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      ‘A Russian asset’: Democrats slam Trump’s pick of Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence

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      Democratic lawmakers are slamming Donald Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, saying their former House colleague is a vocal supporter of Russia who poses a threat to US national intelligence.Jason Crow, a House Democrat from Colorado and a member of the House intelligence committee, told NBC News that he has “deep questions about where her loyalties lie”.“We get a lot of intelligence from our allies, and there I would be worried about a chilling effect,” he said.Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a House Democrat from Florida, told MSNBC on Friday: “There’s no question I consider her someone who is likely a Russian asset.”Abigail Spanberger, another House Democrat on the intelligence committee and a former CIA case officer, said on X that she is “appalled” by Gabbard’s nomination.“Someone who has aligned herself with Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad and trafficked in Russian-backed conspiracy theories is an unsuitable and potentially dangerous selection,” Spanberger wrote. “The objections to her nomination transcend partisan politics. This is a matter of national security.”Gabbard is just the latest of Donald Trump’s cabinet picks to garner alarm over her nomination. Questions and criticism have been raised by members of both parties over the qualification of other Trump nominees, including representative Matt Gaetz as attorney general, Robert F Kennedy Jr as secretary of health and human services and Fox News weekend host Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense.It’s unclear whether all of Trump’s nominees will be able to get through a Senate confirmation, even with the chamber’s Republican majority.Moderate Republicans like Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska have voiced reservations about nominees like Gaetz, who Murkowski said is not “a serious nomination”. Former Republican House speaker Kevin McCarthy similarly said that “Gaetz won’t get confirmed”.“Everybody knows that,” he told Bloomberg.Gabbard was a Democratic representative from Hawaii from 2013 to 2021 and was the first Samoan and Hindu elected to Congress. She served in the military in Iraq and was once a surrogate for Bernie Sanders during his 2016 primary campaign.She has since become a contributor on Fox News and said that she quit the Democratic party, which she said is run by an “elitist cabal of warmongers”. Gabbard has been a staunch critic of US foreign policy. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Gabbard accused the US of running biological weapon laboratories in Ukraine – a falsehood often touted by Russia.Michael Waldman, president of the Brenna Center for Justice, told the New York Times on Wednesday that Trump’s cabinet nominations “seem designed to poke the Senate in the eyes”.“They’re so appalling they’re a form of performance art,” he said. More

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      The ‘foolproof’ election forecaster who predicted Trump would lose – what went wrong?

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      Surely not even Nostradamus could get it right all of the time.Allan Lichtman had correctly forecast the result of nine of the past 10 US presidential elections (and even the one he didn’t, in 2000, he insists was stolen from Al Gore). His predictive model of “13 keys” to the White House was emulated around the world and seemed all but indestructible.Until, that is, Donald Trump, the notorious human wrecking ball, came along and broke his crystal ball. Lichtman had prophesied that Democrat Kamala Harris would win eight of his keys, claiming the presidency, forcing him to face the harsh truth that his winning streak was over. Was it a big personal blow?“Of course,” the 77-year-old admits by phone. “But I care far less about the personal blow than I care about the blow to our democracy. Even before the election I said, ‘Look, if I’m wrong, the implications are vastly greater for our society than they are for the keys.’ It’s much more important to look at the broader implications.”Lichtman, a history professor who has been teaching at American University in Washington for more than a half a century, developed his keys to the White House in the early 1980s. With Vladimir Keilis-Borok, a Soviet expert on earthquake prediction, he analysed elections in terms of stability (the party holding the White House holds it) versus earthquake (the party holding the White House is ejected).The pair devised 13 true/false questions: if six or more keys went against the White House party, it would lose. Lichtman used the model to successfully predict Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1984 and (nearly) every election that followed. After the 2016 election, he received a copy of his Washington Post interview with a message written in a Sharpie pen: “Congrats, professor. Good call. Donald J Trump.”The 2024 election was always going to be a tough test for Lichtman. Joe Biden dropped out in favour of Harris while Trump, who survived two assassination attempts, is a norm-busting figure who was bidding to become the first former president to win back the White House since Grover Cleveland in the 19th century.Why did he think Harris would win, and what went wrong? “The keys are premised on the proposition that a rational, pragmatic electorate decides whether the White House party has governed well enough to get another four years,” he explains. “Just as this kind of hate and violence is new, there are precedent-shattering elements now to our political system, most notably disinformation.“There’s always been disinformation but it has exploded to a degree we’ve never seen before. It’s not just Fox News and the rightwing media. It’s also rightwing podcasters and we have a brand new player, the $300bn guy, Elon Musk, whose wealth exceeds that of most countries in the world and has heavily put his thumb on disinformation.”Musk’s Super Pac reportedly spent about $200m to help elect Trump while his social media platform X, formerly Twitter, amplified rightwing propaganda. Musk was a leading Trump surrogate and has since become a near-permanent fixture at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida. Along with the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, he will now head an effort to reduce wasteful government spending.Lichtman continues: “It’s been reported that the disinformation that he disseminates has been viewed billion of times. The disinformation extends to every aspect of our society and our economy. Many people are living in an alternative universe and that calls into question the fundamental basis of political decision-making in this country.”That includes disinformation about inflation, jobs, employment, the stock market, growth, hurricane aid, the Ukraine war and undocumented immigrants, falsely portrayed as dangerous killers when in fact they commit crimes at far lower rate than native-born Americans.Another problem for Lichtman’s model was a presidential candidate who has constantly torn up the rulebook and defied categorisation. “We’ve seen Trump far more than we’ve ever seen in the history of this country channel the darkest impulses in American life – things that have always been with us but were increased exponentially this time: racism, misogyny, xenophobia, antisemitism.“We’re seeing something new in our politics, which affected the prediction and could affect future predictions but has a much bigger message for the future of our democracy. George Orwell was 40 years too soon. He made it clear that dictatorships don’t just arise from brutality and suppression. They arise from control of information: doublethink. Famine is plenty, war is peace. We’re in the doublethink era and maybe we can get out of it, maybe not.”After Lichtman made his 2024 prediction, he and his wife received a backlash in the form of death threats, vulgar abuse and even people trying to breach their home. They were also the victims of swatting (false reports of a threat intended to draw a heavy police response at the target’s home) and doxing, in which their private information was published online.“I’ve been doing this for 42 years and I have never experienced anything remotely like this,” he says. “I haven’t had to call the police before ever; now they’ve been here several times. They’re on alert. They notified the FBI.”Once an idealistic 13-year-old who watched John F Kennedy speak in New York, Lichtman is dismayed that politics has come to this. “It tells me that America has fallen to an absolute new low,” he reflects.“All I have done is exercise my free speech and yet here I am, subject to all of this hate, attempts to breach the security of my family, and it’s consistent with what we heard from Donald Trump, who’s constantly invoking violence as legitimate, plus for dehumanising those he doesn’t agree with as vermin, scum, something less than human to be dealt with. We’ve never seen anything like this before in America.”Looking back at his 2024 miscalculation, Lichtman is not about to let Democrats off the hook. He had been a staunch defender of Biden until the end and condemned the party for forcing him to step aside in favour of Harris. He is now unimpressed by its epic blame game and self-flagellation over the election result.“They’re pointing the finger at everyone else but not taking any responsibility. This election proves what I’ve been saying for years. I can summarise American politics in one sentence. Republicans have no principles, Democrats have no spine.”As if to prove the point, Trump has nominated Matt Gaetz, a Maga bomb thrower once subject to a sex-trafficking investigation, as his attorney general. The post is currently held by Merrick Garland, whom Lichtman has known for 60 years.“I love the guy,” he says. “I thought he was maybe the greatest federal judge in America and he is now the poster child of the spineless Democrats who have let all this happen. He diddled for almost two years before appointing a special counsel [to investigate Trump’s role in the January 6 2021 insurrection].“We all knew on January 7 what Trump had done. Certainly we knew it by the time Merrick Garland was appointed in early 2021. If he had acted as he should have right away, everything would have been different. I believe Trump would have been convicted of serious federal crimes and either be in jail or be on probation and the whole political system would have been different.”Lichtman adds: “He epitomises the spineless Democrats. ‘Oh, I don’t want to do this because I might seem political and Republicans might criticise me.’ Didn’t he learn anything from his supreme court nomination? Republicans are going to do what they’re going to do.“It doesn’t depend on what you do. I always go by the mantra of: it’s not just the evil people who wreak havoc on this world, it’s the good people who don’t do enough to stop them. And Merrick Garland is right front and centre of that.”The Trump-Musk axis “broke my predictive model this year”, Lichtman admits, but he intends to pick himself up, dust himself down and try again in 2028. “I fully expect to adjust the keys according to what I see unfolding over the next several years,” he promises. “The beauty of being a presidential predictor is you have four years to correct your course.“Presuming I’m still around at 81 and fully engaged in my faculties, I will be very carefully monitoring developments over the next few years apropos of the keys and also speaking out in defence of our democracy. The keys are one thing – they’re totally non-partisan – but I have my own political views as well and I fully intend to express them. And when I think the Democrats are worthy of criticism, I don’t hold back.” More

