US Politics

Subterms

    More stories

    • 88 Shares45 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump picks Howard Lutnick as commerce secretary

      by

      Donald Trump has picked one of his biggest fundraisers for the position of commerce secretary.Howard Lutnick, the billionaire founder of the financial firm Cantor Fitzgerald, will be nominated to serve as one of Trump’s principal advisers on commerce and international trade.In a statement, Trump said Lutnick would “lead our Tariff and Trade agenda” in the role, and also have “direct responsibility” for the Office of the United States Trade Representative, which negotiates trade deals.The appointment hands Lutnick a key role in the implementation of Trump’s plan to impose steep universal tariffs on overseas imports. While economists and corporate leaders have warned the proposal risks increasing prices for Americans, proponents including Lutnick have claimed it will boost the US economy.The businessman, and close ally of Trump, had been tipped for the more powerful role of treasury secretary, an appointment that had the backing of another powerful Trump fundraiser, the tech billionaire Elon Musk.Scott Bessent, an investor and hedge fund manager, has been seen as Lutnick’s closest rival for the treasury. On his social media site last week, Musk wrote: “My view fwiw is that Bessent is a business-as-usual choice, whereas @howardlutnick will actually enact change.”Lutnick was co-chair of Trump’s transition team. He has championed Trump’s plans to use tariffs on foreign imports to build the US economy – a plan many economists believe will lead to rising inflation. He is also a big backer of loosening regulation of cryptocurrencies.Trump has known Lutnick, whom he hailed in Tuesday’s announcement as a “dynamic force on Wall Street”, for decades. A self-described fiscal conservative and social liberal, he has donated to Democrats in the past but recently told the Wall Street Journal that “they have moved away from me”.Cantor Fitzgerald lost 658 employees in the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers on 11 September 2001. In the decades since he rebuilt the privately held company, it now employs 13,000 people, up from 2,000 before the tragedy.It is so far unclear how or if he will separate his vast business interests from his powerful government role.During a rally at Madison Square Garden last month, Lutnick was riffing on what he thinks “Make America great again” actually means when he explained when he believes the US was sufficiently great: 1900. “At the turn of the century, our economy was rocking,” he claimed. “We had no income tax, and all we had was tariffs.” More

    • 138 Shares54 Views

      in US Politics

      Marjorie Taylor Greene issues warning to Republicans opposing Matt Gaetz nomination

      by

      Marjorie Taylor Greene, the firebrand Republican congresswoman from Georgia, has intervened on behalf of Matt Gaetz, Donald Trump’s embattled attorney general nominee, by issuing a bizarre challenge to her Republican colleagues.Amid intensifying pressure for the release of a congressional report into alleged sexual misconduct that could sink Gaetz’s nomination, Taylor Greene demanded similar full disclosure of what she claimed were multiple reports of assault and sexual harassment filed against fellow Republican Congress members.She also said she had filed one of the claims herself.“For my Republican colleagues in the House and Senate, If we are going to release ethics reports and rip apart our own that Trump has appointed, then put it ALL out there for the American people to see,” Taylor Greene wrote on X in a post which had received 1.3m views by Tuesday 1pm ET.“Yes.. all the ethics reports and claims including the one I filed, all your sexual harassment and assault claims that were secretly settled paying off victims with tax payer money, the entire Jeffrey Epstein files, tapes, recordings, witness interviews but not just those, there’s more, Epstein wasn’t/isn’t the only asset. If we’re going to dance, let’s all dance in the sunlight,” she wrote.She concluded with what appeared to be a veiled threat: “I’ll make sure we do.”While not elucidating on the seemingly scattershot allegations, Taylor Greene’s intervention exposed the fissures opened up in Republican ranks by Trump’s nomination of Gaetz as America’s top law official.Republican senators have voiced their opposition in sufficient numbers to torpedo his nomination if they vote with their sentiments in Senate confirmation hearings scheduled to take place once Trump returns to the White House.Gaetz forestalled last Friday’s scheduled publication of a report compiled by the House of Representatives ethics committee into his alleged misdemeanors by resigning his seat after Trump nominated him.Nevertheless, fellow Republican members of Congress and senators are demanding its release for consideration in the confirmation process, triggering Taylor Greene’s outburst.The document is believed to be highly damaging to Gaetz, amid allegations that he paid two women, including a 17-year-old minor, for sex in 2017. It also said that he took drugs, including ecstasy. The allegations formed part of a two-year criminal investigation – subsequently dropped without charges – by the FBI into Gaetz’s possible involvement in suspected sex trafficking.Lawyers for women who have testified to witnessing Gaetz’s behavior have fed more details of the affair to US media in recent days, increasing the pressure on the nominee and triggering speculation that they could be called as witnesses to hearings which now seem likely to turn into a media circus.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe depth of feeling against Gaetz among his fellow Republican Congress members has been demonstrated in interviews some have given on television.Max Miller, a Republican member for Ohio, told CNN that he reflected the private sentiments of many in saying Gaetz should not be attorney general.“I’m looking at him as a member of Congress and the job that he has done here, and it has been abhorrent,” he said. “I’m not the only one who thinks this way. I just say the quiet part out loud, and I wish other my colleagues would have the same courage to do so, but him as a member of Congress, should not be the most powerful law enforcement individual in our country, and everyone knows it, and he’s not going to get confirmed.”Tony Gonzales, a representative for Texas – who once called Gaetz and other far-right Congress members “scumbags” – said cryptically: “Matt’s kind of a quiet guy. We’re all still trying to get to know who he is, but soon enough, the American people get to know who he is.” More

