26 November after a request from Trump for it to be postponed until after the election. It’s unclear if the date will stand.
Since the unsealing of Smith’s case in October, Trump has spoken publicly about how he would immediately fire Smith if he were re-elected.
In a conversation with the conservative podcast host Hugh Hewitt, who asked whether Trump would pardon himself or fire the special counsel, Trump said: “Oh, it’s so easy. It’s so easy … I would fire him within two seconds.”
After notching a string of wins in crucial swing states, Donald Trump was poised to return to the White House after a momentous presidential election in which democracy itself had been at stake and which is likely to take the United States into uncharted political waters.
The Republican nominee took North Carolina surprisingly early, the first battleground state to be called, and later he took Georgia and then Pennsylvania. He was strongly positioned in Arizona and Nevada, other key contests.
The race between Trump, a former president, and the current Democratic vice-president, Kamala Harris, had been a frenetic contest and it finally approached its conclusion amid scenes of celebration in the Trump camp.
At 1.20am, at Trump’s election watch party in Palm Beach, Florida, a prolonged, almighty roar went up as Fox News had called Pennsylvania for Trump. “It’s over!” screamed one man, amid the noise, at what felt like the point of no return. A young man in a black Trump hat shouted: “Fuck Joe Biden! Fuck her!”
The euphoric crowd chanted: “USA! USA!” They gathered near the stage, waiting for Trump to speak.
At 1.47am, Fox named Trump president-elect, though the Associated Press – which the Guardian follows – has not yet put Trump over the finish line.
The man who incited the deadly attack at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, earning (and surviving) a second impeachment; the man who was this year convicted on 34 criminal charges; the man who faces multiple other criminal counts and who has been ordered to pay millions in multiple civil lawsuits, including one over a rape claim a judge deemed “substantially true”. The man at the centre of all of that whom senior military aides called a fascist and a danger to the republic was preparing to head for the White House again.
Eventually, past 2am, Trump emerged to speak, to the strains of God Bless the USA, the Lee Greenwood country anthem plastered on Bibles that Trump hawks for sale. Trump was surrounded by his family, by close aides, and by JD Vance, the hard-right Ohio senator he made his vice-presidential pick.
“This is a movement like nobody’s ever seen before,” Trump said. “This is I believe the greatest political movement of all time. There’s never been anything like this in this country and now it’s going to reach a new level of importance, because we’re going to help our country heal.
Supporters of Donald Trump celebrate outside a restaurant in Miami, Florida, on Tuesday. Photograph: Silvio Campos/AFP/Getty Images
“We’re going to fix our borders. We’re going to fix everything about our country … I will not rest until we have delivered the strong, safe and prosperous America that our children deserve, this will truly be the golden age of America.”
Trump reveled in battleground state victories and said he would win them all. He claimed to have won the popular vote, which had not yet been decided. He described “a great feeling of love” and claimed “an unprecedented and powerful mandate”, celebrating Republicans retaking the Senate. He said it looked like Republicans would keep control of the House of Representatives – again, undecided at that point.
Trump saluted his wife, Melania, his family, and Vance, who he invited to the podium to speak. Vance buttered up the boss, promising “the greatest economic comeback in American history under Donald Trump’s leadership”.
Trump referred to the assassination attempts against him. “God spared me for a reason,” he said.
At Harris’s watch party, at Howard University in Washington, the mood became somber, as hopes Harris could become the first president from a Historically Black College and University began to flicker and dim. Around 1am, Cedric Richmond, a former congressman and Harris campaign co-chair, told supporters they would not hear from Harris.
“Thank you for believing in the promise of America,” Richmond said. “We still have votes to count. We still have states that have not been called yet. We will continue overnight to fight to make sure that every vote is counted, that every voice has spoken.”
Attendees rushed out, the mood swinging to despair. Eight years after Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in a similar fashion, few attendees seemed surprised or shocked. Many declined to comment. “What more is there to say,” one woman shrugged as she shuffled out.
