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Environmental advocates are cautiously optimistic after the Supreme Court left California’s nation-leading auto emissions standards in place — at least for the moment.

The Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge from Ohio and 16 other conservative states that aimed to strip California of its authority to adopt vehicle emissions standards stricter than federal benchmarks. However, days earlier, justices announced they will decide whether red-state fuel producers have legal standing to sue the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for alleged financial losses caused by California’s stringent fuel economy standards and electric vehicle mandate.

State policymakers and environmental advocates view the Supreme Court’s decision to leave California’s regulatory powers intact as a triumph. But, as an adversarial presidential administration is poised to take office, experts say they anticipate a flurry of legal objections over nearly all forthcoming California clean air policies.

“The Supreme Court was right to turn away this radical request by Republican-led states to upend decades of law letting California cut pollution and clean our air,” said Daniel Villaseñor, a spokesperson for Gov. Gavin Newsom. “California’s authority was codified in the Clean Air Act by none other than Republican Richard Nixon, who recognized that California should continue serving as a lab for innovation to show the nation what’s possible with smart policy.”

The battle to alleviate air pollution and reduce planet-warming gases will be waged largely in the courts over the next four years, according to experts. And the legal strategy, they say, will need to focus on defending California’s aggressive clean air rules as much as it will be about ushering in new regulation.

“It’s good news, at least in the short term,” said Joe Lyou, president of California-based nonprofit the Coalition for Clean Air. “Everyone’s concerned about what’s going to happen in the long term. But this is a good start to what will undoubtedly be a long, long battle over clean air over the next four years. A lot of it is going to be up to the lawyers.”

Several industry groups have already filed litigation to contest California’s rules, including a ban on new sales of gasoline vehicles in 2035.

Last week, when the Supreme Court announced it would review a legal challenge over how California regulations affected fuel producers, it signaled its willingness to consider objections to California’s vehicle emission rules. However, the justices won’t be weighing the merits of the case, only whether the fuel companies have the right to sue.

The District of Columbia Court of Appeals had previously ruled the lawsuit invalid, in part, because fuel producers are challenging California emission standards adopted in 2012. Because car manufacturers already comply with the standard, there is no feasible remedy for their claims, experts say.

Another part of the fuel producers’ argument is that the Clean Air Act only grants California the ability to regulate conventional vehicle pollution for clean air — such as smog-forming nitrogen oxides — not planet-warming gases such as CO2 to address global warming.

“Their argument is this authority was given to California because they have really bad smog problems, not because of climate change,” said Ann Carlson, the founding director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change & the Environment at UCLA. “And therefore, they shouldn’t be able to regulate greenhouse gases under this special power they have.”

But many environmental advocates say that argument may be moot. California air regulators have long maintained that air quality issues in major California cities — including smoggy Los Angeles — are so severe that electric vehicles are necessary to meet pollution standards. Air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions go hand in hand, they say.

“You have a technology, in these zero emission vehicles, that can reduce the full spectrum of pollution,” said Alice Henderson, lead counsel for transportation and clean air policy at the Environmental Defense Fund, an organization that has helped defend California rules. “And it is sort of laughable to think that these air agencies should be forced to ignore that technology.”

But the fight to enshrine clean air rules is not just legal sparring. For Lyou, it’s about the health consequences of inhaling air pollution. According to the California Air Resources Board, air pollution contributes to roughly 5,000 premature deaths each year in Southern California.

“It really comes down to whether people are going to have asthma attacks, whether people die prematurely or whether people have heart attacks,” Lyou said. “These are lives at stake.”

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If Democrats want to understand why president-elect Donald Trump is returning to the White House, a good place to start might be the “Know Your Enemy” podcast, hosted by two self-described leftist bros who, without mockery or tongue-in-cheek elitism, explore the complicated past and feverish present of the American conservative movement.

It’s a sort of anti-Joe Rogan program for a perplexed and dismayed left-wing set curious about William F. Buckley Jr., Ronald Reagan, the rise of the tea party movement, conservative fans of the Grateful Dead and why so many right-wing commentators suffer from “Taylor Swift derangement syndrome.” The show’s interrogation of conservative history is rigorous and occasionally peppered with expletives, but the exchanges with guests are nuanced and civil.

“Know Your Enemy” was started in 2019 by Matthew Sitman, the son of a factory worker raised in a Christian fundamentalist home in central Pennsylvania, and Sam Adler-Bell, a Jew who grew up in a left-leaning family, listening to union leaders and visiting picket lines with his labor-lawyer father. They met when Sitman, then an editor at Commonweal Magazine, asked Adler-Bell to write book reviews. The two shared a fascination for country music and right-wing politics, believing the best way to oppose conservatives is not to berate or ridicule but to respect and understand.

“Even if I come to find the [conservative] ideas unpersuasive, there might be some kernel or core there” — such as understanding the costs and consequences of social change — “that’s worth treating seriously and exploring,” said Sitman, 43, a onetime conservative disciple turned Bernie Sanders fan.

“The left has to think really hard about why we’re right [in our beliefs],” Adler-Bell, 34, said in one episode, adding that conservatives are not “self-consciously evil,” but rather rooted in their convictions.

Such equanimity is rare in the age of podcasts and politics of recrimination. The driving forces of the moment are fixated less on enlightenment than on attacking, distorting and vanquishing. Disdain and division reverberate across a vast and partisan social media landscape that includes X, TikTok and YouTube. A recent poll by the Pew Research Center found that 37% of Americans under 30 regularly get news from social media influencers, the large majority of whom have no background with or ties to news organizations.

“Know Your Enemy,” which the two record in their New York apartments, has a modest audience — about 30,000 listeners an episode and 8,000 subscribers who bring in $39,000 a month. The show is smaller than more prominent podcasts with similarly progressive temperaments. “Pod Save America,” hosted by Jon Favreau and other former aides to President Obama, has a reported 20 million monthly downloads; and Tim Miller, host of “The Bulwark Podcast,” which is described as providing an “unabashed defense of liberal democracy,” has nearly 400,000 followers on X. Sitman has 31,300 followers on the platform, and Adler-Bell has 46,300.

But “Know Your Enemy” appeals to socialists, Democrats and more than a few conservatives — some who have been guests — interested in right-wing thought including that of neoconservatives, so-called reformicons and a species known as the paleoconservative. The show, as it wades into what Adler-Bell calls a “swampy morass” of conservative history that touches on free markets and American interventionism, is heavy on reading lists.

“It’s an innovative and important podcast,” said Curt Mills, executive director of the American Conservative magazine, who appeared on the show in November to discuss foreign policy and Trump’s picks for his national security team. “It doesn’t have an enormous audience, but it’s an extremely important audience.”