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      Democratic leaders across US work to lead resistance against Trump’s agenda

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      After the November elections ushered in a new era of unified Republican governance in Washington, Democratic leaders across the country are once again preparing to lead the resistance to Donald Trump’s second-term agenda.California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, said he would convene a special legislative session next month to “safeguard California values and fundamental rights”.Washington state’s governor-elect, Bob Ferguson, who is currently the state’s attorney general, said his legal team has been preparing for months for the possibility of a second Trump term – an endeavor that included a “line-by-line” review of Project 2025, the 900+ page policy blueprint drafted by the president-elect’s conservative allies.And the governors of Illinois and Colorado this week unveiled a new coalition designed to protect state-level institutions against the threat of authoritarianism, as the nation prepares for a president who has vowed to seek retribution against his political enemies and to only govern as a dictator on “day one”.“We know that simple hope alone won’t save our democracy,” the Colorado governor, Jared Polis, said on a conference call announcing the group, called Governors Safeguarding Democracy. “We need to work together, especially at the state level, to protect and strengthen it.”With Democrats locked out of control in Washington, many in the party will turn to blue state leaders – governors, attorneys general and mayors – as a bulwark against a second Trump administration. For these ambitious Democrats, it is also an opportunity to step into the leadership void left by Kamala Harris’s defeat.Progressives such as Newsom and the Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, are viewed as potential presidential contenders in 2028, while Democratic governors in states that voted for Trump such as Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Andy Beshear of Kentucky and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan are seen as models for how the party can begin to rebuild their coalition. And Tim Walz, Harris’s vice-presidential running mate, returned home to Minnesota with a national profile and two years left of his gubernatorial term.Leaders of the nascent blue state resistance are pre-emptively “Trump-proofing” against a conservative governing agenda, which they have cast as a threat to the values and safety of their constituents. As a candidate, Trump promised to carry out the “largest deportation operation in American history”. In statements and public remarks, several Democrats say they fear the Trump administration will seek to limit access to medication abortion or seek to undermine efforts to provide reproductive care to women from states with abortion bans. They also anticipate actions by the Trump administration to roll back environmental regulations and expand gun rights.“To anyone who intends to come take away the freedom, opportunity and dignity of Illinoisans, I would remind you that a happy warrior is still a warrior. You come for my people – you come through me,” Pritzker said last week.Unlike in 2016, when Trump’s victory shocked the nation, blue state leaders say they have a tested – and updated – playbook to draw upon. But they also acknowledge that Trump 2.0 may present new and more difficult challenges.Ferguson said Trump’s first-term executive actions were “often sloppy”, which created an opening for states to successfully challenge them in court. Eight years later, and after studying Project 2025 and Trump’s Agenda 47, he anticipates the next Trump White House will be “better prepared” this time around.Pritzker said Trump was surrounding himself with “absolute loyalists to his cult of personality and not necessarily to the law”. “Last time, he didn’t really know where the levers of government were,” the governor said on a call with reporters this week. “I think he probably does now.”The courts have also become more conservative than they were when Trump took office eight years ago, a direct result of his first-term appointments to the federal bench, which included many powerful federal appeals court judges and three supreme court justices.The political landscape has also changed. In 2016, Trump won the electoral college but lost the popular vote. Despite Republican control of Congress, there were a number of Trump skeptics willing – at least initially – to buck the president during his first two years in office.This time around, Trump is all but certain to win the popular vote, and he made surprising gains in some of the bluest corners of the country.Though the former president came nowhere close to winning his home state of New York, he made significant inroads, especially on Long Island. At a post-election conference last week, New York’s Democratic governor, Kathy Hochul, struck a more neutral tone. Hochul, who faces a potentially tough re-election in 2026, vowed to protect constituents against federal overreach, while declaring that she was prepared to work with “him or anybody regardless of party”.In New Jersey, where Trump narrowed his loss from 16 percentage points in 2020 to five percentage points in 2024, the Democratic governor, Phil Murphy, acknowledged the result was a “sobering moment” for the party and country. Outlining his approach to the incoming administration, Murphy said: “If it’s contrary to our values, we will fight to the death. If there’s an opportunity for common ground, we will seize that as fast as anybody.”Progressives and activists say they are looking to Democratic leaders to lead the charge against Trump’s most extreme proposals, particularly on immigration.“Trump may be re-elected but he does not have a mandate to come into and rip apart our communities,” said Greisa Martínez Rosas, the executive director of United We Dream Action, a network of groups that advocate for young people brought to the US as children, known as Dreamers.She called on state and local officials, as well as university heads and business leaders, to “use every tool at their disposal” to resist Trump’s mass deportation campaign, stressing: “There is a lot we can do to ensure Trump and his cabinet are not successful in their plans.”State attorneys general are again poised to play a pivotal role in curbing the next administration’s policy ambitions.“The quantity of litigation since the first Trump administration has been really off the charts – it’s at a new level,” said Paul Nolette, a political scientist at Marquette University in Wisconsin. “I fully expect that to continue in Trump 2.0.”There were 160 multi-state filings against the Trump administration during his four years in office, twice as many as were filed against Barack Obama during his entire eight-year presidency, according to a database maintained by Nolette.Many of the Democratic lawsuits succeeded – at least initially – in delaying or striking down Trump administration policies or regulations, Nolette said. Attorneys general can also leverage their state’s influence and economic power by entering legal settlements with companies. States have used this approach in the past to “advance their own regulatory goals”, Nolette said, for example, forcing the auto industry to adopt stricter environmental regulations.In a proclamation calling for a special session next month, Newsom asked the legislature to bolster the state’s legal funding to challenge – and defend California against – the Trump administration. Among his concerns, the California Democrat identified civil rights, climate action, LGBTQ+ rights, reproductive rights, as well as Trump’s threats to withhold disaster funding from the state and the potential for his administration to repeal protections shielding undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children from deportation.Trump responded on Truth Social, using a derisive nickname for the Democratic governor: “Governor Gavin Newscum is trying to KILL our Nation’s beautiful California. He is using the term ‘Trump-Proof’ as a way of stopping all of the GREAT things that can be done to ‘Make California Great Again,’ but I just overwhelmingly won the Election.”Democratic leaders in battleground states that Trump won are also calibrating their responses – and not all are eager to join the resistance.“I don’t think that’s the most productive way to govern Arizona,” the state’s Democratic governor, Katie Hobbs, told reporters this week, according to the Arizona Capitol Times. Hobbs, who faces a potentially difficult re-election fight in 2026, said she would “stand up against actions that hurt our communities” but declined to say how she would respond if Trump sought to deport Dreamers or to nationalize the Arizona national guard as part of his mass deportation campaign.The state’s Democratic attorney general, Kris Mayes, who also faces re-election in two years, drew a harder line against Trump, vowing to fight “unconstitutional behavior” and protect abortion access, according to Axios. In an interview on MSNBC, Mayes said she had “no intention” of dropping the criminal case against allies of the former president who attempted to help Trump overturn Biden’s victory in the state.Yet she insisted there would be areas of common ground. She urged Trump to revive a bipartisan border deal that he had previously tanked and called on the next administration to send more federal resources and agents to help combat the flow of fentanyl into the US.With Democrats locked out of power in Washington, the new Indivisible Guide, a manual developed by former Democratic congressional staffers after Trump’s election in 2016 and recently updated to confront a new era of Maga politics, envisions a major role for blue states.“Over the next two years, your Democratic elected officials will make choices every single day about whether to stand up to Maga or whether to go along with it,” the Indivisible guide states. “Your spirited, determined advocacy will ensure that the good ones know they’ve got a movement behind them as they fight back – and the bad ones know they’re on notice.”Among the examples of actions blue state activists can demand their leaders consider, it suggests establishing protections for out-of-state residents seeking abortion access or gender-affirming care; refusing to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement and forging regional compacts to safeguard environmental initiatives, data privacy and healthcare.Democratic leaders at every level and across the country – even those in purple or red states – can serve as “backstops for protecting the democratic space”, said Mary Small, chief strategy officer at Indivisible.“The important things are to be proactive and bold, to be innovative and to work with each other,” she said. “I don’t think everybody has to have all of the answers right now, but to have that intention and that commitment and to not shrink down in anticipation of a more oppressive federal government.” More