Strewn water bottles and other litter were all that was left after the crowd was gone.
Before 1am, the Republicans had retaken the Senate. A West Virginia seat went red as expected but the die was cast when Sherrod Brown, a long-serving progressive Democrat, was beaten in Ohio by Bernie Moreno, a car salesperson backed by Trump. Democrats had held the chamber 51-49. Other key races went right. In Maryland, Angela Alsobrooks provided a point of light for Democrats, joining Lisa Blunt Rochester, of Delaware, as the third and fourth Black women ever elected to the Senate.
The House remained contested, Democrats seeking to retake the chamber, to erect a bastion against a Republican White House and Senate. The House can hold a president to account but the Senate controls federal judicial appointments. Further rightwing consolidation of control of the supreme court, to which Trump appointed three hardliners between 2017 and 2021, looms large.
In June 2022, that Trump court removed the federal right to abortion. Campaigns for reproductive rights fueled Democratic electoral successes after that but on Tuesday such issues seemed to fall short of fueling the wave of support from suburban, Republican-leaning women Democrats had hoped for and pundits predicted.
A measure to enshrine abortion rights in the Florida constitution, which Democrats hoped would help boost turnout, fell short of the 60% needed for approval. Nebraska, won by Trump, voted to uphold its abortion ban, which outlaws the procedure after 12 weeks of pregnancy. Abortion-related measures did pass in New York, Maryland, Colorado, Missouri, Nevada and Arizona.
A huge gender gap opened. A CNN exit poll showed Harris up by 11 points among female voters, Trump up 10 among male voters. Other polls showed dominant concerns over the economy and democracy. According to the AP Votecast survey, four in 10 voters named the economy and jobs as the most important problem facing the country, a hopeful sign for Trump. Roughly half of voters cited the fate of democracy, a focal point of Harris’s campaign.
Wednesday will bring jitters in foreign capitals. Victory for Trump’s “America first” ethos can be expected to boost rightwing populists in Europe and elsewhere – and to place support for Ukraine in jeopardy as it fights Russian invaders.
At home, America lies divided. Harris centered her campaign on Trump’s autocratic threat while he ran a campaign fuelled by grievance, both personal and the perception of an ailing America, baselessly painting Biden and Harris as far-left figures wrecking the economy with inflation and identity politics. Though he was the subject of two assassination attempts, in Pennsylvania and Florida, he stoked huge divisions and widespread fears of violence.
Trump told supporters “I am your retribution” and threatened to prosecute political foes, journalists and others. He suggested turning the US military against “the enemy from within”. He put immigration and border security at the heart of his pitch, painting a picture of the US overrun by illegal immigration, with language that veered into outright racism and fearmongering. He referred to undocumented people as “animals” with “bad genes … poisoning the blood of our country”.
He vowed to stage the biggest deportation in US history, to replace thousands of federal workers with loyalists, to impose sweeping tariffs on allies and foes alike.
On election night, he said he would govern “by a simple motto: Promises made. Promises kept. We’re going to keep our promises. Nothing will stop me.”
Additional reporting by Sam Levine in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Hugo Lowell in West Palm Beach, Florida, and Asia Alexander in Washington DC
Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage
As election night progressed, Americans were fixated on results trickling in, their faces giving way to despair or celebration as states were called for Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump.
Trump supporters were ecstatic at a campaign watch party in West Palm Beach, Florida.
Harris supporters looked on in dismay when it was announced she would not speak at a campaign watch party on the campus of Howard University in Washington, D.C.
It was all smiles and hugs at some watch parties when it was announced Trump won Georgia, a state that he lost by just under 12,000 votes in 2020.
That was a stark contrast with Democratic supporters, who could only bury their faces in their hands as Trump continued to gain ground in states that President Joe Biden won four years before.
By 11pm on election night, Fox News was declaring Donald Trump “a phoenix from the ashes”.
“[He’s] the biggest political phoenix from the ashes that we’ve seen in the history of politics,” said anchor Bret Baier.
