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      Anti-opioid groups are ‘optimistic’ about Trump’s tariffs. Will the move help tackle the fentanyl crisis?

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      Anti-opioid campaigners in the US have welcomed Donald Trump’s threat to hit Mexico, China and Canada with increased trade tariffs if they do not curb the smuggling of the powerful drug driving the US opioid epidemic.Families and doctors grappling with a crisis that has claimed about 900,000 lives say the move may signal that a second Trump administration will finally get serious about tackling the flow of fentanyl into the US. But they also warn that much more needs to be done to reduce demand for opioids and to rein in the power of the pharmaceutical industry which created the epidemic.Trump said last week that he will issue an executive order on his return to the US presidency next month imposing a 25% tariff on goods from Mexico and Canada until their governments clamp down on the smuggling of fentanyl and other drugs into the US, and on people crossing the northern and southern borders illegally.The president-elect also said he will impose a 10% additional tariff on imports from China as the leading manufacturer of the precursor chemicals used by drug cartels to manufacture fentanyl, a highly potent synthetic opioid that is now the single largest cause of drug overdose deaths in the US.Ed Bisch, who lost his 18-year-old son Eddie to a prescription opioid overdose in 2001, said that tariffs are a sign that Trump “means business”.“I’m optimistic that the threat of substantial tariffs will lead to major cooperation in reducing the fentanyl poisoning of America,” he said.Bisch and other campaigners also say that some of Trump’s cabinet choices may signal a greater engagement with the crisis by the next administration, particularly as Robert F Kennedy Jr, who is nominated as health secretary, was a heroin user and the vice-president-elect, JD Vance, wrote a bestselling book, Hillbilly Elegy, about growing up in a household and region hit by drug addiction.Trump campaigned in 2016 and again this year on commitments to tackle the opioid epidemic which has devastated regions of America in ways that are often unseen in other parts. The crisis dragged entire communities deeper into poverty, drove up crime and greater dependency on welfare, and tore families apart.Millions of children have been raised by their grandparents because the intervening generation was imprisoned, dead or in no condition to parent. In West Virginia, the state worst hit by the epidemic, nearly half of all grandparents are raising their grandchildren.The opioid crisis has also played an important part in undermining public confidence in government institutions and medical practice in parts of the US because the epidemic grew out of the pharmaceutical industry pushing the wide prescribing of narcotic pain killers from which drug makers made billions of dollars with the complicity of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The epidemic then evolved as illegal supplies of heroin and then fentanyl drove up the death toll.But critics say Trump failed to follow through on his campaign promises in 2016 and his next administration will be a test of how really committed is he is on the issue in the face of what is likely to be major pushback from the drug industry.As president in 2017, Trump declared the opioid crisis a public health emergency.“No part of our society, not young or old, rich or poor, urban or rural has been spared this plague,” he said at the time.But two years later, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) criticised the Trump administration for a lack of coordination of efforts and failing to fulfill a legal requirement to issue a national drug control strategy.Robert Kent, who served as general counsel for the White House office of national drug control policy under Joe Biden, credits Trump with declaring the epidemic an emergency and establishing an opioid commission that issued guidelines on how to combat the crisis.“In Trump’s first term, he was the one who declared an opioid public health emergency, which is still in effect. The problem was there were no concrete actions taken specifically as a result. He didn’t put significant new resources into it,” he said.Kent said that the Biden administration put a greater emphasis on “harm reduction” such as the provision of overdose antidotes and test strips allowing drug users to detect fentanyl. But he fears those may be in danger from Republicans who see such measures as enabling drug use.Andrew Kolodny, director of Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing and one of the first doctors to raise the alarm about the dangers of mass prescribing prescription painkillers, said harm reduction was necessary but did not get to the root causes of the epidemic.“It’s not hard for Trump to do better than Biden did on opioids. There were some good things that came out of the Biden administration. It was nice to see the federal government move more in a direction of harm reduction. But beyond that there wasn’t really that much done so by Biden,” he said.“When Biden ran for office, he put out a platform on how he would address the opioid crisis if he was president, and it was an excellent platform. But he never really implemented the plan.”Kolodny said that if Trump wants to have a significant impact in reducing opioid addiction he needs to create cheaper and easier access to treatment.“The vast majority of people with opioid use disorder actually want help for it. The reason they keep using fentanyl is that it’s much easier to get fentanyl and cheaper to get fentanyl than it is to get yourself onto buprenorphine or methadone treatment or find a doctor or programme that will very quickly enroll you in treatment when you ask for it,” he said.Researchers are still trying to decipher a drop in overdose deaths in the US last year. They believe better treatment and prevention are playing a part. The Drug Enforcement Administration said earlier this month that the amount of fentanyl found laced into other drugs had dropped and that they were therefore less potent and dangerous. The DEA head, Anne Milgram, attributed that to the Biden administration’s targeting of Mexican cartels and their supply chains.But Kent is cautious.“There’s a lot of people running around because we’ve seen a slight reduction in overdose deaths feeling like that’s mission accomplished when we’re only losing 93,000 people versus 111,000 a year. I would never define that as success in my world. Even within those numbers, underserved communities are being higher impacted at this point. In Black and brown communities the numbers are going up while the other numbers are going down. So there’s work to be done,” he said.Kent said he agrees with the need for an increased focus on the border.“We need to increase the number of staff at the border, just for a whole bunch of reasons, including illicit drugs coming across. There needs to be an investment in screening technology. And there needs to be a continued effort with China, trying to convince China to work with its chemical companies to stop selling the chemical precursors to the Mexican cartels so they can create the fentanyl,” he said.Bisch and others whose lives have been hit by the opioid epidemic are also keen to see broader reform of a system that enabled the drug companies to push mass prescription of opioids on the public in ways not permitted in other countries.Bisch supports Trump’s nomination for attorney general, Pam Bondi, who as Florida’s attorney general cracked down on doctors and “pill mills” churning out opioid prescriptions to anyone who would pay. In 2010, Florida dispensed more opioid prescriptions than every other US state combined as people travelled from across the country to buy the painkillers in bulk. Bisch wants to see Bondi use federal laws to prosecute the drug company executives who made false claims about the safety of prescription opioids in order to get them approved.He also backs Trump’s nomination of Kennedy, who has accused the FDA of putting the financial interests of the pharmaceutical industry ahead of people’s health by effectively encouraging the prescribing of too many drugs and the selection of Marty Makary to head the FDA. Makary has said doctors in the US prescribe too many medications compared with the rest of the world.“The best way to lower drug costs in the US is to stop taking drugs we don’t need,” he told the US Senate in September.In nominating Makary, Trump said the “FDA has lost the trust of Americans and lost sight of its primary goal as a regulator”. He said Makary and Kennedy would work together to “properly evaluate harmful chemicals poisoning our nation’s food supply and drugs”.Bondi is expected to have a relatively easy path to approval by the US Senate. But Kennedy and Makary may face a more difficult time. Kennedy, in particular, will face scrutiny over his rejection of vaccines. But Kolodny said they will also be up against the pharmaceutical industry.“I’ll actually be shocked if Kennedy gets confirmed and if Makary gets confirmed for FDA commissioner because big pharma doesn’t want them, and big pharma has a lot of muscle on Capitol Hill,” he said. More

