Alex Brandon/AP

Elon Musk and former first lady Melania Trump listen as former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally at Madison Square Garden, Oct. 27, 2024, in New York.

In his election night victory speech at Mar-a-Lago, President-elect Donald Trump heaped praise on a supporter he called a “super genius” and a “special guy.”

“We have a new star,” Mr. Trump announced. “Elon.”

Elon Musk, the largest shareholder of SpaceX and Tesla and the multibillionaire owner of the social media platform X and other tech companies, is no ordinary Trump backer. In the campaign’s closing weeks, Mr. Musk organized and bankrolled a get-out-the-vote operation for Mr. Trump and bombarded X users with pro-Trump content. In swing states, he bestowed $1 million on one voter per day who signed a petition supporting free speech and the right to bear arms.

As Mr. Trump noted, Mr. Musk also brought his own brand of quirky star power, appearing on stage at rallies, providing a partial counterbalance to the flood of celebrity endorsements for Vice President Kamala Harris.

“To a lot of people, that’s Tony Stark,” Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, a Democrat, told The New York Times last month, referring to the Marvel superhero. “That’s the world’s richest guy … and he’s saying, ‘Hey, that’s my guy for president.’” (Mr. Musk, in fact, had a brief cameo in Iron Man 2.)

Now, Mr. Trump is tapping Mr. Musk to take a sledgehammer to the federal bureaucracy. On Tuesday evening, the president-elect announced that the entrepreneur, along with former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, would lead a new Department of Government Efficiency, driving “large-scale structural reform” from “outside of Government.” Mr. Trump called it “The ‘Manhattan Project’ of our time.”

It’s a role Mr. Musk seems eager to take on, saying that he wants to cut $2 trillion in spending and that it’s time for “America’s A team” to reform the government. Mr. Musk has also vowed to keep funding pro-Trump candidates through his political action committee, which spent at least $130 million in 2024.

Beyond that new role, Mr. Musk appears to be influencing a wide range of issues. He has been seen at Mar-a-Lago nearly every day since Mr. Trump’s victory, weighing in on staffing decisions and other matters, according to CNN. Last week, Mr. Musk reportedly joined a phone call between Mr. Trump and Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whose military depends on the Starlink internet service provided by Mr. Musk’s SpaceX satellites. By some reports, he has also proposed that Mr. Trump appoint SpaceX executives to the Department of Defense.

Ringo H.W. Chiu/AP/File

Tesla CEO Elon Musk introduces the Cybertruck at Tesla's design studio on Nov. 21, 2019, in Hawthorne, California.

The overlap between Mr. Trump’s governing agenda and Mr. Musk’s business interests is raising concerns among some, given that SpaceX is a major contractor to NASA, the Department of Defense, and other security agencies. Before the Nov. 5 election, Mr. Musk wrote on X that “I have never asked @realDonaldTrump for any favors, nor has he offered me any.”

But Mr. Musk has repeatedly complained of “irrational regulations” that hold back innovation at his companies. Tesla is the subject of federal investigations into the safety of its self-driving technology. More broadly, the close embrace by Mr. Trump, a master of transactional politics, of the world’s richest man marks a new chapter in a modern era of billionaire-funded candidates pushing ethical boundaries.

“Musk and his businesses are going to reap extensive economic benefits from Trump’s presidency,” says Bruce Schulman, a political historian at Boston University. “I think Musk is going to receive favorable treatment from the federal government in regulatory matters.”

Musk: An unconventional innovation driver

Mr. Musk’s risk-taking, no-limits approach to building successful companies – he camps out in his factories to ensure production hits targets – makes him stand out, even among the alpha males of Silicon Valley who jostle for visionary status. Critics also concede that his refusal to heed conventional wisdom makes him a potential disrupter to a federal government that has sprawled in scale and complexity under successive presidents.

Born in South Africa, he made his first fortune more than two decades ago at PayPal, whose co-founders included Peter Thiel, who first backed Trump in 2016. After PayPal, Mr. Musk directed his energies toward Tesla, whose electric cars would become popular, especially among liberals concerned about climate change. In 2010, the company received a $465 million loan from the Obama administration to build its first factory in California, a loan it repaid in three years with interest. It now has plants in Texas, Germany, and China and is valued at more than $1 trillion. After Mr. Trump’s victory, Tesla shares rose by 39%, boosting Mr. Musk’s net wealth to around $320 billion.

Paul Sakuma/AP/File

PayPal CEO Peter Thiel, left, and co-founder Elon Musk, right, pose with the PayPal logo at corporate headquarters in Palo Alto, California, Oct. 20, 2000.

Analysts say Mr. Musk’s space rockets and satellites have succeeded as a result of innovation, private investment, and relentless experimentation, disrupting a defense industry that enjoyed cozy relations with federal agencies but has fallen behind its upstart competitor.