As counts in some swing states were starting to show Trump in the lead, and Trump’s chance of winning seemed to increase, some of Fox’s biggest stars were writing the first draft of his comeback victory.
“This is the most incredible political comeback that we’ve seen since 1968,” said commentator Ben Domenech. It will be “not just the greatest political comeback of all time,” added Laura Ingraham. “It will be the greatest comeback in history.”
Fox News is still firmly in the center of the conservative media universe, despite growing competition from the likes of NewsMax, the One American News (OAN) network, and myriad conservative podcasts. The US broadcaster remains the most-watched cable news network in the country, consistently beating CNN and MSNBC in the ratings.
Though none of the crucial seven battleground states had been called by the network by 11pm on election night, Fox’s roundtable appeared to be getting ready for a Trump victory, speculating on what it would say about the future of politics and American media.
Sean Hannity, who did not make any election night appearances in 2020, said on Tuesday night: “After all they have thrown at this man, after all they have done to this man, with all the media that wouldn’t even vet [Harris] and her radical positions, what would this say about legacy media? It’s dead.”
Jesse Watters told viewers that a Trump win would be a “mandate” to run the country. A Trump victory would be a “complete rejection of everything [the media] has been telling us about Donald Trump”, he added.
Multiple Fox commentators noted that Trump appeared to be doing well with Black and Hispanic voters, noting the “diverse coalition” that Trump’s campaign has pulled together this election. Commentator Dana Perino called it the most “racially diverse political coalition that we’ve seen in generations”.
Things were looking quite different on election night in 2020. Just before 11.30pm, Fox News called Arizona in favor of Joe Biden. The call was pivotal. Arizona had voted for Trump in 2016, a slide to Biden would suggest Donald Trump’s grasp had loosened since the 2016 election.
The early call infuriated Trump, who had come to see Fox News as a friendly extension of his communications team, frequently calling into the network during his presidency and appearing for exclusive interviews.
Ever since then, the network, owned by media scion Rupert Murdoch, has had to navigate a sometimes tense relationship with Trump. The former president has given the network its highest ratings. On election night in 2020, the network got 14.1 million viewers between 8pm and 11pm – 5 million more than CNN during the same time block, and more than double the viewership of other news networks.
But the cozy relationship has also gotten the network in trouble. Fox News paid voting machine maker Dominion $787.5m in a settlement over misinformation in the 2020 election. It still has a $2.7bn lawsuit from Smartmatic in the courts.
Going into the 2024 presidential election, the network has been walking a tightrope. It hosted a town hall with Trump in January, the first time the former president had appeared on the network in almost two years. He has called into the network more and participated in another town hall hosted by the network in October. Murdoch, who in 2020 said that “Trump will be becoming irrelevant”, showed up to the Republican national convention in Milwaukee in July.
But Trump and Fox News have put some distance between each other since 2016. In the days leading up to the election, Trump told reporters that he was annoyed that the network kept playing clips from Oprah’s speech supporting Harris.
“You know who else should be ashamed of themselves is Fox,” Trump said. “Everybody thinks Fox is so pro-Trump. They’re not pro-Trump at all.”
But on Tuesday night, even with most swing states too close to call, Fox brought some of the network’s most Trump-friendly commentators on air to raise the prospect of a Trump resurrection – and discuss its possible implications.
“It would be up to the Democrats and the media,” Watters said. “What’s their posture toward the greatest comeback victory that we’ve ever seen?”
Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage
Donald Trump has taken the stage and is addressing supporters in West Palm Beach, Florida. Trump vows in his election night speech to fight “for your family and your future.”
As the clock ticked toward 3am on Wednesday morning on the US east coast, three of the seven swing states – Georgia, North Carolina, and, crucially, Pennsylvania – had been called for Donald Trump, putting him within spitting distance of 270 electoral college votes. The Republican candidate currently has 267 electoral college votes.
On a stage in West Palm Beach, Trump declared victory and pledged to bring a “golden age” to the United States.
What have Trump and Harris said about the election?