He added that the show’s willingness to dissect center-right ideas at a time when the left often demonizes Republicans implies “a level of curiosity that I think was often lacking for the last eight years. … They’re essentially honest brokers.”

Jon Lovett, Tommy Vietor and Jon Favreau, from left, co-host the more popular “Pod Save America” with their fellow former Obama administration aide Dan Pfeiffer, not pictured.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Other podcasts that focus on right-wing politics include “5-4,” which analyzes Supreme Court cases, and “In Bed with the Right,” which studies conservative ideas on sexuality and gender. But few are as comprehensive as “Know Your Enemy.”

The show’s liberal followers are loyal but don’t hesitate to take Sitman and Adler-Bell to task when they sense a whiff of politesse toward the right.

An interview with rising young conservative Nate Hochman, who was later fired as a speechwriter for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for posting Nazi-adopted imagery online, drew backlash. And after the Mills episode, a listener wrote: “Completely ridiculous how you let him get away with talking about [Pete] Hegseth and the intelligence scandals around Tulsi [Gabbard]. If that’s your approach to having conservatives on – no thanks.”

Another wrote, “Stop giving Trump apologists a platform.”

“We’re really not debaters,” Adler-Bell said. “I think other podcasts on the left, if they had a conservative or a person they disagreed with, the goal would be victory. To embarrass or humiliate the guests. We just don’t do that.”

Listening to Sitman and Adler-Bell is like wandering the basement stacks of a library with two grad students jazzed on coffee and shuffling index cards. Nothing is too obscure, no tidbit too arcane. In an episode that discussed Buckley, founder of the National Review and widely considered the godfather of modern conservatism, the hosts examined extremist and racist elements in the conservative movement half a century ago that persist today.

In another show, they discussed global right-wing populism and a class realignment that foreshadowed Trump’s victory in November.

“Know Your enemy” also delves into right-wing influences on film, music and literature. It examined how conservatism played into the careers of celebrated authors such as Joan Didion — “why she loved Barry Goldwater and hated Ronald Reagan” — and Tom Wolfe, he of the vanilla suits and quicksilver prose, who navigated how post-World War II prosperity led to American subcultures.

Sitman and Adler-Bell spent more than an hour in March on an episode about Taylor Swift.

“Why does she make the right so crazy? Why does she sometimes make the left so crazy? What does her celebrity mean?” Adler-Bell asked at the beginning of the show. “What can she tell us about the nature of American culture today? It turns out, listeners, Taylor Swift is a great lens into making sense of some of the American berserk.”

The podcast offers possible solutions for how liberals and Democrats can appeal to working-class voters they have lost. In an episode called “Organizing in Rural America,” the hosts spoke with Luke Mayville of Reclaim Idaho, a grassroots group that mobilized voters to expand Medicaid in a deep-red state.

“Know Your Enemy” has criticized Democrats for hubris and elitism as the party has shifted toward identity politics and urban college-educated voters. That occurred in the years Trump was breaking taboos within the Republican Party by opposing the war in Afghanistan and global trade, and, according to Sitman, tapping into a “vicious and nativist” anti-immigration sentiment that was embraced by his working-class base even as it left the GOP establishment initially uneasy.

“I can’t really remember when a candidate had shown up in the place where I grew up and told people they were being ripped off and they were right to be angry,” said Sitman, who is on the editorial board of the leftist magazine Dissent, which partners with his podcast. “The nature of Trump’s transgressions mattered less than their anger at the system.”

Sitman and Adler-Bell discussed Taylor Swift, and some conservatives’ views of her, for more than an hour in a March episode.

(John Shearer / Getty Images for TAS Rights Management)

Sitman knows something about that anger. Growing up in a blue-collar, deeply Christian home, he was shaped by the Bible and the conservative politics of self-reliance. Those who fail in life, he once thought, bring it on themselves. He carried those views into young adulthood as he met prominent conservative thinkers while interning at the Heritage Foundation and attending graduate school at Georgetown University.

“I was at my most conservative,” he said, “when I experienced the least of the world — when I was at my most naive.”

His sentiments shifted after he experienced severe depression and reflected on the struggles of others and how the economic class one is born into affects the trajectory of their future.

“The reason I moved from right to left is not because my fundamental values changed,” said Sitman, who has converted to Roman Catholicism. Rather, it was because he came to realize he wasn’t empathetic enough to class differences and the privations of others.

Sitman — who as a boy saw his father pull out one of his teeth over the kitchen sink because he lacked dental insurance — wrote in a 2016 essay for Dissent: “The failure of conservatives to attend to the world as it actually exists, the world in its suffering and hardship, drove me from their ranks.”

Adler-Bell’s upbringing was more secular, tailored by labor struggles and watching movies like “Matewan,” about union organizing in the coalfields of West Virginia in the 1920s. This background taught him, he said, the power of solidarity: “We are all vulnerable, frail and broken and flawed, and the only way we can overcome atomized suffering is through recognizing [this] in others.”

At which point, Sitman, the more understated of the two, chimed in during an interview: “Your diaper was pink, if not red.”

They laughed, then pressed on.

The conservative right, said Adler-Bell, who writes for Jewish Currents, the New Republic and other publications, is less empathetic to shared vulnerability.

“Trump represents,” he added, “more explicitly than any politician I think maybe in American history, … the message of the racketeer, of the mafioso who says, ‘I will protect you, and you can get yours, and everyone else, f— ’em.’ The world is a war of all against all.”

Both hosts wonder who will rise as key players in the new Trump administration. Elon Musk, who spent more than $250 million to help get Trump elected, is in the ascent and supports the president-elect’s pro-business agenda. But Trump’s eldest son, Donald Jr., is also a force. He is close to Vice President-elect JD Vance, whose brand of economic populism leans more toward the working class of Trump’s base than corporate America.

They are also watching how Trump, who has threatened to arrest his political enemies, will oversee the FBI and the Justice Department, and how much of a hawk Sen. Marco Rubio might be if he becomes secretary of State.

“We’re very much in Versailles, French monarch territory,” said Sitman. “Observing the courtiers around the king and trying to decipher who wins favor.”

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When he came to power in 2015, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was hailed as a progressive icon, a charismatic leftist with movie star good looks who promised to reform elections, tackle climate change and legalize marijuana. He quickly became one of the world’s best-known political figures, known for agenda-setting liberal policies — and for taking selfies with enraptured fans.

“He was seen as this Canadian rock star,” said Duane Bratt, a political scientist at Mount Royal University in Calgary.

Nine years later, Trudeau is deeply unpopular at home and fighting for his job amid growing calls that he step down.