A decade ago, defense executives “looked at SpaceX and Elon Musk kind of mockingly,” says Todd Harrison, an expert on defense budgeting at the American Enterprise Institute. “Today, the same defense companies look at SpaceX with grudging respect.” Mr. Musk’s company has “done some pretty incredible things,” he says, and “defense executives would privately acknowledge that SpaceX is beating them, and beating them badly.”

Today, NASA relies on SpaceX to transport astronauts and equipment to the International Space Station. Mr. Musk’s company also has contracts with the Department of Defense to launch satellites for military communications and intelligence collection, a business that has expanded under President Joe Biden, despite Mr. Musk’s often frosty relations with the current administration. (Mr. Musk has also drawn attention for his regular contacts with Russian President Vladimir Putin, before and during the election campaign.)

These deepening ties speak to SpaceX’s competitive advantage in a time of increasing military competition in space, says David Burbach, an associate professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College. But that same advantage – providing a service that other defense companies can’t match – makes SpaceX a larger-than-life partner for the Pentagon.

“I think even the Biden administration feels that SpaceX has been so important and is providing such leap-ahead technology that, I think, the administration has been willing to give Musk a pass where they might not in some other situations,” he says.

Of course, defense companies have long lobbied lawmakers and executives to look favorably on their businesses and the federal contracts that sustain them. But their political donations and support are typically spread across the aisle and conducted quietly behind the scenes, says Professor Burbach, who noted that these are his personal views.

Joel Kowsky/NASA/AP

From left, crew members Konstantin Borisov (Russia), Andreas Mogensen (European Space Agency), Jasmin Moghbeli (NASA), and Satoshi Furukawa (Japan) are pictured inside the SpaceX Dragon Endurance spacecraft onboard the SpaceX recovery ship MEGAN shortly after landing off the coast of Pensacola, Florida, March 12, 2024.

“You don’t see the CEO of Boeing literally jumping up and down with the candidate at a rally, whether it be a Democrat or a Republican,” he says. “You know, maybe in a sense, it’s a little more honest and open with Musk.”

Conflict of interest, and the precedent of Andrew Mellon

Mr. Musk is unlikely to seek any Cabinet role requiring him to step back from running his companies and possibly divest his holdings. If he did that, the closest historical analog might be Andrew Mellon, the banking and steel tycoon who served as treasury secretary under three Republican presidents in the 1920s and ’30s.

“He was one of the richest and most prominent businessmen in the country. And he really did define the nature of governance for that whole decade,” says Professor Schulman.

President Warren Harding praised Mr. Mellon as the “ubiquitous financier of the universe,” after he poured money into the president’s 1920 campaign. Mr. Mellon’s promise to hand off his companies while serving in government proved empty. He controlled a monopoly on aluminum supplied to a growing aerospace sector, and he shaped tax policies that swelled his personal fortune. His reputation later cratered in the Great Depression after lawmakers in Congress exposed his self-dealing.

By tapping Mr. Musk to remake the federal bureaucracy, Mr. Trump is also, in some ways, following in the footsteps of leaders like President Bill Clinton, who in 1993 put Vice President Al Gore in charge of a National Performance Review. The effort spanned Mr. Clinton’s two terms and led to a reduction in the federal workforce and of internal regulations.

But reformers usually speak about improving public administration, says William Howell, a politics professor at the University of Chicago who directs its Center for Effective Government. What’s different about the incoming administration is that “it employs the language of laying waste to an administrative state that it finds corrupt and noxious.”

Both Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk “gesture towards efficiency,” he says. But their real interest “is dramatically curtailing the reach of the administrative state and cutting regulations.”

Pushing innovation or routing regulations

Mr. Musk’s companies are the subject of multiple federal workplace and product safety investigations.

Last year, Reuters published an investigation into deaths and injuries at SpaceX facilities that detailed a chaotic workplace where routine safety procedures were skipped to meet Mr. Musk’s deadlines for rocket launches. After Mr. Trump’s reelection, a former SpaceX official told Reuters that Mr. Musk “sees the Trump administration as the vehicle for getting rid of as many regulations as he can, so he can do whatever he wants, as fast as he wants.”

Jordan Barab, who served as deputy assistant secretary of labor under President Barack Obama, says Mr. Musk’s idea of making government more efficient will likely prove self-serving and hazardous, given his past defiance of health and safety standards, including at Tesla’s factory in California.

“He gives the impression that he thinks of himself as kind of a master of the universe, above all these pesky government regulators,” Mr. Barab says. “He puts the efficiency of his companies over the health and safety of his workers.”

Mr. Musk has denied that his companies provide an unsafe work environment. But he also voices frustration with regulations that he sees as unnecessary or ill-suited to technological innovation, particularly in the development and launching of SpaceX rockets. He has framed this tension as existential in the context of his stated goal of colonizing Mars.

