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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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      House minority leader asks for ‘maximum protection’ after bomb threats target Democrats

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      American lawmakers are on edge after a wave of hoax bomb threats targeted figures across the political spectrum and prompted the Democratic leader in the House of Representatives to demand that Congress take action to provide “maximum protection”.Over Thanksgiving nearly the entire Connecticut congressional delegation of Democrats faced bomb threats that apparently were signed “Maga” – shorthand for Donald Trump’s “Make America great again” political movement.Those threats followed a spate of similar threats that targeted incoming Republican Trump administration appointees and their offices. Figures were also “swatted” by hoax calls to police with the apparent aim of triggering an armed police response to a target.“It is imperative that Congress provide maximum protection for all members and their families moving forward,” House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries said in a statement.Jeffries added: “America is a democracy. Threats of violence against elected officials are unacceptable, unconscionable and have no place in a civilized society. All perpetrators of political violence directed at any party must be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”According to Jeffries’ office, the incidents “ranged from detailed threats of a pipe bomb placed in mailboxes to swatting.” All were signed with “Maga” at the conclusion of the message, Jeffries’ statement said.The US Capitol police declined to offer details about the threats to news website Axios in order to “minimize the risk of copy-cats”.Meanwhile, the FBI is investigating the pre-Thanksgiving wave of threats against Trump’s incoming administration.Among those targeted were New York congresswoman Elise Stefanik, Trump’s pick to serve as the next ambassador to the United Nations; Oregon congresswoman Lori Chavez-DeRemer, whom Trump wants to lead the Department of Labor; and former New York congressman Lee Zeldin, who has been tapped to lead the Environmental Protection Agency.Bomb threats and swatting attempts also married the run-up to November’s presidential election with politicians, election officials and election offices being subject to the threats.The election played out against a background of warnings of civil unrest if the contest had been tight or disputed. However, Donald Trump’s clear victory over the vice-president, Kamala Harris, largely defused any prospect of protest or violence. More

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      ‘He loves to divide and conquer’: Canada and Mexico brace for second Trump term

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      Stone-faced as he stared into a gaggle of cameras on Tuesday, the leader of Canada’s largest province laid bare how it feels to be America’s northern neighbour and closest ally this week.“It’s like a family member stabbing you right in the heart,” said Ontario’s premier, Doug Ford. A day before, president-elect Donald Trump had pledged hefty tariffs on Mexico and Canada, the US’s two largest trading partners. “It’s the biggest threat we’ve ever seen … It’s unfortunate. It’s very, very hurtful.”For both Mexico and Canada, whose economic successes are enmeshed in their multibillion-dollar trade relationships with the United States, the forecasted chaos and disruption of a second Trump term has arrived. And the first salvo from Trump has already forced leaders from Mexico and Canada to revisit their relationship with the US – and with each other.Both have maxims to describe living in the shadow of the world’s largest economic and military superpower, which sees nearly $2tn worth of goods and services pass through its two land borders.“Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant,” the late prime minister Pierre Trudeau told then US president Richard Nixon. “No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.”For Mexicans, it is the words of the 19th-century dictator Porfirio Díaz: “Poor Mexico: so far from God, so close to the United States.”The vagaries of the relationship were tested again this week when Trump threatened in a social media post to apply devastating levies of 25% on all goods and services from both countries, and to keep them in place until “such time as drugs, in particular fentanyl, and all illegal aliens stop this invasion of our country!”Although in 2018 the US, Canada and Mexico renegotiated the Nafta trade pact that Trump had long blamed for gutting US manufacturing, the three countries still have deeply intertwined supply chains – especially an automotive industry that spans the continent – making a levy of that magnitude potentially devastating to all.In Canada, Trump’s demands have left the government scrambling to make sense of the threat – and how seriously to take it.