Voters blame Trudeau for Canada’s sluggish economy, housing crisis and near-record levels of immigration. For months now, polls have shown that it is highly unlikely that he could lead his Liberal Party to victory in the next election, which is due by Oct. 20 of next year.

The election of Donald Trump last month has made things worse for Trudeau.

Conservatives and even members of his own Liberal Party insist he isn’t doing enough to counter Trump, who has threatened to levy heavy tariffs on imports from Canada, and who has trolled Trudeau in recent weeks by repeatedly describing him as “governor” of a 51st American state.

This week, one of Trudeau’s staunchest allies, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, abruptly resigned over her disagreement with Trudeau’s approach to Trump.

In a sharply worded letter announcing her departure, Freeland accused Trudeau of embracing “costly political gimmicks” instead of directly confronting the U.S. leader and of putting his own interests ahead of the best interests of Canadians.

Freeland’s resignation, part of a recent exodus of Cabinet members, has thrown Trudeau’s government into disarray and prompted fresh demands from members of his caucus and other allied parties that he step down.

At the same time, Canada’s three opposition parties are demanding that Trudeau call new elections.

“Everything is spiraling out of control,” Pierre Poilievre, leader of the Conservative Party, said Monday. “We simply cannot go on like this.”

The crisis facing Trudeau highlights the geopolitical havoc that Trump has wrought since his election, still weeks before his official return to the White House.

And it speaks to the same anti-incumbent headwinds and economic anxieties that helped doom the Democrats in recent U.S. elections.

“Everything that seemed bright and refreshing about Trudeau in 2015 now looks old and tired,” Bratt said.

Trudeau is the eldest son of the late Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, who led Canada for 15 years beginning in 1968.

The younger Trudeau worked as a teacher before he entered politics. He was just 43 when he toppled the Conservative government of Stephen Harper by mobilizing legions of young voters energized by his promise to bring back social liberalism.

As prime minister, Trudeau legalized marijuana and enacted a national carbon tax that officials say will reduce the country’s emissions by a third by the end of this decade. He also became a prominent liberal counterweight to Trump, who was first elected in 2016.

Former U.S. President Donald Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau talk before a NATO meeting in England in 2019.

(Frank Augstein / Associated Press)

After Trump banned travel to the U.S. from several Muslim-majority countries in 2017, Trudeau announced that Canada’s doors were open.

“To those fleeing persecution, terror and war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith,” he wrote on the social media platform now known as X. “Diversity is our strength.”

Trudeau was largely praised for steering the country through a successful renegotiation of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada free trade agreement, a process that Freeland helmed.

But COVID-19 posed a challenge for Trudeau, with the country’s economic recovery more sluggish than that of the United States.

Recently, Trudeau has come under fire for allowing near-record numbers of migrants into Canada during and after the pandemic in an effort to spur economic growth.

An influx of temporary workers, international students and refugees helped push the country’s population from 38 million to 41 million in three years. Critics say it has increased existing competition for housing, healthcare and education.

Trudeau’s approval ratings continued to drop. Then Trump won reelection.

The incoming U.S. leader announced that on his first day in office he planned to levy a 25% tariff on goods from Canada and Mexico unless the countries curbed the flow of undocumented migrants and drugs into the United States.

Though many analysts believe Trump may be using the threat of tariffs as a negotiating tactic before he returns to the White House, the issue has caused deep anxiety in Canada.

It has also prompted a debate about what is the smartest strategy for Canada to deal with the pugnacious American leader: pushing back or taking a more conciliatory approach.

Trudeau appears to have chosen the second option. Last month he flew to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida to dine with the president-elect. Then, in an apparent attempt to appease the incoming U.S. leader, Trudeau’s government announced a plan to beef up security along the U.S. border.

Freeland, on the other hand, has advocated a much tougher approach to Trump, one more in line with the stern response of Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum.

“A division over how to respond to the U.S. is front and center in the rationale for Freeland leaving,” said Christopher Sands, head of the Canada Institute at the Wilson Center think tank in Washington.

Freeland’s resignation on Monday, when she was scheduled to deliver a key address on the country’s budget, “really shook the government,” Sands said. “I think this may hasten the end of the Trudeau government.”

Analysts say there are several possible outcomes for the current political crisis.

Trudeau could be forced by his own party to step down as leader of the Liberals, who would choose a new leader. Freeland is considered a possible pick. The Liberals would eventually have to call a new election, but their hope would be that a new leader at the top would help reduce their likely losses to the Conservatives, whom polls show with a large lead.

Alternatively, Trudeau could call for an election and lead the Liberals to the polls himself. This is what he says he intends to do.

Or the opposition parties in Parliament could introduce a no-confidence vote, which would trigger new elections. But their attempts to do so have so far failed.

Jonathan Malloy, a professor of political science at Carleton University, said it seems Trudeau’s days are numbered. “There’s a lot of pessimism and people are upset at government,” he said.

And Trump calling Canada the 51st state isn’t helping.

“It’s fair to say that Mr. Trump has a knack for finding people’s weak spots,” Malloy said. “And he struck directly at the main one in Canada, which is that the United States just views it as essentially the 51st state.”

Staff writer Tracy Wilkinson in The Times’ Washington bureau contributed to this report.

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WASHINGTON —  Miriam Mesina de Gutierrez was 19 years old when she got hired at Paulson Manufacturing in Temecula. It was the summer of 2001 and the job was only part time: on an assembly line, applying an anti-fog, anti-scratch coating to face shields for workers in other industries.

Never in her wildest dreams could she have imagined where that $6.75-an-hour job would lead. In 2009, Mesina de Gutierrez became Paulson’s human resources manager. Two years later, she moved to international sales. Two more years and she was promoted to vice president of operations.

Then, last fall, Mesina de Gutierrez went all the way to the top: president of the 200-employee company that had been headed by a member of the Paulson family for 75 years.

“Oh, it was a big deal,” said the 42-year-old, who came to California as a middle schooler from her native Colina, Mexico. And to Roy Paulson, 66, the company’s longtime president who sold the business last year and stepped down to be its technical director, Mesina’s elevation spoke volumes about manufacturing’s unique value:

“It offers job opportunities at every level in society, and for people to rise up in the organization,” he said.

American manufacturing had its heyday in the 1950s when workers making things accounted for more than 30% of all employees. But despite Mesina de Gutierrez’s meteoric success story, the landscape is vastly different today. Beginning decades ago, corporations found cheaper places to produce around the world, China turned into an exporting giant, and machines took over hundreds of thousands of well-paid human jobs.

Today, manufacturing’s share of all U.S. payrolls is just 8%. In California, it’s only 7%, though the Golden State is still home to 1.3 million factory workers — the most in the nation — who make products as diverse as computer chips and tortillas, blockbuster drugs and ordinary nuts and bolts, electric vehicles and toy cars.