“America is being smothered by ever larger mountains of irrational regulations from ever more new agencies that serve no purpose apart from the aggrandizement of bureaucrats,’’ he wrote on X. “Humanity, and life as we know it, are doomed to extinction without significant regulatory reform. We need to become a multiplanet civilization and a spacefaring species!”

Noah Berger/AP/File

Workers install lighting on an "X" sign atop the headquarters of the company formerly known as Twitter, in downtown San Francisco, July 28, 2023.

How long Mr. Musk will stay focused on Mr. Trump’s efficiency agenda remains to be seen. Neither man seems prepared to dedicate themselves to making “thoroughgoing change in something as extensive and complicated as the federal bureaucracy,” says Professor Schulman. A more likely scenario, he believes, is the creation of a commission that gets a lot of attention and then quietly fades from view.

Podcaster Joe Rogan posed a similar question during an interview with Mr. Musk last month. “How are you going to have the time to oversee all this [expletive]?” Mr. Rogan asked. To which Mr. Musk replied: “I’m pretty good at improving efficiency.”

From Twitter to X, from the left to the right

In April 2022, Mr. Musk decided on an impulse to purchase Twitter for $44 billion amid rising controversy over its content-moderation policies that conservatives decried as censorship. At the time, he was among the platform’s most prominent users.

He discussed his acquisition that month over dinner with four of his sons, according to Walter Isaacson’s biography, published last year. Mr. Musk told them he wanted Twitter to be more of an inclusive public square, adding, “How else are we going to get Trump elected in 2024?”

“It was a joke,” wrote Mr Isaacson. “But with Musk, it was sometimes hard to tell, even for his kids. Maybe even for himself.”

Mr. Musk had previously described himself as socially liberal and said that he donated to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. As he told Mr. Rogan last month: “I was on the left until three years ago.”

His political journey to Mr. Trump’s side appears to have started during the COVID-19 pandemic when he chafed at public health closures of Tesla’s factory in California. He also became a critic of what he calls the “woke mind virus” in society, particularly around gender identity. He has a transgender daughter, Vivian, who transitioned in 2020 at age 16. The two are estranged; Mr. Musk says he “lost” his son to gender surgery that he claims he was tricked into approving. In total, he has 11 children, born to three mothers.

Under his ownership, Twitter, which he renamed X, reinstated Mr. Trump’s account, which had been banned from the platform, as well as several right-wing firebrands. Critics say the platform has largely stopped policing misinformation.

Mr. Musk publicly declared his backing for Mr. Trump after the former president survived an assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13. X leaned hard into the campaign, amplifying positive messages about Mr. Trump and other Republicans at the expense of Democrats, according to The Washington Post. Other research has found Mr. Musk’s own posts have also been boosted on X. Analysts say the increasingly right-wing tilt on X could also reflect the exodus of liberal users under Mr. Musk’s ownership.

Critics accuse Mr. Musk, who has over 200 million followers, of spreading false claims about election fraud and other Trump talking points. He repeatedly argued on X and elsewhere that Democrats were deliberately encouraging illegal immigration as part of a plot to boost their party’s prospects at the ballot box (only citizens can legally vote in federal elections). His claims that Democrats are “importing” migrants into swing states to engineer future majorities also echo the racist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory.

Mr. Trump owns his own digital platform, Truth Social, though his posts there were reposted on X during the campaign. That technically puts the two men in competition for social media clicks, while Mr. Musk has ambitions for X to become a digital-payments platform.

Critics have pointed to X’s loss in advertising revenue and vertiginous drop in valuation since Mr. Musk took it private as an example of his Midas touch deserting him. But his vast wealth means that he can afford to subsidize X to sustain its political reach, just as media tycoons prop up loss-making news outlets that have influence over public life.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns a space company that competes with SpaceX for rocket launches. He also owns The Washington Post, which made him a target for Mr. Trump during his first term. The newspaper’s editorial board reacted furiously when he axed its planned endorsement of Vice President Harris, arguing that The Post should remain politically neutral. After Mr. Trump won a second term, Mr. Bezos publicly congratulated him on “an extraordinary political comeback” and wished him success in “leading and uniting” the country.

The message was posted on X.

Leah Millis/Reuters

Republican Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, who was elected to become the next Senate majority leader, speaks to the media after the leadership vote on Capitol Hill, Nov. 13, 2024.

As President-elect Donald Trump made his triumphal return to the U.S. capital Wednesday, he and his allies got a clear reminder that the old establishment guard of the Republican Party isn’t quite dead yet – and remains a force he’ll need to reckon with.

South Dakota Sen. John Thune was elected the new Senate majority leader by his GOP peers Wednesday, putting the upper chamber of Congress in the charge of an institutionally minded, old-school conservative who’s occasionally been willing to break with Mr. Trump.

After 17 years under Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell, the longest-serving Senate leader in U.S. history, Senate Republicans had the option of going in a more MAGA (“Make America Great Again”) direction. Instead, they picked a close ally of the outgoing leader.

