As the sun set on Howard University in Washington DC, a group of women gathered on a grassy patch in the centre of campus.

They held hands in a wide circle and sang hymns, many wiping tears from their faces.

They had just watched a concession speech given by Kamala Harris.

Many had been at the university the night before, hoping to witness America electing its first female president.

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“I don’t think she could have done anything differently,” one said, “she ran a good campaign, I just think misogyny and racism is deep-rooted in America.”

Another lay the blame at the door of President Biden.

“Unfortunately I think if he’d have gone sooner, she would have had more chance to tell her story and establish herself,” another said.

In Democratic Party circles, the inquest had begun even before Harris spoke.

Not only had she been defeated in all seven of the key swing states, the map showed rightward shifts across the country. Questions about what went wrong for the campaign and the Democratic Party are at a fever pitch.

David Plouffe, a senior campaign adviser for Harris, posted on X: “It was a privilege to spend the last 100 days with Kamala Harris… We dug out of a deep hole but not enough.”

Many are reading that deep hole as one left by Joe Biden, who some say didn’t leave his vice president enough time to make her pitch to the nation known. Mr Plouffe has since deleted his entire X account.

Others wondered whether President Biden’s ego had led him to cling to power too long. Had the man who once pledged to be a transition candidate been so intoxicated by the heady heights of the Oval Office that he couldn’t bear to step aside?

Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen told Sky News she didn’t “think this was so personal towards Kamala Harris”.

She said: “The campaign miscalculated the importance of the economy as a central message.

“I think they thought it was going to be a referendum on Donald Trump and a referendum on abortion. And those two calculations, I think, had them underplay what we know voters’ key issue was, which is the economy.”

President Biden spoke in the Rose Garden, paying tribute to Ms Harris’s campaign and promising a peaceful transition of power to president-elect Donald Trump.

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But his speech will probably be remembered as much for what he didn’t say. There was no introspection about the loss, no answers offered for why it was such a bruising defeat.

Brett Bruin, former White House director of global engagement who worked under Barack Obama, said: “I can’t help but think back to what President Obama said after his first defeat at the congressional level. He acknowledged it was a shellacking.

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“We didn’t hear that from President Biden. This has been part of the problem throughout his presidency, it’s part of the reason why Biden and Harris were so unsuccessful when it came to unpopularity is that they didn’t acknowledge the problems, they didn’t address the problems.

“I wonder when the Democratic Party are going to say, ‘we have to change’.”

At the end of the last Trump presidency, the New York Times declared: “The terrible experiment is over – President Donald J Trump: The End.”

That didn’t age well. If Trump 1.0 (2016-2020) was the experiment, then maybe Trump 2.0 (2024-2028) will be the real deal.

In 2016, Donald Trump was a political novice. That was the attraction for those who chose him. He didn’t know how Washington worked, and he didn’t know how to govern. But he learned on the job as he meandered chaotically through that first term.

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With Apprentice precision, he fired those who crossed him. They were largely people drawn from the establishment and in the end, that was their downfall.

This time, Trump watchers here in Washington believe he will be more organised. He will know who to hire. They will be loyalists – the people he’s eyed up and got to know over the past eight years.

The first appointment has already come.

Susie Wiles will be his White House chief of staff. She is the veteran political consultant who ran his winning campaign. In his shadow for many years, she is an astute political operator whose career began as a junior staffer on Ronald Reagan’s election campaign.

She had the Apprentice treatment once – fired by Mr Trump in 2020 in the run-up to that presidential election after a falling out. But he soon saw her value again. He trusts her and she knows precisely how he ticks.

Mr Trump knows Ms Wiles better than any of the four chiefs of staff he hired during his first term, and crucially she is credited for trying to keep his campaign disciplined. She may be a guardrail in the next White House.

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Her appointment is an indication of what his other appointments will look like. They will be people well-known to him or they will be fully signed up surrogates like Elon Musk and Robert F Kennedy Jr.

Expect family members to be signed up too. Last time his daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner were key figures.