    • 250 Shares56 Views

      in US Politics

      He has already fathered many children. Now Musk wants all of the US to embrace extreme breeding | Arwa Mahdawi

      by

      Is Elon Musk the dinner party guest from hell? It sure seems that way. Not only is the man desperate for people to laugh at his crass jokes, he reportedly has a weird habit of trying to donate his sperm at every opportunity – including, according to an October New York Times report, an incident where he offered some spermatozoa, as casually as you might pass the salt, to a married couple “he had met socially only a handful of times” during a Silicon Valley dinner party.Musk has denied offering sperm to strangers over supper. But it would be in keeping with his creepy breeding fetish: Musk is desperate for people in developed countries to have more children and has himself fathered at least 12 children with three women. (One of the children has since sadly died.) He’s become one of the most famous faces of a growing pro-natalist movement – one with an unsettling overlap with eugenics and deeply misogynistic ideas.Musk is obviously entitled to his obsessions. The problem is, now that he’s Donald Trump’s BFF, he actually has the opportunity to embed his obsessions into policy. While much has been said about Musk’s role in the proposed Department of Government Efficiency, it seems likely that the billionaire wants influence over more than just budgets. He seems to want a say in Americans’ sex lives as well. On Sunday, Musk replied to a tweet about declining birthrates by tweeting: “Instead of teaching fear of pregnancy, we should teach fear of childlessness.”What sort of lessons would that entail? Teaching people that while a woman dies every two minutes due to pregnancy or childbirth – and maternal mortality rates are increasing in the US – it’s childlessness you should be afraid of? It’s easy for Musk, who will never have to carry any of the children he’s so keen on having, to be blase about pregnancy risks: he can outsource them all. Still, you’d think he might be more sensitive to the issue considering the musician Grimes, with whom he shares three children, almost died during her pregnancy with son X Æ A-12. That led Grimes and Musk to use a surrogate for their next child.What else would Musk tell young people to instil a fear of childlessness? That, should they choose not to procreate, they’ll be saddled with more disposable income than they might otherwise have? And they won’t have to fret about the fact the US is the only industrialised country without a national paid parental leave policy? Or should he really put the fear of God in them and explain that they’ll miss out on being woken up at 5am and having to listen to the Frozen soundtrack for the millionth time? Look, I love my child (I’ve even grown to love the Frozen soundtrack), but parenthood can be difficult and it’s not for everyone. There are plenty of ways to live a fulfilling life that don’t involve raising a mini-me.I’ll tell you one lesson that I wish Musk would learn: being a sperm donor is very different from being a parent. While Musk has been parading various children of his through Mar-a-Lago for photo opportunities recently, he seems to leave most of the hard work of parenting to others. I mean, come on, he has six children under the age of six, runs a bunch of major companies and spends all his time hobnobbing with politicians: it’s logistically impossible for him to be an involved father to all his children. He’s also estranged from his transgender daughter Vivian Wilson, and has publicly declared – on at least two occasions – that she is “dead – killed by the woke mind virus”.But Musk’s parenting skills aren’t the real issue here. The real issue is that the billionaire, and his breeding obsession, are part of an incoming administration that wants to roll back reproductive rights and usher in a world where women are forced to give birth. It would be nice to be able to ignore every stupid thing that Musk tweets, but we don’t have that luxury any more. He seems intent on worming his way into our wombs. Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

      Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

    • 138 Shares48 Views

      in US Politics

      Why Kamala Harris couldn’t convince an anti-establishment America | Samuel Hammond

      by

      Two weeks have passed, and Kamala Harris’s convincing electoral defeat still has Democrats pointing fingers at who – or what – to blame. If only Biden had dropped out sooner. If only Harris had picked a different running mate. If only she went on Joe Rogan’s podcast. If only, if only, if only.There is an obvious reason for the lack of consensus. From failing to defend Biden’s record on inflation and immigration to being perceived as too leftwing, Harris’s loss was in some sense wildly overdetermined. And while Democrats were quick to attribute Trump’s victory in 2016 to white racial resentment, that’s a harder story to tell against the backdrop of Republican’s sizable gains among Black, Hispanic, Asian and Native American voters.Harris was a bad candidate, to be sure. But more than any particular individual, this election was a referendum on America’s incumbent political establishment. Starting with Barack Obama’s victory in 2008, swing voters have repeatedly demonstrated a strong preference for change agents. This trend was only briefly interrupted in the 2020 primary, when the pandemic and chaotic dénouement of Trump’s first term allowed Joe Biden to campaign on a “return to normal”. Voters instead got prolonged school closures, surging inflation and a dramatic expansion of progressive cultural politics, putting change back on the menu.The backlash against the establishment is being driven by two longer-term structural trends. The first is the electorate’s political realignment along educational lines. The historic realignment of white, non-college educated voters toward the Republican party won Trump the election in 2016, and brought him to within a hair of re-election in 2020. With this election, the working-class realignment broke through to non-college-educated Black and Hispanics voters as well. As the Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini explained on the Ezra Klein Show, minority voters finally “shed that sense of … racial group solidarity” and “moved toward the party that shared their basic ideological predispositions”.The second structural trend is simply the growth of the internet and social media. In his book The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, the former CIA media analyst Martin Gurri observed how the tsunami of information unleashed by the internet tends to leave legitimacy crises in its wake, from the Arab spring to Brexit. With social media, corruption has never been more easily exposed, and mass movements never more easily mobilized.This election was a consequence and accelerant of both these trends. Rather than resist education polarization, the Harris campaign leaned in, targeting Liz Cheney Republicans and college-educated suburban women. Mainstream media, meanwhile, took a backseat to alternative media, Twitter and the podcast circuit.Gurri argues that the internet-era rewards politicians with a degree of unfiltered authenticity, from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Instagram Live to Trump’s meandering, marathon speeches. Harris’s authenticity gap, in contrast, was reaffirmed at every turn, from her unwillingness to do interviews, to her stock “as a middle-class kid” non-sequitur in the few interviews she did. Even Harris’s Call Her Daddy podcast appearance was manufactured – literally: the campaign spent six figures building her a bespoke set.Authenticity is ultimately a way to signal one’s independence. In a year when incumbents are losing elections worldwide, Harris had to not just signal her independence from the incumbent political establishment, but to do so credibly. Instead, Harris doubled down on the Democratic party as the defenders of “institutions” – the very institutions that many voters were clearly fed up with.Again, this was less the fault of Harris as a person than reflective of the constraints any candidate in her shoes would have faced. As the party of educated knowledge workers, policy elites and public sector unions, the Democratic party simply is the party of institutional incumbents. And how do you run against the establishment when you are the establishment?Democrats are thus guaranteed to learn all the wrong lessons from this election. They will focus-group economic policies that appeal to the working class and excise wokeness from their political messaging. They will try to engineer their own Joe Rogan and uplift candidates that shoot from the hip. But this will all be a version of treating the symptom rather than the disease. Until the elites in the Democratic party loosen their grip and allow authentic, anti-establishment party factions to arise organically, they will remain the party of control and stasis in a world hungry for change.