The GOP vote occurred as Mr. Trump was meeting at the White House with outgoing President Joe Biden, who promised a peaceful transition of power. Earlier in the day, Mr. Trump took a victory lap at a meeting with House Republicans.

The choice in Senate leadership may only matter so much. Senate Republicans are likely to be fairly deferential to Mr. Trump’s Cabinet picks and other nominees, and there was very little daylight between them and Mr. Trump on judicial nominees in his first term. And Mr. Thune has worked to build his relationship with Mr. Trump in recent years.

Mr. Thune made clear he plans to work closely with the White House.

“This Republican team is united. We are one team. We’re excited to reclaim the majority and to get to work with our colleagues in the House to enact President Trump’s agenda,” Mr. Thune said at a press conference shortly after securing the top position. He pledged to “deliver on President Trump’s priorities,” and said he and the GOP “will do everything we can” to process Mr. Trump’s Cabinet nominations quickly.

How Thune beat MAGA favorite Rick Scott

But it wasn’t just Mr. Thune’s victory but the poor showing by the MAGA favorite in the race that signaled most Senate Republicans are still a breed apart from hardcore Trumpers.

Florida Sen. Rick Scott, a close Trump ally who had endorsements from some of Mr. Trump’s most vocal supporters both on and off Capitol Hill, won just 13 votes in the secret ballot. He finished third in the contest, behind Mr. Thune, who had 23 votes on the first ballot, and Texas Sen. John Cornyn, another establishment-leaning lawmaker. Mr. Thune then won on the second ballot over Mr. Cornyn by 29-24.

Nathan Howard/Reuters

Sens. Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Rick Scott of Florida exit the Senate Republicans’ leadership election on Capitol Hill in Washington Nov. 13, 2024. Despite support in MAGA circles, Mr. Scott's bid to be majority leader was rebuffed by colleagues.

Mr. Scott only won three more votes in this contest than the 10 he got when he ran against Senator McConnell two years ago as a protest candidate.

Mr. Trump has a much closer relationship to Mr. Scott than to either Mr. Thune or Mr. Cornyn, but stayed neutral in this race. Mr. Trump hates to back a loser and rarely endorses in races he doesn’t think he can win.

That didn’t stop some of Mr. Trump’s closest allies from lobbying for Mr. Scott. He was endorsed by some top MAGA allies, including billionaire businessman Elon Musk, Republican National Convention co-Chair Lara Trump (the president’s daughter-in-law), and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson – along with a loud online push from MAGA keyboard warriors.

These races often turn on personality and relationships more than on pure ideology, and both Mr. Thune and Mr. Cornyn had spent decades building those friendships and helping out other lawmakers both in their Capitol Hill work and in winning elections. Mr. Scott, who has only been a senator since 2018, tends to keep to himself more. He is best known by his colleagues for running Senate Republicans’ campaign efforts in 2022, when Republicans underperformed after a field of flawed candidates blew winnable races, and for pitching a plan to raise taxes on low-income Americans. The latter caught his GOP colleagues by surprise and became a campaign weapon against the party.

Thune says he won’t end the filibuster

The Senate GOP has gotten much Trumpier in the eight years since Mr. Trump first won office. Most of the Republicans who were willing to buck him in his first term have been replaced by others who are much more loyal to the incoming president. But Senate Republicans are expected to only have a 53-47 majority, just one seat more than they held when Mr. Trump first became president in 2017.

And like then, they have two independent-leaning moderates in Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who defeated a Trump-backed primary challenger in 2022, and Maine Sen. Susan Collins. Neither is a surefire vote on controversial issues. That makes the margin of error pretty small on key legislative votes. Mr. Thune also stated unequivocally Wednesday that he wouldn’t support eliminating the filibuster, the 60-vote threshold required for most major legislation. Mr. Trump has called in the past to get rid of that rule.

While it appears that Republicans will hold on to control of the House of Representatives, it will likely be by just a handful of seats, much slimmer than when Mr. Trump won in 2016.

North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis, a Republican up for reelection in two years, told the Monitor to expect “the typical tug and pull” between the White House and Congress over priorities and specific policies.

“President Trump’s going to try to push his agenda,” he says. “We’re going to work it out and make sure it’s good for everybody – and particularly good for the midterms.”

Many politicians would shrink from the task that lies ahead of the United Kingdom’s Conservative Party: bouncing back from a historic defeat in the country’s July 2024 general election.

But Kemi Badenoch, the Tories’ newly elected leader, is unafraid of a fight.

The first Black woman to lead a major British political party, Ms. Badenoch is known for a straight-talking, no-nonsense approach that sometimes strays into the combative.

Many Conservatives hope that her energy, as well as her staunch “anti-woke” platform, will rejuvenate the party’s flagging political fortunes – out of power for the first time in 14 years, with a record-low number of seats in Parliament.