“‘Good-faith negotiator’ is not usually a descriptor of Donald Trump. He loves to disrupt it. He loves to divide and conquer,” said Colin Robertson, a former senior Canadian diplomat who has had numerous postings in the US. “Trump is determined to truly make his mark. Last time he was disorganized. This time, he’s certainly started off demonstrating a high degree of organization.”Even before Trump’s announcement, the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, and a handful of provincial premiers had mused openly about cutting Mexico out of future trade talks, instead pivoting towards a Canada-US trade pact – a move that Mexico’s lead negotiator called a “betrayal”.On Wednesday, Trudeau held an emergency meeting with all 10 premiers to push a “Team Canada” approach to the confrontation, pledging hours later to invest more in border security – a nod to Trump’s criticism of Canada’s patrolling of its border.A challenge for Canada is a need to approach Trump with skepticism, but also to take the threats seriously, says Robertson, adding that Canada’s trade relationship with the US is immensely lopsided. “The reality is, we need them. They’re big, we’re small.”Still, Trump’s demands “are perverse, but unfortunately predictable”, says Roland Paris, director of the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa and former foreign affairs adviser to Trudeau.He notes that only a sliver of the fentanyl entering the US comes from Canada, a figure so small the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) does not even mention Canada in a report from 2020. As for migrants entering the US, Canada’s federal minister says yearly interceptions are similar to a “significant weekend” at the Mexico border.“This is [Trump’s] modus operandi,” said Paris. “He’s not wasting any time throwing America’s principal trading partners off balance, before he even enters office.”Ottawa’s efforts to smooth things over with Trump are also hampered by domestic politics. Trudeau remains immensely unpopular in polls, and the rival Conservatives have cast the prime minister as weak and ill-equipped to both preserve what Nixon called Canada’s “special relationship” with the US and to face off against a mercurial president.Paris imagines the prime minister’s cabinet, especially veterans of bruising negotiations with Trump during his first term, as “determined” to manage relations with a country that for decades has remained a staunch ally. He says years of close work has produced a significant overlap in policy goals for the two nations, including skepticism of China and a need to secure critical mineral and energy supply chains.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Canada is going to need resolve, patience and the most far-reaching advocacy campaign this country has ever conducted in the United States,” he said. “But everybody knows that Trump is so unpredictable that there’s no saying what he might do this time.”For Mexico, which has long borne the brunt of Trump’s ire, Monday’s tariff threat comes amid already tense relations, including a reform to elect almost all judges by popular vote that has drawn sharp criticism from the US. At the same time, the arrest in July of two top Sinaloa cartel bosses in Texas, a move that surprised Mexican officials, has triggered a bloody gang war that the Mexican president, Claudia Sheinbaum, blames on the US.On Wednesday, Sheinbaum spoke with Trump, a conversation which the US president-elect characterised as “wonderful” after he claimed the Mexican president pledged to “stop Migration through Mexico, and into the United States, effectively closing our Southern Border”. Sheinbaum later gently clarified that she wouldn’t close the border, but that the call was “very kind” and had convinced her that no tariffs would happen.Martha Bárcena, a former Mexican ambassador to the US, said Trump’s tariff suggestion has kicked off “panic” in the Mexican community living in the US. “How can you hit your partners in a free trade agreement with tariffs 25% higher than what you put on the rest of the world? It’s crazy,” she said.“What was his ceiling is now his floor,” she said of his previous negotiating position on trade. “The lesson? Never yield to a bully.”Alejandro Celorio Alcántara, a Mexican diplomat who oversaw migration when Trump first came to power, says the bombast of the next US president can be easier to work with than more traditional allies.“The Biden administration is a little more diplomatic, but this can actually make the discussion more complicated, because you don’t know what the terms of negotiation are,” he said. “Maybe it’s just my style of negotiation. It’s simpler when it’s more open. They put the cards on the table: ‘This is what we want.’ Then you can respond.”Both Mexico and Canada have scores of diplomats already experienced with Trump, but both sides also expressed concern that many of the key figures in Trump’s first term, who acted as a “check” on the president’s whim-based policy decisions, will be absent from the second administration, replaced by loyalists and idealogues who will do whatever he says.Still, for Mexican officials, there is a glimmer of hope that those in positions of power are more reasonable when they’re not in the media spotlight. Alcántara noted that “border czar” Tom Homan, who recently pledged to carry out a “mass deportation’, is known for his controversial positions, “but if you take the facts to him and explain them, he understands. He has a certain discourse in the media that’s very aggressive, but when you sit down together, you can talk.”For Mexico and Canada, a recognition that their fates remain tied to the US has forced them to redouble their efforts, not to reconsider their relationship.“In the end, we need to bet on a strong North America,” said Alcántara. It’s simple: make North America great again. As a region, not just the United States.” 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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      ‘Disenfranchised and demobilized’: Native Americans face ballot box barriers in Arizona