      Samuel Hammond is the senior economist at the Foundation for American Innovation More

    • 200 Shares51 Views

      in US Politics

      To protect US democracy from tyrants, we must protect the truly free press | Robert Reich

      by

      Reliable and independent sources of news are now threatened by growing alliances of oligarchs and authoritarians.The mainstream media doesn’t use the term “oligarchy” to describe the billionaires who are using their wealth to enlarge their political power around the world, but that is what is happening.This is why I write for and read the Guardian, and why I’m urgently appealing to you to support it.During the US presidential campaign, legacy mainstream media – who mostly answer to corporate or billionaire ownership – refrained from reporting how incoherent and bizarre Donald Trump was becoming, normalizing and “sanewashing” his increasingly wild utterances even as it reported every minor slip by Joe Biden.The New York Times headlined its report on the September 2024 presidential debate between the president-elect and Kamala Harris – in which Trump issued conspiracy theories about stolen elections, crowd sizes, and Haitian immigrants eating pet cats and dogs – as: Harris and Trump bet on their own sharply contrasting views of America.Trump also used virulent rhetoric towards journalists. He has called the free press “scum” and the “enemy within”. During his campaign, he called for revoking the licenses of television networks and jailing journalists who won’t reveal their anonymous sources.Come 20 January, Trump and his toadies – including billionaires such as Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy – will have total control over the executive branch of the United States government. Trump’s Maga Republicans will be in charge of both chambers of Congress as well.Most members of the US supreme court, some of whom have been beneficiaries of billionaire gifts, have already signaled their willingness to consolidate even more power in Trump’s hands, immunize him from criminal liability for anything he does, and further open the floodgates of big money into US politics.All of this is sending a message from the United States that liberalism’s core tenets, including the rule of law and freedom of the press, are up for grabs.Elsewhere around the world, alliances of economic elites and authoritarians similarly threaten public access to the truth, without which democracy cannot thrive.It’s a vicious cycle: citizens have grown cynical about democracy because decision-making has become dominated by economic elites, and that cynicism has ushered in authoritarians who are even more solicitous of such elites.Trump and his lapdogs have lionized Victor Orbán and Hungary’s Fidesz party, which transformed a once-vibrant democracy into a one-party state, muzzling the media and rewarding the wealthy.Trump’s success will likely encourage other authoritarians, such as Marine Le Pen and her National Rally party in France; Alternative in Germany, or AfD; Italy’s far-right Giorgia Meloni; and radical rightwing parties in the Netherlands and Austria.Trump’s triumph will embolden Russia’s Vladimir Putin – the world’s most dangerous authoritarian oligarch – not only in Ukraine and potentially eastern Europe but also in his worldwide campaign of disinformation seeking to undermine democracies.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionEvidence is mounting that Russia and other foreign agents used Musk’s X platform to disrupt the US presidential campaign in favor of Trump. Musk did little to stop them.During the campaign, Musk himself reposted to his 200 million followers a faked version of Harris’s first campaign video with an altered voice track sounding like the vice-president and saying she “does not know the first thing about running the country” and is the “ultimate diversity hire”. Musk tagged the video “amazing”. It received hundreds of millions of views.According to a report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, Musk posted at least 50 false election claims on X, which garnered a total of at least 1.2bn views. None had a “community note” from X’s supposed fact-checking system.Rupert Murdoch, another oligarch who champions authoritarianism, has turned his Fox News, Wall Street Journal, and New York Post into outlets of rightwing propaganda, which have amplified Trump’s lies.Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of the Washington Post, prohibited the newspaper from endorsing Kamala Harris. Evidently, he didn’t want to raise Trump’s ire because Bezos’s other businesses depend on government contracts and his largest – Amazon – is already the target of a federal antitrust suit.Bezos’s decision demonstrated that even the possibility of a Trump presidency could force what had been one of the most courageous newspapers in the US to censor itself. Marty Baron, former editor of the Post, called the move “cowardice, with democracy as its casualty”.Citizens concerned about democracy must monitor those in power, act as watchdogs against abuses of power, challenge those abuses, organize and litigate, and sound the alarm about wrongdoing and wrongful policies.But not even the most responsible of citizens can do these things without reliable sources of information. The public doesn’t know what stories have been censored, muted, judged out of bounds, or preemptively not covered by journalists who’d rather not take the risk.In the final weeks before the election, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, blocked his newspaper’s planned endorsement of Harris, prompting the head of the paper’s editorial board to resign. Mariel Garza said she was “not OK with us being silent”, adding: “In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up.”Honest people standing up is precisely what resisting authoritarianism and protecting democracy require. Americans and the citizens of other countries must have access to the truth if we have any hope of standing up to tyranny.The Guardian remains a reliable and trustworthy source of news because it is truly independent. That’s why I’m writing this, and why you’re reading it.Unlike other US media organizations, the Guardian cannot be co-opted by the growing alliances of oligarchs and authoritarians. It does not depend for its existence on billionaires or the good graces of a demagogue; it depends on us.Please support the Guardian today. More