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      Wisconsin’s Ben Wikler joins race for Democratic National Committee chair

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      Wisconsin Democratic leader Ben Wikler joined the race to lead the Democratic National Committee on Sunday, promising “to take on Trump, Republican extremists, and move our country forward”, as the party looks to rebuild from its losses in the November election.In a video posted on social networks, Wikler, 43, touted his state party’s success in organizing to flip 14 state legislative seats and send Senator Tammy Baldwin back to Washington DC in November, and in previously campaigns to win control of the state supreme court and re-elect governor Tony Evers. Wikler, a former podcaster, Air America radio producer and headline writer for The Onion, also stressed his new media expertise.Wikler who has been involved in Democratic party politics since age 11, previously served as a producer on comedian-turned-politician Al Franken’s radio show and as Washington director for the progressive action group MoveOn, where he played a role in the successful battle to save the Affordable Care Act.“Our values – the core belief that our economy should work for working people, and that every person has inherent dignity and deserves freedom and respect – are American values,” Willer wrote on Bluesky. “But they’re not MAGA values. The richest and most powerful people want to divide us and enrich themselves.”“We’ve got to make sure that we are reaching people with the message that we are on their side and fighting for them,” Wikler told Reuters in a telephone interview.Wikler, who has served as chair of the Democratic party of Wisconsin since 2019, is among several candidates looking to replace Jaime Harrison, the current chair who is not seeking re-election when the party votes early next year.Former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, Minnesota Democratic chief Ken Martin and New York state senator James Skoufis also are vying to become the new Democratic chair.Democrats are trying to chart the way forward after losing the White House and control of the Senate, as well as failing to retake the House of Representatives.Wikler said the national party could learn from organizing efforts he has overseen in Wisconsin, even though Kamala Harris narrowly lost the state to Trump.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWikler said Democrats also need to focus on the president-elect’s economic agenda, which he claimed will favor wealthy Americans rather than working families.“For Democrats, this is a critical time to unite and fight back against Trump’s plans,” Wikler said.Wikler’s entry into the race was welcomed by the teachers union leader Randi Weingarten, who wrote that he “understands how to organize and communicate”, and journalist Connie Schultz, who knows Wikler from his time as spokesperson for her husband, Senator Sherrod Brown. More

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      Conspiracy theorist Kash Patel, Trump’s pick to lead FBI, faces Senate blowback

