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      Ex-official exits running for Trump team over Sebastian Gorka appointment

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      A frontrunner to be deputy national security adviser in Donald Trump’s administration reportedly withdrew from the running after learning that he would have to work with Sebastian Gorka, the president-elect’s choice as counter-terrorism adviser.Michael Anton, a conservative speech writer and national security official in Trump’s first presidency, removed his name from contention over Gorka’s appointment against a backdrop of acrimonious past relations between the pair, the Washington Post reported.His withdrawal graphically signifies the unease provoked by the prospective return to the White House of Gorka, a controversial figure who was forced out of Trump’s first administration, where he worked closely with Steve Bannon, within its first seven months.His departure is believed to have been engineered by John Kelly, who became White House chief of staff in July 2017 with the task of bringing order to the chaos that characterised Trump’s first months. Kelly, who later resigned, has since turned against Trump, saying he met “the general definition of a fascist” in interviews given shortly before this month’s presidential election.Gorka, who has worked at the National Defense University, has drawn multiple accusations of Islamophobia.Being considered anathema by Anton – who was believed to be under consideration to become deputy to the prospective national security advisor, Mike Waltz – is all the more striking given Anton’s own hardline views on Islam, which he has called “a militant faith”. He argued that “only an insane society” would accept Muslim immigrants following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.But his opinions have paled in comparison to those of Gorka, who has depicted the religion as a threat to western civilisation and has peddled fears about America falling under sharia law.He was a vocal supporter of the Muslim travel ban enacted against citizens of seven majority Muslim countries during Trump’s first administration. When he departed, he wrote a resignation letter lamenting the president’s failure to use the term “radical Islamic terrorism” in a speech on Afghanistan.The Washington Post cited a source in Trump’s national security transition team as saying there was widespread dismay at the prospect of Gorka’s return, which does not need to be confirmed by Senate hearings.“Almost universally, the entire team considers Gorka a clown,” the source said. “They are dreading working with him.”Anton has previously written about the animosity between Gorka and himself. He recounted how Gorka called him a “coward” and scolded him in a Fox News green room.Gorka, who first came to attention as a firebrand pundit working at the rightwing Breitbart News, declined comment, telling the Post: “I don’t comment to the fake failing news.”Anton’s reported withdrawal follows scathing comments on Gorka’s qualifications by John Bolton, who was national security in Trump’s first term before being fired.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSpeaking to CNN, he called Gorka “a conman” and said the FBI should investigate his credentials.“I wouldn’t have him in any U.S. government,” Bolton told the network’s Kaitlan Collins. “I don’t think it will bode well for counterterrorism efforts.”Gorka, a US-British citizen and the son of Hungarian immigrants to the UK, drew criticism when he appeared at Trump’s first inauguration ball wearing an honorary medal from the Hungarian nationalist organisation, Vitézi Rend. The World Jewish Congress has said some members of the outfit were complicit in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews in the Holocaust.His views on Islam have been distinguished by a rejection of interpretations attributing the root causes of Islamist terrorism to poverty, repression or US foreign policy mistakes.“This is what I completely jettison,” he told the Washington Post in 2017. “Anybody who downplays the role of religious ideology … they are deleting reality to fit their own world.”In a video filmed after Hamas’s murderous 7 October attack on Israel last year, he said he had watched unedited footage of the episode and offered advice to Israeli leaders on how to deal with the Palestinian militant group.“Kill every single one of them,” he said. “God bless Israel. God bless Judeo-Christian civilisation.” More

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      Sarah McBride says Republican attack on trans rights is ‘attempt to misdirect’ voters

