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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

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      Abandoning Ukraine means ‘infinitely higher’ long-term security costs, MI6 chief says

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      Abandoning Ukraine would jeopardise British, European and American security and lead to “infinitely higher” costs in the long term, the head of MI6 has warned in a speech that amounted to a plea to Donald Trump to continue supporting Kyiv.Richard Moore, giving a rare speech, said he believed Vladimir Putin “would not stop” at Ukraine if he was allowed to subjugate it in any peace talks involving the incoming US Republican administration.“If Putin is allowed to succeed in reducing Ukraine to a vassal state, he will not stop there. Our security – British, French, European and transatlantic – will be jeopardised,” Moore said during an address given in Paris alongside his French counterpart.The spy chief was touted earlier this week as a possible surprise appointment as the UK’s ambassador to the US, though he is not thought to be pressing for the job. The former Labour minister Peter Mandelson is considered the frontrunner for a critical role at a delicate time in transatlantic relations.Moore has served as the head of MI6 for four years in what is normally considered a five-year job. At the start of his tenure he overlapped with the Trump adviser Richard Grenell, who was the acting director of national intelligence.Trump has complained about the expense of supporting Kyiv and said repeatedly that he wants to end the war, claiming he could do so “within 24 hours”. JD Vance, the vice-president-elect, has suggested freezing the conflict on the current frontlines, and denying Ukraine Nato membership for an extended period.“The cost of supporting Ukraine is well known,” said Moore. “But the cost of not doing so would be infinitely higher. If Putin succeeds, China would weigh the implications, North Korea would be emboldened and Iran would become still more dangerous.”A key British argument to the incoming Trump administration is to try to link the war in Ukraine with US concerns about the rising military might of China, emphasising that the arrival of North Korean troops is bringing authoritarianism from Asia into what was previously a European conflict.Moore emphasised the UK’s history of intelligence cooperation with France in a speech to commemorate the 120th anniversary of the Entente Cordiale, but he was also careful to emphasise that he expected UK-US intelligence cooperation to be unchanged regardless of any political tensions.“For decades the US-UK intelligence alliance has made our societies safer; I worked successfully with the first Trump administration to advance our shared security and look forward to doing so again,” Moore told his audience at the UK embassy, a short walk from the Élysée Palace, the official home of the French president.The spy chief’s public presence in the French capital reflects a wider political rapprochement between the British prime minister and the French president. After Trump’s victory, Keir Starmer met Emmanuel Macron in France where the two discussed Ukraine amid reports that the Republicans would like European soldiers to act as peacekeepers if a ceasefire was agreed.Moore said Putin’s goal was to “challenge western resolve” and that western spy agencies had “recently uncovered a staggeringly reckless campaign of Russian sabotage in Europe” – a reference to a mixture of arson, assassination and kidnap plots, which included a fire at a DHL warehouse in Birmingham caused by an incendiary device hidden in a package sent at the behest of Russia.Moscow has said its demands regarding Ukraine remain unchanged. Earlier this month, the Kremlin said its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was the “direct result” of a Nato policy that aimed at “creating a staging ground against Russia on Ukrainian soil”.Russia continues to demand “demilitarisation and denazification” of Ukraine, and in previous peace negotiations said Kyiv’s military should be reduced to 50,000. It also claims the territory of four eastern and southern Ukrainian provinces, Donetsk, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia and Luhansk, of which only the fourth is fully occupied. More

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      Trump cabinet picks shaped by new power centers in his orbit