Speaking on Wednesday, Trump said: “This was a movement like nobody’s ever seen before, and frankly, this was, I believe, the greatest political movement of all time. There’s never been anything like this in this country, and maybe beyond.”
Earlier, Harris’s campaign co-chair Cedric Richmond addressed the crowd at her campaign party in Washington and said, “We still have votes to count. We still have states that have not been called yet”, but made clear that the Democratic candidate wouldn’t be speaking.
States still to be called
The swing states still to be called are Wisconsin (10 electoral college votes), Nevada (6), Michigan (15) and Arizona (11).
The other states still to be called are Alaska and Maine. Alaska is considered a red state, and its three electoral college votes could deliver Trump the presidency.
Republicans have retaken the majority in the Senate, the Associated Press reported, after picking up seats in Ohio and West Virginia, and fending off challenges to their candidates in Texas and Nebraska. Republicans will control Congress’s upper chamber for the first time in four years. Donald Trump will be in a position to confirm his supreme court justices, federal judges and appointees to cabinet posts.
The House is still in play, but Republicans hold a strong lead, with 190 representatives to the Democrats’ 168.
Sarah McBride, a Delaware state senator, also made history as the first out transgender person elected to the US House of Representatives. McBride, 34, won Delaware’s at-large House seat in Tuesday’s general election against the Republican candidate John Whalen III, a former Delaware state police officer and businessman. The House seat, Delaware’s only one, has been Democratic since 2010.
Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage
WASHINGTON (AP) — Republican voters in North Carolina cast ballots in greater numbers than four years ago, while Democratic turnout sagged. Together, those two factors carried Donald Trump to victory over Vice President Kamala Harris, marking the third time he has carried the swing state.
While Trump has consistently won North Carolina, his victory over Democrat Joe Biden in 2020 was much narrower — just over 1%. This year Trump held a 2.8 percentage point lead when The Associated Press called the race for him at 11:18 p.m. ET once it became clear that there weren’t enough outstanding votes left in Democratic-leaning areas for Harris to overtake his lead.
To understand why Harris did not do as well as Biden in the state, consider Nash and New Hanover counties.
Hillary Clinton lost Nash County, which is east of Raleigh, but Biden flipped it four years later. This year, Trump carried it by 2 percentage points when the race was called. Meanwhile, Harris was winning in New Hanover County, which is home to Wilmington, but she did not do as well as Biden did in 2020.
CANDIDATES: President: Harris (D) v. Trump (R) v. Chase Oliver (Libertarian) v. Jill Stein (Green) v. Randall Terry (Constitution) v. Cornel West (Justice For All).
WINNER: Trump
POLL CLOSING TIME: 7:30 p.m. ET.
ABOUT THE RACE:
North Carolina gave Trump his tightest swing state victory during the 2020 election, a contest in which he edged Biden by roughly a percentage point but still received less than 50% of the vote. Fast-forward four years, and the dynamics have become even more complicated.
Democratic presidential candidates have carried North Carolina only twice since 1968 — the most recent in 2008, when Barack Obama carried the state. But the state is one of the fastest-growing, with migration from elsewhere in the United States serving as the primary driver of population growth. Many are college-educated professionals — a demographic group that has increasingly favored the Democratic Party.
Layer on top of that the aftereffects of Hurricane Helene, which ravaged western parts of the state that are more conservative and still grappling with the devastation, and it offered Democrats perhaps the best chance they had in years to carry the state.
WHY AP CALLED THE RACE: Trump did better in North Carolina than four years ago — when he also won the race. Harris, meanwhile, failed to draw as much support as Biden. When the race was called, she would have needed to garner almost 60% of the remaining vote and there just weren’t enough votes left in Democratic strongholds for her to reach that threshold.
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Learn more about how and why the AP declares winners in U.S. elections at Explaining Election 2024, a series from The Associated Press aimed at helping make sense of the American democracy. The AP receives support from several private foundations to enhance its explanatory coverage of elections and democracy. See more about AP’s democracy initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
