Donald Trump’s second administration is poised to soon do a great deal of damage in several important areas. Whether it’s health care, education, the federal courts, reproductive freedom, immigration, foreign policy or the economy, millions of people will suffer needlessly if Trump follows through on all of his campaign promises.

That said, when it comes to the damage that will be truly irreparable, no pledge looms darker or more ominous than Trump’s plan to scuttle efforts to combat climate change.

As Katharine Hayhoe – a scientist and lead author of the National Climate Assessment under the last Trump administration – put it in a recent interview, quote “the situation is dire… on many fronts [and…it’s] already getting worse.”

In other words, there’s absolutely no time to waste. Even a mere four years of backtracking will greatly worsen results for our children and grandchildren.

The bottom line: No problem poses a greater threat to the near and long-term wellbeing of Americans than climate change. And no matter what he’s said previously, Trump simply must listen to the experts and act.

For NC Newsline, I’m Rob Schofield.

Sometimes, you just have to shake your head in wonder at the crazy paranoia of North Carolina election conspiracy theorists. Their latest kooky idea: that the recent state election was somehow rigged to prevent victories by Republican candidates for offices like governor and attorney general even as Donald Trump claimed the state’s presidential contest.

That’s right — the same people who repeatedly tell us that state government is dysfunctional and incapable of performing core public functions, are claiming that somehow, someone inside it pulled off one of the most diabolical criminal conspiracies in modern American history.

Please. Give us a break.

If such a scheme were possible – and it’s not – why would the mysterious forces rig just some elections? Why let Trump win?

The bottom line: as political scientists have repeatedly demonstrated, North Carolina voters have been splitting their tickets in the precise way they did last week for decades.

The conspiracy kooks should spend more time studying civics and history and less time wallowing in dark and disturbed corners of social media.

For NC Newsline, I’m Rob Schofield.

There will be a parade of extremists and lightly qualified politicos in the nominations and appointments that President-elect Donald Trump will advance over the coming days. Once again, Americans will have to endure a time in which important government functions are entrusted to individuals who don’t even support the missions of the agencies they’re leading.

All that said, it’s hard to imagine that even Trump would take the request of someone like failed North Carolina schools superintendent candidate Michele Morrow seriously.

Morrow, of course, is a Wake County homeschooler and culture warrior who, despite never having been elected to any public office or held any paid employment in education, believed she was qualified to run our state’s public schools.

And now, having failed in that dreamy quest, she’s actually campaigning for Trump to appoint her Secretary of the U.S. Department of Education. And it’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry at such an absurd idea.

The bottom line: It’s hard to think of a person less qualified to be a U.S. cabinet secretary than Morrow. Even Donald Trump will see that.

For NC Newsline, I’m Rob Schofield.

Almost four years later, it still stands as one of the darkest acts of any elected official in American history – a cowardly and criminal act by small and petty man who sought to overturn two-and-a-half centuries of constitutional government.

I speak, of course, of then-President Donald Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election and his direct incitement of a deadly attempted coup in which our national Capitol Building was ransacked and defiled by a lawless mob.

Sadly, however, American memories are short, and now that same small and petty man will soon be back in the White House.

All of this came to mind last Thursday when our current president, Joe Biden – an honorable man who respects the Constitution – assured us he would oversee a ‘peaceful and orderly transition’ to a new Trump administration – something that Trump lacked the character and class to do for him.

The bottom line: The voters have spoken; Donald Trump has been elected. But that doesn’t mean we should ever forget who he is, what he did, or what he is capable of.

For NC Newsline, I’m Rob Schofield.

The 2024 election is now mostly in the rear-view mirror, and as we all know by now, huge change is in the offing thanks to the return of Donald Trump. Trump’s election would appear to bode ill for a host of important and successful federal government initiatives of recent years on such matters as health care, environmental protection, education and more.

One member of Congress who will be doing her best to defend many of those successful initiatives is Wake County U.S. Rep. Deborah Ross. Ross was reelected by a wide margin this past Tuesday and as she told NC Newsline when we caught up with her the day after Election Day, she’s hopeful that Democrats can add some balance to Washington and that her colleagues will return to Capitol Hill in the next few weeks to provide much more aid for hurricane-impacted areas of western North Carolina.

