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      Trump and Harris Campaigns Met to Talk Tactics. It Wasn’t Pretty.

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      Leaders of the Trump and Harris campaigns met this week to talk tactics. It wasn’t pretty.Reader, we wrote you this newsletter in a tense room in Cambridge.The walls were covered in dark-wood paneling. A U-shaped conference table was elegantly draped with maroon tablecloths and decorated with little jars of roses and calla lilies.On one side of the table sat several senior staff members for the Biden-Harris campaign who looked a little bit as if they were undergoing a collective root canal without anesthesia. On the other side sat five leading Trump campaign staff members and allies who looked a little bit as if they were holding the dentist’s drill.After every presidential election, the Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School invites campaign strategists for both general-election candidates — as well as key staff members from losing primary campaigns — to unload about what happened. The discussions, which take place on panels moderated by journalists, can get heated, as they did in 2016. Maybe some years the event feels cathartic. This year, though, the big word was flawless.Sheila Nix, Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign chief of staff, used it on Thursday as each campaign outlined over dinner what had been its main strategy, saying Ms. Harris “ran a pretty flawless campaign.” And then Chris LaCivita, one of President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign managers, lobbed the word back at Team Biden/Harris during one of the panels today.“Flawless execution,” he sarcastically interjected, after Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, the chair of the Biden and then the Harris campaign, labored to answer a question about the fateful debate that ended President Biden’s campaign.LaCivita’s interruption got at a central tension in the aftermath of the election, one that has grated on Democrats outside the room and became a target of mockery from the Trump staff members inside it. For a campaign that lost, the Biden-Harris team has been reluctant to admit to specific mistakes — and that pattern continued today. They admitted they had lost, but their diagnosis was more about the mood of the country than tactical errors on their part. The ultimate answer may be a combination of both factors.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Defends His Imperiled Pick for Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth

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      President-elect Donald J. Trump gave a public show of support to his embattled choice for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, on Friday morning, saying in a social media post that he will be “fantastic” in the job and that he has a “military state of mind.”Mr. Hegseth has spent the last two days fighting to stay as Mr. Trump’s choice to lead the Pentagon amid mounting news reports alleging troubling behaviors over time including rape, sexual assault, financial mismanagement and drunken behavior, which he denies.Mr. Trump’s post on Truth Social amounted to a public dare to Republican senators, a number of whom have expressed private concerns about Mr. Hegseth, to vote against his wishes. The president-elect until now has put relatively little of his own capital on the line for Mr. Hegseth and has even floated alternative candidates, such as Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, for the job.But on Friday, Mr. Trump doubled down publicly on his initial choice.“Pete Hegseth is doing very well. His support is strong and deep, much more so than the Fake News would have you believe,” Mr. Trump wrote. “He was a great student — Princeton/Harvard educated — with a Military state of mind. He will be a fantastic, high energy, Secretary of Defense Defense, one who leads with charisma and skill. Pete is a WINNER, and there is nothing that can be done to change that!!!”A string of damning news articles have reported problematic behavior. One woman filed a police report in 2017 accusing him of rape, which he denied and said was a consensual encounter. He entered into a settlement agreement with her that included a payment of money years later. The New York Times reported that Mr. Hegseth’s mother sent him an email in 2018 during a contentious divorce saying he had “abused” many women in different ways over the years. NBC News reported about concerns about Mr. Hegseth’s drinking, and The New Yorker reported that he had been accused of mismanagement of groups he had previously led.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Names David Sacks to Oversee Crypto and A.I.

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      President-elect Donald J. Trump has named one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent conservative investors, donors and media personalities to help oversee American tech policy.David Sacks, a venture capitalist and an early executive at PayPal who launched a hit podcast, will be the “White House A.I. and Crypto Czar,” the president-elect announced in a social media post on Thursday. Mr. Sacks is a close friend of Elon Musk, and Mr. Sacks has been among the people over the last year or so encouraging Mr. Musk to delve deeper into Republican politics.The position will be new, and further cements the expectation that the Trump White House intends to take a lighter hand with the regulation of technology and in particular cryptocurrencies, which have surged in value since Mr. Trump won the election and in which Mr. Trump personally has a business interest. Mr. Sacks, who leads a venture capital firm called Craft Ventures, has in general called for a more permissive policy on both cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence.Mr. Sacks won a battle within the Trump transition effort. Some people were pitching Mr. Trump’s team on separate positions where different people would oversee artificial intelligence and crypto, according to a person close to the process. But Mr. Sacks was chosen to oversee them all together in a joint appointment.“David will guide policy for the Administration in Artificial Intelligence and Cryptocurrency, two areas critical to the future of American competitiveness,” Mr. Trump said on Thursday evening. “David will focus on making America the clear global leader in both areas.”It is not clear if his role will be full time; Mr. Sacks has previously told friends that he did not want a formal role because it would require him to leave his position overseeing his venture capital fund, The New York Times has previously reported. Mr. Sacks announced a new start-up funding round led by his firm just this week.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      House Blocks Release of Matt Gaetz Ethics Report as Republicans Close Ranks

