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      Trump Picks Sean Duffy, Fox Business Host, for Transportation Secretary

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      A former Wisconsin congressman and Fox Business host, Sean Duffy, was selected by President-elect Donald J. Trump on Monday to lead the Transportation Department.In a statement announcing his choice, Mr. Trump praised Mr. Duffy as a “tremendous and well-liked public servant” with the experience needed to lead the department, which has an annual budget of more than $100 billion and a vast work force.“Sean will use his experience and the relationships he has built over many years in Congress to rebuild our nation’s infrastructure and usher in a golden age of travel,” Mr. Trump said in a statement.Mr. Duffy served in Congress from 2011 to 2019 as a Republican. He resigned in September 2019 to help care for a newborn daughter with a birth defect, according to The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.Mr. Duffy resigned from Fox News Media on Monday, according to a spokeswoman for the network. He had joined as a contributor in 2020, offering political analysis across all Fox News Media platforms, and had hosted “The Bottom Line” on Fox Business with Dagen McDowell since 2023. He originally rose to fame on the MTV reality show “The Real World: Boston.”If confirmed, Mr. Duffy will oversee a Federal Aviation Administration struggling with air traffic control and a Federal Railroad Administration still pushing for safety reforms after a fiery derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, in 2023. He will also be in charge of assessing how to rebuild the country’s crumbling infrastructure.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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      The Race to Lead Trump’s Treasury Dept. Is Becoming a Cliffhanger

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      Howard Lutnick? Scott Bessent? Marc Rowan? Kevin Warsh? The president-elect’s list of candidates has grown longer, clouding the future of the department.Who will get the key to head up the Treasury Department?Kevin Lamarque/ReutersRowan and Warsh shake up Treasury raceFew of the unfilled positions in Donald Trump’s cabinet are as important as Treasury secretary. But the question of who will fill the role is only getting cloudier.Allies of two candidates, Howard Lutnick, the transition co-chair, and Scott Bessent, a top economic adviser, publicly stumped for them this weekend. But The Times reports that the president-elect himself wants somebody “big” for the role and is now considering Marc Rowan, the C.E.O. of Apollo Global Management, and Kevin Warsh, a former Fed governor.Elon Musk, Dan Loeb and others are weighing in. Musk threw his support behind Lutnick over the weekend, calling Bessent “business as usual,” an especially cutting criticism in the Trump camp. That said, The Times reports that Trump has privately griped about Lutnick hanging around too much and potentially manipulating the transition process for his own benefit.Loeb backed Bessent, arguing that choosing Lutnick might rattle investors, including in the $28 trillion market for Treasury bonds and notes. That said, Bessent is also being floated for positions such as chair of the White House’s National Economic Council.Trump has told associates that he is impressed by Rowan, The Times reports. The president-elect tends to value wealth and status on Wall Street, and Rowan, a co-founder of Apollo who helped turn the firm into a $733 billion investment giant, has plenty of both.Rowan would be likely to reassure many on Wall Street, particularly given how unorthodox some of the other cabinet choices have been. But it’s unclear whether he would want to take such a public role, especially given his current work at Apollo. (How hard it would be to extricate Rowan from any “key man” provisions in the firm’s funds is another question.)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 Stands by Defense Pick Who Says Encounter With Woman Was Not Sexual Assault

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      A detailed memo sent to the Trump transition team claims the incident occurred when Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s choice for defense secretary, spoke in Monterey, Calif., in 2017.President-elect Donald J. Trump has told advisers he is standing by his nominee for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, after the transition team was jolted by an allegation he had sexually assaulted a woman in an interaction he insists was consensual.Mr. Trump made his view plain to aides after a conversation with Mr. Hegseth days ago, after the team learned that a woman had accused him of assault in 2017, according to two people briefed on the discussion. They also learned that Mr. Hegseth had entered into a financial settlement with the woman that had a confidentiality clause.On Sunday, Steven Cheung, the president-elect’s communications director, did not address Mr. Trump’s thinking, but said, “President Trump is nominating high-caliber and extremely qualified candidates to serve in his administration.”He added, “Mr. Hegseth has vigorously denied any and all accusations, and no charges were filed. We look forward to his confirmation” by the Senate.Last week, the Monterey Police Department in California said it had investigated an allegation of sexual assault involving Mr. Hegseth in 2017 at the address of the Hyatt Regency Monterey Hotel and Spa. The statement released by the police said the department had filed no charges against Mr. Hegseth.Mr. Trump announced on Tuesday that Mr. Hegseth, a former Fox News personality, was his choice to lead the Pentagon, setting off a wave of resistance from many corners of Washington. Mr. Hegseth has criticized some in the Pentagon leadership as too “woke,” and he pushed for Mr. Trump to intervene when he was president on behalf of three members of the military accused or convicted of war crimes, which Mr. Trump did.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 Brendan Carr to Lead F.C.C.