For good or bad, and with little experience, Mr Kushner played a central role in moulding Mr Trump’s Middle East policy which culminated with the historic Abraham Accords.

And so the first difference between Trump 1.0 and 2.0 will be the hires. The second will be the power he has.

The landslide victory and likely control of both Houses of Congress gives Mr Trump a powerful mandate to govern. It also gives him a huge confidence in his conviction to do what he wants to do.

A far-reaching agenda is now much more achievable than it was in his last term. He also has a clearer idea of what he wants to achieve.

His manifesto, which has always been a little opaque and subject to change, is likely to include scrapping the department of education and making education a state, not federal, issue.

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It would include a pledge for “mass deportations” of illegal immigrants, tax cuts, the imposition of tariffs on foreign goods and an overhaul of the mechanics of the federal government.

On that last pledge he hopes to reintroduce a plan, unimplemented in his first term, called Schedule F which would see the removal of thousands of non-partisan federal civil servants and replacing them with loyal political appointees.

Some of his policies would require the approval of Congress, which is easier if the Republicans hold control in both Houses.

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Other policies could be implemented via presidential executive orders.

This privilege gives the American president broad executive and enforcement authority to use their discretion to determine how to enforce the law or manage the resources and staff of the executive branch of government.

A few months ago, I had lunch with a top Trump advisor who told me that if re-elected, Mr Trump would sign a pile of executive orders on inauguration day. Only half joking, the official said the president would take the pile to the inauguration ceremony and sign them there and then. Quite the image.

Above all, governance is about confidence. In 2016, Mr Trump didn’t have that confidence. You could see it was missing on his face when outgoing President Obama welcomed him to the White House for transition talks.

This time, Mr Trump has supreme confidence because he just pulled off the most remarkable comeback in political history.

Joe Biden has called for Americans to “bring down the temperature” as he addressed the US for the first time in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s sweeping election victory.

Speaking in the White House Rose Garden, the US president said: “I know for some people it is a time for victory, for others it is a time of loss… the country chooses one or the other.

“I have said many times you can’t love your country only when you win, you can’t love your neighbour only when you agree.”

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The president said he had spoken with Mr Trump and said he has ordered his team to ensure a “peaceful and orderly transition” of power.

He said: “The people vote and choose their own leaders and they do it peacefully. In a democracy, the will of the people prevails.”

His remarks could be seen as a subtle dig at how Mr Trump refused to accept he lost the election in 2020.

The president also spoke about the “integrity of the American electoral system”, saying: “It is honest, it is fair and it is transparent. It can be trusted, win or lose.”

He concluded: “America endures. We’re going to be okay, but we need to stay engaged.”

Mr Biden’s speech was intended to highlight what he sees as his achievements, Sky News’ US correspondent Mark Stone said. With more time, those achievements may have been more clear, he added.

“I thought it was interesting that he kind of made the point, almost suggesting if we’d had a bit more time, maybe the American people would have felt the achievements that this administration has put forward,” he said.

‘We must accept the result’, Harris tells supporters

It comes after vice president Kamala Harris called Mr Trump to concede the race and congratulate him.

In a speech in Washington DC, she told her supporters she was “proud of the race we ran” but said “we must accept the result”.

Trump’s path to decisive victory

Mr Trump won a decisive victory – comfortably clearing the 270 Electoral College votes needed to secure the presidency and clinching five battleground states: North Carolina, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

He is also leading in Arizona and Nevada, which are yet to be called, according to Sky’s US partner NBC News, meaning Mr Trump is on course to claim all seven swing states.

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The 78-year-old president-elect has been keeping a low profile after addressing his supporters in Florida yesterday morning to declare victory.

He is the first defeated president in over a century to return to the Oval Office and also the first convicted of a crime to win the presidency.

Mr Trump is facing several criminal and civil cases, but experts say his victory will essentially end the cases brought against him – at least while he is in the White House.

After spending his first day as president-elect receiving congratulatory phone calls from world leaders, Mr Trump will now begin the process of choosing who will be in his second White House administration before inauguration day on 20 January.