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      Donald Trump’s picks for the incoming administration are being shaped by a combination of different power centers including one-man influences like top Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn and combined groups led by chief of staff Susie Wiles and vice-president-elect JD Vance.The president-elect appears to have settled on a number of cabinet nominees himself without being aggressively pushed by advisers, including Pete Hegseth for defense secretary, Marco Rubio for secretary of state and Russ Vought to lead the Office of Management and Budget.But for other cabinet roles or major White House positions for which Trump did not have a clear preference or a frontrunner in mind, a handful of individuals with outsized influence have come to dominate the decision-making in meetings and interviews being held at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.There are still factions, according to half a dozen people involved in transition planning, though they have been nowhere near as concrete as they were in 2017, when there were clear demarcations between Trump’s family, the Republican National Committee, establishment Republicans and people allied with Trump’s strategist Steve Bannon.And in recent months, the previously distinct camp informally led by Wiles, who has had influence over West Wing picks and some cabinet roles, and the other camp led by Vance have combined and engulfed the wider Trump orbit, the people said.“It’s ever-shifting sands of allegiance. The people who you think are your friends may not be the case in 24 hours. We’re all friends but none of us are friends,” said one person adjacent to the Trump team.Although there are people in Trump’s orbit who disagree with Epshteyn, there is universal acknowledgment that he has had significant influence in the first weeks of the presidential transition, a reflection of Trump’s appreciation for his help in coordinating the defeat of the criminal cases against him.When Trump floated the idea of having the congressman Matt Gaetz for attorney general, Epshteyn was supportive of him during a round-trip flight from Palm Beach, Florida, to Washington when the president-elect announced he was nominating Gaetz.View image in fullscreenAfter the Gaetz nomination sank in the face of holdout Senate Republicans refusing to confirm him over sexual misconduct allegations, Trump nominated as a replacement former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi – who has been friendly over the years with Epshteyn.Epshteyn has also played key roles in finalizing the leadership at the justice department, recommending that Trump keep his personal lawyers in key jobs: Todd Blanche for deputy attorney general, Emil Bove for the principal deputy position and John Sauer for solicitor general.One through-line about those lawyers was that they were successful in delaying until after the election the federal criminal cases against Trump, which were dismissed on Monday. But the other was that they were all recruited by Epshteyn.Epshteyn, whose physically imposing presence is regularly fitted into a navy three-piece suit, has flexed his power away from the department as well, recommending Bill McGinley to be the next White House counsel.Epshteyn has told associates that the choices are for Trump to make. Some of the picks he has suggested have been names endorsed by other allies or people who have appeared on his longtime friends Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast.From the outside, Bannon pushed for McGinley to be White House counsel and may yet get another victory if Trump picks Kash Patel, a regular guest on War Room, for the FBI director or the deputy FBI director roles for which he remains in the running, the Guardian has reported.Bannon lobbied for Vought to lead the Office of Management and Budget and, in a particularly audacious play, managed to get Sebastian Gorka, the deeply polarizing national security aide from the first Trump administration, into the incoming team as the senior counter-terrorism director.He also played an instrumental role in bringing Scott Bessent to the fore, according to a person directly familiar with the matter. Bannon made the first introduction to Trump years ago, while his allies have advocated for him at Mar-a-Lago and pushed his agenda.View image in fullscreenBut a main power center for cabinet picks is widely seen to rest with JD Vance’s crew, which pushed for Bessent to be named as treasury secretary and Brendan Carr to lead the Federal Communications Commission, among others.The Vance crew is informally said to involve Trump’s eldest son, Don Jr – who pushed for Vance to be his father’s running mate – and Don Jr’s close advisers including Arthur Schwartz and Andrew Surabian, as well as former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.In addition to being seen as getting Bessent the nod when Trump still had his doubts, the Vance crew have earned additional juice with Trump in probably securing enough Republican votes for Hegseth to be confirmed as defense secretary, despite another set of sexual misconduct allegations.For West Wing picks, the incoming White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, has extended her personal influence with Trump. Wiles has mostly been able to get the staff of her choosing without having to fight against competing interests.Wiles’s top aides have landed in deputy chief of staff roles, including James Blair for legislative policy, Taylor Budowich for presidential personnel and Steven Cheung as communications director – although the factions are amorphous and Budowich and Cheung are also close to the Vance crew.Then there are individuals – relative newcomers to the Trump orbit – who have been in transition meetings at Mar-a-Lago as a result of their unique situations: Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, and Howard Lutnick, the chief executive of Cantor Fitzgerald, who is also the co-chair of the Trump transition team.By weighing in on major cabinet picks, Musk has gotten on the nerves of some Trump loyalists, including Epshteyn, who have complained that the billionaire knows little of the Trump agenda they are trying to bring about and has little idea about who would be best placed to enact it.Lutnick has retained his authority through his transition co-chair role, although he recently engaged in some accidental self-sabotage by pushing too hard to be treasury secretary and appeared to have been caught in a leak investigation over the nominee for secretary of agriculture.Trump was irritated by Musk’s post on X pushing Lutnick for treasury secretary, which gave an opening for his main rival Bessent to secure the job instead. Still, Lutnick has continued to be close to Trump and last week was named commerce secretary.Musk, who is staying off-site in Palm Beach, has become more judicious with his interactions with Trump since that episode and after he secured himself his own role to lead the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency”. More

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      Sanctuary cities respond to Trump deportation plans: ‘We’re preparing to defend our communities’