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      The House on Thursday night blocked the release of a damaging Ethics Committee report about former Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, as Republicans voted to bury it, an expected move that makes it less likely the materials will ever be made public.Republicans closed ranks to turn back two nearly identical Democratic-written resolutions that would have forced the release of the report on the ethics panel’s yearslong investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct and illicit drug use by the former congressman.They did so by moving to refer both measures back to the committee, which has so far refused to make public its conclusions.The vote on the first resolution was 206 to 198, almost entirely along party lines, with nearly all Republicans voting to block the report’s release and Democrats voting to make it public. The vote on the second measure, which included language about preserving the records but also demanded their release, was 204 to 198, also almost all along party lines.Just one Republican, Representative Tom McClintock of California, sided with the Democrats.Democrats have continued to press for the release of the ethics report, even though Mr. Gaetz has resigned from Congress and removed himself as President-elect Donald J. Trump’s choice for attorney general, at least in part because the ethics report was complicating his confirmation process.Speaker Mike Johnson has said that because Mr. Gaetz is no longer a sitting member of Congress, the release of the report would set a bad precedent in the House and has urged the Republican-led committee not to release its findings.Democrats have argued that burying the report is concealing credible allegations of sexual misconduct.“No workplace would allow that information to be swept under the rug simply because someone resigned from office,” Representative Sean Casten, the Illinois Democrat who has spearheaded the move to release the report, told ABC News.Mr. Gaetz has denied all of the allegations.Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the House majority leader, called the question of releasing the report “moot” since Mr. Gaetz has resigned.Tom Brenner for The New York Times“The member being referenced in the resolution has actually resigned from the House of Representatives; therefore, the question is moot,” Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the House majority leader, said on the floor Thursday night, moving to refer the resolution back to the committee.Since 2021, the House Ethics Committee has been investigating allegations about Mr. Gaetz. That year, it opened an inquiry into sexual misconduct allegations as well as claims that Mr. Gaetz misused state identification records, converted campaign funds to personal use, accepted impermissible gifts under House rules, and shared inappropriate images or videos on the House floor, among other transgressions.The secretive, bipartisan committee met earlier on Thursday for close to three hours to discuss the report, but all of its members were mum as they left the meeting.After the session, the committee issued a terse statement saying that it “met today to discuss the matter of Representative Matt Gaetz. The committee is continuing to discuss the matter. There will be no further statements other than in accordance with committee and House rules.” More

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      Musk, Trump, A.I. and Other DealBook Summit Highlights

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      The economy, inflation, tariffs, the future of media, pardon politics and other big topics that made headlines this year.Jeff Bezos was cautiously optimistic that President-elect Donald Trump would be more measured in his second term.Michael M. Santiago/Getty ImagesFour takeaways from the DealBook Summit The U.S. election dominated the news agenda this year, and the two people at the center of Donald Trump’s win came up in nearly every conversation yesterday at the DealBook Summit. The president-elect and Elon Musk may not have been in the room, but questions about how they will shape business and politics were front and center.The general view of the day was cautious optimism, even among those who had publicly criticized Trump and Musk — or been targeted by them.But many questions remain. What will Trump and Musk mean for government, business and the economy? Will they succeed in cutting regulation and government spending? And will they go after their perceived enemies and rivals?Here are four big themes from this year’s event.What will happen with the economy?Most of the speakers were willing to give Trump the benefit of the doubt, or at least played down worries about his most disruptive policy ideas.Jay Powell, the Fed chair, addressed one of the biggest questions hanging over the next administration: Will the president-elect go after the central bank’s independence? No, Powell said emphatically. The Fed, he said, was created by Congress and its autonomy is “the law of the land.”“There is very, very broad support for that set of ideas in Congress in both political parties, on both sides of the Hill, and that’s what really matters,” he said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Picks Frank Bisignano to Lead Social Security Administration

