Vadluru:

Far from Republican festivities as Donald Trump claimed US election victory, residents of a sleepy Indian village celebrated that their descendant would be the next “Second Lady”, hoping to benefit from her success.

Academic highflyer and successful lawyer Usha Vance, the child of Indian immigrants, is the wife of Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance.

While 38-year-old Usha Vance was born and brought up in suburban San Diego, those in the village of her paternal ancestors in India’s southern Andhra Pradesh state prayed that historic ties would bring improvements to their land.

“We feel happy,” said Srinivasa Raju, 53, a resident of Vadluru, a village of white-washed homes scattered amongst palm trees, more than 13,450 (8,360 miles) from the White House in Washington. “We support Trump.”

Villagers had offered prayers for a Trump win, and Hindu priest Appaji said he hoped Usha Vance would do something in return.

“We expect her to help our village,” the 43-year-old priest said, dressed in flowing saffron robes, after lighting a candle at the idol of Hindu elephant-headed deity Ganesh for Trump.

“If she can recognise her roots and do something good for this village, then that would be great.”

‘Very fine’

Usha Vance’s great-grandfather moved out of Vadluru and her father Chilukuri Radhakrishnan — a PhD holder — was brought up in the Indian city of Chennai, before going on to study in the United States.

“Every Indian — not just myself, every Indian — we feel proud of Usha, because she is of Indian origin,” said 70-year-old Venkata Ramanayy. “We hope she will develop our village.”

She has never visited the village, but the priest said her father came around three years ago and checked on the temple’s condition.

“We have already seen the governance of Trump — very good,” Ramanayy said. “Indian and American relations were very fine during the presidency of Trump.”

Little is known about Radhakrishnan’s initial years in the United States, but the film of J.D. Vance’s memoirs, Hillbilly Elegy, refers to him coming to the country with “nothing”.

Millions of Indians have made similar journeys as the Chilukuris, and according to the most recent US census, Indians have become the country’s second-largest Asian ethnicity, growing 50 percent to 4.8 million in the decade to 2020.

Usha, a practising Hindu who studied at Yale and Cambridge Universities, married J.D. Vance in Kentucky in 2014. They have three children.

‘Inspiring’

But the story was different around 730 kilometres (454 miles) to the southwest, in Thulasendrapuram, once home to Kamala Harris’s grandfather.

T.S. Anbarasu, 63, said the Democrat’s “struggle” had encouraged girls to stay in school.

“She is inspiring this village,” he said. “Any school in the surrounding area, students know about Kamala Harris.”

Harris, 60, was born in California, but was often taken to India by her mother.

“If she comes here, we’ll treat her like the president of the United States,” Anbarasu said.

“We are still proud of her. She is like family to us. If our family members fail, we don’t discriminate against them, or treat them as a loser, right?”

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Beijing:

Donald Trump on Wednesday won the US presidential election over Kamala Harris, and world leaders were swift in congratulating the Republican.

Donald Trump vowed strict trade measures against China on the campaign trail for the White House, and the relationship between Washington and Beijing will be one of the key themes of his tenure.

Here is a selection of comments made by Trump about China:

— “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive,” Trump tweeted in November 2012.

— “I beat the people from China. I win against China. You can win against China if you’re smart. But our people don’t have a clue. We give state dinners to the heads of China. I said, ‘why are you doing state dinners for them? They’re ripping us left and right. Just take them to McDonald’s and go back to the negotiating table,” Trump said at a July 2015 rally.

— “We can’t continue to allow China to rape our country, and that’s what we’re doing,” Trump told a campaign rally in May 2016, insisting that the United States had “a lot of power with China.”

— “China is letting us down in that they have not been buying the agricultural products from our great Farmers that they said they would,” Trump tweeted in July 2019.

— “For the people that are now out of work because of the important and necessary containment policies, for instance the shutting down of hotels, bars and restaurants, money will soon be coming to you. The onslaught of the Chinese Virus is not your fault! Will be stronger than ever!” he wrote in a tweet in March 2020.

— “China’s pattern of misconduct is well known. For decades, they have ripped off the United States like no one has ever done before. Hundreds of billions of dollars a year were lost dealing with China, especially over the years during the prior administration,” he said in May 2020.

— “As we pursue this bright future, we must hold accountable the nation which unleashed this plague onto the world: China,” Trump told the United Nations in September 2020, referring to the coronavirus pandemic.