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      Sarah McBride, the first openly transgender person elected to Congress, on Sunday condemned Republicans’ latest attack on trans rights as “an attempt to misdirect” voters away from more central issues in communities, such as healthcare costs and economic inequality.Delaware’s incoming Democratic member of the House of Representatives, who will join Donald Trump’s new administration in January, also hit back against bathroom restrictions for trans people announced by the GOP on Capitol Hill last week.In a CBS interview on Sunday morning, the congresswoman-elect said: “I think we are all united that attempts to attack a vulnerable community are not only mean-spirited but really an attempt to misdirect. Because every single time we hear the incoming administration or Republicans in Congress talk about any vulnerable group in this country, we have to be clear that it is an attempt to distract.”McBride added: “Every single time we hear them say the word ‘trans’, look at what they’re doing with their right hand. Look at what they’re doing to pick the pocket of American workers, to fleece seniors by privatizing social security and Medicare. Look at what they’re doing, undermining workers.”McBride’s remarks come in response to Republican House speaker Mike Johnson last week banning trans people from using single-sex bathrooms on Capitol Hill that match their gender identity. This follows a bill introduced by South Carolina Republican representative Nancy Mace, who sought similar bathroom restrictions for all trans people using the Capitol, including congressional members, officers and employees.Last Tuesday, Johnson told reporters: “A man is a man, and a woman is a woman, and a man cannot become a woman. That said, I also believe that’s what [Bible] scripture teaches … but I also believe that we should treat everybody with dignity.”McBride was asked by CBS whether she believes she is being treated with dignity.McBride said: “I didn’t run for the United States House of Representatives to talk about what bathroom I use. I didn’t run to talk about myself. I ran to deliver for Delawareans. While Republicans in Congress seem focused on bathrooms and trans people, and specifically me, I’m focused on rolling up my sleeves, beginning the hard work of delivering for Delawareans on the issues that I know keep them up at night.”She added: “Every bit of time and energy that has been used to divert the attention of the federal government to go after trans people is time and energy that is not focused upon addressing the cost of living for our constituents, and we have to be clear that there is a real cost to the American worker every time they focus on this.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSupporters of McBride and trans equality, including fellow Democrats in congress, have rushed to defend her.Illinois US senator and Democrat Tammy Duckworth told CNN on Sunday that she believes Mace’s position is “disgusting and wrong”, adding: “I think we have a lot more to worry about than where somebody goes to pee.” More

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      Republican senator: ‘We’ll have lots of questions’ for Trump’s controversial picks

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      A prominent Republican US senator pledged on Sunday that Congress would not give blanket approval to Donald Trump’s controversial cabinet picks ahead of the congressional confirmation process, as a leading Democrat challenged the qualifications of some of them to serve.Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma predicted lawmakers in the upper chamber will have tough questions in particular for the former Democratic congresswoman, Tulsi Gabbard, who was chosen by the president-elect as director of national security for his second administration.When asked on CNN on Sunday morning if he will vote for all of Trump’s cabinet nominations, Lankford did not answer directly, pointing to the Senate process of holding public hearings for nominees, beginning on 3 January, ahead of Trump’s confirmation on 20 January.“Everyone is going to get a fair shake,” he said of the president-elect’s list of preferred nominees.Gabbard faces a potentially rough ride during her Senate confirmation over a number of questionable incidents from her career. These include spreading Russian propaganda over the war in Ukraine, prompting critics to ask if she might be a “Russian asset”, as well as her making a clandestine and visit to Syria to meet the country’s president, Bashar al-Assad, who has been accused of war crimes, a trip that drew Republican criticism as a shame and a disgrace.“We’ll have lots of questions,” Lankford, the newly-elected vice-chair of the Senate policy committee, told CNN’s State of the Union show.“She met with Bashar al-Assad, we’ll want to know what the purpose was and what the direction for that was as a member of Congress. We want to get a chance to talk about past comments she’s made, and get them into full context.”He added: “So, sure, there’s comments that are floating out there, but we want to be able to know the rest of the story.”Lankford’s comments came at the end of a week that saw Trump’s first pick for attorney general, Florida former congressman Matt Gaetz, fall amid sexual misconduct allegations that prompted pushback from a number of Republican senators and made it unlikely he would win enough votes for confirmation by the incoming-Republican majority.Other Trump choices under scrutiny include Fox TV host Pete Hegseth, the nominee for defense secretary who was the subject of a sexual assault investigation in 2017, and Robert F Kennedy Jr, a conspiracy theorist and vaccine skeptic tapped for health secretary.Lankford also suggested that Pam Bondi, Florida’s former attorney general chosen by the president-elect this week in place of Gaetz, should put aside her promise to seek legal retribution on Trump’s political foes, if she is confirmed.Of the role, Lankford said: “It’s America’s lawyer. It’s not the president’s lawyer. It is very important that we get this role right, and that they’re actually focused on diminishing crime in America.”As well as open hearings, Lankford said of Trump’s nominees: “We’ll sit down with them in our offices, we’ll get a chance to be able to talk.”The Democratic Illinois senator and combat veteran Tammy Duckworth, meanwhile, told CNN’s State of the Union that Hegseth and Gabbard were both unqualified or unsuitable for the roles Trump wants them to fill.“He never commanded a unit, he never commanded a company, let alone battalions, brigades or whole armies. He was a platoon leader,” Duckworth said of Hegseth, a retired major in the army national guard.“He served at a very low level in the military, and we’re talking about an organization of 3 million servicemen, servicewomen and civilians, and a budget of over $900bn. He does not have the experience to run an organization of that size.”Duckworth also vehemently disagreed with Hegseth’s opposition to allowing women to stay in combat roles, after a long-fought battle for greater equality in the US military. She added she was “troubled” by claims Gabbard was a Russian asset.“We have a real deep concern whether or not she’s a compromised person. The US intelligence community has identified her as having troubling relationships with America’s foes, and my worry is that she couldn’t pass a background check,” she said.Oklahoma’s other Republican senator, Markwayne Mullin, a vocal Trump ally, also appeared on State of the Union and gave his unqualified backing to all of the president-elect’s picks.“The president has done this job before. He knows exactly what he needs. He knows who he wants to put in those positions,” he said.“That’s why he’s been able to move fast, because he knows he has four years to reach the mandate the American people said they want, the government going in a different direction. These nominations are going to deliver that for him.”Meanwhile, Republican US Senator Rand Paul said he opposes Trump’s preference to use the armed forces if needed to carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants from the US.The president-elect said last Monday that his new administration would declare a national emergency and use the US military for that purpose.Paul told CBS’s Face the Nation: “You don’t do it with the Army because it’s illegal. If they send the Army into New York and you have 10,000 troops marching carrying semi-automatic weapons, I think it’s a terrible image, and I will oppose that.” Federal troops are prohibited by law from being deployed for US domestic law enforcement, except when authorized by Congress. More