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      President-elect Trump announced on Wednesday night that he had chosen Frank Bisignano, the chairman of the payment processing behemoth Fiserv, to be the commissioner of the Social Security Administration, a sizable federal agency with more than 1,200 field offices and almost 60,000 employees.“Frank is a business leader, with a tremendous track record of transforming large corporations,” the president-elect said in a post on social media. “He will be responsible to deliver on the Agency’s commitment to the American People.”Mr. Bisignano vaulted into one of the most coveted positions in the New York finance world in his late 20s as a senior vice president of what was then known as Shearson Lehman Brothers, the investment bank whose collapse in 2008 helped set off a global recession. After nearly five years at the bank in the late 1980s, he moved to other major Wall Street banks, first to Morgan Stanley, then to Citigroup and then JPMorgan Chase & Company.Mr. Bisignano was listed as the second-highest-paid chief executive in the country in 2017, one of the few to have been compensated more than $100 million that year and to have received more than 2,000 times the average employee’s salary at his firm, First Data Corporation, which later merged with Fiserv.Mr. Bisignano has a long history of political giving, mainly to Republicans. Federal campaign finance reports show that his wife, Tracy Bisignano, donated nearly $1 million to Mr. Trump’s campaign in October. But in November 2023, he had thrown $15,000 behind the presidential campaign of Chris Christie, a Republican former governor of New Jersey who ran on an anti-Trump bid but later dropped out of the race.Earlier on Wednesday, Mr. Trump uploaded an elaborate biography of Mr. Bisignano to social media and congratulated him and his family without mentioning the post to which Mr. Bisignano was being named. The president-elect made a clarification an hour later, ending the speculation on what Mr. Bisignano’s next job would be. More

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      Bitcoin Price Surges to a Milestone: $100,000

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      The price of a single Bitcoin rose to six figures for the first time, an extraordinary level for a 16-year-old cryptocurrency once dismissed as a sideshow.In May 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz, an early cryptocurrency enthusiast, used Bitcoin to buy two pizzas from Papa John’s. He spent 10,000 Bitcoins, or roughly $40 at the time, in one of the first purchases ever made with the digital currency.It has turned out to be the most expensive dinner in history.On Wednesday, the price of a single Bitcoin rose to more than $100,000, a remarkable milestone for an experimental financial asset that had once been mocked as a sideshow and a fad. The total cost of those pizzas today: $1 billion.Bitcoin now stands as arguably the most successful investment product of the last 20 years. The value of all the coins in circulation is $2 trillion, more than the combined worth of Mastercard, Walmart and JPMorgan Chase. The motley assortment of hackers and political radicals who embraced Bitcoin when it was created by an anonymous coder in 2008 have become millionaires many times over. And the invention has spawned an entire industry anchored by publicly traded companies like Coinbase, a cryptocurrency exchange, and promoted by celebrities, athletes and Elon Musk.Even the president-elect says he is a believer. During the campaign, Donald J. Trump marketed himself as a Bitcoin enthusiast, vowing to create a federal stockpile that could push its price even higher.

      Note: As of 10 p.m. Eastern on Dec. 4Source: Investing.comBy The New York TimesBitcoin began as “essentially an experimental hobbyist project,” said Finn Brunton, the author of a 2019 book about the history of cryptocurrency. “To see where it is now is to see a really impressive feat.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Picks Kelly Loeffler, a Top Donor, to Head Small Business Administration

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      President-elect Donald J. Trump chose Kelly Loeffler, a top donor to Mr. Trump’s 2024 campaign and a former Georgia senator, to head the Small Business Administration.“Kelly will bring her experience in business and Washington to reduce red tape, and unleash opportunity for our Small Businesses to grow, innovate, and thrive,” Mr. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social on Wednesday. “She will focus on ensuring that SBA is accountable to Taxpayers by cracking down on waste, fraud, and regulatory overreach.”Ms. Loeffler has little experience in public service. She was appointed to fill a vacated Senate seat in Georgia by Gov. Brian Kemp, serving from early 2020 until she was defeated in a special election by the Rev. Raphael Warnock in January 2021. In the final days of her Senate career, Ms. Loeffler played a prominent role in Mr. Trump’s effort to overturn his defeat in the 2020 presidential election.Ms. Loeffler underwent a significant political transformation during the first Trump administration. She had been seen as a moderate, business-oriented Republican when she was appointed to the Senate — a move viewed by many as an effort to make the Georgia Republican Party more widely appealing.But Ms. Loeffler made a hard-right turn in office, portraying herself as a fervent supporter of and rubber stamp for Mr. Trump as she prepared to defend her seat in the 2020 race. Mr. Warnock ultimately won by two percentage points in a runoff election.If confirmed by the Senate, Ms. Loeffler would lead an agency that is responsible for delivering billions in loans and disaster assistance to small businesses across the country. The S.B.A. played a major role during the Covid-19 pandemic, when it distributed hundreds of billions of dollars to help businesses stay open and continue paying their employees.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More