— “Think of President Xi: central casting, a brilliant guy. You know, when I say he’s brilliant, everyone says, ‘Oh that’s terrible’… Well, he runs 1.4 billion people with an iron fist. Smart, brilliant, everything perfect. There’s nobody in Hollywood like this guy,” he said in July 2023 at a Fox News town hall.

— “I had a very strong relationship with him,” Trump said of President Xi to the Wall Street Journal in October 2024. “He was actually a really good, I don’t want to say friend — I don’t want to act foolish, ‘he was my friend’ — but I got along with him great.”

Trump added: “He’s a very fierce person.”

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Washington:

Donald Trump touted his ability to “get away with it” as a defining theme of his life story when he first ran for president in 2016 — boasting that he could shoot someone on New York’s Fifth Avenue without losing a single vote.

Fast-forward eight years and America’s incoming 47th president looks like Nostradamus, winning the keys to the White House on Wednesday despite incredible odds.

He is the most controversial man in the country, narrowly avoided being killed in an assassination attempt, and at 78 will become the oldest person to take the Oval Office in US history.

And that’s before throwing in the fact that he’s out on bail in three criminal jurisdictions and fighting gigantic civil penalties for sexual assault and fraud. Despite victory, he faces sentencing in just a few weeks on nearly three-dozen felonies related to his 2016 presidential campaign.

Yet in defeating Democrat Kamala Harris, Trump has once more shown he can defy all political and legal gravity.

Many thought this time he wouldn’t manage.

He’d closed out November of last year with a 47.4 percent average in opinion polls — a number that only shifted by one point upward in the intervening year.

Far from moving to the center, he continued to publicly praise foreign dictators, while threatening fellow Americans with military reprisals. He re-upped his once unprecedented, now trademark, claims that Democrats were trying to rig the election against him.

Trump’s longest-serving chief-of-staff called him a “fascist.”

For most candidates, any of these controversies, let alone the legal issues, would have been career-ending.

Yet for Trump, controversy is all part of the show.

Even an assassination attempt at a Pennsylvania rally that left him bloodied could not keep down the man whose self-branded persona as the ultimate deal-maker has embedded itself in the American psyche.

Now, Trump is about to be reinstalled as the commander in chief of the most powerful military in history, despite a criminal record that would bar him from serving as a private in the army.

And his legal troubles could disappear as the new president — emboldened by presidential immunity from prosecution — issues pardons, fires federal prosecutors and gets backing from a Supreme Court dominated by his allies.

‘Enemy from within’

Born wealthy and growing up as a playboy real estate entrepreneur, Trump astonished the world by winning the presidency on a hard-right platform in 2016 against Democratic heavyweight Hillary Clinton.

The Republican’s first term began with a dark inaugural address evoking “American carnage.”

It ended in mayhem when he refused to accept his defeat by Joe Biden, then rallied supporters before they rushed into Congress on January 6, 2021.

In office, Trump upended every tradition, ranging from the trivial (what got planted in the Rose Garden) to the fundamental (relations with NATO).

Journalists became the “enemy of the people” — a phrase he would later tweak to the “enemy from within” as he called for reprisals against all political opponents.

On the world stage, Trump turned US alliances into transactions as friendly partners like South Korea and Germany were accused of trying to “rip us off.”

By contrast, he repeatedly praised — and continues to praise — the likes of Russian President Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.

Throughout, he increasingly dominated the Republican Party, which dropped all opposition and ended up winning him acquittal in two impeachment proceedings.

That loyalty to Trump only deepened after he left the White House, with senior Republicans regularly trooping to see him at his palatial Florida residence and in the dingy Manhattan courthouse where he was tried for fraud this year.

Autocratic drift

Before he rode down the golden escalator of Trump Tower in New York to announce his 2016 White House bid, Trump was best known as a TV personality.

He was famous mostly for the ruthless character he played on reality show “The Apprentice,” as well as for developing luxury buildings and golf resorts, and for his wife Melania, a former fashion model.

The political rise was meteoric. But academics have noted parallels between his evolution and those of autocrats in countries where democratic institutions exist only as facades, allowing populist strongmen to take power.

Millions were thrilled by his attacks on politics, his coarse language, his promises to expel illegal immigrants, and the gaudy glamour that he brought to blue-collar Americans beaten down by globalization and deindustrialization.