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      The Republican and Democratic parties are killing electoral reform across the US | David Daley

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      Ohio’s extreme gerrymanders have enabled more than a decade of corruption, lawless behavior and unpopular legislation passed by lawmakers safely insulated from the ballot box.Voters tried to fix it by bringing a citizen-led independent redistricting commission to the ballot. Due to Republican subterfuge, they ended up voting against themselves. With breathtakingly Orwellian tactics, Ohio Republicans twisted the ballot language and presented it to voters as an initiative that would require gerrymandering rather than end it.When Ohioians arrived at Issue One on their ballots, they were told that a yes vote would “repeal constitutional protections against gerrymandering”. Voters were understandably confused. So while redistricting reform won huge wins in the Buckeye state in 2015 and 2018, with more than 70% of the vote, this year 54% of Ohio voters rejected it.Most analyses of the 2024 elections have focused on the swing toward Republicans at the top of the ballot. But another trend could be more consequential: when citizens stood up across red, blue and purple states this year with reforms designed to strengthen democracy and make all elections more meaningful and competitive, the parties undermined them with brutal, deceptive tactics and submerged them in a swamp of dark money.It worked nearly every time. Unlike 2018, when pro-democracy reforms won big nationwide, this time, reformers were routed.This is frightening news. The vast majority of states – even the purple ones – are either safely Republican or Democratic, or have been gerrymandered that way. Ballot initiatives and citizen-driven reforms uniting voters across party lines have been a rare bright spot and showed a possible path to defeat extremism and entrenched one-party control. But not this year.This year brought defeats – and Ohio-style trickery – across the map, and on a wide variety of pro-voter reforms, including redistricting reform, ranked-choice voting and open primaries. One state, Missouri, even jumped ahead of reformers and banned them in advance with a new prohibition on ranked-choice voting and open primaries – cleverly rolled into an amendment headlined by a ban on “noncitizen voting”, which, of course, isn’t actually happening there or anywhere.Voters in Colorado, Nevada and Idaho advanced initiatives that would have created open primaries and advanced either four or five candidates to a ranked-choice general election. Reformers hoped to give growing numbers of independent voters a say in which candidates are on the ballot in November, and ensure that candidates need a majority to win – instead of a fraction of a fraction of voters in low-turnout, closed primaries.The parties and their dark-money allies pushed back, hard. In Idaho, rightwingers determined to maintain their grip on power ran ads filled with both lies and red meat to outrage the base. “They have open borders. They want open bathrooms. They need open primaries,” claimed one of the most ridiculous and misleading, but effective, mailers.Leonard Leo’s billion-dollar dark-money network – which, after capturing the US supreme court and multiple levels of the judiciary, has now cast its eye on locking in far-right minority rule in the states – dispatched its operatives to mislead voters with one dishonest claim after another about ranked-choice voting. In one especially rich claim, opponents funded by billionaires and the wealthiest rightwing foundations have created front groups to argue that ranked-choice voting would make it easier for the wealthy to buy elections.The true agenda is clear: to protect and defend extreme lawmakers who perform best in base-driven primaries with multiple candidates and a small, divided electorate. That’s why a constellation of groups with ever-shifting names – but with the same far-right foundations and even election deniers behind them – have engaged in this multimillion-dollar scare operation.In Nevada, both Democrats and Republicans (and their aligned groups) spent millions in a successful effort to defeat open primaries and ranked choice. The state’s political elites – the still powerful machine built by the late senator Harry Reid and the Maga state Republican apparatus – built an odd coalition to brand a heretofore popular political reform, incorrectly, as “unproven” and “complicated”.Some Colorado Democrats, and even advocates of ranked-choice voting elsewhere such as Elizabeth Warren, meanwhile, sadly swallowed Leo’s talking points whole to ensure the party retained power in this growing Democratic bastion where a record half of registered voters are unaffiliated.Perhaps what’s happening here is no surprise. Citizens want to reclaim state legislatures that have been distorted by gerrymandering and captured by unrepresentative winners of party primaries. The powerful want to close off one of the last avenues for reform.After all, Ohio’s unbreakable gerrymander, now in its 14th year, is so extreme that only four of 99 state house races were within five points this year, and just one of 17 state senate races. Uncompetitive elections push all the action to low-turnout primaries, where the tiniest percentage of the base can select unrepresentative candidates to coast into the general – and then advance unpopular legislation such a six-week abortion ban once in office.Ohio’s supreme court rejected the state house and congressional maps as unconstitutional not once, not twice, but seven times. A cowed governor, Mike DeWine, conceded that the maps could have been “more clearly constitutional”, but went along with the party line anyway. Lawmakers lawlessly disobeyed, ran out the clock, then found Trump-appointed federal judges with longstanding ties to Leo and the Federalist Society to impose the gerrymandered maps.“It is hard to recognize Ohio,” the former governor Bob Taft, a Republican, told me. “The consequences of extreme gerrymandering have been obvious here.”Idaho’s far right, meanwhile, has captured much of a once-traditional Republican machinery and moved to relentlessly consolidate power. In 2018, voters found an end run around the legislature and used the initiative process to expand Medicaid. More than 60% of voters supported the measure, after lawmakers refused to accept Affordable Care Act dollars during multiple sessions.Lawmakers, recognizing that the initiative represented a last opportunity for the public to check a hijacked legislature, endeavored time and again to make one of the nation’s most difficult initiative processes even more onerous and to oppose efforts to open Idaho’s system to voices beyond their own. Then, when courts and determined citizens pushed forward anyway, the legislature drowned them out with the support of organizations funded not only by Leonard Leo but also the Koch brothers, the Bradley Foundation and DonorsTrust (“the dark-money ATM of the right”).There was one significant bright spot last Tuesday: Washington DC, which overwhelmingly adopted ranked-choice voting despite some misleading efforts by officials from the district’s dominant Democratic party.But the simple truth is that the structural reform we so desperately need has become harder, as those from both the left and the right who prefer to govern without majorities, and without persuading everyone to their side, recognize it as a threat. They won’t stop here, and they have said so.Leo and his henchmen, armed with dark money, having grabbed control of election machinery, will stop at nothing to expand their ill-won and ill-held power. These fights will arrive in more state capitols and in Congress. They are trying to steal control while hiding behind phoney names and untold billions.The good news is that their scam is easy to see through. The test for our democracy – and for reformers – will be how to rise to this new challenge in a polarized, partisan moment. No task will be harder. None is more important.

