Ankita Rao reports: Despite the fact that the president-elect, Joe Biden, leads in the popular vote by at least 5 million people, and despite the fact that he has significant leads in five key states, Donald Trump has baselessly claimed that the election is rigged against him. He’s weaponizing those claims to undermine the election results, to cast doubt on the democratic process, and to try to convince the American people that he is the true winner. These are his tactics: Litigation: The Trump campaign has lodged a slew of baseless lawsuits in swing states, with claims that range from “dead people voted” to “ballots that arrived late are being counted”. So far, as our reporter Sam Levine wrote this week, judges have ruled against the campaign in almost every instance, citing a lack of evidence. Undermining the media: Trump and his supporters are even railing against Fox News because it called the election for Biden. Federal investigation: William Barr, the attorney general, has authorized federal prosecutors to investigate election irregularities, an unprecedented move that prompted the head of the justice department’s election crimes unit to step down. Calling on enablers: Trump is relying on figures such as Ken Starr; the lieutenant governor in Texas; and J Christian Adams, a former justice department official, to continue their crusade against so-called voter fraud. Can Trump stage a coup? Not really. Though the lawsuits continue, and the US supreme court has a conservative majority, it’s very unlikely that Trump can manipulate the levers of democracy and the safeguards in place. As Sam Levine has written, there is a long-shot legal theory, floated by Republicans before the election, that Republican-friendly legislatures in places like Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania could ignore the popular vote in their states and appoint their own electors. Federal law allows legislatures to do this if states have “failed to make a choice” by the day the electoral college meets. But there is no evidence of systemic fraud or wrongdoing in any state, and Biden’s commanding margins in these places make it clear that the states have in fact made a choice. More on that here. President scheduled to receive Operation Warp Speed briefing Operation Warp Speed is a Trump administration program to pursue Covid-19 vaccines and therapeutics. After several days with an empty schedule, amid reports that Trump has been disengaged from the day-to-day of governing, even as coronavirus cases climb, the president’s public schedule says he will receive a briefing on vaccines and treatments tomorrow, which will be closed to press. Trump, who downplayed the coronavirus crisis in the lead-up to Election Day has since largely refrained from weighing in on the latest surge in cases across the US. He has “fumed” that Pfizer announced progress in its vaccine trials after the election, the AP reports, citing an anonymous White House official. Ahead of the election, the president had promised a vaccine by election day, or soon after – presenting a timeline that public health experts said was unrealistic. What will Mike Pence do next after Trump’s election loss? Across the street from the British embassy, with its red telephone box and Winston Churchill statue, in Washington DC is the residence of the US-vice president. It has its own basketball court, on which Mike Pence reportedly installed a logo from the 1986 film Hoosiers starring Gene Hackman about small-town Indiana sports. Fortunately, the Washington Post noted a couple of years ago, the logo is removable. Pence, a former governor of Indiana, and his wife, Karen, will be packing their bags and moving out of the residence in January to make way for America’s first female vice-president, Senator Kamala Harris of California, and her husband Doug Emhoff. Said to have nurtured ambitions for the presidency since he was 16, Pence must now decide what to do with the rest of his life. Among the 61-year-old’s options: a return to his roots in conservative talk radio as a way to remain relevant in his party. “I think he would want to stay involved in Republican politics and probably in a more conventional way than the president,” said Michael D’Antonio, co-author of The Shadow President: The Truth About Mike Pence. “So he could be a broadcaster, and there’ll be lots of opportunity for that, but he would be nicer than Trump. Joe Biden said he will raise the number of refugees that the US will admit annually to 125,000. During a video he recorded for the Jesuit Refugee Service 40th anniversary virtual celebration, Biden said: The United States has long stood as a beacon of hope for the downtrodden and the oppressed, a leader of resettling refugees in our humanitarian response. I promise, as president, I will reclaim that proud legacy for our country. The Biden-Harris administration will restore America’s historic role in protecting the vulnerable and defending the rights of refugees everywhere and raising our annual refugee admission target to 125,000. In October, the Trump administration capped the number of refugees the US will admit over the next financial year at 15,000. It is the lowest cap the US has set since the 1980 Refugee Act took effect. Opinion: Republicans aren’t conceding. And Democrats are bringing a knife to a gun fight The recent HBO film 537 Votes, about the Florida 2000 election mess, offers one overarching message: Democrats’ refusal to sound a clear alarm about the slow-motion heist in process ultimately let the election be stolen. In that debacle, Democrats seemed to think things would break their way with well-honed arguments inside the cloistered confines of the