Now, President-elect Donald Trump has vowed that his return to the White House will bring about a resurgence of blue-collar work across the country. As in his first term, Trump has promised to gear his “America first” policies to spur domestic production and jobs, whether by changing foreign trade rules, imposing tariffs, cutting taxes and government regulations, or all of the above.

“If we want to return to higher levels of growth and innovation, more broadly distributed prosperity, higher wages, so forth, we’re going to have to get that right,” said Oren Cass, founder and chief economist of the right-leaning think tank American Compass, referring to efforts to reindustrialize the U.S. economy.

Exactly what Trump does, and whether it succeeds, will probably have dramatic consequences for the nation’s economy, its politics, its workers and almost everyone else in the country.

Although most economists don’t see domestic manufacturing as likely to prove a major source of new jobs, it still provides among the best opportunities for people without college degrees.

Manufacturing, on average, offers more hours of work and better wages and benefits than private-sector jobs overall, although the pay premium isn’t as big as it used to be. In California, the average earnings for all manufacturing workers was $42 an hour in October, about 5% more than for employees overall.

Expanding the “Made in USA” economy would be especially important for Trump and other Republicans, who have sought with some success to rebrand themselves as the party of the middle class and working people.

“Democrats have been terribly out of step culturally with the working class,” said Harry Holzer, a Georgetown University public policy professor and chief economist in President Clinton’s Labor Department. “They have got to let go of these crazy identity politics and go back to practical issues like creating good jobs and building more houses.”

That realization may be one factor in Gov. Gavin Newsom’s announcement this week of a blueprint for creating better job opportunities for Californians without a college degree.

“Since the election, both the governor and the Democratic state legislative leadership have talked mainly of a new commitment to blue-collar California,” said Michael Bernick, an employment attorney in San Francisco and former director of California’s Employment Development Department.

California’s blue-collar woes and hopes

Over the last half-century, California’s manufacturing employment has fallen more sharply than in the nation as a whole. The end of the Cold War erased more than half of the state’s 200,000-plus aerospace jobs in the 1990s. The next decade saw a similarly steep decline in electronics manufacturing, as China and other Asian countries moved up the value chain.

On the lower end of skills and pay, apparel employment shriveled as Southern California garment makers focused on fashion and small quantities, eliminating tens of thousands of manual labor jobs. California’s furniture industry followed a similar path.

Manufacturing employment overall has been more stable since the end of the Great Recession in 2009, although the last year has seen further cuts,because of layoffs at corporations such as Boeing, Intel and Tesla.

Today, computer-related and electronics producers, including semiconductors and navigational equipment, make up the state’s largest manufacturing sector, employing about 285,000 people. That’s followed by food manufacturing, with 175,000 jobs; and fabricated metal companies, which employ some 120,000 workers who forge, stamp and make products such as cutlery, hand tools, boilers and springs.

All told, more than 30,000 manufacturers operate in the state, mostly small firms, many of them family-owned, according to the California Manufacturers & Technology Assn. The larger ones have business offices in California but tend to manufacture elsewhere, including in low-cost, less-regulated states such as Texas and Arizona.

MGA Entertainment, the Chatsworth-based maker of Bratz dolls and Little Tikes toys, sources mainly from China. In recent years it’s moved some production to Vietnam and elsewhere. And it closed its Mexico operations because of infrastructure issues, said Isaac Larian, MGA’s billionaire founder and chief executive.

The company has one U.S. manufacturing plant in Hudson, Ohio, with about 700 employees. With automation, Larian said, MGA has cut the production cost difference in Ohio from China 8% to 10%. “But even with that,” he said, “we’re having difficulties. We don’t get the skilled labor. They work for two to three months” and leave.

Larian is hopeful that the incoming Trump administration will be good for business. He said Trump generally was in his first term. Lowering taxes again will help, Larian said, as they did after Trump’s 2017 big tax cuts. His biggest concern is what will happen if Trump follows through on his proposal to slap 10% to 20% tariffs on all imports and raise the levy on Chinese goods to 60%, from 10% to 25% that Trump imposed in his first term. Those tariffs were kept in place by President Biden.

(Trump last month threatened 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico, and an additional 10% on imports from China, saying he wanted them to curb the inflow of drugs and migrants.)

Toy makers and importers such as MGA were exempt from Trump’s first-term tariffs. “I believe common sense will apply,” Larian said. If not, he said, he would have no choice but to pass on the higher costs to consumers. Annual sales at Larian’s company, which he founded in 1979, have reached $2.5 billion.

Economist Jerry Nickelsburg, director of UCLA’s Anderson Forecast, also is generally bullish on manufacturing, noting that “California has a deep pool of technical talent.”

Paulson’s new boss, Mesina de Gutierrez, is optimistic too. Though trade friction would probably crimp the company’s exports, she wouldn’t talk about what may come down the pike. Instead, she said: “My team is strong.”

Paulson has benefited from multiple patents and its occasional research and development partnership with UC Riverside and other universities. Skilled workers have sustained burgeoning industries such as space exploration, advanced chips and electric vehicles despite recent slumps in tech and aircraft manufacturing and a flight of some businesses, including the headquarters of Elon Musk’s Tesla and SpaceX.

Northrop, Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed, Tesla and SpaceX have thousands of employees in the state.

What will Trump do?

In his first term, Trump pressured individual manufacturers planning to move production out of the U.S., ultimately with little success. And he often threatened countries with tariffs, sometimes as a bargaining chip, though the tactic often upset financial markets and created uncertainty about what might happen next.

Trump’s tariffs on China prompted many businesses, including Chinese-owned ones, to shift production elsewhere, and the overall U.S. trade deficit didn’t shrink. Trump targeted steel and aluminum imports, which gave a small boost to the domestic metal industry but hurt other American manufacturers, including makers of beer, bicycles and other goods; they ended up paying more for raw materials.

This time will be different, say Trump’s current and former advisors. They say policy won’t be so chaotic as key members of the incoming administration are more aligned and have a more skeptical view of corporate power. Trump backers say they expect him to do what he said in imposing universal tariffs and increasing taxes on China to thwart transshipments of Chinese goods to the U.S. and spur manufacturers to open plants and create jobs on American soil.

Most economists, however, say across-the-board tariffs of 10% to 20% will almost certainly prompt reciprocal measures by other countries, resulting in slower trade and economic activity and higher prices for businesses and consumers.

“The disruptive force of a tariff is much greater today than even in the early 1930s,” said Douglas Irwin, an economics professor and trade historian at Dartmouth College, noting how much bigger and more connected trade and supply chains are today. Broad-based tariffs on imports deepened the Great Depression.