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      President-elect Donald J. Trump on Sunday chose Brendan Carr to be chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, naming a veteran Republican regulator who has publicly agreed with the incoming administration’s promises to slash regulation, go after Big Tech and punish TV networks for political bias.Mr. Carr, who currently sits on the commission, is expected to shake up a quiet agency that licenses airwaves for radio and TV, regulates phone costs, and promotes the spread of home internet. Before the election, Mr. Trump indicated he wanted the agency to strip broadcasters like NBC and CBS of their licensing for unfair coverage.Mr. Carr, 45, was the author of a chapter on the F.C.C. in the conservative Project 2025 planning document, in which he argued that the agency should also regulate the largest tech companies, such as Apple, Meta, Google and Microsoft.“The censorship cartel must be dismantled,” Mr. Carr said last week in a post on X.Mr. Carr could drastically reshape the independent agency, expanding its mandate and wielding it as a political weapon for the right, telecommunications attorneys and analysts said. They predicted Mr. Carr would test the legal limits of the agency’s power by pushing to oversee companies like Meta and Google, setting up a fierce battle with Silicon Valley.Mr. Carr has “proposed to do a lot of things he has no jurisdiction to do and in other cases he’s blatantly misreading the rules,” said Jessica Gonzalez, co-chief executive of the nonpartisan public interest group Free Press.“Commissioner Carr is a warrior for free speech, and has fought against the regulatory lawfare that has stifled Americans’ freedoms, and held back our economy,” Mr. Trump said in a statement.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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      After Flurry of Cabinet Picks, Trump Rethinks Candidates for Treasury Secretary

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      President-elect Donald J. Trump is expected to invite the contenders for the role, including Kevin Warsh and Marc Rowan, to Mar-a-Lago this week.President-elect Donald J. Trump is eyeing a new candidate for Treasury Secretary amid internal debate over who should have the role: the former Federal Reserve governor Kevin Warsh.Mr. Trump is also considering the Wall Street billionaire Marc Rowan.Mr. Trump had been expected to pick either Howard Lutnick, the chief executive of the Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald, or Scott Bessent, the founder of the investment firm Key Square Capital Management and a former money manager for George Soros. And he had been seen as likely to make the selection late last week.But he has been having second thoughts about the top two candidates, and has slowed down his selection process. He is expected to invite the contenders to interview with him this week at Mar-a-Lago.Mr. Lutnick, who has been running Mr. Trump’s transition operation, has gotten on Mr. Trump’s nerves lately. Mr. Trump has privately expressed frustration that Mr. Lutnick has been hanging around him too much and that he has been manipulating the transition process for his own ends. A person familiar with the process, who spoke on condition of anonymity, described the battle between Mr. Lutnick and Mr. Bessent as a knife fight, with Mr. Lutnick as the primary aggressor.Mr. Bessent is said to still be under consideration, and has also been raised by people in Mr. Trump’s economic circles as a possible contender to lead the White House’s National Economic Council. Elon Musk, a close adviser to the president-elect, on Sunday called Mr. Bessent a “business-as-usual” choice for Treasury secretary in a post on his social media platform, X, while throwing his support behind Mr. Lutnick.Mr. Trump and Mr. Lutnick met on Sunday, and it wasn’t immediately clear what came of the discussion, according to two people briefed on the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss personnel matters. Mr. Bessent has also met with Mr. Trump. The other two — as well as any other new names that emerge — are likely to be asked to meet with Mr. Trump this week, according to one of the people briefed on the matter.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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      Donald Trump Is Already Starting to Fail