legal system – they never understood how public-facing politics can play a role in what ended up being a pivotal political brawl outside the courtroom. Twenty years later, the lesson of the Bush-Gore debacle isn’t being heeded Now, 20 years later, the lesson of that debacle isn’t being heeded. Donald Trump and his cronies are quite clearly waging a public-facing campaign designed to create the conditions to pull off a coup in the electoral college process. This is a full-scale emergency – and yet the Democratic strategy seems to be to try to pretend it isn’t happening, in hopes that norms win out, even though nothing at all is normal. In the week since the election, Donald Trump and his Republican allies have waged a public campaign to call the election results into question – not just in the courtroom, but in the public’s mind. Their lawsuits and Attorney General William Barr’s recent memo are designed as much to to generate headlines as they are to win rulings and initiate prosecutions. Their tweets asserting fraud, and their high-profile promises of financial reward for evidence of fraud, are all designed to do the same thing. Most ominously of all, Republican lawmakers in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and Arizona are already insinuating the results may be fraudulent, even though they haven’t produced any evidence of widespread fraud. Read more from David Sirota, a Guardian US columnist and an award-winning investigative journalist: Joe Biden advised against Osama bin Laden raid, Barack Obama writes Joe Biden advised Barack Obama to wait to order the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, the former president writes in his new memoir. “Joe weighed in against the raid,” Obama writes in A Promised Land, about discussion of the Navy Seals mission, which he ordered to go ahead as intended in Abbottabad, Pakistan, on the night of 1-2 May 2011. Obama’s book will be published on Tuesday. Guardian US has seen a copy. Obama writes that his vice-president, who will follow him to the White House in January, immediately supported his decision to proceed with the Bin Laden raid. Whether Biden advised against the raid has been a contentious issue in US politics. During this year’s election, Republican attack ads claimed Biden opposed taking Bin Laden out altogether. Biden has said that during group discussion of whether to order the raid, he advised Obama to take more time, saying: “Don’t go.” He has also said he subsequently told Obama to “follow your instincts”. In his memoir, Obama echoes the accounts of other senior aides present in the White House Situation Room nine years ago who have said Biden counseled caution. Like the defense secretary, Robert Gates, Obama writes, Biden was concerned about “the enormous consequences of failure” and counseled that the president “should defer any decision until the intelligence community was more certain that bin Laden was in the compound”. In the event, a Navy Seal team flew from Afghanistan to Pakistan and shot dead the al-Qaida leader, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. “As had been true in every major decision I’d made as president,” Obama writes, “I appreciated Joe’s willingness to buck the prevailing mood and ask tough questions, often in the interest of giving me the space I needed for my own internal deliberations.” In a preview of an upcoming interview with 60 Minutes, Barack Obama said Republicans who are humoring Donald Trump’s refusal to accept loss are on “a dangerous path”. “The president doesn’t like to lose and never admits loss,” Obama said. “I’m more troubled by the fact that other Republican officials who clearly know better are going along with this, are humoring him in this fashion,” he said. “It is one more step in delegitimizing not just the incoming Biden administration, but democracy generally. And that’s a dangerous path.” DHS cybersecurity agency: 2020 election "was the most secure in American history" The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) – a part of the Department of Homeland Security – said the 2020 election “was the most secure in American history”. In a joint statement with several other agencies, CISA assistant director Bob Kolasky said: “When states have close elections, many will recount ballots. All of the states with close results in the 2020 presidential race have paper records of each vote, allowing the ability to go back and count each ballot if necessary ... This process allows for the identification and correction of any mistakes or errors.” “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised,” the statement reads. Donald Trump and his Republican allies have continued to spread misinformation and sow doubt on the integrity of the US election system. His campaign has continued to pursue longshot litigation to challenge vote counts, even as it is clear that there is no evidence of widespread voting irregularities. Donald Trump’s attacks on the credibility of Joe Biden’s election win through meritless lawsuits could undermine Americans’ trust in voting and could pose an immediate threat to the security and safety of the country, experts have warned. Trump’s campaign has unleashed a stream of lawsuits in states key to Biden’s electoral college win, none of which are expected to affect the outcome of the election. The US attorney general, William Barr, has authorized the Department of Justice to investigate voting irregularities, in a highly unorthodox move, and Republican state representatives in Pennsylvania are calling for an audit of the election, though they have no evidence of fraud. University of Southern California (USC) law professor Franita Tolson said she was