Even though North Carolinians gave the state’s electoral votes to Donald Trump, last Tuesday was, in many ways, a status quo election in our state, in which very little has changed in the way the two major parties are controlling key levers of power. What’s more, as we learned in a conversation the day after the election with Western Carolina University political science professor Chris Cooper, there is every indication that despite its performance in recent presidential elections, North Carolina remains one of the nation’s most deeply purple states. Cooper shares his takeaways from the November 5th elections.

This year’s election may have come and gone, but one thing that hasn’t gone anywhere in North Carolina this year is hunger. Especially since congressional Republicans blocked the reauthorization of some key social safety net programs that led to great success during the pandemic, food insecurity has expanded to the point at which more than 560,000 people in our region alone fit this troubling description.

And with the recent devastation wrought by Hurricane Helene, things have been even more dire in western North Carolina – a fact that has led the Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina to ship truckloads of goods to the mountains. Earlier this week, we learned more about this effort, the work of the food bank more generally and the need for average folks to become anti-hunger advocates in a conversation with the food bank’s Vice President of Communications and Public Policy, Jason Kanawati Stephany.

Click here to learn more about how you can contribute.

In the event you thought this year’s election was over and all of the races decided – hold on a minute.

It turns out tens of thousands of ballots that North Carolina voters cast are yet to be counted.

That’s because there are many circumstances – most notably when people forget their photo ID or show up at the wrong precinct – that voters get to cast so-called provisional ballots that only get counted
later.

And for those who lacked ID, their ballots won’t be counted at all unless they return to their county board of elections with a proper ID to show by this Thursday, November 14.

Could these provisional ballots make a difference? Absolutely.

Some state legislative races were decided by just a few dozen votes. Even at the state level, Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs trails in her race by less than a tenth of one percent.

The bottom line: It would be tragic if any candidate in any race lost because not all of their supporters’ votes were counted. Let’s hope that North Carolina voters show up to prevent such a scenario.

For NC Newsline, I’m Rob Schofield.

It’s one of the great conundrums of modern American politics. Time and again, voters elect politicians who espouse positions that are contrary to what the majority of the public believes.

The list of such issues is a long one: climate change, gun violence, wages, tax fairness, health care.

And another classic example of this disconnect occurred in this past Tuesday’s election. All across the country – in red and blue states – voters came out in big numbers to support initiatives that enshrine abortion rights in state constitutions. And yet, at the same time, they elected a president opposed to reproductive freedom.

How? Why?

Sadly, the suspicion here is that a huge proportion of the public is simply not paying attention. These folks may hold progressive beliefs, but they vote with their heart or their gut instead of their head.

The bottom line: Donald Trump is an enormously savvy politician, but ultimately, his success should be a reminder to voters that they too need to be savvy and pay close attention if they want their policy beliefs to prevail.

For NC Newsline, I’m Rob Schofield.

This week’s election in North Carolina was what might be properly termed a “status quo election.” Republicans continued to dominate the presidential contest, and Democrats returned the favor in the governor’s race.

Meanwhile, most of the other races for statewide offices were pretty much evenly divided and all decided by a point or two. And thanks to egregious gerrymandering, Republicans won most of the congressional and legislative races even though the vote was, as usual, about evenly split. But, of course, all of this normalcy is overshadowed by one deeply worrisome decision that was made, effectively, in other states – namely, Donald Trump’s impending return to the White House.

Absent some big policy flipflops by Trump, North Carolinians– should prepare themselves for several destructive changes – to their healthcare, the environment, the economy and quite possibly, to their basic personal freedoms.

The bottom line: North Carolina voters may have acted in a normal fashion this year, but the impacts of the election, sadly, promise to be anything but.

For NC Newsline, I’m Rob Schofield

Well, another Election Day has come and gone, and while the voters in North Carolina and across the nation have made their choices, the time for an even more important set of decisions will come very soon.

And that’s because the policy challenges that the candidates have debated so fiercely over the last several months must now be addressed. Come January, elected officials in Washington and Raleigh will need to grapple with dozens of huge, even existential issues.

The list includes:

* The climate change crisis that’s rapidly degrading our planet’s health and causing mass human migration on an unprecedented scale.

* The ongoing global assault on freedom and democracy in which authoritarian dictators and regimes are waging wars of aggression and undermining human freedom.

* The rapid and unjust accumulation of wealth by a handful of global billionaires who possess more power and influence than entire nations.

The bottom line: Elections are of enormous importance, but the task of maintaining a working democracy is a 365-day-a-year job. Today, that work begins anew.

For NC Newsline, I’m Rob Schofield.