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      Trump’s White House is filling with alleged sexual abusers … led by him

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      Donald Trump was found civilly liable last year for the defamation and sexual abuse of the writer E Jean Carroll – just one of the more than 27 women who have accused him of sexual misconduct. In January 2025, he will again be president of the United States – the first to take office with a court-adjudicated history of sex crimes.And it seems he’s eager to pack the White House with people just like him.Four of president-elect Trump’s cabinet-level nominees have faced serious allegations of sexual misconduct, ranging from workplace sexual harassment to assault, and a fifth is embroiled in a sexual abuse-related lawsuit.As Americans brace themselves for Trump 2.0, it’s time to be clear-eyed about the Maga machine: a history of alleged sexual criminality isn’t a bug, it’s a central part of the hardware; an organizing principle that clarifies how Trump and those like him view their power and how they intend to wield it.Trump’s first choice for attorney general, the former representative Matt Gaetz, was concurrently under investigation by the Department of Justice and the House ethics committee for allegedly violating federal sex-trafficking laws and statutory rape. The disgraced representative also reportedly bragged about his sexual conquests and showed nude photos of women to his fellow lawmakers. On Thursday afternoon, Gaetz announced he would be withdrawing his name from consideration to avoid being a “distraction to the critical work of the Trump/Vance Transition”, just hours before CNN published a report about a second alleged sexual encounter between Gaetz and a 17-year-old. (The age of consent in Florida is 18.)Gaetz’s withdrawal provided a brief moment of relief. But, still, Trump’s would-be cabinet is filled with alleged criminals, all of whom the president-elect has vociferously defended, and all of whom deny wrongdoing.Elon Musk, whom Trump has tapped for the made-up position of “efficiency czar”, reportedly exposed his penis to a SpaceX flight attendant in 2016 and offered to buy her a horse in exchange for sex. Musk’s company SpaceX paid her $250,000 in 2018 to settle the sexual misconduct claim. He was also sued this year by eight former SpaceX employees, who alleged that the CEO treated “women as sexual objects to be evaluated on their bra size, bombarding the workplace with lewd sexual banter”.Then there’s the nominee for secretary of defense, the Fox News host Pete Hegseth, who was accused of sexually assaulting a staff member of the California Federation of Republican Women in 2017.In the police report that was filed at the time, and which was obtained by the New York Times, the unnamed woman told law enforcement that Hegseth had taken her phone and blocked her exit from his hotel room before assaulting her. Though Hegseth was never charged with a crime, he did enter into a nondisclosure agreement with the woman, which included a financial settlement.Robert F Kennedy Jr was accused of sexually assaulting Eliza Cooney, a former family babysitter, in the late 90s. Trump now wants him to run the Department of Health and Human Services.Finally, Trump’s pick for secretary of education, Linda McMahon, was recently named in a lawsuit alleging that she and her husband, Vince McMahon, failed to stop an employee from sexually abusing children in the 1980s and 90s, when the McMahons were running World Wrestling Entertainment. (An attorney for McMahon told CNN that the lawsuit is “filled with scurrilous lies.”)These picks feel comically brazen, like shots fired directly at the #MeToo movement, which erupted in the wake of Trump’s election in 2016. It’s not a stretch to imagine that Trump, a man who has threatened to sue every one of his accusers and has openly bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy” without their consent, is attempting to exact revenge on a movement designed to use the collective to force consequences for a handful of powerful predators.#MeToo was just one piece of a slate of shifting gender norms over the last decade. Now, we’re living in the middle of a backlash.Roe v Wade has fallen, a known sexual abuser is re-entering the Oval Office, and the very online far right has found a new slogan: “Your body, my choice.”In Susan Faludi’s 1991 book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women,she writes that these moments of backlash are not random. They are “preemptive strikes”, which “have always been triggered by the perception – accurate or not – that women are making great strides”.The perception that women were gaining status at the expense of men’s, combined with the real ways in which many men in this country are struggling economically, socially and mentally, has seemingly helped fuel the Trump campaign.Trump sneered at “childless cat ladies”, courted Joe Rogan listeners and crypto-bros, and trotted out Hulk Hogan to perform hyper-macho drag at the Republican national convention. The campaign deployed far-right influencers to wax poetic on X – which Musk owns – about the dangers of “toxic femininity” and mock the peeing habits of men who supported Kamala Harris.On election day, Trump senior adviser and noted white nationalist Stephen Miller tweeted a very particular plea: “Get every man you know to the polls.” After Trump’s win, the far right were out in full force celebrating what they clearly perceived not just as a win for their preferred political leader, but for their gender as a whole; they flooded X and TikTok with the phrases “your body, my choice” and “get back in the kitchen” and crafted supercuts of liberal women crying.Perhaps what Trump is counting on is that people who oppose the draconian agenda of his administration will be so exhausted by the piling horrors that they’ll get overwhelmed and give up – that all of the allegations will blend together and the backlash will become the norm. And yet, we know where a backlash brews, so does a resistance to it. More