concerned that these actions, which would not change the trajectory of the election, were meant to call into question the legitimacy of the result. “What does that do to our democracy as we play out this process? What does it do to the belief in the system when 70 million people think the election was stolen,” Tolson said, referring to the popular vote total for Trump. “To me that’s the danger of this narrative, that’s the danger of this litigation.” Top election officials in every state, representing both political parties, told the New York Times there was no evidence that fraud or other irregularities played a role in the outcome of the race. A coalition of hundreds of journalists from more than 150 newsrooms also found no major problems, in ProPublica’s collaborative election monitoring project Electionland. Coronavirus cases in Texas are continuing to climb at a rapid clip. Yesterday, Texas was the first state in the US to surpass 1m cases as a state. As the weather gets cooler, residents are increasingly likely to engage in indoor gatherings, epidemiologists say. El Paso, which is one of the hardest-hit areas, has hired mobile morgues to hold the dead. *This post has been corrected to say that Texas was the first to surpass 1m cases. In Illinois, Democratic congresswoman Lauren Underwood has won re-election – but her Republican opponent, following in the footsteps of the president, has refused to concede. The AP declared Underwood the winner earlier today. She’s leading her opponent by half a percentage point – with some mail-in ballots still outstanding. But her opponent Jim Oberweis, the chairman of the popular ice cream chain Oberweis Dairy, is not planning to concede, according to WBEZ: When asked whether Oberweis was planning to concede, the GOP candidate’s campaign manager said “not at all” shortly after The Associated Press called the race for Underwood. Earlier in the week, spokesperson Travis Akin told WBEZ a recount was imminent. In a written statement, Akin said the campaign is “committed to exploring all legal options,” and that the Associated Press’ call “does not change anything in this race from a legal standpoint,” saying there are still votes that have yet to be counted and certified. The Guardian’s Vivian Ho reports: California is nearing a grim milestone in its battle against the coronavirus, as the state looks set to become the second in the US to surpass 1 million cases of Covid-19. Following a period in which new infections dipped and sectors began to cautiously reopen, the state of nearly 40m residents has recently joined the rest of the country in a surge that was predicted to come with the flu season. With 991,609 total cases, California saw nearly 7,000 cases in the past 24 hours, with a 7-day test positivity rate at 5%. Hospitalizations have increased by nearly a third in the past 14 days, with intensive care hospitalizations going up by 29.6%. The state is averaging 44 deaths a day; in total more than 18,000 people have died from the virus. Just one month ago, the state was reporting daily numbers below 3,000 and a positivity rate of 2.5%. “Obviously, it’s sobering, these numbers,” said Gavin Newsom, California’s governor. Texas passed 1 million confirmed cases of the coronavirus earlier this week. Chicago mayor issues 30-day stay-at-home advisory Weeks before the Thanksgiving holiday, Chicago’s mayor, Lori Lightfoot, issued a 30-day advisory asking residents to stay at home, avoid unnecessary travel and avoid gatherings of more than 10 people. “While this is tough — this whole year has been tough — you must cancel the normal Thanksgiving plans,” Lightfoot said. “If we continue on the path we’re on and you, me, and others don’t step up and do more ... we could see at least a thousand more Chicagoans die.” The advisory takes effect Monday morning. November on track to be worst month of pandemic so far in US as cases surge Miranda Bryant reports: November is on track to be the worst month of the pandemic so far in the US as new cases and hospitalizations continue to surge to record highs. There were 143,231 new cases and 2,005 deaths in the US on Wednesday, according to figures recorded by Johns Hopkins University. It marked the ninth consecutive day of cases topping 100,000 and a new record for daily cases. It comes after the country recorded more than a million cases in the first 10 days of November. Total cases in the US have now reached over 10.3m and 241,910 people have died, the highest totals in the world. Health experts have in part put the increase down to incoming cold weather driving people indoors and frustration with public health precautions such as masks. Dr Anthony Fauci, America’s top infectious disease expert, said America can slow the spread by “doubling down” on precautions such as mask-wearing, avoiding crowds, keeping activities outdoors and social distancing – and that if people do so a national lockdown could be avoided. “We would like to stay away from that [a national lockdown] because there is no appetite for locking down in the American public. But I believe that we can do it without a lockdown, I really do,” he told ABC on Thursday morning. French president Emanuel Macron says Biden will “make our planet great again”. Biden has promised to rejoin the Paris climate agreement, which Trump pulled the US out of on 4 November. That the US will soon rejoin 194 countries and the European Union who are signatories to the agreement “is proof that we had to stand firm against all the headwinds”, Macron said in an online summit hosted by the French government, Reuters reports. “‘Make our planet great again’ is a possibility, not just in words but also in deed,” Macron said.