“If we’re trying to reshore manufacturing, tariffs are very blunt and they raise costs for other industries,” he said. “And you have to think about other policies that won’t adversely affect exports to help out manufacturing.”

Whatever Trump does, he will be starting out with a strong American economy and may get a good jobs boost as new semiconductor factories, electric vehicle and parts plants and other green energy projects come online, thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act enacted during the Biden administration. Intel, for example, is getting billions to help pay for a pair of new leading-edge chip factories in Ohio and other projects.

Such government subsidies will help, but it’ll take a lot more to reinvigorate manufacturing, such as cutting red tape and supporting skills training for workers, especially at the state and local level.

“What we know from our and others’ research is that manufacturing is most likely to get a boost from customized assistance to workers and firms rather than large-scale, blunt federal policies,” said Brad Hershbein, a senior economist at the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research in Kalamazoo, Mich.

Hershbein isn’t counting on a resurgence of manufacturing jobs.

“Manufacturing is important for the American consciousness, more so than it may be for the American economy,” he said. “I think a lot of people had in mind that for a large number of people, it was an accessible job [that] you didn’t need that much education or training for that paid relatively well. And there aren’t that many jobs like that available today. People yearn for that.”

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Polio came for 5-year-old Lynn Lane when she was visiting her grandmother in rural Indiana. Suddenly, her arms and legs became weak, and by the time she got to a hospital in Indianapolis, she was totally paralyzed and in respiratory failure. Lane spent the next several months in an iron lung.

“I don’t really remember too much about that,” Lane, now 73, told me Monday from her home north of Sacramento. “The only memories I really have are mainly at night. You could hear the swooshing of all the iron lungs.”

Lane’s family moved to Northern California a few years after her bout with polio, when she was 8. “That’s when I started noticing I was different than other kids,” she said. “I was in leg braces and had to learn to walk all over again.”

Her parents took her to Shriners Hospital in San Francisco, where she lived on and off for the next eight years.

“It was kind of like a boarding school, except with surgeries,” Lane said. “They did all these muscle and tendon transfers. I think I had maybe 15 to 18 surgeries. They transferred my quads from the front to the back so I could stand.”

In her early 40s, Lane was diagnosed with post-polio syndrome, which afflicts between 25% and 40% of childhood polio survivors. It is similar to chronic fatigue syndrome and can range from mild to debilitating.

“I’m not in a wheelchair yet,” said Lane, who uses leg braces and crutches, “but it’s heading that way.”

The idea that anyone would question the polio vaccine now, she said, “makes me nuts.”

Last week, the New York Times reported that in 2022, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s attorney and close advisor Aaron Siri had petitioned the Food and Drug Administration to revoke approval of the polio vaccine in use for the last three decades until its safety can be studied further against an unvaccinated control group. Kennedy, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for Health and Human Services secretary, is a longtime vaccine skeptic who spouts nonsense about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and a lot of other things. He is, in the view of many medical professionals, a danger to public health.

The Times’ report set off shock waves. Before Jonas Salk developed the first successful polio vaccine in the mid-1950s, the disease killed or paralyzed more than half a million people around the world each year. Many high-profile Americans who suffered from childhood polio, including Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell and the actor Mia Farrow, immediately condemned the questioning of the vaccine. Kennedy and Trump were forced to reassure Americans that they support the lifesaving treatment.

As Kennedy met with Republican senators to shore up support for his nomination this week, he told reporters that he is “all for” the polio vaccine. Trump, in his first post-election press conference, insisted, “You’re not going to lose the polio vaccine. It’s not going to happen.”

And yet Trump also persisted in promulgating the oft-debunked lie that childhood vaccines are linked to autism, vowing to “look into” the conspiracy theory. Kennedy, he said, will “come back with a report as to what he thinks. We’re going to find out a lot.”

This fear-mongering is unconscionable. We already know a lot. In fact, we know more than a lot.

The autism question has “been studied to death in some ways,” said Richard Pan, a pediatrician and former California state senator who led the successful 2015 campaign to eliminate a “personal belief” exemption from vaccine requirements for the state’s schoolchildren.

“Do we know what causes autism? Not yet,” Pan said. But, he added, we do know what does not cause autism: the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, which was implicated in a long-since-discredited 1998 paper based on 12 cases by the defrocked English physician Andrew Wakefield.

“What will it take to convince Trump and RFK Jr. that a retracted 12-subject study with fake data was actually wrong?” asked Pan.

In any case, he added, blaming the vaccine is an “ableist” response to autism by some parents. “They don’t want to accept that their child is neurodivergent,” Pan said. “You want to say your child is broken and my life has been ruined and it’s the fault of Big Pharma or whoever.”

People who do not vaccinate their children, he said, are risking the health of the very people they are supposed to protect.

“You are playing with your children’s lives,” he said. “All of these adults have already been vaccinated.”

Although polio has essentially been eradicated in the U.S., it still exists in parts of the world and could certainly make a comeback here if enough people refuse to vaccinate their children. In 2022, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that an unvaccinated New York man had contracted polio. And earlier this year, amid Israel’s war on Hamas, a 10-month-old child in Gaza contracted the virus, confirming fears about the war’s potential effect on preventable childhood disease.

As for the Kennedy advisor’s petition, Pan said, how could we withhold a potentially lifesaving treatment from children in a control group to test the efficacy of a vaccine that has been used successfully for decades?

“Sometimes a trial cannot be done safely or ethically, “ he said. “Are you willing to volunteer your child into the control group?”

Bluesky: @rabcarian.bsky.social. Threads: @rabcarian

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SACRAMENTO —  At a somber electoral college ceremony at the state Capitol on Tuesday, electors who had hoped to be celebrating the historic presidency of a Democratic daughter of California cast their votes for Vice President Kamala Harris knowing that Republican Donald Trump will head to the White House next month instead.

It was a starkly different scene than in 2020, when Democratic electors in Sacramento burst into cheers and applause as California solidified Democrat Joe Biden’s win, ousting Trump after his first presidential term, as the Republican refused to accept defeat and made unfounded claims of voter fraud.

This time, quiet lulls filled the Assembly chamber as all 54 of California’s electoral college votes were cast for Harris, the first California Democrat to become a presidential nominee.

“You can talk to your friends. This is not a funeral, this is a good time,” Secretary of State Shirley Weber said as she commended electors, who sat at desks usually reserved for legislators, for their “dedication to democracy” regardless of how they felt about the outcome of the election.

Harris secured about 58% of the votes in her home state of California, defeating Trump by more than 20 points, but lost to him nationally.

Though the popular vote nationwide between Harris and Trump was close, Trump won the electoral college — the system based on population and state representation in Congress — by 312 to 226. Members of the electoral college convened in each state Tuesday to cast votes for the candidate who won their state.