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      Biden must Trump-proof US democracy, activists say: ‘There is a sense of urgency’

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      The skies above the White House were cold and grey. Joe Biden greeted the championship winning Boston Celtics basketball team, quipping about his Irish ancestry and tossing a basketball into the crowd. But the US president could not resist drawing a wider lesson.“When we get knocked down, we get back up,” he said. “As my dad would say, ‘Just get up, Joe. Get up.’ Character to keep going and keep the faith, that’s the Celtic way of life. That’s sports. And that’s America.”Such events continue to be among the ceremonial duties of a “lame duck” president with waning influence. Biden has cut a diminished figure in recent months, first surrendering his chance to seek re-election, then finding himself sidelined by the doomed presidential campaign of his vice-president, Kamala Harris.But with his legacy imperiled by Donald Trump, the president is facing calls to mitigate the oncoming storm. Advocacy groups say Biden, who turned 82 this week, can still take actions during his final two months in office to accelerate spending on climate and healthcare, secure civil liberties, and Trump-proof at least some fundamentals of US democracy.Trump’s signature campaign promise was a draconian crackdown on illegal immigration. He has nominated officials including Tom Homan and Stephen Miller, architects of family separations at the southern border during his first term, and vowed to use the US military to carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.The plans include mandatory detention, potentially trapping immigrants in inhumane conditions for years as they fight deportation. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is leading an opposition effort, urging Biden to halt the current expansion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention facilities, especially those with records of human rights abuses.Eunice Cho, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU national prison project, said Ice detention facilities “characterised by abusive conditions, pervasive neglect and utter disregard for the dignity of people in their custody” are key to Trump’s logistical plan.Dozens of people have died in Ice detention facilities – mostly owned or operated by private prison corporations – over the past four years, according to the ACLU, and 95% were likely preventable if appropriate medical care had been provided. Yet the Biden administration has backed new Ice detention facilities in states where they did not existed before, such as Kansas, Wyoming and Missouri.“We are calling on the Biden administration to take action now, in the final days of the administration, to halt any efforts to expand immigration detention and to shut down specifically abusive facilities once and for all,” Cho told reporters on a Zoom call this week. “We don’t need to put down runway for the Trump administration to put in place these mass detention and deportation machines.”She warned: “We know that the anti-immigrant policies of a second administration are going to be far more aggressive than what we saw in the first term, and mass arrest and detention is going to become perhaps the norm to create and carry out these deportation operations unless we can do all we can to put a halt to them.”View image in fullscreenAnother crucial area for Biden to make a last stand is criminal justice. In his first term, Trump oversaw the execution of more people than the previous 10 presidents combined. Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, then imposed a moratorium on federal executions in 2021.Trump has indicated his intention to resume such executions and even expand the death penalty. His nominee for attorney general, Pam Bondi, issued a public apology in 2013 while serving as Florida’s top law enforcement officer after she sought to delay the execution of a convicted killer because it conflicted with a fundraiser for her re-election campaign.Cassandra Stubbs, director of the ACLU’s capital punishment project, told reporters via Zoom that Trump said “he will work to expand the death penalty. He’s going to try to expand it to people who do not even commit killings. He’s called for expanding the death penalty to his political opponents.“But perhaps most dangerously in Project 2025 [a policy blueprint from the Heritage Foundation thinktank] – and we believe every word of it is this – he promised to try to kill everyone on death row, and the reason why we have to believe this and take it so seriously is the record that Donald Trump left where he, in a span of six months, carried out 13 executions.”The ACLU and other groups are therefore pressing Biden to commute the sentences of all individuals on federal death row to life in prison, fulfilling a campaign promise and preventing potential executions under Trump. Commuting “is really the thing that Biden can do to make it harder for Trump to restart executions”, Stubbs added.Pastor Brandi Slaughter, a board member of the pressure group Death Penalty Action, told reporters this week: “We know what the next president plans to do if any prisoners are left under a sentence of death under the Biden administration. We’ve been there, we’ve done that.”Biden has also received 8,000 petitions for clemency from federal prisoners