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      Donald Trump’s plan to nominate as FBI director the “deep state” conspiracy theorist Kash Patel, a virulent critic of the bureau who has threatened to fire its top echelons and shut down the agency’s headquarters, is facing blowback in Congress as US senators begin to flex their muscles ahead of a contentious confirmation process.Politicians from both main parties took to the Sunday talk shows to express starkly divergent views on Patel, whom Trump announced on Saturday as his pick to lead the most powerful law enforcement agency in the US. The move is dependent on the incumbent FBI chief, Christopher Wray, who Trump himself placed in the job in 2017, either being fired or resigning.It is already clear that confirming Patel through the US Senate is likely to be less than plain sailing. Mike Rounds, a Republican senator from South Dakota, indicated that Patel could face a tough confirmation battle.Rounds pointedly sang the praises of the existing FBI director in an interview with ABC’s This Week. He said that Wray, who still has three more years of his 10-year term to serve, was a “very good man”, adding that he had “no objections about the way that he is doing his job right now”.The senator also emphasised the separation of powers between president and Senate, signaling possible trouble for Patel. Rounds said he gave presidents “the benefit of the doubt”, but also emphasised that “we have a constitutional role to play … that’s the process”.Other Republican senators rallied to Patel’s side. Ted Cruz, the senator from Texas, told CBS’s Face the Nation that he believed Patel would be confirmed.“Patel is a very strong nominee to take on the partisan corruption of the FBI.”Bill Hagerty, a Republican senator from Tennessee, said on NBC’s Meet the Press that he would vote to confirm Patel. “Kash is the best at uncovering what’s happened to the FBI and I look forward to seeing him taking it apart,” he said.Patel is a Trump loyalist who has published children’s books featuring “King Donald”. He has long denigrated the FBI as a pillar of what he calls the “deep state” or the “corrupt ruling class”.In an interview with Shawn Ryan in September, Patel vowed to “shut down” the FBI’s headquarters in Washington DC and reopen the building the following day as a “museum of the deep state”.He has also threatened to use the power of federal law enforcement to go after those he claims are responsible for corrupting the federal government, a list of whom he published in his memoir. Jake Sullivan, Joe Biden’s current national security adviser, was among that list: Patel called him “one of the corrupt actors of the first order”.Sullivan was asked by ABC’s This Week whether he was worried personally about Patel’s potential leadership of the FBI, given the threats against him. He declined to comment, saying he was wholly focused on keeping the country safe in the remaining 50 days of his term in office.But he did highlight that Biden had kept Wray on as FBI chief, despite having inherited the official from Trump. Sullivan said that Wray served “with distinction, entirely insulated from politics or the partisan preferences of the current sitting president. This is a good, deep bipartisan tradition that President Biden has adhered to.”Jamie Raskin, a House Democrat from Maryland, challenged the claim by Trump and Patel that the FBI had been politically weaponised under Biden to go after Republicans. He pointed out on CNN’s State of the Union that over the past four years the FBI had prosecuted the disgraced Democratic senator from New Jersey, Bob Menendez, and the Texas Democrat Henry Cuellar.“I think that’s what they mean when they talk about politicization in the deep state – anybody who doesn’t do the will of Donald Trump,” Raskin said.According to an Axios report on Sunday, Trump had initially planned to appoint Patel as deputy FBI director but changed his mind after his pick to head the agency, the state attorney general of Missouri, Andrew Bailey, failed to impress him. Raising Patel to the number one position makes the move far more politically loaded.Despite the storm he is generating, Trump shows no sign of moderating his leadership choices for his upcoming administration. Over the weekend he tapped Charles Kushner, father of his son-in-law Jared Kushner and a convicted felon whom Trump pardoned in 2020, as US ambassador to France.On Sunday, Trump announced on Truth Social that he had chosen his daughter Tiffany’s father-in-law, Massad Boulos, to be senior adviser on Arab and Middle Eastern affairs. Boulos, a Lebanese billionaire, was active in Trump’s presidential campaign as a liaison with Arab American and Muslim leaders.Trump has also picked a county sheriff, Chad Chronister, from Florida to head the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). The agency will have a key role in attempting to fulfill Trump’s pledge to staunch the cross-border flow of fentanyl and other drugs into the US, which is already causing diplomatic tensions with Canada and Mexico.Chronister’s father-in-law, Edward DeBartolo, was pardoned by Trump three years ago on a 1998 conviction for involvement in a gambling fraud case. DeBartolo, the former owner of the San Francisco 49ers American football team, was fined $1m and suspended by the NFL for a year. More

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      Doug Burgum could soon be driving Trump’s ‘drill, baby, drill’ promises on public lands