      David Daley is the author of the new book Antidemocratic: Inside the Right’s 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections as well as Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count More

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      Trump health secretary choice is ‘courting catastrophe’, says rights group – as it happened

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      Donald Trump’s nomination of Robert F Kennedy Jr as US secretary of health and human services has prompted widespread criticisms towards Kennedy, an anti-vaccine activist who has embraced a slew of other debunked health-related conspiracy theories.In a Truth Social post on Thursday, Trump claimed that Americans have been “crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies” and that Kennedy will “will restore these Agencies to the traditions of Gold Standard Scientific Research, and beacons of Transparency, to end the Chronic Disease epidemic, and to Make America Great and Healthy Again!”In response to Kennedy’s nomination, Public Citizen, a progressive nonprofit organization focusing on consumer advocacy, said: “Robert F Kennedy Jr is a clear and present danger to the nation’s health. He shouldn’t be allowed in the building at the department of health and human services (HHS), let alone be placed in charge of the nation’s public health agency.”“Donald Trump’s bungling of public health policy during the Covid pandemic cost hundreds of thousands of lives. By appointing Kennedy as his secretary of HHS, Trump is courting another, policy-driven public health catastrophe,” the organization added.Apu Akkad, an infectious disease physician at the University of Southern California, called the announcement a “scary day for public health”.This blog is closing now but you can continue to read our latest US political coverage here. Thank you for reading.Here are the key developments from the last few hours:

      Donald Trump nominated Robert F Kennedy, Jr to lead the Health and Human Services department. If confirmed, Kennedy – who has gained notoriety for being one of the most persistent and successful purveyors of misinformation about vaccines – would be in charge of the department that oversees the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Kennedy joined forces with Trump and promised to “Make American Healthy Again” after dropping his own presidential bid. Public health experts warn that his involvement in the US health and medical infrastructure could have devastating consequences.

      Trump’s nomination of RFK Jr as US secretary of health and human services prompted widespread criticisms towards Kennedy, an anti-vaccine activist who has embraced a slew of other debunked health-related conspiracy theories.

      Trump also named Jay Clayton, his former SEC chair, to serve as US attorney for the southern district of New York. The court often handles high-profile financial fraud cases.

      Two prominent senators have called for the House ethics committee to share with them its investigation into Matt Gaetz, who Donald Trump nominated to serve as attorney general in his administration. Gaetz resigned his seat in Congress shortly after, likely stopping the release of the report into allegations of sexual misconduct and drug use, but the Democratic senator Dick Durbin and his Republican counterpart John Cornyn said the document should be shared with them, if Gaetz’s nomination is to proceed.

      Kevin McCarthy, who was ousted as House speaker last year in a putsch backed by Gaetz, said the ex-congressman “won’t get confirmed” as attorney general.

      Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton said that before either is confirmed, the FBI should investigate both Gaetz and Tulsi Gabbard, who Trump nominated as director of national intelligence. She is known for her tolerant view of Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad, both US adversaries.

      Nikki Haley said she was never interested in serving in Trump’s cabinet. She was UN ambassador during his first term, but Trump recently said he would not bring her back into his government.

      The Onion is buying conspiracy theory hub InfoWars in a bankruptcy auction, after its creator Alex Jones was hit with a massive defamation judgment from families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims.

      Social media platform Bluesky picked up more than 1 million new members on Thursday, continuing a surge to the platform as former X users leave the platform. Elon Musk reportedly met with Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations on Monday, a day before Donald Trump named the SpaceX founder as one of the heads of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency.

      Elon Musk reportedly met with Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations on Monday, a day before Donald Trump named the SpaceX founder as one of the heads of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency. The meeting was a discussion of how to defuse tensions between Iran and the United States, according to two Iranian officials who spoke with the New York Times. One of the Iranian officials said that the Tesla executive requested the meeting and that the ambassador picked the site.

      Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are asking Americans who are “high-IQ small-government revolutionaries” and willing to work over 80 hours a week to join their new Department of Government Efficiency – at zero pay.

      Trump announced Dean John Sauer as solicitor general. Sauer was Missouri solicitor general from 2017 to 2023. Sauer has also worked on Trump’s legal team before, arguing his presidential immunity case.

      Trump announced his former Georgia congressman Doug Collins as Secretary of Veterans Affairs. Collins ran for Senate in 2020, finishing third in the primary. He also, per the Hill, “provided counsel to Trump in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election as Trump sought to challenge Georgia’s election results.”

