When the US’s first Muslim senator used Arabic in his victory speech, it cut through the torrent of vile racism Maga launched at him throughout his campaign

Repeat after me: yallah. YAH-luh. This versatile Arabic word means everything from “hurry up”, to “come on” to “speak to you later”. If you add a “bye” at the end, the meaning shifts to “please shut up, fool” or “speak soon friend,” depending on your intonation.

Next up: wallah. wa-LAH. Again, the definition changes depending on context and cadence. It can mean everything from “no way!” to “I swear to God.”

US president rhapsodized about ballroom features for more than 20 minutes, with no mention of Democrats’ ‘blue wave’

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Less than 24 hours after suffering historic party losses in the US midterm elections, Donald Trump gathered reporters and network TV cameras at the White House to congratulate his team.

“The whole thing is a miracle, and it’s all because of you,” the US president said into a microphone on Wednesday afternoon.

Trump Media stock and WLFI coin saw declines but he is still $2.7bn wealthier than when he won election in 2024

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Donald Trump’s wealth is falling along with his political fortunes.

Tradable investment assets that helped make the president more than $2bn during his first year in office are collapsing in value the day after the Democrats trounced the Republicans in the midterm elections. Trump Media and Technology Group stock, which trades on the Nasdaq exchange, was priced at just over $5 on Wednesday morning – its lowest mark ever, and down from an all-time high of $101. It lost 11% overnight, dropping from $5.90 once the election returns started coming in. Trump has reported he owns 114m shares of DJT.

Troy Jackson, in just 101 days, bested the Republican, preventing her sixth Senate term: ‘You can’t eat road salt’

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The political demise of Susan Collins – a fixture of Maine and Washington politics for three decades – recalls the famous line in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises about how one of the novel’s characters experienced bankruptcy: gradually, then suddenly.

In the run-up to Tuesday’s stunning Democrat “blue wave” election triumph, it seemed obvious that Collins’s 30-year tenure as Maine’s Republican senator was vulnerable to the challenge of Troy Jackson, the Democrats’ explicitly working-class candidate as voters prepared to unleash pent-up anger with Donald Trump’s presidency.

Abdul El-Sayed has become America’s first Muslim US senator following a brutal election laced with outspoken Islamophobia. Oliver Laughland and Tom Silverstone travel to Michigan to watch the final days of the campaign unfold. They witness the intolerance that has underpinned much of the Maga effort against him and the euphoria of election night as Democrats across the country take power back in Congress.

Even Trump seems to recognize that the relationship has become a political liability, and may never be the same

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On the eve of a midterm election that ended in an unequivocal rejection of his brand of politics, even Donald Trump seemed to recognize that the US-Israel relationship had become a political liability.

Trump’s 11th-hour suggestion, on election morning, that he would cut military aid to Israel at the end of the year because, as he put it, “they don’t need it”, was condemned across the board – with pro-Palestinian advocates dismissing it as “desperate” and pro-Israel ones as “unserious”.

The real question in my mind is whether Democrats will take advantage of the new age of populism

The great sleeping giant of the US has awakened, taken a hard look at what’s become of the nation, and roared a thunderous “NO!”

What occurred on Tuesday was not – as some are saying – the inevitable midterm swing of the pendulum against the party in power. Texas hasn’t elected a Democratic senator since 1988. The last time Kansas elected a Democratic senator was 1932.

Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist and his newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com. His new book, Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America, is out now in the US and in the UK

Trump’s rout could be part of a democratic spring that began in Hungary. But will it extend to the French elections next May?

Hungary, Brazil, Serbia, and now the US. So far this year, when their hand has been held to the stove, voters have chosen what the Texas senator-elect James Talarico, the new face of the US’s Christian left, campaigned on as a “politics of love”: a society where we aren’t at each other’s throats, or a police state at ours.

Is it any surprise that when there is clarity about the choice on offer, voters have started to shrink away from a vision fuelled by billionaire wealth and runaway inequality? Away from oligarchic rule and unapologetic corruption, connivance with aggression, expansion, colonialism and war; environmental degradation and the surrender of the human spirit to a reality mediated by the algorithm.

Alexander Hurst writes for Guardian Europe from Paris. His memoir Generation Desperation is out now

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Voters have delivered a damning verdict on Donald Trump’s presidency with this Congressional landslide

Bitter experience made Democrats wary of believing that the blue wave predicted by polls would materialise. What arrived was not just victory but a rout: control of Congress and a Republican wipeout. It was an astounding humiliation for a president whose political brand is power. Donald Trump won it back in 2024 by promising voters lower prices and no foreign wars. He lost it by launching an illegal conflict that hit them in the pocket and imposing hefty tariffs too. He urged voters to pretend that he was on the ticket and they delivered a verdict that could not have been more damning.

Two years ago, retaking the House looked like a genuine fight for Democrats, and the Senate a long shot. On Tuesday, they needed to flip four more seats to gain a 51-seat Senate majority. Within hours of polls closing, they had 54, with two more races in the balance, and had easily passed the 218 seats needed for a House majority. This appears to be the biggest congressional landslide since 1976, in Watergate’s aftermath.

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As tech bosses get richer and ordinary Americans struggle, Democrats put the case against the US’s grotesque unfairness – and voters responded

Remember the “vibe shift”? Just last year, columnists and corporate boardrooms alike declared that the second coming of Donald Trump meant the old rules of politics and even everyday civility were roadkill.

“I feel liberated,” one top banker told the Financial Times. “We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled … it’s a new dawn.”

Scott Colom leads Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith by 1,138 votes with 96% of the vote counted – a small but growing margin

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Wall Street surged at the open, after Democrats scored historic victories in midterm elections and secured control of US Congress.

The Dow Jones rose 2%, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq and the benchmark S&P 500 both gained more than 1%. That’s quite a reversal: Overnight, stock futures fell sharply as investors worried about the prospect of tougher regulation of the AI sector and the impact on economic growth.

Excitement over midterm election results tempered by worry of return to ‘business as usual’

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Guardian readers from around the world have shared their reactions to the results of the US midterm elections on Tuesday night. Here’s what they had to say.

Stance signals vice-president seeks to distance himself from the unpopular conflict ahead of possible 2028 run

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JD Vance said on Wednesday that the war against Iran doomed the Republican party in the US midterm elections, which are widely seen as a sweeping rebuke of Donald Trump’s presidency.

The intervention signals that the vice-president, once the face of the Trump administration’s deal-making efforts with Tehran, seeks to distance himself from the unpopular conflict before a possible 2028 White House run.

Democrats have taken back the House and Senate in the 2026 midterms. Here’s what a majority in Congress means for them – and for Trump

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• Democrats win control of Senate as US voters reject Trump’s agenda

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Democrats have flipped the US Senate and House of Representatives in a massive rebuke of Republicans and Donald Trump’s agenda. With Democrats majorities in both chambers, the final two years of Trump’s presidency will look markedly different from the first half. But what can Democrats actually do with congressional power?

Donald Trump and his Republican party have been dealt a devastating blow in the midterm elections with Democrats taking control of the House and Senate

After the party regained control of both houses of Congress, stars including Viola Davis, Bette Midler and John Cusack have been celebrating

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Celebrities have been reacting to last night’s historic midterm victory for the Democrats after the party regained control of both the House and the Senate.

The night saw a string of major victories for the party as voters expressed their disapproval of Donald Trump and his failing economy.