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      View image in fullscreenOf all Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees so far, Doug Burgum has stood out for appearing to be one of the most conventional.The billionaire governor of North Dakota – like most picks to lead the Department of the Interior, the largest landowner in the US west – comes from a western state. He is not a conspiracy theorist, he hasn’t been investigated for sex trafficking. Unlike the president-elect’s pick to lead the Department of Energy, he is not a fracking CEO.“He’s not a lunatic,” said Patrick Donnelly, the great basin director for the Center for Biological Diversity. “He’s not someone wholly inappropriate for the job. But I fear the way his extractive agenda will play out in public lands.”Over the next four years, Burgum is poised to radically remake the agency that oversees 500m acres (200m hectares) of public lands, including national parks and wildlife refuges. A former software executive and one-time climate pragmatist, Burgum has become closely enmeshed with oil and gas industry executives.Burgum led the Trump campaign’s development of its energy policy. After Trump asked oil executives to steer $1bn toward his campaign, Burgum promised them Trump would halt Joe Biden’s “attack” on fossil fuels. As Trump makes good on his promise to “drill, baby, drill”, Burgum will be overseeing the department that expedites those drilling permits.“There’s going to be an effort to get every ounce of fuel out of the ground and burn it,” said Daniel R Patterson, a former environmental protection specialist for the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), a division of interior, who filed a whistleblower complaint during the first Trump administration. “And if we do that, we’re burning ourselves.”Burgum had long had an affinity for Teddy Roosevelt, the US president who established the national parks system and was a champion of the outdoors. Roosevelt was from New York, but had a special connection to the Dakotas, seeking solace in the region’s sweeping badlands.The 26th president was also known for his machiavellian political philosophy. “Teddy Roosevelt encouraged America to speak softly and carry a big stick,” Burgum said at the Republican national convention in Milwaukee. “Energy dominance will be the big stick that President Trump will carry.”In addition to managing the interior department, Trump has also tasked Burgum with serving as an “energy czar”, overseeing energy policy across the federal government at the helm of a new “national energy council”.He will be, in essence, a fox guarding the henhouse – in a position to tear down environmental regulations, and ramp up extraction. “We’re going to see a hard turn, to almost complete hostility to conservation interests,” said Patterson.With Burgum at the head of the department, Patterson added, “the direction from DC is going to be to permit as much resource exploitation as possible. And interior employees are going to be asked to push the boundaries of the law more.”Burgum’s zeal for extraction – and his focus on ramping up oil and gas production – could make him more efficient and effective than Trump’s previous interior secretaries. Trump’s first interior leader, Ryan Zinke, racked up 18 ethics investigations in just under two years. His replacement David Bernhardt was also dogged by allegations of ethics violations – and was investigated for carrying on his work as an oil industry lobbyist even after he joined the administration.Burgum’s relatively short political career has not been without scandal. During his short-lived presidential bid, he drew attention for offering $20 gift cards to people who would donate $1 to his campaign, so he would have enough individual donors to make the Republican primary debate stage. But until quite recently, Burgum was viewed as a relative moderate.Initially, he was known for his bipartisanship and pragmatism. Tribal leaders in North Dakota have credited him with smoothing tenuous relationships between tribal and state governments, and though he urged the federal government to take quicker action to clear out protesters of the Dakota Access Pipeline, he advocated against using force after taking over as governor toward the end of the standoff.He was never a progressive champion of climate action – but he promoted the same “all of the above” approach to energy that Democratic administration have supported, backing North Dakota’s powerful oil and gas industry while also encouraging the development of renewable energy infrastructure. In 2021, he set a goal that North Dakota would stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by 2030, becoming “carbon neutral” – advocating for a plan that retained the state’s fossil fuel industries while investing in carbon capture and storage technologies to offset emissions. At the time, environmental groups supported Burgum’s pledge, but noted the impracticality of relying on unproven carbon capture technology rather than a transition away from fossil fuels.But in the past year and a half, Burgum underwent a Maga conversion, becoming one of Donald Trump’s closest advisers on energy