    • 188 Shares45 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘This is not his first rodeo’: will federal courts be able to rein in Trump?

      by

      A week after Donald Trump entered the White House for the first time in January 2017, he signed executive order 13769, known as the Muslim travel ban, barring entry to the US for refugees and immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries.Mayhem ensued. Protests erupted in airports. Panic spread around the world.Within 24 hours it was blocked.“There is imminent danger that there will be substantial and irreparable injury to refugees and other individuals from nations subject to the order,” a federal district judge ruled.That was the start of an epic tug-of-war between Trump’s new presidency and the courts. Judges from Hawaii to Maryland stepped in to halt the ban, prompting its architect, the far-right immigration hardliner Stephen Miller to accuse them of “judicial usurpation of power”.The order had to be written three times before it could satisfy even the increasingly rightwing US supreme court, losing 18 months in the process.In nine weeks’ time Miller will be back in the White House as deputy chief of staff for policy, carrying with him an even more extreme plan for the largest domestic deportation effort in US history. The billion-dollar question is, will the courts let him this time?“The second Trump administration is going to pose the federal judiciary with huge challenges,” said Lia Epperson, a constitutional law professor at American University. “Trump is going for extreme measures, and that will test the balance of power between branches of government over issues like immigration, free speech, and many more.”View image in fullscreenTrump has already made clear, through his own policy agenda and in the gargantuan roadmap to a second term produced by his allies, Project 2025, that he intends to be more aggressive and radical this time. His flurry of cabinet and key federal agency appointments underline the point.Matt Gaetz, the president-elect’s choice for US attorney general, has provoked fears that the justice department will be weaponised to go after Trump’s political enemies. The choices of the hardline South Dakota governor, Kristi Noem, for homeland security secretary and the Fox News host Pete Hegseth for defense secretary give heft to Trump’s intention to use emergency powers and the US military to implement the mass deportations.“He is creating a cabinet of loyalists who will be in lock step with his agenda,” Epperson said.Trump will arrive back in the Oval Office emboldened by the gift that the supreme court bestowed on him earlier this year: broad immunity from criminal prosecution for any of his official acts. The protection, awarded in a July ruling, could have some unexpected consequences.At its most dystopian, Trump might read the justices’ edict as giving him carte blanche to defy their very own orders.“One of the things we don’t know yet is what would happen if Trump defied judicial orders from the supreme court, claiming the immunity granted to him by the very same justices,” said Professor Rachel Moran of Texas A&M University school of law.Another major shift in Trump’s favour is that during his first term he managed to push the federal judiciary drastically to the right. The 6-to-3 supermajority of the supreme court was forged by Trump’s appointments of Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.The lower courts were also transformed by the 242 judges who he assigned to district, appeals and other federal courts. If Trump keeps up that frenetic pace over the next four years he will succeed in appointing more than half of all federal judges.Among his first-term appointments were 54 appeals court judges – second only to supreme court justices in the power they wield. And of those, Trump placed no fewer than 10 judges on the 29-strong ninth circuit court of appeals in San Francisco, which is traditionally seen as a liberal bastion.That in itself could be significant over the next four years. During Trump’s first term, the ninth circuit was by far the most popular route through which to challenge the administration.Now, though, the court will be less attractive to those seeking to rein Trump in, given the stamp he has already put on its ideological balance.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMeanwhile, Biden is scrambling to complete as many judicial approvals as he can before he leaves office, and has already confirmed 215. That will restore some equilibrium, but it will not erase the fact that Trump will begin his second term facing a far more friendly judiciary than in his first.“The proportion of appointees who might be sympathetic to his administration has grown, and that means they are likely to be a less effective check on his power,” Moran said.‘He knows how to do it, and is better prepared’It wasn’t just the Muslim travel ban that got embroiled in the courts during Trump 1.0. Several of his signature policies, including family separation of undocumented migrants at the Mexican border and inserting a citizenship question in the US census, were stymied.A study by the non-partisan thinktank the Institute for Policy Integrity, comparing how successive administrations fared when they introduced major new rules, found that the Trump administration was challenged legally at a far higher rate than any previous administration going back to Bill Clinton in the 1990s. When cases got to court, Trump’s record was even more abysmal.He lost 57% of the time. That was dramatically worse than Barack Obama’s average across his two terms – 31%.“The process of getting new rules out was flawed in many cases, as was the supporting analysis – so when they showed up in court they were getting dinged a lot,” said Don Goodson, the institute’s deputy director.The travel ban got such a beating in federal courts in part because Trump’s White House showed a disdain for basic procedural guardrails designed to ensure that the government acts in rational and beneficial ways. Miller and Steve Bannon, Trump’s then chief strategist – “my two Steves” as he affectionately dubbed them – overruled experts in the Department of Homeland Security and ignored the oOffice of legal counsel, which is normally routinely consulted.A similar dismissive attitude was shown across the Trump administration towards basic requirements set out in the Administrative Procedure Act, such as the need to give the public a chance to comment on all policy proposals. Those guardrails are still in place, which carries a warning for Trump and team.Should they show as much disregard for the rules as they did last time, they are likely to suffer another bloody nose. On the other hand, Trump now has the benefit of experience.“This is not his first rodeo. He knows how to do it, and is better prepared,” Epperson said.Epperson sits on the national board of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which was at the forefront of the fight against the Muslim travel ban. The ACLU filed 434 actions against the first Trump administration, and is already gearing up to be similarly adversarial come January.“Litigation is going to be critical,” Epperson said. “Will there be 100% wins in cases protecting civil rights and liberties? No. But will there be a good chance that the courts serve as one of several lines of defense? Yes.” More