      Trump named his own lead attorney, Todd Blanche, as deputy attorney general, the second most senior position in the Department of Justice. Trump has nominated far-right Republican congressman Matt Gaetz as attorney general.
      As Donald Trump secured victory in the US presidential election, an unexpected phenomenon began trending on social media: young American women declaring their commitment to “4B”, a fringe South Korean feminist movement advocating the rejection of marriage, childbirth, dating and sex.The movement has sparked intense global interest, with millions of views on TikTok and viral X posts heralding it as a women’s rights revolution.Yet within South Korea itself, the picture is more complex and in some places the feminist movement is under attack.“I had never heard of 4B until recently”, says Lee Min-ji, an office worker in Seoul who was surprised at all the international attention. “I understand where all the anger comes from, but I don’t think avoiding all relationships with men is the solution”.Park So-yeon, a publishing professional in Seoul, says she does not date because she is prioritising her professional life.“Like me, most of my female friends are more focused on their careers than dating right now, but that’s not because of 4B, it’s just the reality of being a young professional in Korea,” she says.Janelle Bynum will serve as Oregon’s first Black member of Congress after the Democrat flipped a US House seat from the Republicans.Bynum, a state representative who was backed and supported by national Democrats, ousted Republican Lori Chavez-DeRemer. The win was a boost for Democrats who won back the seat after Republicans flipped it red for the first time in roughly 25 years during the 2022 midterms.“It’s not lost on me that I am one generation removed from segregation. It’s not lost on me that we’re making history. And I am proud to be the first, but not the last, Black member of Congress in Oregon,” Bynum said at a press conference last Friday.“But it took all of us working together to flip this seat, and we delivered a win for Oregon. We believed in a vision and we didn’t take our feet off the gas until we accomplished our goals.”Here are the best, worst and weirdest graphics from the US election:Social media platform Bluesky picked up more than 1 million new members on Thursday, continuing a surge to the platform as former X users escape misinformation and offensive posts.Including Thursday’s arrivals, Bluesky has seen an influx of 2.5m new accounts in the wake of the US election to reach more than 16 million users worldwide, the platform said.Bluesky has also overtaken Meta’s Threads to reach number one in Apple’s app store and enjoyed its “highest traffic day ever” on Thursday, according to Bluesky developer Daniel Holmgren.The site suffered a brief outage on Thursday, with some users reporting significant delays when trying to load feeds and notifications. Spokesperson Emily Liu said the outage was the result of an internet provider’s fiber cable being cut and not related to the surging demand, which Bluesky’s team was “prepared to meet”.Social media researcher Axel Bruns told the Guardian earlier this week the platform offered an alternative to X, formerly Twitter, including a more effective system for blocking or suspending problematic accounts and policing harmful behaviour.“It’s become a refuge for people who want to have the kind of social media experience that Twitter used to provide, but without all the far-right activism, the misinformation, the hate speech, the bots and everything else,” he said.You can read more about Bluesky here:Donald Trump has wasted no time in assembling his incoming cabinet, issuing a flurry of nominations this week that – in some cases – have further heightened fears that his return to the White House will lead to an extremist agenda.The roster of names has inevitably drawn comparisons with Trump’s 2016 victory, when he was reported to have devoted relatively little attention to a transition effort. Back then, his picks were described as “conventional” and the incoming cabinet was said have been broadly in line with that of a traditional Republican.Eight years on and the shape of the Trump 2.0 White House so far has spurred serious concerns about public health and reproductive rights, and left military leaders “stunned” and former intelligence experts “appalled”.Some senators have already expressed doubt that some of Trump’s nominees will garner sufficient votes to be confirmed – even in the Republican-majority chamber which holds the power to deny his appointments.So how do Trump’s cabinet nominees in 2024 compare with those he made in 2016?Elon Musk reportedly met with Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations on Monday, a day before Donald Trump named the SpaceX founder as one of the heads of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency.The meeting was a discussion of how to defuse tensions between Iran and the United States, according to two Iranian officials who spoke with the New York Times. One of the Iranian officials said that the Tesla executive requested the meeting and that the ambassador picked the site.As Trump prepares to address conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, Musk, the world’s richest man, has been assisting in discussions with foreign officials, establishing himself as the country’s most influential civilian come January.Earlier this month, Musk reportedly made a guest appearance on a call between Trump and the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who thanked Musk for the satellites he had been providing Ukraine through his company, Starlink.“He’s now engaging the Iranians,” said Sina Toossi, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, about Musk. “And the Iranians have not engaged Americans in direct negotiations since before Trump left the nuclear deal, so this could be a very big deal.”California’s Democratic representative Robert Garcia called the nomination “fucking insane”, writing on X: “He’s a vaccine denier and a tin foil hat conspiracy theorist. He will destroy our public health infrastructure and our vaccine distribution systems. This is going to cost lives.”Alastair McAlpine, a pediatric physician at British Columbia’s children’s hospital, wrote: “It is hard to overstate what a terrible decision this is. RFK Jr has no medical training. He is a hardcore anti-vaccine and misinformation peddler. The last time he meddled in a state’s medical affairs (Samoa), 83 children died of measles.”The conservative pundit and lawyer George Conway also commented on Kenedy’s nomination, along with that of Tulsi Gabbard and Matt Gaetz.“Very little of what Trump does these days amazes me. Any one of the last three of Trump’s Cabinet-level picks (Gabbard as DNI, Gaetz as AG, RFK Jr for HHS), standing alone, would arguably have been the worst in American history. The fact that Trump made all three in a span of roughly 24 hours is astonishing,” Conway wrote.Donald Trump’s nomination of Robert F Kennedy Jr as US secretary of health and human services has prompted widespread criticisms towards Kennedy, an anti-vaccine activist who has embraced a slew of other debunked health-related conspiracy theories.In a Truth Social post on Thursday, Trump claimed that Americans have been “crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies” and that Kennedy will “will restore these Agencies to the traditions of Gold Standard Scientific Research, and beacons of Transparency, to end the Chronic Disease epidemic, and to Make America Great and Healthy Again!”In response to Kennedy’s nomination, Public Citizen, a progressive nonprofit organization focusing on consumer advocacy, said: “Robert F Kennedy Jr is a clear and present danger to the nation’s health. He shouldn’t be allowed in the building at the department of health and human services (HHS), let alone be placed in charge of the nation’s public health agency.”“Donald Trump’s bungling of public health policy during the Covid pandemic cost hundreds of thousands of lives. By appointing Kennedy as his secretary of HHS, Trump is courting another, policy-driven public health catastrophe,” the organization added.Apu Akkad, an infectious disease physician at the University of Southern California, called the announcement a “scary day for public health”.More now on Robert F Kennedy Junior, Trump’s nominee to oversee key US health agencies:Kennedy’s Children’s Health Defense, the nonprofit anti-vaccine group he led until becoming a presidential candidate, flooded American Samoa with vaccine misinformation ahead of a devastating measles outbreak there in 2019.The position to lead the US health department needs Senate approval. If approved, experts say vaccines will be “the first issue on the table”.Dr Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said even if public policies remain unchanged, should authorities with the imprimatur of the federal government speak out against vaccines, “that discourages people who might otherwise be vaccinated, and at that point that’s as bad as not having a vaccine at all”.The effects are not theoretical. As recently as last week the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released a report that found fewer than one in six healthcare workers had received updated Covid-19 vaccines in the 2023-24 respiratory virus season, and under half had received flu shots.Childhood vaccinations have also dipped since the pandemic. Vaccination hesitancy and misinformation were both cited as major reasons by researchers.“We forget what this country was like 50 years ago – how many children died every year from polio, pertussis [whooping cough], measles,” said Osterholm. “We’re going to see the return of diseases we have controlled for decades.”RFK Jr has also recommended removing fluoride from drinking water, although fluoride levels are mandated by state and local governments.Trump has announced another pick for his administration: Dean John Sauer as solicitor general. Sauer was Missouri solicitor general from 2017 to 2023. Sauer has also worked on Trump’s legal team before, arguing his presidential immunity case.From the New York Times: “As Missouri’s solicitor general, Mr Sauer took part in a last-ditch effort to keep Mr. Trump in power after his defeat in the 2020 election, filing a motion on behalf of his state and five others in support of an attempt by Texas to have the supreme court toss out the results of the vote count in several key swing states.“He also joined in an unsuccessful bid with Texas in asking the supreme court to stop the Biden administration from rescinding a Trump-era immigration program that forces certain asylum seekers arriving at the southern border to await approval in Mexico.”In a statement, Trump said:
      I am pleased to announce that Dean John Sauer will serve as Solicitor General of the United States in my Administration. John is a deeply accomplished, masterful appellate attorney, who clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia in the United States Supreme Court, served as Solicitor General of Missouri for six years, and has extensive experience practicing before the US Supreme Court and other Appellate Courts.
      Most recently, John was the lead counsel representing me in the Supreme Court in Trump v. United States, winning a Historic Victory on Presidential Immunity, which was key to defeating the unConstitutional campaign of Lawfare against me and the entire MAGA Movement. John was a Rhodes Scholar, graduated from Duke University, Oxford University and is a Magna Cum Laude graduate of Harvard Law School. John will be a great Champion for us as we Make America Great Again!
      Trump is announcing another flurry of names for his administration, including in a statement sent out minutes ago, former Georgia congressman Doug Collins as Secretary of Veterans Affairs.Collins ran for Senate in 2020, finishing third in the primary. He also, per the Hill, “provided counsel to Trump in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election as Trump sought to challenge Georgia’s election results.”Trump’s statement reads:
      I am pleased to announce my intent to nominate former Congressman Doug Collins, of Georgia, as The United States Secretary for Veterans Affairs (VA). Doug is a Veteran himself, who currently serves our Nation as a Chaplain in the United States Air Force Reserve Command, and fought for our Country in the Iraq War. 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. Thank you, Doug, for your willingness to serve our Country in this very important role!
      Donald Trump has named his own lead attorney, Todd Blanche, as deputy attorney general, the second most senior position in the Department of Justice. Trump has nominated far-right Republican congressman Matt Gaetz as attorney general.In a statement, the president-elect said:
      I am pleased to announce that Todd Blanche will serve as Deputy Attorney General in my Administration. Todd is an excellent attorney who will be a crucial leader in the Justice Department, fixing what has been a broken System of Justice for far too long. Todd prosecuted gangs and other federal crimes as a Chief in the Southern District of New York United States Attorney’s Office, clerked for two Federal Judges, and graduated with Honors from law school, while working full time at the SDNY. Todd is going to do a great job as we, Make America Great Again.
      Donald Trump has continued to nominate loyalists with dubious qualifications to his upcoming administration. The most significant nomination of the day of of Robert F Kennedy, Jr to lead the Health and Human Services department.If confirmed, Kennedy – who has gained notoriety for being one of the most persistent and successful purveyors of misinformation about vaccines – would be in charge of the department that oversees the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Kennedy joined forces with Trump and promised to “Make American Healthy Again” after dropping his own presidential bid. Public health experts warn that his involvement in the US health and medical infrastructure could have devastating consequences.