policy, coordinating closely with oil industry executives.At a now infamous meeting between Trump and oil executives were Burgum and Harold Hamm – the head of Oklahoma-based energy company Continental Resources. The two men are close allies in politics and business.Hamm has donated to Burgum’s political campaigns ($250,000 to his presidential bid), and help finance his pet projects (giving $50m to fund the Theodore Roosevelt library in North Carolina). His Continental Resources, which is the largest oil and gas leaseholder in North Dakota, also leases land from Burgum’s family for oil and gas extraction.And their chumminess blossomed as Hamm, who has become one of Trump’s biggest benefactors and advisers, reportedly helped talk up Burgum at Mar-a-Lago. As a profile of Hamm in the industry publication Hart Energy asserts: “When Harold Hamm talks US energy, President-Elect Donald Trump listens.”Burgum and Hamm worked in tandem to shore up support for Trump among industry executives. And a now infamous meeting with executives where Trump asked for $1bn in support, Burgum promised that if elected, Trump would “stop the hostile attack against all American energy” on “day one”, according to a recording obtained by the Washington Post.In his dual role as energy czar and interior secretary, environmentalists are bracing for him to gut regulations and speed-up permitting in ecologically vulnerable regions – further opening up the Arctic national wildlife refuge in Alaska for oil and gas exploration, or welcoming uranium and coal development in areas bordering the Grand Canyon.Trump has given Burgum one diktat: drill. Conservationists fear Burgum is likely to oblige not with sweeping action, but by way of a thousand cuts to environmental rules and regulations, allowing not only oil and gas companies, but also mining companies and other businesses unencumbered access to public lands.“The reality is, BLM approves everything that comes in front of them, and that’s true no matter who is present in the White House,” said Donnelly of the Center for Biological Diversity. Of greater concern, he said, is how that permitting happens.“That’s something I really fear, because the ramifications of the first Trump administration are still extremely present in our lives,” he said.During his first administration, Trump oversaw the rollback of more than 125 environmental rules, many with the aid of the interior department, whose secretary will wield vast power over how environmental regulations are interpreted and implemented.For example, the BLM created new rules to roll back restrictions on methane releases from oil and gas wells. A US district court eventually found the rule to be flawed, but then a Wyoming court struck down Obama-era restrictions on methane that preceded the Trump rule. All the while, companies were allowed to release methane unfettered.Burgum could also help Trump gut the interior department, reducing staff at key offices that oversee vast areas of public land – undermining the department’s ability to monitor public lands and enforce regulations. Career interior employees may also choose to retire or leave.“Public employees largely do these jobs because they believe in the public interest,” said Patterson. “If a new political boss comes in and tries to turn the agency into a giant bulldozer to pave the way for moneyed interests, they may not want to be a part of that.”There were 4,900 fewer employees at the interior department at the end of Trump’s first term compared to the beginning. “We know there’s a big emphasis and thrust of the incoming administration on reducing the size of the federal government, and we worry that BLM will once again be in the crosshairs,” said Robert Dewey, vice-president for government relations with the non-profit group Defenders of Wildlife. “If it is targeted, that would have an impact on their ability to balance conservation along with their other objectives. And we worry that wildlife would suffer as a consequence.”The administration faced several complaints and lawsuits over its rushed or inadequate environmental reviews, including over its environmental impact statement (EIS) for an oil and gas leasing program in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge that environmentalists called “slapdash”. In 2020, Patterson filed a whistleblower complaint alleging that the BLM district office ignored requirements in the National Environmental Policy Act, in one case allowing a gold mining operation to create toxic pit lake, rather than requiring it to build a more expensive and less polluting system for wastewater. Patterson also alleged retaliation, and the complaint was eventually dismissed in a legal settlement.“Right now, one of the only things standing in the way between this extractive boom, you know, ruining our public lands and driving species to extinction, are bedrock environmental laws,” said Donnelly. “And groups like ours, who are willing to stop these things.”If Burgum and the incoming Trump administration are able to dismantle those laws, he said, it could have consequences that persist well beyond the next administration. “This could be extremely devastating for the future,” he said. More

