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      Trump Picks Doug Collins, Ex-Congressman and Impeachment Defender, to Lead V.A.

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      President-elect Donald J. Trump said on Thursday that he intended to nominate former Representative Doug Collins of Georgia to lead the Veterans Affairs Department, elevating another of his most vocal defenders during his first impeachment inquiry.“We must take care of our brave men and women in uniform, and Doug will be a great advocate for our Active Duty Servicemembers, Veterans, and Military Families to ensure they have the support they need,” Mr. Trump wrote in a statement.Mr. Collins, 58, who serves in the Air Force Reserve as a chaplain and deployed to Iraq for five months, said in a statement on social media that he would “fight tirelessly to streamline and cut regulations in the VA, root out corruption, and ensure every veteran receives the benefits they’ve earned.”As a congressman, Mr. Collins became the face of Mr. Trump’s first impeachment defense in the House in 2019. Then the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, Mr. Collins emerged as a fixture on Fox News and led House Republicans’ efforts to undercut the impeachment hearings held by Democrats.Mr. Trump has tapped three other current or former House Republicans who defended him during the impeachment inquiry to serve in his cabinet: Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, and former Representatives Lee Zeldin of New York and John Ratcliffe of Texas.Mr. Collins cut a somewhat idiosyncratic figure in the House. In front of the cameras during the impeachment proceedings against Mr. Trump, he was fiercely partisan. But he also worked with Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, now the Democratic leader, to pass bipartisan legislation aimed at rolling back tough sentencing laws that had caused the country’s prison population to balloon.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Republicans Float Lara Trump to Fill Rubio’s Senate Seat

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      Senator Rick Scott, the Florida Republican who has presented himself as a champion of the MAGA right wing in the run-up to President-elect Donald J. Trump’s second term, threw his support behind Lara Trump, the president-elect’s daughter-in-law, to replace his colleague Senator Marco Rubio.“Lara Trump would be a GREAT Senator and represent Floridians well,” Mr. Scott, who lost his bid to serve as majority leader this week, wrote on social media on Thursday.Mr. Trump tapped Mr. Rubio on Wednesday to serve as his secretary of state, and, if confirmed, Mr. Rubio will have to step down from his Senate seat. Gov. Ron DeSantis, Republican of Florida — who suffered a humiliating defeat to Mr. Trump in the party’s presidential primary race this year — has the power to appoint a replacement for Mr. Rubio until 2026, when a special election would be held for the final two years of Mr. Rubio’s term.Ms. Trump, the co-chair of the Republican National Committee, said in an interview on Fox Business on Thursday that she had not spoken to Mr. DeSantis about appointing a replacement, but she nodded to support she had received from other Republican lawmakers, including Senator Katie Britt of Alabama and Representative Anna Paulina Luna of Florida. “If this were something that I’m asked to do,” she said, “I would seriously consider it.”“I don’t think you’ll find a person who is more in line with Donald Trump’s America-first values and policies than me,” Ms. Trump said.Ms. Trump, who is married to Mr. Trump’s middle son, Eric Trump, was one of two handpicked allies of the president-elect — along with Michael Whatley — to lead a takeover of the Republican National Committee this year, gutting the party apparatus and remaking it in their image.Ms. Trump also served as a surrogate for her father-in-law on the campaign trail this year, repeating his lies that the 2020 election had been stolen from him and raising the specter of Democrats’ cheating in 2024. More

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      Here’s How Trump Could Lose the Coming Trade War