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      Mike Johnston, the mayor of Denver, joined a drumbeat of local leaders in left-leaning cities across the country earlier this month to say he’s willing to protest the incoming Trump administration’s expected mass deportation efforts.He told local outlet Denverite that Denver police would be “stationed at the county line” to keep federal authorities out. “It’s like the Tiananmen Square moment with the rose and the gun, right?” he said. He then walked back the comments about using local police, but still said he would protest deportations – even being willing to go to jail for it.“I’m not afraid of that and I’m also not seeking that,” he told 9News.Donald Trump’s “border czar”, Tom Homan, said that’s one area where he and Johnston agree. “He’s willing to go to jail, I’m willing to put him in jail,” Homan told Fox on Tuesday.The back and forth is indicative of what’s to come, as liberal cities and states plan to push back against Trump’s mass deportation plans. The resistance will likely come with a backlash from Trump, who could withhold federal funds or, as Homan threatened, arrest local leaders who stand in his way. Trump’s team is reportedly figuring out ways the president could unilaterally remove federal resources from Democratic cities that don’t go along with deportation plans.The stature is not new for some cities. Some have had so-called “sanctuary city” policies in place since before Trump’s first term, promising not to aid federal immigration and customs enforcement agents as they seek to detain and deport immigrants. Some additionally have programs to provide support to migrants and to manage what data they collect on undocumented populations.Other cities and states choose to cooperate with agents by providing them information and resources to identify and detain migrants – and some state laws bar cities from adopting sanctuary policies. Texas, for instance, has offered up state land to use for deportation facilities.Sanctuary policies can slow deportations and, local officials hope, deter immigration agents from targeting their communities because operations there would encounter organized resistance and cost more money to carry out.“They work – that’s why the Trump administration hates them,” said Naureen Shah, the deputy director of government affairs for the American Civil Liberties Union. “The Biden administration doesn’t like those policies either.”For his second term, Trump and his appointees have threatened a more forceful and broad deportation plan, though they have not offered details on what it will look like. Trump has said he will activate the military to carry out deportations, and there are likely to be flashy raids in Democratic cities that defy him.ICE has limited resources and has historically preferred to conduct raids in localities where it has local cooperation, though in his first term, Trump still sought to deport people from cities that opposed deportations. Immigration advocates expect a blend of these two strategies – with some showdowns in “sanctuary” places as a show of force.“Some of the raids will be in the red states where they have a lot of support from state and local law enforcement, because that’s just going to help them reach the numbers that they want to reach,” Shah said. “They’re also going to want to make people feel very afraid and very unsafe in the blue states. They’re going to want to create that sense that there is no safe sanctuary. That’s part of their game. So I don’t think that we should be comfortable in any part of the country.”What cities are doingAround the country, mayors and city councils are discussing how they can protect local immigrants from a mass deportation campaign. Cities cannot stop federal authorities from deporting people, but depending on state laws, they can refuse to use local resources or voluntarily provide information to assist in these operations. In Los Angeles, the city council approved a sanctuary policy earlier this month, with one council member saying the city would be “hardening our defenses” against Trump.Homan spoke out against the city on Newsmax. “If you don’t wanna help, get the hell outta the way,” he told the rightwing outlet. “If I gotta send twice as many officers to LA because we’re not getting any assistance, then that’s what we’re going to do. We got a mandate. President Trump is serious about this. I’m serious about this. This is gonna happen with or without you.”Chicago’s Democratic leaders have reignited trainings similar to those communities there went through during Trump’s first term. The trainings are designed to teach people how to spot and respond to immigration enforcement actions.Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, an alderman on Chicago’s city council, said a local training in mid-November drew nearly 600 people – six times as many as the first training in 2017. The group is also getting started earlier.“Trump is promising massive deportations on day one, and we’re preparing to defend our communities on day one,” he said.During Trump’s first term, hundreds of people in Ramirez-Rosa’s ward were ready to stand against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) using tactics such as bicycle brigades, which ultimately were not needed at that time. Still, being organized can serve as a deterrent to immigration agents, who want the lowest cost and easiest operations possible, he said. “Ultimately, the organized community is the safest community,” Ramirez-Rosa said.Slowing down deportations means fewer people are deported, though he acknowledges the policies can only go so far. “At the end of the day, nothing can preclude federal immigration agents from coming into your community, pulling people over, knocking on people’s doors. No local law can prohibit the federal government from enforcing immigration law in your community or in your neighborhood.”He said local officials should make sure policies are ready when Trump takes office, but also preparing the community to organize against deportations and engage in nonviolent civil disobedience. They should also be figuring out what local resources they can use to help migrants through legal clinics or cash assistance, while being mindful about the data they collect and how it could be accessed by federal authorities to find and deport migrants, he said.“We, as residents, as US citizens, really do need to be thinking about how do we leverage our collective power to defend our immigrant neighbors?” Ramirez-Rosa said. “Do we surround Ice vehicles when they come into our neighborhood? Those are all risks that US citizens in particular should be thinking about taking at this time. But of course, doing that in a way that is strategic and organized, peaceful and really mitigates the harm, particularly towards undocumented people.”What Trump could do in responseTrump has said he will call a national emergency and then use the military to help carry out a mass deportation campaign. The use of the military, in particular, would bring up a host of legal questions.“The use of the military on domestic soil should worry all of us, but there’s plenty of harm that the Trump administration could seek to do just by using state and local law enforcement as the force multiplier to mass deportation,” Shah said. “And so sealing off access to the extent possible is going to be significant. It slows them down. It stymies their ability to act at the scale and speed that they want to.”The Trump administration is likely to try to deny federal funds to cities and states to get them to play ball. One idea floated in Project 2025, the conservative manifesto, called for withholding federal emergency assistance grants as a way to compel cities to detain undocumented immigrants and share sensitive data with the federal government for immigration enforcement purposes.The second Trump administration is coming into office emboldened by a strong electoral college win and a US supreme court ruling that granted a president immunity from criminal charges for actions taken in his official capacity.But the Trump administration will still need Congress’s help to expand their authority. A key test will be whether Congress agrees to take away funding from cities that don’t want to participate in deportation efforts, Shah said.“We’re going to be firing on all cylinders, and we’ll answer their blitz of policies with our own blitz.” More