    • 138 Shares48 Views

      in US Politics

      US Republican politician must resign after pleading guilty to sexual assault

      by

      Days after winning elected office, a Republican politician in Indiana pleaded guilty to trying to sexually assault a woman in Las Vegas and now must resign his position.John Jessup, commissioner of Hancock, Indiana, is at the center of one of the more bizarre tales to emerge from the down-ballot 5 November elections across the US.As noted by the local Greenfield Daily Reporter newspaper and KLAS, authorities in Nevada charged Jessup, 49, in June in connection with a sexual assault that occurred in January. But he remained in office as a county commissioner; ran for a seat on the Hancock council, which is a distinct elected body; and emerged as one of three victors after collecting about 15,000 votes.Jessup’s satisfaction with his victory – secured while he was under house arrest in Nevada – may have been fleeting, however. Records show he pleaded guilty in Nevada court on 13 November to attempted sexual assault, which is a kind of felony that can carry multiple years in prison, according to state law.Indiana prohibits convicted felons from serving in state or local elected offices, though a decisive majority of its voters on 5 November helped vault Donald Trump to a second US presidency just months after a New York City jury convicted him on felony charges of criminally falsifying business records.Therefore, Jessup must resign – unlike Trump, who has also faced multimillion-dollar civil penalties for a rape allegation that a judge determined to be substantially true.Jessup on Monday told the Guardian that he must fill out certain paperwork before he could step down. The county council chair had mailed him those papers, but they had not immediately arrived, said Jessup, who is awaiting a sentencing hearing tentatively scheduled for April.According to what Jessup told the Daily Reporter, he was prepared for prosecutors to argue that he deserves between eight and 20 years in prison. Jessup reportedly said that his attorneys were going to seek a sentence of probation.“It’s been my greatest honor serving the people of Hancock county and I’m deeply, deeply ashamed and profoundly sorry for the shame that I brought to the county,” Jessup told the Daily Reporter.An affidavit obtained and reported on by the outlet said Jessup’s criminal charges came after he flew to Las Vegas with a woman in January.Multiple witnesses allegedly told authorities that Jessup got the woman intoxicated by constantly “feeding” her Long Island iced teas. Purportedly, as Jessup repeatedly said the famous slogan “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas,” she became so intoxicated that she needed a wheelchair to get back to her hotel room.There, she recalled showering while clothed – and her immediate next recollection was waking up naked as Jessup sexually assaulted her, authorities wrote in the affidavit cited by the Daily Reporter.The woman reported the assault to police in just a few days, and authorities arrested him in Indiana in June before extraditing him to Nevada. According to the Daily Reporter, during an interview with investigators, Jessup acknowledged that he “fucked up” – and spoke of taking his life – yet also maintained that he had not done anything criminal.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJessup posted a $100,000 bond to await the outcome of the case against him under house arrest in the Las Vegas area.In a statement to the Indiana news outlet WXIN, a Republican party official in Hancock county denied that her organization had any role in Jessup’s case “until the legal process concludes or he resigns”.“Mr Jessup decided to keep his name on the ballot after charges were filed,” Janice Silvey, Hancock county Republican party chairperson, said in a statement. “He later verbally and via text committed to resigning if elected.”Silvey added that the local Republican party would arrange a caucus to fill Jessup’s position once his resignation takes effect.Hancock county is part of a region that includes Indianapolis, the state capital. It has a population of about 80,000. More