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      The good news: I don’t think Donald Trump will cause a global trade war.The bad news: The reason I say that is I believe that a trade war would be coming even if Trump had lost the election, largely because China is refusing to act like a responsible economic superpower. Unfortunately, Trump may be the worst possible person to guide U.S. policy through the turmoil that’s probably ahead.He won’t be the reason we have a trade war, but he may well be the reason we lose it.China is the greatest economic success story in history. It used to be very poor; there are still many people alive who remember the great famine of 1959-61. But after the reforms that began in 1978 its economy soared. Even now, China is only a middle-income country, with G.D.P. per capita substantially lower than ours or in Western Europe. But China has a huge population, so by some measures it is now the world’s largest economy.However, all indications are that China’s era of torrid economic growth is behind it. For decades, Chinese growth was fueled mainly by two things: a rising working-age population and rapid productivity growth driven by borrowed technology. But the working-age population peaked around a decade ago and is now falling. And despite some impressive achievements, the overall rate of technological progress in China, which economists measure by looking at “total factor productivity,” appears to have slowed to a crawl.But a growth slowdown doesn’t have to be a catastrophe. Japan went through a similar demographic and technological downshift in the 1990s and has, on the whole, handled it fairly gracefully, avoiding mass unemployment and social unrest.China, however, has built an economic system designed for the high-growth era — a system that suppresses consumer spending and encourages very high rates of investment.This system was workable as long as supercharged economic growth created the need for ever more factories, office buildings and so on, so that high investment could find productive uses. But while an economy growing at, say, 9 percent a year can productively invest 40 percent of G.D.P., an economy growing at 3 percent can’t.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why We Got It So Wrong

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      Let me ask you a few questions:If the Democrats nominated a woman to run for president, would you expect her to do better among female voters than the guy who ran in her place four years before?If the Democrats nominated a Black woman to run for president, would you expect her to do better among Black voters than the white candidate who ran in her place four years before?If the Republicans nominated a guy who ran on mass deportation and consistently said horrible things about Latino immigrants, would you expect him to do worse among Latino voters over time?If the Democrats nominated a vibrant Black woman who was the subject of a million brat memes, would you expect her to do better among young voters than the old white guy who ran before her?If you said yes to any of these questions, as I would have a month ago, you have some major rethinking to do, because all of these expectations were wrong.In 2024, Kamala Harris did worse among Black voters than Joe Biden did in 2020. She did worse among female voters. She did much worse among Latino voters. She did much worse among young voters.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Los nombramientos temerarios de Trump

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      Donald Trump ha demostrado de innumerables maneras que no es apto para la presidencia, pero una de las más claras es la compañía con la que se rodea: figuras marginales, teóricos de la conspiración y aduladores que anteponen lealtad a él por encima de todo. Esta semana, una serie de nombramientos para el gabinete por parte de Trump mostraron de la forma más cruda posible los peligros potenciales que entraña su dependencia a su círculo de allegados.Para tres de los puestos más importantes y de mayor rango del país, Trump dijo que nombraría a leales sin cualificaciones discernibles para sus trabajos, personas manifiestamente inapropiadas para puestos cruciales de liderazgo en la aplicación de la ley y la seguridad nacional.Lo más irresponsable fue su elección para fiscal general. Para ocupar el puesto de máximo responsable de la aplicación de la ley del país, el presidente electo dijo que nombraría al representante por Florida Matt Gaetz.Sí, ese Matt Gaetz.El mismo que pidió la abolición del FBI y de todo el Departamento de Justicia si no dejaban de investigar a Trump. El que estuvo entre las voces más audibles del Congreso en negar los resultados de las elecciones de 2020, quien dijo que estaba “orgulloso del trabajo” que él y otros negacionistas hicieron el 6 de enero de 2021, y quien elogió a los alborotadores del Capitolio como “estadounidenses patriotas” que no tenían intención de cometer actos de violencia. Aquel cuya maniobra para desbancar al presidente de la Cámara de Representantes, Kevin McCarthy, en 2023 paralizó el liderazgo de su propio partido en la Cámara durante casi un mes.Gaetz, quien presentó su carta de renuncia al Congreso el miércoles después de que se anunciara su nominación, fue objeto de una investigación federal sobre tráfico sexual que duró años y que condujo a una condena de 11 años de prisión para uno de sus socios, aunque él negó cualquier participación. El Departamento de Justicia cerró esa investigación, pero el Comité de Ética de la Cámara de Representantes sigue investigando las acusaciones de conducta sexual inapropiada, consumo de drogas ilícitas, aceptación indebida de regalos y obstrucción de las investigaciones gubernamentales sobre su conducta. McCarthy, el expresidente de la Cámara, culpó a Gaetz por su destitución, con el argumento de que Gaetz “quería que detuviera una denuncia de ética porque tuvo relaciones con una joven de 17 años”.