serving non-death penalty sentences that he could either reduce or pardon. The former senator has long been criticised for his role in drawing up a 1994 crime law that led to the incarceration of thousands of Black men and women for drug offences.This week, members of Congress including Ayanna Pressley and James Clyburn led 64 colleagues in sending a letter to Biden urging him to use his clemency power “to reunite families, address longstanding injustices in our legal system and set our nation on the path toward ending mass incarceration”.They were joined at a press conference on Capitol Hill by Maria Garza, 50, from Illinois, a prison reform advocate who spent 12 years in a state prison. She said in an interview: “There is a sense of urgency because a lot of the people that are sitting waiting for clemency are people that have de facto life sentences that will die in prison if they don’t [receive clemency]. A lot of their unjust sentencing was because of the 1994 crime bill that he was the founding father of.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMitzi Wall, whose 29-year-old son Jonathan is incarcerated on a seven-and-a-half-year federal cannabis charge, called on Biden to keep a campaign promise to grant clemency to more than 4,000 people in federal prison for nonviolent cannabis crimes.“We voted for President Biden,” she said. “He gave us hope and we’re asking him to do nothing more than keep his promise.”Wall, 63, from Maryland, added: “President Biden was partly responsible for writing the 1994 crime bill that thrust families into abject poverty and pain. I know he feels bad about that and he can right that wrong with the power of the pen. I’m appealing to him as a father whose son [Hunter] could very possibly be going to prison.”In other efforts to protect civil liberties, the ACLU is recommending a moratorium on all federal government purchases of Americans’ personal data without a warrant. It is also asking Congress to pass the Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act to prevent potential abuse of surveillance technologies under the Trump administration.Meanwhile, Trump has pledged to rescind unspent funds in Biden’s landmark climate and healthcare law and stop clean-energy development projects. White House officials are working against the clock to dole out billions of dollars in grants for existing programmes to minimise Trump’s ability to rescind or redirect these funds. Earlier this month, the transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, announced more than $3.4bn in grants for infrastructure projects across the country.Wendy Schiller, a political science professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, notes that Trump will have the power of impoundment to stall the money flowing out of the government and can order rescissions to programmes funded by Congress.“The singular thing that Joe Biden can do is expedite the flow of federal dollars in all the programmes,” Schiller said.“Any money that is supposed to leave the treasury to go to schools, food safety, environmental protection – anything that is not yet distributed needs to get distributed. It’s like emptying literally the piggy bank before you go on a trip. President Biden needs to be literally getting as much money out the door in the hands of state, local and community organisations as he can.”Another priority for the White House is getting Senate confirmation of as many federal judges as possible, given the potential impact of the judiciary in challenging Trump administration policies. The Marshall Project, a non-profit news organisation, noted: “Federal judges restricted hundreds of Trump administration policies during his first term, and will likely play a significant role in determining the trajectory of his second.”Senate Republicans forced numerous procedural votes and late-night sessions this week in attempt to stall confirmations. Eventually a deal was struck that will bring Biden within striking distance of the 234 judicial confirmations that occurred in Trump’s first term – but four of Biden’s appellate court nominees will not be considered.The outgoing president could also engage with Democratic-led states and localities to bolster protections and establish “firewalls” against Trump’s agenda, particularly in areas such as immigration. These collaborations could involve reinforcing sanctuary city policies and providing resources to states that are likely to face pressure from the Trump administration.Chris Scott, former coalitions director for Harris, said: “What will be interesting is how or what can President Biden to work with states, especially where we have Democratic leadership in place, to be able to brace themselves and arm themselves with more protection. We already have places like a Michigan or Illinois where you have governors vowing to make sure that they have protections – even in the Trump presidency.”As Barack Obama discovered before handing Trump the keys to the Oval Office in 2017, however, lame duck presidents can only do so much. Trump will come into office with a flurry of executive orders, a supportive Congress and fewer guardrails than the first time around.Bill Galston, a former adviser in the Bill Clinton administration, said: “On January 20 Donald Trump will control all the instruments of government and, at that point, it’ll be up to the courts – and public opinion – to restrain him.” More