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      The calls started coming in to the Arizona Native vote election protection hotline around 6am on election day.Voters in Apache county, where a sizable chunk of the population is Diné, also known as Navajo, were seeing problems at the polls. One location was locked and several others were having trouble printing ballots, according to an affidavit filed in state court. As the day went on, voters reported hours-long waits and observers reported that people were leaving. A local judge would eventually agree to extend voting in nine precincts in the county by two hours.“It was just a mess from what we could tell and from our folks,” said Jaynie Parrish, the executive director of Arizona Native Vote, a nonprofit civic engagement organization focused on Native communities.While delays in opening polling sites and glitches that lead to long lines are not uncommon, they can be particularly acute in Native communities, where voters can travel hours to get to the polls and face other unique barriers, like non-traditional addresses and language access issues. Taken together, those barriers result in a significant gap between turnout among those living on tribal lands and those who live off of them, according to a new study from the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit that studies voting rights and elections.“There are systemic issues that prevent Natives from getting to the ballot box – some intentional,” said Samantha Blencke, a staff attorney with the Native American Rights Fund, which had poll watchers in six states this election. For a voter who travels a far distance to cast a ballot, a polling place not opening on time could make a big difference, she said. “That’s it,” she said. “That’s their one shot to vote.”Native American voters are an influential voting bloc in Arizona, where they comprise 5% of the population. Both Republicans and Democrats courted Native voters this year. Election results analyzed by the New York Times showed that Donald Trump gained in many counties where Native Americans comprise a majority of the population.In addition to long travel times, Native voters also face a litany of unique hurdles. Many lack traditional addresses, making it more difficult to vote by mail. Tribal identification cards can get rejected at the polls. And there can be significant issues in translating ballots into Native languages.Turnout among those living on tribal lands was on average 11 points lower than turnout among people living off them between 2012 and 2022, according to the Brennan Center’s study. In presidential elections, the gap was 15 points.Tribal lands that had the highest share of Native voters also had the lowest turnout rates, the study found. And those who live on tribal lands were also less likely to use mail-in voting than those who lived off them.“These findings demonstrate that Native Americans living on tribal lands are uniquely disenfranchised and demobilized from participating in federal elections,” the report says.This year, after election day, Navajo voters sued Apache county again. Arizona gives voters five days after election day to address any issues with mail-in ballots. But county officials had delayed making public the number of voters who had problems with their ballots until two days before the deadline, the lawsuit said. With just two days left, they notified that there were 182 people who needed to cure their ballots, setting off a scramble to contact them.A judge rejected the request after elections employees said they had made a reasonable effort to contact anyone who was at risk of having their ballot rejected.For years, Leonard Gorman, the executive director of the Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission has been concerned about the way ballots have been translated into Navajo. Translation is required under the Voting Rights Act, and accurately describing things like ballot measures on abortion and fentanyl can be immensely challenging, Votebeat reported earlier this year. Navajo is a historically oral language, and translators come up with audio that those who are not proficient in English can listen to at the polls, according to Votebeat.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOver the years, Gorman said he’s heard glitches and poorly worded audio. And when he showed up at a polling location in Apache county in late October, the machine that offered the audio translation wasn’t working, he said.“It only said in literal translation or interpretation: ‘If you want to listen to the ballot, press any button,’” he said. When he pressed a button, the instruction would simply repeat. “That was the worst experience I’ve ever had.”Apache county election officials did not respond to an interview request.Chelsea Jones, a researcher at the Brennan Center who co-authored the nonprofit’s study, said its findings showed that people who live on tribal lands face unique barriers that haven’t thus far been addressed by federal laws. A piece of legislation, the Native American Voting Rights Act, that would address many of the systemic challenges Native voters face, has stalled in Congress.“Any of these common ways that we participate in elections have really layers of barriers for people who live on tribal lands,” Jones said. “Each of those numbers represent hundreds of thousands of people who are not able to or have a harder time participating. And so that’s what’s the hardest for us to grasp is that this many people are being left out of what is a fundamental right for all Americans.” 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