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      The Onion Buys Alex Jones’s Infowars Out of Bankruptcy

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      The satirical news site planned to turn Infowars into a parody of itself, mocking “weird internet personalities” who peddle conspiracy theories and health supplements.The Onion, a satirical publication that skewers newsmakers and current events, said on Thursday that it had won a bankruptcy auction to acquire Infowars, a website founded and operated by the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.The Onion said that the bid was sanctioned by the families of the victims of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, who in 2022 won a $1.4 billion defamation lawsuit against Mr. Jones and his company, Free Speech Systems.Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit dedicated to ending gun violence that was founded in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook shooting, will advertise on a relaunched version of the site under The Onion.The publication plans to reintroduce Infowars in January as a parody of itself, mocking “weird internet personalities” like Mr. Jones who traffic in misinformation and health supplements, Ben Collins, the chief executive of The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, said in an interview.Family members of the victims of the Sandy Hook shooting, which claimed the lives of 20 first graders and six educators, sued Mr. Jones in Connecticut Superior Court in 2018 after he spread the baseless claim that the rampage was a fabricated pretext for confiscating Americans’ firearms.The Onion declined to disclose the price it paid for Infowars and its assets, including its production studio and diet supplement business. Mr. Jones could not immediately be reached for comment, but he said on the social media platform X this week that he planned to continue producing his online program, “The Alex Jones Show,” until he was forced to stop.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Tapestry and Capri End Plans for ‘Accessible Luxury’ Merger

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      Tapestry, the owner of Coach, said it would abandon its $8.5 billion deal to buy Capri, the parent company of Michael Kors, after the Federal Trade Commission successfully sued to stop the transaction.An attempt to assemble an “accessible luxury” powerhouse in the United States has unraveled.Tapestry, the owner of Coach and Kate Spade, and Capri Holdings, the parent company of Versace and Michael Kors, on Thursday called off their plan to merge, which was first announced last year. The Federal Trade Commission had sued to block the $8.5 billion deal last spring over antitrust concerns, and a federal judge sided with the agency last month.At the center of the F.TC’s case was a worry that consumers would end up paying more for the relatively less expensive handbags and other fashion items sold by Coach, Kate Spade and Michael Kors in what the industry calls the accessible luxury market.While Tapestry and Capri argued that it was not a defined category, the federal judge ruled that accessible luxury handbags appeared to have traits that distinguished them from true luxury brands. The court determined that the category was defined by bags that start with a price of about $100 and “heavily rely on discounting.”Tapestry and Capri said that they had “mutually agreed that terminating the merger agreement was in the best interests of both companies.” The decision to abandon their appeal suggested that the companies were not more optimistic about a judge’s ruling under the Trump administration, and that they did not think putting in the time and money required by a lengthy appeal process would result in a viable pathway to acquisition.“We are now focusing on the future of Capri and our three iconic luxury houses,” John Idol, Capri’s chief executive, said in a statement. Mr. Idol stressed Capri’s strong customer loyalty and store base, with more than 1,200 retail locations worldwide.Joanne Crevoiserat, the chief executive of Tapestry, said in a statement that “we have always had multiple paths to growth, and our decision today clarifies the forward strategy.”“Tapestry remains in a position of strength,” she added.Tapestry also said its board had approved a program in which the company would buy an additional $2 billion of its own shares.The company’s shares rose about 10 percent, and shares of Capri fell 4 percent, in early trading on Thursday. More

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      Trump fake-elector scheme: where do five state investigations stand?