      Trump also named Jay Clayton, his former SEC chair, to serve as US attorney for the southern district of New York. The court often handles high-profile financial fraud cases.

      Two prominent senators have called for the House ethics committee to share with them its investigation into Matt Gaetz, who Donald Trump nominated to serve as attorney general in his administration. Gaetz resigned his seat in Congress shortly after, likely stopping the release of the report into allegations of sexual misconduct and drug use, but the Democratic senator Dick Durbin and his Republican counterpart John Cornyn said the document should be shared with them, if Gaetz’s nomination is to proceed.

      Kevin McCarthy, who was ousted as House speaker last year in a putsch backed by Gaetz, said the ex-congressman “won’t get confirmed” as attorney general.

      Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton said that before either is confirmed, the FBI should investigate both Gaetz and Tulsi Gabbard, who Trump nominated as director of national intelligence. She is known for her tolerant view of Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad, both US adversaries.

      Nikki Haley said she was never interested in serving in Trump’s cabinet. She was UN ambassador during his first term, but Trump recently said he would not bring her back into his government.

      The Onion is buying conspiracy theory hub InfoWars in a bankruptcy auction, after its creator Alex Jones was hit with a massive defamation judgment from families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims.
      Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are asking Americans who are “high-IQ small-government revolutionaries” and willing to work over 80 hours a week to join their new Department of Government Efficiency – at zero pay.In a new X post on Thursday that doubled as a job announcement and another one of Musk’s trolling attempts, the account for the newly formed Doge wrote: “We don’t need more part-time idea generators. We need super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting.”The name of the department, which is not part of the federal government, harkens back to a meme of an expressive shiba inu dog.“If that’s you, DM this account with your CV. Elon & Vivek will review the top 1% of applicants,” the statement added.In a separate post, Musk chimed in on the callout, saying: “Indeed, this will be tedious work, make lots of enemies & compensation is zero.”“What a great deal!” Musk, the richest man in the world, wrote with a laughing emoji. He has promised to reduce federal bureaucracy by a third and cut $2tn from US government spending, an endeavor he said “necessarily involves some temporary hardship”. More

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      The Democrats must become an anti-establishment party | Robert Reich

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      A political disaster such as what occurred last Tuesday gains significance not simply by virtue of who won or lost, but through how the election is interpreted.This is known as the Lesson of the election.The Lesson explains what happened and why. It deciphers the public’s mood, values, and thoughts. It attributes credit and blame.And therein lies its power. When the Lesson of the election becomes accepted wisdom – when most of the politicians, pundits and journalists come to believe it – it shapes the future. It determines how parties, candidates, political operatives and journalists approach coming elections.What’s the Lesson of the 2024 election?According to exit polls, Americans voted mainly on the economy – and their votes reflected their class and level of education.While the US economy has improved over the last two years according to standard economic measures, most Americans without college degrees – that’s the majority – have not felt it.In fact, most Americans without college degrees have not felt much economic improvement for four decades, and their jobs have grown less secure.The real median wage of the bottom 90% is stuck nearly where it was in the early 1990s, even though the economy is more than twice as large now as it was then.Most of the economy’s gains have gone to the top.This has caused many Americans to feel frustrated and angry. Trump gave voice to that anger. Harris did not.The real lesson of the 2024 election is that Democrats must not just give voice to the anger, but also explain how record inequality has corrupted our system, and pledge to limit the political power of big corporations and the super-rich.The basic bargain in America used to be that if you worked hard and played by the rules, you’d do better, and your children would do even better than you.But since 1980, that bargain has become a sham. The middle class has shrunk.Why? While Republicans steadily cut taxes on the wealthy, Democrats abandoned the working class.Democrats embraced Nafta and lowered tariffs on Chinese goods. They deregulated finance and allowed Wall Street to become a high-stakes gambling casino. They let big corporations gain enough market power to keep prices (and profit margins) high.They let corporations bust unions (with negligible penalties) and slash payrolls. They bailed out Wall Street when its gambling addiction threatened to blow up the entire economy but never bailed out homeowners who lost everything.They welcomed big money into their campaigns, and delivered quid pro quos that rigged the market in favor of big corporations and the wealthy.Joe Biden redirected the Democratic party back toward its working-class roots, but many of the changes he catalyzed – more vigorous actions against monopolies, stronger enforcement of labor laws and major investments in manufacturing, infrastructure, semiconductors and non-fossil fuels – wouldn’t be evident for years. In any event, he could not communicate effectively about them.The Republican party says it’s on the side of working people, but its policies will hurt ordinary workers even more. Trump’s tariffs will drive up prices. His expected retreat from vigorous anti-monopoly enforcement will allow giant corporations to drive up prices further.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIf Republicans gain control over the House as well as the Senate, as looks likely, they will extend Trump’s 2017 tax law and add additional tax cuts.As in 2017, these lower taxes will benefit mainly the wealthy and enlarge the national debt, which will give Republicans an excuse to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid – their objective for decades.Democrats must no longer do the bidding of big corporations and the wealthy. They must instead focus on winning back the working class.They should demand paid family leave, Medicare for all, free public higher education, stronger unions, higher taxes on great wealth, and housing credits that will generate the biggest boom in residential home construction since the second world war.They should also demand that corporations share their profits with their workers. They should call for limits on CEO pay, eliminate all stock buybacks (as was the SEC rule before 1982) and reject corporate welfare (subsidies and tax credit to companies and industries unrelated to the common good).Democrats need to tell Americans why their pay has been lousy for decades and their jobs less secure: not because of immigrants, liberals, people of color, the “deep state”, or any other Trump Republican bogeyman, but because of the power of large corporations and the rich to rig the market and siphon off most of the economy’s gains.In doing this, Democrats should not retreat from their concerns about democracy. Democracy goes together with a fair economy.Only by reducing the power of big money in our politics can America grow the middle class, reward hard work and reaffirm the basic bargain at the heart of our system.If the Trump Republicans gain control of the House, they will have complete control of the federal government. That means they will own whatever happens to the economy and will be responsible for whatever happens to America.Notwithstanding all their anti-establishment populist rhetoric, they will become the establishment.The Democratic party should use this inflection point to shift ground – from being the party of well-off college graduates, big corporations, “never-Tumpers” like Dick Cheney and vacuous “centrism” – to an anti-establishment party ready to shake up the system on behalf of the vast majority of Americans.This is and should be the Lesson of the 2024 election.

