Hours after video emerged of Donald Trump boasting about committing sexual assault, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell criticized Trump’s comments as “repugnant” and “unacceptable.” But were they disqualifying? McConnell wouldn’t say—until nearly a month later, when, days before the election, he declared that “we need a new president, Donald Trump, to be the most powerful Republican in America.

It happened—Donald Trump is now the president of the United States. How will life change under his administration? While every presidency starts off with a hefty dose of uncertainty, this is the first time a populist demagogue with zero government experience has been in charge. So, we don’t know. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth hazarding a guess. Predicting the future is a fool’s errand—when the primary goal is to be proved right.

A couple of days after the 2016 election, New Jersey patent attorney Rabiya Kader met up with a few female friends to regroup. Devastated by Donald Trump’s victory and the increasing conservatism of Congress, the women talked over what they could do to affect issues that mattered to them—reproductive rights, voting rights, climate change.

Donald Trump shares several important traits with his ally Vladimir Putin—foremost among them, the deployment of outrageous lies as a political tool. Putin is a master of disinformation. After Russian troops and aircraft invaded Ukraine in 2014, for example, he simply denied they were there, which slowed and destabilized Western response. The deployment of falsehood by Putin’s regime is right out of the old Soviet playbook.

You—yes, you—should be running for political office. But what would it entail, exactly? Slate spoke to four first-time candidates who won their races in November about their experiences campaigning and their thoughts on seeking office. These excerpts from our conversations with them have been edited and condensed.

The “liberal media” have long been one of President-elect Donald Trump’s favorite punching bags. So it was no surprise on Wednesday to hear Trump use his first press conference since the election to lambaste CNN and BuzzFeed for reporting on a dossier full of unverified claims about his relationship with the Russian government.

Not long into his confirmation hearing for the office of attorney general, Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions had a remarkable exchange with South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham. “I’m from South Carolina,” Graham said, “so I know what it’s like sometimes to be accused of being a conservative from the South. That means something other than you’re a conservative from the South.

In a recent op-ed in the Raleigh News & Observer that was picked up far and wide, including here on Slate, political science professor Andrew Reynolds wrote: In 2005, in the midst of a career of traveling around the world to help set up elections in some of the most challenging places on earth ... my Danish colleague, Jorgen Elklit, and I designed the first comprehensive method for evaluating the quality of elections around the world. .

Earlier this month, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing about “The Electoral College and the Future of American Democracy.” More precisely, it was about establishing a future for American democracy without the Electoral College, which Monday will formally award the presidency, for the fourth time in history, to a man who lost the popular vote—this time, by a margin of nearly 3 million votes.

The Chinese government has vowed to return a U.S. underwater survey drone that was seized on Thursday in the South China Sea, effectively ending a brief standoff between the two nations. “Through direct engagement with Chinese authorities, we have secured an understanding that the Chinese will return the UUV to the United States,” Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook said in a statement.