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      After the 2020 election, a group of 84 people in seven states signed false documents claiming to be electors for Donald Trump. This year, despite the fact that four states have brought criminal charges against the fake electors, 14 of them will now serve as real electors for the president-elect.The 14 once-fake-and-now-real electors were selected by state Republican parties in Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Mexico and Nevada. They will meet in their state capitols on 17 December to cast their ballots for Trump.Prosecutors in many of the states where fake electors signed false documents are moving forward with charges, as the federal charges against Trump for election subversion and other alleged crimes are up in the air after his re-election.Five of the seven states pursued charges related to the issue. Authorities in New Mexico and Pennsylvania did not pursue charges because the documents the false electors there used hedged language that attorneys said would likely spare them from criminal charges.The fake electors in some instances are high-profile Republicans: people in elected office, in official party roles, prominent members of external conservative groups.Here’s where the state cases stand.ArizonaKris Mayes, the Democratic attorney general for Arizona, said on Sunday that her office will not be dropping any charges related to the fake electors.A grand jury in Arizona charged 18 people involved in the fake electors scheme, including the 11 people who served as fake electors and Trump allies Mark Meadows, John Eastman, Boris Epshteyn, Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, Christina Bobb and Mike Roman. Some of the fake electors are high profile: two state senators (Jake Hoffman and Anthony Kern), a former state Republican party chair (Kelli Ward) and a Turning Point USA executive (Tyler Bowyer).“I have no intention of breaking that case up. I have no intention of dropping that case,” Mayes told MSNBC. “A grand jury in the state of Arizona decided that these individuals who engaged in an attempt to overthrow our democracy in 2020 should be held accountable, so we won’t be cowed, we won’t be intimidated.”Arizona charged people in April 2024, so the case is still in its early stages.GeorgiaGeorgia’s case will be the most watched, especially if all federal charges against Trump are dropped. It is the only state case where Trump himself is charged, though he will seek to have the charges dropped because of the supreme court’s presidential immunity ruling, or at least paused until he’s no longer in office. Several of the 19 people charged pleaded guilty and received probation and fines.Fake electors David Shafer, Cathleen Latham and Shawn Still were charged in the criminal racketeering case, but not all of the fake electors in Georgia were charged – many were granted immunity to cooperate with the case.The US supreme court rejected an attempt by Meadows on Tuesday to move the case to federal court.The next step is set for December: the Georgia court of appeals will hear arguments on whether prosecutor Fani Willis can continue on the case herself despite a romantic relationship with the special prosecutor on the case. A lower court previous ruled that she could continue.MichiganSixteen fake electors were charged in Michigan in mid-2023. One of them agreed to cooperate with the prosecution and had his charges dropped in return.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe case is working its way through the court process, with the last of the defendants sitting for examinations in October as the judge decides whether the case should go to trial.Six of those charged will serve as Trump’s actual electors this year. Attorneys for those fake and now real electors have said their role this year shouldn’t have any bearing on their legal cases.NevadaSix Trump electors in Nevada were charged at the end of 2023 with state forgery crimes for their roles in the scheme.In June, Clark county district court judge Mary Kay Holthu dismissed the case, saying it was in the wrong venue and should not have been filed in Las Vegas. Democratic attorney general Aaron Ford vowed to appeal the ruling, but defense attorneys have said the charges are now outside the statute of limitations.“My office’s goal remains unchanged – we will hold these fake electors accountable for their actions which contributed to the ongoing and completely unfounded current of distrust in our electoral system,” Ford said. “Our drive to seek justice does not change with election results. We are committed to see this matter through, either through winning our appeal or filing anew before the new year. This is not going away.”Two of the fake electors will again serve as Trump electors this year: Michael McDonald, the chair of the Nevada Republican party, and Jesse Law, chair of the Republican party of Clark county.WisconsinThe fake elector scheme allegedly began in Wisconsin, where pro-Trump attorney Kenneth Chesebro is from.Those who served as fake electors did not get criminally charged in Wisconsin, though three people involved in the scheme – Chesebro, Roman, and James Troupis – were charged in June by the state attorney general for their role in orchestrating the scheme.The state’s fake electors settled a civil lawsuit in 2023 that required them to agree not to serve as electors when elections involve Trump and to acknowledge Joe Biden’s victory in 2020. Some of the electors have publicly claimed they were misled about the purpose of the alternate slates. More