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    Trump Picks Burgum for Interior Secretary

    President-elect Donald J. Trump has tapped Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota to lead the Interior Department, leading the new administration’s plans to open federal lands and waters to oil and gas drilling.Governor Burgum, 68, has longstanding ties to fossil fuel companies and acted as a liaison between the Trump campaign and the oil executives who have donated heavily to it. The governor is particularly close to Harold G. Hamm, the billionaire founder and chairman of Continental Resources, one of the country’s largest independent oil companies, who has hosted fund-raisers and donated nearly $5 million to Mr. Trump since 2023.Mr. Trump made the announcement during a gala for the America First Policy Institute being held at his Mar-a-Lago estate. Mr. Burgum was in attendance.“I won’t tell you his name, it might be something like Burgum,” Mr. Trump said, before telling the crowd, “Actually he’s going to head the Department of Interior, and he’s going to be fantastic.”North Dakota sits over part of the Bakken Formation, which has emerged as a major source of oil in the United States thanks to hydraulic fracturing, a horizontal drilling technique that took off in 2008 and made it possible to extract substantial amounts of oil that had been inaccessible through traditional drilling.Mr. Burgum has been a cheerleader for drilling, a posture that fits in well with the mantra of “Drill, baby, drill,” which Mr. Trump repeatedly uses to describe his energy policy.Scientists have said that the United States and other major economies must stop developing new oil and gas projects to avert the most catastrophic effects of global warming. The burning of oil, gas and coal is the main driver of climate change. The Biden administration has tried to limit some drilling on public lands and in federal waters, particularly in fragile wilderness like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Mr. Trump has said he would end those protections. More

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

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

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    Why We Got It So Wrong

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

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    Here’s How Trump Could Lose the Coming Trade War

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

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    Los nombramientos temerarios de Trump

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

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    Americans Have Regained Modest Trust in Scientists, Survey Finds

    A sharp partisan divide remains over how involved researchers should be in policy decisions.For the first time since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, the public’s trust in scientists has improved, according to a survey published Thursday by the Pew Research Center.About 76 percent of Americans say they have confidence that scientists act in the public’s best interest, a modest but significant improvement from last year but about 10 points lower than the figure before the pandemic.This year’s uptick was driven largely by a slight increase in trust among Republicans, a group that also experienced the steepest drop in confidence during the pandemic, said Alec Tyson, a Pew researcher and the report’s lead author.Still, the roughly 9,500 Americans surveyed were divided over whether scientists should play a role in policy decisions — a particularly timely issue now, as President-elect Donald J. Trump prepares to appoint leaders of the country’s science and health agencies.About half of the survey respondents said experts should take “an active role” in policy debates about scientific issues, like childhood vaccines and climate change, while the other half said they should focus instead on “establishing sound scientific facts.”Respondents were largely split along partisan lines: 67 percent of Democrats believed scientists should be involved in policy debates, compared with just 35 percent of Republicans.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    What a Matt Gaetz Justice Department Would Mean for Business

    The Trump loyalist supports an “aggressive” antitrust approach and has called for breaking up Big Tech. But can the controversial nominee win Senate approval?Matt Gaetz may be Donald Trump’s most surprising and contentious pick yet to join his cabinet.Mike Blake/ReutersA “disrupter” for the Justice DepartmentMatt Gaetz is known for his outspoken defenses of Donald Trump, numerous scandals and a House ethics investigation. He can now add another distinction: being the president-elect’s pick to be nominee for attorney general.It isn’t clear whether Gaetz, perhaps the most divisive of Trump’s cabinet choices so far, will get Senate confirmation. But if he does, he could keep corporate America on its toes.Trump and his allies see the position of attorney general as especially important, given the president-elect’s numerous legal woes.The Times reports that Trump weighed more traditional candidates, including Jay Clayton, who was S.E.C. chair in his first administration, and Bob Giuffra, a co-chair of the white-shoe law firm Sullivan & Cromwell. But he ultimately chose a loyalist who supported efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.Gaetz “is a disrupter,” said Representative Chip Roy, Republican of Texas, praising Trump’s selection. Gaetz, who resigned from his position as representative of Florida last night, repeatedly challenged Republican leaders, picked fights with Democrats and pulled off stunts like trying to barge into the secure chambers for the House Intelligence Committee.Will he go after Trump’s perceived enemies, including in business? In his announcement on social media, Trump said that Gaetz would “dismantle Criminal Organizations” as part of a mission to bring “desperately needed reform at the Department of Justice.” On X, Elon Musk wrote that “the Hammer of Justice is coming.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    F.B.I. Searches Home of Shayne Coplan, Polymarket Founder

    The search involving Shayne Coplan, the founder of Polymarket, known for its presidential election odds, was part of a criminal investigation, three people said.The F.B.I. carried out a search on Wednesday morning at the New York City home of Shayne Coplan, the founder of the betting website Polymarket, three people with knowledge of the matter said.The raid was part of a criminal investigation by the F.B.I. and the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, one of the people said. The investigation appears focused on whether Mr. Coplan, 26, ran Polymarket as an unlicensed commodities exchange, allowing users in the United States to place bets in violation of a settlement with the U.S. government, the person said. Polymarket rose to prominence this fall for offering odds on the presidential election.The F.B.I. seized Mr. Coplan’s electronic devices, including a phone, the person said.A law enforcement official confirmed that F.B.I. agents had conducted “court-authorized law enforcement activity” at Mr. Coplan’s address early Wednesday, but declined to elaborate.Election betting is a murky legal area in the United States. In 2022, Polymarket agreed to stop offering its services to U.S.-based users after settling with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission for operating without registration. The company paid a $1.4 million fine.After the settlement, it was an “open secret” that users in the United States could still gain access to the site with virtual private networks, a former employee previously told The New York Times. On social media, Polymarket’s customers exchanged tips on how to get around the prohibition.Polymarket soared in popularity during the presidential campaign. While polls showed a close race, the site’s odds gave former President Donald J. Trump a large advantage over Vice President Kamala Harris.A spokesman for the company said the F.B.I. raid was “obvious political retribution by the outgoing administration.”In a post on X, Mr. Coplan said the Biden administration was making “a last-ditch effort to go after companies they deem to be associated with political opponents.”A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment.Some details of the investigation were reported earlier by Bloomberg and The New York Post. More