      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

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      How a Republican trifecta makes way for Trump’s rightwing agenda

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      With the confirmation that Republicans have won a majority in the House of Representatives, Donald Trump and his party will now have a governing trifecta in Washington come January, giving the new president a powerful perch to enact his rightwing agenda.Even without majorities in both chambers of Congress, Trump’s victory in the presidential race already gave him significant control over US foreign policy and the makeup of the federal government, both of which he is seeking to overhaul.But a Republican trifecta in Washington will give Trump much more sweeping authority to implement his legislative priorities. As the Guardian has outlined through the Stakes project, Trump’s plans include extending tax cuts, rolling back landmark laws signed by Joe Biden and advancing a conservative cultural agenda.One of Republicans’ most oft-repeated campaign promises is that they will extend the tax cuts Trump signed into law in 2017, many of which are set to expire at the end of 2025. An analysis from the non-partisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that making the tax cuts permanent would cost $288.5bn in 2026 alone and disproportionately benefit the highest-income households. The highest-income 20% of Americans would receive nearly two-thirds of that tax benefit, compared with just 1% for the lowest-income 20% of Americans.Perhaps the most haunting possibility for Democrats is that Republicans would use their governing trifecta in Washington to enact a nationwide abortion ban. Trump has said he would veto such a policy, but his repeated flip-flopping on the issue has raised questions about that claim. Research has shown that existing abortion bans have forced doctors to provide substandard medical care, and they have been blamed for the deaths of at least four women: Josseli Barnica, Nevaeh Crain, Candi Miller and Amber Thurman.With majorities in both chambers, Republicans could also allocate vast resources to assist Trump’s plan to deport millions of undocumented migrants, which became a central plank of his re-election platform. While US courts have affirmed that presidents have much leeway when it comes to setting immigration policies, Trump will need Congress to appropriate extensive funds to carry out such a massive deportation operation.In a worrying sign for immigrant rights advocates, Trump said after his victory on Tuesday that his deportation program would have “no price tag”, doubling down on his commitment to the project.“It’s not a question of a price tag. It’s not – really, we have no choice,” Trump told NBC News. “When people have killed and murdered, when drug lords have destroyed countries, and now they’re going to go back to those countries because they’re not staying here.”In addition to advancing Trump’s platform, Republicans would almost certainly be looking to unravel key portions of Biden’s legacy, including the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). The IRA marked the country’s most significant response yet to the climate crisis and has spurred significant energy-related investments in many districts, prompting some Republicans to suggest that Congress should preserve some of the law’s provisions while repealing others.That quandary reflects a potential problem for Republicans in full control of Congress: what will they do with the Affordable Care Act (ACA)? When Republicans last held a governing trifecta, during Trump’s first two years in office, they tried and failed to repeal and replace the ACA. The Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, recently suggested that there would be “no Obamacare” if his party won full control of Congress, according to a video published by NBC News.But he seemed to caveat that statement by telling supporters: “The ACA is so deeply ingrained, we need massive reform to make this work, and we got a lot of ideas on how to do that.”In recent years, both parties have experienced the pains of governing with narrow majorities, and those problems could reappear in the new Congress. During Biden’s first two years in office, his legislative proposals were repeatedly blocked in the Senate despite Democrats holding a majority because of the concerns of two centrist members of their caucus, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhen Republicans held a 52-48 majority in the Senate in 2017, they still failed to repeal and replace the ACA because three members of their conference opposed the proposal. Two of those members – Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska – are still in the Senate today and may be resistant to various components of Trump’s agenda, particularly a potential abortion ban.And although Republicans have won the House, their narrow majority could exacerbate issues that played out in the last session of Congress, when the conference’s inner turmoil repeatedly brought the chamber to a standstill. Johnson will have to corral a fractious conference that has repeatedly clashed over government funding, foreign aid and the debt ceiling.Despite the potential challenges of narrow majorities, Trump and his Republican allies have made clear at every turn that they will use their newly expanded power to its maximum effect.“The mandate that has been delivered shows that a majority of Americans are eager for secure borders, lower costs, peace through strength, and a return to common sense,” Johnson wrote in a “Dear Colleague” letter sent last week. “With unified Republican government, if we meet this historic moment together, the next two years can result in the most consequential Congress of the modern era.”With the country torn between joy and revulsion over the prospect of seeing Trump’s agenda implemented, much will be riding on Republicans’ ability to remain unified. More

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      Trump announces Matt Gaetz as attorney general and Tulsi Gabbard for top intelligence post – US politics live