Yet others fear that her uncompromising, often Trumpian approach will pull the party further to the right, deepening divides and alienating the centrist voters whom the party hopes to recapture.

A staunchly right-wing worldview

Ms. Badenoch was born in London but grew up in an affluent family in the Nigerian city of Lagos. She lived there until she was 16, when her parents sent her to the U.K. to avoid the increasingly unstable political situation at home. As a teenager, Ms. Badenoch worked at McDonald’s to fund her studies, which earned her a degree in computer systems engineering at the University of Sussex.

Ms. Badenoch has described these experiences as the bedrock of her political worldview – one which is staunchly right-wing. In an interview with the Daily Mail, she described Nigeria as a country where she “never felt safe,” feeding her appreciation for order and security in the U.K.

House of Commons/Reuters

Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch speaks during Prime Minister's Questions at the House of Commons in London, Nov. 6, 2024.

The politician says her time at college – surrounded by those she described as “stupid, lefty white kids” – also fed her conservative views. “People often ask what made me a Conservative and there was no one thing,” she told The Times of London in one interview. “But part of it was being at Sussex among snotty, middle-class north Londoners.”

Today, Ms. Badenoch is well-known for her vocal stance on what her supporters call “culture war” causes. She has criticized the Black Lives Matter movement, opposed letting people self-identify as transgender, and said that “not all cultures are equally valid” when it comes to deciding who should be allowed into the U.K.

Those positions have fired up hopes among Tories that Ms. Badenoch will win back voters who abandoned the Conservative Party in favor of the populist Reform UK, which enjoyed unprecedented success at the general election by running on an anti-immigration platform.

Others believe that Ms. Badenoch’s bluntness will also play well with voters who are tired of politicians trotting out vague platitudes.

“I think [Ms. Badenoch] is really good at getting her message across in a clear, coherent, and meaningful way,” says Gareth Lyon, a Conservative local councilor in Rushmoor, in southern England, who voted for Ms. Badenoch in the party members’ leadership vote. He says that since Ms. Badenoch’s election, a surge of new members have joined his local party branch.

“She actually reminds me of Ronald Reagan,” says Mr. Lyon. “Something about her is inspiring. Reagan was able to build a coalition, not by pandering, not by trying to make everyone happy, but by starting from what he believed in. That’s what I’ve seen in Kemi.”

This straight-talking approach could backfire. The “culture war” issues that have earned Ms. Badenoch admiration from some voters are bound to alienate others. She is expected to take the party’s policies firmly to the right, a move which could put off more moderate Conservative voters.

But for now, it is a risk that the Conservative Party is willing to take.

Overcoming “immorality and incompetence”

Much will depend on Ms. Badenoch’s next steps. Her leadership bid did not reveal concrete policies, but rather self-described “core principles,” such as personal responsibility, family, and truth.

As a result, Ms. Badenoch has a largely blank slate on which to work. She remains mostly unfamiliar to the electorate: Polling by YouGov in the run-up to the leadership vote found that 43% of Britons simply didn’t know how they felt about her.

Ms. Badenoch may be “straight-talking” – but her impact on the electorate will still depend on the issues and policies she chooses to champion, says Ben Worthy, a lecturer in politics at Birkbeck College, University of London. While Ms. Badenoch has built her reputation on “anti-woke” issues, topics such as trans rights have little traction with voters, he says.

“It could be that she’s going to be ‘straight-talking’ on immigration; there is a segment of voters who are very interested in immigration,” says Dr. Worthy. “But most of these voters are already Conservatives.”

To win back voters, Ms. Badenoch will need to both diagnose and remedy what led the Conservatives to implode at the last general election.

Polling shows that two events in particular damaged the Conservative Party’s reputation, says Dr. Worthy: the Partygate scandal, when then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson held a Downing Street Christmas get-together in violation of COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, and the tenure of Liz Truss, a prime minister best known for unpopular economic policies and being compared to a lettuce.

“It’s a mixture of immorality and incompetence,” says Dr. Worthy.

Her strong moral stances may position Ms. Badenoch well to tackle at least some of these problems. But the road ahead is likely to be long. With just 121 members of Parliament compared with 411 from the ruling Labour Party, the Conservative Party is extremely unlikely to be able to reverse its fortunes in a single term.

Under these circumstances, consistency will be key, rather than simple answers or even fiery rhetoric. Ms. Badenoch must be able to unite rather than divide in a British political scene that is still fractured and unstable. The Conservative Party itself has burned through six leaders in less than a decade.

For now, it is a challenge that Ms. Badenoch’s supporters believe she is more than capable of meeting.

“If you try and be all things to all people, it might work for a short period of time,” says Mr. Lyon. “But people will end up treating you with contempt because you’ll be neither hot or cold, but lukewarm and good for nothing.”