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      Trump voters hail controversial cabinet picks as the government they want

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      In the American heartland, they’re excited. Finally, say voters who put Donald Trump into the White House for a second time, they are about to get the president they wanted all along.Even as leading Democrats decry Trump’s cabinet nominations as “agents of his contempt, rage and vengeance”, the former and future president’s supporters are interpreting the selections as evidence that he has finally broken free of the Washington establishment.Democrats are fuming that Trump wants to put a vaccine denier in charge of health, former Fox News presenters at the helm of the Pentagon and transportation department, and at the prospect of Elon Musk slashing and burning his way through the sprawling federal bureaucracy.Even senior Republicans have been less than enthusiastic about some of Trump’s choices. The tapping of the former Florida congressman Matt Gaetz to be the US attorney general ran into the sand after just a few days over allegations of sex with a minor.But many of those who voted for Trump are weighing other priorities.Neil Shaffer, chair of the Republican party in Howard county, Iowa, which twice voted for Barack Obama but has swung ever more to Trump with each passing election, has never been an enthusiast for the former president even if he voted for him three times.“This time around I was still a little lukewarm on the whole thing but I’m very impressed with the people he’s surrounded himself with, especially Tulsi Gabbard and Bobby Kennedy and Elon Musk. With each one of these people there’s a big, big part of their appointment that is reforming and streamlining,” said Shaffer, who works in water conservation for the state.“I like the idea of bringing people from outside government to look at this with eyes from the real world not Washington DC. Washington DC is not the real world. It’s a made-up puppet regime of dark shadows. You’ve got the military-industrial complex, big pharma, big agriculture pulling all the levers. They want all that money. It’s why we got the way we are with our food. I’m actually mystified that he’s this well organised, that all these names are coming out so quickly.”View image in fullscreenShaffer offers a frequently heard view among Trump supporters that the former president was ill-prepared for his unexpected victory in 2016, and was then captured by big business and the Republican establishment in making cabinet appointments. That, he said, held back Trump’s promise to “drain the swamp”.“He was inundated with all these lobbyists and corporate interests and individuals who really were there more to perpetuate the system instead of reform the system,” he said.This time, said Shaffer, Trump has the experience to put in place officials who will represent his ambitions.Among the most contentious nominations, and popular with the next president’s supporters, is the choice of Robert F Kennedy, scion of the US’s most famous Democratic political family, as secretary of health and human services. His liberal critics see a crank who rejected Covid vaccinations and promoted false claims over links between immunisation and autism.But more than a few Trump supporters are focused on Kennedy’s longstanding criticisms of the power of the food and agricultural industry over what Americans farm and eat, and the prescription drug makers’ influence on healthcare.Corporate lobbyists helped ensure that the US government spent more than $100bn subsidising the growing of corn over the past 30 years. Some of that ends up as high-fructose corn syrup now found in most processed foods in the US, from breakfast cereals to salad dressings and soft drinks, and is a major contributor to some of the highest rates of obesity and diabetes in the world.A meme about the unhealthy ingredients in Heinz tomato ketchup made in the US, including corn syrup, compared with the UK version is doing the rounds among Trump supporters enthusiastic about Kennedy’s appointment. As Shafer sees it, corporations are getting taxpayers to subsidise an industry that is killing them.“It’s like I heard Bobby Kennedy say the other day, when you go back to the 1960s and what our health was then to where it is now, our DNA didn’t change, our diet changed. And what spurred our diet to change?” said Shaffer.“The food thing is huge. I’m so happy that he’s going to have a cabinet position.”Bo Copley, a former miner in West Virginia who now works as a salesman, said he was disappointed that Trump did not behave with more dignity during his first term. He’s not confident that will change but thinks the former president has learned from other mistakes, principally in who he appoints to positions of power.