    • 125 Shares56 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump selects Fox News contributor Sean Duffy as transport secretary

      by

      Donald Trump has named Sean Duffy, a former Republican congressman from Wisconsin,and former cast member of the MTV show The Real World, to serve as the secretary of transportation. He was also a co-host on Fox Business but left that role on Monday, according to Fox News Media.Duffy served in Congress from 2011 until 2019. Before being elected to public office, he was district attorney for Ashland county, Wisconsin, from 2002 to 2008 and previously had a reality TV show role. Duffy was a cast member on The Real World: Boston in 1997 where he would meet his wife, Fox news contributor Rachel Campos-Duffy.“He will prioritize Excellence, Competence, Competitiveness and Beauty when rebuilding America’s highways, tunnels, bridges and airports,” the president-elect said in a statement announcing his nomination. “He will ensure our ports and dams serve our Economy without compromising our National Security, and he will make our skies safe again by eliminating DEI for pilots and air traffic controllers.”During his time in Congress, Duffy, 53, faced immense backlash for comments he made on CNN about the difference between white supremacist mass violence and violence carried out by the Islamic State. He also said that one of the “good things” that came from the 2015 mass shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church (AME) was that it led Nikki Haley, the then governor of South Carolina, to remove the confederate flag from the state capitol.After the backlash, Duffy said that the massacre at Emanuel AME was horrific but the shooter was not a part of an organized terror group such as IS. He encouraged the government to continue to monitor large hate groups such as the KKK.In a March 2017 op-ed Duffy penned for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel after Trump’s first State of the Union, the former congressman praised Trump’s dedication to working with conglomerates such as Ford, General Motors and Walmart to combine efforts to “reinvest in America”.Duffy, a father to nine children, resigned from Congress in 2019, citing complications during his wife’s pregnancy for the couple’s ninth child and his desire to spend more time with his family.If confirmed, Duffy will oversee aviation, automotive, rail, transit and other transportation policies at the department with about a $110bn budget as well as significant funding remaining under the Biden administration’s 2021 $1tn infrastructure law.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHis potential appointment follows the devastating train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, and still-elevated numbers of traffic deaths, which have fallen this year but remain above pre-Covid levels. He will also have to deal with ongoing investigations into companies run by Elon Musk, who’s been cozy with Trump and deeply involved in the administration’s transition plans. The Department of Transportation is investigating Tesla Autopilot, while the FAA has proposed fining SpaceX for violating space license rules.Trump has vowed to reverse the Biden administration’s vehicle emissions rules. He has said he plans to begin the process of undoing the Biden administration’s stringent emissions regulations finalized earlier this year as soon as he takes office. The rules cut tailpipe emissions limits by 50% from 2026 levels by 2032 and prod automakers to build more EVs. More