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      Trump nominates Jared Kushner’s father for ambassador to France

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      Donald Trump has nominated Charles Kushner, a businessman who is the father-in-law of Trump’s daughter Ivanka, to serve as US ambassador to France, the president-elect said on Saturday.Kushner, whose job requires Senate confirmation, is the latest of Trump’s picks to have close ties with the incoming president. Kushner’s son, Jared Kushner, is married to Ivanka Trump, and was a close advisor to Trump during his first presidency.“I am pleased to nominate Charles Kushner, of New Jersey, to serve as the US Ambassador to France. He is a tremendous business leader, philanthropist, & dealmaker, who will be a strong advocate representing our country & its interests,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social.“Charlie is the founder & chairman of Kushner Companies, one of the largest & most successful privately held real estate firms in the nation. He was recognized as New Jersey entrepreneur of the year by Ernst & Young, appointed to the US Holocaust Memorial Council, & served as a commissioner, & chairman, of the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey, as well as on the boards of our top institutions, including NYU [New York University].”Kushner no longer serves on the board of NYU. In 2005, he pleaded guilty to 18 counts of illegal campaign contributions and tax evasion, as well as witness tampering after he retaliated against his brother-in-law, William Schulder, who was cooperating with federal investigators.According to the US justice department, Kushner admitted to hiring a sex worker to seduce Schulder, videotaping the encounter and sending the tape to Schulder’s wife – Kushner’s sister. He was sentenced to two years in prison.Trump pardoned Kushner in 2020, stating that he “has been devoted to important philanthropic organizations and causes”.Kushner donated $100,000 to a pro-Trump group in 2015, and $1m to a pro-Trump super Pac in 2023.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Congratulations to Charlie, his wonderful wife Seryl, their 4 children, & 14 grandchildren,” Trump wrote in his post announcing the nomination. Trump did not mention that three of those grandchildren are also Trump’s grandchildren. More