“Opponents would consider them radical but for the people who support him, he’s putting people in place who will help him get the job done. There are people that would shake up the establishment in Washington DC. We’re not looking for lobbyists to be in these positions. We’re not looking at people from big pharma to be in these positions,” he said.Copley named Kennedy and Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman who switched to the Republicans earlier this year and is nominated as director of national intelligence, as among the choices he most liked.Nikki Haley, the former UN ambassador who challenged Trump in the Republican primaries, on Thursday criticised Gabbard as “a Russian, Iranian, Syrian, Chinese sympathiser”. But Copley is not alone in welcoming Gabbard’s scepticism about Washington’s escalating military support for Ukraine, including the Biden administration’s decision this week to supply landmines and permit the firing of US-made missiles into Russia.View image in fullscreen“One of the biggest talking points the first time Donald Trump went into office was he’s going to start world war three and he actually de-escalated conflicts. Now we’ve sent Ukraine billions and billions of dollars when we have people in North Carolina who went through humongous disaster, the hurricane, and we offer them $750 apiece when their entire lives have been wiped out. It’s completely asinine to me,” he saidskip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThen there is Elon Musk. Even before he was nominated to head the new “Department of Government Efficiency”, some were questioning how long the egotistical billionaire would remain in Trump’s favour. But Shaffer is particularly keen on Musk carrying through his promise of deep cuts to government spending after the national debt rose by more than $2tn over the past year.“I was in DC this summer. I walked past this ginormous education department building every time I left my hotel. I thought there’s no reason for this to be here. If that money was spent in our local communities, the quality of education would skyrocket,” he said.Copley, too, is enthused at the prospect of Musk “cutting down the wasteful spending that happens in Washington”. He acknowledges that West Virginia, one of the poorest states in the US, is heavily reliant on federal aid to fund education, transport and social services. A relatively high proportion of people on low incomes in the state receive welfare payments and healthcare coverage.“I know that a lot of West Virginians receive money and receive those kind of payments, but I’m all for revamping those so that people don’t game the system and use them as lifelong crutches,” he said.For Ed Bisch the desire to tear down parts of the system is deeply personal. He lost his 18-year-old son Eddie to a prescription opioid overdose in 2001, an early victim of an epidemic that has claimed close to 900,000 lives. Bisch voted solidly Democratic all the way up to supporting Hillary Clinton in 2016 in the belief that the party would take on the big pharma interests that caused the opioid epidemic. But little changed.Then Bisch saw Trump in office and decided he was the president most likely to challenge the drug industry and what he sees as its corruption of American medicine and health regulation.Bisch is enthusiastic about Kennedy, who is a former heroin addict, and JD Vance as vice-president after he wrote a bestseller, Hillbilly Elegy, about growing up in a region blighted by drugs.He is also pleased by the nomination of Pam Bondi to be the US attorney general after Gaetz dropped out. As Florida’s attorney general, Bondi shut down the “pill mills” churning out opioid prescriptions at a time when more oxycodone pills were sold in Florida than all other US states combined.Bisch wants to see Bondi prosecute the Sackler family which owned the company that kicked off the opioid epidemic with the powerful narcotic OxyContin. He’s also counting on Kennedy to follow through on a pledge to “close the revolving door” between the drug industry and its regulators at the Food and Drug Administration which has been accused of allowing the epidemic to take off because of lax oversight and too close a relationship with the drug makers.Kennedy has repeatedly criticised the FDA for conflicts of interest, accusing it of putting the interests of the pharmaceutical industry ahead of the nation’s health.Then there is Trump’s promise to finish building the wall on the border with Mexico. That is primarily about immigration but Bisch said it would also help stem the flow of fentanyl, the synthetic opioid that is responsible for most overdose deaths these days.“I’m excited. Let’s finish the border wall. I agree when people say most of the fentanyl gets in through ports of entry not the open border but once we get the wall built and secure the border, then you can put more resources at the ports of entry. The bottom line is, you’ll never be able to stop it but reducing the supply is a proven way to reduce deaths,” he said.How the desire to see Trump take on a system that has increasingly come to resemble a corporate oligarchy will square with Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s authoritarian plan to impose rightwing control across the entire US government that would also enlarge the power of big business, remains to be seen. Trump has distanced himself from the plan even though members of his first administration were influential in its creation.Shaffer is no fan of Project 2025. He takes Trump assurances at face value and believes the next president will see that his supporters want to see the corporate grip on government broken.“The Democrats have leftwing crazies. We’ve got some wackos out there on the far right and they concocted this list of their priorities. There’s probably some good things in there but there’s a lot of screwball things. I don’t see those people coming to the table,” he said.“I think Trump is going to have enough free-thinkers and people that have already explicitly criticised a lot of the stuff that’s been going on out there. That will be his guiding force.” More

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      Trump picks Brooke Rollins to lead Department of Agriculture