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      That was quick.Donald Trump is planting the seeds of his own political demise. The corrupt, incompetent and extremist men and women he’s appointing to many of the most critical posts in his cabinet are direct threats to the well-being of the country, but they’re also political threats to Trump and to his populist allies.To understand why, it’s important to remember a cardinal reality about Trump’s political career. He has now won two general elections when he was the only alternative to an unsatisfactory status quo, and he lost the one when he was the unsatisfactory status quo. If he can’t govern well, his populist partisan realignment will come apart before it can truly begin.One of the most maddening aspects of the 2024 election is the extent to which so many voters viewed Trump as a mostly normal political candidate. MAGA Republicans see Trump as a singular figure, but an immense number of voters thought the talk about Trump was overheated, in both directions.If you’re like most Americans and don’t follow the news closely, it’s easy to see why you would see Trump in more conventional terms. A Politico analysis of the Trump campaign’s ads showed that “the single most-aired ad from his campaign since the start of October is all about inflation, Medicare and Social Security — arguing that” Kamala Harris “will make seniors already struggling with high prices ‘pay more Social Security taxes,’ while unauthorized’ immigrants receive benefits.”That is a normal, conventional political message. Trump’s ads attacking Harris’s past support for taxpayer-funded transition surgery for people in prison and immigration detention were also an appeal to the mainstream, an effort to label Harris as extreme.One of the challenging realities of American politics is that while vast numbers of Americans participate in presidential elections, only small minorities of voters actually stay engaged. And the priorities of the two groups are not the same, far from it.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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      Jared Polis Wants to Win Back the Hippies

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      It’s such a bother when politicians have to go and complicate your clean narrative about why they’re succeeding.Last week, I spoke to Jared Polis, the Democratic governor of Colorado. Polis’s state was, if not a bright spot for Democrats, a less-dark one. In New York, Democrats lost 11 points off their 2020 margin; in New Jersey, 10 points; in Massachusetts, nine and a half points; in California, nine points (though votes are still being counted); in Illinois, seven points. In Colorado, the difference was two and a half points. What is Polis, who won re-election in 2022 by a 19-point margin, doing right?One answer — and this, to be honest, was the answer I’d gone looking for — is focusing relentlessly on the cost of living. “You can’t just do one policy and expect, somehow, people will know it,” Polis told me. “But they generally understand the drumbeat of 30, 40 things you’re doing, each of which reduces costs in a different way. And so that’s been our strategy: to flood the zone with this work to reduce costs.”Polis points with pride to his successful efforts to expand pre-K and kindergarten and get a public insurance option onto the Colorado health exchanges — but also to his rejection of proposals to add benefits that would drive up costs. He’s happy to brag about reducing the tax rate for both businesses and individuals, walking me through every decimal-point reduction he achieved, and the many bills he’s signed to make it easier to build homes.“When you say something a lot, it means you generally believe it,” Polis said. “So here’s a line I often use: We want the best solutions from the left and the right to save people money.”But during our conversation, and in the days after, another answer emerged — and for Democrats this one is a little more challenging. Polis is a dissenter from the trends that swept through Democratic governance during the pandemic. He was unusual among Democratic governors for the emphasis he put on both personal responsibility and personal liberty. Colorado opened early, sparking a tourism boom, and Polis tried to rely more on information than compulsion.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 Attends U.F.C. Fight in New York

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      President-elect Donald J. Trump arrived at Madison Square Garden for an Ultimate Fighting Championship event, which for a brief moment resembled one of his campaign rallies.President-elect Donald J. Trump, who has made few public appearances since Election Day, returned on Saturday to Madison Square Garden, the site of an inflammatory campaign rally late last month, to face a warm welcome from tens of thousands of people at an Ultimate Fighting Championship event.Mr. Trump walked in to “American Bad Ass,” by Kid Rock, and was met with a chant of “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!”As the president-elect took his seat around 10 p.m. at the edge of the octagonal fighters’ cage, the arena for a few minutes could have been mistaken for one of his rallies. In an unusually political scene at a major sporting event, Mr. Trump was heralded on the Jumbotrons with a sleek video that began with Fox News calling the election for him and ended with the numbers 45 and 47 flashing red on a black screen.Joining Mr. Trump at the event were Elon Musk and the podcaster Joe Rogan, as well as several of the president-elect’s choices for high-ranking posts in his administration: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the would-be health secretary; Tulsi Gabbard, his pick for director of national intelligence; and Vivek Ramaswamy, who along with Mr. Musk has been tasked with leading the Department of Government Efficiency, intended to advise on cost-cutting. The group, which also included Speaker Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, looked incongruously formal in an arena filled with sweatshirts, U.F.C. gear and baseball caps.Also in Mr. Trump’s circle was Dana White, the U.F.C. chief executive and a longtime friend, who has become close enough to the political operation that Mr. Trump invited him onstage in West Palm Beach, Fla., after his victory speech on election night. Mr. White used the moment to thank a handful of bro-culture podcasters, including the enormously popular Mr. Rogan.Mr. Trump’s campaign aggressively courted young male voters, also a significant share of U.F.C.’s target audience, through podcast appearances, and the league’s cast of characters played a role in Mr. Trump’s campaign. Steven Cheung, Mr. Trump’s campaign spokesman and his pick for White House communications director, once worked in U.F.C.’s communications office.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