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      Trump defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth’s mother called him ‘an abuser of women’

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      The family dynamics of Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense, have burst out into the open after an email from his mother criticizing her son over his treatment of women and calling him an “abuser of women” was leaked to a newspaper.A 2018 email from Penelope Hegseth accused her son of routinely mistreating women and displaying a lack of character.“You are an abuser of women – that is the ugly truth and I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego,” Penelope Hegseth wrote in the email obtained by the New York Times.“You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth,” she added, advising her son to “get some help and take an honest look at yourself”.Penelope Hegseth told the New York Times she had written the message “in anger, with emotion” while her son was going through an acrimonious divorce from his second wife, Samantha, the mother of three of his children, and had immediately apologized to her son in a second email.She rejected her earlier characterization of her son to the outlet. “It is not true. It has never been true,” she said. She added: “I know my son. He is a good father, husband.” She said that publishing the contents of the first email was “disgusting”.The release of the letter comes ahead of Hegseth’s confirmation hearings in the Senate after Trump takes office on 20 January, in which the veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars will come under scrutiny.Hegseth, a former Fox & Friends host, is already facing questions over payments he reportedly made to a woman who accused him of sexual assault – an encounter that he insists was consensual.Hegseth’s attorney has said his client was “visibly intoxicated” at the time of the incident in a Monterey, California, hotel in 2017 and police who had looked into the woman’s claim had concluded that “the complainant had been the aggressor in the encounter”.In a statement, Hegseth’s lawyer, Timothy Parlatore, said his client had agreed to pay an undisclosed amount to the woman because he feared that revelation of the matter “would result in his immediate termination from Fox”.Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung told the Times that the outlet was “despicable” for publishing “an out-of-context snippet” of Penelope Hegseth’s exchange with her son. More

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      Is it safe to have a child? Americans rethink family planning ahead of Trump’s return

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      Chris Peterson wasn’t surprised that Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election. But he was surprised by how quickly he and his wife started asking one another: should we try to have another baby before a possible nationwide abortion ban takes effect? Or should we give up on having a second child?Peterson and his wife, who live in North Carolina, are thousands of dollars in debt because their first child needed to spend weeks in the hospital after being born prematurely. They had wanted to pay off that debt and wait a few years before having a second baby. But now, reproductive rights are again in the balance – Trump has said he would veto a nationwide abortion ban, but his allies are emboldened to push through more restrictions.Peterson is terrified of what is to come, and that his wife might not be able to get the medical care she needs if they decide to conceive again. “We should be happy thinking about expanding our family,” said Peterson, who is, like his wife, in his late 30s. “We shouldn’t be worried that we’re going to have medical complications and I might end up being a single father.”Peterson is not the only American who, in the weeks after the US election, is rethinking plans around having children. On 6 November, the number of people booking vasectomy appointments at Planned Parenthood health centers spiked by 1,200%, IUD appointments by more than 760% and birth control implant appointments by 350%, according to a statement provided to the Guardian by Planned Parenthood. Traffic to Planned Parenthood’s webpages on tubal ligation, vasectomies and IUDs has also surged by more than 1,000% for each.After the election, the Guardian heard from dozens of people in the US reconsidering whether to have children. Most pointed to fears over the future of reproductive healthcare, the economy and the climate in explaining their concerns.“I hesitate to bring more children into a world with an uncertain ecological future, assuming that the incoming administration pulls out of the Paris climate accord and ceases to support green energy transition,” a 34-year-old Minnesota mother of one wrote to the Guardian in response to a callout inviting readers to share their thoughts about post-election family planning. Trump pulled the US out of the historic agreement during his first administration; doing so again – which Trump has promised to do – could “cripple” the it, according to the UN secretary general.“We have two children and I have desperately wanted a third – but now I am fearful of being able to get adequate care if I get pregnant,” wrote another woman who lives in Louisiana. “I can’t risk leaving my two children behind if [I] die because I can’t get adequate care here. It feels like a dystopian novel, and yet here we are.”These worries are not necessarily new. In 2023, a Pew Research Center survey found that 47% of 18- to 49-year-old US adults say they are unlikely to ever have kids – a steep jump from 2018, when 37% said the same. Of the people who are unlikely to have kids, 38% said “concerns about the state of the world” were a major part of their decision-making. Roughly a quarter pointed to fears about the environment.Working in disaster relief, Catherine regularly sees the effects of the climate crisis up close. “I’m in Washington DC right now and flowers are blooming. It’s November. This should not be happening,” she said in an interview. “While I have always wanted kids, that choice has become tinged with a level of despair and anger that I didn’t have two years ago.”She continued: “Why would I bring a child into this world that is dying?”Earlier this year, Catherine got a copper IUD, which can block pregnancy for more than a decade.Like developed countries around the world, the United States is in the midst of a fertility slump. In 2023, the US fertility rate fell by 3% and reached a historic low.But this decline is not evenly distributed across the political spectrum. After Trump won the presidency in 2016, births in Republican-leaning counties rose sharply compared to those that leaned Democratic. Today, Democrats are likelier than Republicans to be childfree – a trend that, the Washington Post has hypothesized, is likely also related to the rightward drift of big-family white Protestants.That the outcome of the 2024 election has spurred such fear and hesitation around having children is apt – not only are US political parties on diverging paths when it comes to babies, but the election itself was in many ways a referendum on families and fertility. While Kamala Harris made support for abortion rights a key plank in her platform, Donald Trump promised “baby booms” and pledged to give people “baby bonuses”. Trump’s vice-president-elect, JD Vance, has built his political brand on pronatalism, a movement that urges people to have babies to benefit the greater good. Vance has a track record of deriding “childless cat ladies” and raising the alarm about the US fertility rate.“We want more babies because children are good,” Vance once said. “And we believe children are good, because we are not sociopaths.”M, a Texan mother of three who asked to go by her first initial because she feels stigmatized for voting for Trump, hopes that Trump’s victory will improve the economy to the point that she and her husband can afford to have a fourth child.“I still have a child in childcare now – like daycare – and just seeing those costs rise year after year since 2020, it’s been really hard for our family to consider having another baby,” M said. “The possibility of that being alleviated through better economic policy or even just those costs being taken away somewhere else – whether it’s groceries or utilities to whatever it is – that really makes it possible for us to consider having another kid.”M, who opposes abortion, feels confident that she would be able to get adequate care if she had a miscarriage. (Since Roe v Wade fell, at least three women have died in Texas after doctors reportedly delayed treating them for miscarriages or gave them inadequate miscarriage care.) The climate crisis worries M less than making sure her kids have access to clean water and healthy, chemical-free food.Not everyone reconsidering having kids has totally ruled it out. N, a 26-year-old from New York, is for now only delaying her plans to have kids until after Trump leaves office. (She asked to go by her first initial because she previously had an abortion.) Ruth, who has a newborn at home and is married to an undocumented person, fears abortion bans and her husband being deported – but still wants to keep the conversation about having a second kid alive.“We want to be able to dream of having a family the way we want to, on our terms,” said Ruth, who lives in Florida and asked to be identified by her middle name due to her husband’s immigration status. “My husband being an immigrant – we feel that it shouldn’t foreclose our options to build a family. We have just as much of a right to build a family on our terms as anyone else.” More