Usually far from the war’s front lines, the Christian residents of this quiet mountain village in northern Lebanon are still traumatized by the Oct. 12 blast that turned two houses to rubble in a tiny Shiite enclave in their midst.

The targeted Israeli strike, which reportedly killed three people, shook the hillside like an earthquake – and produced a cloud of shredded bits of $100 bills that witnesses suggest may have been a Hezbollah stash of cash.

The incident, which deepened Lebanon’s sectarian divide, underscored the increasingly high political cost paid by Iran-backed Hezbollah for its destructive war with Israel.

Hezbollah has wielded immense power in Lebanon for decades. But it has been substantially weakened by a string of shocks from Israel, ranging from exploding pagers that wounded thousands of its operatives to airstrikes that killed 20 of its top leaders and commanders.

Thousands of airstrikes have targeted its missile arsenal and even its banking system, and a ground incursion has revealed networks of tunnels near Israel’s border. As a result, swaths of territory have been demolished, afflicting every Lebanese sect.

“There is a rising tide of anger [against Hezbollah] among Shias, but also amongst the broader Lebanese social fabric,” says Maha Yahya, director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut. “There is a lot of tension on the ground today, and the prospect of civil strife is quite high.”

“We have nothing to do with this war”

In Deir Billa the day after the strike, local Shiites swept debris off the road beside a small mosque. Roofs and walls of two homes across the narrow street were obliterated, their interiors exposed. Two men, including a Hezbollah civil defense worker, hung a Lebanese flag atop the rubble and retrieved a prayer rug with an image of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

The words "We are here for you, Nasrallah," a reference to the assassinated Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, are written in dust on a car the day after an Israeli airstrike targeting Hezbollah infrastructure in largely Christian Deir Billa, Lebanon, Oct. 13, 2024.

Traced in the powdery dust on the hood of a damaged car are the words in Arabic, “We are here for you, Nasrallah,” in reference to the Hezbollah chief assassinated by Israel in a series of explosions in Beirut in September.

Among the 1.3 million people displaced from Hezbollah strongholds in the south and east of the country, some Shiites have recently found their way to this community, making residents wary.

“We are a peaceful village, but when strangers come, refugees – we don’t know them – then trouble starts,” says Toni, a Christian whose family home sits a few hundred yards away from the two targeted buildings. “We have nothing to do with this war. ... So this was a shock to us.” He declined to give his family name.

“Trust me, before this happened, we were friends,” says Toni, speaking of his targeted Shiite neighbors. “There was nothing bad about the [Shiite] people who lived there for years, for 100 years. We are talking about the newcomers.”

Yet some residents voiced concern over what they say have been Hezbollah’s long-term aims in their community. “Our friends, they don’t show it, but they support [Hezbollah] in their hearts,” says another Christian, who gives the name Samir. “For a long time, Hezbollah is supporting them financially to make a base for them here, maybe to take over the area.

“We believe they had weapons here a while ago,” he adds. “My concern is why they have guns in our areas. It’s far away from Israel and the border. It’s against us [Christians]. Those weapons give power over us.”

Hezbollah’s unique status

In years past, Hezbollah enjoyed widespread popular support in Lebanon, often well beyond its Shiite base, for its self-declared role as the armed defender of Lebanese sovereignty. But in the past two decades, periodic resentment of the group has sharpened into more widespread hatred, owing to an increasing number of events linked to Hezbollah even before this hugely destructive war, which many Lebanese see as unnecessary.

Those include the 2005 assassination of popular Sunni Prime Minister Rafik Hariri; a costly all-out war with Israel in 2006; the use of force against political opponents and rival sects; and the massive 2020 Beirut port explosion, which killed more than 200 people and left hundreds of thousands homeless.

Hezbollah operatives also helped violently suppress the anti-corruption, anti-sectarian protests of the October 2019 revolution.

For Lebanese exhausted by chronic state failures and economic collapse, Hezbollah’s unique status as a heavily armed state-within-a-state is increasingly a key part of the problem, not of the solution.

Hassan Ammar/AP

Smoke billows following Israeli airstrikes in Dahiyeh, a Hezbollah stronghold in Beirut, Lebanon, Nov. 13, 2024.

Some now see the first chance in years of changing Lebanon’s internal political equation.

“What is visible to me is that other political parties in Lebanon are trying to capitalize on this, seeing this as an opportunity not only to undermine Hezbollah, but also to reassert their position within the political system,” says Carnegie’s Ms. Yahya. The party “still has 13 members of parliament, so the political framework, the political scaffolding is still there.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sought to deepen divisions on Oct. 8, warning Lebanese in a videotaped message to sideline Hezbollah or risk civil war.

“Christians, Druze, Muslims – Sunni and Shia – all of you are suffering because of Hezbollah’s futile war against Israel,” he said. “You have an opportunity to save Lebanon before it falls into the abyss of a long war that will lead to destruction and suffering like we see in Gaza,” Mr. Netanyahu said. “Stand up and take your country back.”