Rusty Hicks, chair of the California Democratic Party, said it was not a sad day of defeat, adding that the Golden State remains “a beacon of freedom” for the nation. Democrats maintain unfettered power in Sacramento, ruling in the governor’s office and in the Legislature, even though they lost a few seats.

And while the election was a big win nationwide for Republicans, who will soon control the Senate, the House and the presidency, Democrats unseated three Republican incumbents in California congressional races, helping to reduce the razor-thin GOP majority.

“Do most of us want a different outcome? Of course,” Hicks said in the Capitol on Tuesday. “But this is part of our democracy — of making our voices heard, coming to the people’s house and honoring the results of the election. I think that’s something that we should all be proud of.”

California’s presidential electors included a roster of Democrats from across the state — city council members and mayors, political strategists, leaders of nonprofits and elected officials such as Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas (D-Salinas) and new Assemblymember Mark Gonzalez (D-Los Angeles).

Family members of politicians also acted as electors, including Karen Waters, daughter of Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles); Angela Padilla, wife of Democratic U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla; Candice Adam-Medefind, mother of incoming Democratic Rep. Adam Gray; and Elizabeth Cisneros, mother of Democratic Rep.-elect Gil Cisneros.

Trump was not mentioned at Tuesday’s official ceremony, but his looming presidency is inescapable in the California Capitol, where Gov. Gavin Newsom recently launched a special legislative session dedicated to funding litigation against Trump’s conservative policy proposals.

“This process reminds us of what is possible when we honor the voices of the people and the values we hold dear, of freedom, fairness and the right of every individual to have their say and shape the future,” Rivas said in welcoming remarks on the Assembly floor.

Gray, who claimed a crucial congressional seat, ousting Republican Rep. John Duarte in an extremely close Central Valley race, was at the Capitol on Tuesday as an observer.

The newly elected congressman was cautiously optimistic about the incoming administration and said he’s willing to work with Trump on areas where they agree.

“In every election, somebody doesn’t win. That doesn’t preclude us from waking up the next day and still working on the things that are important to our communities,” he said.

Xiomara Flores-Holguin was an elector Tuesday and top volunteer for Democrat George Whitesides’ congressional campaign. Whitesides, a first-time candidate, defeated Republican Rep. Mike Garcia in another closely watched House race in northern Los Angeles County.

Flores-Holguin said she was was filled with “mixed emotions” on Tuesday. She plans to help Democrats revisit voter engagement strategies with a renewed focus on Latino constituents before the next election.

“Coming today feels like there is still a ray of hope that the Democrats will be back,” she said. “We’ve learned some lessons from it and we’re not giving up. We’re not going away.”

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An Orange County judge on Tuesday barred a former boyfriend of U.S. Rep. Katie Porter from contacting her or her children for the next five years and said he had committed domestic abuse by sending the congresswoman hundreds of threatening and harassing messages.

Superior Court Judge Elia Naqvi said her restraining order will bar 55-year-old Julian Willis from contacting Porter or her family. The order will also prohibit Willis from discussing Porter with nine of her current and former colleagues, including employees in her congressional office.

Porter, an Irvine Democrat who is leaving Congress next month, obtained a temporary restraining order against Willis last month.

She said in court filings that Willis, her former boyfriend of a decade, began bombarding her and her loved ones with messages that constituted “persistent abuse and harassment” after she asked him to move out of her Irvine home in August.

Porter said Willis sent more than 1,000 text messages and emails, including texting her 82 times in one 24-hour period in September, and 55 times on Nov. 12 before she blocked his number. The messages arrived so frequently that Porter said she feared for her safety and her emotional well-being.

Porter said Willis had been hospitalized twice since late 2022 on involuntary psychiatric holds and had a history of abusing prescription painkillers and other drugs.

On Tuesday, Porter waited in an Orange courtroom for nearly three hours as the judge worked through a docket of more than a dozen domestic violence cases.

When Porter’s case was called, the courtroom was empty except for two reporters. Porter sat next to her attorney with her hands folded in her lap, speaking only when the judge asked her a direct question.

Porter said that she and Willis had dated for a decade and that he had never physically abused her.

Porter also said Willis had repeatedly violated the November restraining order by continuing to email her and her colleagues and staff.

Porter’s attorney, Gerald Singleton, read a portion of an email that he received from Willis that said: “Please inform the court that I violated the terms of your partially approved, out-of-state restraining order.”

Singleton said it was a “great concern” that Willis had told Porter and law enforcement in New Jersey, where he is now living, that the restraining order didn’t apply to him.

Restraining orders can last up to five years in California. Naqvi said a five-year order was justified because the couple had been together for a decade and because it was “very concerning” that Willis had repeatedly violated the court order.

Porter declined to comment after the hearing.

Porter is leaving the House of Representatives in January after losing in California’s U.S. Senate primary in March. She has been discussed as a front-runner in the 2026 governor’s race in California after Gov. Gavin Newsom is forced out by term limits, but has not said whether she will run.

Willis did not appear in court Tuesday and has not submitted a formal response to Porter’s allegations. He did not respond to a request seeking comment Tuesday.

He previously told The Times that he did not have a lawyer and that the “universe will deliver me the right attorney when it’s time.”

Porter’s court filings included 22 pages of emails, text messages and other communications among Porter, family members and colleagues who had received messages from Willis.

The filing also included messages between Porter and Willis’ siblings as they discussed trying to help him during his psychiatric holds and while he was staying in a sober-living facility.

In one email that Willis sent to Singleton in late November, Willis said he had visited Porter’s oldest son at college out of state and told him that he would “bring the hammer down on Katie and smash her and her life into a million pieces.”

He told Porter’s attorney: “That’s what I am doing — and now you are next on my list, you piece of garbage.”

In another email in the filing, Willis told Singleton he would file a complaint with child protective services about Porter, who has a 12-year-old daughter and a 16-year-old son.

Willis previously made the news in 2021, when he was arrested after a fight that broke out during a Porter town hall meeting at a park in Irvine.

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In his latest step to strike back against media outlets he says have said wronged him, President-elect Donald Trump has filed a lawsuit against an Iowa pollster and newspaper that he said intentionally skewed a poll against him to try to help Vice President Kamala Harris in the November election.

A legal expert gave the litigation little chance of succeeding, and press freedom advocates protested it as another retaliatory measure designed to chill news agencies from making fair assessments of the incoming president — particularly after other Trump lawsuits against media institutions including CBS News, ABC News and the board that oversees the Pulitzer Prizes.

ABC News agreed last week to pay $15 million toward Trump’s presidential library to settle a lawsuit over anchor George Stephanopoulos’ inaccurate on-air assertion that the president-elect had been found civilly liable for raping writer E. Jean Carroll.