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      Donald Trump has chosen Brooke Rollins, president of the America First Policy Institute, to be agriculture secretary.“As our next Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke will spearhead the effort to protect American Farmers, who are truly the backbone of our Country,” the US president-elect said in a statement.Trump’s nomination of Rollins marks the completion of his top cabinet picks for his incoming administration.If confirmed by the Senate, Rollins would lead a 100,000-person agency with offices in every county in the country, whose remit includes farm and nutrition programs, forestry, home and farm lending, food safety, rural development, agricultural research, trade and more. It had a budget of $437.2bn in 2024.The nominee’s agenda would carry implications for American diets and wallets, both urban and rural. Department of Agriculture officials and staff negotiate trade deals, guide dietary recommendations, inspect meat, fight wildfires and support rural broadband, among other activities.“Brooke’s commitment to support the American Farmer, defense of American Food Self-Sufficiency, and the restoration of Agriculture-dependent American Small Towns is second to none,” Trump said in the statement.In response to her nomination, Rollins wrote on X: “Thank you, Mr. President, for the opportunity to serve as the next U.S. Secretary of Agriculture. It will be the honor of my life to fight for America’s farmers and our Nation’s agricultural communities. This is big stuff for a small-town ag girl from Glen Rose, TX — truly the American Dream at its greatest.”She added: “Who’s ready to make agriculture great again!”The America First Policy Institute is a right-leaning thinktank whose personnel have worked closely with Trump’s campaign to help shape policy for his incoming administration. Rollins chaired the Domestic Policy Council during Trump’s first term.As agriculture secretary, Rollins would advise the administration on how and whether to implement clean fuel-tax credits for biofuels at a time when the sector is hoping to grow through the production of sustainable aviation fuel.The nominee would also guide next year’s renegotiation of the US-Mexico-Canada trade deal, in the shadow of disputes over Mexico’s attempt to bar imports of genetically modified corn and Canada’s dairy import quotas.Trump has said he again plans to institute sweeping tariffs that are likely to affect the farm sector.He was considering offering the role to the former US senator Kelly Loeffler, a staunch ally whom he chose to co-chair his inaugural committee, CNN reported on Friday.In a separate announcement on Saturday, Trump urged Randy Fine, a former gambling industry executive and current Florida state senator, to run in a special election to represent the state’s sixth congressional district in the House of Representatives.Trump’s endorsement of Fine comes after he named Mike Waltz, Florida’s current sixth congressional district representative, to serve as his national security adviser.Writing on Truth Social, Trump called Fine “an incredible voice for MAGA”.“Should he decide to enter this Race, Randy Fine has my Complete and Total Endorsement. RUN, RANDY, RUN!” Trump added. More

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      John Bolton rips into Trump’s pick for counter-terrorism chief Sebastian Gorka

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      Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton has laid into Sebastian Gorka, the president-elect’s pick for counter-terrorism chief, as a “conman” whose selection is not “going to bode well for counter-terrorism efforts when the [national security council’s] senior director is somebody like that”.Trump praised Gorka, an immigrant from Hungary, as a “tireless advocate for the America First Agenda and the MAGA Movement”.But Bolton came out swinging at Gorka on Friday. The neocon, who served in the Reagan, George W Bush and first Trump administrations, has set out his stall against many of Trump’s picks, including former Democrat and Iraq veteran Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence, and told CNN that he “wouldn’t have him in any US government”.Earlier this week, Bolton told NewsNation’s The Hill that up until Gorka was nominated by Trump as a deputy assistant to the president and the senior director for counter-terrorism, he would have said that Gabbard’s nomination “was the worst cabinet appointment in recent American history”.Bolton’s not alone in his criticism. Democratic National Committee spokesperson Alex Floyd called Gorka “a far-right extremist who is as dangerous as he is unqualified to lead America’s counter-terrorism strategy”.Gorka is outspokenly pro-Israel and supportive of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and has faced allegations of Islamophobia for supporting Trump’s 2017 Muslim travel ban that barred travel to the US for 90 days for visitors from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.Gorka also claimed that Islam is “not a religion of peace”. He’s come under fire for showing up at Trump’s 2017 inaugural ball wearing an honorary medal from the Hungarian nationalist organization Vitézi Rend and for a previous position serving as an adviser to the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán.Bolton said Gorka “needs a full FBI field background investigation” and his “education claims” need to be investigated.“I think he is a perfect example of somebody who owes his position purely to Donald Trump,” Bolton told the outlet. “He doesn’t display loyalty. He displays fealty. And that’s what Trump wants. …“He doesn’t want Gorka’s opinions, he wants Gorka to say ‘yes, sir’, and I’m fully confident that’s exactly what will happen no matter what it is Trump says.” More