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      Mexican president claims ‘no potential tariff war’ with US after call with Trump

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      Claudia Sheinbaum has said her “very kind” phone conversation with Donald Trump, in which they discussed immigration and fentanyl, means “there will not be a potential tariff war” between the US and Mexico.The president of Mexico spoke to reporters on Thursday following Trump’s threat earlier in the week to apply a 25% tariff against Mexico and Canada, and an additional 10% tariff against China, when he takes office in January if the countries did not stop all illegal immigration and fentanyl smuggling into the US.Trump, in a post on Truth Social on Wednesday, claimed that during the phone call with Sheinbaum she had “agreed to stop Migration through Mexico, and into the United States, effectively closing our Southern Border”.During her Thursday address Sheinbaum clarified she did not agree to shut down the border.“Each person has their own way of communicating,” Sheinbaum said. “But I can assure you, I guarantee you, that we never – additionally, we would be incapable of doing so – proposed that we would close the border in the north [of Mexico], or in the south of the United States. It has never been our idea and, of course, we are not in agreement with that.”She added that the two did not discuss tariffs, but that the conversation with Trump had reassured her that no tit-for-tat tariff battle would be needed in future.On Monday this week, Trump threatened to impose a 25% percent tariff on Mexico until drugs, including fentanyl, and undocumented immigrants “stop this Invasion of our Country”. He declared that Mexico and Canada should use their power to address drug trafficking and migration and, until they do, “it is time for them to pay a very big price!”The following day, Sheinbaum suggested Mexico could retaliate with tariffs of its own.On Wednesday, however, the conversation between Sheinbaum and Trump was “very kind”, the Mexican president said. She said she told Trump of the various migration initiatives her government has undertaken, including providing resources and support to central American countries and to migrants arriving in Mexico. Potential immigrants “will not reach the northern border, because Mexico has a strategy”, Sheinbaum said.Trump “recognized this effort” by the Mexican government, Sheinbaum added.She also said Trump expressed interest in the government-driven programs to address fentanyl addiction and overdoses in Mexico. And she raised the problem of American-made weapons entering Mexico from the US to be used by drug cartels.Sheinbaum further added that she encouraged Trump to stop the blockades against Cuba and Venezuela, since “people suffer and it leads to the phenomenon of migration”.Asked by a reporter from Rolling Stone magazine that quoted anonymous Trump-aligned sources discussing a “soft invasion” of Mexico by deploying the US military inside the country against drug trafficking groups, Sheinbaum dismissed the idea, calling it “entirely a movie”.“What I base myself on is the conversation – the two conversations – that I had with President Trump, and then, at the moment, the communication we will have with his work team and when he takes office,” Sheinbaum said. “We will always defend our sovereignty. Mexico is a free, independent, sovereign country – and that is above everything else.” More