Some of Trump’s supporters cheered the Iowa lawsuit and supported its contention that pollster J. Ann Selzer and the Des Moines Register intended to influence the election outcome, though they presented no evidence of malfeasance or collusion intended to favor the Democratic presidential candidate.

Trump’s lawyers filed the action Monday in a state court in Polk County, home to the state capital of Des Moines and the Register, Iowa’s leading newspaper. The president-elect had signaled the action in a news conference earlier in the day, saying: “In my opinion, it was fraud and it was election interference.”

“Defendants and their cohorts in the Democrat Party hoped that the Harris Poll would create a false narrative of inevitability for Harris in the final week of the 2024 Presidential Election,” Trump’s lawsuit contends.

The suit names as defendants Selzer and her polling company; the Des Moines Register; and Gannett, one of America’s largest newspaper chains and owner of USA Today. While Trump has accused other media outlets of defamation, the Iowa action alleges violations of the state’s Consumer Fraud Act, which prohibits deception when advertising or selling merchandise.

Selzer did not immediately respond to the lawsuit. But in postelection interviews she and election analysts familiar with her work rejected Republican conspiracy theories.

Gannett released a statement acknowledging that the final Iowa poll did not reflect the ultimate outcome. It showed Harris leading by 3 percentage points, and Trump won Iowa by more than 13 points. The statement described the voluminous background data the pollster released about how the survey was conducted.

“We stand by our reporting on the matter and believe this lawsuit is without merit,” the statement said.

Selzer has been one of Iowa’s most trusted pollsters for decades. Her surveys have been watched nationally by journalists and politicos of both parties due to their accuracy, particularly leading up to the primary-season caucuses, which are viewed as crucial in presidential politics.

Selzer’s last poll for the Register, before the 2020 vote, showed then-President Trump leading former Vice President Joe Biden by 7 percentage points. That proved to be very close to the mark: Trump won the state by a little more than 8 percentage points.

Leading into last month’s vote, the Selzer & Co. poll for the Register came up with a result that the veteran pollster and other observers acknowledged surprised them. It showed Harris held a 47%-to-44% advantage over Trump among likely voters, in a state that the Republican had carried handily in the two previous elections.

Publication of the poll in the week before the election heartened Democrats as a potential sign that Harris had momentum, not just in Iowa, but potentially in other crucial Midwestern battleground states. Republicans expressed doubt about the poll’s accuracy.

Pollsters routinely caution the public that their surveys are only snapshots in time and are not necessarily good at predicting election results. They also urge voters not to use poll results in a single state to extrapolate to other states, which inevitably have different electoral dynamics and demographic makeups.

Still, the Selzer poll’s more than 16-percentage-point miss was wide enough that the pollster conceded she had been troubled by it and had racked her brain for explanations. In recent interviews, Selzer expressed dismay and continuing puzzlement.

In one interview, she described how she and her team had closely scrutinized the poll results and found no warning signs of a misstep. A couple of the internal indicators of the sample’s composition seemed to favor Trump, since it included more rural voters and fewer young people than were expected to cast ballots.

The pollster said it was possible that she had used too stringent a “screen” to weed out voters whom she deemed unlikely to vote. But she said critics had tarred her for something far more nefarious.

“They’re saying that this was election interference, which is a crime,” she said last week during a panel discussion. “So, the idea that I intentionally set up to deliver this response, when I’ve never done that before — I’ve had plenty of opportunities to do it — it’s not my ethic.

“But to suggest without a single shred of evidence that I was in cahoots with somebody, I was being paid by somebody — it’s all just kind of … hard to pay too much attention to it, except that they are accusing me of a crime.”

On one thing both sides in the furor agree — the Iowa poll results got major coverage in the media. Selzer speculated in last week’s interview that the finding that Trump was trailing Harris might have actually spurred more of his voters to the polls in Iowa.

“There might have been something that happened between when we finished polling on Thursday night and election day,” she said. “Contrary to what was being charged, it could be that the release of that [poll] got the Republicans more hustled up, and … had the impact of actually inflating the Trump vote.”

But she acknowledged that there was no proof of that speculation. “I don’t have the data for that,” she said.

Selzer also noted previous occasions when results of her polls mirrored the election victory, and one when they did not.

In 1988, her poll showed a large lead for Democrat Michael Dukakis over Vice President George H.W. Bush, a finding that also went against conventional wisdom. Journalists at the Register even discussed whether they should publish the finding. They did, and Dukakis went on to win the state by more than 10 percentage points, much as Selzer’s poll forecast.

In 2004, by contrast, Selzer’s poll showed Democratic Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) with a narrow lead over President George W. Bush ahead of the election. But Bush eked out a victory of under 1 percentage point. Selzer recalled that Iowa’s GOP governor, Terry Branstad, had later told her that the poll helped prod more Republicans to vote.

In his Monday news conference in Florida, Trump acknowledged Selzer’s positive reputation. His implication seemed to be that such an adept pollster could not have been so off the mark unless she intended to favor his opponent.

“You know, she’s got me right, always. She’s a very good pollster,” Trump said. “She knows what she was doing.”

Election law expert Rick Hasen wrote on his blog: “I don’t expect this lawsuit to go anywhere.”

In an interview, Hasen noted that defamation cases surrounding public figures require plaintiffs to demonstrate “actual malice.” He said he expected that standard would be applied in Iowa, even if state law does not specifically enumerate it.

“This is 1st Amendment activity, a speech activity, and therefore she’s protected,” he said. “She and the publishers of the poll are protected.”

Hasen predicted Trump’s lawyers would face other hurdles.

“It doesn’t appear that there was any false statement. And there’s no evidence that the pollster deliberately manipulated the results,” he said. “Also, it’s not clear that this [state] statute applies to something like a poll, as opposed to a consumer product, or typical protecting consumers from bad products or lies about products.”

Much of the reaction to the lawsuit fell along predictably partisan lines.

“She wasn’t part of any conspiracy, there was no conspiracy. She was just wrong,” progressive commentator Cenk Uygur wrote on X. “So, can Hillary [Clinton] sue all the pollsters who said she was going to beat Trump? Most importantly, can all the slimy politicians sue everyone now for criticizing them or even doing a poll that shows them losing?”

One Trump loyalist, former national security advisor Michael Flynn, posted a compilation of a series of preelection polls that mostly showed Harris with a narrow lead over Trump.

“Powerful data,” Flynn wrote. “Clearly shows how organized polling is meant to influence and not inform.”

“I hope it doesn’t have a chilling effect on news gathering, but it might,” said Barbara Kingsley-Wilson, a lecturer and media advisor with the Department of Journalism and Public Relations at Cal State Long Beach. “It’s a financially difficult time for journalism organizations in general, and the well-heeled forces that try to bully and intimidate know that.”