Lebanon’s political reckoning

While few Lebanese will heed any warning from the Israeli leader, it highlights the fragility of Hezbollah’s position.

“Hezbollah is destroyed not as a faction, but as an idea,” says Makram Rabah, an assistant professor of history and archaeology at the American University of Beirut. “Hezbollah’s supernarrative is that they have the ability to defend Lebanon, and defend the Shiites, and ultimately liberate Palestine. None of these credos have been effective.”

As long as Hezbollah keeps firing at Israel, “They can still claim that they have the capacity to fight,” he says. But Hezbollah has lost politically by forgetting its endurance requires grassroots support, beyond the Shiite community.

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

Lebanese first responders help a woman walk through rubble, in the aftermath of Israeli airstrikes targeting a senior Hezbollah official in a crowded central district of Beirut, Oct. 11, 2024. At least 22 people died and over 100 were wounded in the strike, according to Lebanese officials.

“People who were hesitant to take them on believed for some time that these [Hezbollah] weapons could defend Lebanon,” says Dr. Rabah. “Now they have proved that they could not even defend themselves.”

Yet while Hezbollah may be knocked off its pedestal, it continues to fire rockets and battle Israeli forces.

More and more Lebanese – like the Christians of Deir Billa, for instance, and many disillusioned Shiites – say the Lebanese army should be made strong enough to deploy all the way to the southern border.

Hezbollah “are trying to simply play out the clock, because they believe that they can win by points,” says Dr. Rabah. “It’s a David and Goliath thing. You don’t really need to defeat Goliath; you just need to sidestep him until something happens.”

It is not clear what that “something” may be, with U.S. President-elect Donald Trump likely to give Israel even more leeway than the Biden administration has to strike Hezbollah. But inside Lebanon, the political reckoning has begun.

“You have 1.3 million displaced people who will never go back unless Hezbollah disarms,” says Dr. Rabah. “We won’t give them money this time to turn our villages again into bunkers and into ammunition depots.”

For people who rank climate change high on their list of societal concerns, the Nov. 5 election result was a sobering one: The next president of the United States will be someone who campaigned on relying more on fossil fuels, not less.

That result may seem counterintuitive, given that most Americans see climate change as a threat and believe human actions are the cause of it.

But it’s also not surprising, say many who study the issue. Multiple studies have shown that most voters rank climate or energy policy well below economic concerns and other social issues when it comes to picking political candidates.

This election proved that there “is no ‘climate voter,’” says Roger Pielke Jr., a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and a nonresident senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute who has long written about climate change and policy.

He and political scientist Ruy Teixeira, another American Enterprise Institute fellow, conducted a survey of voters in September and found that even those who list climate as an important issue are generally unwilling to pay extra for it.

“It is important,” says Dr. Pielke of voter opinions on climate change. “It’s up there, but it’s nowhere near immigration, inflation, the economy, and things like that.”

Climate and clean energy are important priorities, he says. But putting them into the context of economic prosperity is a far more effective approach than putting the climate goals at the forefront.

To some extent, the nation’s transition toward cleaner energy sources is already resting on a financial rationale that goes beyond the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Solar and wind power are economically competitive with fossil fuels.

Alex Brandon/AP

Attendees holding signs listen as Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump speaks during a campaign event at Alro Steel, Aug. 29, 2024, in Potterville, Michigan.

If climate advocates are reeling from the election of Donald Trump to a second term, many also hope that the country’s transition toward clean energy has become economically powerful enough to withstand a change in political power.

Indeed, the economic and energy landscape Mr. Trump is inheriting in 2024 is fundamentally different than it was in 2016, many experts say. The past eight years have seen a dramatic expansion in both solar power and other renewable technologies, as well as a growing recognition among automakers and other manufacturers that if the U.S. does not make big gains in “green” technology, the country will find itself losing even more market share to China.

“There should be nothing partisan or political about creating jobs or driving economic growth or making our air and our water a little cleaner for all of us,” says Bob Keefe, the executive director of E2, a nonpartisan group of business leaders advocating for a clean economy.

Still, throughout his campaign, Mr. Trump criticized the climate policies of the Biden administration, particularly incentives for electric vehicles. His promises of “drill baby, drill” reflect his goal of ramping up oil and gas production, even more so than the record levels under the Biden administration. He has also pledged to roll back clean power regulations.

Perhaps most influentially, Mr. Trump has talked about repealing the $437 billion Inflation Reduction Act, which he has blamed for inflation and described as the “green new scam.” But the realities of what he can – or will want to – do with that legislation is complicated.

More than 80% of the clean energy investments catalyzed by the Inflation Reduction Act – into everything from new battery or electric vehicle factories to “green cement” projects or solar plants – have gone to Republican districts. In August, a group of 18 GOP representatives sent a letter to Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, urging him to “prioritize business and market certainty as you consider efforts that repeal or reform the Inflation Reduction Act.”