At the same time, more than half the country agrees with Trump’s top White House aide John Kelly that the tycoon is a fascist, according to a recent ABC poll.

In office, he relished the daily controversy, joking about changing the US Constitution to stay in power indefinitely. As he campaigned to return to power in 2024, he again called for termination of the founding document.

Trump’s allies dismiss such talk as mere rhetoric.

But Trump broke all precedent when he refused to concede his 2020 loss, ultimately unleashing a mob on the US Capitol, while his vice president, Mike Pence, went into hiding.

Unprecedented — but forgiven by just enough US voters to allow the showman to get away with it again.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Washington:

When political outsider Donald Trump defied polls and expectations to defeat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 US presidential election, he described the victory as “beautiful.”

Not everyone saw it that way — considering that Democrat Clinton had received nearly three million more votes nationally than her Republican rival. Non-Americans were particularly perplexed that the second-highest vote-getter would be the one crowned president.

But Trump had done what the US system requires: win enough individual states, sometimes by very narrow margins, to surpass the 270 Electoral College votes necessary to win the White House.

Now, on the eve of the 2024 election showdown between Trump and Democrat Kamala Harris, the rules of this enigmatic and, to some, outmoded, system is coming back into focus.

Why an Electoral College?

The 538 members of the US Electoral College gather in their state’s respective capitals after the quadrennial presidential election to designate the winner.

A presidential candidate must obtain an absolute majority of the “electors” — or 270 of the 538 — to win.

The system originated with the US Constitution in 1787, establishing the rules for indirect, single-round presidential elections.

The country’s Founding Fathers saw the system as a compromise between direct presidential elections with universal suffrage, and an election by members of Congress — an approach rejected as insufficiently democratic.

Because many states predictably lean Republican or Democratic, presidential candidates focus heavily on the handful of “swing” states on which the election will likely turn — nearly ignoring some large states such as left-leaning California and right-leaning Texas.

Over the years, hundreds of amendments have been proposed to Congress in efforts to modify or abolish the Electoral College. None has succeeded.

Trump’s 2016 victory rekindled debate. And if the 2024 race is the nail-biter that most polls predict, the Electoral College will surely return to the spotlight.

Who are the 538 electors?

Most are local elected officials or party leaders, but their names do not appear on ballots.

Each state has as many electors as it has members in the US House of Representatives (a number dependent on the state’s population), plus the Senate (two in every state, regardless of size).

California, for example, has 54 electors; Texas has 40; and sparsely populated Alaska, Delaware, Vermont and Wyoming have only three each.

The US capital city, Washington, also gets three electors, despite having no voting members in Congress.

The Constitution leaves it to states to decide how their electors’ votes should be cast. In every state but two (Nebraska and Maine, which award some electors by congressional district), the candidate winning the most votes theoretically is allotted all that state’s electors.

Controversial institution

In November 2016, Trump won 306 electoral votes, well more than the 270 needed.

The extraordinary situation of losing the popular vote but winning the White House was not unprecedented.

Five presidents have risen to the office this way, the first being John Quincy Adams in 1824.

More recently, the 2000 election resulted in an epic Florida entanglement between Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore.

Gore won nearly 500,000 more votes nationwide, but when Florida — ultimately following a US Supreme Court intervention — was awarded to Bush, it pushed his Electoral College total to 271 and a hair’s-breadth victory.

True vote or simple formality?

Nothing in the Constitution obliges electors to vote one way or another.

If some states required them to respect the popular vote and they failed to do so, they were subjected to a simple fine. But in July 2020, the Supreme Court ruled that states could impose punishments on such “faithless electors.”

To date, faithless electors have never determined a US election outcome.

Electoral College schedule

Electors will gather in their state capitals on December 17 and cast votes for president and vice president. US law states they “meet and cast their vote on the first Tuesday after the second Wednesday in December.”

On January 6, 2025, Congress will convene to certify the winner — a nervously watched event this cycle, four years after a mob of Trump supporters attacked the US Capitol attempting to block certification.

But there is a difference. Last time, it was Republican vice president Mike Pence who, as president of the Senate, was responsible for overseeing the certification. Defying heavy pressure from Trump and the mob, he certified Biden’s victory.

This time, the president of the Senate — overseeing what normally would be the pro forma certification — will be none other than today’s vice president: Kamala Harris.

On January 20, the new president is to be sworn in.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)