She said she would tell student journalists to “be thorough, be fair and don’t be intimidated by threats of meritless lawsuits.”

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WASHINGTON —  On the snowy sidewalk of a drab residential street in Moscow, blood, soot and the mangled remnants of an electric scooter marked the spot where a top Russian general was assassinated — and signaled a potentially dangerous new phase of the war in Ukraine.

Coming just over a month before President-elect Donald Trump takes office, the bombing that killed Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov and his assistant on Tuesday was widely attributed to Ukraine, which stopped short of a formal claim of responsibility but quietly let the role of its security services be known.

Kirillov, 54, was the highest-ranking Russian military figure to die outside the battlefield since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine nearly three years ago. With the U.S. president-elect vowing to bring a swift end to the fighting, analysts say both sides are scrambling to inflict heavy blows aimed at achieving maximum leverage in any upcoming negotiations.

“This is a new chilling stage in this war,” former Ukrainian government minister Tymofiy Mylovanov wrote on X, casting the killing as part of an apparent retaliatory campaign in which Russia has similarly targeted Ukrainian military officials.

Russian state media cited investigators as saying the early-morning blast that killed Kirillov and his assistant — an act of suspected terrorism — was triggered by an explosive device planted in a scooter parked near the entrance to an apartment building.

Ukrainian officials had made it abundantly clear they considered Kirillov a legitimate target. Only a day earlier, authorities in Kyiv lodged charges in absentia against the general, accusing him of ordering the use of banned chemical weapons in Ukraine.

The Biden administration too had linked Kirillov to Russia’s use of the chemical agent chloropicrin — a poison gas dating to the trenches of World War I — against Ukrainian troops on the front lines in the country’s south and east.

The State Department, joined at various points by Britain, Canada and New Zealand, imposed sanctions over Moscow’s alleged violation of the three-decade-old Chemical Weapons Convention.

In his capacity as chief of Russia’s radioactive, biological and chemical defense forces, the general had often publicly turned international accusations back against his accusers, claiming the Ukrainian military employed toxic agents and plotted to carry out attacks with radioactive materials. Ukraine and its backers denied those claims.

As it has at many key points in the war, Russia vowed harsh retaliation for the killing. The deputy head of the Kremlin’s Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev, pledged there would be “imminent retribution” in kind against senior Ukrainian figures. Russia’s United Nations mission said it would bring the matter before the Security Council, of which it is a permanent member.

Some analysts pointed out that the killing was a likely prelude to talks in which Russia and Ukraine will each desperately seek to avoid negotiating from a position of perceived weakness.

“I think it’s a significant escalation,” analyst Ian Bremmer said of the killing, citing Kirillov’s rank and importance. In an analysis posted online for his GZERO Media, Bremmer suggested that escalatory moves by both sides in the conflict probably reflected the belief that “negotiations are coming soon.”

The killing of Kirillov was particularly audacious and high-profile but not an unprecedented attack. Last week, Moscow was also reportedly the scene of the apparent targeted killing of a top engineer of its cruise missiles, deployed with the aim of sowing havoc and death in Ukrainian cities.

Those attacks on civilian targets have increased in tempo and intensity in recent weeks, often targeting Ukraine’s power grid as cold weather tightens its grip.

On the battlefield, outnumbered and outgunned Ukrainian forces are increasingly beleaguered. In a bloody war of attrition on the eastern front, Russian forces have steadily gained ground.

In addition, a slice of Russian territory that Ukraine captured in a surprise late-summer incursion has been shrinking in size, with Russia using North Korean troops to augment the push to regain ground in the Kursk region.

Trump’s election victory in November sent tremors of dread across Ukraine, where people had closely tracked his campaign-trail commentary denigrating billions of dollars in crucial Western assistance to Kyiv.

But Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky quickly turned his attention to a public relations campaign of sorts, seeking to persuade Trump that there were distinct advantages — from personal prestige to potential access to Ukraine’s mineral wealth — in avoiding capitulation to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The president-elect and Zelensky spoke this month in Paris, a meeting brokered by French President Emmanuel Macron when the U.S. and Ukrainian leaders both attended the grand reopening of Notre Dame Cathedral, which had been ravaged by fire in 2019.

Even before taking office, Trump has rattled nerves in Ukraine and among U.S. allies over the prospect of withholding crucial support.

Ukraine considered it a significant breakthrough last month when President Biden, after months of public pleas from Zelensky, reversed course and gave Ukraine the go-ahead to use U.S.-supplied long-range missiles for strikes against military targets deeper inside Russian territory. On Monday, at a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago resort, Trump called that decision “stupid” and suggested he would reverse it.

Hours after the targeted bomb blast against Kirillov in Moscow, Zelensky, speaking remotely to the summit of a regional alliance, did not mention the general’s killing. But he cited the expectation that negotiations might come soon.

“We all understand that next year could be the year this war ends — we must make it happen,” the Ukrainian leader said. But he added: “We need to establish peace in a way that Putin can no longer break.”

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Donald Trump went off on a raving diatribe during a Monday Palm Beach, Florida press conference, claiming he left the country in perfect shape when he left office in 2021, right after his disastrous handling of COVID and an insurrection.

Demented Donald wears so much make-up he looks like the logo from Red Devil paints.

Nothing is ever Trump’s fault in his maggot-nfested brain.

TRUMP: Like, out of nowhere came the China virus. Out of nowhere came other things. We don’t want to have.

You know, when I left, we had no wars. We had no problems. The Middle East was good. We did the Abraham Accords.

We did things that nobody thought were even possible.

But think of it. Four years ago, we had no wars.

You didn’t have Russia going into Ukraine. They wouldn’t have done it. They weren’t even thinking about it.

When they saw what happened in Afghanistan, I think they gave them an idea. But they wouldn’t have done it.

They would have never gone in. President Putin would have never gone in.

And now you look at all those people are dead. All those cities are destroyed. You know, it’s nice to say they want their land back, but the cities are largely destroyed.

They’ve left Kiev because probably maybe they want to use it or occupy it, but they haven’t done it.

They’ve done a lot of damage, but relatively, compared to the other cities, very little.

Russia was planning to invade Ukraine for a long time before they did on on 24 February, 2022, but that’s beside the point.

When Trump left office, he had just allegedly incited a insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

People were dying at an alarming rate from the COVID pandemic because of his many failures in dealing with the virus. The US unemployment rate skyrocketed, the stock markets crashed, schools were closed and a sick paranoia engulfed the entire population.

But sure, what he meant to say was he had “no problems” after he left office.

The country was gutted.