While the group criticized the partisan passage of what it called a “deeply flawed bill,” the representatives also pointed out that “Energy tax credits have spurred innovation, incentivized investment, and created good jobs in many parts of the country – including many districts represented by members of our conference. ... As Republicans, we support an all-of-the-above approach to energy development and tax credits that incentivize domestic production, innovation, and delivery from all sources.”

The business outlook

Businesses, meanwhile, want a stable regulatory environment, says Anne Kelly, vice president for government relations at Ceres, a nonprofit and business network working on clean economy transitions. Although Mr. Trump has criticized global climate pledges and national emissions standards, those policies have kept American businesses competitive internationally.

“Businesses want certainty and predictability, and many of them have already committed to climate transition action plans,” Ms. Kelly says. “They’re already being pressured by certain European rules and regulations. ... And so, to suddenly have the U.S. jump out of the global arena – it just makes no sense. It’s disruptive.”

Evan Vucci/AP/File

President Joe Biden gets in a Corvette during a tour of the Detroit Auto Show in 2022. He has promoted electric vehicles, something President-elect Donald Trump has portrayed as government overreach and unfair for consumers.

Scores of environmental organizations put out postelection statements criticizing Mr. Trump’s prior positions on climate change and urging increased advocacy. Yes, clean energy is good for the economy, many indicated. But addressing climate change is also important for far larger reasons.

“A changing climate affects everyone, regardless of political affiliation, and what happens over the next four years is of profound importance if we are to head off the worst harms of a warming world,” Environmental Defense Fund President Fred Krupp and Executive Director Amanda Leland said in a joint statement after the election. “The climate crisis requires seriousness and urgency – and it requires holding our government accountable. This fight is about protecting who and what we love.”

Still, if clean energy boosters see momentum behind renewable sources, they also say the policy choices under a new administration will matter.

“Will Trump slow the growth of clean energy in America and set us back in climate? Probably, but he won’t kill it,” Mr. Keefe says. “If you look at any poll of what people want in clean energy and climate action from the federal government, Republican, Democrat, whatever, they want our country to do more. The momentum is there. The need is there. The technology is there now, and the desire is there. I just hope the new president builds on that and doesn’t tear it down.”

Editor’s note: This article, originally published Nov. 8, was updated to correct the spelling of Ruy Teixeira’s name.

Social Media/via REUTERS

Thousands of students participate in a bike ride to Kaifeng from Zhengzhou, Henan, China, Nov. 8.

When young people in America are disgruntled with their economic prospects, they can vote against the ruling party. In the Nov. 5 election, for example, men under 30 years old opted against incumbent Democrats. Yet in China, where elections are nil, what do unhappy youth do?

They ride bikes at night. En masse.

On Nov. 8, more than 100,000 university students – many with grim hopes of finding a job – pedaled more than 30 miles from Zhengzhou in central China to the historic city of Kaifeng. The nocturnal spin, mostly on rental bikes, was for the joy it. At first, the Chinese Communist Party praised the spontaneous swarm of bright-eyed bicyclists. Kaifeng is known for its soup dumplings, its ancient temples, and a theme park. Tourists are welcomed.

Yet many of the riders were also glad to be part of a mass movement that expressed their values. “Young people in mainland China are very eager to take part in public life,” Zhengzhou-based teacher Li Na told Radio Free Asia.

They are also well connected through social media. In the days that followed, young people in other Chinese cities began to copy this exuberant expression of freedom by taking nighttime rides together. The ruling party’s security forces quickly put an end to all the fun.

Any large gathering outside the party’s control, especially among youth, is seen as a threat. In 1989, the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests were led by students. Many had biked to the Beijing square.

Today’s young Chinese people know the limits of staging protests driven by fear or anger, even if they are experiencing record-high unemployment. Instead, their public expressions are often affirming, even joyful.

“I want to be a normal person in an abnormal society,” one woman told China expert Ian Johnson in a book last year about the country’s unofficial historians. “I want to be able to say truthful things and express what’s in my heart.”

The real foes of the Communist Party, writes Mr. Johnson, are “the lasting values of Chinese civilization,” such as righteousness and freedom of thought. “As strong as the party is, is it stronger than these deep reservoirs of resilience?” he asks. Independent thought lives in China, he states, and has not been crushed.

When China’s leader Xi Jinping said after taking power in 2012 that young people should dream big, he probably did not imagine they would take night rides by the tens of thousands. One of the riders to Kaifeng, Xia Tian, told the Australian Broadcasting Corp., “I’ve been feeling a bit down and anxious lately, and when I saw a night cycling event, it looked so spirited and free.

“I decided to tell my friend and join in and unwind.

“Everyone was so polite, cheering each other, and even people at the intersections were giving us encouragement.”

The pedalers and their supporters were living democracy. Even if they don’t live in one.