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      Trump cabinet criticized as hodgepodge team unified only by ‘absolute fealty’ to him

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      During Donald Trump’s first administration, his vice-president became the target of an angry mob amid calls for him to be hanged. His top diplomat was fired via Twitter and branded “dumb as a rock”. His first attorney general was given his marching orders and called “very weak” and “disgraceful”.Despite it all, Trump has had no trouble recruiting a team eager to serve when he returns to the White House in January, even if his initial pick for attorney general, Matt Gaetz, was forced to back out amid allegations of sexual misconduct.Trump’s cabinet for his second term is nearly complete just three weeks after his stunning election victory over Kamala Harris. To his Maga (Make America great again) followers it is a team of all the talents, poised to enforce an agenda of mass deportations, gutting the federal bureaucracy and “America first” isolationism.To critics with memories of Trump’s first cabinet, however, it is an ideological hodgepodge glued together only by unquestioning fealty to the incoming 78-year-old commander-in-chief. Some have compared it to the gathering of exotic aliens in the Star Wars cantina. Others predict they will soon be fighting like rats in a sack as different factions compete for Trump’s attention.“The same thing that happened last time will happen this time,” said Rick Wilson, co-founder of the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group. “He cannot resist chaos. It is his drug. He will eventually start doing what he always does and turn on different people and start sandbagging his own choices for these various jobs.“It’s that pattern he has. He comes out one day and says, ‘I love so and so,’ and then the next he’s talking to his friends saying, ‘Hey, you think Tillerson’s doing a good job or is he screwing me over?’ Those things are patterns we’ve seen in Trump’s personal life, his business life and his prior administration. An 80-year-old man is not going to be a changed person.”Eight years ago, Trump arrived in Washington as a political neophyte in need of a helping hand. He appointed a cabinet that included traditional conservatives of whom he knew little. This time, he returns as a former president who has transformed the Republican party and prioritises unwavering loyalty and adherence to his agenda over qualifications and experience.This was most obvious sign of this was the selection of Gaetz for attorney general, a position key to Trump’s plans to deport undocumented immigrants, pardon January 6 rioters and seek retribution against those who prosecuted him over the past four years. Gaetz’s replacement, Pam Bondi, is a longtime ally who declared after Trump was criminally charged that the “investigators will be investigated”.View image in fullscreenThere was a similar motivation behind the choice of Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host, for defence secretary despite him having no track record in government. Hegseth fits with a drive to purge perceived “woke” policies from the military. He has denied allegations made in a police report that he sexually assaulted a woman in 2017 at a conference in California.Trump’s selections are sending mixed economic signals. The nomination of the Wall Street billionaire Scott Bessent to head the treasury implies an attempt to reassure markets (it is also notable because Bessent used to work for George Soros, the target of countless rightwing conspiracy theories). But Howard Lutnick, nominated for commerce secretary, has praised the president-elect’s proposed use of tariffs. Vice-president-elect JD Vance is also among those pushing a more protectionist agenda on trade.And Trump’s pick of Lori Chavez-DeRemer, a congresswoman from Oregon, as labor secretary could be one of the rare selections that draws bipartisan support. She is considered one of the most union-friendly Republicans in Congress, and her selection was viewed as a way for Trump to reward union members who voted for him.On foreign policy, Trump made a relatively conventional choice in Marco Rubio for secretary of state. The Florida senator has advocated in the past for a muscular foreign policy with respect to foes including China, Iran and Cuba. But the president-elect also intends to put Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democrat who has previously made statements sympathetic to Russia, as director of national intelligence.Other picks include Brooke Rollins, president of the America First Policy Institute thinktank, as agriculture secretary; Doug Burgum, a wealthy former software company executive, as interior secretary; and Linda McMahon, former chief executive of World Wrestling Entertainment, as education secretary – overseeing an agency that Trump pledged to eliminate.Then there is Robert Kennedy Jr, an anti-vaccine activist and sceptic of established science. Kennedy’s career as an environmental lawyer could put him at odds with Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” philosophy and figures such as Lee Zeldin, set to lead the Environmental Protection Agency with a mandate to slash environmental regulation. Kennedy has also been condemned by Mike Pence, the former vice-president, and other social conservatives for supporting abortion rights.Outside the cabinet, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s “Department of Government Efficiency”, while lacking official authority, signals a strong push for drastic budget cuts and deregulation. And despite campaign trail denials, Trump has embraced Project 2025, a controversial plan from the Heritage Foundation thinktank, by appointing figures such as Russell Vought as director of the Office of Management and Budget.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe person who will have to make sense of it all is Susie Wiles, a longtime Florida political operative who will become the first woman to serve as White House chief of staff. She will hope to avoid the fate of chiefs of staff who failed to last the course of Trump’s first term as, like a sports coach, she seeks to make disparate players gel into a cohesive whole.In an analysis for the New York Times, David Sanger, who has covered five US presidents, identified “a revenge team”, “a calm-the-markets team” and “a government shrinkage team”, commenting: “How these missions will mesh and where they will collide is one of the biggest unknowns of the incoming administration.”But others argue that the cabinet’s range of experiences and worldviews will pale into insignificance when set against their devotion to the Trump cult. Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist, said: “Regardless of whatever individual ideological leanings these people have had at varying points in their adult lives, it’s largely irrelevant because the only litmus test we have seen put forward is absolute fealty to Donald Trump.“As we have seen in the Republican party overall, absolute fealty to Donald Trump overshadows any ideological belief. We could take almost every issue that used to be a part of the Republican party and show how the party has moved to a diametrically opposite position. This is not a party governed by ideology any more. It is governed by personality. It is governed by loyalty to Donald Trump.”Bardella, a former Republican congressional aide, added: “They’re all going to get in a room and they’re just going to go: ‘Here’s what we think. What do you think, boss? Oh, OK, well, that’s what we’re all going to do.’ The idea that there’s going to be ideologically rooted debate, vigorous debate happening in the Trump administration is absurd. It’s laughable.”Notably, Trump’s cabinet is more diverse than in his first term, although it again has only three people of colour in secretary positions. Rubio would be the first Latino to serve as America’s top diplomat; Bessent could become the first openly gay Republican cabinet member confirmed by the Senate; Gabbard would be the first director of national intelligence from the Pacific Islander community.But seasoned Trump watchers detect no method in the madness and suspect that the former reality TV star will once again act on impulse and thrive on conflict. Chris Whipple, the author of The Gatekeepers, a book about White House chiefs of staff, said: “I don’t think there’s any evidence that Trump has learned anything about governing since his first term.“There’s a lot of wishful thinking among a lot of commentators that OK, he’s had four years in office, he learned a lot, he’s had all this time to plan with Project 2025 and the America First Policy Institute and he’s got his act together. I just don’t think that’s true. I don’t see any evidence that there’s any sort of plan here other than ‘this guy looks good for that job, and Robert F Kennedy Jr has got a cool last name’.” More