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      Donald Trump has chosen Matt Gaetz, of his most prominent defenders in Congress, to serve as attorney general.The appointment could put Gaetz in charge of Trump’s promised effort to retaliate against his political opponents, including officials who served in his previous administration but have since repudiated him. Trump announced the nomination, which must be confirmed by the Senate, on Truth Social:
      It is my Great Honor to announce that Congressman Matt Gaetz, of Florida, is hereby nominated to be The Attorney General of the United States. Matt is a deeply gifted and tenacious attorney, trained at the William & Mary College of Law, who has distinguished himself in Congress through his focus on achieving desperately needed reform at the Department of Justice. Few issues in America are more important than ending the partisan Weaponization of our Justice System. Matt will end Weaponized Government, protect our Borders, dismantle Criminal Organizations and restore Americans’ badly-shattered Faith and Confidence in the Justice Department. On the House Judiciary Committee, which performs oversight of DOJ, Matt played a key role in defeating the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, and exposing alarming and systemic Government Corruption and Weaponization. He is a Champion for the Constitution and the Rule of Law…
      Gaetz, a congressman representing a very conservative district in the Florida panhandle, became known nationally last year when he was a key player in the putsch that ousted Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House.Susan Collins, the moderate Republican senator of Maine told reporters she was “shocked” but the Matt Gaetz nomination.“I was shocked by the announcement — that shows why the advise-and-consent process is so important,” Collins said. “I’m sure that there will be a lot of questions raised at his hearing.”Matt Gaetz has been one of the most loyal backers of Donald Trump in the capitol, supporting Trump’s attempts to deny the results of the 2020 election. He voted with about 150 Republicans to overturn the results of the 2020 election.Along with members of the far-right group the Proud Boys, he took part in protests against the result of a Senate race in Florida.He also evoked language adopted by the Proud Boys at Trump’s hush money trial earlier this year, posting on social media: “Standing back, and standing by, Mr. President” along with a photo of him with Trump and other congressional Republicans.Hill reporters are gathering shocked and evasive responses from Republicans reacting to the Gaetz nomination.Senator Chuck Grassley stopped talking to reporters when asked for his reaction.House Appropriations chair Tom Cole avoided responding as well: “I know nothing about it.”Senator Ron Johnson: “The president gets to pick his nominees.”Matt Gaetz, the Florida congressman who Donald Trump just nominated to be his attorney general, has for years faced allegations of sexual misconduct.Last year, Gaetz said the justice department had closed an investigation that began after allegations emerged of the congressman having sex with a 17-year-old girl and paying for her travel. The House ethics committee earlier this year announced that it was beginning its own inquiry into whether Gaetz “engaged in sexual misconduct and illicit drug use, accepted improper gifts, dispensed special privileges and favours to individuals with whom he had a personal relationship, and sought to obstruct government investigations of his conduct”.That investigation has not yet been publicly concluded. Here’s more about it:Since he first arrived in Congress in 2017, just days before Donald Trump took office, Matt Gaetz has been one of his most vocal advocates on Capitol Hill.Now, Gaetz may lead the justice department, and ensure that prosecutorial decisions, which are normally made independently by the attorney general, are to Trump’s benefit.From a profile of Gaetz the Guardian’s Lauren Gambino published last year, shortly after he led the successful effort to oust fellow Republican Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House:
      “Florida Man. Built for Battle,” reads Gaetz’s bio on X, formerly Twitter.
      Gaetz followed his father into politics more than two decades ago. After serving in the Florida statehouse, Gaetz was elected in 2016 to represent a ruby-red chunk of the Florida panhandle.
      Since his arrival in Washington, the pompadoured lawmaker has built a political brand as a far-right provocateur, courting controversy seemingly as a matter of course.
      Like Donald Trump, to whom he is fiercely loyal, Gaetz is more interested in sparring with political foes than in the dry business of governance, according to his critics. On Capitol Hill, he has repeatedly disrupted House proceedings, including once barging into a secure facility where Democrats were holding a deposition hearing.
      In 2018, he was condemned for inviting a Holocaust denier to Trump’s State of the Union address. A year later, he hired a speechwriter who had been fired by the Trump White House after speaking at a conference that attracts white nationalists.
      Months after the January 6 attack on the Capitol, Gaetz embarked on an “America First” tour with Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right Georgia congresswoman, in which they amplified the former president’s false claims of fraud in the 2020 election. He also continued to attack Republicans critical of Trump, using language that reportedly alarmed McCarthy, who feared the lawmakers’ words could incite violence.
      Donald Trump has chosen Matt Gaetz, of his most prominent defenders in Congress, to serve as attorney general.The appointment could put Gaetz in charge of Trump’s promised effort to retaliate against his political opponents, including officials who served in his previous administration but have since repudiated him. Trump announced the nomination, which must be confirmed by the Senate, on Truth Social:
      It is my Great Honor to announce that Congressman Matt Gaetz, of Florida, is hereby nominated to be The Attorney General of the United States. Matt is a deeply gifted and tenacious attorney, trained at the William & Mary College of Law, who has distinguished himself in Congress through his focus on achieving desperately needed reform at the Department of Justice. Few issues in America are more important than ending the partisan Weaponization of our Justice System. Matt will end Weaponized Government, protect our Borders, dismantle Criminal Organizations and restore Americans’ badly-shattered Faith and Confidence in the Justice Department. On the House Judiciary Committee, which performs oversight of DOJ, Matt played a key role in defeating the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, and exposing alarming and systemic Government Corruption and Weaponization. He is a Champion for the Constitution and the Rule of Law…
      Gaetz, a congressman representing a very conservative district in the Florida panhandle, became known nationally last year when he was a key player in the putsch that ousted Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House.The Senate confirms nominees for director of national intelligence, a cabinet-level position created after 9/11 to oversee the intelligence community and liaise directly with the president.There is reason to think that Tulsi Gabbard might raise a few eyebrows in the Senate, even when it is controlled by Trump-aligned Republicans, as it will be from January.As a congresswoman from Hawaii, Gabbard visited Syria, met with its president Bashar al-Assad, and expressed skepticism about well-documented atrocities attributed to his forces during the country’s civil war. More recently, she has spent time attacking Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. It’s all a turnabout from her days in Democratic politics, when she vyed unsuccessfully for the party’s presidential nomination in 2020 and backed Bernie Sanders’ candidacy four years prior. Here’s more about how her views have shifted dramatically:Donald Trump has named former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard as his nominee for director of national intelligence. Gabbard is another loyalist who frequently joined Trump at campaign events.Here’s what he had to say in announcing in picking Gabbard, who represented Hawaii from 2013 to 2021, and endorsed Trump after leaving the Democratic party:
      I am pleased to announce that former Congresswoman, Lieutenant Colonel Tulsi Gabbard, will serve as Director of National Intelligence (DNI). For over two decades, Tulsi has fought for our Country and the Freedoms of all Americans. As a former Candidate for the Democrat Presidential Nomination, she has broad support in both Parties – She is now a proud Republican! I know Tulsi will bring the fearless spirit that has defined her illustrious career to our Intelligence Community, championing our Constitutional Rights, and securing Peace through Strength. Tulsi will make us all proud!
      Donald Trump has just officially named Florida senator Marco Rubio as his nominee for secretary of state.News of the choice filtered out over the past day or so, but Trump had not made it official, until now. Here’s what he said:
      It is my Great Honor to announce that Senator Marco Rubio, of Florida, is hereby nominated to be The United States Secretary of State. Marco is a Highly Respected Leader, and a very powerful Voice for Freedom. He will be a strong Advocate for our Nation, a true friend to our Allies, and a fearless Warrior who will never back down to our adversaries. I look forward to working with Marco to Make America, and the World, Safe and Great Again!
      Joe Biden’s meeting with Donald Trump was attended by Susie Wiles, who the president-elect recently announced would serve as his White House chief of staff.Wiles, who co-managed Trump’s campaign, will be the first woman to hold role. Biden’s chief of staff, Jeff Zients, also attended.While Donald Trump appears to have mostly stayed out of the race for Senate Republican leader, the Maga hardcore were rooting for Florida senator Rick Scott.He unsuccessfully challenged Mitch McConnell for the leadership post two years ago, and his bid this year was similarly unsuccessful. In a statement released after John Thune won the race, Scott said:
      I may have lost the vote, but I am optimistic. I ran for leader with one mission: to fundamentally change how the Senate operates and upend the status quo so we can actually start representing the voters who put us here. When I announced, I said that we are in a moment where we need dramatic change. The voters confirmed that last week when they elected President Trump and Republicans took the majority in both chambers of Congress with a clear mandate.
      …
      While it isn’t the result we hoped for, I will do everything possible to make sure John Thune is successful in accomplishing President Trump’s agenda.
      When asked about comments made by Trump’s new pick for secretary of defense, Fox and Friends co-host Pete Hegseth, that “we should not have women in combat roles”, Jean-Pierre spoke to the “importance of gender equality, of women in the workforce”.She said the Biden administration does not agree with those views.Biden “looked forward to the conversation and appreciated the conversation,” Jean-Pierre said, adding that the two met for nearly two hours.“I think the length of the meeting tells you they had an in-depth conversation on an array of issues.”A reporter asked Jean-Pierre if there were any conversations between Biden and Trump about not accepting the results of the 2020 election, but she said it was now about “moving forward”.“There was an election last week and the American people spoke.” More